#and i super love that my MOST liked post is a text post

[the-bitter-ocean]

2 for the isat ask meme!

(Act 3/ Act 4 Spoilers) Thank you for the ask @beneathsilverstars ! I’ll be saying my response under the cut:

2- favorite npc?

Okay aside from the main cast (Loop, Mirabelle, Isabeau, Bonnie and Odile) I’d have to say my favorite npc would have to be Euphrasie!

I adore her design and I just grown to really appreciate her/ writing her in general when applying the theory/ hc I had that she’s from the island like Loop, Siffrin and the King are. I’ve talked about that theory in depth in the official ISAT discord server, as well as here on tumblr. You can find a huge summary of that theory/ hc I initially came up with compiled by my good friend @felikatze who wrote a master post analysis on it here. My personal ramblings and theories about her can be found here and here.

From what little we get to see of her I just think she’s neat! A very fun and sweet character! I personally enjoy both writing her and drawing fanart for her. I’m a sucker for the characters who adores are kind and lighthearted/silly but still willing to do what it takes to protect the people they care about! Euphrasie is cool and it makes me sad when people say she isn’t really a character bc that’s wrong imo! Idk man even if we aren’t given a lot in the game itself, I think Euphrasie is in a similar category with characters like Petronille (Bonnie’s sister) or Claude ( Mirabelle’s roommate) we can clearly see glimpses of what they’re like based on how others describe them and flavor text/ interacting with objects in game etc. Like in canon Euphrasie has: 1) helped guide Mirabelle and many other people in the house of change 2) was one of the few people who knows about wish craft/ did her own research on it to help stop the king and 3) literally gave her own powers/ blessing of being immune to the King’s time freeze to Mirabelle so that she could escape being frozen at the cost of her own safety. Hell even when the world seemed to be ending and Siffrin shoved her away when he went super fucking huge kaiju star mode, she seemed to be fairly lax on the whole situation. Holy shit. Nerves of steel. What a gal. I love her vibes.

I know most people think nothing of her because she doesn’t get to talk or do much, but I find her role fascinating in the context of the game especially knowing that in the loops Euphrasie is aware that the world is breaking apart or that she’s forced to repeat/ say things like a broken record against her wishes. If you don’t understand what I mean by that you should check out the ISAT script project website which can be found on the tumblr blog @isat-script-project

TLDR- I like euphrasie a lot and I like when people in aus or fanfic and fanart expand on her other npcs characters in depth in general. It’s very cool and awesome >:)!!

[toadallytickles]

Made it home safely from another successful tickle gathering~!🪶 This weekend was SO MUCH FUN, I felt like I deepened a lot of connections I’ve made previously, had a really good heart-to-heart with a good friend, and felt some parts of myself heal. I heard some things I really needed to hear. I already know drop is gonna suck..

Anyway.. need someone local to quench my constant tickle thirst.. tickle gatherings are too far apart..! 😩💦

[astranauticus]

Do mechanites cry?

[burning--heart]

The Grinning Man is Not a Horror Show

this post brought to you by: my own personal experience trying to show this musical to people (which i have already talked about briefly) and also this post by castledock:

the mainstream media’s perception of LHQR is almost always “well I haven’t watched or read it but this guy looks scary so it must be a very disturbing and scary book/movie” and every time I go outside of my little circle of LHQR Appreciators it’s like being slapped in the face by Ableism

i’m spinning this off into my own post because the essay got Long and also it’s definitely about tgm and not lhqr. strap in y’all.

like, ok. you see the pictures online. the protagonist has a bloody bandage on his face, the lighting is moody, and the puppets are creepy i guess (but they are so charming once you see them in motion)…

i’ll be focusing on flesh-and-blood adult grinpayne and his face. does it cause him a lot of grief? yes. is it central to the show? absolutely. but are you meant to be scared or disturbed by it? no. if you were, then yeah. this would be a horror show, and a bitingly ableist one at that. but it’s not.

there is one single moment where we are made to see grinpayne’s face as horrifying, and even then it's... well. it’s not about his smile being grotesque. not really.

it happens when his frustration at being kept as a spectacle because of his face reaches a tipping point. he bites back. "i'm the stuff of your nightmares," he says, "i am the freak show! watch me smile!" it's not an empowering moment. he is gutting himself for his audience.

