Today my therapist introduced me to a concept surrounding disability that she called "hLep".
Which is when you - in this case, you are a disabled person - ask someone for help ("I can't drink almond milk so can you get me some whole milk?", or "Please call Donna and ask her to pick up the car for me."), and they say yes, and then they do something that is not what you asked for but is what they think you should have asked for ("I know you said you wanted whole, but I got you skim milk because it's better for you!", "I didn't want to ruin Donna's day by asking her that, so I spent your money on an expensive towing service!") And then if you get annoyed at them for ignoring what you actually asked for - and often it has already happened repeatedly - they get angry because they "were just helping you! You should be grateful!!"
And my therapist pointed out that this is not "help", it's "hLep".
Sure, it looks like help; it kind of sounds like help too; and if it was adjusted just a little bit, it could be help. But it's not help. It's hLep.
At its best, it is patronizing and makes a person feel unvalued and un-listened-to. Always, it reinforces the false idea that disabled people can't be trusted with our own care. And at its worst, it results in disabled people losing our freedom and control over our lives, and also being unable to actually access what we need to survive.
So please, when a disabled person asks you for help on something, don't be a hLeper, be a helper! In other words: they know better than you what they need, and the best way you can honor the trust they've put in you is to believe that!
Also, I want to be very clear that the "getting angry at a disabled person's attempts to point out harmful behavior" part of this makes the whole thing WAY worse. Like it'd be one thing if my roommate bought me some passive-aggressive skim milk, but then they heard what I had to say, and they apologized and did better in the future - our relationship could bounce back from that. But it is very much another thing to have a crying shouting match with someone who is furious at you for saying something they did was ableist. Like, Christ, Jessica, remind me to never ask for your support ever again! You make me feel like if I asked you to call 911, you'd order a pizza because you know I'll feel better once I eat something!!
Edit: crediting my therapist by name with her permission - this term was coined by Nahime Aguirre Mtanous!
Edit again: I made an optional follow-up to this post after seeing the responses. Might help somebody. CW for me frankly talking about how dangerous hLep really is.
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How I save time on backgrounds as a full-time webcomic artist
Hi! I make webcomics for a living, and I have to be able to draw a panel extremely fast to keep up with my deadlines. I draw about 50 panels a week, which gives me about 45 minutes per panel if I want any semblance of a healthy work-life balance.
Most webtoon artists save time on backgrounds by using 3d models, which works for them and is great! but personally I hate working in 3d... I went to school for it for a year and hated it so much I completely changed career paths and vowed never to do it again! So, this is how I save time without using any 3d, for those of you out there who don't like it either!
This tactic has also saved me money (3d models are expensive) and it has helped me converting my comic from scroll format into page format for print, because I have much more art to work with than what's actually in the panels. (I'll touch on this later)
So, first, I make my backgrounds huge. my default starting size is 10,000 x 10,000 pixels. My panels are 2,500 pixels wide, so my backgrounds are 4x that, minimum. Because of this, I make them less detailed than I could or that you might expect so it doesn't look weird against my character art when I shrink portions of it down.
I personally find it much easier to add in detail than to make "removing" details look natural at smaller sizes, but you might have different preferences than I do.
I also make sure to keep all of my elements on separate layers so that I can easily remove or replace them, I can move them to simulate different camera angles more easily, and it's simple to adjust the lighting to imply different times of day.
Then I can go ahead and copy/paste them into my episodes. I move the background around until it feels like it's properly fitting how I want.
Once I've done that in every panel, I'll go back through the episode and clean up anything that looks weird, and add in solid blacks (for my art style) Here's a quick before and after of what that looks like!
This makes 90% of my backgrounds take me just a few hours. This is my tactic when I'm working in an environment that an entire scene, or multiple scenes, will take place.
But many panels will inevitably have a location that's used exactly once, and it would waste time and effort to draw a massive background for those. So in 10% of cases, I just draw the single panel background in the episode. I save all of these, just in case I can re-use it later (this happens more often with outdoor locations, but I save them all nonetheless!)
I generally have to draw about 2 big backgrounds per episode, and 3-5 single-panel backgrounds per episode! At the beginning of an arc/book the number is higher, but as the series is continuing and I'm building up an asset library of indoor and outdoor elements to re-use for the book, the number generally goes down and I save more time.
My series involves time travel and mysteries, so there's a lot of new locations in it and we're constantly moving around. If I were working on a series that was more consistent in this aspect, this process would save me even more time!
Like I said earlier, this also saves me a lot of pain and gives me a lot more options as I'm converting from scroll format to print format!
panels that look like this in scroll format...
can look like this in print!
because I drew the background like this, so I didn't need to go through the additional effort to add in the extra detail to expand it outwards at all.
Anyways, I hope this helps someone! As always if it doesn't help, just go ahead and disregard. This is what I do and what works for me, and I feel like I only ever see time-saving tips for comics that involve 3d models and workflows, which don't work for me at all! I know there's more people like me out there, so this is for you!
Enjoy!
Also obligatory "my webcomic" if you want to see this in action or check it out!
