#[ so vague. i am sorry! ]

[fudgecake-charlie]

beloved friend sent me one of scar's newer tweets and i HAD to draw it

[rendevok]

“Take my hand” a comic for NaruMitsu Week 2023

day 1 - lies & secrets - 2 - 3 - 4

[bloobydabloob]

Playing Ratchet & Clank

[demigod-of-the-agni]

kurunthokai, 168 — “what the hero said to his heart”

[tossawary]

Reading Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" was a good choice because it is a funny, interesting, culturally significant book. Reading "Pride and Prejudice" was also a bad choice because I am now cursed to know exactly how wrong people are constantly being about "Pride and Prejudice".

[hamsterdads]

Ive been sending stuff on anon tonight but since that isnt an option an i dont thuink ive filled my quota: hi i hope you have a wondrous week ahead and i really realy like ur art and interpretations of the characters physicalities and also ur got me johndavekat pilled. That is all baaaiyyeee

hiiiii beloved stupidusernamepolicy!! thank you for your kind words hehe<3 im sooo glad that you are johndavekatpilled as well i feel insane about them. anyway here is a speedy doodle for you. enjoy ^^

[himboextraordinaire]

I love domestic/fluffy Byler so much, but what I really want is for them to be a mess.

Everything about their relationship with the involvement of the upside down and Eleven is a mess. Will is carelessly lying to Mike about El and his painting, Mike is not communicating and was being particularly distant to Will for virtually no reason on his birthday (which btw I totally don’t buy it that the Duffers and the writers room just “forgot” Will’s birthday when they remembered Will’s favorite candy just so they can have it as a silly little easter egg in like two scenes). Everything about it that has been building up to this point is just a huge pile up at this point.

They’re going to likely be with each other for most of season 5 because of the promise that they made to each other at the end of season 4 (and the BTS photos but yknow), which gives time for a lot to happen. Will and Mike are not perfect people, and it’s clear that their friendship isn’t either. The confession isn’t going to be light and fun. That pileup is going to collapse under it’s own weight and it will not be pretty at all. It’s going to be a mess, it’s going to hurt, and I am HERE FOR IT.

[hebby-arts]

hey hebby what's on your mind?

OH....

NOTHING.................................... IT'S PROBABLY........ NOTHING.....

IM JUST........ THINKING ABOUT SOMETHING.... VERY VERY INTERESTING....

[quotidianish]

Jade Winglet (minus Umber and Carnelian 😢) designs and another Winter/Turtle doodle

[calciumdreams]

are your requests open? :)c i cant tell if they are, but if they are,, ive got an odd ship, dream x fresh! um. i just think itd be a goofy crack ship. or just dream himself in your style, your style is very cute!

yep requests are open :o} thanks! i had never heard of that ship before so i ran with the first thing i thought which wasn't uhhh very goofy jsjs

not very uhhh ship-py i think, just some concepts thrown together i guess???

[garden-bug]

Zosan would be angsty sexuality gender crisis unrequited love heartbreak and Zolu would be silly funny platonic best friends chaos would die for you my beloved jungle gym.

[greenerteacups]

oooh please someday tell us what you think of GOT

oh, no, it's my fatal weakness! it's [checks notes] literally just the bare modicum of temptation! okay you got me.

SO. in order to tell what's wrong with game of thrones you kind of have to have read the books, because the books are the reason the show goes off the rails. i actually blame the showrunners relatively little in proportion to GRRM for how bad the show was (which I'm not gonna rehash here because if you're interested in GOT in any capacity you've already seen that horse flogged to death). people debate when GOT "got bad" in terms of writing, but regardless of when you think it dropped off, everyone agrees the quality declined sharply in season 8, and to a certain extent, season 7. these are the seasons that are more or less entirely spun from whole cloth, because season 7 marks the beginning of what will, if we ever see it, be the Winds of Winter storyline. it's the first part that isn't based on a book by George R.R. Martin. it's said that he gave the showrunners plot outlines, but we don't know how detailed they were, or how much the writers diverged from the blueprint — and honestly, considering the cumulative changes made to the story by that point, some stark divergence would have been required. (there's a reason for this. i'll get there in a sec.)