He removes his bandages and reveals his jaw - a huge nightmarish bloody grin. Horribly unhealed. Red. Raw. Glistening. It's there, and then it's gone. “Laughter" riff crashes in and the world tilts.

Above is the stage direction from the script. Note that the “Laughter” motif is identified by name.

We can see how this was executed onstage in Bristol: The reveal is accompanied by sickly green strobe light, Louis Maskell as Grinpayne snaps his head to the side, there's a brief blackout, we are jumpscared by a giant grinpayne puppet head in the same green strobe, blackout again, then it’s on to the characters' reactions.

It sounds horror on paper. it looks very horror in Bristol. and yet the characters react as though they've just seen heaven. what's up with that?

here lies one of the biggest challenges the grinning man has: its empathetic theme gets easily muddied by the reactions the other characters have to grinpayne. generally, when experiencing a story, we look to the characters within it for cues on how we should feel about its topics, and they guide us through it. this is especially true of media aimed at children. the grinning man is... not like that. the royals and the people of the fair see his face and they are instantly enlightened! with sudden clarity, you're him, and he is you!

the audience doesn’t get it. 

but i don't think we're supposed to.

Song lyrics like ‘you realise that you are him and he is you’ explain to us Grinpayne’s effect on his audiences, but we are never shown that experience nor are we invited to feel that experience ourselves. (Brendan Macdonald, Exeunt)

this reviewer was close, very close, but has jumped to conclusions and ended up shutting the door on the idea that makes the musical make sense. its true that we are told how the other characters see grinpayne, and we don't get to experience that for ourselves. but the thing is, while we are told one thing, we are actually being shown something entirely different.

characters in his audience look at grinpayne and we are told they have an earth-shattering revelation. we hear them explain it multiple times. despite this, their reaction is not what we feel. this is the part that's unintuitive.

here’s where we circle back to the face reveal. the dramatic imagery clashes with what the fictional audience is seeing and feeling. this is because we, the non-fictional audience, are not supposed to be putting ourselves in their shoes at all. the character we’re anchored to is grinpayne. and to him, this is not a triumph of self-discovery. the horror isn’t in his appearance, it’s in how people treat him because of it.

and when it comes to the characters’ revelations, it’s not really about grinpayne anyway. it’s about themselves and what they project onto him, whatever that is. grinpayne is a symbol to almost everyone, whether they see him as a gruesome face, a lord, or a god. they don't understand him when they look at his face.

the audience of the grinning man, unlike the characters within it, are provided the opportunity to connect with grinpayne on a deeper level. we get to dive into his head like nobody else. this is why “Labyrinth” is a big deal (this is also why them changing over half the lyrics to this song at the transfer is a big deal). this is why dea’s love for him is a big deal: she sees him for who he is, and has from the start.

we also get to see the “real” grinpayne (and even love him for who he is), but unlike the characters’ sudden (and shallow) enlightenment, our understanding of grinpayne is gradual, but truer because of it. it builds slowly and perhaps unnoticed throughout the show until you’re fully immersed; it’s something that you feel, not think. though, if i had to pick a moment, personally, it would be “when they are gazing at my grin / what is it that they see within?” from “Labyrinth” because that line knocks me on my ass to this day.

and. surprise! this deeper understanding is also why i think this show is a musical and not a straight play. nothing has the emotional capacity that music does. we aren’t just told the way grinpayne feels; his songs allow us to feel with him in a way that spoken word never could. that’s how we connect.

at the end of the day, this guy still has a bloody face. and some people are going to see this and assume that tgm is horror. but hopefully if they watched it they’d change their minds, because the grinning man shows us the most (and only truly) disturbing thing about grinpayne’s injury is the cruelty and misunderstanding he faces at the hands of a miserable world where “laughter is the best medicine.” and “I Am the Freak Show” may contain the moment with the strongest “horror” visuals in the show, at least in the original production, but it’s actually a crucial example of why tgm itself is not a horror show itself.

