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meabh-mcinness · 3 months ago

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Chronicles of a Second Chance

Chapter Four: The Devil in the Details

Fair warning that this chapter contains a lot of swearing and reader experiencing a panic attack. If these are not your cup of tea or you're not in a great mental state, maybe skip this for now.

Your heart thundered in your chest as you took in the car, coloured in the white and black format of the police, casually parked across the street from you.

No.

No!

It was far too early for him to be out and about! He shouldn’t be anywhere near here! Around this time both him and his little partner should be hacking into the military and not show up for at least a few days. That was how the movies went at least.

So, what in the absolute hell was Barricade doing prowling towards Sam’s house!? Even if he had been alerted to move fast just because you deleted the listing, he should still be at least a day or two away, not mere hours!

Your pulse roared in your ears as the traffic light flickered from red to green. The police cruiser’s engine rumbled to life, its headlights flashing briefly as it eased forward.

You swallowed hard, forcing yourself to breathe. Maybe—maybe—if you didn’t react, if you just kept your head down and moved normally, it would pass by. It had to. But as the car got closer, something felt off.

The colours were wrong.

The black-and-white pattern was inverted, with more white than black, and—was that a red emblem on the hood? Not the jagged, silver Decepticon insignia you’d been dreading then, but something else entirely. On the sides you could barely glimpse the words ‘Highway Police Patrol’ printed in big black letters. You exhaled sharply, the tension in your shoulders easing just enough for your brain to kick in.

Of course. Of course, the first cop car you saw wasn’t Barricade. What were the odds? You were getting paranoid. No, scratch that—you were paranoid, jumping at shadows just because you knew things you shouldn’t.

Shaking your head at yourself, you pushed off with your foot, gliding forward as you muttered under your breath, picking up speed once more. “I need to chill. The moment I start thinking every police car is Barricade is the moment I need to re-evaluate my life choices.”

You didn’t see the police car suddenly hesitate. You didn’t see the flicker of movement inside. But you did hear the distinct whoosh of a car abruptly pulling into a U-turn.

Your stomach dropped.

Tires screeched against pavement as the cruiser swerved, smoothly cutting across the road and pulling up alongside you. The driver’s side window was already rolled down, a man sitting in the driver’s seat.

His uniform was crisp, almost unnaturally pristine, and his posture was eerily perfect—like he’d been placed there by a machine rather than someone who actually lived in his skin. Dark hair, short and brushed back neatly was paired with piercing blue eyes that locked onto you with an intensity that made your hair raise in warning.

This —this was bad. You’d seen enough of these situations in media to know that being stopped by the police, let alone a potentially alien robot police officer, was never a good sign.

“Good evening, ma’am,” his voice was low and gravely but carried an odd, measured calmness to it, like every word was chosen with precision. You couldn’t help the minute flinch at his words, the urge to correct him on your gender was strong. Somehow though this didn’t seem to be the time to get into a talk on gender perception. “You seem to be in quite the hurry.”

Your throat went dry.

“Nope,” you said, forcing a laugh that sounded as unnatural as it felt. “Just, uh, skating. Exercise. Fresh air. You know, trying not to get run over on my way home.”

His sharp blue gaze didn’t waver. If anything, it sharpened, dissecting you in real-time.

“Is that so?” he said, tone cool and detached. His fingers drummed once against the car door—a small, precise movement that sent a chill down your spine. “Strange. Your body language suggests otherwise.”

You swallowed hard. Shit.

“I mean, getting nearly sideswiped by a cop car tends to do that,” you tried, forcing out another nervous chuckle. “Makes for a real adrenaline rush to come down from, you know?”

Your stomach twisted. Shit. He was picking you apart, analysing you like a puzzle missing just one crucial piece. If you didn’t keep it together, he’d find that missing piece, and you really didn’t want to know what would happen if he did.

You forced yourself to shrug, shifting your weight on your skates like you weren’t standing on metaphorical thin ice. Keep it casual. Keep it light.

"Well, yeah, I mean—it’s not every day a cop car does a U-turn just to talk to me. Kinda freaks a person out, y’know?"

He gave the slightest head tilt, "A reasonable response." His fingers tapped again—measured, deliberate. Every movement of his felt too precise, too calculated. The air felt thick, like an invisible net was tightening around you. Your mind raced. He couldn’t know anything. You hadn’t even gone near anything remotely suspicious, nothing he could prove at least.

So why did it feel like you were being dissected under a microscope?

His gaze didn’t waver. It pinned you in place, searching, waiting.

"You live around here?" he asked, his tone still eerily measured. It wasn’t the question itself that set off alarm bells—it was the way he asked it. Too neutral. Too precise. Like he was cataloguing your response before you even gave it.

Your brain tripped over itself trying to find a casual answer. "Uh, yeah. Just a few neighbourhoods over." You gestured vaguely down the street. "Not that far. Was just out, y’know, enjoying nature."

He hummed. A soft, considering sound. His fingers tapped against the doorframe again—three times, evenly spaced. You had the horrible feeling it wasn’t an idle habit.

"Odd," he said.

Your stomach tightened. "What is?"

The man studied you for a moment longer before tilting his head slightly. "Your body language suggests heightened stress levels. Your breathing is shallow. Pulse elevated. You claim to be out for exercise, yet your current movements indicate an avoidance pattern rather than a leisurely pace."

You gritted your teeth. Of course he noticed. The bastard wasn’t just a cop—he was a living machine. One that could probably analyse a hundred different things about you just from looking.

But he was bluffing. He had to be. There was no way he could truly know—C’mon, think. Say something smart. "Well, yeah, I saw a police car and panicked for a second. Who wouldn’t?"

A slow blink. A fraction of a tilt to his head. "Why would you panic?"

"Uhm—because I have anxiety?" The words were out before you could stop them. You winced internally. That was technically true, but it sounded so much worse in this context. Like you were hiding something. Like you’d been caught.

The cop’s eyes narrowed, "I see." Oh no. That was not a good ‘I see.’ That was an I just mentally filed that away for later ‘I see.’

You needed to get out of here.

Your brain scrambled for a way out. Any way out.

But there was none.

The man wasn’t moving, wasn’t reaching for anything, wasn’t even doing anything overtly threatening—just watching. Calculating. Like he already knew the answer and was only waiting for you to confirm it.

You forced yourself to breathe, inhaling through your nose and exhaling slowly. You had nothing to hide. As far as he knew, you were just some random civilian with a nervous streak.

Stick to that. Keep it simple. “I mean, I don’t usually have cops pulling U-turns just to talk to me, so yeah, maybe I freaked a little.”

His gaze remained steady, unnervingly precise. “A reasonable response,” he conceded. But there was something in his tone—too measured, too neutral.

You weren’t convincing him.

The worst part was that you weren’t even sure what he was looking for. It wasn’t like he could possibly know—

No. No, that was paranoia talking. He shouldn’t know, couldn’t know.

And yet.

Another small, deliberate tap of his fingers against the car door. The sharp, rhythmic sound made your skin crawl, like a countdown to something inevitable.

“You have an acute awareness of your surroundings,” he observed. Not an accusation, but not casual either. “An impressive trait.”

Your mouth went dry. That was not a compliment. That was a probe.

Shrug it off. Play dumb. “Uh… thanks?”

The man tilted his head, eyes narrowing just a fraction. “But unusual, given the circumstances. Most civilians would not react with such immediate recognition to a law enforcement vehicle—let alone a specific one.”

Your stomach flipped. He was leading you. Steering the conversation exactly where he wanted it to go, and if you weren’t careful—

“Perhaps,” he continued, voice smooth as steel, “it is less about my presence and more about who you thought I was.”

Your heart pounded. That—that wasn’t fair. That wasn’t even a question!

But it didn’t need to be. The way your body locked up for half a second too long, the flicker of realization that must have flashed across your face—he caught it. You knew he caught it.

You needed to redirect. Fast. “Look, man, I just—c’mon, everyone’s seen those dashcam videos of cops pulling people over for no reason. Can you blame me for being a little twitchy?”

The cop hummed. A thoughtful sound. A considering sound. A ‘I’ll allow you to think you’re off the hook for a moment’ sound.

And then, deliberately, he drummed his fingers once against the car door. And judging by the way those too-sharp blue eyes narrowed fractionally, the man—Prowl? It had to be—had caught everything. And wasn’t that a surprise? Considering he had been nowhere near any of the live action movies. So why was he even here?

Your hands clenched into fists at your sides. Your instincts screamed at you to run, to move, but you weren’t an idiot. Running from a police car—especially one that was most definitely not a car—was a terrible idea.

So, you swallowed hard, plastered on your best attempt at a clueless smile, and prayed to whatever cosmic force might be listening that you could bluff your way out of this.

And then, deliberately, he drummed his fingers once against the car door.

A small, precise movement. Like a trigger being pulled. The air around you seemed to shift, tense with something unseen but unmistakably wrong. This wasn’t just some cop who would ticket you for speeding.

This was a threat to your very being.

“I would advise,” Prowl said, his voice even but edged with something firm, “that you choose your next words carefully.”

Your heartbeat slammed against your ribs.

You were standing on a tightrope, balanced between life as you knew it and something much, much worse. Your mind flashed as quick as it could to dredge up everything you knew about the Autobot military strategist. He was practical – to an almost detrimental fault – authoritative, controlled, logical-

Logical. Logic. Military. Enforcer.

“Oh,” you breathed out in realization, “Logic Enforcer 99. You were the one helping Beezknees keep the journal out of Simmons’ hands.” With this realization in mind, it seemed painfully obvious that Bumblebee was the other username, to the point you kind of wanted to smack yourself for not realizing it sooner.

Prowl’s holoform eyes widened before immediately narrowing, the blue in his fake optics practically glowing as they locked you in place. Whoops, you should not have said that out loud, and to think you ragged on Sam and Miles all the time for being dumbasses.

The second the words left your mouth, you knew—knew—you had just royally screwed yourself. Your stomach twisted into a knot so tight it might as well have been a black hole, dragging every last ounce of your luck and self-preservation into its oblivion.

Prowl didn’t move. Didn’t blink. Didn’t even breathe—not that he needed to. But you could feel it, the way the atmosphere around him grew heavier, charged like an impending storm.

His optics glowed brighter, razor-sharp and calculating.

You’d just given him a new puzzle, and Prowl was ever so good at solving them.

Oh no. Oh nononononono—

Your mind scrambled, flipping through every possible escape route, every excuse, every way to not end up detained, dissected, or—hell—disintegrated for knowing too much.

Maybe you could laugh it off? Pretend you were just making a wild guess? No, no, he’d already caught the recognition in your voice—denying it now would just make it worse. Maybe you could redirect? Talk in circles until he lost interest?

Hah. Like hell. If this Prowl was anything like his usual portrayals, he had the patience of a saint and the stubbornness of a black hole. No way he’d let this go.

Your hands were sweating. Your pulse pounded in your ears.

The back door closest to you swung open on its own and you jumped at the sudden movement. “I’d suggest getting in,” his voice cut through your thoughts swifter than any bullet he could shoot at you, “We appear to have much to talk about.” A harsh swallow made its way down your throat, and it took everything in you to not submit to the screeching prey instincts inside of you. To not immediately take off and run as far and fast as you could away from the predator in front of you.

Never mind that he could probably catch up to you in two steps.

“I uh don’t suppose I can sit in the passenger seat and not look like a prisoner?” you questioned. It was more like you were pretty sure the back doors to cop cars had child locks and if you wanted to at least attempt to duck and roll out to escape at some point, then you had to be in the passenger seat. The even further narrowing of eyes and the revving of an engine promptly killed any thoughts of that.

Right, you were a prisoner.

