#What's another decade?

[pressure-change]

What a waste...

[heartorbit]

i just wanted to draw the ave mujica outfits .

[unproduciblesmackdown]

Lackadaisy Enrichment

[al-luviec]

ninjago s11 redraw

[feroluce]

Love thinking about Sampo's possible early days after just infiltrating Belobog. Like imagine Sampo hiding out, spying on the captain of the guards, trying to learn all the important people's names and faces on this weird new planet if he's gonna make this whole thing work.

He likes watching the blonde one, he apparently has a thing for blondes now. There's also two idiots down there though, privates by the looks of them, and even from all the way up here, Sampo can tell just from watching their movements that they're talking while the captain is giving orders. Amateurs-

And then he hears that blonde captain guy yell for them to drop and give him 20 in his harsh voice and his military discipline tone and Sampo just. Freezes. Goes completely stock still. Slowly turns red and drops his face into his hands where he'd dropped almost face-first into the snow because ohhhhhh holy shit.

Sampo, looking up at the sky, face STILL red: You're doing this on purpose. You must be. You think this is fucking funny, don't you. Aha: 🔔🔔🔔🔔

[literallyjusttoa]

Left this abandoned in the drafts (which is a bit ironic) but it's a spin on this post, where instead of Apollo just being locked in some room on Olympus somewhere, he's bound to the ruins of an abandoned Ancient Greek city. Maybe somewhere near Delphi, maybe Troy, idk.

[belovedcarrion]

Fowler and Shindo's no children ass marriage was hilarious

Like they didn't even get divorced!

Fowler gets widowed and sent back to home county because no one is sponsoring his green card anymore lol

[bunchabears]

warm-up redraw

time flies...and yet leon kennedy remains

[weazawoo]

hatsune climber

awesome right

[thosewildcharms]

How insane it is that she’s been raising 2 kids alone and running, protecting a community but hasn’t felt safe in near a decade. And the one man that gives her security was pushing her away

me when rick said he wasn't going home:

i'm so glad danai gurira is the genius she is and that both she and andy are the actors they are because in less talented hands rick's behavior may have been unforgivable. because what the FUCK rick?? i'm probably rick grimes' number one apologist and even I wanted to smack him, even while feeling incredibly sad for him. hell I'm pretty sure he'd go back in time and punch himself in the face for hurting her like that if he could. LUCKILY FOR US THOUGH towl (and 1x04 in particular) is fucking great and all of this just made them stronger :')

but yeah, it's honestly devastating when you think about how michonne went through all of that grief and pain and suffering for years, suffered even more trying to find him, all the while thinking everything would be okay again once she got him back. because it really is only when he's around that she doesn't feel like she has to be so strong all the time, doesn't have to be so self-reliant, can be vulnerable and soft because she knows she has a real partner who will protect her and their kids and will help her carry the weight of everything they have to deal with. for years she didn't have that anymore and had to go back to being hard and hyper vigilant, constantly. only to find him and instead of finally being able to let her guard down again, had to fight him for him. because all of his strength had been replaced by fear.

like, that really is the love of her life and he must really be worth it, really must make her feel safe on a level so profound that she was literally wiling to do anything to get him back because my god, anyone else really would have walked. anyone else wouldn't have tried to find him in the first place. she really is the strongest woman alive. and for what it's worth i don't think there's any question that rick knows this and is gonna spend the rest of his life making it up to her and living up to who she deserves him to be.

[panicv0mit]

time for some very rare "is Tron even still relevant?" art

[rookeryyy]

EAT YOURSELF

:D aka a gift for my buddy @triffany-lottablog of their bugsnax oc for getting me cattails: wildwood story and don't starve together <333

[tinystepsforward]

ngl it makes me want to die a little bit that it's so often trans people who feel that sex is mutable but oppression is always-forever based on asab in ways that allow them to demand that information from other trans people. like it feels fucking bad. it feels bad when it's people holding up someone who posts a lot of selfies as transition goals to a degree they have to clarify what they have or haven't done or what "direction" they're going in, it feels worse when people are out there like "caster semenya is not tma" or whatever the fuck. i am, as always, not a trans woman, but here's a sentiment echoed by many of the trans women around me who log the fuck off, quoted directly from one: "people who draw a clear line where they say that semenya or khelif are tme and then call me tma are just calling me male at this point".

