#a post??? that isn’t a comic reference i found??

[tinned-beef]

actually lila pulling five into the party is something that can be so personal

[sabertoothwalrus]

Art theft has always been bad, but I feel like the way tiktok promotes remixing other people’s content into “your own” has ESPECIALLY proliferated the idea that, if something is on the internet, it’s anyone’s to take.

like. My friend just found these comments on a tiktok someone made of their comic:

This is why I don’t allow reposts. Because even if I give one person permission, even if they credit me and do everything I ask, you never know who is going to steal it from them.

So here’s your reminder:

If you see fanart or a fancomic you like, you ABSOLUTELY MAY NOT share it without checking if it’s ok first.

IF YOU RUN A FAN ACCOUNT. I’M LOOKING AT YOU. YOU’RE NOT HELPING ‘EXPOSE’ ARTISTS BY POSTING STOLEN ART YOU’RE JUST BEING SELFISH AND DISRESPECTFUL. @‘ING ME ON INSTAGRAM ISN’T GOING TO FIX THE FACT THAT YOU DIDN’T ASK PERMISSION

THIS GOES FOR TRANSLATIONS. I UNDERSTAND WANTING TO MAKE A COMIC MORE ACCESSIBLE TO YOUR LANGUAGE, BUT IT’S STILL A CONCERN THAT IT WILL GET STOLEN FROM YOU (and I KNOW some people don’t ACTUALLY care about it being more accessible, because I’ve asked people to reblog my original post with a translated transcription and they threw a fit because they obviously just wanted the views for their own page)

Comic dubbers are also not exempt from needing to ask for permission. I know there’s a lot of editing and you are technically producing new content, but jfc you still need to ASK TO USE SOMEONE’S ART. ESPECIALLY IF YOU’RE MONETIZING YOUR PAGE.

I also DO NOT CARE if your pinterest page is “just for your personal reference” STOP UPLOADING ARTWORK AS ORIGINAL POSTS. IF YOU MUST PIN ART, JUST POST THE LINK!!!! I die a little inside every time someone says they saw one of my comics on pinterest and had a hard time finding my actual post.

Why is it important that artists stay credited? Well, I for one, am about to start my junior year of my BFA, and I won’t be able to work my part-time job anymore. My art is going to be only source of income. Every time someone reposts my art without credit, that’s more people that won’t find the link to my store. That’s potential job recruiters that won’t find my portfolio. That’s work that I’ve done that someone else is getting activity for, potentially even making money off of.

Please, PLEASE be aware of art theft. Point it out when you see it. Please understand most artists see it as offensive and disrespectful and are not flattered by it.

[mspaesthetic]

Tidbit: The “Posterization” Effect of Panels Due to the Consequences of GIF Color Quantization (and Increased Contrast (And Also The Tangential Matter of Dithering))

There’s this misconception that the color banding and patterned dithering found in panels is an entirely deliberate, calculated effect Hussie manipulated the image into looking with some specific filter, but this isn’t the case, exactly. It wasn’t so much a conscious decision he took but rather an unavoidable consequence of the medium he partook in: digital art in an age where bandwidth and storage was at a premium.

Not to delve too deeply into the history and technicalities of it, but the long and the short of it is back in the early nineties to late aughts (and even a bit further into the 10s), transferring and storing data over the web was not as fast, plentiful, and affordable as it is now. Filesize was a much more important consideration than the fidelity of an image when displaying it on the web. Especially so when you’re a hobbyist on a budget and paying for your own webhosting, or using a free service with a modest upload limit (even per file!). Besides, what good would it be to post your images online if it takes ages to load them over people's dial-up Internet? Don't even get me STARTED on the meager memory and power the average iGPU had to work with, too.

The original comic strip's resolution was a little more than halved and saved as a GIF rather than a large PNG. That's about an 82.13% reduction in filesize!

So in the early days it was very common for people to take their scans, photographs, and digital drawings and scale them down and publish them as smaller lossily compressed JPEGs or lossless GIFs, the latter of which came at the cost of color range. But it had a wider range of browser support and the feature to be used for animations compared to its successor format, PNG ("PNG's not GIF").

You'd've been hard-pressed to find Hussie use any PNGs himself then. In fact, I think literally the only times he's ever personally employed them and not delegate the artwork to a member of the art team were some of the tiny shrunken down text of a character talking far in the distance and a few select little icons.

PNGs support semi-transparency unlike GIFs, which is why Hussie used them to preserve the anti-aliasing on the text without having to add an opaque background color.

While PNGs can utilize over 16 million colors in a single image, GIFs have a hard limit of 256 colors per frame. For reference, this small image alone has 604 colors:

For those who can't do the math, 256 is a pretty damn small number.

Smaller still were the palettes in a great deal of MSPA's panels early on in its run. Amazingly, a GIF such as this only uses 7 colors (8 if you count the alpha (which it is)).

Not that they were always strictly so low; occasionally some in the later acts of Homestuck had pretty high counts. This panel uses all 256 spots available, in fact.

If he had lowered the number any smaller, the quality would have been god-awful.

To the untrained eye, these bands of color below may seem to be the result of a posterization filter (an effect that reduces smooth areas of color into fewer harsh solid regions), but it's really because the image was exported as a GIF with no dithering applied.

Dithering, to the uninitiated, is how these colors are arranged together to compensate for the paltry palette, producing illusory additional colors. There are three algorithms in Photoshop for this: Diffusion, Pattern, and Noise.

Above is the original image and below is the image reduced to a completely binary 1-bit black and white color palette, to make the effect of each dithering algorithm more obvious.

Diffusion seemingly displaces the pixels around randomly, but it uses error diffusion to calculate what color each pixel should be. In other words, math bullshit. The Floyd-Steinberg algorithm is one such implementation of it, and is usually what this type of error diffusion dithering is called in other software, or some misnomer-ed variation thereof.

The usage of Pattern may hearken back to retro video game graphics for you, as older consoles also suffered from color palette limitations. Sometimes called Ordered dithering because of the orderly patterns it produces. At least, I assumed so. Its etymological roots probably stem from more math bullshit again.

True to its name, Noise is noisy. It’s visually similar to Diffusion dithering, except much more random looking. At least, when binarized like this. Truth be told, I can’t tell the difference between the two at all when using a fuller color table on an image with a lot of detail. It was mainly intended to be used when exporting individual slices of an image that was to be “stitched” back together on a webpage, to mitigate visible seams in the dithering around the edges.

To sate your curiosity, here's how the image looks with no dithering at all:

People easily confuse an undithered gif as being the result of posterization, and you couldn't fault them for thinking so. They look almost entirely the same!

Although I was already aware of this fact when I was much younger, I'm guilty of posterizing myself while editing images back then. Figured I may as well reduce the color count beforehand to help keep the exported GIF looking as intended. I view this as a complete waste of time now, though, and amateurish. Takes away a bit of the authenticity of MSPA art, how the colors and details are so variable between panels. As for WHY they were so variable to begin with, choosing the settings to save the image as requires a judicious examination on a case-by-case basis. In other words, just playing around with the settings until it looks decent.

It's the process of striking a fine balance between an acceptable file size and a "meh, good enough" visual quality that I mentioned earlier. How many colors can you take away until it starts to look shit? Which dithering algorithm helps make it look not as shit while not totally ruining the compression efficacy?

Take, for example, this panel from Problem Sleuth. It has 16 colors, an average amount for the comic, and uses Diffusion dithering. Filesize: 34.5 KB.

Then there's this panel right afterwards. It has 8 colors (again, technically 7 + alpha channel since it's an animated gif), and uses Noise dithering this time. Filesize: 34.0 KB.

The more colors and animation frames there are, and the more complicated dithering there is, the bigger the file size is going to be. Despite the second panel having half the color count of the first, the heavily noisy dithering alone was enough to inflate the file size back up. On top of that, there's extra image information layered in for the animation, leaving only a mere 0.5 kilobyte difference between the two panels.

So why would Hussie pick the algorithm that compresses worse than the other? The answer: diffusion causes the dithering to jitter around between frames of animation. Recall its description from before, how it functions on nerd shit like math calculations. The way it calculates what each pixel's color will be is decided by the pixels' colors surrounding it, to put it simply. Any difference in the placement of pixels will cause these cascading changes in the dithering like the butterfly effect.

Diffusion dithering, 16 colors. Filesize: 25.2 KB

This isn't the case with Noise or Pattern dithering, since their algorithms use either a texture or a definite array of numbers (more boring nerd shit).