Of a robotic alien that was millions of years old and who had who knew amounts of death of his own kind on his hands, much less other species.

Gods you hated eBay.

With the resignation of a death sentenced inmate, you put the wheels on your shoes back up and carefully got into the back seat of the car. If Sam and Miles ever got word that you were the first one of the group who ended up in the back of a police car, you would never hear the end of it. Although depending on how this night ended, they might never get the chance to take the mickey out of you.

No, you shook your head mentally. You refused to have this night end any other way than you, your friends and family safe in bed. Prowl could go rust in a ditch if he thought you were going to reveal anything to him – well anything more at least. He may have millions of years in interrogating prisoners, but you had the foreknowledge of what was going to happen next.

Or at least you thought you had.

Prowl’s existence, much less that he was here this early, was something you had not been expecting. As much as it may have annoyed you that the creators hadn’t taken advantage of having the two cop cars against one another, that had not meant that you wanted to deal with extra unknowns.

Who else was here? Who else was coming? Was the Ark here? FirstAid and Sunstreaker? Were the other members of the Elite Trine here with Starscream? You weren’t certain you could handle having to deal with three crazed Dorito-shaped robots along with so many unknowns on top of the other dangers that were supposed to happen already.

You knew your presence would change things, but this was a bit much.

The urge to scream was strong. Briefly, an image of a Prowl swerving because he had been startled by your scream of all things caused a few hysterical giggles to escape you.

The laughter didn’t last long.

It came out thin, breathless, and far too sharp around the edges—more a choked wheeze than anything resembling amusement. The moment it started, it spiralled, twisting in your throat like barbed wire. Your chest felt too tight, lungs squeezing in a way that had nothing to do with your position in the back seat of a moving police car and everything to do with the overwhelming weight pressing down on you from all sides.

The edges of your vision blurred.

Your heartbeat, already frantic, kicked into an erratic, painful staccato.

Oh, fuck.

This wasn’t just nerves anymore. This was panic. Real panic.

Your fingers clenched into the fabric of your pants, nails digging in as you tried to steady your breathing—in for four, hold for four, out for four—but nothing was helping. The world was tilting, shrinking, and oh gods, the car was getting smaller by the second, too small, too tight, too much—

Somewhere in the haze of static that was your mind, you distantly registered movement. A flicker of something shifting in the front seat. A low, measured voice breaking through the overwhelming rush of blood in your ears.

"Calm down," Prowl said, his tone as precise as ever, but noticeably softer, like he was speaking around something fragile. "You are hyperventilating."

No shit, Sherlock.

You let out a breath that was supposed to be a laugh but came out as more of a desperate gasp. Your hands were shaking. Your whole body was jittery. You couldn’t tell if you were too hot or too cold, but it didn’t matter—either way, you felt wrong.

There was another pause. Then, with that same deliberate, calculating tone, Prowl continued, “I need you to focus. Follow my instructions.”

You weren’t in much of a state to argue.

"Close your eyes."

You hesitated. Rule number one of being prey was to never take your eyes off of your predator.

"I am not going to harm you."

Against all odds, some part of you actually believed him. Or maybe it was you clutching to the last strings of hope that you were going to get out of this alive and well.

Shaky and uncertain, you squeezed your eyes shut.

"Good. Now, count your breaths. Inhale for four seconds. Hold for four. Exhale for four."

He was using the same pattern you had just tried, but the steadiness in his voice was oddly grounding. You clung to it like a lifeline, forcing yourself to follow the slow rhythm he set.

In for four. Hold for four. Out for four.

Again.

And again.

And—gods—it actually started working. The tightness in your chest didn’t vanish completely, but it loosened just enough that you could breathe without feeling like you were drowning.

After a while, the weight pressing down on you lightened, and the tremors in your hands faded to a dull, lingering shiver. You blinked your eyes open, your vision still slightly blurred, but no longer spinning out of control.

Prowl, to your surprise, was watching you through the gate separating the front and back half of the car. His optics had dimmed slightly, no longer quite as laser-focused as before.

"Better?" he asked, voice still unreadable.

You swallowed, throat dry and nodded.

"Good."

Another pause. Then, more quietly, as if he was debating saying it at all—

“You are not my prisoner.”

That surprised you enough to glance up at him fully. His expression remained unreadable, but something about his posture had shifted. He wasn’t as stiff, as rigid as before. Not quite relaxed, but no longer bracing for a threat.

“If you were,” he continued, almost idly, “you would not be sitting freely in the back seat.”

You opened your mouth. Closed it. Frowned.

"You revved at me," you accused, the words slipping out before you could stop them.

Prowl tilted his head slightly, as if considering. Then—

"Yes." A beat of silence. "…I can see how that may have threatened you."

The silence stretched unbearably long. You could practically feel the weight of Prowl’s processors spinning at speeds you had no hope of keeping up with. Every logical thread, every scenario, every outcome—he was analysing all of it, and you?

You were the goddamn variable.

Prowl’s optics burned into yours, unyielding and dissecting, his fingers tapping the door once more in a slow, deliberate motion. Not a warning this time, a calculation.

“You have approximately five seconds,” he said, tone eerily even, “to explain how you came by that information before I determine you as a security risk.”

Your stomach lurched. Oh, shit. Oh, shit, oh shit, oh shit.

Your mind scrambled for an answer—something that wouldn’t get you detained, or worse, erased.

"Look, uh," you started, forcing yourself to stay still, to not look like you were about to bolt, "you’d be surprised what someone can piece together when they pay attention. And, uh, have a very niche internet history."

Prowl’s expression didn’t so much as flicker. If anything, he looked less convinced.

"Elaborate," he ordered.

Shit, shit, SHIT.

"Okay, okay!" You lifted your hands, palms open. "I wasn’t looking for it, alright? It’s just—there’s patterns! You and Beezknees leave behind similar digital footprints whenever something gets scrubbed off the net. Doesn’t take a genius to realize there's a method to it. You both target the same clusters of data leaks, the same sources. But where Bee covers tracks with messy, scattered diversions, you operate with precision. The patterns match. I just—connected the dots!"

You exhaled sharply, chest tight, pulse hammering.

Prowl, for his part, didn’t move. Didn’t react. Just stared. Then—

"…Your assessment of Bumblebee’s tactics is generous."

Your brain short-circuited.

"Wha—wait, what?"

Prowl's optics dimmed slightly in something that might have been exasperation. "Messy and scattered are accurate descriptors."

A snort of laughter escaped you and you blinked in surprise at it.

Did—did he just deadpan at you?

For half a second, your sheer confusion overrode the terror. Then his gaze sharpened again, and the fear slammed right back into place.

"You are a liability," Prowl stated bluntly as he turned back around.

Your blood ran cold.

"N-no, no, I’m not—"

"You have knowledge you should not possess," he continued, unmoved by your panic. "And despite your insistence on mere observational skills, the probability of coincidence in your deductions is not statistically feasible."

Your mouth went dry.

He knew. Maybe not the whole truth, not yet, but he knew there was more to this. And if he dug any deeper— The seatbelt moved around you and clicked in all on its own before the car, the Autobot, carefully pulled back on to the road.

Oh, you were so screwed.

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vqrtualheartss · 2 years ago

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E42 Miles Morales x Black!Fem!Reader! - Across the Multiverse (might change it)

A/n : Soo, this is my first time publishing any of my writings online, although intended to be a oneshot, if all goes well a part two may come by. Feel free to give suggestions, requests, feedback. Next part here 3rd part heree

Warnings : cheating/ profanity, miles (1610) cheating, angst, cursing (only 2 words I think) , implied sexual assault,GWILES,, (not very detailed) harm done to reader

Reader = blue, Miles (1610) = red, Gwen = pink, others = white, may get a colour though

Genre : Angst(?)

I am in no way, shape or form trying to villainize Gwen, everything is just for plot in fact I love Gwiles. My only point of interest is Miles G.

𝓘𝓷𝓽𝓻𝓸𝓭𝓾𝓬𝓽𝓲𝓸𝓷| Every Saturday, my boyfriend -and Brooklyn's infamous Spider-Man- Miles Morales, would sit down and tell me the tea in the Spider-society. I've learnt about his encounters with other spider-people across the spider-verse and his relations with them. It was a silly little tradition but I loved it.

"Yea, so basically, the multiverse is a collection of all the universes there are, including this one. And that cow..villain thing, called The Spot has holes that can drag you anywhere across the multiverse or somewhere different in this one. I'll make sure to beat his ass next time he comes though so I can protect you from it"

I threw the pillow supporting my elbows at him, he webbed it to the wall "Corny ass"

He got up from his seat around the desk walking over to my place on the bed hovering over my frame.

"I don't care if I'm corny, I'll protect and love you in every universe there is, including this one"

We started giggling like little kids as the gap between our bodies closed in, he cradled my face in his hands before our lips met. We froze in the moment for about ten seconds before pulling back.

"I love you so, so much , and I don't ever want you to ever forget that."

He was clingy at times, but oh so adorable

"Ofcourse I know, you like to tell me everyday"

"And I'll never stop telling you"

He pecked my cheek. My hand rested onto his, caressing it

For about what seemed like hours but was just a few seconds we stared into the other's eyes, pure love and admiration in each set.

Who wouldn't fall in love again if someone looked at them like that?

"Even after two years I feel like I still have a crush on you-...Uahhh"

I held onto Miles as everything in the room including us started to levitate. He was more confused than scared since he's used to wierd stuff being Spider-Man and all. What shocked him was the blue.. portal thing that opened up in the ceiling. As it spread more, everything returned to it's position. From it a girl with blond, shoulder length hair and a right side-cut floated down on the bed beside us.

Taking a moment to process the events, Miles launched onto her

"Gwanda!, I missed you so much" huh?

"I missed you too Miles"

I stared at them blankly, separating themselves off each other, he cleared his throat.

"Y/n, this is Gwen, Gwen this is my girlfriend, y/n"

I awkwardly waved to her, to which she did back with almost the same energy. It was like looking at an inverted version of myself. My skin was a medium ebony, hers a snow white, I had coily 4c hair, her's was wavy, not to mention our clothing styles. Polar opposites.

"So why'd you call her Gwanda, and she like that?"

Confused wasn't even the word for me right now. Miles scratched the back of his head, a nervous tactic of his

"It's an inside joke, you wouldn't get it"

I shook my head to his statement. The silence got a bit awkward before she decided to break the ice

"Soo, how's everything since I left?"

Not wanting to disrupt their convo, I started scrolling through my feed

"The worst obviously"

I raised my eyebrows in shock at his confession. "obviously" What's that to mean? I had to bite at the inside of my cheek to stop myself from doing or saying anything irrational. I allowed myself to step out their convo, aimlessly browsing through social media, my focus was deep into my phone. However, my head swiftly moved when I heard their last few sentences

"Let's go patrolling, we still have a lot of catching up to do" Gwen's eyes widened, her blue irises scaring me a bit, they looked quite uncanny

"Does she know that you're-"

"Yeah, she does. You can trust her" Not sure if I can trust you or her right now.

"In that case, yeah, I'd like that"

My face stained with an inquisitive expression, both tones sounded a little too.. flirtatious for my liking, what exactly was so secretive that they had to talk it out in the city? I looked up at both persons as they put their suits on, waiting to see if neither would acknowledge my existence. Nope, they just got suited up and.. left. If there's a word to describe something to be more invisible than invisible then that was definitely how I felt. Not even my boyfriend could say goodbye.. humph

"It can't be that bad, they're just catching up.. yeah"

Trying every and anything to convince myself, I took up my belongings, letting myself outside his room then house. At first, I called out to his parents - "Mama Rio, Tio Jeff?" - hearing no response I left, locking the door using the key I got from Tiá Rio as a reminder that - I'm always welcome - I smiled at the memory.

