#i wanted all the lens flares lol

[themissingmango]

x x

[adhdtsukasa]

WXS OCHAME KINOU FINALLY RELEASED OFFICIALLY and i wanna ramble about the line distribution because it killed my grandma and it's becoming one of my favorite wxs covers all time. (at first i just wanted to talk about the emu solo line... but oh well...)

(the credit is on the screens, but the video belongs to yann__94 on yt!)

obviously rui got this line, it couldn't be any other way!! after all, this precisely *is* what rui's role mainly is. he's the stage director, the one who's supposed to make everything work well — and it only intensifies after backlight lens flare, where it was recognized even further from what i've seen. because i didn't watch the entirety of it yet. i'm waiting for my summer break to catch up on events

wonderland sekai!!! that sounds like a sole definition of wonderlands sekai to me. (and is only a furthermore proof why ochame kinou is so wxs coded that it even sounds like a wxs comm)

and this is what i wanted to talk about from the very beginning — because this is so cuteeee..... "is your birthday ahead" and they're releasing it just ten days before tsukasa's birthday? Hey. emu being the one who sing this line just adds to the adorableness because i'm not saying that nene and rui wouldn't do so, but combined with the way emu sings just makes me see the mental image of emu dragging tsukasa with her and just going "cmon cmon tsukasakun it's your birthday soon we need to have fun". which is honestly very accurate i think. she's the designated sun of the wxs, after all

but maybe i'm just biased because i love platonic emukasa as i already said countless of times 🫶🫶

THIS LINE ON THE OTHER HAND MAKES ME SO SAD and i don't call me a sadkaser because this is not meant to be, maybe i'm just reaching too much because i'm too kidkasa pilled from writing a thing for his birthday, but,,, yeah, it screams dazzling to me. because that's how tsukasa was as a kid, right? if you behave well and let them see you're the strong one, you'll be happy — but you still need to have faith that tomorrow will be a better day.

again, that only makes this cover releasing right before tsukasa's birthday even more foul lol.

and i don't have much to say about this line... i'm just glad to see that emu got to still have her dreamer motif here. makes me very happy.

and last but not least, polysho ruined lives

[steamberrystudio]

13/08/2023 Devlog

Hallo! It is time for the bi-weekly Tumblr update once again

Summary:

Sprite art finished and imported (all sprites are now in the game)

All CG art completed

50% of CGs coded

The Ramble:

So here is the quick ramble for Gilded Shadows.

I finished all the remaining sprite art and got that imported into the game. 

And I finished all the CG art. I have not finished coding the CGs as some of them take a bit longer due to Morgan. So I have a few more of those left to do.

I really did not expect to be finished with the CGs by this point but somehow managed to finish them by the end of Friday without killing my hand.

I've definitely been...uh...feeling it the past couple of days though. Ha ha. 

Fortunately the art is done now so my hand will have plenty of time to rest through beta testing! 

Upcoming Weeks:

Beta testing! 

I have a few more things to wrap up, including coding the rest of the CGs and then Yuu's route will move into the beta testing stage which will last a few weeks; but I'm not sure how long.

So yeah. We're nearly to the final release for Gilded Shadows. 

Even after release, I still have some KS related loose ends to tie up but the game is kind of the main thing to complete and we are nearly there.

=o

Anyway, that's all for now on Gilded Shadows. By next update we should be mid-beta testing and I'll probably be working on some of the KS loose ends while waiting for feedback.

When Stars Collide:

For those following updates on this project:

I have received one new background since last time and a new sketch.

I have also done a fair bit of writing but since this is just my side project I've actually been tracking my word count progress a little less meticulously than usual. I don't know how many words it was at my last update so I don't know how much progress I've made since then. LoL!

I have one more short scene for Yren chapter 5 left but I also worked on the new chapter 3, which I had planned out but not started last time. So it looks like I wrote right at 10,000 words based on how long the scenes I know I wrote are. 💪

I also wrote Kav's first actual scene and appearance (well, it's part of the new chapter 3, not a separate scene.)

I've done a few other small things - worked on potentially re-designing the flowchart screens, changed up some character lore for a few characters. Changed a few character name spellings too (there are reasons for this; it wasn't just a whim. LoL)

And a few other minor things.

I also improved my WSC word count spreadsheet.

Keeping a detailed spreadsheet of my progress - including a specific goal system and progress tracker really helps keep me focused so that my forward momentum stays at a steady pace.

I'm not a naturally organised person - in fact, my natural state as a writer is quite chaotic and disorganised. But I have learned during Changeling that chaos does not serve me well in the development process and that I do better if I make myself use organisational tools to stay on track.

I haven't been meticulous with writing spreadsheets for WSC since it has been my side project until now. But as GS wraps up, it will become more of my focus so I want to be sure I have the tools in place to stay focused.

Hence...better spreadsheets. 💪💪

Side note. But did you lens flares are actually required when something is set in space? That is how you know it's sci-fi.

I don't make the rules.

[wigglebox]

tho for real, while talking with folks today, i do believe that’s gabriel and not loki [going off of gabe’s story that loki gave him the disguise at some point] due to language he used. 

the interesting one was the use of ‘samesies’ as a friend said, which came about mostly, according to google, around 2007. which is also, interestingly, is the same year gabe’s/loki’s first episode aired lol. 

but also, i do believe wholeheartedly that it was in fact chuck and not just a rob benedict easter egg, particularly bc this interview with robbie dropped before the episode:

Samuel is a big mythology character to come into the series. What’s the mandate been about how many of these “known characters should be folded into the first season?

You know, our mandate — and that’s a great phrase for it — was: What’s the story? What’s the story we’re trying to tell with these characters? They can’t just be Easter eggs and fun for the fans. We never said “no” to any character. We never said, like, “Absolutely not!” But when we got into the nitty gritty of “if we do bring in that character, what’s the story? What are we saying about Supernatural? And are we breaking anything that we, therefore, have to buy? Any time that was the case, where it felt like there was no more story here, and therefore it was just an Easter egg fun thing, we moved on from it. It’s not like they’re Pokemon and we’ve got to collect all of them. We really wanted to find a way to tell our story, and then how those character could exist within ours. So that was really the mandate.

basically, they’re not throwing in OG SPN characters for shits and giggles, they’re there for a purpose. And they even did a tighter shot on Rob playing the piano, and he was wearing a party city wig, AND he was wearing white. 

you don’t casually throw in a rob benedict reference because for every new fan who won’t understand the significance or may pick up on the fact that it’s him, you have more of us OG SPN fans who would. And yeah, I know it was LS performing, but Rob didn’t say he was going to be there. No one was expecting it. I mean some of us were expecting for a while to see him pop up but there was no expectation that he would this episode. 

and i’m thinking about this TBT he posted a while ago, as chuck, in swan song, wearing white, with an in-universe prequel comic book poster framed behind him of john winchester. 

and another friend pointed out that there were quite a few lens flares during carlos’ singing scene. 

so yeah. 

that was chuck, that was gabe, and no i don’t think gabriel is stuck in a mirror. that’s just what he does to throw people off his trail. and if he is stuck in that mirror, obviously we know he doesn’t stay there. 

and now we obviously know that dean’s in their timeline too 

so — are they really in existence right now? are they in the empty? are they all sharing a mass hallucination? you have gabriel using modern language indicating time travel, you have dean and the car indicating time travel, and you have chuck who should not be having powers now if we are following the story linearly from OG SPN 

Damn I love this show I can’t wait for more. 

[slayerkitty]

There has been ongoing discussion of Only Friends amongst a few of us about central themes of the show and ideas Jojo seems to be exploring. We ended up in a discussion on ephemerality that led to a broader discussion on what the show is trying to say about permanency, mostly through the use of things like Boston's photography, surveillance videos, and other audio/visual means.

We also touched on the idea of voyeurism being a running theme (potentially tying back to the very public nature of queer culture in the 80's and 90's) based on the different medias being presented and the frameworks that each episode has used so far. I posited at the time that the different frameworks of each episode could be a type of voyeurism (and because we've brought up control), a type of controlled voyeurism; the voice overs, talking heads and even the Twitter posts are great for giving the audience insight into character insights, feelings and emotions but only what they want us to see.