Noise dithering, 16 colors. Filesize: 31.9 KB

Pattern dithering, 16 colors. Filesize: 23.1 KB

There's a lot more I'd like to talk about, like the different color reduction algorithms, which dither algorithms generally compress better in what cases, and the upward and downward trends of each one’s use over the course of a comic, but since this isn’t a deep dive on GIF optimization, I might save that for another time. This post is already reaching further past the original scope it was meant to cover, and less than 10 images can be uploaded before hitting the limit, which is NOWHERE near enough for me. I should really reevaluate my definition of the word “tidbit”… Anyway, just know that this post suffers from sample selection bias, so while the panels above came from an early section of Problem Sleuth that generally had static panels with diffusion dithering and animated panels with noise dithering, there certainly were animated panels with diffusion later on despite the dither-jittering.

Alright, time to shotgun through the rest of this post, screw segueing. Increasing the contrast almost entirely with “Use Legacy” enabled spreads the tones of the image out evenly, causing the shadows and highlights to clip into pure black and white. The midtones become purely saturated colors. Using the Levels adjustment filter instead, moving both shadow and highlight input level sliders towards the middle also accomplishes the same thing, because, you know, linear readjustment. I'm really resisting the urge to go off on another tangent about color channels and the RGB additive color model.

Anyway, there aren't any examples in MSPA that are quite this extreme (at least in color, but I'll save that for a later post), but an image sufficiently high in contrast can be mistaken for being posterized at a glance. Hence the Guy Fieri banner. In preparation for this post, I was attempting to make a pixel-perfect recreation of that panel but hit a wall trying to figure out which and how many filters were used and what each one's settings were, so I sought the wisdom of those in the official Photoshop Discord server. The very first suggestion I got was a posterization filter, by someone who was a supposed senior professional and server moderator, no less. Fucking dipshit, there's too much detail preserved for it to be posterization. Dude totally dissed me and my efforts too, so fuck that moron. I spit on his name and curse his children, and his children's children. The philistines I have to put up with...

In the end, the bloody Guy Fieri recreation proved to be too much for me to get right. I got sort of close at times, but no cigar. These were some of the closest I could manage:

You might be left befuddled after all this, struggling to remember what the point of the blogpost even was. I had meant for it to be a clarification of GIFs and an argument against using the posterization filter, thinking it was never used in MSPA, but while gathering reference images, I found a panel from the Felt intermission that actually WAS posterized! So I’ll eat crow on this one... Whatever, it’s literally the ONE TIME ever.

I can tell it's posterization and not gif color quantization because of the pattern dithering and decently preserved details on the bomb and bull penis cane. There would have had to have been no dithering and way fewer colors than the 32, most of which were allotted to the bomb and cane. You can't really selectively choose what gets dithered or more colors like this otherwise.

Thank you for reading if you've gotten this far. That all might have been a lot to take in at once, so if you're still unclear about something, please don't hesitate to leave a question! And as always, here are the PSDs used in this post that are free to peruse.

[rubysundaymondaytuesday]

@mirrorleaf convinced me to post my theory from Sunday on Tumblr, so strap in fam, because I have some Thoughts™️ about the “twist at the end”.

At the end of ‘Last of the Time Lords’, when Ten held a funeral for the Master, a hand with red nails picked up Harold Saxon’s signet ring. This was later used to resurrect the Master during ‘The End of Time’.

And the end of ‘The Giggle’, a hand with red nails picks up the Toymaker’s red tooth, which we were told contains none other than the Master.

Who did we see in ‘The Devil’s Chord’ who had painted nails? Maestro, someone with a direct connection to the Toymaker. And what does Henry Arbinger call this godly being? “Daddy.”

Henry Arbinger is being taught about music. Specially, the devil’s chord, a tritone. This was used by a lot of musicians, one of whom was notably Metallica. While I can’t be entirely certain of this next point — ie. if this particular song includes the chord — one of their most famous songs is called ‘Master of Puppets’.

Russel T Davies has never been one to mince his clues, and I am pretty convinced that the “twist at the end” is that Henry Arbinger is the Master.

First, the comparison of the ring and the tooth, both highlighted by the narrative when we’ve been told “the Master is dead” and it’s turned out to be only temporary.

Second, the Master has a precedent for regenerating into/hiding as a kid. During the Time War, there is a comic arc where he goes by the name ‘the Boy’…

But if we look at less obscure sources/show canon, when the Master used the chameleon arch to be Professor Yana he was found as a “naked child” on the coast of the Silver Devastation.

Thirdly, the Fifteenth Doctor is really playing up the “I’m adopted” card this season. While yes, this could just be him relating to Ruby and coming to grips with the Timeless Child situation, he also specially says “the species that took me in” when he refers to the Time Lords.

The show has always used the Doctor and the Master as foils of each other; so what if Maestro adopted the Master? (EDIT: If he was, I wonder if he’d be at the head of these “legions” we keep being told about…)

Fourth, a Maestro can be defined as “a master of an art, especially of music.” (EDIT: this episode also talks about the music of the spheres, which was not audible but could be “heard by the soul”, and I couldn’t help but think of the toclafane, as the last souls of humanity. More an observation here, than thoughts on the twist m.)

Fifth and final, when the Master was playing at Prime Minister, he used the name Harold Saxon. We know this was part of an anagram for the Master, but the last Saxon King of England was Harold II.

After Harold, we have William the Conqueror. And then we have William the II. And then we have, you guessed it — Henry the First. How many Masters have there been since Harold Saxon? Two. Missy is William the Conqueror, Dhawan is William II, and by my theory, Henry Arbinger is Henry I.

This last note isn’t evidence, I just think that it’s something to think about. Wouldn’t it be interesting if, while Susan and the First Doctor are right there in London in 1963, while Susan can pass for a schoolchild, the Master was also there, passing as a schoolchild…?

[david-talks-sw]

An allergy to the Prequels

While I'm putting together a post about the evolution Lucasfilm's transmedia strategies, this part kinda turned into its own thing!

So I'm not sure if anyone else noticed, but, uh... there hasn't been that much Prequel content since the Disney sale, right?

'Couple novels and comics, some episodes... but nothing meaningful.

The more I look into it, the more it feels like a deliberate avoidance to touch on anything Prequel-related - beyond the required quota, that is - to a point where they'd rather tell stories set during periods that are Prequel-adjacent (Dark Times, High Republic) than something set around Episodes I, II and III.

On-screen policy: "pretend they never happened"

I mean, this one's no secret. When The Force Awakens had been announced, with J.J. Abrams at the helm, everyone sighed in relief. "Finally, George Lucas won't keep ruining the franchise."

When Abrams had been announced as the director of Episode VII, I remember this cringey animated video started circulating online, titled "4 Rules To Make Star Wars Great Again" or "Dear JJ Abrams":

“Star Wars isn’t shiny and clean... Star Wars is a western.”

If you ask me, those two things are not mutually exclusive.

'Cause Star Wars has always been both, for many Prequel kids. Both clean and dusty, Coruscant and Tatooine. There was never a disconnect between the Original Trilogy (OT) and the Prequel Trilogy.

Even the documentary The People vs George Lucas shows Prequel-hating fans begrudgingly admit their kids felt all six episodes tied seamlessly.

Abrams, on the other hand, said: "I think [the "Dear JJ" video] was right on." Later on, he also said:

he considered "putting Jar Jar Binks's bones in the desert" on Jakku, somewhere, and

he intentionally made the lightsaber fights "rougher", "primitive" and "more powerful" unlike the fast-paced ones in the Prequels.

Later, we found out he wanted to blow up Coruscant.

It's clear he wasn't a big fan of the Prequels.

But y'know what? Not many fans over 20 were, at the time. And when The Force Awakens came out, most them celebrated it as a wonderful love letter to the OT.

Star Wars is cool again. Mission accomplished 🙌 !

However movies keep coming out, and references to the Prequels - if there are any - are literally just that... references.

Sometimes in the shape of a cameo ("hey look, Genevieve O'Reilly from the Ep. III deleted scenes is playing Mon Mothma again!")

Sometimes in a name (Luke name-dropped "Darth Sidious"!)

But nothing set during the Prequel era, and nothing treating the events that happened in that period as relevant or impactful, beyond subtextual nods.

In fact, the trend of avoiding anything Prequel-related continues as the final film in the Skywalker Saga comes out:

The Rise of Skywalker has a secret Sith society that chants the name "Palpatine" instead of his Sith name "Darth Sidious",

the film pretends the Kaminoans never existed,

and neither TROS nor Trevorrow's Duel of the Fates script even try to bring Hayden Christensen's Anakin Skywalker back on screen. Let that sink in, we're talking about the Chosen One, Skywalker Senior, whose sins caused this whole mess... and his name isn't even uttered once in the final chapter of what Disney dubbed the *Skywalker* Saga (or the entire Sequel trilogy, for that matter).

