#anyway as if my tag were not long enough

[eggy-the-boy]

I can’t decide in what way Noel Gruber is trans but they definitely got some transgender in them. 

[arttsuka]

Based on somewhat real events

I spent way too much time drawing this...

But yeah, Ford finally saying thank you

A continuation (kinda)

[summer-fire]

Aberration

[starflungwaddledee]

Oooo starstruck dee has little stars at the bottom of her feet! Are they just aesthetic or would they make imprints into the ground? (like pawprints)

exactly like that! though she's not the only one...

edit: might need to add some additional dialogue to this to make it more clear, but a clarification in the interim; he knows about his own footprints. he's just surprised to see something similar already there when he knows he's only just landed. he lifts his own shoe to confirm that they're not identical (and also to reveal this to the viewer). seems his stoicism beat off the clarity in this one, sorry 😭

[they-didnt-last]

anyone interested in talking about the iconic 2000's middle-grade-bordering-on-ya book series gallagher girls??

[hedgehog-moss]

I lost one of my chickens :( she was caught and carried away by a fox... I’ve been growing complacent about my chickens’ safety I think because we’ve only had one other attack before, a goshawk that swooped in abruptly (unsuccessfully), but no fox sightings nearby so I’ve been assuming Pandolf was a great deterrent. Which he is, just not foolproof. I’ve talked to some people in town about this and they were pretty philosophical about foxes stealing chickens, like “it’s the tribute we pay to woodland animals, it’s just a few hens here and there.” I don’t begrudge the fox for being a fox, if anything I have a renewed respect for foxes because everyone I talked to proceeded to give me their best / worst fox stories, and most of them involved foxes outsmarting humans (learning people’s habits / timetables, opening latches, faking a limp...) Still I feel terrible for my hen, she was only three. RIP Cordy :( You’ll be remembered fondly... (except by the cats.) I feel bad for the other hen too, who just lost her pal!

When I said that last thing, one of my neighbours jumped on the opportunity to try and convince me again to accept a rooster from him. He had a rooster baby boom last summer and I’ve been telling him for months that I don’t need a rooster, I don’t want to raise chickens I just want eggs, and his new argument was that a rooster would protect my hen (or if it comes to that, would heroically sacrifice himself rather than let the hen be eaten—I’m sceptical...) I asked around for a young hen but there aren’t any to be had in this season, so my remaining one is going to be alone until the spring, and my neighbour said she’d get stressed and male company is better than no company. (I wish I could ask my hen what she wants! Maybe she’s penning A Coop Of One’s Own as we speak.) I said the rooster was more likely to stress her out and harass her and he said nah they’re free ranging all day, it’ll be fine, and he’s young so your adult hen will boss him around. I was like, but then will he be any good at protecting her? etc. etc. and after a while I caved in.

When I told her about this on the phone my mum sighed “you’re terrible at saying no”—excuse me, I said no so many times and the guy just kept ploughing on until he could foist a rooster upon me. I’m good at saying no, other people are terrible at hearing it! I reassured her that I had only agreed to take the rooster for a short probationary period, and if he bothers my hen too much I’ll drive him back to his native farm. My mum was like “Drive him back? look I’m sorry I raised you as a city kid but there’s no need to waste gas on driving a rooster around, I’ll have no qualms about wringing his neck for dinner if he’s more trouble than he’s worth.” The rooster’s fate is not sealed though, if he is anywhere from vaguely useful to not actively problematic I’ll keep him, so we’ll see...!

[masterbaiting]

"Nero's eunuch bride playing a role in the vicissitudes of the imperial succession" The Thick of It & the life of Nero;

The Thick of It, The Rise of the Nutters, 3x07, 3x08, season 3 deleted scenes, 4x02, 4x04, 4x06, 4x07 / Roman Homosexuality, second edition, Craig A. Williams / Suetonius' Life of Nero, 28, 46, 47, 49, trans. myself / Plutarch's Life of Galba, 9.3, trans. Aubrey Stewart

[percki]

loveybug is too busy thinking about kissing to fight supervillains... anytime an akuma shows up she hits it with a comically large hammer harley quinn style until it's flat and she can go back to unsubtly flirting with chat noir

[marcmorrigan]

@fenglianweek day 6: memories/growing up

the best thing thats ever been mine

[sleepinglionhearts]

new stickers? it’s more likely than you think!