There was also discussion in the tag about how this show feels like a throwback to sort of a late 90's aesthetic over all (I can't find this post - specifically I'm thinking of a post that mentioned OF had a very Dawson's Creek aesthetic, which hit me like a truck when I read it because YES). Given that Jojo was born in 1984, so I think this post about OF being the voice of 80's babies is right.

So, you must be asking, duh, we've already talked about this. What's your point?

All of this extremely prolific long-windedness is because I noticed something while watching the Let's Try MV from the OST as well as the BTS videos that have been released so far and I don't think anyone has mentioned it.

In the MV, shots from the show (both what appear to be canon and a smidge of BTS material) are shown like they were filmed on a mid-90's camcorder. This also happens in the in the BTS videos as well (episode 1, episode 2.)

Also, both the MV and the BTS videos have visual effects. Transitions like lens flares, static, and whatever that blippy line distortion was on VHS tapes that we fixed with the tracking buttons (if you know, you know) repeatedly show up in both.

(Please prepare yourself for some absolutely horrible screenshots; I have no skills in this area, lmao, but I wanted a couple of visuals)

(What? No, I didn't choose these three screenshots because of the colors, absolutely not. I also absolutely am not tagging @respectthepetty because of it either, nope. Don't know what you're talking about.)

But Slayerkitty, you ask, what does it mean?

It definitely shows that we're on the right track regarding this, I think, because using it in the MV and BTS materials is a very deliberate choice given the amount of photo, video, and audio focus the show has done to this point. Interestingly, you could also say the BTS videos are a type of controlled voyeurism as well, since it's a specific peek at how things were made (the view they want us to have lol).

(Also interesting but I'm not sure if it means anything or if they just thought it looked cool, but in the MV from about 2:29-2:40 and 2:52-3:10 the scenes are all "camcorder" video and the second time stamp is pretty much all BTS footage.)

(P.S. I also don't think anyone mentioned it before now, but that fluffy jacket/cardigan thing we're all obsessed with that Ray wore in episode two is what Khaotung is wearing the MV. It looks like they probably shot the episode two car scene and the MV the same day/night.)

Tagging the ephemerality squad and anyone who's posts I linked to, in case you guys have any thoughts: @waitmyturtles, @wen-kexing-apologist, @ranchthoughts, @chickenstrangers, @lurkingshan, @twig-tea, @clara-maybe-ontheroad, @distant-screaming, @shouldiusemyname

I know I forgot someone, I'm sure! Apologies if I did. I'm gonna have to make a list, lol.

[wavesoutbeingtossed]

Robin is my beloved song because there’s so much tenderness wrapped up in the need to allow a child to stay a child as long as possible (something we are terrible at in this world). And then to put it on her Denial playlist because we just suck at letting kids stay young? Just never leave me beautiful song with a stunning bridge full of love and tenderness.

Yeeeeeeeeessssssssss.

I've talked about this before I think, but "Never Grow Up" is a song that's always been gut-wrenching to me, because on the surface it's this sweet lullaby to a friend's baby, but the lyrics are actually a reflection of all the pain she's been through, and the undercurrent of the innocence she feels she lost (or was taken from her). She's mourning a part of herself and mourning for the future (e.g. the things she's going to lose like her parents, fleeting experiences, happiness, etc.) which makes even more sense in the context of Would've, Could've, Should've.

So Robin is kind of in that same vein, even if it's approached from a different way. It's a touching tribute to a friend's child and the love she feels for them. How she and all the adults in their life work their damnedest to preserve their innocence and make that childhood possible and make it last as long as possible. It's full of all the specific details that are a trademark of her writing -- playing with dinosaurs covered in mud, the dragonflies over the bed, the swingset, the trampoline, etc. -- but paint the picture of childhood being experienced to its fullest, in sweetness.

Yet there's still the undercurrent of her older self hiding the pain through this love letter to the child: we all vowed to keep the secret from you (because we all know that life will not be this idyllic for you for long), you have no time for regrets (like you'll have as an adult like I do), you talk nonsense from your imagination because you have no idea (what life will have in store for you and how life may try to curb your lust for life), etc. And much like how part of Never Grow Up's poignancy is how it is contextualized by other parts of Speak Now (namely Dear John, Haunted, Last Kiss, etc.), Robin is also contextualized by other parts of TTPD (the heartbreak, the loss, the anger, the defeat). She wants this child to experience the joys of life as long as they can before the realities of life gradually carve off their wide-eyed innocence.

So it makes perfect sense why it's on the Denial playlist, like you said: it's because we strive to make the childhoods of our loved ones as magical as possible, even if it involves a little deception to get there. (Just think about how those who celebrate keep the Santa mystery going as long as they can; it's not to deliberately lie to kids, but to let them believe in the magic of the story to create memories.) I could probably make a link between the "secret" she helps to perpetuate for the child in Robin and the stories she told herself to keep the dreams alive in her head from her other experiences on the album, hence Denial. But. That's probably another post lol.

The song is SO tender and so loving and grabbed me from first listen. I've said it before, I'm not much of a crier until I have a breakdown (because I'm dead inside lmao) but Robin is one of the closest times I've come. And like many of her other songs it feels so cinematic to me, like I could picture the child running in the mud and pumping their legs on a swing and roaring through the yard in 24 fps and lens flares lol.

[azatas]

book recommendation tag game!

rules: recommend as many books as you like. please include genre and some basic information on it (either your words or a copy+paste synopsis). feel free to include cover art, a personal review, trigger warnings, and anything else! just don’t spoil the book!

tagged by @dekarios, ty!! 💜 i've been so bad about reading this past year, but i've been slowly getting back into it so it'll be nice to get some recs!

The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle

A fantasy novel about a lone unicorn who ventures out from the safety of her enchanted forest on a quest to learn why others of her kind have vanished. Joined along the way by a bumbling magician and an indomitable spinster, the unicorn learns all about the joys and sorrows of life and love before meeting her destiny and confronting the creature that would drive her kind to extinction.

both the book an the movie are childhood favourites of mine. the writing is beautiful, with themes of hope, self-discovery and loss. i love when a story portrays fantasy creatures as more than just big, highly intelligent animals. the unicorn isn't just a horse with a horn, she's something strange and beautiful, and the time she spends with mortals changes her permanently

Dracula by Bram Stoker

A gothic horror novel. When Jonathan Harker visits Transylvania to help Count Dracula with the purchase of a London house, he makes a series of horrific discoveries about his client.

not much to say about this one — it's dracula! it's a classic, and one of my all time favourites, and i'm always recommending it. so grateful to Dracula Daily for giving me a unique way to reread it every year

Unlikeable Female Characters: The Women Pop Culture Wants You to Hate by Anna Bogutskaya

How bitches, trainwrecks, shrews, and crazy women have taken over pop culture and liberated women from having to be nice. Female characters throughout history have been burdened by the moral trap that is likeability. Unlikeable Female Characters traces the evolution of highly memorable female characters, examining what exactly makes them popular, how audiences have reacted to them, and the ways in which pop culture is finally allowing us to celebrate the complexities of being a woman.

really great, easy to read nonfiction book about the history of female representation in movies and television through the lens of the women we're meant to dislike

How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell

When the technologies we use every day collapse our experiences into 24/7 availability, platforms for personal branding, and products to be monetized, nothing can be quite so radical as… doing nothing. Here, Jenny Odell sends up a flare from the heart of Silicon Valley, delivering an action plan to resist capitalist narratives of productivity and techno-determinism, and to become more meaningfully connected in the process.

another nonfiction. this one is cheating a little because i just started it, but i'd already recommend it to anyone! it's not just a "social media detox" self-help book, it's more of a deep dive into the deeper issues of a capitalist system that demands our attention 24/7 (at least so far lol)

tagging: @rivensbane, @blighted-elf, @tethrras & anyone else who'd like to do this! 💜

[twinsoftriumph]

Hello!