so far, i'm not saying anything all that original. a lot of people recognized how bad the show got as soon as they ran out of Book to adapt. (I think it's kind of weird that they agreed to make a show about an unfinished series in the first place — did GRRM figure that this was his one shot at a really good HBO adaptation, and forego misgivings about his ability to write two full books in however many years it took to adapt? did he think they would wait for him? did he not care that the series would eventually spoil his magnum opus, which he's spent the last three decades of his life writing? perplexing.) but the more interesting question is why the show got bad once it ran out of Book, because in my mind, that's not a given. a lot of great shows depart from the books they were based on. fanfiction does exactly that, all the time! if you have good writers who understand the characters they're working with, departure means a different story, not a worse one. now, the natural reply would be to say that the writers of GOT just aren't good, or at least aren't good at the things that make for great television, and that's why they needed the books as a structure, but I don't think that's true or fair, either. books and television are very different things. the pacing of a book is totally different from the pacing of a television show, and even an episodic book like ASOIAF is going to need a lot of work before it's remotely watchable as a series. bad writers cannot make great series of television, regardless of how good their source material is. sure, they didn't invent the characters of tyrion lannister and daenerys targaryen, but they sure as hell understood story structure well enough to write a damn compelling season of TV about them!

so but then: what gives? i actually do think it's a problem with the books! the show starts out as very faithful to the early books (namely, A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings) to the point that most plotlines are copied beat-for-beat. the story is constructed a little differently, and it's definitely condensed, but the meat is still there. and not surprisingly, the early books in ASOIAF are very tightly written. for how long they are, you wouldn't expect it, but on every page of those books, the plot is racing. you can practically watch george trying to beat the fucking clock. and he does! useful context here is that he originally thought GOT was going to be a trilogy, and so the scope of most threads in the first book or two would have been much smaller. it also helps that the first three books are in some respects self-contained stories. the first book is a mystery, the second and third are espionage and war dramas — and they're kept tight in order to serve those respective plots.

the trouble begins with A Feast for Crows, and arguably A Storm of Swords, because GRRM starts multiplying plotlines and treating the series as a story, rather than each individual book. he also massively underestimated the number of pages it would take him to get through certain plot beats — an assumption whose foundation is unclear, because from a reader's standpoint, there is a fucke tonne of shit in Feast and Dance that's spurious. I'm not talking about Brienne's Riverlands storyline (which I adore thematically but speaking honestly should have been its own novella, not a part of Feast proper). I'm talking about whole chapters where Tyrion is sitting on his ass in the river, just talking to people. (will I eat crow about this if these pay off in hugely satisfying ways in Winds or Dream? oh, totally. my brothers, i will gorge myself on sweet sweet corvid. i will wear a dunce cap in the square, and gleefully, if these turn out to not have been wastes of time. the fact that i am writing this means i am willing to stake a non-negligible amount of pride on the prediction that that will not happen). I'm talking about scenes where the characters stare at each other and talk idly about things that have already happened while the author describes things we already have seen in excruciating detail. i'm talking about threads that, while forgivable in a different novel, are unforgivable in this one, because you are neglecting your main characters and their story. and don't tell me you think that a day-by-day account tyrion's river cruise is necessary to telling his story, because in the count of monte cristo, the main guy disappears for nine years and comes hurtling back into the story as a vengeful aristocrat! and while time jumps like that don't work for everything, they certainly do work if what you're talking about isn't a major story thread!

now put aside whether or not all these meandering, unconcluded threads are enjoyable to read (as, in fairness, they often are!). think about them as if you're a tv showrunner. these bad boys are your worst nightmare. because while you know the author put them in for a reason, you haven't read the conclusion to the arc, so you don't know what that reason is. and even if the author tells you in broad strokes how things are going to end for any particular character (and this is a big "if," because GRRM's whole style is that he lets plots "develop as he goes," so I'm not actually convinced that he does have endings written out for most major characters), that still doesn't help you get them from point A (meandering storyline) to point B (actual conclusion). oh, and by the way, you have under a year to write this full season of television, while GRRM has been thinking about how to end the books for at least 10. all of this means you have to basically call an audible on whether or not certain arcs are going to pay off, and, if they are, whether they make for good television, and hence are worth writing. and you have to do that for every. single. unfinished. story. in the books.

