#Making some kind of progress

[the-unified-programs]

Quick doodle of Kadaj (well, supposed to be Kadaj) but shadow creature because why not? Drawing humans is difficult :(

His hair turned out a little poofier than we wanted it to... Don't think it's too horrible, though, especially for a first attempt at drawing something human. This is what happens when you put your drawing points into dragons only.

Anyways, most of the reason we decided to draw Kadaj is because he's haunting us. In all actuality, it's probably us hallucinating (probably from lack of sleep) or just weird lighting at where we work. But Kadaj haunting the gas station we work at is much funnier than sleep deprivation, so we're going with that one lmao

[what-the-fuck-khr]

oh yeah did a stress echocardiogram yesterday. awful. I’m very unfit so my thighs started hurting and on top of that I was so fucking out of breath I felt like I was gonna die. being told to hold my breath, both on breathing in and out, was so fucking difficult wow. don’t know if that’s my heart or me being unfit lol. little bit of both probably bc yesterday was the first time I’ve stepped foot on a running treadmill lmfaooooo. anyways homie said there’s no arrhythmia or anything weird or out of place, but “most people your age usually last longer on the treadmill” sorry doc I’m just unfit for my age lmfao. bad knees meant less exercise of any kind and high meant weakened muscles over time and here I am. peak image of fitness or lack thereof lol.

got sent home with a holster monitor, so far I’ve been just fine have had no issues whatsoever. it’s a little bit to get used to having cords and shit attached to you for a full 24 hours and am yet to sleep with the bastard yet but we’ll find out how that goes. my little symptoms page is empty and will be of absolutely no help in this regard. client consent form said if this gets damaged or broken, repairs or replacement can cost up to $1,200 :). so that’s scary. definitely makes you treat the bastard like glass lol. wore clothes that very easily come off up the top, like a jumpsuit but the top is loose, float fabric too so it has ease of movement and also the monitor could sit in the breast area of the thing lol

have an appointment with cardiologist next week after this to go over results to decide what to do after this OH I DIDNT MENTION IT BUT!!!! a bit of a breakthrough was that we think it’s either my antidepressants that sped up my heart rate, or a long covid symptom from my first infection which was somewhere around the same time as my change of antidepressants unfortunately lol so they both line up with each other, but narrowing it down like that makes life easier. but yeah after the first bout I realised this heart rate thing had been a reoccurring issue for a while now prior to the incident this year so! we’re making very slow progress. what the uhhhh procedures will be for the future?? who knows. maybe just take heart tablet for the rest of my life or smth I guess if it’s a covid thing. if it’s not, then change my antidepressants and see if that fixes it. guessing game atm but it’s with two answers!!

[saradiation]

Hey it's that time of the year again :D

HAPPY 413! 🎂

[a-scary-lack-of-common-sense]

Putting the Gravity Falls characters into the Trolls universe just because I can

[turtleplushi]

Some assorted mostly-finished bits from an animation I'm working on

If anyone can guess what the audio is supposed to be you'll get some monopoly money as a reward lol

[ducktracy]

THANK YOU TO EVERYONE WHO HAS EVER SAID ANYTHING NICE TO ME BTW.. i mean this goes without saying. but i've tried and failed many times and many years to keep a list of compliments people give me, and i decided to pick it back up again since i'm trying to be a bit more proactive in being nicer to myself--been nabbing some nice tags and reblogs and asks and replies and messages i've remembered from people on here, as well as making sure i have all the drawings saved that people have drawn for me (going all the way back to 2017!!) and i'm just SO overwhelmed by everyone's kindness and support... it means the world to me but i struggle immensely with internalizing it, so i just wanted to spew a word of THANK YOU! thank you for supporting me and being here, regardless of for What or for How Long. even if i don't respond right away (and i've been trying to get better, thank you to everyone still waiting on DMs from me 🙏) i read absolutely everything and while it can be difficult to drill into my own head, the support and love and grace i feel from ya's is not lost on me. so thank you! do something nice for yourselves today

[sunnibits]

random ass post but I’ve gotten into the habit lately of doing a happy little dance every time I have good food and I highly recommend that everyone else tries this too, ESPECIALLY if you have food issues. it’s just so fun and goofy and it makes the experience of eating something yummy even better and helps you appreciate how good it is!! so like instead of only remembering the bad food experiences you can start to really be conscious of your good food experiences too… idk something something therapy speak. but I think everyone should do the “mmmm delicious chili” dance when they have some delicious chili.