like i get it. i really do. we seek community and shared experiences, and we feel betrayed when people have less in common with us than we thought they did. [*more on this later.] but that's not those people's faults and my god in the case i'm seeing play out on twitter rn this poor person did absolutely nothing to intentionally mislead people, just posted pictures of their actual kid self. who looks a lot like i did, because shockingly enough "we can always tell" doesn't fucking work for trans people either!

on the one hand i move in intersex circles which are unapologetically welcoming in cis "dyadic" people with pcos, because it serves nobody to draw a clear line where mutilation or genetics or some ineffable childhood suffering are what make somebody intersex, especially when most of us (esp in places like nz) have never been karyotyped and are being treated for symptoms without a pinned-down cause anyway. the more of us there are the stronger we are, the more pressure we can exert on a medical profession which doesn't like to consider how common outliers are, how uneasy sex is at all. and then on the other hand there's dyadic trans people on the internet who've yelled me out of spaces because a couple of traumatised incarcerated trans women i worked with as a prison abolitionist assumed i was also a trans woman and i didn't immediately tell them my entire csa-involved history of being sexed in varying ways as an infant and child and/or exactly how big my phallus was at birth or where in my junk config my urethra lives so they could decide i was tme or whatever.

returning to the * for a related but not identical thought: i think presuming shared experiences leads to some fucked shit in general! "oh we all had a radfem phase" or "oh we all were channers" no we fucking weren't and it's particularly obnoxious when me & mine are trying to build trans community locally to organise and resist the growing wave of far-right backlash against our existence, and there's just white people in there on a spectrum from "straight up being antisemitic and trying to get the n-word pass" through "handwringing about how they need to make space for people who aren't politically correct" to "handwringing about how brown people are right to be mad at them but doing shit fuckall". and then the other fucking brown people in the space are on some identity politics shit where they're like "trans joy inherently excludes those of us who could get deported" or "big city white queers are killing us by being visible instead of going stealth bc it stirs up the discourse" or whatever the fuck i've heard pulled out this year. there's a bunch of reasons i primarily organise outside of trans spaces and that's one of them. i've never felt more alone in spaces where people claim we're all the same than being left as the brownest moderator or organiser in a space full of people to whom "this is a safe trans space" apparently means they get to abdicate all other responsibilities not to lapse into presumed shared patterns that are fucking racist or otherwise alienating. i've never felt more alone than surrounded by exclusively trans people who sort people into boxes and assume everyone in those boxes has the transition goals they have. like i was on cypro until it disagreed with me to the point of endocrine crisis and now i'm on t and at both those points people were so fucking presumptive or entitled to my reasons or journey or personal relationship w my body

literally just submitted on (and was invited to consult on) the nz law commission's review of the human rights act and like. it's straight up fucked how many nz trans people fully do not comprehend that any "sex assigned at birth" type definitions fundamentally exclude migrants who have no way of proving it and many intersex people who happen to have been reassigned later or many times or never assigned at all as a baby. we can't make law with this shit and that's why we have to have symmetrical protections for all genders/sexes/expressions/presentations, bc naming and defining a protected class here often leaves the people who already are left out from those shared experiences of marginalisation out in the cold when they face violence

[hinasho]

I'll tell you what people's problem with The Crow 2024 is — I'm a longtime fan by the way, I own the comics, I watched all the movies, so on.

The Crow 1994 managed to get the soul of the source material (comics). The Crow is a story about overcoming grief and acceptance of death — the author wrote Eric's story during his darkest periods of grief after his girlfriend was killed. So the story of Eric and Shelley have meaning, they are meaningful characters to a lot of people. Brandon's movie, while with some differences from the original story, still carried the same themes beautifully and the tragedy that happened during the filming made people (me included) turn protective over the memory of The Crow and it’s meaning.

There were three other movies after The Crow 1994 but they never dared to touch on Eric's character, instead they created new ones like Ashe Corven, Jimmy Cuervo and Alex Corvis. And those movies suck, don’t get me wrong, but people don’t have a problem with them because they didn't touch on Brandon's Lee legacy and di their best to stay on theme — grief and acceptance. They are their own thing, and that's that.

So did the comics. Eric story is the first main one, but no one took him and tried to continue it, he's pretty much untouchable, he has his beginning and his end. Instead, they created new Crows for their stories: Joshua, Iris Shaw, Mark Leung...There's a long list of existing Crows with their own stories.

