#Y'know. For character accuracy purposes

[avelera]

Apologies for screaming into your askbox like this but

EVERYTHING YOU SAID ABOUT BENIOFF AND WEISS IS SO FUCKING TRUE AND I AM SO GLAD SOMEONE ELSE IS FINALLY SAYING SOMETHING

As someone who read the Game of Thrones books (probably younger than I should have...but that's beside the point) the sorts of things that the two Ds decided needed to be added for the sake of "realism" or "accuracy" was ALWAYS just an excuse to brutalize someone. Be it kids, be it women (though in GoT is was usually women) and so much of it was not in the books!!! Like, sure, the books have accrued a reputation for being brutal, and they totally are...but they never seem as gretuatus in the way that David and Dan seem to revel in the crualty. Utterly original characters are introduced for the express purpose of being killed or assaulted, and it makes watching Game of Thrones a harrowing experience.

I'm not surprised that this has continued in their other work, in so many ways, the bloodlust became their calling card. I am deeply thankful that most of the other places that had been courting them to make projects have dropped them.

I will say in defense of the no doubt huge team who worked on Three Body Problem that it's not a gore fest or anything. There was a lot I've enjoyed in eps 1-5 (which as far as I've gotten at the moment) and scenes of violence are hardly the only thing that happens (though umm... maybe be prepared for the opening scene. It's also a doozy.)

Anyway, as I see it, Benioff and Weiss's sadism is more like... Tarantino's foot fetish. It doesn't consume the entire story, but when Tarantino does a loving closeup of feet you're like, "Ah, there it is. I was wondering when that would show up." If B&W work on something, like it or not, they're going to mash the cruelty button and heighten the cruelty of canonical scenes (if it's an adaptation) in order to try to get a reaction out of the audience. It's just how they work. For some audiences, that might even be a feature, not a bug!

The thing that makes me so frothing at the mouth enraged about Benioff and Weiss is how fucking coquettish they are about their sadism. They always act so fucking surprised like they're shocked that anyone would think that the gore and the horror were the point and what drew them to the story (I know, I'm just repeating my post at this point but STILL--!).

Look, when I was a teen, I totally first started writing angst to sort of... express this vein of sadism in myself in a safe outlet like fiction. I wanted to make people cry with my writing. So I'd do things like just kill off all the characters and be so proud when a reader said they were sad after.

But that's just... really flat and amateurish angst, y'know? There are so many more sophisticated and meaningful ways to create emotion, including sadness, in an audience other than just killing off all the characters or torturing them.

But I feel I remember enough from those days (I'd like to think I've long since grown out of that impulse) to know a sadist when I see one? And Benioff and Weiss's storytelling, to my eyes again, is simply sadistic. It glories in watching people in pain and it finds ways to exaggerate that pain and the chance to exaggerate moments of pain is what draws them to the stories they like to depict.

And that's fine. Plenty of horror creators revel in gore and cruelty and it's an entirely worthy art form!

But for the most part, those horror creators know what they're doing and they're open or even joyful about the fun they have creating these horror stories! Enjoying creating horror stories or depicting suffering or even being sadistic, particularly in fiction where no one is actually getting hurt, is perfectly fine.

I just fuckin... wish Benioff and Weiss would admit that's what it is goddamn it makes me INSANE.

[henrysglock]

At this point I wouldn't be surprised if they suddenly included a teenage Murray in the play despite him not even living in Hawkins. I get that they struggle with age accuracy of several characters but they change a bit too much in my opinion. Plus the character names. Like is Bob's father now a priester or principal??? And who is the priester then??? I'm so sad I won't be able to see the play so I really hope they'll put in on netflix in summer 2024 or something but it's already soo confusing

You see, Nonnie, I personally don't think they struggle with ages at all. I'm the type of person who's more inclined to consider that they're deliberately fucking with us.

To answer your question: I'm not sure who the priest is going to be, since priests aren't meant to have secular jobs (like being a principal)...but I won't lie and say I'm not tickled about how this contradicts the one (1) Collider article that drops even the slightest hint at a Patty/"George" one-sided romance. They list her as being the preacher's daughter:

and with that key bit of her character description thrown into question...well. Y'know. I don't think I need to point out how unreliable this makes everything else sound.

Anyway, I'm hoping you'll get to see it at some point, Nonnie!

And this is nothing against you, personally, but I struggle to understand how people don't see how reminiscent this all is of a NINA simulation.