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i'm constantly getting myself worked up about what the qunari in dragon age could be if the writers weren't racist as shit. in a perfect world that we don't live in, the veilguard comes out and it reveals that everything heard about qunari and the qun were wrong and people are just there living their lives and to stop treating their religion, that is inescapably a parody of islam, like it's a form of control. stop treating them like they're inheritly violent or murderous when like. the grey warden kills a bunch of desperate refugees that attack them at the start of the game. not incapcitate, kill. hawke is constantly killing people like All the Time. it is a joke between the da2 characters in the game. but when the qunari do it it's suddenly wrong? suddenly murder is bad in the context of the world?
when the religion of the maker and the elves gets treated with respect and nooo andrastians aren't forcing their religion on anyone they're just making people see the Truth. but when anyone willingly converts to the qun that means they? are bad people now? when the qunari have a spy that's invasive and scary but when you have your own spymaster that tortures people well that's fine it's just what's necessary. when the circles literally take someone's spirit away by making them tranquil that's horrific but it is what it is, but when the qunari restrict their mages in a very similar way, the only difference being that you can See from the outside what it feels like, then it's an even worse unspeakable horror? even when the mages of the qun are giving to that willingly for the percieved safety of others vs nearly every account of tranquility being forced, somehow the qun version of the same thing is still worse???
that is the way the games themselves through story and mechanics frame it and it's shit because the qunari is very obviously based on a real life religion and real life people that are heavily demonized in real life and it is not fair
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I just need every single person in this fandom who has ever been mean about Luke Newton to know that Nicola Coughlan hates you. Genuinely and wholeheartedly.
She hates you. Sure, she won't say it aloud, because she's a professional who knows her career lives or dies by fans, but please know that she does. She hates you if you've said Colin gave you the ick, especially so if you said it to Luke, she hates you if you've left a rude comment on his social media, she hates you if you acted like she didn't like him or that she was shading him, she hates you if you bullied the people around him, she hates you if you said something disparaging about how he looks or how he acts, she. hates. you.
And sure, it's not all people who are in her or Pen's fanbase, in fact a lot of people have been cruel about him outside of the Polin fandom, but a LOT of people are Pen fans, and hearing her talking about how defensive she gets over him when people say something rude about him? And knowing there are SO many stupid opinion blogs and youtubers and tiktokers who say they're Pen fans and Nicola fans but are mean as fuck about Luke?
I need every single one of them, in particular those who have been out here making up stupid shit to be mad at him about 'on her behalf' to know that when you say something mean about the man she gushed to her Mum about, and who her Mum was so excited to meet because she just knew he was kind, the man she introduced to her entire family, the man she is always reaching for and hugging and snuggling up to and calling wonderful and giggling around and saying how she wouldn't want to do such vulnerable intimate scenes without and complimenting and leaning on and having fun with and calling a special person in her life, she is taking off her earrings and ready to meet you outside in his honor
because she hates you for being a dick about him. hope that clears things up
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Ranking One Piece ships!! My opinion ofc
Zoro x Sanji: 100000/10, my otp, I would die for them, never a dull moment with this ship.
Franky x Robin: 11/10, incredible, showstopping, even better as t4t.
Usopp x Kaya: 10/10, no notes, they’re adorable.
Nami x Vivi: 9/10, very cute! Now all we need is for Vivi to come back 😔😔
Shanks x Buggy: 7/10, very funny, and childhood friends to enemies to lovers is a fun trip.
Luffy x Zoro: 5/10, I hc Luffy as aroace so it doesn’t work, but I can at least see where people are coming from with this one.
Sanji x Usopp: 5/10, it’s cute and the fan content is nice, but it’s just not my thing.
Luffy x Law: 4/10, their dynamic is amusing but it doesn’t really work for me as a ship.
Luffy x Nami: 3/10, doesn’t work because of my hcs for them and I don’t think they’d like each other that way, but there are worse options.
Ace x Sanji: 3/10, I can see Ace being Sanji’s bi awakening but they wouldn’t work as an actual couple imo.
Zoro x Robin: 2/10, where’s the chemistry? This ship would be boring more than anything else. Also don’t love 19 x 28.
Luffy x Boa: 0/10, I’m sorry but I’m not shipping a 17 year old with a 29 year old. Her infatuation with Luffy bothers me tbh.
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fandom psa; there is nothing whatsoever that is inherently "problematic" about shipping characters who are "found family."
Adoption is not found family. A blended family is not found family. A found family or chosen family is a group which, through circumstances or simply mutual affection, hold their relationship to one another with equal care and importance as family members ought to. It's not the same type of relationship.
It's not incest. It's not even pseudo-incest unless you want it to be. I personally don't care what people ship, but I'm absolutely tired of people misusing the term "found family" to just recreate the idea of a nuclear family and force those roles onto the entirety of a fandom. Sure, maybe characters who are found family may view themselves like siblings, or like a parent and child or aunt and niece, but they might also just see each other as friends-- and guess what? romantic partners too! That's technically the most widely-accepted form of found family/chosen family there is!
The whole point of found family/chosen family is to have the importance of "family" on relationships that lie outside the commonly-understood bounds of that relationship. Not to recreate the "mommy-daddy-daughter-son" dynamic with unrelated characters and use that headcanon or fanon dynamic to enforce your own morality or preferences on other fans.
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