before you know about women, you hear that you do not need to love the man, just that you need to love him through his manhood. which is to say you have seen the future painted in lamb's blood over your eyes - how your mother shoots you a look about your father's inability to cook right. how your aunt holds her wineglass and says i'm gonna kill em. men, right! how your best friend bickers with her boyfriend, how she says i can't help it. i come back to him.
you learn: men are gonna cheat. men aren't going to listen when you're talking, because you're nagging. men think emotions are stupid. they think your life is vapid and your hobbies are embarrassing. men will slam things, but that's because men are allowed to be angry. if you get loud, you're hysterical. if a man gets loud - well, men are animals, men are dogs, men can't control their hands or their eyes or their bodies. they're going to make a snide comment about you in the locker room, about your body, about how you're so fucking annoying. you're going to give him kids, and he will give you the money for the kids, and you're going to be running the house 24/7 - but he gets to relax after a long day, because his job is stressful. the man is on stage, and is a comedian, and says "women!"
and you are supposed to love that. you are supposed to love men through how horrible they are to you - because that's what women do. that's what good women do. wife material. your father even told you once - it'll make sense when you're older. it was like staring down a very lonely tunnel.
it feels like something's caught in your throat, but it's all you know, so. it's okay that you see sex as a necessary tool, a sort of okay-enough ritual to keep him happy, even though he doesn't seem to care about happiness as-applied-to you. it is relationship upkeep. it is kissing him and smiling even though he didn't brush his teeth. it is getting on your knees and looking up and holding back a sigh because he barely holds you as you panic through the night. it's not like the sex is bad and you do like feeling wanted. and besides! he's a man! like... they're another species. you'll never be able to actually communicate, right. he isn't listening.
you just don't get it. you don't feel that sense of i'm gonna climb him like a tree. mostly it just feels fucking exhausting. you play the part perfectly. you smile and nod and are "effortlessly" charming. and it's fine! it's alright! you even love him, if you're looking. you could have good life, and a good family, and perfectly happy.
in the late night you google: am i broken. you google i'm not attracted to my husband. you google i get turned on by books but not by him. you google how to get better in bed.
the first time he yells at you, it almost feels like blankness. like - of course this is happening. this is always how it was going to end up. men get angry, and they yell, and you sit there in silence.
you mention it to your friend - just the once - while you're drunk. she shrugs and says it's like that with me too, i just try to forget and move on. men are always gonna hear what they want to. pick your battles and say sorry even though he's in the wrong. you play solitaire online for a month. you go to your therapist appointment and preach about how you're both so in love.
after all, you have a future to want. nobody lied about it - how many instagram posts say marriage is hard. say real love takes work. say we fight like cats and dogs but the best part is that we always make up. how many of your friends say happy anniversary to the best and worst thing to ever happen to me. if you really loved him - loved yourself too - you'd accept that men are just different from you.
the first time she kisses you, it's on a dare at a party. something large and terrifying whips through your body. you wake up sweating from dreams where her mouth is encrusted with pearls and you pick them off one by one with your teeth. fuck. you sit at the computer and your almost-finished game of sim city. you think about your potential perfect life and your potential future family. you google am i gay quiz with your little hands shaking.
you delete each letter slowly. you don't need to love him. you just need to keep going.
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How I save time on backgrounds as a full-time webcomic artist
Hi! I make webcomics for a living, and I have to be able to draw a panel extremely fast to keep up with my deadlines. I draw about 50 panels a week, which gives me about 45 minutes per panel if I want any semblance of a healthy work-life balance.
Most webtoon artists save time on backgrounds by using 3d models, which works for them and is great! but personally I hate working in 3d... I went to school for it for a year and hated it so much I completely changed career paths and vowed never to do it again! So, this is how I save time without using any 3d, for those of you out there who don't like it either!
This tactic has also saved me money (3d models are expensive) and it has helped me converting my comic from scroll format into page format for print, because I have much more art to work with than what's actually in the panels. (I'll touch on this later)
So, first, I make my backgrounds huge. my default starting size is 10,000 x 10,000 pixels. My panels are 2,500 pixels wide, so my backgrounds are 4x that, minimum. Because of this, I make them less detailed than I could or that you might expect so it doesn't look weird against my character art when I shrink portions of it down.
I personally find it much easier to add in detail than to make "removing" details look natural at smaller sizes, but you might have different preferences than I do.
I also make sure to keep all of my elements on separate layers so that I can easily remove or replace them, I can move them to simulate different camera angles more easily, and it's simple to adjust the lighting to imply different times of day.