here's an example: in the books, Quentin Martell goes on a quest to marry Daenerys and gain a dragon. many chapters are spent detailing this quest. spoiler alert: he fails, and he gets charbroiled by dragons. GRRM includes this plot to set up the actions of House Martell in Winds, but the problem is that we don't know what House Martell does in Winds, because (see above) the book DNE. So, although we can reliably bet that the showrunners understand (1) Daenerys is coming to Westeros with her 3 fantasy nukes, and (2) at some point they're gonna have to deal with the invasion of frozombies from Canada, that DOESN'T mean they necessarily know exactly what's going to happen to Dorne, or House Martell. i mean, fuck! we don't even know if Martin knows what's going to happen to Dorne or House Martell, because he's said he's the kind of writer who doesn't set shit out beforehand! so for every "Cersei defaults on millions of dragons in loans from the notorious Bank of Nobody Fucks With Us, assumes this will have no repercussions for her reign or Westerosi politics in general" plotline — which might as well have a big glaring THIS WILL BE IMPORTANT stamp on top of the chapter heading — you have Arianne Martell trying to do a coup/parent trap switcheroo with Myrcella, or Euron the Goffick Antichrist, or Faegon Targaryen and JonCon preparing a Blackfyre restoration, or anything else that might pan out — but might not! And while that uncertainty about what's important to the "overall story" might be a realistic way of depicting human beings in a world ruled by chance and not Destiny, it makes for much better reading than viewing, because Game of Thrones as a fantasy television series was based on the first three books, which are much more traditional "there is a plot and main characters and you can generally tell who they are" kind of book. I see Feast and Dance as a kind of soft reboot for the series in this respect, because they recenter the story around a much larger cast and cast a much broader net in terms of which characters "deserve" narrative attention.

but if you're making a season of television, you can't do that, because you've already set up the basic premise and pacing of your story, and you can't suddenly pivot into a long-form tone poem about the horrors of war. so you have to cut something. but what are you gonna cut? bear in mind that you can't just Forget About Dorne, or the Iron Islands, or the Vale, or the North, or pretty much any region of the story, because it's all interconnected, but to fit in everything from the books would require pacing of the sort that no reasonable audience would ever tolerate. and bear in mind that the later books sprout a lot more of these baby-plots that could go somewhere, but also might end up being secondary or tertiary to the "main story," which, at the end of the day, is about dragons and ice zombies and the rot at the heart of the feudal power system glorified in classical fantasy. that's the story that you as the showrunner absolutely must give them an end to, and that's the story that should be your priority 1.

so you do a hack and slash job, and you mortar over whatever you cut out with storylines that you cook up yourself, but you can't go too far afield, because you still need all the characters more or less in place for the final showdown. so you pinch here and push credulity there, and you do your best to put the characters in more or less the same place they would have been if you kept the original, but on a shorter timeframe. and is it as good as the first seasons? of course not! because the material that you have is not suited to TV like the first seasons are. and not only that, but you are now working with source material that is actively fighting your attempt to constrain a linear and well-paced narrative on it. the text that you're working with changed structure when you weren't looking, and now you have to find some way to shanghai this new sprawling behemoth of a Thing into a television show. oh, and by the way, don't think that the (living) author of the source material will be any help with this, because even though he's got years of experience working in television writing, he doesn't actually know how all of these threads will tie together, which is possibly the reason that the next book has taken over 8 years (now 13 and counting) to write. oh and also, your showrunners are sick of this (in fairness, very difficult) job and they want to go write for star wars instead, so they've refused the extra time the studio offered them for pre-production and pushed through a bunch of first-draft scripts, creating a crunch culture of the type that spawns entirely avoidable mistakes, like, say, some poor set designer leaving a starbucks cup in frame.

anyway, that's what I think went wrong with game of thrones.

[willczek-art]

are you okay, little lawyer??