[miraculouslbcnreactions]

The fandom can't make up its mind on what's supposed to be a joke and what's supposed to be serious because the show can't either half the time. It's a tonally disjointed mess that wants to have absurd over-the-top humor as well as a plot and moments of drama, romance, and angst that demand you see the characters as people and feel for what they're going through. Except you can't do that without also treating the dumb bullshit in a somewhat grounded way. Like, you're still dealing with the same characters. You can't just go "Oh, that? Let's ignore that!" the moment it's no longer convenient to you. You've opened this can of worms and now you have to sleep in it. So, every character flip-flops between two different versions of themselves depending on what the writers need in any particular scene.

This is not to say surreal humor can't be used right alongside characters you're supposed to empathize with, Teen Titans (not Go) did that and it worked. It's just that the absurdity can only come from the setting (Mad Mod, Mother Mae-Eye, pretty much anything Control Freak is in) or from designated joke characters (Date With Destiny). Teen Titans never had the main characters acting in clearly absurd ways as the butt of a joke unless those characters were brainwashed somehow, because the writers knew that would ruin any of the more grounded moments they wanted to write. The writers of Miraculous missed the memo on that one.

I don't disagree. A perfect example is Derision where the show takes all of the bad jokes about Marinette's crush and decides to take them seriously as if you can possible take them seriously without making Marinette come across as unhinged and dangerous. You can't, which brings us to the topic at hand: how do you even begin to understand these characters when the show is constantly making character-breaking choices?

My approach - and the approach I recommend others take if they're going to keep watching the show - is to focus on the characters' cores and reject anything canon does to violate those cores. I don't argue for this stance because I love the characters so much that I only want the good things to count. I take this stance because, if you don't, then the characters fall apart. There is no way to make them work as fully realized characters while embracing every choice canon has made. Miraculous has massive characterization issues that go well beyond the humor.

For example, Adrien has multiple moments of terrible behavior that are played in a serious manner such as the moment in the episode Frozer where he tries to start a fight with Ladybug in the middle of an akuma attack because she wouldn't accept a rose from him earlier:

Setup

Ladybug: I can't accept this rose from you. I told you already. I'm in love with someone else. Cat Noir: I know, M'lady. But if he weren't here, would things be different between us? Ladybug: Well, you know, I can't even begin to imagine him not being here. I'm sorry, Cat Noir. I really gotta get going, and you better do the same. (Swings her yo-yo to head back home; Cat Noir is sad, looking downwards, with one petal of the rose falling.)

Payoff

Ladyice: Cat Noir. We need to set up a trap for whoever turned the city into a giant ice rink. (throws yo-yo) Icecat: (bitterly) My feline instincts prefer to track and observe before I attack. You go your way, I'll go mine. Ladyice: Please don't tell me you're mad at me about the rose. Icecat: There may be a certain chill now between us. Ladyice: I get it, but we should really focus on saving Paris right now. Icecat: We don't always have to do everything together, after all. It's not like we're a couple. (skates away)

There's no way to argue this off as a bad joke. While Adrien has every right to feel hurt, those feelings don't excuse him acting like a pouting child in the middle of an akuma fight. It doesn't excuse him acting like this at any point! Ladybug is not a villain for telling him no. She wasn't even mean about it!

I clearly fully agree that Adrien looks awful and selfish here, but I'd still argue that it's not something that should be used to define Adrien's character if your goal is to tell the "ideal" version of Miraculous. "Ideal" being the version that canon seems to be going for based on the overall picture we can sort of make out if we back way, way, way up and look at the extremely abstract picture canon is clumsily painting.

Unless canon is going to do something monumentally stupid, Adrien is Marinette's endgame romantic interest. It's also clear that there is no plan to cut him from the team. He's going to be Chat Noir for the rest of his life or at least well into his adulthood. This means that he is supposed to be a good hero who deserves his miraculous just like he's supposed to be a charming and cute romantic lead. These are the two things I keep in mind when trying to shift through canon to figure out what writing choices I should fully embrace and what writing choices I have to either ignore or treat as true flaws that get an actual character arc. In my book, either approach is fine because most of the characters are deeply flawed at this point and you can't give them all arcs without bloating the story to nonsense levels.