I tried walking around the city to clear my mind, about halfway through my walk I saw two familiar suits gliding and having their best time in the sky, moving along the roofs of houses. That's some patrolling

Mood ruined, I cut my time short and headed straight home. Unlocking the door, I took my shoes off placing the beside the table. I would usually call out to my parents but they were away on a business trip. After getting some food, I took myself up to my bedroom. Taking a shower and changing into silk shorts and an oversized shirt (sleep clothes). But before heading to the bed I sat around my desk, admiring fairy lights adorned with pictures of Miles and I.. my boyfriend and I. I looked out my window only to see the two leaned against each other, back faced to my vision.

"This is going to end badly isn't it?... Maybe I'm thinking of the worst, he loves me. He wouldn't replace me like that right?" Wrong.

For the next few days it was all about Gwen. Gwen. Gwen. Gwen. Gwen. I felt as if he was dating her

"Wanna go on a date? Just you and me, it'd be fun" "Sorry I'm already with Gwen"

"Bonito, do you still want to go for ice-cream?" "Sorry princess, drawing with Gwen. Can you pick some up though? She loves vanilla."

"Can you buy that plush for me? I'll pay you back." "Sorry, spent all my money on Gwen"

(time-skip)

I tried so. so hard to keep positive, but I just couldn't. I changed, now it was gaslighting myself from crying to crying. "How's this even fair, he's supposed to be my boyfriend.. who is he even dating now" I felt like trash, disposable, he made me feel disposable. I thought I'd have to die before I see this era come. Clearly, I underestimated fate. I felt replaceable, disposable, and, jealous. I had completely let myself go, my eyes were always puffy, hair more tangled than usual, I looked a mess. I finally decided to talk with him, knowing this talk would only end one of two ways: good or bad.

I fixed myself up, it didn't take much really, I combed my hair, putting it in a nice high puff. Wore some cute clothes and that was it. Call me a narcissist, but I knew I was always pretty (bad lil bitch). I stared at my reflection in the mirror, smiling as I admired my features, taking a couple pics too , I finally headed out. My parents were out on another business trip, they always are, giving me another reason to visit the Morales - to visit my second family-.

Arriving at their residence, I knocked to acknowledge the presence of anyone that may be in the house. Miles' mother opened the door

"Tiá Rio! It's so good to see you" she pulled me into a hug before pulling back, both of us smiling

"Likewise mija.. oh dear, what happened? Your face is all sad-looking and-"

Your son is what happened

"it's nothing mama, I've just been tired, that's all"

It warmed my heart at how much she seemed to care for me, assuming she was referring to my puffy eyes I lied. - well that's one thing you can't rid in a day - whilst listening to me, she gestured for me to get inside, closing the door behind me as I took my shoes off

"If it's that boy stressing you out, I'll beat him for you, just let me know" I laughed at her suggestion

"No mama, it's not him, thank you for the offer though" I was still chuckling, then she joined in

"Anything for you. I'll get going though, I have something on the stove to attend to" I shook yes, heading towards his room

"Leave a plate for me?"

"Always " I smiled as I turned focus to Miles' bedroom door. I went in deciding to not knock

I don't even know if I wished I did or not. The scene behind the door was heartbreaking, but I couldn't look away. There he was.. my "boyfriend" kissing Gwen Stacy. He was looking at her with those eyes, the eyes of love he used to look at me with. Both of them looked at me like they've seen a ghost. The expression wasn't too far off, they did make me feel like a ghost, invisible. I shook away any tears starting to form, but my eyelids were like a broken dam, no way or use in controlling it. If anything, I wanted him to see how I felt, to see how much he hurt me, to feel guilt, sadness, anything.

"Cielo, don't cry. It's not what it looks like"

"How long ?" He started to stutter. "How long Miles?"

"2 weeks, listen.. please. We were caught up in a moment and we just-"

"Do you think that's helping?" I felt my words ball up, stuck in my throat, my stomach continuously dropping. It's as if I could feel the sadness in my body. I didn't like it

"No.." I looked over his shoulder, looking at Gwen as she turned her face away, his sweater and other belongings on her

"What happened to protecting and loving me in every universe? In this universe Miles. I don't care about any other universe, you had one job to do. Is loving me harder than being Spider-Man?" I shook my head side to side in disbelief

"Princessa-" Gwen hummed a timid response. Un-fucking-believeable

"Do not call me that, there's your princessa" I pointed over to Gwen that had her sweater still stuck over her body. The air quotes from myself added to the comedic effect and subtracted from the restraint I had to not laugh

I made a run for it when he turned his head in the direction of my finger before I broke down. I couldn't let him see me like this. I ran to the door, shoes in hand as I searched for my keys, unlocking it. Talking to Miles' mother in between quiet sobs as she rushed behind me, "I'm sorry tiá" I finally made my way onto the streets of Brooklyn running somewhere, anywhere far from their house. Once settled I tried putting on my shoes, who knew that such a simple task was hard when crying ?

Rio's p.o.v

What the hell is going on, more importantly, why is (y/n) crying. I looked up in the direction of Miles' room to see him run forward to the door, a girl that was definitely not her behind him, her lipstick smudged. What the actual- she looks old enough to vote ?! I stood in my position, putting 2 and 2 together.

"Miles Gonzalo Morales. Get. Here. Now."

(Y/n) p.o.v

Still, I was wandering around the city, just something I do to blow off steam. - The hell? - it's kinda wierd to see Brooklyn this empty, especially on a Saturday evening. I continued walking until I saw the reason for the lack of people, The Spot.

Could this day get any worse? I sighed, Yes unfortunately, mentally, I answered my question as I tried running opposite from the creature, my attempts to escape failed as it stretched it's hands to engulf me in its nothingness. As it took me in, I saw holes that spread randomly, seemingly having no start nor end.

I knew what they led into -a new universe-, but not where. Knowing there was no going back, I decided to leap into a random hole, accepting whatever fate it throws to me. Before making my decision, a hole randomly spawned underneath my legs, bringing me into any universe it leads to.

It was a hard fall to say the least but I got up. I landed in...Brooklyn? It was nothing like my Brooklyn but, sure it was pretty. The place was littered with multiple shades of dark purple and other hues, a black tint being evident on the atmosphere. Having nothing else to do, I did what I know best, wander. For about 10 minutes my eyes never left the buildings, neon signs or billboards, it was chaotic...but in a harmonious way. I was now more amused than scared. Then my thoughts hit me like a train

"Where will I stay?"

"Wouldn't I already live here?, I could be dead. SHIT I COULD BE DEAD"

"what should I do now?"

Lost in my own thoughts, I didn't seem to acknowledge the group of men (3) that stood, cat-calling me. I decided to ignore their existence, walking briskly

"Hey doll, come here. I don't bite"

"What's a pretty girl like you doing here?"

With their words slurred, I could only assume they were drunk, plugging my ears with my fingers.

"ohh, so you think you're better than us now?" The third man stated

"bitch"

I blame Miles Morales of earth 1610 for this

They started to run after me, I started to run from them. To make the situation worse on my part, before arming myself with even a rusty nail, one of the men held on my arm, forcefully dragging me into an alleyway and throwing my body against the wall. One thing happened after another, now they started to beat and bruise my body anyway and where they could. Whether it was by throwing glass at my face, kicking my chest, slapping my face, throwing my head back into the wall, stomping on my body they didn't stop. They stopped when I was at my weakest, my mouth was bleeding, slap marks imprinted on my face, glass shards in and around my body, blood dripping at a slow rate from my head, most of it got soaked up in my hair, making the coils look more like curls. They did all this while letting out a few remarks on their minds.

"That's what you get for resisting, you had a choice y'know"

"Think you're better than the rest of us huh?"

"cry all you want, there's no one here to save you"

Spitting out blood, and wiping my mouth with my sleeve I begged for some forgiveness - "Please" "Let me go" -

"Hmm, you see. I really can't do that doll but you can get something else"

"what?"

The man's mouth distorted into a smug smile before he tore my jacket in half from the seams. I tried to cover my chest with the hand covered in blood as the other men laughed. He tore away my hand, slamming my head once more into the wall. Hard. Getting rid of any consciousness I may have had left. I silently cried as I felt my soul slip from my body.

My eyes started to shut , vision doubling as I heard the sound of metal scraping against the wall, faint screams came from infront me, my body getting weak. I heard men shouting, slicing, punching, and, the splatter of something that heavily fell on my face and clothes. Finally, I felt the hand that had intentions of violating my body fall, its owner seemingly dropping to the floor.

Forcing myself to open my eyes I saw a suit with colours of purple and black step towards me, lifting my body up.

"It's all good now. You'll be fine" The voice sounded almost mechanical behind the mask, the demeanour of the wearer gradually softening as he reassured me. I closed my eyes trusting the stranger with my life. I can trust him afterall..right?

#earth 42 miles morales x reader #miles morales #earth 42 miles x you #earth 42 miles morales x black!reader #earth 42 miles x reader #earth 42 miles fluff #across the spiderverse #spiderman #black writers #black tumblr #black reader #yn #miles molares #light angst #angst #fluff #fsnfics #fanfic #Spotify

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alias-inkpatch · 2 years ago

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soo, i took the vessel creation sprites and used them to design the six fallen humans.

i’m not the first to try giving those humans designs but i thought it’d be fun.

the bottom row is the fallen humans without the items they were said to have been wearing in game. The bow, skirt and apron were available sprites.

if anyone has any suggestions on how they could be designed i’d love to hear them. I wanted to use inverted colours for them, like Chara is with Frisk but i didn’t have a base for that so they’re mostly coloured in opposites to their soul colour. I switched it up based on what i thought looked best.

#Undertale #ut #Undertale theory #undertale sprites #deltarune #deltarune sprites #the fallen humans #sprite editing

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anothermonikan · 1 year ago

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KEEP DRAWING FOREVER I LOVE YOUR ART PEACE AND LOVE. whats your process if you mind me asking

Hehe, I'm glad to hear it! I'm not gonna stop anytime soon! On account of if I go too long without making something I start writhing on the floor like. an almost dead lizard (rain world) or something. ehe ^^;

I don't really think about my art process that much! Lemme rack my brain a lil bit ehe ^^; I like to draw a lotta different things so it's dependent on what I'm drawing! I don't think my art is. that grand to have a formal process. It's like some sort of spirit possesses me for a few hours and I come out of it with some sort of art aha ^^;

I can try and walk through a simple piece mayhaps

(They call me the yapper for a reason, this turned out way too extensive, sorry if it's TMI, turns out I like talking about this stuff ^^;)

Behold! A silly! I typically sketch on a dark background with a white pencil brush, I'll use whatever one the art program I'm using has, but specifically for FireAlpaca (the art program I'm currently using), I use the sketchbook pencil at size 6, I find a slightly bigger brush size for the sketch helps negate too many stray lines that can make the sketch harder to follow when moving onto lineart. my sketches tend to be. super super messy! Edgar's kinda a simple character so it doesn't really show, but sketches to me are more a brief estimation as to what I want the final piece to look like and a lot of that is gonna come through in the lineart.

Up until very very recently, I actually had a ton of trouble with lineart! It can be such a daunting part of the art process, I used to just kinda skip it all together and just do sketches with colour ^^; Every time I felt like I had to do lineart for a piece I was kinda. miserable about it! I didn't like doing it! It took too long! it's so tedious! But like, actually a week ago, something clicked and I realised that the reason I found lineart so awful and long to do is because I took it. way too seriously! Turns out, lineart doesn't have to be literally perfect to work! Unbelievable I know...