Complaining and making my case below the cut.

Bob shouldn't be hanging around Jopper, they weren't friends in high school. They knew of each other, and Jim bullied Bob. Karen and Henry should be around the same age as Alice, which is to say: children. Alice is at least close to filmed canon, even if you think shes younger than Henry. They should at least have cast them similarly with actors, but they didn't. They do all this swapping: Priest to Principal, Allen to Alan, Henry (12) to Henry (14-15) while all the other actors are close enough to be passable if you don't look too hard.

This is all reminiscent of NINA and the constant swapping behavior. Like I'm just going to tap these few signs.

I mean honestly, this alone should be enough to put NINA on our radars:

Everyone but El is the right age, and she's aged up visibly.

They also swap on whether Henry's hair is a natural side part or not:

They swap on which way Brenner's tie is done:

They swap on prop orientation, corpse posing, or blood patterns:

All this changing around with an end result of no one (who cares enough to look) being able to say concretely which version is real.

I feel like this should ring warning bells:

Even if we want to discredit the papers and put Alice as Henry's younger sister, she's still cast as the right age in TFS. Visibly so. Henry is visibly aged up.

The only place we've ever seen this happen is in NINA, which is conveniently the time when El's memories are being altered as they're fed back to her.

So unless this is some secret third thing where Henry (12) went back in time to try and fix things but he continues to age normally/he's now 14-15 when he ought to be 12 (which isn't an option I'm against, I actually think it would be fun)...we're just not given another viable explanation in filmed canon.

So yeah, Nonnie...who's the priest and who's the principal? Is he Alan or Allen? Is it Henry or Vecna or One? Henry/Vecna/One? Allen/Alan/Al? What's the truth? What are we settling on?

But my main gripe is about the attitude, and again it's not about you personally, Nonnie, but:

Is it so hard for the fandom to go "Hey, maybe all these discrepancies in TFS are there for a reason, not just because the writers are dumbfucks who don't know their own story...despite having written it in tandem with ST4"?

Especially given that Kate Trefry wrote the NINA project? Not Matt, not Ross. Kate.

Why is everyone so against it being purposeful? Where's the fandom's sense of joy and whimsy? Is no one else willing to have fun and be creative about it? Must it always be a derisive little "uhuhu dumbfuck writers silly writers look how stupid and messy they are, retconning the canon THAT THEY WROTE SIMULTANEOUSLY" thing?

Idk. Just rubs me wrong. We'll see soon enough, though.

[not-too-many-eyes]

I love Yu Nogi's character in Hackers Memory so much.

Matadormon says when you find that K is Yu that: "He's nothing more than a worm who lost his mind between self-loathing and hero worship" he idolizes Keisuke so much that he wants to be him. He steals his best friend's account so that Keisuke would have to rely on him. Because Keisuke was the only one who looked out for him, who ever believed in him.

He's jealous of Hudie too, jealous that there taking Yu's time away from Keisuke. Keisuke who is the only person in Yu's life who believes in him. He's scared that Keisuke will leave him for them, for Keisuke to finally realize that Yu is worthless. That Yu doesn't deserve him.

Because who is Yu compared to him? He's never going to be able to catch up to him, never going to be able to repay him, never going to be able to do anything that will equate to what Keisuke did for him. Keisuke is so perfect, so untouchable. He hates him. Why can't Keisuke treat him like the terrible unredeemable person he really is? Why can't Keisuke hate him as much as he hates himself?

But he's also very much in love with him which...does not make things easier for him at all. He puts out a request that Keisuke "checks out dating spots" with him under a guise that "A friend asked him too" but it's implied that it really is just him wanting to spend time with him, and even if a friend really did ask him...he wanted Keisuke to do this with him specifically for a good reason, insisting that he and Keisuke should "act like a couple" for accuracy purposes. He also straight up says he's "Not satisfied with being Keisuke's close friend anymore" he is so very much in love with Keisuke.

And Yu knows Keisuke doesn't love him back, romantically speaking. And with the added manipulation of Matadormon and the already huge amounts of self-loathing and idolization Yu has...it wasn't going to turn out good.

Even though Matadormon manipulated him Yu knows that those feelings are his. And Keisuke has taken the brunt of them. Keisuke has gotten hurt so many times over because of him.

I see people call Yu a "Yandere" and ignoring my dislike of the term itself I feel like that descriptor detracts from Yu's overall character.