[synthaphone]

‘ohh this animal isnt really cool or interesting, because people have heard of it’ well sorry you cant appreciate both popular and unpopular animals but im different

[impostorsshow]

I'm thinking about my 7 year old oc again

My "little" rant is below the read more so I don't clog up your feed and there's descriptions for the art with a bit more information in the alt text thingy. I add alt text with personal comments to most of my posts but I saw a post somewhere saying most people don't even realize the feature exists, so I'm just. I'm stating it here it exists I use it

While Jessica was experimented on by an entire institute, there was one main person overseeing the experiment, and that was the guy up there. The original experiment was to see what happened when you combined animal DNA with human DNA, since in this fake world genetic science is a bit farther than ours today, and this particular facility had successfully given animals different attributes, such as a rat gills and and chicken a tail like that of a cat. Despite both those creatures dying within hours, this corrupt motherfucker decided to try and get a human subject, and Jessica's family needed the money. Thankfully, not only did the test of giving her dog dna [idfk I'm a cat person give me a break on the breeds] worked, it turned out she was much harder to kill, and had not grown as expected from a 14 year old girl who's going through puberty and in turn growth spurts.

Anyway yada yada she broke out find out she's immortal whatever. Other notes :

She has a brother. I forgot his name but he did have a name, and was later submitted to the facility before her family found out she was missing at the age of 19 and survived, but he gained a compromised immune system and I might give him mobility aids. His color scheme is mainly green and yellow and I always think of those aesthetic pictures of the shoreline when I think of him. Jessica meeting her brother [now technically 23] is a very big help to her recovery, and while her brother is accepted and loved in their home town, Jessica can't bring herself to come back and usually asks him to visit her on the edge of town or at her house, usually bringing along friends. Eventually the main scientist dies by her hands and she covers it up ["cmon gromit, we have to hide the body! There's not cheese and crackers in hell, gromit!" /ref], and a few years later the facility is shut down due to malpractice and Jessica slowly starts to actually visit the town and her parents. They never have the same relationship they used to, but her parents are just happy she's safe and sound and being taken care of.

Jessica will eventually outlive Flora and inherit her belongings, as Flora lived alone her entire life, her photography career and later Jessica being more than enough to make her happy. Jess would start managing her social media when she got older, and never had the heart to delete anything, inviting her distant family to the funeral and arranging for her to be buried in the woods near her home. She's still visibly 14, and would simply live later with her brother in Floras old home and take care of it the best she could. Her story is about moving forward, and as such, you could say she has an infinite epilogue, rather than my other ocs who never get an ending, and the ones that do are frozen at the very end of it, not meant to go any further.

Jessica isnt meant to be aroace, but I heavily imply it because her never aging causes complications, and this isn't really a vampire example. She and her brother are the only one of their kind, and her brother is still destined to fall at some point, aging slowed dramatically rather than completely stopped. I used to consider giving her a love interest for hours on end, but eventually her being 14 would interrupt it and I just gave up. Flora however, is aroace, sex adverse and is the reason she chose the lifestyle she did.

Speaking of Flora, dispite living in the middle of nowhere in the woods, she's quite the extrovert. She loves nature, and used to be a wildlife ranger before her photography career took off, and often travels around the world to capture wildlife. When she found Jessica and found out she had run away from home, and didn't ask any questions after until they had more trust built up between them, simply providing shelter and care that eventually became a permanent roommate situation. She slowly worked up to taking jobs around the world again, but now that Flora had someone to come back home to, she booked her flights to make sure she could be home as much as possible. I think if Jessica was a normal girl and somehow found her way to Flora, they would spend weeks in Paris and Britain together, Flora never leaving Jessica behind on her trips. Unfortunately, werewolf science experiments would never get past TSA.