The problem with 2024 The Crow is mostly that they called it a remake and took Eric's names to a character that doesn’t even resembles the original Eric — and I'm not saying in physical appearance, I'm saying his essence because the original Eric is a killer of bad guys, but he's also pretty charismatic; he loved life, he was gentle with the little girl Sarah he was friends with, he was kind, he was thoughtful, he even jokes around! Which, to many people, Bill's Eric does not resembles even a little bit of Eric's other than his name and neither does his story matches the themes and soul behind The Crow franchise.

The main gripe The Crow community has with the 2024 version is them taking Eric's and Shelley story, then changing it so much and losing it's soul when the easiest thing to avoid all this controversy and review bombing would've been just be like "Hey, we're making a new Crow movie, but we have created our own original protagonists for it!" just like people have been doing for years, because that's what 2024 Shelley and Eric feel like to people — original characters who just happen to share the names of the OG's.

Anyway, I watched the 2024 version and while Bill did a phenomenal job as always with what he was given and he looks so damn good, the story just...Didn't get me at all. There's not one bit of The Crow essence in there for me.

Hello, thank you for sharing your thoughts! 💞 I finally watched The Crow 1994 and City of Angels today (still need to watch Salvation & Wicked Prayer) so fortunately I now have a bit more context.

The problem with 2024 The Crow is mostly that they called it a remake

So to begin my breakdown: The 2024 isn't a remake of the 1994 movie. This seems to be a widespread misconception. But in all of the clips and trailers Lionsgate has released, they clarify that it's a "modern re-imagining of the original graphic novel". The movie never claims to be a remake of the 1994 film.

Now a fair debate could be how closely tied (or not) the '24 movie is to the graphic novel, which the two are remarkably different, but based on the reviews and comments I've seen, fans seem more inclined to keep comparing it to the 1994 adaptation despite Lionsgate never claiming they were trying to remake that specific film.

So basically, comparisons between '94 Eric and '24 Eric don't really hold up as valid criticisms in my opinion, because the director had no intention of adapting the '24 film from the '94 movie in the first place.

the original Eric is a killer of bad guys, but he's also pretty charismatic; he loved life, he was gentle with the little girl Sarah he was friends with, he was kind, he was thoughtful, he even jokes around! Which, to many people, Bill's Eric does not resembles even a little bit

'24 Eric is still a killer of killers. He only kills those that attack him first or had something to do with his and Shelly's deaths. He never kills needlessly.

In regards to him loving life, 2024 Eric does in droves! He actively hates having to kill so many people and takes no enjoyment out of it. The opera scene, while fantastic, wasn't a fun moment for him. Since her death, you can tangibly feel that all he wants to do is get back to his simple life with Shelly. He loves her and he loves the life they had.

As for him being charismatic, I can see your point there. In the graphic novels (from summaries I've read), GN Eric does have a morbid sense of humor and at times played around with his kills before finishing the job. His relationship with Sherri was brief but sweet and he gets a cute cat!! He continues to form relationships even after Shelly's death because of his charisma and kindness.

From a writing perspective, I believe all of these moments are intended to humanize Eric given the GN begins with him as The Crow pretty much immediately. We are introduced to him already in the throes of his grief and seeking vengeance.

In contrast, the '24 film paces the transition MUCH slower with the first act being about how Shelly and Eric meet, and the growth of their romance. I believe Director Rupert Sanders used those scenes to humanize the characters instead, which he accomplishes as both Eric and Shelly feel like they're just normal people dealt a shitty hand who only want to live their lives together. You can see the love they shared and how pure it was.

Basically, the core of the characters remain the same, just told in different ways throughout the story. In the graphic novel, James O'Barr humanizes Eric & adds levity in the midst of the carnage, while Rupert Sanders adds it before the carnage. Despite the timeline differences, both succeed in showing that Eric isn't a mindless murdering machine, and is just a regular guy who's been driven to the point of madness.

(It still would've been a nice touch for '24 Eric to adopt a cat for Shelly in the movie though.)

Bill's Eric does not resembles even a little bit of Eric's other than his name and neither does his story matches the themes and soul behind The Crow franchise.

From my understanding, the main themes behind the franchise are grief, the difficulty to move past it, and divine justice.

All three Erics suffer from visions of Shelly, who's memory plays on a feedback loop as they go about their spree. Something both the '94 and '24 films don't do, however, is touch on GN Eric's self harm tendencies. Which isn't a criticism! I'm merely discussing the different ways they show Eric's state of mourning.

The inability to move on is also still prevalent in the '24 movie. It's an active choice Eric makes when Kronos gives him the option to get his life back, and instead Eric submerges deeper and signs away his soul. He steps into it with his eyes wide open knowing he's damning himself forever.