[aroaceleovaldez]

I actually have a very specific headcanon for how Will Solace ended up at CHB that I don’t really talk about much in-depth (besides some little inklings of it on Deadangelos here and there) because of how he’s only introduced in TLO, so I figured i’d get into it.

Because we know Will isn’t a camper in BoTL but is in TLO (and was made counselor because he literally only had two siblings left), I headcanon that he joined camp in the off-season the winter after BoTL.

Basically, I figure Will got into a fight with some bullies at school, not necessarily because they were bullying him (because people tend to just kind of generally like him) but because he’s the kind of person who calls people out on their BS, and he got so mad that he accidentally caused some kind of minor plague. Either a plague of rats or locusts or just plain old weird case of like The Black Death. Whatever happened, obviously nobody assumed it was him because that seems physically impossible, but his school ends up closed down for a bit so Will has to find a new school. And cause he’s twelve and his powers are starting to ramp up more and he has to find a new school anyways (and maybe Naomi is about to go on tour and isn’t able to help Will find a new school at that moment) they decide it’s time for him to go to CHB and that he’ll be a year-round camper unless he gets sick of it and really wants to come home in the off-season. So Will goes to CHB in the middle of winter and immediately it sucks. It’s that kind of sleet weather where all the snow is grey and wet and keeps freezing and unfreezing. It’s annoyingly cold but not really cold enough for a heavy jacket and it’s cloudy and dark and the sun sets by like 4. And Will’s from Texas and an Apollo kid (never seen snow before and solar-powered) so he’s immediately miserable and Argus has to basically drag him from the airport to camp.

And then when he actually gets to camp it turns out he’s the only Apollo kid there. Because year-round Apollo kids are basically unheard of (given their powers are generally mellow enough that they’re fine going home for the off-season and Apollo kids are notorious snowbirds anyways) (and canonically there were no year-round Apollo kids pre-TLO). And it’s the dead of winter between BoTL and TLO so camp is particularly empty with like probably a dozen or so campers total. So Will is stuck in an empty cabin feeling miserable and there’s barely any other campers to make friends with (and even fewer his own age, since he’s at that point one of if not the youngest kid in camp). He tries to make friends regardless and Drew immediately adopts him as her best friend (and he doesn’t really get a choice in the matter) and Chiron ends up taking Will under his wing as a medic apprentice, which Will enjoys and it helps brighten his spirits a bit, which makes everyone else in camp feel a little bit better in turn because seeing a little happy sunny twelve year old Apollo kid running around healing people really helps takes their minds off their impending doom, especially while camp is the most barren it’s been in decades.

Then the other Apollo kids start trickling back when the weather turns and it’s a little awkward because Will has to get used to having siblings and not being in an empty cabin and the other Apollo kids have to get used to having a new sibling right after they all just lost Lee Fletcher (which Will is very mortified to learn about). And it’s even more awkward because they’re not used to siblings arriving to CHB while nobody’s there, so Will’s already used to camp and knows everybody except the summer-only kids so they don’t have to show him the ropes or anything, but also Will’s been doing everything by himself so it’s odd for him to adjust to having to listen to his older siblings. Weird feelings all around. (And extra bonus points if we’re also going with the headcanon that plague children of Apollo are considered bad luck, so Will feels extra bad about showing up right after the old cabin counselor died and right before the major battle of the war, and so refuses to tell anyone about his plague powers.)