But hey, The Clone Wars got renewed for one last Season! That's cool right? So many stories had gone unfinished and somehow the animation looks even better than befo--

-- oh. It's not 22 episodes? Only 12?

Four of which had already been shown to us, but hey! We need to set-up the Bad Batch series, so let's shoehorn those episodes in there, and forget Son of Dathomir, Dark Disciple or Crystal Crisis.

*sigh* Better than nothing, I guess.

In other mediums: "just not a priority"

Now this is something that I'll explore more in the transmedia post (and purely my interpretation), but the noticeable change between Lucasfilm's transmedia strategy *post-ROTS* and the one post-Disney sale is that:

Before, the games, comics and novels were the main content. After all, Revenge of the Sith had been released, so that was it, for the movies. Thus, a variety of other content was being cranked out to keep the Star Wars franchise relevant. There were comics set 100 years after Episode 6, comics set 25,000 years prior, games set in the Old Republic era, other stories in the New Republic era, novels galore, a couple of parody films and an animated show, The Clone Wars, which sometimes received its own tie-in comics, novels and games.

After the sale and ever since, most of the transmedia products have had only one goal: promoting the films & streaming shows.

So while in 2015 you won't see an abundance of Prequel content... you'll see an avalanche of OT books and comics come out.

Why? Because the heroes of that era will be in the Sequel Trilogy movies. It provided context to the kids who hadn't seen the OT yet, and reintroduced those films to a new generation of fans, while priming them for the Sequels.

A multimedia marketing strategy that ultimately proved successful.

However, it continued even after The Force Awakens came out.

Don't believe me? Compare how many comics there have been set during the Prequel era vs the OT era.

If they make comics about the Prequels, they're limited runs.

Case in point: before the current Yoda series, the best any Disney Prequel-set comic series ever got was 6 issues.

Note: it's worth pointing out that the frequency of mini-series aren't just a Star Wars-specific thing, it's a comic book industry thing. The readership for comics is dwindling, many people are reading scans online, and so no publisher wants to commit to a story that lasts more than 4-6 issues. My problem is: there absolutely would be readership for a Prequel comic series to warrant an extended run instead of a mini-series.

Let's talk books. There have been give or 64 canon novels published since the Disney sale.

Only 11 of them are set during the Prequel era. And even those stories only came out when the planets were aligned.

Almost half of them were released while being a part of some bigger multimedia push.

Example:

Before the Obi-Wan Kenobi series was being released on Disney Plus, we'd had one novel and like two comic stories about him during the Prequels... released between 2012 and end 2021. That's about three pieces of content in almost ten years.

Clearly a low frequency.

Then, when the series is around the corner, two books and a comic story comes out in the space of months, plus an anthology book with an alt cover with his face on it and a comic with a story of him and Anakin in the first issue, all in 2022.

My takeaway: short of there being a film or series that needs to be promoted, you'll rarely get any Prequel comics or books.

And this is OBI-WAN we're talking about. The character who even the Prequel haters love. Imagine how little attention the other ones get.

Gaming-wise, Battlefront had no Prequel content at all (again, 2015 was the year where OT content was shoved down the consumer's throats to prep them for Episode VII), and Battlefront 2 only released Prequel content a full year later.

All that being said, we did seen some Prequel elements here and there. After all, some actors got to reprise their roles, books and comics came out featuring Prequel characters... but there's a catch.

The stories they appear in are set in-between Episodes III and IV, a time-period known as "the Dark Times" or the "Imperial era".

"Dark Times" being used instead of the Prequel era

It's easy to see the appeal of this era. You keep the same threat from the Original Trilogy - the Empire - but redress it with Prequel elements... while also cherry-picking the best characters of both the OT and the Prequels and giving them a chance to shine again.

The situation is more clear cut, as opposed to the complex one in the Prequels. Bad guys are stormtroopers, good guys are anyone else. And the stories no longer take place in the shiny capital, you're back on the frontier.

But at this point... it feels like a cop-out.

When you consider how much content has been set during the Dark Times, it's nothing to sneeze at. Since the sale, we've had:

2 movies (Solo, Rogue One)

4 series set in that time-period (namely The Bad Batch, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Andor, and Star Wars: Rebels).

2 video-games (Jedi: Fallen Order and Jedi: Survivor).

17 novels (such as Ahsoka, Lords of the Sith, the new Thrawn books, etc)

And just a whole bunch of comic book series & mini-series (like Kanan, Princess Leia, various Vader-centric comics including Darth Vader: Lord of the Sith, many tie-in mini-series promoting Rogue One, Jedi: Fallen Order, Obi-Wan Kenobi, etc).

There's been so much content made for this time-period that it feels like an unwillingness to do the work and create something set something during the Prequel era, let alone something that follows its Jedi.

After all, why make a story set in the Prequels (disliked by vocal fans) when you can just take the characters in that story and put them in an OT setting (which will appease the Prequel-haters)?

Maybe these stories get relegated to the Dark Times because:

there seems to be a perception that anything set in the Prequel era won't sell?

or maybe the current SW writers weren't fond of Episodes I, II and III, and don't find those Jedi characters likable, thinking they're too righteous and dogmatic which makes it hard to craft a story around them.

Or maybe it's because they're under the impression that the Prequel Jedi are bad. Like, canonically, in the narrative. Not just in a "I don't like them" sense, but also in a "the story is all about them becoming corrupted" sense.

Let's expand on that last point.

Retconning the Prequels as the "Fall of the Jedi" era

Somehow the rare stories set during the Prequels that we do get seem to automatically be about how "the Jedi lost their way/failed".

The series Tales of the Jedi is explicit about it...

... and I already explained why it contradicts what George Lucas established here and here.

You also see it in Rebels and the new season of The Clone Wars...

... in comics...

... in games...

It gets to a point where the Prequels era has now been redubbed the "Fall of the Jedi" era by Lucasfilm.

You wanna know what that period was referred to before the Disney sale? The "Rise of the Empire" Era.

Because - and I'll never get tired of saying this cuz it's factual - the Prequels aren't about the fall of the Jedi, they're about the fall of the Republic and Anakin, and rise of the Empire and Vader.

So in addition to being overdone, the "Jedi lost their way" is not even the intended narrative of the Prequels (if one puts any stock in Lucas' words). It's a minor subplot at best, hardly the focus of the films, let alone a whole time period.

But dubbing it "Fall of the Jedi" implies that there's another era in which the Jedi were in their heyday.

Because Star Wars authors are in luck! Yet another alternative has presented itself in the shape of a new transmedia initiative, and it's even better than the "let's set it during the Dark Times" solution:

A new transmedia initiative: The High Republic

You wanna deal with the Jedi before the Empire, but for some reason you wanna avoid dealing with the ones seen in the Prequels?

Look no further. Meet the Jedi of the High Republic.

Noble, adventurous, inspired by the Knights of the Round Table, they're everything the OT kids dreamed about when they heard ol' Ben Kenobi talk about the Knights of the Old Republic.

That's more like it!

Note: the High Republic was created for other reasons and has many more upsides than the ones mentioned above. Namely, a fresh new spot in the timeline that allows for creative freedom and a beautifully-coordinated transmedia storytelling effort where retcons are non-existent. However it does seem evident that not having to deal with the 'unlikable' Prequel Jedi and their "fall" is one of those upsides.

Another perk that the High Republic era offers is more freedom in terms of storytelling compared to the Prequels.

In 2016, Pablo Hidalgo tweeted he still quotes to authors the following excerpt of West End Games' guide for aspiring Star Wars writers, from 1994.

You can't write "this was the best day in Luke Skywalker's life", for example, because another author may want to write a better day than the one you just wrote.

My guess is that a similar approach applies to how all characters from the movies are treated. They're massively iconic. So you can't write a book that drastically changes how Mace or Yoda or Obi-Wan are perceived overall.

The stories need to be self-contained, disregardable if necessary, because you'll have dozens of writers coming up with new stories for those same characters, and you need to leave them some room.

Examples:

Notice how in the book Dooku: Jedi Lost we never see how Dooku turns to the Dark Side and joins the Sith.

Same goes for crossover comic book arcs of the Star Wars issues, like Vader Down or Crimson Reign... the characters don't really change by much in those comics. You could stick to just watching the movies and you wouldn't really miss anything.

But with The High Republic, you indeed can develop these characters as much as you want.

All stories featuring Avar Kriss leave an impact on her, you can nail down who she is perfectly in one book or one comic arc, both being just as meaningful to her character.

The fact that she's not as iconic/famous a character as Mace Windu means that authors can go to town on crafting an interesting and nuanced character arc for her that'll have a beginning, middle and end... something Mace will never really get.

CONCLUSION:

Back in 2015... let's not kid ourselves. The Prequels were unpopular and Disney is a multi-billion dollar corporation. Opting to make as much money as possible is what they do.