I don't know if I've ever said this but hey I'll say it again she used to have actual wolf dna, hence werewolf, hence Jessica Winterwolf, but I learned to draw wolf ears from gacha life and I genuinely didn't know what to do about it and couldn't think of another way of drawing them without them looking like cat ears, so I just made them floppy like a pug. Also Winterwolf is because winter is Jessica's favorite season.

Similarly with Jessica's ears originally being gacha life, I actually conceptualized her fully for the first time with a designed I liked in there, and one of the bits that stuck was the fact that she has crescent shaped pupils that are a lavender shade.

Her existence was heavily inspired by a series named "Harrowed Past" which has now been taken down by the creator, but the characters still live on, you can probably find it if you search up "pip and twitch thedragonhat" which I think is who made it?? Oh well I'll edit the post later if I'm wrong. Twitch was actually the first piece of art/fanart I ever made with the purpose of getting better at art, and I really wish i still had it, but I can't even find a picture i took of it or anything. Unfortunately, the character is really hard to find since his name is shared with the giant streaming site Twitch. I haven't watched the guys stuff in a long while but I think he uses twitch as his main vtuber for streaming nowadays which is cool.

[alamari-chibi]

@pocket-size-cthulhu

I'm making a separate post bc I kind of sent myself down a rabbit hole. I wanna clarify that I am a Big Hozier Fan and that most country music is a different lyrical ballpark entirely bc of the nature of the genre. (If I had to describe it I'd say it's more literal and storytelling than the whole, like, in-the-woods poetry thing hozier's got going on.)

Anyway I tried to find some that have the same kind of poetry to them or at least aren't about dirt roads and, like, alcoholism. (this is very hard to do there are so many songs about drowning your sorrows in alcohol. I think maybe that's a bad thing but what do I know about songwriting)

Zach Bryan - Something in the Orange

Ryan Bingham - Wolves

Deana Carter - Strawberry Wine

Chris Stapleton - Tennessee Whiskey

Brooks and Dunn - Neon Moon

Uncle Lucius - Keep The Wolves Away

Juice Newton - Angel of the Morning

Johnny Cash - God's Gonna Cut You Down

The Band Perry - All Your Life

Lee Ann Womack - I Hope You Dance

Josh Turner - Would You Go With Me

I also have a few that I think just have generally clever lyrics that you probably won't enjoy very much if you don't like country music:

Rodney Atkins - If You're Going Through Hell

Sugarland - It Happens

Jessica Andrews - Who I Am

Billy Currington - People are crazy

Blake Shelton - Honeybee

Tim McGraw - Just to See You Smile

[flame-shadow]

re: your tags SHOW ME JEROME PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE booflies are my favorite non-boss enemy in the entire game i love them so so much. I'm making a cowboy bug oc that's a boofly wrangler soon. I must gaze upon this boofly oc.

You're in luck, for I have not one, but TWO boofly OCs! Pictured here with some of my other characters too. Zip is the smaller purple one, and Jerome is the large one with the scarf.

First up is Jerome, most beloved. One of my oldest HK OCs and best friends with Cyra the wasp who will stab and kill anyone who tries to harm her buddy. Jerome is a soothing presence, slow to intense emotion and very thoughtful. He's a little odd for a boofly because he's as much a person as any bipedal bug, but without the means to communicate with those bugs, he is not often recognized as such. With Cyra's help, he developed a special form of communication that's a mixture of body language (limb gestures, wing positions, tail angle, head tilt) and sounds (humming, rumbling, tapping, thumping) so that he could communicate with her, and she could translate to other bugs. A way to make new friends!! He loves friends!! He will convert Cyra to the way of friends eventually, too, but he has to be patient and persistent, which he's good at.

[more about how cyra and jerome met and bonded can be found in this post]

And now onto Zip! He is such a weird boofly! He's very energetic and speedy! ...well, speedy for a boofly. He won't win any races against a dragonfly, but that's alright. Once he gains some momentum, he becomes rather like an errant rubber ball, bouncing off rocks and walls and other bugs if he can't stop or turn in time. He's fine, though! It's all play for him. Fearless to the point of ignorant endangerment, he will go where no boofly has gone before! And probably get stuck, because it's hard to explore small cracks as a big, round bug. He sometimes needs help getting free, something Jerome recruits Cyra to help with. That won't stop him from trying to explore the next small crack, though!