I tend to turn the transparency of both my sketch and background down while doing lineart. the sketch to around 40% and the background to around 60%. My lineart is mostly darker colours and trying to see dark on dark is not. ideal! I try to keep in mind what I want the colours of the final piece to be and make my lineart match that accordingly. I could just do the lineart in black and make a clipping layer to colour it afterwards, but I am kinda terrible at keeping track of my layers so having every element be the same colour can cause different parts of the lineart to overlap with each other without being noticed and then I have to do a buncha layer reconfiguration, it's awful aha ^^; so I just try and do the colours right away to prevent that ^^; I use a size 4 pen brush for my lineart!

The sketch is just a suggestion of what the final piece could look like! A lot of the time I think of something new to add to a drawing right in the middle of lineart, for example that artigourm piece I did a few days ago, the slugpups in there? Not part of the original sketch at all! I was practically done with the piece when I thought of adding them and I had to work around the drawing I already had to add them XD Luckily this time it was something small, I thought adding little hearts in Edgar's eyes would be cute so I did that ^^;

Colours! I like colouring a whole bunch! I hide the background and sketch layers, select the outside of the drawing, and then invert it! It helps to avoid having to keep the colours inside of the lines which I am, actually really terrible at! I freehand coluring for the most part because I find using the fill bucket leaves a small space between the lines and I end up having to go over it anyways ^^; I try to think of which colour should be on top of the others and start with that, I then create layers under that for what colour should be under that (for this drawing it ended up as Edgar's body >> Edgar's Eyes >> Edgar's face)

I don't. really know colour theory? I just kinda go for what looks good to me aha ^^; I don't use specific palettes for stuff or anything.

Shading wise? I really love doing it! Doesn't mean I have the slightest idea what I'm doing tho!

I tend to do my shadows in a dark greyish colour and my light in a pale yellow. I then scale the transparency down to around 30% for both

Does this shading make any logical sense? Probably not! Does it look good? To me, yes, so I don't really think so hard about it aha! I do try to consider light source when doing all this but I'm actually. quite new to this whole lighting and shading thing! This was another part of the art process I was so intimidated by that I just. didn't do it for a long time. Turns out I actually enjoy doing this part tho aha! It adds a lotta depth to the drawing, even very simple shading like this!

Glow-wise, while it's obviously not something I do on all drawings, I find just covering the area you wanna glow with an airbrush in whatever colour you want the glow to be and then turning the transparency to 30% works pretty well!

Background wise,,,I have NO idea what I'm doing! Unless I go into a piece with a very specific background idea I usually. Don't do one. and this is one of those pieces so um. Gradient background with some markings it is aha!

Sometimes if want a piece to portray a specific mood, I use a colour filter over everything, for that gabv1el piece I did a few days ago I used a dark red colour filter because I wanted that piece to feel quite comfy and warm, I don't think this drawing really needs one but here's it with one anyways so you can see what I mean

I make a layer above everything and colour the subject of the drawing one colour, and then turn the transparency down to 30%

..and now Edgar looks a lil warmer and softer!

I. ended up yapping way too long asfddfhdfh. I have no idea if this is even what you meant by process butt. I got to draw Edgar so I'm happy hehe ^^;

Thanks for the ask hehe~

#look I deleted like 2 whole paragraphs from this just about my drawing software history and getting inspired this is not getting any shorter #I did paste them into a text document. if you wanna hear that also. it is NOT very interesting or relevant tho sdhdshsd #I haven't got to draw Edgar in so long ehe. I love Electric Dreams so much aughhh!#I'm real happy you like my silly art ehe! it's not something I take super seriously but it is something I like sharing with people~#Android Arts #Android Answers #Android.txt

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paulfc · 1 year ago

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Further observations on Hitomezashi stitch patterns

It seems that the majority of Hitomezashi stitch patterns have the running stitches at right angles to each other resulting in patterns that are essentially made of squares.

I don't think that is an absolute requirement so here we have a couple of tests that have the weft stitches angled off 30 degrees and then mirrored back on themselves. This results in rhombus based patterns.

Regarding the angle between warp and weft forty five degrees and the rhombus produced is a square, if the angles are mirrored then the stitch lengths are the same, I have not yet tried different angles for warp and weft but it seems to me that the stitch lengths will be different.

While I was making the patterns in Corel Draw I coloured the surface stitches black and the rear-side ones yellow just for convenience but it occurs to me that while it would double the sewing inverting the pattern in another thread colour would probably look quite good, if the fabric colour was taken into account.

So some messing about with angles of warp and weft to try virtually and some real life sewing to try my own suggestion.

#sashiko #visible mending #hitomezashi

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abyssalpriest · 2 years ago

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Recountings from a day with Lev, 10/9/23

Distant from it, the Day Sky hovers over my head like planes of incense smoke hang uncommitted in draft-less rooms. It's alluring more than anything else, puts the suggestion of the taste of tart fruit on my tongue. It's distant.

Burning, burning. The fire is eating me, licking tongues, consumption, enrapturing. I'm writhing in silken ashes, even the sharpest sticks are sliding through my melting flesh like sharp knives through solid butter. So much colour - not many colours, but so much of a small range of vibrant hues. I become the Ecstacy of St. Teresa but the rays of the Sun pierce me from ground up sliding like snakes across all of me, their beautiful, shining saffron brodies slowly make their way through me to the deep reds hidden beneath my skin where they merge...

Returning from somewhere else on another plane, lying here in the Astral above my physical body. Staring at him, shining black hair like obsidian cascading, black eyes half-lidded staring at technology, soft. I'm covered in soot or at least the smell of it sears into all my senses.

"You're auto-cannibalising," He says in response to that, highlighting for me the cyclical exudation of my energy transmuted into the scent of burning ash which therefore comes back to my senses. Through our link, he rearranges in an intelligent instant my scent output to that of a flower I know well, though can't place... It looks like magnolias when I try to understand, but I forget what they smell like. Looks like lotus.

Theres a huge storm outside on the physical plane, huge in the way of the whip-crack of explosive thunder, but barely there in the drizzle of rain... He's standing outside by the road, I see him. The rain smells like smoke, the causality of fire and rain overlapping. The sky is a burning bright grey, the rain like boiling water, the thunder inverted explosions rolling like waves of consciousness through the brain of God extended and warped over the circumference of the Earth.

Thunder... It's made of arcane petroglyphs, moments of speaking, hypnagogic registering of murmurs. Burnt and burning feathers, lightning chases the Sky Bird and lights him, he's screaming.

The rain stops like a section of a song that slows it's tempo. I begin to see runes and glyphs in the leaves.

He's doing something...? Not moving, or at least this body of his that I'm seeing isn't, he's inside another part of reality working and stitching, the thunder above is to his work like the sound of needle popping through leather, of thread scraping through its fabric, is to a clothier. I see a halo of eyes as if circled perpendicular to the eye of the storm. The petrichor is intense, exuded not just from the plants and parched concrete but all of the Material world itself as it listens. Bells tolling. The song slow...

When I go to switch the actual music playing on this plane to something else he returns to my room, to consciousness, not heralded by a presence of a body but of thoughts as his impulses and opinions begin to eclipse my brain again. The purple flowers outside spell out a name.

#~abyssal murmurs #Otherside //#Sky //#Fire //

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haeroniel-doliet · 4 months ago

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Bonus content!! Please feel free to enjoy the process timelapse of the most recent thing I made for the Avantris Valentines gift exchange!

I am gonna have a little ramble about some thoughts on this one below the cut, mostly for my own future reference and anyone curious!

Hey there! fun fact I turned on recording a few art projects ago and I think its genuinely helping me a lot to keep a reference like it for how each process vs finished product was!

First of all, please do not pay mind to the janky final few seconds, I cut the canvas size down and clearly the recording did not enjoy that :')

As usual, had a bit of a hard time figuring out exactly what I wanted to do, and just threw shit at the wall literally doodling anything and everything, and literally just ended up thinking lol, thats kinda funny and building from there

Generally, I do a super rough thumbnail style idea, then one of very large shapes to block out what goes where before finally going onto do the first draft, that I try do real fast so I can get all ideas on paper and all mistakes visible before I dedicate in too hard

(I was feeling stuck honestly at this stage, so I decided to slap some colours on for fun to see if I even like the big picture at all, and funny enough a good few friends did suggest that thats totally good enough right? But it didn't feel like something I was proud of so I got a week or so of a break before breaking into the full clean drawing/lining process which does take ages but turned out quite lovely here I think

Praise be references again!! Granted, here I got off quite easy, I really only used the official character art + a few screenshots of Andy + a pretty crow I found online. No, wait actually, I remember I had a terrible horrible time trying to find the exact kind of pose or even hand reference online for some reason, so I did take my own photos to make it work!

Oh so the thing I learned, idk if you can spot it, in the colouring in stage, I was trudging through Jericho on the left as I normally do, dreading the lack of time I had left and how long just flat colours would take, right? Then by Marius I was exhausted, worried I would actually have nothing to gift my giftee, and decided hell at least I can make a highly stylised just filled in with a relevant colour thing, right? And if I do have the time to finish it, I can always use them as a sort of wash/colour unifying overlay! Here, I remembered the fill tool exists hahh, and I just had to make a few lil work arounds like not letting colours touch each other and boom, speed!

but thing is, I was still spending forever gently outlining my tiny 4 pixel wide lines to not make it sloppy, when I learned about this groovy lil contiguous selection tool (lil magic wand icon!) and boom I can select a coloured in region, invert selection and colour in with like a few broad strokes total! Absolutely a game changer

So I did manage to absolutely speed through the rest, deciding fuck it I am gonna do my best to do at least a lil rendering, even if doing a beautiful full perfect job wouldve taken at least an extra week probably, and I think it doesn't suffer much for it!

The background btw is from my lovely friends suggestions, something simple that suggests a vaguely transitional moment in time, and i thought some sunset like colours would also be a bit valentines appropriate!

And, this recording is 69,441 frames long (would've been so god damn funny if it was 69,420 though) and I crunched some numbers, where I wouldve spent at minimum like 20 hours of active constant drawing on this! Thats, a good chunk honestly and maybe hopefully now with this colouring trick I can get even more efficient!

Anyway, despite the rush at the end where I felt like my hand would fall off from drawing so much so quickly (felt about as stressed in a good way as for my thesis lol) I am beginning to be proud of the end result and i'm very glad my giftee liked it too!! Time to face the scary concept of sharing this in the big discord server hahaaaaahh

Heres to trying to draw a bit more and hopefully be more chill about it!! Although, I do love the satisfaction I get from making all the lil details too (fun fact, I hid a ton of tiny lil hearts super subtly all throughout them, i.e. in the rose centres)

I don't imagine anyone has made it here and read all this, but hi! if you did, please do leave a like or a comment or so, I'm very interested to know if this was at all interesting to anyone but me! Also I love chatting about art!!

#Haeroniel draws #art timelapse #art progress #krita timelapse

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k00299539 · 1 year ago

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Movement Project Week 4 - Suffering from Ceramics

I guess I'm just lying in these titles now cause I actually really enjoyed the ceramics workshop on Monday. I was a complete Zombie from not sleeping the night before, so maybe that was the root cause of the suffering. I choose to agree with the Buddha though that desire is the root of all suffering and there was nothing I more desired on Monday morning than to be not in school. Hence the title.

That actually got me thinking though, about desire and suffering. came in to the Elaine/Gemma/Mary's ceramics workshop on Monday with an obvious desire; to recreate my spiral staircase in clay and be done with it. This rockheaded approach is obviously not conducive with the creative process which our great school endeavours to instill in it's student body.