Yu Nogi is a person who hates themselves to their very core, who could never imagine why someone would actually care for him, who latched on to the first person who ever saw something worth seeing inside him. And has to learn to grow from that. To consider himself as someone worth something.

His Digimon has some fun symbolism too. While Yu doesn't have a specific Digimon partner, the one he uses first in battle in his Dominion fights is a Geckomon/Whalmon, in the Digimon Reference Book Geckomon is described as:

"An Amphibian Digimon that charms those around it with a pleasant voice that is hard to imagine by looking at its bizarre appearance. "

And for Whamon we have:

"Since it lives in the deepest parts of the Net Ocean, it is rarely ever encountered (the organs in parts of it equivalent to its eyes have degenerated). Due to its ferocious personality, it will attack by generating an enormous tsunami."

Geckomon and Whamon feel like very deliberate references to Yu's insecurities and hidden feelings. Whamon especially due to it's degenerated eyes since its lived in darkness for so long (How Yu's been bullied so much and how his hero worship and self-loathing blinds him)

After he gets his Character Arc finished up Yu Whamon evolves into MarineAngemon...Y'know, the digimon mainly known for it's healing abilities, cuteness, and dislike of combat. Who's main move is called "Ocean's Love" which makes there enemies lose their fighting spirit. That's what the "ferocious" Whamon evolves into.

Yu is a interesting character and I wish we got more of him in game. More times to see Keisuke and him interact before and after he reveals his K. I like how layered he is, he's probably my favorite character next to Erika.

[about-faces]

What’s your opinion on Harvey and Two-Face having their left eye damaged by the acid? Sometimes it looks like it is, but it seems to work fine. Do you generally think of its vision as miraculously unharmed or functionally as good as, partially impaired (maybe halfway, heh; also this is my answer) or totally gone? Should they wear an eyepatch?

Because if Two-Face is visually impaired and may lack some or all depth perception, he’s a really great marksman, especially since he usually uses two guns at once which itself lowers his accuracy. I reckon a lot of those weeks/months between escaping hospital and becoming a crime lord were spent just teaching himself to shoot.

He never gets the hang of darts though. So he’ll never get to put a picture of Batman or his symbol on a dartboard and remotely stab it. Damn you, Maroni!

Y'know, there was a time when I was against him having eye damage because it would have been permanent, and therefore not something that could have been repaired with plastic surgery. Because for a long time, I held to the classic comics' idea that a happy ending for Harvey Dent meant getting "restored to normal." As you can probably tell, I no longer think of that as an ideal solution for him, even besides the problematic ableism involved with the idea of "fixing" someone like that.

Even still, I wasn't a huge fan of it before simply because no one's ever done anything with the idea aside from artistic aesthetics, whether it's to make him look more "scary" or to add some "realism" to his design. What I love about your ideas here is that they actually serve some real purpose to his character, showing the logistics of how he has to live and function now after the acid attack. I love that shit. I wish more writers would explore the ways he still lives with the ongoing issues associated with being a burn victim.

Off the top of my head, the only writer to do that was Mark Verheiden in Secret Origins Special, where Harvey had sufficient nerve damage on his shoulder to feel no pain from being shot. Oh, and Steve Englehart in Batman: Dark Detective had him constantly using eyedroppers since he can no longer blink on that side. Those are the kinds of details I wish we could see more often.

Of course, it occurs to me that there's only one reason why most writers would think to include such an impairment in Two-Face: it would give Batman something to exploit. For that cynical reason alone, I'm a little surprised more writers haven't tried playing with Harvey's eye being impaired or blinded.

I much prefer ideas like this, which actually deal with what he has do deal with, and how he has to compensate. It also adds another layer to stuff like him learning marksmanship from Deathstroke, an idea which was introduced in Tomasi's Nightwing: The Great Leap. Not so he could be a more effective killer, but more so he could be more functional in the life he's doomed to inhabit.

[awlumii]

Speaking of Ancient Greece…

I don’t know whether someone has said his before a while ago, but how about Greek myth aus for Genshin characters?

Kazuha is Orpheus, without a doubt. And I love angst, so yay!

I can imagine Cyno or Xiao in Hades and Persephone if we perhaps cut some of the unhealthiness away from the relationship…

This one isn’t particularly romantic, but Albedo would definitely fit the bill for Pandora’s Box.