Any tips for drawing the twin's hair please ? Whenever i draw them, i always draw Sah's as like a spiky mountain with a curtain since i dunno how to draw tall hair yet

And Mekh...um-

Yeah

Dw Sah's hair has been evolved from mountain to Kagamine Len. Not sure if that's an improvement tho lmao-

hello! and hey for what it's worth, i also have my moments where i'm drawing their hair and i go "what.. is going on here" LMAO but also len's hair isn't all that different from spiky twin's so i'd say that's improvement! but here are some things i try to keep in mind when drawing their hair

ignore me emoting at the bottom. i would simplify their hair as a tear drop for sah and a half circle for mekh, but i also do not want them to appear Too flat. hence, the shape is a base to build off of. it helps us determine the direction of the hair, how we layer it, and the space it occupies. but sol, why a tear drop and not a triangle? to which i say We must consider that sah has hair at the Back of their head that also extends from the nape of their neck so it must be considered when drawing the hair as a whole

determining a point where the hair parts/where the bangs start from also helps us better understand how the hair flows from that point

mekh has a bang in the middle of their hair and some face-framing bangs along their jaw. you can still see the basic half-circle/dome shape of their hair, and you can see how the sections of hair logically appear to flow from the marked point on their head. the top of their head is round, the bottom of their hair is basically Flat and straight across (it's just a bob that's very flared out at the bottom) which is why the back isnt really visible from the front unless you're looking at them from a lower angle. case in point:

mekh as viewed from the back and slightly below. the traced line shows that the bottom of their hair is basically a circle lol

now sah is..... Certainly Something..... ngl im not so sure how to describe them but i will try. their bangs sweep right and i try to keep their hair in Big triangular sections to resemble the model more closely. the back of their hair Also sweeps right. id say the spikes of their hair run along the curve of the aforementioned teardrop, and you can basically use a differently-angled teardrop for the front bang as well. But Sol, you may ask again, why are some of the spikes labeled as being the Back of their hair?

ok this pic quality sucks but you get the idea. when viewed from the side, you will see that their hair also flows Back. you can also see the hair coming from the nape of the neck. sah's hair is actually like.. sorta shaggy and longer, pretty multi-layered in the hypothetical scenario that it isn't styled up which is where all those spikes come from. (i'd even say it'd extend lower than mekh's if unstyled since mekh's is so bluntly cut across.)

this got kinda long but some ending notes: honestly don't be afraid to stylize and you don't need to be perfectly on-model with their hair. there's nothing wrong with using references either, i have a bunch of screenshots of the elders from different angles and if you/a friend has the hair you can also just screenshot that to give you a guideline. and also don't be hard on yourself if it looks kinda off or anything because i have drawn a lot of spiky haired characters in my time and i still sometimes look at stuff i deemed Fit To Post and go "hm. i would have drawn that differently if i redrew it today."

but uh i mostly just hope this was helpful LOL. good luck drawing the twins!

[woundedheartwithin]

tagged by @sunlightfeeling thanks!

Name: Caitlin

Pronouns: she/her

Star Sign: Aries (insert Kratos screaming Ares gif here)

# of Siblings/Fun Facts About Them (If Any): one, my baby brother (nine years younger than me). Fun fact, he's getting his masters in history. He's also the coolest person I know and my best friend

# of Pets & Their Names: ah shit okay. Five dogs (Ollie, Callie, Lucy, KC, and Mickey), one cat (Georgie), two horses (Woody and Ebby), four chickens (no names), and 16 goats (Stormy, Flare, Rori, Phoebe, Monica, Chili, Bo, Teenykins, Babycakes, Yakko, Raditz, Rosie, Gia, Toodle Britches, Blue Boy, and Moony Man)

Fandoms: RGG (current), Ghostwire Tokyo, Death Stranding, Ghost of Tsushima, Far Cry 5. I'm also peripherally involved in BTS (meaning I make gifs but I don't really participate in the actual fandom outside of that).

Favorite Color: really any shade of blue, but if we're gonna get specific, I'm fond of cornflower blue

Favorite Song: is and always will be this one

Favorite Author (of anything readable - books, fanfics, zines, webtoons, whatever!): hmmm... I'm a big fan of Joe Hill. My favorite short story was written by Andy Weir. I have lots of favorite fanfic authors. But like... not really one author to rule them all, I guess. If I had to choose, I'd say Joe Hill

Favorite Fic Type: oh I cannot pick just one of these. angst, fluff, friends to lovers, enemies to lovers, enemies to friends to lovers, college au, magic au, smut, etc etc etc

Favorite Holiday: big fan of food, so y'know... thanksgiving, I guess

Do you have a partner (romantic, qpr, anything!)?: nah

Hobbies: many lol. music, gif making, art, video games, photography (virtual and irl), crochet, needle felting, writing. probably more tbh. I try very hard not to ever have A Thought, so I like to keep busy by immersing myself in various and often short lived hobbies

Fun Facts About You: hmmmm... I once submitted a design to a Trail of Painted Ponies contest and won like $200. I bought a really big telephoto lens with it and took pictures of the moon. I appeared on national news with my horse when I was in college. I have never had a drop of alcohol, nor do i have any interest in drinking ever. Likewise, I have never done an drug (outside of prescription stuff, naturally). I saw Vanilla Ice live at a food festival a few years back (yes, he did Ice Ice Baby and the ninja turtles theme song). I'll stop there I guess lol

Tagging: whoever wants to do this

[odetoviscera]

Liveblogging Mission: Impossible 3, Lens Flare-ily

BACK. BACK AGAIN. THE MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE. THE ETHAN: HUNTED MAYBE I ASSUME??? THEMATIC COLOUR BASED ON THE PARAMOUNT+ BANNER: COOL BLUE.

i think these are just getting longer. liveblogging below.

this movie released in 2006, when i was sixteen and therefore very likely to have seen it. i have the vague impression that i did. i still don’t remember anything specific about it, but we’ll see if any Buried Memories resurface during this viewing lol

paramount logo now comes with Vaguely Sinister Sounds

oop, i hear ethan getting electrocuted

and oh BOY is he looking rough. my boy :( we’re in media res i guess lol. “we’ve put an explosive charge in your head.” i bet you’re wondering how i got into this mess--

is that philip seymour hoffman??? yes it is, as our villain for the piece, one assumes. you don’t waste philip seymour hoffman on your cold open only villain who never shows up again lol

“you’re gonna tell me where the rabbit’s foot is or she dies” so firstly: obviously The Villain has made an accurate assessment of Ethan Hunt’s Survival Instincts. secondly: whomst? whomst this? “jules” apparently.

ethan goes from “we can talk like gentlemen”-- shot of a goon with a broken nose that i assume ethan gave him here, btw, which: split second of levity, thank you movie-- to RATTLING THE CHAINS ON HIS CHAIR LIKE A DOG ON A CHOKE CHAIN between the villain counting from two to three. i am. FULL OF CONCERN. movie has done a genuinely good job setting a High Stress Threshold from the word go lol

OOF villain just shot hostage lady in i think the knee? it went pretty fast. either way he is Not Impressed with ethan’s attempts at negotiation.

you know i am genuinely not sure ethan actually knows what villain guy wants? he seems to be legitimately losing his mind about hostage lady, i’m not sure he’d still be prevaricating by this point. sometimes he surprises me though!

HMM. got to count of ten, and i’m not sure if that was a gunshot or the Mission Impossible Match Lighting for the opening! will be interested to see if we’re going back in time or if this was the Trauma Setup for the film

so who’s our director on this-- oh it’s JJ ABRAMS? where is this in his filmography… huh, i guess this was his directorial debut in film. he’d previously worked as a director in tv on alias and lost, though-- alias is presumably what got him this one. okay, so i should expect lens flare and, ugh, “mystery boxes” lol

and the credits end with I THINK hostage lady jules opening her fridge. kind of hard to tell without the duct tape lol. but i believe this means we’re in Flashback Territory

oh ethan is kissing on her. look at that smile! one must imagine ethan hunt happy

okay her family’s over. awww, ethan: “it’s going well right?” i wonder if this is the first time he’s meeting her whole family or? regardless he is seeking Validation. insecure ethan hunt. bless.

oh it’s their engagement party! but yes it seems like this is the first time they’re meeting him. whirlwind romance?