Meanwhile in the graphic novel, Eric is already submerged. He is already a walking corpse, the embodiment of a heart so broken the only way to put himself back together is to weaponize the shards of his loss. I believe this is who '24 Eric develops into after the second act when he signs away his soul.

In the first act, he is human. In the second act, he is transitioning, and in the third act, he has truly become The Crow. Too deep in grief to escape it. The main difference between the '24 version and the GN version is that we see '24 Eric's journey to reach that final stage. It's the difference between character-focused narratives vs parable-like storytelling. Neither is inherently better than the other, just different.

And when it comes to divine justice, hmmm.....

In the GN, Eric and Shelly are killed and brutalized due to a completely random act of evil. The gang that killed them and assaulted Shelly had zero connections to the couple and were just some cruel, awful randos off the street. Based on what I've read, Eric nearly kills all of them without difficulty. Most of his hardship comes from his own bouts of depression and misery.

(By the way, by having the villains all be mediocre average goons, and majority of Eric's troubles be psychological, the GN focuses more on the danger of all-consuming grief, highly likely because of the trauma James O'Barr was experiencing when he wrote it. Meanwhile both the '94 and '24 films have Eric struggle a lot more during his fight scenes, elevating the danger of his physical opponents. But this is a tangent, back to what I was talking about!)

By all of them being average goons, the story gets across that: yes normal everyday people can and are capable of atrocious acts of evil, and yes they deserve to face the brunt of their crimes and divine punishment.

However in both the '94 and '24 movies, Eric and Shelly's deaths are not random and are planned crimes to silence Shelly. And both come up with a "big bad" for Eric to face off against. In the '94 movie, it was Top Dollar, a criminal kingpin, and in the '24 movie it's Vincent Roeg, a rich executive who's also a crimelord.

BUT what the '24 film does differently is that Roeg is also a supernatural being himself, who's made a pact with the devil to trade innocent souls for immortality.

This is probably the only area in which I agree with OG fans on that a central theme was changed. Because by making the main antagonist "unnatural", it's no longer about everyday, normal people committing horrible evils. It's about a supernatural entity on par with The Crow.

I think Rupert Sanders wanted to focus more on the supernatural aspect of The Crow universe. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing and definitely made for a fun movie, but I do agree with OG fans that the "grounded" nature of casual human cruelty was lost in that regard.

By implementing this change, the weight of Eric's vengeance is also changed. Because now it's no longer just personal. As the character of Kronos says in the movie, they need Eric to kill Roeg because he and all the deaths he's caused are unnatural and they essentially need Eric to tip the scales back into balance. While Eric's primary motive is still about doing right by Shelly, there's now an element of saving the world from an unnaturally superpowered tyrant, rather than the everyday cruelties of man.

So in this aspect, I do agree that a core theme was changed between the graphic novel and the 2024 movie. This still doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad story, just that Rupert Sanders had different intentions.

Because this still connects to the previous theme, the inability to move on and cope with death. Except now it's portrayed in the antagonist as well. His power is completely about his refusal to accept his own mortality. However, this does, like I said, detract from the normality of evil theme. So it's basically a gain and a loss 😅

(Plus, as I was writing this, I thought about how Eric's motivation is changed as well. In the '24 movie, Eric's goal is still to do right by Shelly, but it's to save her. Because if he succeeds, Shelly will be resurrected. This adds a noble spin to his killing spree, whereas the GN and the '94 film are solely about overwhelming rage at the loss of a loved one. There is no resurrecting Shelly. It's about enacting divine justice against their killers before traveling to the afterlife together. They're already dead and there's nothing GN Eric can do to change that, unlike 2024 Eric.

On the flip side, while this "nobler" take may feel like a negative change, I think it's countered by the fact that Eric succeeds in saving her, but is still dissatisfied because he's unable to actually be with her. GN and '94 Eric were able to find peace and reunite with their loves. '24 Eric only gets about 5 minutes before she's resurrected and he's stuck in purgatory forever.

At the end of the '24 film, both Eric and Shelly are dissatisfied as they can no longer be together. It's a bittersweet ending that feels more bitter than sweet. So while there is a "nobler" cause behind Eric's actions, the tone of the story is still very grim.

This is also why I believe the way the 2024 movie ended was with the intentions of a sequel where Eric does achieve his own peace. But that's a different conversation!)