There are probably some other ones I could think of but my brain’s a little too dead for that at the moment…

-🎻 anon

i stopped in the ancient egypt section to take a break but GOODNESS, NOT ORPHEUS.. I'M EVEN MORE ANGRY BC IT FITS

i personally would try and stick cyno in some ancient egyptian myth for the sake of accuracy, but because i don't know them very well, i'd probably say xiao would fit the hades and persephone myth (but only if we're using the modernized, romantic versions because the actual myth is intended to be horrifying thanks to its purpose as a depiction of the fear that women and their mothers experienced with marriage back in those days).

pandora... y'know, i actually see very little of her in my studies of greek mythology — Iike despite her being reportedly the first woman and infamous for basically causing all of the world's problems (fun fact: she'd be the equivalent of christianity's eve) (fun "fact"2: the more colloquial term used now to describe causing a bunch of problems is "opening a can of worms"; "opening pandora's box" is used less frequently nowadays) she doesn't make much of an appearance.. she's also apparently zeus's other method of punishing prometheus for giving fire to mankind

sorry abt the infodump;; (its not like my knowledge is very useful anyhow, i'm generally wrong abt these kinds of things) but i'll happily discuss more later once i find some kind of bookstore or café to hole myself up in! rn, i think i'm gonna go look around the museum some more and then i'm gonna go on the hunt for food n whatnot 🥰

[donuts4evry1]

Considering how poor Iwamine's hygeine prolly is (y'know, with all the experiments and stuff), you'd think he'd smell either like strong BO or some kind of body spray (like Axe or somethin)

[carbonatedjem]

“Symbols of Survival This is a commission for GokuvsSuperman117 on Deviantart! He’s a friend of mine and he’s commed me in the past. And for all of his comms so far he’s always had a speech prepared relating to the image. 

--- "Survival. Perhaps the most basic and universal instinct known to nature. Every creature adheres to the concept at one time or another, whether they realize it or not. Though some are unable to execute it, those who do showcase resilience, determination, and an unstoppable willpower to push through what seems impossible. Through this continued strive to live, strength, purpose, and even victory can be attained. All throughout the realms of fiction, the three I find to embody the concept of survival with purity and accuracy fittingly hail from the genre of survival horror. Whether they face reaninations of the deceased, the mutations of our very mitochondria, or the return of formerly extinct feral beasts, they have learns the ins and outs of evading death, pressing on to fight another day, no matter what horror impedes their progress. Jill Valentine of Resident Evil, Aya Brea of Parasite Eve, Regina of Dino Crisis. These three enduring women of action have out outfought and outfoxed the odds on several occasions. Whether it was through the raging fire of hours or the precious few seconds that decided the difference of life and death, they preserved their hardships and overcame their challenges. Through their astonishing tales of survival, they completed their missions, lived to fight for the future, and continued their battles to ensure the well-being of others and themselves." Lovely job my man, and also as per usual he's asked me to give my thoughts on the characters along with the process of drawing them. --- Jill Valentine - Aight so I ain't never played Resident Evil in my life. The most exposure I've had to it are like, a few lets plays of the 7th Game and that's all, and even with RE3 I know mostly about Nemesis rather than Jill. And even what I know about Jill is limited to the Marvel vs Capcom version where she looks like an Anime! So I can only give opinions on drawing her . . . So like the hell that was drawing her hands and that gun are like the most notable thing I can mention about her drawing process specifically. Drawing that burning building behind her was cool though!~ Aya Brea - So like, y'know how I said I ain't never played Resident Evil and what I did know about it was limited??? Yeah I literally forgot Parasite Eve existed until this commission was first described to me. However the comm did make me somewhat interested in getting into the games, whether that be by playing them or watching lets plays on youtube I have yet to decided. As for Aya, honestly she's my favorite part about this comm, drawing her from sketch to shading was really fun for a reason I can't explain without a college major in astronomy. Maybe it's the shoulders. Regina - And now we're in the middle of how much I know about Dino Crisis and Regina. I didn't forget she existed, but I also don't know what her favorite kind of bread is, a true conundrum. She was second most fun to draw, her design was nice and unique from the others and her hair is perty. And drawing the dinosaurs behind her was pretty cool, I like how I drew the T-Rex's eye. Jazz. --- https://carbonatedjames.tumblr.com/post/188530447089/httpsdocsgooglecomdocumentd1tmqgzy2sj2z3ofm Commissions are currently open