“ethan doesn’t have his parents anymore either”-- i guess his mom died between movies?

dfklha;ldkfha;slkh ethan boring everyone at the party with his “i work at the department of transportation” cover lol

dfl;kkhas;ldkfha;lskh okay the ladies are in the kitchen gossiping and i am PRETTY SURE ethan is reading their lips from across the room lol

jules is a nurse! and apparently they met while skydiving or something lol, which based on ethan’s Freeclimbing Hobby i guess does track as something he’d do in his freetime, but DOES also open the possibility that they met on a job. i’m undecided on whether she Knows™ lol

this is all very wholesome, even without the cold open i’d know it was doomed

phone call “is this mr. ethan hunt” and he doesn’t Get It immediately despite the Sinister Tone bc he’s in Happy Ethan Cover Mode.

aaaand the penny drops. “all-expenses paid trip to mexico”

ethan: chucks the ice out the back door

ethan: oh nooo we ran out of ice i’ll go get some

listen i don’t know enough about cars to tell you what kind this is, but it is a Dad Car. ethan hunt is engaging Dad Mode before he even gets married

omg they even have a DOG. does the dog die??? hang on i have to know this before i become emotionally attached-- okay per doesthedogdie.com NO. THE DOG IS SAFE.

anyway i can’t believe The Local 7/11 is where ethan has meetings with his handler lol. oh hm ethan is Training Operatives now instead of working, apparently. this seems like a positive career move! i’m sure it won’t last!

“agent farris” is missing-- that’s not nyah is it? …no, nyah is nordoff-hall. someone else ethan trained, presumably. (speaking of which, what happened with nyah?)

and of course ethan can’t resist at least Retrieving the mission brief hidden in the disposable camera lol. oh good lord, i figured it would just be on the film reel, no, this thing has an IRIS SCANNER, someone introduce me to imf’s q, who is the silly bastard inventing these

oh we got a name for villain guy now, “owen davian”-- has farris hostage, they aren’t disavowing her bc they want her intel, apparently.

new team!

declan gormley-- sorry about your name my guy-- is an “aviation machinist” (so probably our pilot) and a sysop engineer, so probably also our hacker

zhen lei is a “lan computer networker”-- …sure-- with “combat assault skills” which should come in handy even if ethan is now specced more for soldiering than he used to be

luther! love to see you but why haven’t you retired with your bajillion dollars yet. also why are there so many hackers on this team. anyway, he’s also got “artillery equipment specialist” listed in his credentials, which i assume is from that one time he fired a bazooka at a car chasing ethan last movie lol

“this message, let’s call it my excellent engagement gift to you--” dhf;lakhd;flkhas dude. no.

i will say the latest imf bigwig seems less infuriating than the last two, even if he is Dragging Ethan Out Of Retirement. it is an “if you choose to accept it”! i mean ethan will, inevitably, accept it, bc he’s Himself, but there’s at least a hypothetical out.

ethan’s having nightmares :( 

and yep, now he’s telling julia he’ll have to “go on a business trip”. although he tells her it’ll only be for a night, which is probably over-optimistic of him.

LUTHER!!!! he is exuding Competence and Confidence which is an interesting change of pace from him, lol, he’s often been a bit Anxious in the previous two movies. not about his skills, but about like. The Inherent Dangers Of The Job. i guess this is Older Wiser Luther lol

and it looks like we’re going STRAIGHT into the extraction, no setup, so uh. i’m not sure it’s gonna go well. also, first of the Really Noticeable Lens Flares lol

i will say, egregious lens flares notwithstanding lol, this is actually really well lit for a night scene. you remember when films used to LIGHT for dark scenes instead of just doing them IN the dark? those were the days

okay this is an interesting exchange between ethan and luther. luther says “you know i got your six.” and ethan’s response is just “hey, man. that’s your job.” which, objectively speaking, is TRUE-- but there’s a beat afterwards where they just look at each other before they move on. i’m not sure if this is some kind of unresolved tension from ethan having gotten out of field work for a while, if this is luther alluding to ethan’s tendency from the last movie to go into situations without the POSSIBILITY of backup, if luther is trying to remind ethan that he’s got a Full (and Fully Trained) team for possibly the first time since the first movie, if luther is trying to remind ethan that they’re FRIENDS and being kind of gently rebuffed bc this is a high-stakes field operation… unclear.

anyway luther has gotten Four Computer-Operated Guns that he can run from the safety of his little combat van setup, lol.

lkafd;lkfh;alsh okay listen. luther has heat-vision on the building. okay. i’ll buy it. luther locates a heat-signature that appears to be sitting in a slightly reclined position that looks uncomfortable and probably like restraint-- cool! that’s probably our hostage! but the computer then announcing “target match” with “VASCULAR ID CONFIRMED”-- that! is not! how that works!

okay so real quick: vascular pattern recognition is real, blood vessel patterns are about as unique as fingerprints and iris patterns, but significantly harder to counterfeit bc they’re Beneath The Skin. but you DO NOT identify vascular patterns by heat signature, they ARE NOT analyses of the entire vascular system of the body, they usually FUNCTION LIKE FINGERPRINT SCANNERS, bc they assess the blood vessel patterns beneath the skin of a fingertip. it’s a photographic comparison between the database pattern and the registered pattern, which is scanned with infrared leds and fancy cameras. it’s only more secure than a fingerprint bc of the Beneath The Skin part. don’t ask me why i know this, i write fanfiction, you just pick these things up. THIS IS NOT HOW IT WORKS!!!

look at some more lens flare. also i need you to know that the yellow lights on the left side are flickering in time with the fluttering cymbal in the score.

fh;alksdhf;lakkh luther, mid-op, “at some point we gotta go over this whole getting married thing.” luther is demanding to know if julia is good enough for his ethan lol i’m guessing he’s grumpy he wasn’t consulted

hmm, they’re drugging farris with something, “give her 10ccs more”-- oh hey, the one creepily petting her hair is the goon with the future broken nose, btw. deserved.

blow some charges and luther is lighting this place UP with his four guns lol. this seems like it might be SLIGHTLY risky with ethan and a hostage inside, but i assume they’re accounted for in the targeting ranges

ethan takes down one goon with a short burst, so he’s upgraded from hand guns to something more robust. he just gets Shootier and Shootier each movie lol

farris gets an adrenaline shot so that she can participate in her own rescue, i assume-- hopefully that doesn’t interact too badly with whatever she’s drugged with

i haven’t seen enough of the new teammates to really get a sense of them yet but zhen admittedly looks cool as hell moving through the facility towards her objective lol. i can’t get a decent screengrab of this bc the lights are flashing constantly, the cuts are too fast, and paramount+ won’t let me scroll frame by frame but just trust me that she is cool and we love a woman in military gear. also she VERY narrowly avoids getting blown up by a grenade by flinging herself out a window.

uh-oh, farris is telling ethan to turn off his transmitter so she can talk to him Privately. that’s ominous, especially Mid-Rescue while the building is full of holes

they were interrupted by a firefight, and farris’ adrenaline has definitely kicked in! looks like ethan trained her well

the intel (?) that zhen came for has been slightly blown up, hopefully still useful

fkha;ldkfh;lakshdf;lkah

lindsey: i’m out, how many rounds you got?

ethan, making The Most Concerned Unconcerned Face: …………Enough

also he makes like a thousand tiny flinching faces while he’s gearing up to take his One Shot, which Must Kill This Man bc “enough” means “one bullet”, which makes it extremely clear how much his blase “now i’m out :|”

after said shot does kill said man is a FUCKING MASK. ethan hunt knows half his reputation is cool one-liners after he does something absurd and that that’s the part people will remember, and he plays into that ON PURPOSE bc his previous job role was BEING THE FACE. i am begging everyone on earth to remember that this man’s SECOND career is soldier, and he came from THE THEATRE OF ESPIONAGE. he is a dramatic bitch INTENTIONALLY to ACCOMPLISH SOMETHING.

one INCREDIBLY hot extraction on the top of luther’s van later, and everybody’s getting on the helicopter without farris getting to have her solo talk with ethan-- aaaaand now she’s complaining of a sudden intense headache, which probably means her head is about to explode ala “we’ve put an explosive charge in your head” from the cold open

…uhoh, declan-- i was right, he is our pilot-- is hesitating to take off, and i hear another helicopter approaching-- yeah, that’s a gunship. and alas it does not get taken out by the van blowing up, so they’re being pursued-- through a field of wind turbines which is an interesting visual AND an interesting tactic by declan

oh my god so much lens flare though lol. the music is getting increasingly ominous

they've located the bomb in farris' head! according to ethan’s little magic scanner device, it contains at least nitroglycerin and magnesium, and it looks about the size of a pill, so… possibly her head does not explode as such, just. burn from the inside out.

declan doing some VERY tight maneuvering to dodge some missiles. luther is leaning out the side of the helicopter with a handgun apparently hoping he can use it to shoot down a gunship lol. MAYBE if he can get a shot through the windscreen???