When I let go of that desire and simply engaged with the workshop as intended, I not only enjoyed the process of it a lot more, but found I landed on better ideas than those I was holding onto so steadfast. This is essentially a longwinded way of saying that when the ceramics workshop opened with us painting sheets of paper with ink, I was internally combusting.

Above: Ceramics?

This was pretty fun. We were asked to write out a list of words, verbs specifically, that had something to do with movement or our conception of it. And then we had to express that through the unforgiving canvas of black ink on white paper. I've uploaded it already for a previous post, but here's another look at the list I put together:

Above: Obviously leaving room in case I hadn't written enough...

So for those playing along at home your task is to look at the set of veritable rorschach test of inkblots above and connect them to their verb of origin...

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The answer is number 1. "fall" for all of them... I don't know why I wrote so many tbh. You might also note that in all the infinite vastness of my personal dictionary the word "spiral" doesn't appear once. I still hadn't connected the dots on that one... I am very smrt.

Above: The process

I was pretty conservative with this whole process, maybe due to the aforementioned sleep deprivation. I did three A2 sheets, which felt like a lot til I saw how many everyone else did. Even in terms of the tools used to make marks in ink, I was below par. I used a foam brush with a triangular tip, a roll of material that felt like what straw hats are made of out but probably wasn't that, cardboard, and gravity.

Honestly I could've been a lot more adventurous here and some of the class made some incredible impressionistic work. I think I prefer the "experiment with the resources you have" stage, to the "gather resources" stage if that makes sense. I feel a lot more able to get creative once the limitations have been set, which sounds pretty contradictory now that I write it out... onto the next step.

Above: Very interesting shapes according to me

The next step was choosing one of our inked up pages and photocopying it at different sizes and with inverted colours to get us thinking purely in terms of shape. We made viewfinder to locate the most interesting parts of the image and gave particular attention them. Evidently I choose the swooshy curve from my second sheet.

Above: (:

At first we were told to cut up, rearrange, and mess around with all our photocopied material to come up with an interesting collage of shapes. I hate collages. I hate scrap booking. I hated this. sadface.

Then it all turned around when we told to start thinking in 3D and combining our shapes into structures. This was a huge relief for me. Making weird shapes out of paper is a lot more fun and creatively motivating than making collages.

Above: Return of the spiral staircase

My first structure was pretty simple. I had told Elaine about my staircase idea and she suggested trying it out in paper. The centre column is just an A3 sheet rolled into in a cylinder and the steps are short strips of card taped onto the side. Not exactly the most elegant contraption.

Above: Spiral something or other

After talking with Mary about the project, I finally had my eureka moment of realising "spiral" is a also a movement verb. Very intellectual stuff. She suggested pushing the spiral idea into forms other than a staircase, so I got two cutouts of my swoopy yoke and connected them end-to-end after wrapping them into cylinders.

The shape lent itself to having a kind of dolphin tail or cresting wave look to it. It made the start and end points seem ambiguous, a static object that had a dynamic motion to it, the exact thing I had been searching for with the staircase. I had to compromise a bit and add a strip of card for support but this was still the work I was most happy with from the workshop.

Tumblr is informing me I'm out of images for this post so I'll finish this off in another.

#lsad #ceramics #movement #3d

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radkindoffeminist · 3 years ago

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Stolen Phrases and Slogans

I used to have a much bigger post with many more receipts so forgive me for it being a slow-growing post. I will try to add as much as I can when I can. Please check the original post for updates.

You’re free to comment or message me with additional slogans I may have forgotten, particularly if you have sources of them saying this. I will give you credit for your additions unless asked not to tag you.

Most recent update: 18/06/2023

(Black) Trans Lives Matter

Stolen directly from Black Lives Matter.

Examples:

Black Trans Lives Matter March

Medium article titled TLM

Trans Rights Are Human Rights

Stolen from feminism. Original phrase: Women’s Rights are Human Rights. Source suggesting it dates back to the 80s/90s

Examples:

UN Foundation

BC Human Rights Clinic

Literally a site called TRAHR

Stop Trans Hate

Stolen directly from Stop Asian Hate.

Examples:

Stop Trans Hate

Walking While Trans

Stolen from Black Lives Matter. Original phrase: Walking While Black.

Examples:

Article on ‘walking while trans’

Second article

Trans Panic

Credit: @wl9140

Stolen from the LGB Community. Original phrase: Gay Panic.

Originally used as a murder or assault defence where a man could blame his violent outburst on being shocked/frightened by the unwanted sexual advances from another man. Trans panic is a similar defence with the difference being that the assault was due to not knowing that the person they were having sex with/had sex with/wanted to have sex with was a trans person.

Examples:

Sources to be added.

Conversion Therapy

Credit: @wl9140

Stolen from the LGB community.

Originally only applied to forcibly ‘correcting’ someone’s sexuality but has been more widely appropriated to also mean forcing someone to identify with their birth sex.

Examples:

Sources to be added

AMAB/AFAB/AGAB (or alternatively (CAMAB/CAFAB)

Stolen from the intersex community.

Assigned Male/Female At Birth (or Coercively Assigned Male/Female At Birth) was a phrase from the intersex community used to label themselves and the fact that they were assigned a certain sex in circumstances where their sex was unclear due to their intersex disorder. It was then appropriated by the trans community to label themselves and ignore the fact that they are a certain sex, with some going as far as believing that these labels are arbitrary and not a recognition of someone’s biological sex in the vast majority of cases.

Examples:

Sources to be added.

Trans is Beautiful

Stolen from the Civil Rights Movement. Original phrase: Black is Beautiful.

Examples:

Sources to be added.

The Future is Trans/Genderfree/Etc

Stolen from feminism. Original phrase: The Future is Female. Source suggesting it dates back to 1975 and resurfaced in 2015.

Examples:

Article about a documentary

Article titled The Future is Trans

Bonus Misogyny Round:

‘The Future is female’ is problematic

Sources to be added.

Passing

Credit: @opabiniawillreturn

Stolen from people of colour

Examples:

Sources to be added.

(Trans) Chasers

Credit: @peakedlesbian

Stolen from the fat positivity movement

Examples:

Sources to be added.

Intersectional Feminism

Stolen directly from intersectional feminism.

Examples:

Sources to be added.

Girls Like Us

Credit: @ialmostdroppedmycrossiant

Stolen from an anti-trafficking movement.

Examples:

Sources to be added.

Trans Girls Magic

Credit: @opabiniawillreturn

Stolen from intersectional and black feminism. Original phrase: Black Girls Magic.

Examples:

Medium article

T-shirt via Redbubble

Genderqueer Flag

Not so much a phrase but the colours are almost identical to the original suffragette colours.

Examples:

Suffragette sash:

Coloured with Green, White, and Violet which represents Give Women the Vote.

Genderqueer Flag:

TRAs confusing the two:

Cotton Ceiling

Credit: ???

Stolen from feminism. Original phrase: Glass Ceiling.

Glass ceiling was inverted by feminists to describe the phenomenon of women being unable to progress past certain milestones in their careers as a result of misogyny. The glass ceiling represented the invisible barrier which prevented women from progressing higher in their careers. Cotton ceiling was later coined to say that trans women’s biggest barrier to womanhood was lesbians refusing to sleep with them due to not seeing them as being complete/real women. The cotton represents lesbian’s underwear as the ‘barrier’ to trans women’s womanhood.

Examples:

Information on an old workshop about overcoming the cotton ceiling

Mexican Pink

Credit: @infeliz-jueves

Stolen from feminism and victims of femicide.

Mexican pink is a hot pink colour used to paint over the crosses of the graves of women who were victims of femicide. It was appropriated by a trans woman to mean alliance with trans women.

Sources:

Article

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the-stove-is-on-fire · 4 years ago

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Mom Said It’s My Turn On The Wing AU

I present to you, Winged Danny Phantom with WING SPIKES, courtesy of the Spur-Winged Lapwing. Wing headcanons under the cut.

Fentons Danny - Spur-winged Lapwing Jazz - Great Blue Heron Maddie - Grey Falcon Jack - Spur-winged Goose

Danny and Jazz take their plumage colouration after their mom but are both water birds after their dad. Danny inherited Jack’s wing spurs which are a super uncommon trait. Jazz easily has the biggest wings in the family and Danny often feels that his are inadequate. Before getting his ghost powers Danny had a hard time flying for any extended period of time. His Dad keeps assuring Danny that his wings will grow with him as he gets older.

Foleys Tucker - Goldfinch Angela - Goldfinch Maurice - Goldfinch

All the Foleys have Goldfinch wings which is a bit uncommon but not exactly rare. Though since they all have rather small songbird wings they don’t do much flying and Tucker has a pass for flight related gym activities. Every now and then his parents not-so-subtly try to suggest nice Goldfinch girls for Tucker to meet and “get to know”.

Mansons Sam - Raven Pamela - Crow Jeremy - Blue Jay

Pamela resents her wings and regularly lightens them so that they’re more of a grey/beige colour. Jeremy is just a regular dude but he really like his wings; his favourite colour is blue. Sam wholeheartedly embraces her wings and is pretty smug that hers are the biggest in her family. She often uses them to cover Danny and Tucker.

Masters Vlad - Black Swan Dani - Spur-winged Lapwing

Vlad’s wings invert colour in ghost form just like Dani and Danny’s do. Jack insists on referring to Vlad and himself as “goose buddies”. This is very fucking annoying for Vlad but everyone else finds it hilarious. Vlad can’t fold his wings flat against his back which he finds very annoying. Dani uses here wing spurs to poke people at any given opportunity.

Grays Valerie - Barn Owl Damien - Great Horned Owl

Val and her Dad have both been living up to their reputation of Night Owl these last few years, and honestly, they both secretly prefer it. Damien thinks his wings are pretty average and normal. His height and the size of his wings accidentally intimidates people, even when he tries not to. Valerie has the softest, prettiest wings in school, and they look like they have stars on them, or at least according to Danny.

Miscellaneous Wes - Wood Stork

When you invert Wes’ wings they look suspiciously like Phantom’s...

Lancer - Great Grey Owl

Great big wings that are about as grey as Lancer’s outlook on life but excellent for sheltering several children from falling rubble during a ghost attack.

Dash - Stellar Sea Eagle Kwan - Harpy Eagle

EAGLE BUDDIES. In this AU Football is played in the air and on the ground like some kind of American Quidditch but still with only one ball.

Paulina - Scarlet Macaw

People are often distracted by Paulina’s colourful plumage and underestimate her.

#DP #Danny Phantom #Winged Danny #wing au #stove on fire #22688

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lairofdragonagelore · 2 years ago

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Murals in DAI: Red Lyrium Idol

This mural has been shown in Dragon Age Official Teaser Trailer - 2018 Game Awards.

[This post is part of the series “ Murals in DAI ”]

[Index page of Dragon Age Lore]

The context of this mural is unknown to us. We don’t truly know if it was Solas who painted it. We can only guess it was he because it’s a piece of Nick Thornborrow who usually draws Solas’ murals, and because in general the context of the game allows us to assume so. We don’t know where it’s located either.

The Background

As we saw in Murals in DAI: Basics, the inverted triangle seems to be used to represent the Fade, and it’s the symbol we see in the majority of the places in this piece that are not burning. I imagine that this may represent 1) the destruction of the Veil [or the barrier that surrounds the Black City), or 2) the “surface” of the Sphere of Fire [The Death of a Titan] that has been contained with vines which have worn-out over time. In any case, the fire is what overtakes the image, putting the Fade symbol on a secondary plane.

There is also a line in the background that seems to suggest that there is a mountain, and what we are seeing is happening at the feet of a mountain. This could also mean a metaphor to link this image with the one related to the sphere of Fire in “The Death of a Titan“ [remember that the right side of that mural shows mountains that may suggest connection with the Waking World or even with The Horror of Hormak].