It gets better for a bit when Kayla and Austin join camp a little before the Battle For Manhattan, cause Will isn’t the youngest in the cabin anymore and they’re both also year-rounders, but then it immediately turns sour when after the war suddenly those three are the only ones in the cabin. So now Will is traumatized and has to be in charge of his also traumatized barely-younger-than-him siblings, and he’s in an (almost) empty cabin again, and he’s only been at camp for less than a year and is still one of the youngest kids at camp. And he still doesn’t like winters in New York and he misses his mom.

Things turn up for him a bit after the war when there's the sudden huge influx of new campers, so he’s not the youngest anymore and he has something to busy himself with and camp is bustling even in the off-season. But for that first year Will just has an absolutely cruddy time, because man it must have sucked to be a campers joining in the middle of the Titan War.

[bookwyrminspiration]

TLT's Religion + Trauma Survey Results!

About a month ago, I shared a survey regarding the impact of TLT's religion on fans and specifically fans with self-identified religious trauma. This was part of a larger group project for a class, but a handful of people were interested in knowing the results, so here they are!

Before we start: this was a very informal project and necessarily limited. Response options were limited, it didn't inquire into demographic information, data was analyzed manually, and Christianity was the focus/frequently presumed given its global prevalence and relation to the story. Several avenues of analysis weren't pursued given time and project constraints, so please keep all this in mind

The survey was open for about a week and received 965 responses

First, respondents were asked on a scale of 1-4 "Does The Locked Tomb's use or depiction of religion impact your reading experience?" From the entire pool, 83.6% rated it as at least slightly impactful (further broken down in the graph), and 97.4% indicated this was a positive impact.

In open response, respondents listed some reasons why, ranging from: "“it's just a part of the story” to “I enjoy the examination of the ways religion can shape someone's world view, or be used to manipulate and control” and "Religion is my autistic special interest and I love fictional religions!"

Respondents were then asked "Do you have, in your opinion, religious trauma?" The qualifications of religious trauma were intentionally non-specified and left to respondents discretion.

358 respondents, 37.1%, marked yes

This specific group of 358 were asked if this religious trauma impacted their reading of TLT. 66.1% indicated that it did.

Open response answers elaborated on this, saying: “I think reading it is cathartic for me,” “Space trauma lets me look at my real trauma without me or real people being hurt in it,” and “making religion a part of the narrative and drawing out the themes in a way that can be analyzed and picked apart made my experience with religion something I could look at in a similar way.”

The first question from the survey was then returned to, and the ratings of the 1-4 scale were looked at solely in the group of 358 respondents with self-identified religious trauma.

Of these, 90.3% marked a 2 or higher (compared to 83.6); 15% marked a 2 (compared to 22.1%), 31% marked a 3 (compared to 33%), and 44.3% marked a 4 (compared to 28.6%). Pardon the quick graph, as I made it in about 3 minutes specifically for this

Respondents with religious trauma, on average, rated the series' depiction of religion as more impactful to their reading experience than respondents without.

All respondents were then asked, "Has TLT helped you challenge or reinforce your ideas of and experiences with religion?"

Respondents elaborated that: "it reinforced my ideas of religion because I see religion as a means of controlling people, often abusive, and rooted in the supernatural" or "It challenged me to consider how religion can be both a positive force and a hurtful institution. I knew this to a degree already, having experienced both, but reading about it helped reinforce that nuance."

Respondents were then asked on a scale of 1-5, "Does the original text or the fandom contribute more to challenging or reinforcing ideas of and experiences with religion?" 1 is individual text only, and 5 is fandom only.

The majority of respondents indicated an equal impact from the original text and the fandom, however very few people were impacted only by the fandom (1.4%) compared to the number only impacted by the text (13.8%). This wasn't investigated further.

Finally, respondents were asked what religion they'd been referring to or thinking of when they'd been answering the above questions. The vast majority indicated Christianity or Catholicism, though we did not count exactly how many of each; it was clear it was the majority, and that sufficed for our purposes. A larger, more thorough study would be needed to look at Non-Christian/Catholic respondents' experiences in comparison.

The conclusion of all of this was that, as predicted, fans of TLT with self-identified religious trauma were more impacted by the series' use and depiction of religion. This was via catharsis, sympathy, identifying with the characters, and more.