….okay so ethan’s plan for dealing with the explosive is to shock farris with the defibrillator-- i’m kind of unclear on whether the plan is to use the defib on the chest as intended or like. on her HEAD. hopefully the former lol

second missile fired-- ah, okay, it looks like luther’s gun was actually a flare gun, he’s just fired it in an attempt to divert the missile ala firing chaff. which works! shears a turbine blade off into a field of very alarmed sheep lol

third missile lock, and declan just went BETWEEN THE BLADES of a wind turbine, which the following gunship really should not have attempted lol, it got crunched like tinfoil. we love to see that imf competence on display-- which their AGENTS typically do! their organization as a whole, less so

aaand the aed’s thirty-second charging window was just slightly too long and farris’ charge has detonated in her brain. relatively bloodless, although her eyes get kind of fucked up, which i will do you the favour of not screencapping

this is the face of ethan hunt about to go on the warpath, by the way

ethan hunt returning to his nice domestic life after a mission that ended in complete failure despite everyone technically doing a spectacular job

aaand putting the mask on for the almost-wife. there was a MOMENT where he wasn’t caught up and he still looked lost and devastated, and she caught it-- bc of course she did-- and he couldn’t tell her what it was about, so-- The Patented Ethan Hunt Grin comes on. this is almost extra tragic? bc like… clearly he doesn’t want his spy life to overlap with his wife life. understandable (hi cold open) and probably unavoidable, given she wouldn’t have clearance to know 99% of it anyway. but just the emotional distance between Party Ethan who seemed genuinely happy and excited and nervous in that Border Collie way-- meeting new people! being nice to them! getting his girlfriend’s brother a beer! “it’s going well, right?”-- and this ethan, who is papering over his hurt bc he can’t afford to show her what it’s about.

and you can see she doesn’t entirely buy it, either. if she survives this movie, that’s going to become an ongoing source of conflict.

oh i take it back, apparently laurence fishburne is the REAL IMF brass of this movie, and he sucks just as much as the rest of them lol. “i read your training brief on agent farris. the words you used were “beyond capable.” that still stand, mr hunt?” fuck you dude, like ya’ll don’t lose agents left and right around here

oof, yep, the intel did get fried by the grenade, which is not making the imf any happier. not, to be clear, that i want the imf to be happy. fuck the imf ethan, GO FREELANCE, these people have sucked in EVERY MOVIE

oof, farris was his First Ever recommendation for field duty. no wonder this is hitting him like a train

hmm, ethan just got a call at farris’ funeral asking for a “mr. kelvin” which must be one of his cover identities, since he answers to it. apparently farris-- or “farris”-- sent him a postcard from berlin. the postcard has no text-- it has a “microdot”, per luther’s examination, but there’s nothing on THAT either. Mysterious™

luther just asked if there was anything going on between ethan and farris-- honestly, fair question, given his track record with hooking up with the ladies he works with lol, although in at least one case that was a honeytrap working on him lol-- and ethan reports that she was “like his little sister”, which-- aww, and also :( 

fla;ksdhf;laskh;lkh ethan @ luther “remember when you were sweet? can you remember that far back?” ETHAN IT WAS AT MOST TWO MOVIES AGO. arguably last movie, no i am not over his little terrified teary voice when ethan is doing dumb shit lol

new character! benji, who i have gathered from @leupagus is part of the Ongoing Team-- currently he is apparently a desk tech at imf who is complaining that the hard drives they recovered are fried lol. ethan already knows him, which is interesting.

flkahdl;fkhasl he did recover something from the Fried Drives anyway lol, so i guess he just wanted to complain. specifically he’s uncovered that davian is going to be at the vatican, and also that he’s there to get The Rabbit’s Foot (of cold open fame)

benji is one of those “tell a rambling story to get around to the point” people lol

interesting, ethan is trying to get musgrave-- the guy i originally thought was the imf brass of the movie, not technically ethan’s handler since ethan technically isn’t doing field work lol, i think he called himself a branch manager or something at some point-- “deniability” on the operation he’s about to undertake based on benji’s find. meaning he’s trying to protect musgrave’s reputation after it took a ding from the failure to recover farris.

ethan letting julia know he’s going to be “away on business” again, this time for TWO days. he interrupted her at work to have this conversation on, apparently, the roof of the hospital she works at, which is an interesting choice lol. she is Not Happy About It and asking for explanations which i can’t imagine he’s going to give her.

alskdhf;laskhdf;lkash;lkh she asks for reassurance that their relationship is real and he’s like “you know what fuck it let’s get married Right Now in the hospital chapel”. they have to use some little plastic rings he got in the gift shop or something lol. adorable. i’m love them.

aaaaand time to break into the vatican! plan: kidnap davian (and also get his buyers, which i’m assuming means ethan will be pulling out a Davian Face Mask at some point)

this is their hilariously analogue solution to not being able to loop a static shot to a vatican cctv camera. hopefully ethan didn’t get a bird in the frame lol

also he’s now dressed up as a priest and i would love to know how uncomfortable it was to keep those robes wrapped up inside the worker jumpsuit he was wearing earlier

i’m guessing this is zhen who’s underwater breaking into a vent, and it looks like declan has had his own costume change into a tourist!

actually come to think of it, how does this whole team from the failed op have time to do ethan’s off-the-books operation? how frequently do imf agents get work? we know the imf keeps tabs on them, from that time they tracked ethan down during his freeclimbing vacation, so the imf surely Knows they’re all in the vatican, and that would be suspicious even without whatever equipment they requisitioned-- surely they don’t just own all of this shit themselves-- and especially with them all having been on a failed op together like. last week. so either the imf is spectacularly incompetent-- totally possible-- or they’re aware of this operation and tacitly approve bc it means they can just DOUBLE disavow everyone if it goes wrong

oh it was luther underwater! i assumed he was in the van. this begs the question of where zhen is-- ah, i hear her teasing declan lol-- they have her in a Very pretty car, although bright orange makes me suspect this is a decoy rather than a getaway vehicle lol

alksdhf;lkash;lkah luther and ethan just blew a hole in a wall of the vatican catacombs. way to destroy some irreplaceable art history boys lol

ma’am you didn’t have to slay me like this but thank you

ooooh are we going to get to see how they make the plastic face masks???

dflaksjdf;lkahs luther is trying to patch things up with ethan about him being snippy about ethan’s engagement. WAIT until he hears ethan is already married lol.

luther: a normal relationship isn’t possible for people like us ethan: i don’t agree with that luther: then i’m smarter than you

LUTHER YOU DON’T HAVE TO ROAST HIM LIKE THAT (pls continue it’s very entertaining)

The Facemaskification Process-- put a big plastic sheet over the dummy head, input a bunch of photos of the target face at various angles, i’m unclear if these are lasers or saws but Something cuts away the plastic to match

luther has ethan as a captive audience while they prep for him to pretend to be davian, so he’s continuing to harangue ethan about his relationship lol. “23 months” is his estimate for how long it’ll last, which is Suspiciously Specific, luther, you projecting a bit babe?