The Panels

Here, we find a scene that I think is happening in the Fade and against the barrier that isolates the Black City. The background, beyond the fire, shows inverted triangles in a greenish-grey plain colour. The place is set on fire, potentially connecting this scene with the fire sphere in “The Death of a Titan” or simply implying Solas is destroying this danger enclosed in the barrier of the Black City.

I can’t say if this mural shows one or two panels. All the elements are so well integrated that I think the wolf, the elvhen, and the tree are in the same space than the white sphere with the idol inside. The whole scene seems to be a big allegory of what is going to happen. I was not sure if we should consider the white sphere as an independent panel, since the wolf and the elvhen seem to be focused on the white sphere. So, instead of trying to understand this mural in “panels”, I will explore each of the elements in it and see how they integrally connect each other at the end.

The Vhenadahl

The vhenadahl is a tree with a lot of mystery in the DA games. It’s naively presented as a cultural element kept by the city elves to remember Arlathan and the “Old Ways”. These trees are, curiously, painted in red with white lines and swirls raising up from their roots, which has a strange interpretation for the player who knows about the codex of “The Death of a Titan”: Veilfire Runes in the Deep Roads.

In DA2, Marethari Talas has a very focused cinematic when she enters the alienage and looks at the vhenadahl, which is a bit strange. It can be considered as a scene that shows how the city elves respect her as a Dalish, but it’s curious that so many seconds of a cinematic were given just for that, in a game that has cut a lot of content with more plot relevance.

In The Masked Empire, Felassan makes a very brief comment about this tree too:

Felassan paused as they came to a great tree in the market square. The vhenadahl was decorated with ribbons, and the dirt around it was marked with sticks stuck into the earth and decorated with bits of bright cloth hung as offerings. “The tree of the People,” Briala said. “Your people.” “And yours.” Felassan looked away. “Though you don’t think so.” “It’s a nice tree,” Felassan said. “Let it just be a nice tree.”

It’s not clear the implication of such comment, although I think it’s not a good one for an elvhenan. He seems to imply these tree are “not nice” at all for the ancient elvhen but they are “the Tree of the people”, understanding “the people” as the city elves. This means the elves who came after the fall of Arlathan, the mortal elves, the elves that ended up rescuing a slave culture thinking it was their original elvhenan one. If the Aravels were ships to transport slaves to centres of experimentation [The Horror of Hormak ], and the Vallaslins were the brands of the noble elvhen over their slaves, there is a big chance that this tree has another horrifying meaning that has nothing to do with the original culture of the elves [or maybe, ironically, it is another representation of the “old ways”, like the aravels and the vallaslins are]. Personally, I think it’s related to the vines that covered the “fire sphere”, but I will talk about it later.

In the elven folklore that barely survived, we have some city elf songs that may still have some weak connection with the truth of the real function of these trees for the Elvhenan:

In the original song of Where Willows Wail, the presence of the words vhenadahl seems to be related to the loss of immortality and the loss of the ability to dream into the Fade. The translation is quite rough to understand it, but it seems to have an elvhen slave origin [it speaks of trying to lead despite the worn-out brands of the vallaslin] and a conflicting relationship with their freedom [they are committed to it, but they describe this freedom as inevitable and troubling]. This way of speaking about freedom makes me think in Abelas and his people: servants of Mythal are more than mere slaves, they worked hard to become her servants, so they embrace this submission to Mythal as a duty, as a purpose, and as a service, so only in this case I can see why freedom may be troubling. This interpretation also makes sense to some degree since the original song has been found in the Temple of Mythal, therefore it must have been written by Abelas’ people, after all.

If we see the original song, the first line use a negative structure [Tel’, Bana] with the name of the tree. The line translates, in my opinion, something closer to “never again the tree” [bellana= forever, banal=never]. They also speak of “abel revas” [abel= sorrowing, revas=freedom]. This encourages the idea of a freedom that has caused more sadness than anything: we know this applies for the Mythal’s servants who had suffered since she died. Maybe the tree is related to this event of losing Mythal too, so they say “never again the tree”. If we combine this with the codex Veilfire Runes in the Deep Roads, there are three elements that seem to be connected: the death of Mythal, the appearance of the vhenadahl, and the danger unleashed by the Evanuris that was the last straw for Solas. [Explaining my thinking process: Solas says to the Inquisitor that the Death of Mythal was the reason that made him banish the Evanuris; the codex seems to imply it was something else, more horrifying, and probably, connected with her death. Then, the Mythal’s servants suffer their freedom--because Mythal is dead--while sharing some mid-negative sentiment towards the vhenadahl. Hence, maybe the vhenadahl is also connected with her death and the “horrifying thing” that the Evanuris did. This is why I kind of connect these three events with one another]

The most curious detail in the song is that the last part of it is translated using the word "war”, but the original lines does not use the same word at all for that [in fact, we can’t detect any words that may mean “war”], so I feel there is something wrong in this translation or something tricky. The glory and the people were not lost to the war, but to something else which is not a word that can be repeated in both lines. And this “something else” that made lost the people and the glory is related to the “winning/failure” of the Wolf.

I imagine the fact that the translation of win/fail is so extremely ambiguous because the elven language uses a very ambiguous word on purpose, since the creation of the Veil--the only solution that the “wolf” found--caused a situation that was a win and a loss at the same time. But I still have my doubts about the “war” part. Sadly, DA series tends to be a bit inconsistent in their elven language and they do not provide much vocabulary about it to have a better guess. Maybe is “am” war? Unlikely, it should be an independent word.

There is another iconic tree in DAI related to the irony of a peace tree turned into a war table. There is not much said about it than this. We can assume it may have been related to the Elvhenan simply because Skyhold was part of a series of fortress under the command of Fen’Harel, so far we can guess, but the construction of this table may have happened at any moment of the history of Skyhold, which has been handed over other races such as dwarves and humans. The symbols we see in the book Art of Inquisition suggest little.

The tree symbol on this stone can loosely be related to Vallaslins such as Mythal’s [which is too asymmetrical to be related to this one] or the superior part of the vallaslin of Falon’Din [which is symmetrical, but makes no sense for it to be here]. In general, I hardly see any historical link with the elvhenan and a supposed truce [so far, we were not informed that such a thing ever existed]. Plus, if this stone is related to the time of the Elvhenan, it should be related to Fen’Harel, who seemed to have used this fortress as part of his network of operations all over the Waking World and the Fade in his opposition to the Evanuris. So, in general, there is little to say with respect to this tree and I will proceed to discard it from now on when talking about the vhenadahl.

Another connection that I can make with trees and Elvhenan is the disturbing codex A Flowering Imago, which doesn’t show a tree but a vine. Through the codex found on the mural of “The Death of the Titan” [Veilfire Runes in the Deep Roads], we know that a “sphere of Fire” was contained by using vines. I’m not sure how much these vhenadahl can be considered “vines” [or maybe its roots can be described as such], but maybe through them and in combination of both previous codices, we may be hinted a subtle connection between Uthenera [which seems to be connected with the vines via A Flowering Imago], and a power to control or restrain a danger underground. Of course this concept is super loosely for my taste, but it’s impossible to say more than this without turning it into a wild speculation.

In one of the last peeks/trailers that showed some DA:D images, we have seen that it may exist an extra meaning to these tree, since one of them appears in an ominous way.

In that image we can see a tree similar to the ones found in the Exalted Plains, surrounded by some Dwarf with long limbs statues and a lot of funerary urns that were used in Ferelden buildings as well as in Elven ruins. The tree seems to be covered by an ignited vine that reminds us a lot to the codex Veilfire Runes in the Deep Roads, where the vines cover a red sphere and the runes worn-out over time [associated with anger and fire] as a way of preventing a disaster.

In our exploration of the Exalted Plains [a place that was supposed to have ancient Elvhen buildings such as the Dead Hand or the Citadelle du Corbeau, but were retaken long ago by ancient Dalish around the time of Halamshiral/before the Exalted March against the Dales], we see many big trees with corpses hanging from them. I’m not so sure how many of them could be considered as consequence of the current War of the Lions [Celene vs Gaspard], or as remnants of the time of the Dalish Kingdom and the Exalted March that separated the elves into city elves and the different Dalish clans. If the ancient Dalish got some symbols right [like the wolves as protectors] maybe their interpretation of these trees could have some hint closer to the truth than the modern city elves have.

As a last link to the vhenadahl, we should not forget that Mythal seems to be related to a tree symbology deeply if we take into account her Vallaslin, so the vhenadahl may be related to her, who represented justice and motherly kindness, but we need not to forget that she also had a clear side of Vengeance and Revenge as we learnt in the Altar of Mythal [A detail that has disturbed me a lot because makes Elgar’nan as another aspect of herself instead of being another Evanuris]. Mythal is also related to the Uthenera Chamber we saw in the Deep Roads, Lower Walkways, so we find another soft link again between Mythal, tree roots=vines, and Uthenera.

So, if we keep in mind all these details, and return to the concept art of the vhenadahl, and use the symbols we have gathered along the games such as the swirls [check Murals in DAI: Basics], one could be inclined to think that these trees represent something that absorbs a red danger underground, maybe even controlling it. This power of control may be related to lyrium or Fade [swirls] which is also compatible with the idea of being related to Uthenera too. Once again, we can see the subtle link between this iconography and a “vine covering a fire sphere” from the codex Veilfire Runes in the Deep Roads. All this also seem to be potentially related to Mythal and her death.

Considering all this context, we return to the mural:

The tree we see at the left of the mural looks a bit thorny. If we can link this to a subtle interpretation of a thorny vine we know via Murals in DAI: Basics that this is a symbol related to darkspawn and the Blight.

It’s also true that this tree has no painted trunk, but we need to remember that only city elves paint their vhenadahl. These tree represent something more ominous to any elvhenan elf.

With the details explained above, I’m inclined to think that this tree may be related to containing and controlling a danger described in codices as a “sphere of Fire”. Its roots can be aesthetically interpreted as vines, controlling the danger underground. Via A Flowering Imago, we can relate vines with Uthenera. The vhenadahl may be related to lyrium, Fade, and potentially Uthenera in an unknown way so far. In this mural, it is suggested that the tree is on fire as well, unable to control the “thing that will destroy the world” after aeons passed [Veilfire Runes in the Deep Roads]: Its protective power has worn out. Since the vhenadahl may represent the last barrier containing the “big danger”, Solas’ figure steps forwards to take actions.

The Elf and the Wolf

The elvhen figure, who seems to be Solas, has red eyes, same as the black wolf in the mural. Red eyes usually are a representation of anger, which in this case, and inside the context of having absorbed Mythal, could be interpreted as Solas acknowledging and indirectly working to accomplish Mythal’s revenge. I mean, I don’t think his main goal is to avenge Mythal, but his plan of destroying the Veil and fighting the banished Evanuris will have consequences that will fit such revenge.

We know Flemeth had decided to avenge Mythal, to give her “a reckoning that will shake the very heavens”, but she also agreed to give her power to Solas, because, most likely, she may have known that this revenge would be accomplished nonetheless through his plan as a side effect.

The elvhen figure is wearing a black robe with a symbol [a stylised dagger mark] that looks similar to the one I found in the Dorian’s tarot card. It’s still a bit different to the strange “dagger” symbol from the mural “The Creation of the Veil”. I really can’t guess with some decent justification what this symbol may imply. I didn’t see it in any other context/drawing of Nick Thornborrow.