It's the same reason they decided not to go with George Lucas' original plans for the Sequels, in 2012.

I mean, imagine you're Disney. You just dropped 4 billion dollars, with a B, on this franchise. Your next Star Wars movie needs to be worth the price tag. Now, you can pick between two options:

Option #1 is uncharted territory and it explores the midi-chlorians (the cursed word…!) and the guy who presented you with this option also openly admits that a big chunk of customers won’t like it, but he wants this to be done because it’s his vision.

Option #2 is very simple: a soft reboot, that plays on nostalgia that the same chunk of customers (aka the 'boomer and Gen-X fans who grew up with the Original Trilogy and now have kids, grandkids and MONEY) will like.

It's a no-brainer. They gave the customers what they wanted.

But time has passed, the fans who were children when the Prequels first came out have grown up, and grew up with characters like Yoda, Mace, Plo Koon, Kit Fisto and other Jedi as their heroes, aside from main characters like Anakin and Obi-Wan and Ahsoka.

Can we maybe expand on them, flesh them out more?

No, let's either ignoring the storytelling potential of these characters or reducing it to them being "righteous, arrogant and dogmatic".

God forbid we get a story showing the Prequel Jedi in a *gasp* more positive light? One where their POV is more understandable, instead of the same old "we brought this on ourselves" storyline.

There's a whole decade between The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones... you're telling me there's no space to show us Anakin's training and how he formed bonds with the Jedi we later see in The Clone Wars? I tried my hand at it here:

Interesting or fun Prequel-set ideas from other pro-Jedi fans on Tumblr can be found here, here and here.

And y'know, part of the Star Wars intent is for fans to take the ideas in the movies and come up with their own stories. You're supposed to create headcanons.

What I'm saying is fans of the Prequels are being given less "imagination food" than the rest, and many of us who like the Jedi in particular are forced to rely on headcanons only. "Better than nothing" is no longer an acceptable standard.

There's a range of recognizable Jedi characters that have already been established in films and TCW, can we maybe expand on them, flesh them out more, instead of whole new ones?

[hana-no-seiiki]

Are you familiar with Ms Marvel (Kamala Khan)? What about Yandere Platonic Batfamily with a reader who is basically like Kamala (Comics ver).

Just imagine how hilarious to find that their Fangirl knows their identities and made a few fanfics about them. Like for example-

Red Hood vs The Monster truck possessed demon!

Batman and Robin vs Evil Sewer lizard's from another world!

Nightwing and the Smog-Breather!

Y'know just Fanfic writer who's also a superhero.

Also I love your content. Make sure to take breaks!

YANDERE BATFAM W/ MS MARVEL! READER

“Just to make sure. . . You’re totally Damian Wayne right?”

“What-“

“Cool! That means Batman has to be Bruce. And the robins…”

You may or may not have been knocked out during your first encounter with one of your favorite heroes. By Robin himself.

Look, Damian doesn’t usually knock out innocent civilians like they murdered his cat or anything but you were a liability and a half.

Yeah, maybe revealing that you knew everyone’s identities wasn’t a good idea.

Besides Damian was kind of iffy about you since you were feeling up his body when he swooped in to save you.

(Turns out you were just confirming your theories but still)

Now the surveillance started mostly due to your uncanny encyclopedic knowledge of the Batfam and basically every other hero and villain out there.

Once they figured out you were basically harmless and just needed to get a better filter when it comes to things you say, you were mostly home free.

The thing is, the Batsons might have formed an obsession with you. Since you’re asking a yandere blog here, it was definitely not healthy.

They liked the idea of someone knowing them in and out. You’ve had competitions with Tim to figure out who knew the other better while Bruce and Damian just deadpanned in the background.

Dick loved entertaining your ships and headcannon questions. Bruce was more reluctant but found it to be a great way to incentivize you to behave and work with him better.

Jason just adores you. You’re the only younger sibling that isn’t stuck up or reminds him of his low self esteem and struggle to be a good vigilante. He was definitely weirded out at first but grew to be like Dick and definitely fuels your fan habits. Both guys definitely not so subtly strip in front of you sometimes so you can get more “reference” material.

Which brings me to the next point, who you choose to write or draw on your blog definitely gets discussed. Your blog’s every post is actively monitored at all moments. I wouldn’t be surprised if Bruce installed a large monitor in the Batcave just to watch over it.

Him and Tim definitely analyze your stats and help you with growing your blog. Watch Bruce spend thousands of dollars to get your page everywhere (subtly cause the first time he did it, you were so embarrassed you refused to talk to him for a week). Alfred works as your personal assistant when it comes to timing/scheduling your posts and making sure you tag them properly + have the most aesthetic formats.

Anyways, back to the discussing your posts thing, you learnt to make sure your posts, heck even your drafts, are all equal when it comes to who it features. Otherwise prepare to get overwhelmed with love bombing.

It took Damian the longest to warm up to you, but when he realizes how much you mean to him there’s no turning back. It starts from him unconsciously humoring your questions to full blown out debates over how he’d definitely win in whatever battle you pit him in your fanfics.

Speaking of fanfics, Damian loves to blackmail you about them. He’s the type of brother to love tormenting you about your totally ‘weird hobbies’ while simultaneously reading every piece of literature/art piece in your blog as if you’re bringing out the modern bible and he’s a staunch believer in the God that is you.

He then proceeds to critique your art and written works if not outright bash them.

You’d have been in tears from the essays he writes about you if you didn’t already know it was him.

(Tim told you.)

Now when your powers awakened, you went from that one sibling that knew way too much to almost an essential part of their team.

Almost because every time you were allowed to go out, someone had to be on “mouth guard duty” for when you accidentally spill what you know.

(It’s usually Tim or Bruce)

You worked a lot with Bruce during those times. Who definitely flexes the hours you two spend in comparison to the batsons.

He doesn’t mind it if you get distracted by the boys, though.

Really, he’s glad you haven’t asked how your family has been doing or when you’re going home.

‘Cause he’d have a lot of explaining to do.

General Batfam Taglist: @the-sander-fander

[stitched-mouth]

Madame Web Production BS

Just to be clear, I love this movie. But I love talking about what a dumpster fire it was behind the scenes so let me point everything wrong with my favourite of the year so far. SPOILERS!

• Cass’s personality is not fleshed out… that’s a major problem. I feel like they just told Dakota Johnson to do what she wants the whole movie BUT then right at they end they decide to give Cass a personality completely ripped from the comics. And it doesn’t work with the way Dakota was playing her the whole movie and these no character development over the course of the movie, so it’s actually a little scary seeing her switch at the end.

• None of the characters have a personality actually. The villain was the worst to be fair because I still don’t really understand his motives. Like… you tricked and murdered a pregnant woman and a few others because your family was poor? And you think Spidey strength will fix that? Um, ok. So is mine but I don’t know.. wouldn’t kill anybody over it though.

• I hate Sydney Sweeney’s image. And it’s not her or her marketing teams fault. It’s her fans’ and her directors. She’s constantly purposely dressed sexy in movies (even when dressed down like a nerd, she’s still sexualised) but then is playing a child. Like wtf. They did it to her in Euphoria and they’ve done it to her again in Madame Web. And how Sydney dresses for press also is clearly influenced by directors and fans’, like the look isn’t just what they want for her characters but also how she’s expected to be irl too. It’s kind of sick and related to how paedophilic things are still normalised in our society today, I’ll have to say that rant for another day though.

• Why does it feel like nobody cared about this movie? The script feels like the first draft that was supposed to have rewrites but nobody was bothered. Same with the editing, everything but especially the dialogue and music feels so placeholder, why was it in the finished project? Like even the Google cast page is not finished, only the leads have their character names on there. Zosia Mament (the villain’s assistant) is credited as fucking ‘Actress’.

• Why was Cassie able to fly to Peru when she’s a wanted criminal? Why is she flying to Peru when talking about laying low because she’s a WANTED CRIMINAL??!

• The writers constantly forgetting what year it is was hilarious and the editors just throwing one Brittney Spears song in and a few Beyonce billboards in to cover up their mistake is also hilarious.

• ACTUALLY, apparently the whole reason the movie was set in 2003 was because the director really wanted to use Toxic in the movie. Because apparently you can’t play a song in a movie if the movie doesn’t take place in the same year the song was released 🤡

• BUT Toxic was released in 2004 🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡

• The writers taking the time setting as a opportunity to reference Garfield’s Spider-Man but then also forgetting that that SM was born in 1995 🤡🤡🤡🤡

• Yes I checked, they specifically wanted to reference Garfield’s Spidey, but through editing they realised their mistake and started trying to make it look like they were talking about Tom Holland’s SM instead, which risks breaking some rules with Marvel… AND THAT SPIDEY WAS BORN IN 2001 SO THEY STILL FUCKED UP. The fact that a simple Google and common sense (like they must of know Garfield’s fist SM movie took place in 2012 and if he was born in 2003, he would of been only 9 years old in 2012 😑) would of fixed this problem is again hilarious.