Continued Facemaskification: airbrushing the colours from the same photos. this raises some questions about lighting-- both in terms of the lighting the source photos are taken in-- does the mask hold up to the same scrutiny under different lighting conditions than the source photos?-- and things like subsurface scatter, which presumably wouldn’t work with a mask that’s built like this one seems to be. obviously you can paint a facsimile of subsurface scatter, but again, that won’t hold up under various lighting conditions. many questions remain.

lol luther is continuing to try to talk ethan out of this by telling him how much he’s going to screw up the girl, and ethan finally breaks in with “jules and i got married two days ago.”-- which is an interesting timeline note, by the way-- and luther after a beat is just “..........congratulations.”

zhen has just dumped red wine on davian to divert him to a bathroom lol

very creepy ethan lol

ah, and now we get a look at how the vocoder gets set up the first time-- he’s having davian read a phonetic passage to collect voice samples to clone. idk how accurate that was to 2006, but voice cloning ai is actually pretty achievable today-- unfortunately, for deepfake reasons.

ksdhf;lkashd;lflkah okay so post-kidnapping switcheroo the cover to get ethan/”davian” away from his bodyguards is to have zhen offer to “wash his shirt”/offer sexual favours and having “davian” take her up on it lol. which, i’ll grant you, he seems plausibly like that kind of creep and zhen looks. uh. listen we’d all follow her to a hotel room is what i’m saying.

fajhdlfas;lkh the center console in zhen’s car rolls back so they can all exfil into the sewers-- meaning the bodyguards can’t even follow her car. “what’s up”

and then they BLOW UP THE CAR, which is going to a) have vatican security Swarming, and b) davian’s bodyguards (and anyone else who knows him) will now think he’s dead!

lovely full team shot zipping away on a speedboat. ethan has “dad taking the kids on a joyride” energy lol

and we’re only halfway into the movie so can’t wait to see how this unqualified success goes spectacularly tits-up

fakhdl;fkhas;ldkh musgrave just claimed to be aware the operation was happening, presumably to give ETHAN cover from the brass for going off-book (well, also to get credit)-- you boys need to coordinate better on who is covering for who

davian Starts Off this interrogation with “do you have a wife, girlfriend? bc i’m going to hurt her” which like. accurate from the cold open. apparently he thinks his best strategy is to Antagonize his captor, which, well, it’s a choice lol

ethan responds, as you might expect, by threatening to dump davian out of a moving plane if he doesn’t get the information he wants. luther has to talk him down-- “this isn’t you”, which is interesting, bc i would have said that was true TWO movies ago, m:i ethan avoided conflict like the plague, but m:i 2 ethan MIGHT have pulled a stunt like this. and of course now in mi:3, ethan is Emotionally Compromised by losing his protege and having a Very New Wife to worry about. which might ultimately be the real reason that romantic relationships outside of the intelligence community are unwise.

luther ultimately does talk him down, but it’s a close thing. (and davian a) doesn’t talk, and b) heard ethan’s first name when luther was pleading with him not to lose his single strand of chill.)

davian gets picked up in an armoured vehicle into imf custody, but given we’re following its progress i doubt he’ll stay in it long enough to get to a detainment facility

on the drive luther has apparently gotten farris’ microdot file decrypted and sent back to him! let’s see what was so important-- OOOOOH, she traced a call to davian from laurence fishburne’s office at the imf. can’t trust any of these motherfuckers

and yep, the convoy’s going-- looks like they’re being attacked by missiles of some kind. (ah, there’s a fighter (? very small silhouette) in the air, that’s probably where the missiles came from, so air-to-surface rather than rocket-propelled) lots of civilian traffic also getting caught as collateral, and they’re on a bridge, so could very well be a collapse coming. 

jeez, and a HELICOPTER. they’ve certainly got air coverage locked down

(zhen and declan are both here and trying to help, but i mean. options are pretty slim.)

ethan shouts at all the civilians to get down as the heli squad starts firing indiscriminately onto the bridge-- at least once woman gets shot, luther goes out to try to get her into cover, and ethan takes off to try to get a good shot to do something Useful with his handgun Versus A Helicopter with multiple armed combatants onboard

oh interesting, he’s trying to get davian out of the truck-- presumably to hold him hostage so the helicopter will stop shooting at civilians. no dice, they just shot the driver, and they make those trucks hard to break into for, you know, the obvious reasons

fa;lkdhf;lah ethan’s got to crawl back into his Flipped Truck, which is one good shove away from falling through a hole in the bridge, to get a gun that can actually do shit to a helicopter

heli squad has dropped onto the bridge to extract davian, this foam presumably will either explode or eat through the side-- huh, looks like it sort of flash-froze, i assume so they can shatter the metal somehow

ah okay, the “fighter” is a drone being piloted from the helicopter

ethan nearly gets blown up and DOES get to bodyslam a car. this after the car crash from the initial missile impacts. this boy is coming out with broken ribs and a concussion minimum, he’s lucky his wife is a nurse

ethan gets his new gun put together and manages to take out the drone, which ALMOST but not quite dings one of the helicopters (which, i hadn’t realized there were two until now, scenes have been a little disjointed) on its way down

ethan makes a FLYING leap across the destroyed bridge-- gratuitous lens flare again lol-- unfortunately doesn’t quite make his jump, manages to hold on to some rubble so he doesn’t tumble into the water but it slows his pursuit of davian, who is now being hustled to a helicopter

ethan manages to fire a few rounds at the helicopter on its way by, but no dice, davian is in the wind (literally). ethan calls home right away bc i guess he assumes davian can have her kidnapped Instantaneously-- which apparently is true, bc julia isn’t home and her brother (apparently crashing at their house lol) asks ethan if “his friend” found him and that he told “some english guy” that julia might know where ethan was and to try her at the hospital. soooo great job rick, your sister’s maybe gonna die.

ethan has requisitioned the least-crashed car on the bridge, which seems fair under the circumstances, although i’m sure the owner-- if they aren’t shot-- will have other opinions

oh julia’s not kidnapped yet! she’s still at work, that’s why she’s not answering ethan’s calls

okay the receptionist at the hospital knowing ethan well enough to respond to his very abrupt “I Need To Talk To Julia” with “hey honey, i’ll transfer you” is adorable

…Some English guy just stuck a Mysterious Yellow Dot (which will make her pass out momentarily i’m sure) to julia’s arm and her reaction is just :)? what’s that? sweetheart… no… develop an aversion to people putting things on you without your permission…

oof, ethan literally passes right by Julia On A Gurney being taken out of the hospital, but of course Some English Guy has her under a sheet, so he doesn’t realize

and davian calls to give ethan a “julia’s life for the rabbit’s foot” 48 hour ultimatum. problematic given ethan still doesn’t know what the hell that is, although he does at least tell ethan that the location is in the case they got with davian.

aaand of course this is the moment the imf rolls up to take ethan into custody, so yet again he’s about to be at odds with his own organization. i’ll say it again, ethan: GO. FREELANCE.

this is really gonna cut into his 48 hour timeline also why the fuck have they MUZZLED HIM

laurence fishburne of course is saying Some Bullshit, musgrave of course is nodding along like “yes sir of course sir ethan hunt is a traitor sir”-- ACTUALLY, stray thought. farris didn’t hear laurence fishburne talk to davian, she just knows the call came from his office, which seems to be the same building musgrave works in. musgrave making calls from his boss’ office, perhaps?

hmm, musgrave is mouthing to ethan silently so ethan can read his lips without the rest of the office picking it up, and then slips him something to get out of his restraints. this does not make him less suspicious, if he’s working with davian he has a motive to want ethan out and hunting the rabbit’s foot.

captain america stole his elevator fight scene from ethan hunt. except ethan’s doing it while still half-tied to a gurney, so who really wins here?

escape into the elevator shaft, shockingly well-lit lol

fha;lkdhf;alskhdlk brassel (laurence fishburne, i’ve finally learned his name lol) hearing His Own Voice giving orders he hasn’t given over the radio. ethan works fast. why he has a voice strip with brassel’s voice encoded on its easily to hand i don’t know, but it’s better than last movie when he did a full outfit swap, vocoder, and face mask switcheroo with the villain’s not-boyfriend

oh huh looks like the imf facility is actually underneath the department of transportation, that’s where that cover story comes from lol. df;lkha;ldkfh;lak and ethan ditches his radio next to a boombox so the only thing on the imf security channel is sister sledge playing “we are family” lol

musgrave apparently directed the entire team to the same shanghai apartment he told ethan to go to on Rabbit’s Foot duty

the team settles in to debate their entrance strategies and ethan, Of Course, chooses the roof access lol. he’s gonna Jump from one building to the target building. well, swing, but still. and the basejump from the building to exfil lol

we are at 2 hours until the Julia Dies ultimatum

ethan looking very brooding and cool, and presumably doing math in his head about the velocity and angles he needs to hit if he doesn’t want to unceremoniously splatter on a roof. luther gives him a pep talk which is very matter-of-fact and does not allow for the plan to go sideways, which, like. it will, but we appreciate the solidarity. luther, yet again, for best boy.

awww, ethan thanks luther for coming and luther’s response is “that’s my job.” CALL BACK TO THE WEIRD MOMENT FROM THE FARRIS OP, whatever that weird tension was-- probably about julia, considering the rest of the movie-- it has been Resolved in the midst of this Crisis.