My goal with this approach is never to say, "oh, that moment shouldn't count in terms of how people feel about the character." It's more, "that moment goes so hard against who this character is very clearly supposed to be that I can't take it into account if I want to tell the kind of story that Miraculous is trying (and clearly failing) to tell."

As an example, let's list off Adrien's worst behaviors. The things that make him look terrible:

He sucks at communicating his needs and feelings, leading to multiple moments where he gets mad at Ladybug for things she's totally unaware of

He has quit or considered quitting without warning multiple times and only one of those was because of something he did "wrong" (NYC Special)

He puts his feelings before the safety of Paris on multiple occasions, even going so far to purposely miss akuma fights to see what happens

He is incredibly pushy about his crush, often ignoring Ladybug's feelings on the topic by continuing to bring it up even after she asked him to stop

There have been multiple instances where he almost cataclysmed multiple people in a fit of anger

His love for Ladynette isn't strong enough to let him break free of things like akumas and nightmare dust even when he's looking her in the eyes making him a pretty crappy romantic lead

People will argue that some of this behavior makes sense for his character because of the abuse that canon has technically introduced, but that the writers seem blissfully unaware of. I don't disagree with that argument, but that doesn't change the fact that none of this is acceptable behavior for a hero and Adrien is a hero who keeps doing these things. A sad backstory doesn't give you the right to behave poorly without consequences.

At the same time, if I fully embrace these elements of canon, what I get is an Adrien salt fic where he loses his miraculous for good while Marinette finds her real true love or even just a non-salty fic where Adrien leaves for his own meatal health and gets replaced by someone who can handle being a hero right now. Canon's not writing either of those, so the only way to engage with these flaws while enjoying canon or aiming for the same end goals as canon is to say, "I guess this doesn't count" or "I guess I need to tone this way down and work through it via a character arc" or even "I guess that was just a bad joke maybe?"

That is the essence of what I mean when I call myself a writing salt, character sugar blog. It comes from looking at canon and seeing that there's simply no way to embrace the worst moments and the best at the same time. We're not dealing with a coherent plot and/or complex characters. We're dealing with a nonsense plot that will warp the characters to bizarre shapes to make random ideas work even if those idea go wildly against canon's end goals.

As an example, Glaciator and Frozer should not exist in the same universe or, at the very least, something should explain why Chat Noir randomly changed his stance on Ladybug's crush from acceptance to pushiness. As is, the pieces don't fit together. The behavior is too contradictory. Remember, this is how Glaciator ends:

Perhaps Ladybug will love me someday. I mean, like, I love her. I have to believe. In the meantime, her friendship is the best gift of all.

Where did this version of Adrien go? Why did he regress in Frozer? There's no in-universe reason. It happened because the writers weren't ready to let the love square date or grow close, but they also wanted the love square to cause drama, so Adrien ends up looking terrible just like Marinette ends up looking terrible when it's her turn to cause love square drama. Her terribleness takes a different flavor so it can be hard to realize that this is a systemic issue, but that's what it is. It's deeply frustrating, but it also clearly stems from cheap writing and not quality characterization.

This is also why my stance is that canon as a whole only supports my Doyalistic core-character analysis style of approach. The writing is too poor quality to do Watsonian analysis where you embrace the full picture and try to put it all together. The closest I'll get to Watsonian analysis is pointing out how much the writing botches a Watsonian take by showing you all the way the writing contradicts itself, twisting into a nonsense pretzel of frustration where the payoffs never satisfy! (See the season four rant for an example or anything where I talked about Chloe's supposed damnation arc.)

There are even characters where canon is such a total mess that you can Doyalistically argue for two separate takes! Gabriel is a perfect example. He is all over the place and his ending was so poorly handled that you can make strong arguments for writing him as a cold-hearted villain or a sympathetic villain without the end result feeling like it spits in the face of canon because both takes maintain his one core element: villain.

That's the big thing I keep in mind when I look at the characters and the lore and the plots and try to come up with versions that the average fan would like. I don't think that there's one true version of any of these things, but I do feel comfortable saying that there are versions that will very clearly only appeal to people who are salty about a specific thing that canon did poorly. That's not who I want to appeal to in my adaptions, so while I'm not going to argue that those takes have no backing in canon, I will argue that those takes are not supported by canon as a whole. Embracing them requires you to take the worst parts of canon at face value while ignoring what canon is clearly trying to do with the overall story.