Jerome keeps an eye on Zip. He can't keep up with the bundle of energy, but at least he tries. Cyra doesn't like Zip, but she tolerates him for Jerome's sake.

Oh, and as a bonus. Back when Jerome and Cyra were two of my only HK OCs, I liked to put them in angsty situations. Here's a quick comic I did a few years ago where Jerome gets infected. Enjoy :,)

Also thank you for the ask! I haven't gotten to talk about Jerome in a while. He hasn't gotten much development since whenever the previous time was, but he doesn't really need it. He exists to be a stable character.

[topflights]

i’ve got another 20 mins left in 2022 so i’ll get sappy rq. i’ve really, truly, genuinely enjoyed being on here w y’all this year. i joined wrestling tumblr near the end of 2021, so i’ve had this blog a little over a year now, and i’m really grateful i made it and joined you guys on here. thank you for looking at my silly little posts, thank you for thirsting abt wrestlers w me, thank you for sticking around and being generally welcoming to a new face around here. it’s been a really fun year enjoying wrestling with you guys, and i’m excited to do it more in 2023 💕💕

[spookykestrel]

When I was a growing up every year my mom would get our nativity set out and my sisters and I would fight over who got to play with it first and divide the pieces among ourselves and create the most fantastical (and likely blasphemous) stories like Mary falling in love with the shepherd and magical floating baby Jesus

[emometalhead]

Ashley!! Curious to know what you think of Electric Touch and also what the wider FOB fandom thinks of it :)

I am entirely obsessed!! I've been trying to equally listen to the entire album, and I've failed spectacularly lol. Electric Touch is easily my most listened to on the whole album.

I think Taylor and Patrick's voices really suit each other! The bridge drives me crazy!! They complement each other so well!! Plus even beyond the vocals I like the lyrics!! "All I know is this could either break my heart or bring me back to life" is a feeling I can totally understand despite never being in a relationship.

Obviously I'm biased toward both parties, but I can safely say this song did not disappoint me! It's making me want a full collaboration between Fall Out Boy (the whole band) and Taylor even more than I already did. In the meantime, I'm happy to enjoy Electric Touch!!

I've lowkey been avoiding seeking out opinions from the wider FOB fandom. The Swemos (Swiftie emos) seem really excited about it! Like some people want it to play at Emo Nite events even. I've seen a couple older FOB fans say they like it. Some FOB fans are upset that Electric Touch is FOB's top song on Spotify rn, but I think they should have anticipated this. Also I know some people complained that the song is too pop, but again I don't know why they would expect otherwise. So long story short, I'm not sure what the consensus is or if there is a consensus! It would hurt my heart a little bit too much to see FOB fans trashing Taylor or vice versa.

Thank you so much for asking, and I'm sorry in advance about the lengthy tags!!!!! Taylor and Fall Out Boy are not subjects I'm capable of being concise about!!!!!

[roaringroa]

today i met up with my high school friend group for the first time in 3 years (i had seen all but one individually or in smaller groups ocasionally at parties or something in the last year but never all of them together and never somewhere just us where we could really talk) and we spent  hours talking and laughing and remembering but also catching each other up in our current life events and just having an overall great time and like man life really is worth living

[nekky-nek]

So the job is going much better than a couple days ago, but I'm still thinking "Is getting paid for this even worth it?"

[the-punforgiven]

I'm happy to see two of the posts at the top of my blog rn are the same Elden Eing character

[southislandwren]

ive gone back into full dorm mode. i need ice for my water bottle but i cant leave my room because i might encounter someone which is the worst possible scenario in the world

[tamayokny]

as of today, all of my former coworkers in the circulation department have either relocated to different branches or resigned 🤭