...the easiest thing to avoid all this controversy and review bombing would've been just be like "Hey, we're making a new Crow movie, but we have created our own original protagonists for it!" just like people have been doing for years, because that's what 2024 Shelley and Eric feel like to people — original characters who just happen to share the names of the OG's.

Sure! I don't disagree. Well, I don't really think anything deserves to be review bombed unless it's content that's actively harmful. But I don't disagree with the original protagonists angle. Changing the names couldn't have hurt.

That said though, and I say this as gently as I can, Eric's character existed before '94 Eric and does not need to end with the '94 movie. I think it'd be one thing if the 1994 movie created the story of The Crow and that was the first iteration of Eric's character. But... it's not.

Multiple re-imaginings and adaptations of books / comics have been around since forever. The show Smallville and Man of Steel both adapt Superman in wildly different ways. Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew has had five different adaptations, and yet no one shits on 10 Things I Hate About You (1999) or Deliver Us From Eva (2003) for being modern re-imaginings. Awhile ago, me and my friend were discussing our favorite adaptations of the Little Women novel. Her favorite is the 1994 film while my favorite is the 2022 modern Kdrama!

I bring up all of these examples to say that there is REALLY nothing wrong with doing modern re-imaginings of older works, and tweaking characters and plotlines to reflect the changed style of the story and time period.

What's most important is that the heart of the story is kept. At the end of the day, The Crow is about an innocent man who enacts divine justice against he and his lover's murderers, while struggling to cope with her loss. Based on the graphic novel and what I've seen of the 1994 movie and the City of Angels sequel, the world of The Crow says that life can be fair and that no matter how high, or low, or cruel, or spineless, someone is, that karma is a bitch and it IS possible for them to reap what they sow.

I truly think the 2024 adaptation captured that feeling, even if it may look different than what people might be used to or expected.

Instead of being upset about how unexpected it is, try going in with an open mind and seeing the story Rupert, Bill, and FKA Twigs wanted to tell. I've read and seen a few interviews by now, and these three were genuinely passionate about the characters & story, and you can feel that in the movie.

And even if you still have no interest, the other parts of the franchise you do enjoy aren't going anywhere. The 2024 adaptation doesn't effect them in any capacity. The stories you love still exist and the new addition can't harm or take them away from you.

[lavellyne]

can the "finding your art style" discussion finally end because it does nothing but feeds people's insecurity and obsession with finding something... that they already have?

i've been there, trust me. growing up i was obsessed with "finding" my own art style. but you know what it only did? it made me almost quit drawing altogether on many occasions when in reality i already had one.

an art style is how you interpret everything around you through the act of creation. it's how you draw right now. it's how you place the lines. your line-weight. it's how you draw the eyes. it's how you shade.

an art style grows with you. it grows with your improvement. of course you can explore and bump it up by testing bits and pieces from art you love. but you don't add those bits to nothing. you add to what you already have, to the art style you already have. it's how you draw.

[aeoris4lovers]

i think by the time we get to see them, astrid and eadwulf’s relationship has gone from being romantic to completely defying any labels other than “extremely fucking close”.

they’re platonic soulmates. they’re an old married couple. they’re friends with benefits. they’re partners in crime. they’re two sides of the same coin, two halves of the same person. they know more about each other than most people know about themselves. they’re so in sync that they finish each other’s sentences and predict each other’s actions without even trying. they have the kind of sixth sense for when the other is hurt or upset that people say twins do. they can have a whole conversation just with looks. they’re incapable of doing anything without thinking of what the other would say. they trust each other implicitly. they talk about each other like puppylove crushes. they talk about each other like siblings that understand each other a little too well to hate each other. they live in separate houses but spend most of their days together in one or the other. they’re perpetually fighting over some ridiculous disagreement. when they’re hurt or sick or scared, they cry out for each other instinctively like children do to their parents. they would know each other’s footsteps or breathing or hands in the dark. they could sculpt every inch of each other from memory, in painstaking detail. they know how to hurt each other better than anyone else. they know how to make each other smile or laugh better than anyone else. they would kill for each other in an instant, no hesitation and no questions asked. if one of them died, the other would kill everyone who let it happen and then drop dead beside them. they had each other when they had nothing else. they’re everything to each other. they wouldn’t know the first thing about how to live without each other. when it comes down to it, it’s always them against the world. always has been and always will be, no matter what. they are each other’s person, in the deepest and truest sense of the word.

is it healthy? probably not, but it keeps them alive, and you’d have to have a death wish to try and take it from them.

and if you ask them what they are to each other? it’s just, “that’s my best friend.” what else could they possibly say?