[utilitycaster]

Do you think that Laura and Marisha are deliberately making their relationship somewhat toxic and unsustainable or do you think they see the relationship as healthy? It is just so different from all of the other relationships they have been a part of and not really in a good way. Would love to get your perspective on it if you have one

I am honestly unsure. I would like to say it's deliberate. Prior to it becoming canon, in fact, I, and a lot of other people who were less than enthused by Imogen and Laudna's romance and weren't entirely sold from the start, made the case that we expected they would be talking to each other and would put together a compelling story, not the dull fluff so common in fanon. While whether it's compelling is a subjective judgment, we know for a fact they didn't talk to each other. We know for a fact Marisha was surprised by the question of "Can I kiss you," and Laura was surprised by the answer. We know from a 4SD not long after (4SD #16, Kiss and Tell) that several episodes later they still hadn't talked. We know that Marisha perceives Laudna as holding Imogen back (and that Laudna perceives herself as doing so) from the Rose City Q&A. We know that from 4SD #20 (Episode Twenty) that Laura doesn't like conflict in narrative and Marisha does, and that Laura was thrown by Laudna's regression following Ashton's attempt to absorb the shard (4SD #19, Shard Candy).

I don't know if it's deliberate or not; I don't have any extra insight that isn't public knowledge any fan can easily access. But man, it doesn't feel like these are two actors on the same page about what's going on.

I've touched on this before but mostly in tags or whisper posts but I've always felt ill at ease with a number of for lack of a better term "fandom-approved opinions" and one of the ones that has baffled me the most is this idea that Marisha and Laura have exceptional chemistry. I watched Campaign 1 knowing the endgame ships but deliberately avoiding the fandom, and Vex and Keyleth did not even once occur to me as a thing. I watched the first year of Campaign 2 without a ton of fandom interaction because I was avoiding additional C1 spoilers and it seemed crystal clear that the obvious ship was Beau and Yasha; it felt like Beau and Jester only even had enough potential for me to multiship it as my general "whomever Jester picks" for like, 30 episodes. And yet people - people who didn't even ship either of the above ships and in some cases disliked them- would just say "oh man I can't wait until we get to a campaign where we can finally explore Marisha and Laura's incredible chemistry!" and it's like. I feel like I'm the kid in the Emperor's New Clothes on this! I understand that chemistry is to an extent a matter of taste and subjectivity, but it just increasingly feels like people looked at two campaigns of tables where Ashley was frequently absent and said "well, if I want an F/F ship that's between two of the women in the cast, I guess this is what I have to work with" and repeated to themselves that a flat pamplemousse La Croix was a Piña Colada until they started to believe it. I mean if someone wants to explain it to me in good faith I suppose be my guest and I will try to take it in, but it feels like people just treat this as incontrovertible fact and if you doubt it they're like "don't you have eyes" and it's like, well, pretend I don't. Explain like I'm eyeless and five because I have never understood this. They both have more chemistry with every single other cast member; it's not all romantic but man, I didn't even buy Laudna and Imogen as platonic best friends of two years. I have never had this problem with any other pre-existing character relationships Marisha and Laura have played, platonic or otherwise. It's literally just them. I just never feel like they're quite on the same page.

Back to the relationship between Imogen and Laudna onscreen, this was easily the best conversation since the start of the gnarlrock fight, and it is my hope it doesn't fizzle out the way that did. You can't keep kissing Laudna whenever she fears she's lost forever to Delilah, Imogen. Or you can, but that won't fix the problem. Again: are you disgusted? Do you feel betrayed? If you're not, why did you say that? If you are, how will you move past it? Do you want to be with someone who never feels like they're good enough for you? Laudna, do you want to be with someone who, no matter what they say, you feel you're holding back?

Early in the campaign, my feeling was that of our current situation, switched - Imogen felt her powers were a burden and a curse and Laudna kept referring to them and to her glowingly. It's just...ships passing in the night, no pun intended here. I hope it's on purpose and whatever comes from it is a good story - and either a tragedy or a happy story could be a good one. But I have a nagging sensation that Laudna wants out but is afraid to say no, and Imogen is afraid to let go, and I honestly don't know if the actors have realized this impasse and how the characters might resolve it, one way or another, besides the insufficient bandaid of a kiss whenever the conversation gets too uncomfortable.

[nomazee]

Hello! Tysm for holding the mix and match event!

My request is: Dan Heng as the character, friends as the trope, dreams as the prompt, and the timestamp being 2:14 am.

Again tysm for holding this event and remember to take care of yourself!

THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THIS REQUSRT you're so sweet ❤️❤️ I HOPE U ENJOY!!!

my 1k event!