Then I can go ahead and copy/paste them into my episodes. I move the background around until it feels like it's properly fitting how I want.
Once I've done that in every panel, I'll go back through the episode and clean up anything that looks weird, and add in solid blacks (for my art style) Here's a quick before and after of what that looks like!
This makes 90% of my backgrounds take me just a few hours. This is my tactic when I'm working in an environment that an entire scene, or multiple scenes, will take place.
But many panels will inevitably have a location that's used exactly once, and it would waste time and effort to draw a massive background for those. So in 10% of cases, I just draw the single panel background in the episode. I save all of these, just in case I can re-use it later (this happens more often with outdoor locations, but I save them all nonetheless!)
I generally have to draw about 2 big backgrounds per episode, and 3-5 single-panel backgrounds per episode! At the beginning of an arc/book the number is higher, but as the series is continuing and I'm building up an asset library of indoor and outdoor elements to re-use for the book, the number generally goes down and I save more time.
My series involves time travel and mysteries, so there's a lot of new locations in it and we're constantly moving around. If I were working on a series that was more consistent in this aspect, this process would save me even more time!
Like I said earlier, this also saves me a lot of pain and gives me a lot more options as I'm converting from scroll format to print format!
panels that look like this in scroll format...
can look like this in print!
because I drew the background like this, so I didn't need to go through the additional effort to add in the extra detail to expand it outwards at all.
Anyways, I hope this helps someone! As always if it doesn't help, just go ahead and disregard. This is what I do and what works for me, and I feel like I only ever see time-saving tips for comics that involve 3d models and workflows, which don't work for me at all! I know there's more people like me out there, so this is for you!
Enjoy!
Also obligatory "my webcomic" if you want to see this in action or check it out!
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"Are the Robins child soldiers" It depends. If the story is super serious and into exploring complex morality and grounded from reality's standards, then yes. If the story is lighthearted, made for children, fluff, etc., then no. If it's somewhere in the middle, it might depend.
If an author wants to write a story seriously delving into the fucked up-ness of children fighting criminals, they can, and if you don't like it, you can read something else.
If an author wants to write a fun story about villains and heroes featuring Robin in a world where that's not an issue, they can, and if you don't like it, you can read something else.
If an author wants to write a serious story but not apply IRL-logic to Robin, they can, and if you don't like it, you can read something else.
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I don't think we talk enough about when Kaz was holding the parem to hide it from Nina. Because to me, that scene is a pretty good example of their relationship.
Nina was fully willing to do anything to get the parem from Matthias. If it was picking his pocket, fine. If it was sleeping with him, fine. I feel like she was probably willing to do more with Matthias than say- Jesper or Wylan. (I feel like she would have avoided Inej for Inej's own comfort)
But she was still willing to do things out of character for her to get the parem.
Yet, when she heard that Kaz had it, she stopped. You can say it's just because she knew Kaz would probably hurt her but here's the thing: I don't think he would have. Kaz is pretty big on "protecting his investments", and he isn't going to injure one of his crows greatly right before a huge plan.
And I think Nina knew that too. I think the reason she didn't try to reason with or steal from Kaz was partially because she knew she wouldn't win. But her knowing she wouldn't win also means that she was guaranteeing to herself that she wouldn't use her powers on him. Because even Kaz Brekker isn't immune to an altered Grisha's powers.
Nina wasn't willing to hurt Kaz and break his boundaries for the parem, and I don't think Kaz was willing to hurt her.
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you have shit luck. money's skint, and your car finally kicks the bucket. there's nothing in your area that looks remotely reliable and within your budget. you need transport for work. you lose it, you lose your job. desperate times call for desperate measures.
desperate measures lead you to a seized vehicle auction, where you buy a banged-up car on the cheap.
it's disgusting—reeks of tobacco, the console's sticky, and the glove box looks like something took up residence prior to the car's seizure. you don't know the history, neither do the police. it's sat in the secure car park for so long that they just want to be rid of it.
remember your shit luck? yeah. the scathing look on your normally absentee neighbor’s face and his furious gesturing to lower the window suggests you shouldn’t comply. but you do. he doesn’t hesitate to reach in, pop the lock, and yank the door open to haul you out. he clenches a lit cigar between his teeth, the tension in his jaw nearly crushing it.
what the fuck are you doing, driving his car? he reported it stolen just this morning, finding it missing when he got it in.
ah. maybe that's why it looked familiar.
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