• Obviously the biggest goof was Dakota Johnson not realising she’s not in a Marvel movie and firing her agent the same day the trailer got dropped 🤡

• She also might be in trouble for posting the teaser on her Instagram and tagging Marvel before the trailer dropped (so before she found out), but I don’t think Dakota manages her own socials tbh. That post was removed then put back up without a Marvel tag.

• The press tour is amazingly bad, I love it.

• Not seeing the girls turn or become heroes was probably the worst part about this movie but I knew that going in so didn’t mind too much. But the real issue is with how Sony keeps straight up lying to their audience with their trailers. Obviously some studios add somethings into their trailer to create more interest for the audience but that’s not what Sony is doing, they are straight up LYING. And they do it so often now I want to fight whoever is in charge of that, they are the reason this movie flopped.

• Them and the writers… and whoever decided to hire the Morbius writers again, everyone there deserves to lose their jobs.

• The only reason I want this movie to do well is because I want Madame Web to have more movies with Dakota Johnson, Sydney Sweeney, Adam Scott, Isabella Mercer, Emma Roberts and Celeste O’Connor all returning. But I really don’t see that happening now, I can’t see Dakota signing another contract with Sony or doing everything to get out of this contract if it’s not over yet.

• The fact that they had to dub the villain’s lines makes me so confused to why he was hired? He didn’t even give a good performance, not saying he’s a bad actor (I’ve heard he’s great on other movies), but he really didn’t do anything in MW.

• And the part with the FBI agent and the villain had me so confused too. Like, did she seduce him to find out information about him? Because it makes sense that the FBI would be suspicious of this guy. But then did he see through her act and decide to at least get laid before killing her and stealing her passcode? But everyone is saying he seduce her for her passcodes and yeah I’m confused.

• The problem is the pacing and how everything that needs explaining isn’t, but everything that doesn’t need an explanation IS explained. And too much.

“He worked with my Mom in this place looking for this spider right before she died”

That’s not the exact quote but it’s pretty close to and that’s less than 5 minutes in. Ok thanks spoiling the whole movie to me. I really didn’t know a movie could spoil the movie to me.

• I’ll add more to this post when I remember more bs this movie endured or forced me to endure, feel free to add to this list in the comments or reposts.

[this-thing-saved-me]

This Show Saved Me - BTVS 7x22

7x22 Chosen

I will never not find it funny that to stream Buffy I have to go to Disney+. Or the fact that the most recent episode I’d watched (whenever that was) was this one. Since I’m pretty sure I left my rewatch mid-season 3.

But that’s the thing about this particular episode. It’s practically a perfect finale. And felt like the right place to start, because who says everything should happen in order. That’s not always how life works. 

THERE WILL LIKELY BE ABUNDANT SPOILERS FOR A FINALE THAT AIRED OVER TWENTY YEARS AGO. There, that was your warning. And now for some Cole's notes “Story so far.”

Okay, so Buffy’s been through it by this point. The First has annihilated her self-confidence and Caleb has been on the warpath. Spike has told her she’s the one (!!!), whether she fully believes in herself yet or not. (SIDENOTE: yes, I ship Spuffy. Yes, there are very, very valid reasons not to. However I am a big fan of redemption arcs and where they land by the end of the comics feels like as healthy a place as possible with a very real love.)

And Angel shows up trying to be all tall-dark and forehead. Which I get, he’s Angel, he needs to be in the finale. But ultimately he's a delivery boy and he didn’t need to do it in person other than to prompt the first on my list of loves for this episode. 

Which is what I lovingly refer to as the "Cookie Speech." Buffy knows she has more growing to do and she’s self-aware enough to share that with the first love of her life. She’s come a long way from the season of post-resurrection depression, but she’s still not quite ready for what Angel might like her to be (granted he’s JUST lost Cordelia so the fact that he is back at Buffy’s door is a rant for another post.) The idea that things aren’t working for her romantically because she’s not done baking. She hasn’t figured out all that she wants to be. While I love love LOVE this analogy, I wonder if there’s ever really a time in our lives where we are done baking? Besides the end of course. We’re supposed to evolve. We’re supposed to grow.

Spike is her Champion, not Angel. They’ve seen the best and the worst of each other, remember? He knows she needs someone strong, someone with a soul, and despite the bad, she knows he’s earned the right to the title through growing and atoning. Motivated people can change, and that’s something I believe that Spike has shown.

“He had to split” - the joke is LHF and I love it. Does its utterance deserve a place on this list? Yes. Because it's very me-coded. I’d have a very hard time not making the same joke if I had just rendered a man from stem to stern. But I digress. This episode is serious and still silly. It’s the epitome of BTVS episodes. I mean Spike waking from a dream yelling “I’m drowning in Cool Whip,” come on. It’s akin to “the cheese wears me” in off kilter nonsense. Plus Anya later finding her strength in her hatred for "floppy, hoppy bunnies" will never not kill me. (Or her, again spoiler.) I adore Emma Caufield.

Willow is afraid to use magic because of her history with the darkness. Not knowing if she’s stable enough. I can identify with her at this moment after clawing back from my own mental health blip a couple years ago. She went dark. (I went, arguably, nuts) She’s regained her balance but how secure? It’s going to turn out to be really secure because “Oh my goddess” she’s got this. AND…

The fact that Kennedy is there for Willow to help keep her grounded. Her very presence supports Willow but isn’t the deciding factor for victory. Willow needs to believe in herself that she won’t go back over that edge. She touched the darkness and it freaked her the f out. (Once she came back down from the overwhelm and shock of her grief.) I lived in that fear for a long time. And I’m grateful for the grounding I’ve found outside of the support of others, but within myself.

Just for fun, let’s chat about the DND session. Even the scoobies needed to disassociate before the big thing. And self-permission to have fun during challenging times is key. It can’t all be doom and gloom. Sometimes you recharge that nervous energy through Trogdor the Burninator references and that’s more than okay.

Ultimately we have the’ shared power’ speech. “Here’s the part where you make a choice” more specifically. Because they could easily choose to let the First and its legions overwhelm the world and finally be the apocalypse they couldn’t handle. It’s easier to stay down. It’s easier to say I can’t. But where does that get you? Making that choice to take your power back and say I am more than what wants to overwhelm me is a beautiful moment. This moment, where all the Potentials get their piece of the power pie is tremendously moving. I get shivers just thinking about it. Male or female, we don’t need the permission of Slayer power to take back our own. To say ‘no more’ and get back up off the ground. (Although Slayer strength would be badass, let’s be real.)

The bottom line, this episode epitomises what I love about Buffy and the Whedon-verse. Real characters in a fantastic world who battle larger than life caricatures of the demons we fight in our daily lives. This show saved me in a lot of ways. My very first boyfriend got me to watch it back in 2005, which he may have regretted as it CONSUMED my brain for most of grade 12. It was the perfect time for me to experience this show. I credit it for helping me find my voice offline. I was always a nose-in-a-book girl or heavily distracted with FanFiction. I was one of the quietest in my friend group, not really feeling like there was a value to what I had to say. The message that we can choose to be strong and fight back? That’s one that I’ll eternally be grateful for and will carry with me, always. What’s your favourite episode? And why is it “Once More With Feeling”? ;)

(Honourable mention goes to this eye contact where my headcanon is convinced he sees she really does love him despite him telling her otherwise seconds before. THOSE SMG EYES! I can't.)