The red circle behind the elvhen figure seems to be a halo, since it’s centred in his head. It could be a representation of Divinity [in a sense that it’s a halo, which is a symbol always related to sanctification and divinity] but filled with anger [since it’s red] so my guess is that this red halo may represent what Solas has absorbed with Flemeth’s powers: the duty to accomplish Mythal’s revenge alongside his plan of destroying the Veil and get rid of the sealed Evanuris.

The black wolf has red eyes and some parts of his fur show the swirly details that the statue of the Howling Fen'Harel statue displays, so this wolf is Fen’Harel, the guardian/protector.

Due to its grim-looking and the splashes of black ink around him and Solas [very similar to Solas’ last tarot card which shows black tendrils feeding the towering black wolf behind] it can also be associated with the Demon of Regret from the short story Callback from Tevinter Nights. This wolf in the mural can be a representation of Fen’Harel but also of this demon that Solas has been feeding since the day he created the Veil. It has a colossal size because that’s the amount of regret Solas has gathered in his long life.

Curiously, the ground where the elvhen figure is walking on looks like a part of a sphere or piece of land set on fire. Its border seems to show a certain kind of “dashed” line that we can interpret as a worn-out Veil-like barrier that we had talked about in other posts.

What if this piece of ground is a representation of the sphere of fire as well? Solas may be walking on the sphere of Fire that floats in the Fade [metaphorically speaking, this is art after all].

The white sphere and the Red Lyrium Idol

I always made a soft link between Solas’ words at the end of Trespasser with the murals “The Death of a Titan” and its codex Veilfire Runes in the Deep Roads: the reason why he banished the Evanuris was “the death of Mythal”, but we also know it was more than that; it was about preventing the “release of something that would put at risk the whole world” [that it is implied in that codex] and that Solas kept in secret so nobody would be tempted to use it ever again [or maybe he kept it in secret so it would not be reflected in the Fade as well, and any reflection may be sealed inside the Black City]. In that sense, the Red Lyrium Idol seems to be the synthesis of both concepts in this image.

Due to the structure of this mural, the dashed border, and all our study of the iconography of the Veil in Murals in DAI: Basics, we can conclude that this white sphere with the idol represents something dangerous, and likely, related to all the symbols we saw that exist inside this kind of barrier in previous murals: Black City, red Lyrium, and Evanuris or pride creatures.

This circle has the same border we saw in other murals [ Murals in DAI: Basics]. It represents a strong barrier, usually the one that forbids the entrance to the Black City, where neither dreamers nor spirits can reach to. This circle contains a danger: the red lyrium idol.

The similarity of this idol with Mythal were explored in the post Red Lyrium Idol, and seems to coincide with Solas’ claim that the Evanuris were banished because the Death of Mythal [idol] and the whisper in the codex Veilfire Runes in the Deep Roads [potentially the red lyrium]. We need to highlight that the idol seems to represent the death of Mythal thanks to some common elements both images share like the spiked crown and the presence of a ring that looks like a Golden Ring [Elvhenan symbol].

Since this sphere is white, and it’s behind the wolf figure, it has an extra potential interpretation of a moon, but it’s not clear how much importance this has or how this affects Fen’Harel. The presence of the moon inside the DA lore has never been important, and it’s barely related to Elvhenan so far the games/books showed us. I know that the Dalish have some lore associated with it: Andruil is the sister of the “moon” [Andruil: Goddess of the Hunt], which may mean that the moon is Sylaise: the Hearthkeeper, but like I always say, this is extremely unreliable, and without another source that would guide us to see where the hint of truth lays, it’s usually a waste of time to make speculations only based on these legends.

Two of the seven semi-circles in here are still glowing in gold, meaning “divinity alive” or “god-like power” still alive. Inside of them there is an asterisk symbol. This may mean--if all our previous conclusions in murals like “The Creation of the Veil” or “The Death of a Titan” were correct--that the (power of a) "heart” of the Titans/ elvhenan orbs are related to the last archdemons: Moon-head creature and Beetle-head creature.

Thanks to one of the last trailers of DA:D, we see that the two semi-circles which are still active are related to the symbols of the creatures that appeared in the last mural of DA:D : the two remaining archdemons [further explanation about them in the post “The Destruction of the Veil”]

Integral conclusion

If we assume that this scene is happening in the Fade, according the inverted triangles in the background, Solas would be walking, metaphorically speaking, on the fire sphere related to the codex Veilfire Runes in the Deep Roads. The vhenadahl seems to represent the worn-out mechanism that was protecting the world [green vines] from the danger inside the fire sphere [we can assume that its roots can also be seen as vines, which are restraining this ancient danger underground]. It’s not clear if the vhenadahl has a relationship with lyrium and Uthenera processes even though there are some codices that may show a soft subtle link to one another.

Solas walks in front of the vhenadahl since this last barrier has fallen and now all depends on Fen’Harel/Solas to fix the world, remove the Veil, and deal with the sealed Evanuris and the biggest danger that the world has ever faced for good.

Solas brings with him the ire of Mythal [red halo] while the black wolf also seems to join efforts against this battle, although it could also be a mere observer as he keeps feeding on Solas’ regrets. It’s not clear what function the big black wolf has in this mural. We can be sure it represents Fen’Harel [thanks to the swirly pattern on its fur] as well as the Regret demon that Solas has been unconsciously feeding since the day he created the Veil [due to the inky splashes around it].

The “big danger” seems to be represented by the white circle that should be containing the Black City. Instead, it has the red lyrium idol in the centre of the white sphere.

This makes a lot of sense when we see the mural “Destruction of the Veil”, where it is revealed that the Black City is contaminated with Red Lyrium too.

This terrible danger is contained inside a dashed lined barrier we have seen before, which has seven gates and/or protectors, where only two are alive now. This reinforces the idea that the contention mechanism of this big danger has been weakened severely. Based on another trailer of DA:D, we can connect symbols to these gates/protectors, which seem to represent the Archdemons shown in the mural “Destruction of the Veil”.

If we contrast this with Solas’ words about the Blight and his disapproval of killing archdemons, it seems to reinforce the idea that the dragons which are considered archdemons during the Blights are part of this mechanism of protection. Hence, there are only two dragons-archdemons protecting the world from this bigger danger.

This white circle also seems to look like a moon. It’s not clear if the moon representation has an important role in Elvhenan lore. We only know based on the unreliable Dalish tales that the moon can be related to Sylaise herself.

The most integral speculation I can make with all these elements is that inside the barrier that forbids access to the Black City even for the spirits, contains something that the Evanuris “unleashed in their lust for power” and it’s related to the death of Mythal. Maybe it’s the very thing that killed her [remember it’s hard to kill an Evanuris, because Solas implies they have some effective immortality going on, but they managed to kill Mythal anyway].

Solas managed to seal this danger, probably with the Evanuris trapped inside too, in order to prevent further spreading, and buried all this underground and under the most cryptic secret so nobody would be ever be tempted to use it, and sealed its reflection in the Fade inside a powerful barrier that keeps Dreamers and spirits away [so, he made a double seal= in the Waking World underground and in the Fade, inside the Black City]. Somehow, all these concepts seem to be represented in the red lyrium idol, which reinforces our suspicion that it pictures the death of Mythal protecting “the people” [further details in Red Lyrium Idol ] and unleashing a disease hard to control, accidentally or on purpose is not clear, as a last gesture of revenge.

#DAI murals #mythal #red lyrium #red lyrium idol #Archdemon #inverted triangles #Vhenadahl #wolf #Solas #fen'harel #veil #the veil #moon head creature #beetle head creature #asterisk symbol #fire sphere #regret demon

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antique-forvalaka · 3 years ago

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Okay I love your colour theory posts for Kinnporsche so much... Have you seen the Hidden Messages video on Be on Clouds YouTube channel? It really highlights the colouring used for each character, especially Kinn and red, and I think it would be really cool to look into in regards to the colour Theory side of things!

ooh what a lovely suggestion!

I do feel like I've seen the video before, but if that's the case i don't think i'd have mistaken gold as Kinn's colour instead lmao

So, initially i really didn't think the Hidden Messages video on Youtube would be worth doing a Colour theory on, since i thought a lot of it was really obvious, but upon my second watch i reconsidered.

I thought for the purposes of this analysis I'd try to stay a bit more true to the actual order the shots appear in, thus I'm starting with this one. It's the first shot we see, Kinn sitting in a dark room with a blue backlight. Please also pay attention to the Golden Lamp and candle, we'll see those again later.

These shots are just magnificient!!! They don't happen in direct sequence, this will not be the only time mirrored shots are 'interrupted' however. Obviously we have here both Kinn and Porsche in their respective colours, backlit with each other's. I wanna also call attention to their facial expressions as well, despite both having just as much dominion over the screen here Porsche seems less at ease than Kinn.

Just as the shots above, these one are in the same order as they appear in the video, yet are interrupted several times in the source material. The first shot here is dominantly only lit in red, whereas the later ones, when Kinn starts giving money to Porsche, his blue also enters the frame. I think it's very significant that Porsche burns the money. It's a callback (or uh foreshadowing in this case, as the video came out before the first episode) that Porsche isn't interested in money, in episode one he even refuses Kinn's numerous job offers and complains as being misunderstood as someone who can be bought.

As an aside, i did not change the aspect ratio of these at all, but as you can see some of the shots were made in a wider ratio than some of the others. Thus how much space these are allowed to take up on-screen is also significant!

A lot of these short scenes also play with mirrors and reflections, both Porsche and Kinn are often shown to mirror each other. Most visually appealing is this scene, in which Porsche turns in a slow circle and points his fingergun at this one-way mirror opposite him, as the camera turns to follow his hand. To reveal Kinn standing in such a way behind the mirror that it is unclear to an observer if he is just a reflection as well. He too is not actually holding a gun, just miming it. This scene is also lit more in Green than either blue or red, to underline the conflict. Both are still at odds, at opposite sides, though Kinn, positioned behind the one-way mirror reminiscient of Police interrogation is subtly implied to have more power here. There's also a bed on Porsche's side which gives the whole room a prison-like impression.

Again, both are (inverted) reflections of each other. They're in the same hallway and even the neon light in the background is mirrored. This could also play with the concept of being 'two halves of the same coin', which would fit in nicely with their later relationship. In any case, kudos to the director!

Here we have Porsche in a blue lit stairway, looking upwards yet descending into the depths, which are coincidentally lit in red as well! Possibly a metaphor for him joining the darker underbelly of Kinn's world. This is the point where we also start seeing more flashes of both Kinn and Porsche lit in blue, to parallel the constant flashes of both of them fighting in the red room. As an aside, the wall to Porsche's right is presumably the very same in front of which the striking portraits shown above were created.

The scenes of them fighting in the red room are now overlaid with these shots, of both of them in blue, though this time Porsche is backlit in orange (gold or red depending on your interpretation). Where before the focus was on the business relationship, the fighting and them being at odds, these shots instead show a more tender relationship. It may not be that obvious in these still frames but the second to last shot has Kinn foregoing the cigarette to instead caress the side of Porsche's face. This is also where my note on picture width and aspect ratio comes back into play. A lot of the dominantly blue shots, including Porsche's descent, are much less wide than most of the rest. Porsche is hemmed in, or his power is, and only in the last one of this sequence when it starts to rain and both hug (a picture i sadly couldn't include here) does the fram grow again!

Remember me saying to keep an eye on the lamp and cigarette? This is where those reappear. The postioning of both items relative to the camera suggests that this is actually the inverse shot of the very first one, which in combination with the second one here suggests that Kinn was always standing opposite Porsche, who was hidden behind the tapestry. Which btw, seems to be a very obvious allusion to Kinn's trust issues and reluctance to get close to his employees, as later implied by Pete in episode 2. It's a bit on the nose, especially as Porsche appears behind the burnt fabric presented as solution and core of the problem at once, but the visuals are too pretty to begrudge the simplicity too much. It's just sooooo nice to look at!!! The rest of this burning flag will also later be the very end of the video, as both men have dissappeared and the smoldering remains underline the series title!