The study demonstrates a function of speculative fiction that allows readers to engage with and process difficult topics (such as religious trauma) though a protected, distanced lens where no one real is hurt. This can be taken beyond TLT and to the genre as a whole, which is often dismissed as less literary or worthy of study than its classical counterparts, an opinion the surveyors argue against.

If you've made it to the end here, thank you again for all the responses and help! I hope you've enjoyed the results, and if there are any further questions feel free to ask and I'll do my best to answer them. Upfront, yes there were 2 other components to the project (looking at queer demographics for the fandom and analyzing common themes in fanart and fic); those were my groupmates' sections, so I haven't shared them, but if you're curious I can always ask them if they'd be open to sharing :)

[wewerebornsextuplets]

parentce 👍

[alloreli]

tagged by @asexualbookbird and i'm SO ON THIS i'm doing it within like a half hour of getting tagged

anyways pick one of my Top 5 favorite characters

per usual tagging anyone who's interested in doing this

[wall-e-gorl]

Arlaen and the Raven Queen, making a choice

[thedrotter]

not-yet-dead-person

silly comic of a conversation in-game i thought was too funny not to make something proper for instead of a doodle ww

(timelapse + wip images (thus silly process commentary in read more if you like artist commentary :3)

i think the sketch looks silly and goofy and funny so i find it important to share with you the mere presence of the faces i drew on it. i drew it on top of the boxes without staying inside its borders because i find my proportions can get wonky if i draw them cropped in a restricted space. and I feel trapped otherwise and i will draw BAD!!! give me spaceeeee to go wild!!!!

the head circles are there for emotional support

very low res speedpaint because truth is the canvas was much bigger than the space where my comic was placed. i didnt account when exporting my timelapse in 720px that that tiny space would look so pixelated ... but it's able to be percieved, so its okay.

(i will now comment on my process and it is not brief sorry)

usually i would try to clean up my sketches and figure out what goes on top before jumping into linework, but since there are multiple panels and drawings i chose to jump into inking right away for the sake of brevity. i just went in with a brush that uses pen pressure and drew what was needed. i added extra line thickness and contrast in areas around the face because it helps direct your eyes there more easily that way.

according to her equipment rei has a chain belt but i only remembered it existed once I was going to color, and i did not like that discovery... I chose to ignore it to maintain my peace. i already have the color palettes for these characters figured out, and i didnt really want to think about a new element at the moment www I tend to overthink those things a lot so i skipped it

the rest is rather straightforward! not that anything else wasn't, but in here i could turn my brain off and sing. linework and sketching require mumbling so i cannot turn my brain off. just block in the characters with a solid color so i can have a mask (something along those lines,) where the color can stay inside. then just color in !!!

Base colors just had slight cell shading on the skin, and for the hair i airbrush a bit of the skincolor in low opacity near the forehead... I'm not sure what it means, but i can look at the faces easier with it somehow. i like the gentle subtlety it adds even if you cant really tell. it makes things look nice.

background was just me blocking in the color of the wall and floor, shade the wall a bit, then slap a noise and free use wood texture on top. work smarter not harder ! yet it took a bit to make it look stylistically fitting with the characters, and even now i think bottom middle panel looks odd. whatever!!!

for the middle panel i thought itd be funny if the background was a solid silly and colorful one to contrast the next panel's sketchy black one. a contrast to how the word widow is seen. on that note my handwritting is not pointy. i gaslighted my hand into thinking that it was indeed pointy in that moment so i could write "not-yet dead person" in letters that didn't seem cute. my hand did not fall for it but it complied anyway

that's basically it! I'm not sure what else i could say that doesn't feel barebones because it really is that straightforward. if you're curious I used clip studio paint for this. only special brush used was for linework (a brush named Lemon Brush), the rest used were just the default. my computer gets the least credit. it was trying to convince me a 20mb file was going to nuke it all the time and hardly let me save multiple times so i do not appreciate it