[snootlestheangel]

A Guide to All Things Snootles

Primarily a COD blog but it's just straight brain rot. Lotta reblogs but also some very nifty homemade stuff. I am super friendly, I promise! Feel free to send any kind of ask/dm, I'd love the interaction :D Here's my side blog dedicated to my OG work: @snootlessimperfectworld Snootles-made ask game CEO of the SoapGaz Bromance and GirlDad!Price; President of Sleeptalking!Soap; Advocate for Just A Dude!Ghost Monster AUs; SHould be a case study on how down bad I am for Captain John Price

Shadow Company OCs found under "Snootles's Shadow OCs" Initial Post and Ask Reblog; Ness Dump; Flash Dump; Truck Dump; Woody Dump: Here is Art of Ness and Here is a Comic ft. Ness I FUCKING LOVE THESE ARTISTS

The SoapGaz Bromance Series: 1st Post, 2nd, 3rd

Girl!Dad Price: OG Post; Incorrect Quotes (based on a work, see WIPs further down); Random Thing; Another Girl!Dad thing

Things for To Love, To Let Go: Post One, Some Things, Worldbuilding

Sleeptalking!Soap: The Reblog; The Ask

Gaz Has A Twin SIster: Proof, Further Evidence

Soap is Lightning, change my mind

Random YouTuber AU ft. GazAlex: AO3 Link, OG Post, Next Post, First Drabble;

My WIPs:

Silence is Golden But Consequences are Red ;a SoapGhost fic; alternate universe; angst; slow-burn; features the SoapGaz bromance

Of Earthly Things ; SoapGhost fic, Cryptid!Ghost, Cryptid Hunters 141 AU; Cryptids, monsters, witches, demons: anything you heard fairytales of or anything warned about by the elders are very much real. Very real and very much a part of everyday life.The 141 is a small, private group composed of researchers and other cryptid enthusiasts that specialize in monitoring the inhuman populations around the UK. They offer their knowledge and resources to assist those dealing with issues regarding those that aren’t human. It isn’t uncommon for the 141 to help get rid of a goblin infestation, or relocate a fae circle to one of the designated areas. And life is pretty normal for the small team. At least, it is that way before the new hire. Something about him just doesn’t seem to be quite human…

Guardian of Mercy and Men : A Price x f!OC; Price encounters an old friend of his that he had fallen in love with all those years ago; some angst and fluff as they navigate their feelings for each other when she is assigned to the 141 as a combat medic.

To Love, To Let Go : Self-indulgent fic where, after an apocalyptic event in the US, Price meets a kid named Bailey Gray who has lost everything since The Incident. Together, with the help of Nik and the 141, they learn how to love new and let go of others.

Unending Devotion ; Dad!Price fic; he's a girl dad; NikPrice; Gaz is best big brother; daughter is animal hybrid; some angst, some fluff, and everything in between; about to feature a Graves hero arc

His Wounded Cry ; Wolfshifter!Ghost fic; SoapGhost; technically slow-burn?; Ghost gets a family again; just Ghost being loved like he deserves, okay? Here's the worldbuilding post

Dead City ; Left4Dead AU with Task Force 141 trying to survive the apocalypse. Has SoapGhost, some angst, some fluff, lots of cheesy jokes/references to Left4Dead, and Gaz being the unluckiest mf-er to ever exist

Break For Your Heart ; a GhostSoap Prison Break AU ft. Unhinged!Soap and Is Weird to Cope!Ghost; found under the tag "break for your heart" or "prison break au" or "it's unhinged!soap time"; ao3 link

Cheers to the Unknown ; Monster AU featuring Just A Dude!Ghost; random posts made here; most likely won't be full, coherent story, just ramblings all tagged under "cheers to the unknown" Here is the initial post that started this and here is the follow-up worldbuilding post

Random Short Works

It Means I Love You SoapGhost short; catshifter!Ghost

Artemis to His Apollo Gaz has a twin sister short fic

What Am I? SoapGhost angst short; comfort?

COD Boys Play A Board Game: exactly what it sounds like

Thistle A very painful short fic I did that has MCD but I used it as coping for losing a loved one

Screaming Into The Void A short SoapGhost angst fic set in an apocalyptic world

[redux-iterum]

Do you have any advice to help or prevent writer's block? I have a terrible habit of starting but never completing what I write. Also really excited for the Charred Legacy!

Hello and thank you! My advice splits into two categories of writer's block, which I'll call here Classic Block and Progression Block. Classic Block refers to the block people usually mean, especially when drawing: that you can barely write three sentences before erasing it all because it's awful and you hate it, leading you to sit around stewing in frustration that your skill level is so low. Progression Block, meanwhile, is the block where the actual work of writing something to completion is a Herculean task, even if you don't hate your writing style. The distinction DOES matter, as you’ll see.

To start off, Classic Block sources from your standards of writing not matching what you perceive to be your level of ability. Maybe you used to like how you write, but now all you see is the flaws. Your skills have leveled out or lowered instead of steadily increasing in quality – at least, that’s how it feels. This leads to you not writing at all, or only getting a bit done and then abandoning it because it sucks and what’s even the point and you’ll never make anything good anyway and so on. It’s the same thing as artist’s block, just with typing.

This brand of block has similar advice in every medium of art that it appears in, which is “study and practice”. The only way to get better is to examine where your faults are at and work to fix them. If you find how you write dialog unnatural, for example, you take a look at books or scripts you enjoy the dialog of and pay close attention to how the characters talk, or you find as many advice posts on the web as possible about how to create natural-sounding conversations, or even just listen in to people chatting in the real world. Like an artist studies anatomy and feels more confident about their improving work, a writer studies all the advice they can get and applies it to their story, and continues writing for practice until they get somewhere they’re okay with. It may not be as easy as artist’s block to conquer, depending on who you are, but it is doable.

Progression Block is a different beast, and I’ve certainly felt it before on my comics and writing. This is when you’re at the beginning or starting the middle of your project and you find yourself unable to continue on to the end. Maybe you’ve lost the adrenaline that the start gave you; maybe the prospect of a long-term story is too daunting; maybe you ran out of ideas or passion; maybe you don’t like the start now and you want to rewrite it before you continue; maybe (and this is the most common one) you’ve found yourself at a part of the story you’re not that excited about and it’s difficult to get through it. Whatever the case is, you’re good at starting ideas, just not finishing them. This is extremely common, so don’t feel bad about it. I can’t count how many webcomics or fics I’ve seen left to rot after about a month of work on them. I’ve done it myself, multiple times! We’re all at risk of it.

The biggest thing to address here is that, sadly, writing is not always going to be exciting. That’s just a fact. You are not going to be riding a high the entire process. You WILL get to something that feels more like homework than fun. This is a guarantee for every single project that goes on longer than a couple pages, and sometimes even the short stuff isn’t safe. This is not a horrible thing, it’s just something you need to develop methods to overcome. Discipline is important if you want to take writing seriously. There are ways to get through this: dinner-before-desert (the promise of “I have to write this dull chapter and I’ll get to write the scene I’m really excited about”), setting small goals to get the unfun part done a bit at a time (writing 200 words a day, or a couple paragraphs, etc), finding things to appreciate (like that joke you threw in or how pretty this scenery is), and having something occupying the senses to keep flow going (listening to music, mainly) are all tools I use myself to get past potentially weeks of writing that I’m not excited about. You do need to be a little stern with yourself, but the reward of getting to the thing you’ve been dreaming of since the start is completely worth it, I can promise that. You just gotta eat your dinner first, and then we’ll get you some ice cream. One carrot at a time. You can do this.

Something that can get to people is the prospect of being “stuck” with something for months or potentially years. The size of a project can be intimidating, I understand that. You’re doing this particular thing for god knows how long, and you have to do it on a regular basis if you ever want to get anywhere with it? That’s a little scary! I get it! But that does not mean you won’t have fun, or won’t ever be finished. It took me six years to complete a comic you can read through in one day, I’ve started one I know will take me at least ten, and Iterum itself is going to be a long fucking ride I don’t dare to guess the length of. I have had the occasional sensation of leaning on a table, bracing myself on my arms, staring down at a drink and thinking “Jesus Chirst” about how long all this shit will take me.

With that issue, I’ve personally found that taking joy in the process is the best solution. “Well, I do love writing these particular characters, I’m excited to see how they’ll grow over time!” “Planning chapters is a very chill way to spend my evenings while still giving me something to think about.” “It’s so exciting to have all these secret plot developments no one but me knows yet!” And so on. Like in life, you should appreciate the Now, not constantly be fretting about Later or Before. Learn to love typing out dialog and prose! It’s doable.

Of course, you should have a few thoughts about the future. That’s where planning comes in. Some people can make up shit on the fly and write a complete, excellent novel. I am not one of those people, and not many are. Some architecture is generally necessary. When I don’t have a set general path ahead of time for me to take as I write, I give up on things because I don’t know where to go next. Create your path, however vague or exact it needs to be! My advice on planning is to start with only the most major of story beats, arrange them in the order you want or need them to happen, and add smaller connecting lines to them, then connecting even smaller lines to those lines, slowly getting more and more specific and detailed as you zoom in on the story beat-by-beat.

Another thing that might help you keep at it is finding an audience – at least, it worked for me. When I started writing for real, I was doing choose-your-own-adventure threads in forums, and then a choose-your-own-adventure webcomic, where people got to send in commands to move the story forward. I could not get anything completed on my own to save my life, but having people participating and actively waiting for me to continue the story helped me develop the discipline and work ethic required to do the projects I’m doing now (and taught me how to improvise extremely well, as a side benefit). Your audience could be one person, or ten, or a hundred. Even if they don’t comment or regularly engage with the story, just knowing that someone is there waiting to see what happens next can be a good motivator.

