#frame within frames

[oliviali158-blog]

[sirazaroff]

I meant to post this yesterday 😔

[rainscenes]

—Kurt Brown

[screwpinecaprice]

Actually cute. Had to do a quick redraw.

Screenshot is from when Jay lit up the Jack-o'-lantern in the living room.

[equill]

Reuniting with a distorted past.

Extra:(New personality tested gone wrong)

wanted to play with rin living in the aftermath aus aswell and had these drawings laying around to share so yay

Panel 1: Was buried alive.

Comic 1: Who are you supposed to be?

new friends

Comic 2: Misguided protection.

obito still sensing the warning signs of rin losing her temper. anyways they proceeded to be dragged into the ocean by rin like some sea monster

Comic 3: Finding out (Now what will you do?)

obito is harshly brought back from his delusions because now its not just kushina but rin too who he needs to ripped out the tail beast from

[ooooo-mcyt]

Scott Smajor (cc) is such a good story teller actually and the common themes he uses in his storylines captivate me. I think we should talk about how good he is at Themes more often. If I wasn't so tired I'd write essays.

[evidenceof]

Band of Brothers -> BTS/Unused Promo Shots Episode 4: Replacements

everybody cheered

[ashipikaur]

HARUGUMI 🌸 ashi style!

haru / natsu / aki / fuyu

[godtrauma]

horror people, please reblog this and put a horror video game moment that scared the shit out of you. i’ll start, marguerite baker’s final for from resident evil: biohazard 🫣😱

[its-kinda-snowy]

Plotting to deceive, inveigle, and obfuscate if I'm being honest :/

[oliviali158-blog]

[racc0jello]

deltarune tomorrow

[boyfailurecharliekelly]

the “i’m having feelings again” interaction isn’t supposed to imply that dennis does not in fact FEEL anything; it’s pretty clear that it's in reference specifically to romantic feelings. it’s eye opening to him that one could feel genuine care for someone they are also in a sexual relationship with. thus, it is much more indicative of his disordered relationship with sex stemming from csa hence the specific reference to being “like a fourteen year old kid.”

[sunlight-shunlight]

suddenly sitting up awake at 12am: i think thedas has a genre of memento mori types of paintings, where they put a skull in with some fancy still life stuff to indicate that the patron/artist is wealthy, but also Pious and thinking about Inevitable Death rather than material things (even though they're lovingly rendering all the silverware and expensive fruits and lace tablecloths or whatever)

BUT. since andraste is associated with fire, this is done by including like a lit candle or an urn of ashes or something in the composition, to show the piety and focus on the impermanence of life! i think this would be common in orlais especially. presumably tevinter is trying not to play up the "whoops we turned the saviour into a burnt kebab :)" angle in their religion, so they'd have... idk. a knife or something? to indicate the sword of mercy as the pious symbol of death rather than the fire itself?

[tasaq]

I believe in aromatic utenanthy. It's the hill to die on

[withthewindinherfootsteps]

I sometimes see the opinion that MXTX took the clichéd tropes she'd critiqued in Scum Villain, and played them straight in MDZS. But though a lot of them appear in MDZS, I'd argue that none are actually played straight at all!

The main point of MDZS's tropes is subversion. Yes, WWX has a 'tragic backstory', even an arguably overused one (orphaned by his parents at a young age, forced to live on the streets with nobody to rely on, etc) – but how things differ in how it's used. Tragic backstories are normally used to build sympathy for a character, to make us care and get invested in them. But... we're never actually shown any of those street days, we're never shown and never dwell upon how much he suffered during them. They're only really mentioned in passing and whenever dogs come up! If the goal was to make us feel bad for WWX, this would be very ineffective writing. But what's actually important here isn't that WWX went through tragedies – it's how he doesn't let the tragedies he went through define him. He doesn't dwell on them, the narrative doesn't dwell on them, it's never used to earn sympathy points... because what defines WWX is his choices and how he chooses to act, not a backstory completely out of his control. What gets us invested in him is his personality and the character writing of MXTX, not tragic events used as a substitute for identity.

And this trope treatment fits extremely well with WWX's personality itself – he's someone who 'forgets the pain as soon as the wound has healed'*, but also who actively chooses to focus on the present because you can't change the past; someone who holds the belief that 'gains and losses [should] remain uncommented on' when choosing what to do.

The use of the tragic backstory isn't the only thing that's subverted, either – the other main thing is the 'blackening' of the protagonist, and its impact on the protagonist's fall. After being thrown into the Burial Mounds, on a surface level it does seem like this blackening has occurred: the first thing we see when he returns is his gruesome torture of the Wen cultivators; he's 'forsaken' traditional cultivation in favour of an 'evil but more powerful' path; and frankly, Sunshot-era WWX is terrifying. But MDZS is not a blackening story, and so the events of the Burial Mounds aren't used as a catalyst for that purpose. Though it's true that WWX's not entirely the same person he was before (because how could be be?), underneath it all, his morals, worldview and core** stay the same. Though gruesome, his revenge is directed towards the ones who wronged him, not those past that and certainly not the entire world. His experience in the Burial Mounds doesn't lead to him being some evil, blackened overlord... like everyone says he is at the start! That's subverted, because again, WWX's values and choices are more important to the story than genre conventions.

But the most crucial thing? What leads to WWX's downfall isn't any blackening! It isn't any vengeance or morally dubious actions***– he was praised for those things during the Sunshot Campaign! No, what leads to his downfall is something completely unrelated to that, something which would've disappeared had the trope been played straight. It's him doing what's right by defending the Wens, it's him following his moral code when it opposes the world's, it's him standing up to the injustice of others – not others standing up to the injustice of him. That's the subversion here.

(Also, once again, the fall of Lotus Pier, the Burial Mound, etc, aren't used for sympathy points – and if it was relevant, they wouldn't have been used to excuse any actions, either. Using tragic events as an excuse for doing bad things is critiqued many times in MDZS, through characters like Xue Yang and Jin Guangyao. And that's not exactly a trope subversion, but it is a critique of badly handled 'excuses'.)

These are by no means all the tropes MDZS subverts – the nature of guidao vs the usual nature of modao being another very major one – but they're the main ones that feature in Scum Villain.

So, though at first glance MDZS seems to play the tropes MXTX critiqued there straighter, it's not a simple case of using them as cliches, and we see that by how they're used to impact the narrative, and how that differs from what they're traditionally used for. MDZS doesn't fall back into clichés Scum Villain satirised – it's the subversion to Scum Villain's exploration and critique.

--

*Which I know is generally used negatively, to describe someone not learning a lesson from a punishment, but it really describes WWX in general, too. He doesn't dwell on that pain, he does his best to move on from it.

**...heh

***And, because it's often debated – whatever the morality/culpability of Nightless City is doesn't even matter! The events happened at a pledge conference against him that was already taking place. WWX's actions there didn't make people want to kill him because that was explicitly happening beforehand.