julia if you survive this movie you should have No Doubts about this man’s love for you ever again lol

oof, at the terminus of the swing he still has like a twenty foot drop ONTO A GLASS ROOF which he is now sliding directly down. ethan. babe. i know time is short and options are limited but pls.

catches himself on the gutter and literally says “...okay” in the most strangled voice lol. oh, more lens flare. honestly there’s been so much i can’t even call it out specifically lol

luther: he made it! he made it! ….i knew he’d make it I TOLD YOU HE WAS STILL SWEET ETHAN.

we aren’t even seeing ethan’s actual theft of the rabbit’s foot, we’re watching the team outside wait for him and count down the minutes, which is a fascinating choice that i actually really like. we’ve seen ethan do impressive spy shit, none of that’s new. watching the new team react to ethan’s radio silence, that IS new. luther is trying to maintain chill. declan is Fretting. zhen is apparently PRAYING under her breath. (apparently a prayer she’d say to bring home her Lost Cat as a kid, which-- love you zhen, pls stick around for next movie.) flkah;dlkfha;lkh aww, declan asks her to teach him the Lost Cat Prayer, presumably bc he needs Some Kind Of Distraction-- they get interrupted by ethan finally coming back on the line (things have, predictably, gone pear-shaped) but it’s a cute moment

so, ethan’s base jumping From The Roof was already going to be cutting it very close on the lower limits of height for that-- he instead jumps out a window like halfway down the building, which means if he hits the ground he will do it Hard-- so instead he crashes into the window of, i think, a different building, although it’s unclear how intentional that was given how much drag he was fighting

oop, his chute is about to drag him back out the window lol. having been dragged around campus by my own portfolio getting caught in a wind tunnel-- my sympathies, ethan, you belong to the north wind now

his chute catches on a streetlight, which does him the favour of not splattering him, although it does drop him into oncoming traffic-- that truck driver is a hero for not obliterating him or spinning out and slamming into every other vehicle on the road btw

team picks him up and they’re now in a highspeed car chase with building security while ethan tries to make the call to davian to tell him he’s got the rabbit’s foot

oh noooo zhen got hit. that better be a flesh wound ma’am we’ve had enough women dying this franchise thanks

apparently ethan decided the angles INSIDE the car weren’t good enough and he’s sick of being shot at. being the Best Spy, he of course manages to blow the pursuit vehicle's tires, so they're home free!

musgrave still so suspicious. “go secure” ethan says, “we are” musgrave says, sir. that’s your cellphone and you didn’t do literally anything, if that’s secure i’ll EAT your phone. anyway, ethan is calling to tell him that he’s tagged the rabbit’s foot so that the imf can retrieve it after ethan makes the exchange with davian. which, if anyone at the imf is both competent and not a traitor-- A BIG ASK, I AM AWARE-- means the cold open should have some cavalry coming, hypothetically

the team Reluctantly lets ethan go off to make his Solo Handoff/get captured

ethan at the drop point gets into a vehicle and on instructions from Some English Guy also Drinks A Mystery Vial, which i’m sure will go great for him

interestingly it appears to be making him hallucinate being intimate with julia, and then we wake up in the cold open!

so yeah, it seems like ethan legitimately thought he’d given the rabbit’s foot to davian and his confusion and prevariation here are bc he legitimately doesn’t know how to fix this

meanwhile the team has arrived home to uh. This on the landing strip

well. it WAS indeed a gunshot. and julia does now seem to be dead.

One Must Imagine Ethan Hunt Happy

and in comes musgrave i KNEW IT you little rat

oh ooof. “it’s complicated. you can’t just open the canister. we had to be sure you brought the real thing. now we know.” so LITERALLY he brought you what you wanted, and you killed julia For Show.

unfathomable that ethan hunt is not fully deranged by the end of this movie. i would be eating musgrave’s bone marrow by the end of the runtime.

…gross, but apparently that is some other RANDOM woman-- actually i think it’s davian’s other bodyguard, which, not great benefits there-- they just killed with a julia mask on? i guess that’s good for ethan but also What The Fuck???

ah, bc musgrave is using her as further leverage to find out What Farris Knew.

flkha;lfkhd;lkfahs;lhkds musgrave is complaining that brassel is an “affirmative action poster boy” DUDE YOUR MOTIVE IS JUST RACISM? RACISM AND JEALOUSY? YOU WHINY LITTLE PISSBABY SIT DOWN

“and when the sand settles, our country will do what it does best. cleanup. infrastructure. democracy wins.” god were people really buying that in 2006. i guess that was only five years after 9/11, nationalism was High and the bush admin was still in place. anyway, Yet More Racism from this twerp

ethan asks for a phone call to confirm that julia is alive. amusingly, the fact that julia can remember what the lake is called means it’s Much Less Likely to actually be her on the phone, given she couldn’t remember it during The Party

i see now why they muzzled him lol

huh, ethan called benji as his first point of contact once he’s knocked out musgrave and gotten out of his restraints

benji goes from “you’re on interpol’s most wanted! i’m hanging up!” to “i’m going to lose my citizenship over you” in the space of like thirty seconds and ethan doesn’t even say PLEASE lol

lol benji is being ethan’s on-call gps service. he is doing this At Work, by the way, at the organization that currently wants ethan’s head on a stick, so he keeps having to pause to make Pleasant Office Noises at his coworkers lol. also featuring: The Ethan Sprint

jkhfjkhskdfak a couple of little old chinese men took one look at ethan gasping and bleeding in the doorway and ratted out the villain’s location

aaand while looking around he promptly knocks a bunch of shit off a table. guess those concussions are finally catching up to you, babe. but we’ve found julia!

unfortunately at exactly THAT moment, davian remembers he put a bomb in ethan’s head

well, if he can win this fight with davian while his brain is about to fry, at least his wife is a nurse! she can probably shock him both to death and back to life! if there’s an aed around! which i haven’t seen one, but for plot reasons, probably is somewhere!

ethan has, as per tradition, engaged Emergency Fight Mode at the threat to a loved one! i don’t know why these villains keep threatening people he cares about, it goes SO MUCH WORSE than when they just threaten him

dfl;kha;ldkfha;l okay rolling davian on top of him and into the path of an oncoming vehicle is novel and definitely ends the fight quickly, which is good given ethan has a couple of minutes before his brain melts. also honestly refreshing after the like fifteen-minute fight with the main antagonist of the last movie

fha;lkdhfl;aksh;l ethan hands julia his gun, tells her it’s a very accurate close range weapon, and then immediately follows up with “don’t point it at me” lol

he’s a good teacher! giving julia instructions about how to use the gun that mirror things she’s done at home-- “shove the new mag in like the batteries in the flashlight in the kitchen”. also he is clearly setting up a diy electrocution, which, well, it’s not like he’s got a better option, apparently this don’t use defibrillators at whatever sketchy back alley clinic this is

and of course AS SOON as julia flips the switch to short out the bomb/shock him to death, someone starts shooting at her so she can’t immediately start resuscitation. so ethan is now lying dead on the floor (it’s! temporary!!!) and julia has been promoted to Action Girl!

aaaand since she’s a brain death time limit with ethan, she does NOT wait for the goon to come to her, she just figures out where he is, pops up, and empties an ENTIRE mag into him lol

oooh! and then turned around and did the same to musgrave! well done ma’am, marriage material indeed

now the Sad CPR

also ethan goes from Dead to Firing Position in the space of One Heartbeat

lol sees musgrave dead on the floor and his response is “you did that? …wow” in this very admiring tone lol while julia is still reeling from him not being dead

and yeah ethan kind of has to spill the beans to her at this point lol

apparently the white house is now asking for ethan directly and by name

hey, julia gets to meet the team!

and off they go on their honeymoon!

alright MISSION IMPOSSIBLE 3 COMPLETE. about as much lens flare as i expected, only “mystery box” that i detected was that no one ever fessed up about what the fuck “the rabbit’s foot” was supposed to be for, but for the purposes of this particular film it doesn’t really matter, it’s just a plot macguffin.

i did not, in fact, remember a single goddamn thing about this movie lol

ethan gets physically put through a wringer in this film, this might be the most cumulatively beaten up he’s been so far. i didn’t make a count or anything, but he’s got probably more than one concussion, multiple broken ribs, has to have sprained every joint in his body, wouldn’t be surprised if he’s fucked up his spine, and also he was dead for a few minutes after electrocuting himself with an unknown voltage.

on the other hand, this is the happiest we might have ever seen him! also the most despairing. dichotomy of ethan. i’m glad julia didn’t die! not just bc she’s good for ethan, she also seems cool in her own right, i’m hoping that unlike nyah she’ll stick around for further movies.

actually i would like to keep this whole team! declan and zhen were fun in the screentime they got. benji was fun and they could use somebody at the home office who isn’t a Complete Twit.

i still think they should all go freelance. luther’s done it before! and the imf keeps fucking ethan in particular over! and apparently their ranks are absolutely RIDDLED with traitors who want to work with black marketeers lol.

i’m not sure ethan’s Ethan Stunts here should contribute to the Does Ethan Have A Death Wish conversation, bc in this particular film most of them are motivated by Trying To Save Julia and he’s clearly at the end of his mental and emotional rope from the moment she’s taken. it is, admittedly, probably not healthy for him to hinge so much of his sense of security and comfort on one person, but it’s too late now.