One final thing: you may fall into the trap many do of looking at the small bit of stuff you’ve completed, not liking it, and wanting to go back and rewrite it, because this time you’ve got the skills to do it right.

DO NOT FUCKING DO THAT.

All that’s going to do is trap you in an endless cycle of “improving” what’s already there at best, and wear you out from going over the same old ground over and over and drain your love for the story at worst. You will not be fixing anything. Put it out and move on. Don’t keep trying to rescrub the same plate until you put a hole through it. You’re going to look back and think it’s shit. That’s normal. Doesn’t mean it’s true, or that you should waste time “fixing” it. Learn to go “well, I don’t like it, but I gotta keep going”. Get it done. It will never be perfect, and the sooner you understand that, the sooner you can get this project done.

That’s about all the advice I can think of for now. I hope this prattling helped you, at least a little bit!

[lackadaisy-headcanon-supply-unit]

✨The Moonshiners’ Menu✨

So it looks like you have found our blog (or at the very least this post, drifting along the deep blue river of Tumblr). Welcome!

If you have a thing for beautifully drawn and dapperly dressed fictional feline criminals from the 1920s (be that “thing” a platonic fondness or romantic attraction... or even an eldritch cactus), you’ve come to the perfect place! Step right up and quench your thirst with our following selection:

Oneshot On The Rocks:

Rich and full-bodied with a deep, soulful amber shine. The serving size may only equal a single chapter, but in exchange for the lack of wordiness it is sufficiently potent. Soft or bold, tragic or harsh, sweet or (for the more daring) spicy - all those nuances will be tailored to the requester.

(Translated into common tongue: we do fluff, angst, crack, anything in-between, but no smut. Dirty jokes or suggestive references, sure, but actual erotica's off the table. Please pick another tavern to indulge your unorthodox desires of that sort.)

Headcanon Home-Brew: 

Clear, undiluted character; an essence of the purest kind. Bullet-pointed brews based in our very own interpretations of the cast, personally prepared for pretty much any theme under the sun so long as it ties back to a relationship with the reader in one way or another.

(Oh yeah, right, I forgot to add. Any relationship type goes! Lovers, friends, siblingly bonds, adoption, whatever the heck. Not everyone wants to smooch the kitties, and that is more than alright. We serve whatever sort of affection is needed.)

Scenario Cider: 

A ripe golden concoction blooming with the smooth taste of apple orchards. Fragrant and foamy, it has a delectable tease of plot... or semblances thereof; it is not fully a Oneshot, not a Headcanon cocktail either, but something to satisfy tastes in-between that blends the strongest points of both.

(We retain the right to refuse service, a.k.a not do a request, if we are not comfortable with it for whatever reason. We shall likely expand on these rules in the future if more disclaimer-worthy details emerge.)

Absinthe Imagine: 

A herbaceous chartreuse refreshment dripping with indulgent abandon. Mostly it can be described as an idea, a thesis, a feeling poured into crystal-polished words and gently whispered over the counter like a wistful secret. May remind a bit of Headcanons, as they're similarly concentrated, but more loose and situation-like.

(Oh, and one more thing; we write at our own pace and have some rather busy lives outside of this lovely hellsite, so please be patient with us! We're doing our best! As well, true quality doesn't exactly develop quick, heh.)

Which is all very fine and well, but, a reader insert isn’t quite a reader insert without the characters themselves! At the moment we are able to provide the following “flavors” from Lackadaisy’s cast of beloved kitties:

🔥 Roark "Rocky" Rickaby 🔥

⚾ Calvin “Freckle” McMurray ⚾

🎶 Ivy Pepper 🎶

⚒️ Viktor Vasko ⚒️

🍷 Mitzi May 🍷

🎷 Dorian “Zib” Zibowski 🎷

✒️ Mordecai Heller ✒️

🔮 Serafine Savoy 🔮

🐊 Nicodeme "Nico" Savoy 🐊

💎 Sedgewick Sable 💎

(Regarding rarer flavors (side characters from the comics not included here), most we can offer is a couple drops (some headcanons or maybe short scenarios/imagines), but don't let that stop you from ordering whatever your little heart desires! Just don't expect it to be particularly lengthy.)

Requests Open!

[fototingobug]

presenting the love of my life , Kifah Suleiman . Warning : hella yap .

I said if I got 5 likes on the original post I made for them that I would make a mini lore dump and I got 6 so 👍

Kifah is 30 during X-men 97 . Their codename is viper .

Kifah’s mutant abilities include hyper-agility , improved stealth , and the psychic ability to trap another mind in a dimension of their own making if their hands make contact with the other person’s head . Both of them will go limp during this time , as they are no longer in that plane of existence . Their physical bodies remain unharmed , and Kifah can’t hold someone there for longer than 30 minutes in the real world , but considering they can do anything to shatter the minds of whoever made the unfortunate decision of being on the opposite side as them , it could feel like years . Kifah prefers close-range combat because of their hands , but does occasionally fight with a bowstaff .

They were born to a Syrian mother and an Afro-Syrian mutant father . Kifah was born looking the way they did but did not develop their psychic abilities until they were 12 .

Kifah is intersex and identifies as agender , but does refer to themselves as transfeminine or transgender at times and identifies with the label to some extent . Their pronouns are they/she .

Kifah’s mother was unaware that she carried the X-Gene , and she was also unaware that her husband was a mutant . Her husband himself was in such denial he genuinely didnt believe he was either . His mutant ability was to speed up the photosynthesis process in plants .

TW BRIEF CHILD ABUSE AND CSA MENTION UNDER THE CUT . NOT GRAPHIC .

Kifah’s father left when she was 5 due to not wanting a mutant child . Her mother turned to neglecting them , and instead pouring all her time out into their younger brother .

Kifah’s mother eventually married another man who abused Kifah in multiple ways including physically and sexually . This eventually lead to Kifah scratching their stepfather on the face , causing him to go blind in his right eye .

abuse mentions over 🖤

Kifah’s stepfather twisted the story and made Kifah out to be an uncontrollable mutant who needed to be put down . Kifah’s mother unreluctantly sent them to live in a Christian orphanage , before they were declared too much trouble and were sent to an orphanage and boarding school in the United States where they met their best friend Molimo ( my friend’s oc , unfortunately he isn’t a tumblr user but here’s doodles of them I’ve done )

Much like them , molimo couldn’t hide being a mutant , and they bonded over that . I don’t have my friends permission to talk much about their oc right now , but if I get it I’ll update . To make a long story short , the orphanage burned down due to anti-mutant rioters , and Kifah was ‘ killed ‘ in the fire . Molimo found forge , and Kifah , was found by Fabian Cortez . Fabian saw potential in Kifah’s reality-warping and time-bending powers , and so he manipulated them into feeling as though they were in a safe position .

im getting tired of writing so to make another long story short , Kifah leaves what would become the acolytes at 16 , briefly joins the brotherhood , quits and keeps a low profile for the next 4 years , before rejoining the brotherhood and losing their horn on asteroid M during the magneto protocols . She goes on a villain arc due to this as her horns are incredibly important to her , before joining briefly with the X-men and reuniting with Molimo . After this they become more of their own character and aren’t really a part of any particular organization , school , or group , and instead makes radical statements of anti-government and anti-mutant hate groups through extremist acts of art and protest , as well as some physical assaults on government officials and police .

they were originally made for the comics but after watching 97 I think I’m obligated to make them work for 97 as well . It may change a bit to accommodate for how she lost her horn since asteroid M and the magneto protocols take place when they would be 30 , so maybe they lost it somehow else .

tldr I love Kifah and they deserve the world .

[datusaguy]

All TMNT Shredder’s Revenge Color References - Casey Jones

Other character posts are linked at the bottom of this post.

Been playing Shredder’s Revenge recently due to the new dlc and since I haven’t seen much discussion in terms of references the new dlc, I decided to look into a lot of it myself. Feel free to give me any additional info/corrections you might know and I hope you enjoy checking this out.

# 1 - Default 87 (Wish this guy appeared in more than 5/193 episodes)

# 2 - 1989 Playmates Toys Action Figure - It doesn’t have as much green on the actual toy, but stuff like the green equipment definitely makes it seem correct.

# 3 - 1990’s movie(s) - Likely based on the first movie

# 4 - 2003 Show - This does also resemble the 2007 movie design since the coloring is quite similar. Since a lot of other characters reserve this spot for 03 though, I’m putting that.

# 5 - 2012 Show - This is where it’s harder to tell what the Casey is based on, but a lot of characters do put their 2012 design right after 2003 from what I can tell. As to the actual design itself, while it doesn’t quite capture the face paint nor spray paint looks, the mostly gray, black and white design (that isn’t “black-and-white” like Mirage) does look similar to the 2012 design.