I get the appeal of that, but it's not fun for me because that approach feels like rolling around in the mud with the pigs. I don't want to sink to canon's level! I want to have fun! That's why I talk about how to make canon into its best self, not its worst self. If you want its worst self, just go watch the actual show. I will be shocked it if disappoints you.

[qoldenskies]

cc!leo is so weird and fun to write because i have to capture the spectrum of him impossibly gentle and caring, goofy and nonchalant to make everyone feel better, and INSANELY invested in the prospect of brutally murdering someone all at the same time and writing ch23 really illuminates that for me lmao. like the characters just kind of take me places that i dont expect and apparently the answer to "what happens when you strip leo of all his layers of facade and make him forced to hurt the most important person in his life through horrifying mind control?" in this extremely specific instance was uhhhh. Bloodthirsty! apparently

he's so funny to me like bro can you CHILL

[caelanthe]

Fanfiction is so goated actually

No monetary incentive, just writing in one's free time. Some incentive for like kudos and comments, because who doesn't want to hear that someone else enjoyed what they wrote. Just writing a story that is good and/or enjoyable, no real-life pressure to keep it going because god forbid you and other people are depending on it financially.

Writing a story because you want to write a good story, so you can write what they want the way you want, at a pace that is realistic for you, with exactly the plot pacing you want there to be.

[vernyhore]

The masculine urge to write more no-plot Langdon whump on top of the two longer fics I’m workin on right now 👀

[queenerdloser]

me, making free hotel reservations back in like january: wow this place looks nice, that's within my budget even if it's a bit pricier, i want to stay here!!! sure i'll pay extra for a upgraded space with a nice view, why not????

me, making the actual hotel payment: oh god. oh jesus. should i just stay in a tent on the roadside instead.

[mikkaster]

Parmini's Ice Wood Spear done! 🎉🎉 One of the first models I made that wasn't from a tutorial.

[nylarac]

i stopped shaving my legs for the first time since i was in like. i think late middle or early high school and it's v interesting/freeing

[iwritenarrativesandstuff]

I feel like Crystal is going to have so much going on in season 2, and she is probably not going to handle it super well at first… just a guess

She’s trying to piece together her old life, coming to terms with who she was (not a very nice person) and who she is now that she has her memories again, her parents didn’t even notice that she went missing, Niko “died” saving her and I suspect she’ll have no small amount of grief over that, and David is buried in her mind and we already know he’s going to cause problems with the tree if he stays there too long. That’s. That’s a lot. Poor Crystal :/

[qoldenskies]

April spending the night holding CC Donnie and rationalizing why her mom was wrong, it couldn’t have been the boys. Not her boys, and especially never to her boy.

HEY. YOU. JUST COMING IN SWINGING WITH THAT ONE HUH

BUT UGHHHH YEAH SHE DEFINITELY DIDN'T SLEEP. her confusion and fear was so obvious especially with how manic she was the morning after, her desperation to be comforting despite wanting to bombard him with questions. and yet she didn't have the courage to ask the other three, because if there was a slim chance that she was right.... she couldn't fathom it. ive always thought she sent one message to them that morning, and it was a lie that she didn't know donnie was there after he ran. anything to keep them away from him a little longer-- not knowing that saying that might have actually lead him into the jaws of death faster.

and she spent days after looking for him. she probably even skipped school in her desperation. her going to the lair was a last resort. she didn't expect him to be there, she just needed to get a little bit of the hurt out. to take it out on the people she knew at that point were responsible, as much as it hurt. she spent those days looking for him in the rain overthinking everything, overcome with numb horror at the realization of what she'd fed into. she came to a lot of conclusions that she hated to see proven right.

it was skipped over in miner's eulogy but i cant help but wonder what it must have felt like when she first saw donnie curled up in that cot. she forces herself to be so strong after because they all have it way worse (even if she is angry at them, of course she is, she still feels hurt and used and betrayed) but that sight had to have broken something a little bit. maybe she would have been able to do something if she didn't spend so long making justifications for them. maybe if she'd just known him a little bit better she would have been able to make true on her vow to protect him.

it was simultaneously reassuring to learn about the curse and the most horrifying thing she'd ever heard, especially since she learns after that they didn't tell her everything, only the things they could say out loud without hyperventilating or throwing up.