—°+..｡ﾟ｡ﾟ+.*.｡.—

Dan Heng hears you call his name before he even sees your face. His room is completely dark, save for the swirling water patterns of the floor beneath his measly mattress. He lifts a hand up from the confines of his blanket to rub his eyes clean of sleep, blinking himself awake as you come into view. 

“What,” he rasps out, head muddled in his exhaustion and the dread of being woken up. His hand flails out to push your face away. You’re awfully close, laying on your side and facing him, but the proximity is nothing he’s not used to. For as long as he’s known you (which is really a terribly long time), you’ve had a habit of sticking close to him. Like a barnacle grown onto the side of a ship—though he should really find a nicer metaphor to use. 

Your own hand comes up to latch onto his, pulling it away from where he tried swatting your face away. “You were having a nightmare,” you tell him, a lack of judgment or worry in your tone. The indifference is more comforting than being coddled. “Or, maybe not a nightmare. You were just talking to yourself and I got worried.” 

A moment passes before the dwindling memories of his dream float back into his consciousness. Heat builds up the sides of his face and he hopes that the illuminated floor tiles don’t light up the flush of his cheeks. It was— a really nice dream, truthfully, but he’d rather not spill the contents of it to you. And he really hopes that he wasn’t saying anything embarrassing out loud. 

“Oh,” he says in lieu of a real response, eyes fluttering shut in his exhaustion. Your fingers are still curled around his, and he squeezes your hand without really thinking of it. It would be embarrassing if he were any more conscious, but this in-between state of being asleep and being awake is too soothing for him to mess with. 

“So? Was it a nightmare?” 

“Don’t— I don’t know. I don’t remember.” It’s a total lie, and you can pry right through his facade too easily. But you’re kind, kinder than you have any right to be, and you don’t mention it. 

“Sure,” you say instead, lighthearted enough to back away from the subject and leave him be. For now. “Don't fall asleep yet. I’m here! You don’t want to talk to me?” 

You’re playing around with him, kicking playfully with your words. If his eyes were open, he’s sure he’d see you holding back a laugh, and he’d have to resist mirroring your expression. 

“What time is it?” 

You answer him with silence, which means it’s an hour of the night where he should definitely not be conscious. Dan Heng sighs, chest-deep and tired, feeling your own breath fan across his face from how close you are. He doesn’t swat a hand at you, this time. 

“There’s a comet passing by the Express in a few minutes,” you tell him, chatting in full sentences like you’ve been awake for hours. You probably have been—you’re always wandering at odd hours of the day, sleeping when you shouldn’t, walking around when you should, sneaking into his room when you could be doing anything else. 

“What does that have anything to do with me?” 

“You should watch it with me. It’s a once in a lifetime thing.” 

“It’s really not. They pass by all the time.” 

You groan, and he hears you shuffle away from him to lay on your back. The temperature around him drops immediately with the absence of your warmth, but you’re still holding his hand, so he clings to that heat and squeezes your fingers again. In a motion that makes his breath stutter, you slip your hand out of his only to dive back, this time interlocking each of your fingers with each other. It’s slow and deliberate, and not for the first time, Dan Heng wonders if he’s still locked in the embrace of his dream. 

“You really won’t come with me to watch?” 

“You really can’t just watch it by yourself?” 

You scoff, incredulous. “Of course not. I can’t do much without my lovely, lovely friend.” 

And you’re joking, like you always are, but Dan Heng never learned to stop taking everything you say to heart. Even after years of knowing you, years of trying to scrape you off the wood of his rowboat—and really, you deserve a nicer metaphor after so much time. 

As is his fate, he watches the comet with you, dragging his wispy blanket along with him as you both sit in the parlor car. You tell him make a wish as you both stare at streaks of blue and white right outside the window, and all Dan Heng can think of is sappy thoughts, too embarrassing to voice to you.

—°+..｡*ﾟ｡*ﾟ+.*.｡.—

gen taglist: @tragedy-of-commons @lasiancunin

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[courfeyracs-swordcane]

[pointing towards you emoji] favorite blaseball team. go

(if you want to practice drawing in another style, then draw yourself as a transformer OR as a human character)

WE ARE FROM CHICAGO