Before that however we still have two more moments i want to highlight. One of which is this one. This seems to be the same room as the beginning, I've had to lighten it up a bit because it was really just that dark. Porsche is posing in front of the one way mirror again, almost in challenge. Later we have the reverse shot. Porsche has turned away from the mirror only for Kinn to appear behind him again, this time however none of them seem agressive and i think it's significant that Porsche may have his back turned but is still aware of Kinn behind him. A sign of trust or disrespect? Since this is in the later half i'd see it as the former.

Let's close this out with my two favourite shots.

These ones are the only two shots we get of this unknown bathroom, assumedly it is not one on the ma/fia family's property, but the tiling is in a reddish orange, which is evened out by the diffuse blue light from outside. This whole setting feels very intimate and the first shot, closer to the start of the video, still visualises some very obvious emotional distance. Porsche's side, or rather the side we directly see, in opposition to Kinn in the mirror also feels more real to the observer, more immediate. We start the series closer to Porsche's perspective as our viewpoint character.

Yet the last shot has Porsche join Kinn in his world instead, Porsche is the active one here, he not only left his own, seemingly more real, world but is also seeking bodily closeness. In this shot Kinn is also smiling, yet another difference to the first one!

Ah i gotta be honest, this one was a lot of fun! The visuals are incredibly striking, so thanks a lot for calling my attention to this again!!!!! I hope this analysis lived up to your expectations as well.

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I just noticed i forgot my disclaimer this time, hahhah, so to make it short: All of this is subjective and was created with limited information re: character developement!

More of this here:

Major Players: Kinn

The Intersection of Kinn and Porsche / Green

Kinn’s Colour: A revision

Episode 2; Significant Scenes

Episode 3; Significant Scenes (+Tankhun)

Episode 4; Significant Scenes

Episode 5; Significant Scenes

#kp meta #kinnporsche meta #kinnporsche #colour theory #kinnporschetheseries #kinnporsche the series #i got an ask!#answered ask #soyellowcurtainsthen

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wonwooridul · 4 years ago

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HELLO!

Welcome to method 3; written by me, Lee <3

♡ ♡ you can check out @buwuyu method (1) and @soonhoonsol method (2) here and here in a masterpost ♡ ♡

thankyou my besties for doing this !! we had so much fun 🥺💖

we will use gradient map and hue / saturation and mask them with paint brush tool and selective colouring for adjustments.

- this will require basic knowledge of photoshop and colour schemes.

STEP 0: OPEN YOUR B&W PICTURE IN PHOTOSHOP (file > open) AND YOUR REFERNCE PICTURE

we start of by using a reference photo photo with similar lighting as a reference for the skin tone. This process won't be needing to do contouring cause adjustments in gradient map and blending will ensure highlights and dark tones.

I was too lazy to remove teh allure mark so i just coloured the without watermark photo @iiasha posted. thankyou zero<3

STEP 1: MAKING SKIN TONE PALETTE WITH A REFERENCE PICTURE

Pick colours from different tonal values. I'd suggest one colour of skin from each of the degree of contrast; different levels of brightness from the ref picture.

here's something basic about tonal value.

darkest being called blacks and lightest being called whites.

Go to brush tool and set its size according to you and its hardness to full. Make sure your Sample Size settings are set at 5 by 5 per average and Sample is set at All Layers.

With Brush tool selected, Press ALT and you'll see a colour picker, select a colour ; use that brush to make a swatches on any place on the b&w photo so that its easy to access during gradient map.

Select the marquee tool and select the palette and press CTRL + J / CMND + J. this will create a new layer which you can later delete after you're done using the palette.

STEP2: MAKING GRADIENT MAP WITH THE SKIN TONE PALETTE

go to adjustment layers and select Gradient Map. Make sure your palette layer is above the gradient map layer. If not, the it'll become a part of the gradient map and we don't want that since we will be using it for sampling.

click on the small bottom left square, it will open up a colour picker. Select "whites" from the Reference skin tone palette. Select "blacks" from the ref palette. You don't necessarily have to stick with the palette you created. Sometimes, to may be too extreme because in the end it is from a different photo. To adjust the skin tone, you can play with the tones according to your wish.

Now, the gradient may look pretty dark. Select Gradient Map layer and set its blending as "COLOUR".

To add more colour to the skin, you can adjust saturation of each colour too. Select the small box who's colour you want to change and it will open a colour picker, on the right side you can see Hue, Saturation, etc. You can play with both the Bars

The skin tone still looks very unrealistic. To manage that we will edit the layer style. Now, right click Gradient Map layer and Select Blending Options.

If you try to adjust directly with left & right triangle cursors, it will be too extreme. Photoshop allows us to break each of these cursors into two. Press ALT and click on the Triangle cursor and it will split it into two parts. These settings may defer from picture to picture.

STEP3: PAINTING THE SKIN WITH GRADIENT MAP INVERTED MASK

Select the White part on the gradient map layer and click CTRL + I / CMND + I to turn the mask into an inverted mask. The mask will turn black. It looks like we came back to square one, doesn't it? Don't worry! We just turned on inverted mask for us to colour the skin.

Select your brush tool again and start painting/colouring the skin parts. It's okay if you went out of lines. We can easily correct it by erasing the colour that went out of lines. Smaller the eraser, precise the colouring looks after touching up. i'd suggest Kyle's Eraser- natural edge or Soft brush Eraser.

adjust more of skin tone by using Selective Colour adjustment layer and playing with reds and yellows.

reds: +10, +7, +9, -56 | blacks: 0,0,0, +11 | whites: 0,0, -48, +3 | yellows: -43, -10, +5, +29

To darken the Vest and Hair just increase blacks in the Black Colour in Selective colour.

COLOURING THE LIPS & CLOTHES

LIPS

Select Hue/Saturation adjustment layer and turn on inverted layer mask with ctrl + i / cmnd + i and tick Colourise in properties of the layer so that it's the actual colour and not a colour influenced by the gradient map colours.

Select your lip colour and you can lighten or darken it with Lightness bar and adjust the saturation with Saturation bar.

my settings were: HUE= 0 (red), SATURATION= 70, LIGHTNESS= -27

CLOTHES

with the same process as of colouring the lips, mask the clothes and socks part with Hue/Saturation inverted mask and adjust the colour of the clothes according to your linking by playing with Hue, Saturation and Lightness.

To change overall settings of the picture, use Brightness/Contrast and/or Selective Colour. I added more brightness and increased the contrast a little too.

One upside of this method is that you don’t have to re-mask or re-colour if you want to change colours, you can just play with the Hue and change the colour. So, no double work!

if the Skin tone seems very yellow-ish you can use Red PhotoFilter (50% opacity) and colour on the skin using inverted mask again.

FINAL OUTCOME

if youre done with your whole colouring process and still want to change colour, of example clothes; just play with hue/saturation adjustment layer and blending mode ! Ta-Da you have your new colour.

thankyou for reading my method! i hope it was a little helpful ! for any doubts you can reach out to me <3

#lee.guide #colouring #recolouring tutorial #recolour #tutorial #hoshi #studiocarat #colouring tutorial #lee.gif.gfx #photoshop #photoshop tutorial #photoshop recolour #photoshop guide #colouring guide #allresources

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warrioreowynofrohan · 5 years ago

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Christian Themes and Symbolism in Brandon Sanderson’s Works

I think Sanderson’s works have some strong Christian elements, particularly the central theme of Warbreaker and a particular piece of symbolism in The Stormlight Archive.

Warbreaker

If I had to sum up the core theme of Warbreaker, it would be They that exalt themselves shall humbled, and they that humble themselves shall be exalted. Ironically, it’s also the core belief of the society that Vivenna and Siri live in, but that’s deconstructed and inverted. In their culture, a person should be little-noticed, unobtrusuve, avoid bright colours; Siri’s exuberance and love of colour incite disapproval, while Vivenna’s responsibility and adherence to custom are admired. This, however, is a shallow understanding of what consitutes pride and humility, and the narrative rapidly tears it apart. Siri openly recognizes that she doesn’t know what she’s getting into, is open to new ideas and a new culture, actively endeavours to learn and try her best, and empathizes with others, and as a result - and despite mistakes - achieves things her sister would have utterly failed at. Vivenna sets out on her mission out of pride, the need to be important and essential; she is blinkered, self-righteous, judgemental, continually overestimates how much she knows about her situation, and gets very badly hammered by the narrative for most of the story until she learns humility. The difference between pride and humility isn’t about colour or Breath or power or social status - several characters of extremely high status are humble in that they recognize their own failings and lack of knowledge - it’s about attitude towards oneself and others.

And in this way the book is also a very strong and deliberate anti-fundamentalist statement. Vivenna, who thought she was the example of humility in avoiding bright colour and ostentation, is the example of pride in her certainty of moral rightness, and is humbled. Siri, whose countrymen saw her as an example of pride in her rebellious love of colour and beauty, is the example of humility is recognizing how much she doesn’t know, being willing to learn, and empathizing with and seeking the good of others, and is raised up.

The Stormlight Archive - Oathbringer

I feel a little awkward about this one, because when I first read the passage I’m going to discuss I found the symbolism obvious on a practically CS Lewis level, but the one time I suggested it in fandom the response was basically “...well, that certainly is a thing someone could think.” But to me the symbolism still seems very strong.

The chapter “Loopholes” in Oathbringer stands out because it’s a bit of an anticlimax. The Skybreakers’ training started out with being told to kill someone and now lesson two is...paintball? A gentler form of paintball, even, since it’s just balls of colourful chalk being thrown and it doesn’t hurt. It seems a little uncharacteristic of this rather harsh order. And Szeth isn’t really doing anything we haven’t seen before, in terms of powers. It’s an enjoyable chapter in its own right; but I think the themes and symbolism within it, and their relationship to the wider story in Oathbringer, are what make it really important.

The contest is: the students throw the balls of chalk at each other, use their powers to fly and dodge, and the person with the least marks on them at the end wins. Szeth is practised in using his powers, and does well from the start. And on top of that, he’s actually having fun. For the first time in a very, very long time, he’s happy. And then, the second he realizes this, he feels guilty:

He had left tears, blood, and terror in his wake like a personal seal. He had destroyed monarchies, families - innocent and guilty alike. He could not be happy. He was only a tool of retribution. Not redemption, for he dared not believe in such.

And, immediately after he thinks this, he gets hit for the first time. He keeps on, not letting himself enjoy it any longer, but at the end he gets hit with a pile of the chalk balls. It seems he’s lost.

But. He dives into the waters of the Purelake where they have been practising, swims underwater, and returns to the judges. He no longer has any marks on them; the water has washed them away. And so he wins.

Now. It is impossible for me not to see this as a rather blatant metaphor of baptism and redemption. Both the fact that he picks up the first stains right after he decides that redemption is impossible for him, and the washing away of his stains in the water, emerging clean again. (The name of the Purelake doesn’t hurt the synbolism argument either. And the name of the previous chapter, in reference to the lake, is “Water Warm as Blood”.) Moreover, this symbolism describes the core message of Oathbringer: that no one is beyond redemption, and that the difference between the heroes and villains in the book is not what they have done in the past (how many stains they pick up), but whether they are willing to repent and to be redeemed (washed clean).

The heart of the entire book is summed up in this one chapter. And it’s one of my favourite chapters in the entire series.

#brandon sanderson #the stormlight archive #vivenna #warbreaker #szeth #christianity #biblical symbolism #redemption

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