# 6 - Rise of the TMNT (Foot Recruit) - I don’t think any of the colors are based on the Casey from the Rise movie, but this does have a similar color scheme to Cassandra. Plus it’s where a Rise alt for the turtles and Splinter went.

# 7 - Tournament Fighters Genesis

# 8 - Colored Mirage Design? - I both found a picture of Casey from a colored Mirage comic and 2 toys (including the one below) which all seem to be based on the Mirage Casey. Alternatively, it seems like he wore a close costume in the Batman crossover comics. I’m not exactly sure where else he uses the design though and I am struggling to find more images of that colored Mirage comic using the same color scheme, but it seems like the closest I’ve found so far. Also worth noting that the toy has more so tan-ish accessories rather than white.

# 9 - Original Mirage Comics

# 10 - NES - I doubt it’s specifically a reference to the NES Tournament Fighters, but it does look close and probably is the most likely NES game that’s specifically referenced (besides maybe Usagi who I need to look into more as of making this post).

# 11 - Gameboy - I don’t believe Casey was in any actual Gameboy games, but the pallet is definitely Gameboy inspired.

All other Color References posts:

1. Karai

2. Leonardo

3. Michelangelo

4. Raphael

5. Donatello

6. April O’Neil

7. Master Splinter

8. Casey Jones

9. Usagi

[babbybones]

some real-world dates associated with UTDR characters

not all of these are my idea! I just thought it’d be nice to compile all of them in one post. for Liability Reasons, I will not refer to these as birthdays; I’ve learned my lesson since the Font Birthday Incident. they're simply fun ideas for “character days” to celebrate, if you wish!

Undertale

W.D. Gaster - Wingdings released with Windows 3.1 - April 6, 1992

Toriel - Undertale demo first released to the public - May 23, 2013

Sans - Comic Sans released with Microsoft Plus! for Windows 95 - August 24, 1995

Undyne - Undyne first revealed to the public by name - September 13, 2015

Papyrus - Several options.

• First public release of the Papyrus font in “late January 1984,” which happens to coincide with National Puzzle Day - January (29), 1984 (this one's cute) • Date on Chris Costello’s final design sketch for the Papyrus font - May 6, 1983 • First time Papyrus was released as a digital font with Office 97 - November 19, 1996

Deltarune

as you can see, these ones are all Cyber World characters... it's much easier to find dates associated with modern tech, but if you have any ideas for Card Kingdom/Lightner characters, feel free to make a suggestion.

Maus - First modern computer to use a mouse released - March 1, 1973

Spamton & Addisons - First spam email sent (and first documented example of online advertising) - May 3, 1978

Sweet Cap’n Cakes - Strong Bad Email #72 (featuring Sweet Cuppin’ Cakes) released - May 5, 2003

Virovirokun - ILOVEYOU virus - May 5, 2000 (alternatively, Happy99 virus - January 20, 1999)

Plugboy - Modern American plug-and-socket design patented - June 17, 1913

Poppup - Japanese release of Fin Fin on Teo the Magic Planet* - June 28, 1996

Ambyu-Lance - McAfee Associates founded** - August 14, 1987

Queen - iMac G3 release date*** - August 15, 1998

Tasque Manager - Task Manager first introduced to Windows - August 24, 1996

Swatch & Swatchlings - MS Paint release, as proposed here - November 20, 1985

*you have to celebrate fin fin’s birthday too. **finding the “date the first antivirus was created” is basically impossible ***queen isn’t officially based on this computer; I just think it’s a cute idea­­­­­­­­­­­­

[saltylemonade13]

Edit: I am afraid that I may have spread some misinformation, and a lot of the information in this post is technically wrong now. So please PLEASE check the comments! someone left a link to a post on twitter explaining how Hobie’s age is up to opinion, and I think everyone should look at that first. I will still be keeping this post up to to provide a link to the interview if you want to watch it yourself, and I also want to see what other peoples opinions are on the subject! (Please keep it friendly) However, if you are curious to read the psa, go ahead, but keep in mind that it isn’t exactly accurate anymore.

———————————————————————

PSA FOR PUNKFLOWER FANS

WILL CONTAIN SPOILERS FOR SPIDER-MAN: ACROSS THE SPIDER- VERSE

———————————————————————

Yall I think we messed up. Hobie could be an adult and we all were wrong about him being 16. My evidence comes from an interview with co-director Kemp Powers. In the interview we get a short mention on Hobie Brown, and that includes his age. [Timestamp: 1:02:21]

And the quote is as following: “… We need to make that character look like a dork. And the character that makes that character look like a dork is Spider Punk. Y’know he’s- he’s nineteen- twenty, six foot three inches tall real thin…”

As far as I am aware this is the best conformation of his age that I have found. HOWEVER this could possibly be referring to the comic version of Hobie, and how the directors found him and all of COMIC Hobie’s details, as we know that in the comics- he’s an adult. But its important to not this because, on every other site I check- they say he’s around 16, and maybe a little older than Gwen. But I’m hesitant because all of those sites have little to no confirmation, and aren’t a stable source of evidence.

ALSO if Hobie really is 19-20 that makes the whole “love triangle” thing with Gwen REALLY weird. I’ve seen a lot of people say that the love triangle was a joke and wasn’t a serious plot point, but again, the interview says other wise.

“ …but wonderfully as we were working on the film he became integral to the plot. And I think that’s-that’s really whats key. ‘Cause it starts with like- well this is kind of a cool character this idea of you know Mile’s starting to have feelings for Gwen and being uncertain about this other boy so punk like immediately filled in that slot. ” [Time stamp: 1:01:40]He then goes on to talk about how over time punk’s character develops more past that and blah blah blah.

The genuine idea of Mile’s being jealous about Hobie and Gwen seems weird to me if Hobie really is an adult, but that fact that he is mentioned to be 19-20 scares me. Powers never mentioned if he was talking about comic or movie Hobie or if they even are different, but it’s very possible Hobie is an adult in the movie.

I could definitely be looking into it WAY to much and if thats true I apologize, but for all my Punk-flower fans out there, maybe it’s best if we hold off on the ship until someone gives out an official age? Or we should at least be careful. I am aware that some of my information and opinions here aren’t clear and I am so sorry for that. And I am also aware that most sites say that Hobie is around 16 but unless we can confirm that, better safe than sorry y’know?

This does not mean any punk flower enjoyers are now like pr0shipers or something- especially because we don’t really know much, and I don’t intend to make anyone feel bad, I only intend to inform everyone on how punk-flower could very possibly be an accidental pr0ship- and if it is we should take it down as quickly as possible. BUT TAKE EVERYTHING I SAY WITH A GRAIN OF SALT.

Have a nice day, and I love you all 🫶

[darklydeliciousdesires]

DRABBLE/SHORTS REQUESTS!

All with be either straight smutty, hinting at smut, comic, angst or fluff (I will write dark, too, but only at your specific request so if you want this, please mention upon asking!) Each piece will run at either 100 words for a drabble, or more if I turn it into a short. The guys I write for are as follows - 

John Shelby

Luca Changretta

Tommy Shelby

Arthur Shelby

Alfie Solomons

Sean Wallace

Adrien Brody

Choose one man from the above, and one prompt below!

1. “I know it’s too much, but I’m not going to stop.”

2. “I just found your underwear in my pocket.”

3. “Stop being a tease, or I’ll take you to the nearest darkened corner and fuck you so hard, you won’t be able to walk.”

4. “Don’t play games with me, sweetheart. You won’t like it when I play them back.”

5.  “Your legs look amazing, but they’d look even better wrapped around me.”

6. “Yeah, I do love you. I’m going to fuck like I don’t, though.”

7.  “Oh my god, I don’t think I’ve ever come so hard!”

8.  “I want to see those pretty lips wrapped around my cock.”

9. “Have you ever come so hard, you’ve cried? I could make that happen for you.”

10. “A life where I don’t wake up next to you every morning isn’t a life worth living.”

OR, I will be taking requests for three word drabbles of your choice, if you don’t want to choose a prompt! This is a new little feature I’m rolling out, so yeah. same guys as above, please. Let’s see what you lovely people come up with!

Now, click on the below to read the rules of the drabble requests prior to sending one please!

RULES!

You must not ask on anon, or your request will not be honoured.

You must engage with a comment and reblog, or you’ll be blacklisted from drabble requests!

If I begin getting too many similar requests, they’ll be staggered and stay in my inbox for a while, so don’t panic that I’ve forgotten you! Please just send an ask and don’t reply on this post, then I can keep everything managed in one place. 

I’m looking forward to seeing who choose who and with what prompt! 

If you need to find this post in the future for reference, just search the hashtag ddd drabble requests and you should find it.