8.5/10, the style was a little too frenetic to keep track of the action all the time and the lens flare was exactly as much too much as you’d expect, but the story was solid except for the rabbit’s foot contrivance being a little too meta-textually irrelevant for my tastes and there was a lot of good Pathos in ethan finally trying and failing to settle down, and good performances from everybody.

would watch zhen swan around in a red dress again.

[suuho]

Top 3 kpop mvs from the 2000s

hey!! thank you so much [: this got long, so without further ado...

1. bigbang, haru haru.

it's literally this and then [BRICK WALL] like, this music video literally changed the trajectory of kpop, it became a viral moment that lasted until, like, 2010. it catapulted bigbang to international stardom. i desperately cannot stress enough how this music video and song is a moment, and a high, that kpop is still chasing to this day and that they might never reach again. absolutely, purely organic genius. the brilliance of haru haru is how absolutely earnest it is with its very own melodrama. the acting. the conflict. oh my god, that story line. this is maybe the greatest kpop music video ever, just because it is impossible to replicate now. this changed lives. it did a lot to put kpop on the map. and it is just perfect as it is, and as a time capsule. i watched this approximately 3655467287 times in 2010 alone. i think people who know how iconic and influential bigbang are only ever choose fantastic baby or bang bang bang as examples, but haru haru is what turned them into yg's biggest superstars before inflated numbers, streams, etc. it's hard to explain if you weren't there, to be honest. on another note, i am pretty sure that gtop fight was my gay awakening, lol. another bigbang entry that just missed the mark because it was released in 2010: tell me goodbye. literally a masterpiece. narrative! CINEMATOGRAPHY! that top verse i can still recite word for word! a perfect marriage of everything that makes japanese kpop offerings impeccable. i carried a picture of that gdragon in my school diary until i graduated high school, lol. (choices, i know)

2. 2pm, heartbeat

i wanted to go with mirotic first, but i think heartbeat did the same things done in mirotic, just better. first of all, this music video does not rely on any narrative or any gimmicks, and it is still so well done. the angles and camera pans here, the obstructed shots, the lens flares. the contrast between the industrial gray and the eery, hollow white set. that choreography. this is so purely, undistilled 2nd gen kpop but in, like, a gothic fantasia. the atmosphere of this video is almost creepy which serves the song perfectly, and it is carried by performance, lights, and camera alone. i would have almost chosen again&again, because it does have a story line, but i actually think heartbeat's directive choices are so much better, and far superior. it is such an interesting music video just because how it is shot in a way that makes it visually appealing while simultaneously a little off-kilter. amazing. no notes. 100000/10 beast is not here, by the way, because if i would have chosen anything, it would have been shock, but heartbeat is once again the better offering of a similar style.

3. g-dragon, heartbreaker

one more masterclass. i am sorry, but this is another one of those insane offerings. the production design here is off the charts, the checkerboard heart eye-make up and bleached hair immediately became a signature hallmark look, the choreography is so memorable yet perfectly in sync with g-dragon's artistic persona. this music video felt insanely expensive back in 2009, and deviated from the nitty-gritty of that era. it was colorful, catchy, and immediately, insanely recognizable. replay factor? through the roof, especially with that breathe teaser making it a two-piece. also, the apple imagery was just another stroke of genius. like, this felt like watching a superstar emerge into the scene with that intro. "I'm all by myself, but it's all good," like yeah, sure, is this cringy as hell? absolutely. could anyone else pull this off in the year of our lord 2024? never, but it works perfectly here. the sci-fi influences. the masked dancers. oh my god. we will never have something this earnest, unironic, serious and yet glossy and campy.

3. shinee, ring ding dong

did you really think you would not find shinee here? c'mon now. what is there to say about this music video that hasn't been said yet. the wings. the choreography that the entirety of korea knows by heart. this made shinee my instant ults, my instant biases. dancing in the water!!! the concise color palette, the grays and reds, the hairstyles getting progressively more disheveled. watching jonghyun in this music video for the first time (and to this day) was like watching a miracle appear right in front of your eyes, that sort of gravitas and charisma is rare to come by and i am afraid there will never be anyone else quite like that. truly, one of a kind and just an insane moment in time to live through. how, in a way, unpolished this music video and their performance is is precisely why it is one of the greatest things ever. you can literally see them launching straight into their stage and performance genius from this. it's so crazy. this is like watching history being written, which is why it is one of the best kpop mvs of that decade.

honorable mention: sorry sorry by super junior. a perfectly slick, chrome fever dream that could be a commercial for all i know. i am sorry (hah) but when this song comes on, every ounce of, like, common sense leaves my body and i am stuck in this 4:17 true kpop marvel. it is just perfect. the production of this music video and this song. the aspect ratio (slay). the black and white. that tastefully measured autotune because suju has like maybe 3 decent vocalists. the group choreography shots look tight as hell, especially at the end. the last 15 seconds of this music video look just. fucking amazing. sorry, yeah, it had to be here.

ask me my top 3 anything, kpop edition 💌

[the-kaedageist]

Ohh, original writing? 👀 Very curious about reincarnation lol!

This one has been percolating in my brain for over a decade now! At some point, I'm going to actually write it - and I think it's the original idea I have that's the most publishable.

The premise is that in a totalitarian future where reincarnation has been scientifically proven, an authoritarian state uses people's past life identities to train super soldiers with the assumption that traits from past lives will pop up again in people's present. Our heroes are an elite super soldier squad who accidentally find themselves on the wrong side of the state that brainwashed them, pulling on a thread behind the conspiracy and watching the entirety of their assumptions about their loyalties unravel.

It's kind of a silly premise but also a lens to study brainwashing and authoritarianism, and what it takes to break out from that sort of upbringing. There's a lot more to the plot than this little bit but I don't want to post TOO much info here in case I do end up publishing it!

The majority of what I have of this was written ten years ago and needs to be edited and re-written in my current, more mature style, but here's a snip!

“Hello,” the man said. His voice was smooth and pleasant to listen to. “My name is Anton and I’m a reporter.” He entered, stooping his head a little to get his whole height past the door frame, and seated himself in the uncomfortable metal chair. Sarra remained on her bed, staring at him distrustfully. She still didn’t trust reporters, even though they didn’t answer to the Cooperative anymore. “I’m guessing you have questions for me.” Her voice was rusty from disuse. She rarely talked anymore, not even to the nurses; she mostly sat alone, hiding in her thoughts. She didn’t like the way her voice sounded out loud anyway. It wasn't right. “You’re the last one,” Anton said, pulling out a stylus and an electronic pad and quickly thumbing through the pages until he reached a blank sheet. “You’re the only one left. Everyone else is either dead or disappeared. You’re the only one who can tell us why you did it.” “It’s been fifteen years,” she answered, frowning. “I’ve been asked this question thousands of times. What makes you think that this time, you’ll get an answer?”

“Hello,” the man said. His voice was smooth and pleasant to listen to. “My name is Anton and I’m a reporter.” He entered, stooping his head a little to get his whole height past the door frame, and seated himself in the uncomfortable metal chair. Sarra remained on her bed, staring at him distrustfully. She still didn’t trust reporters, even though they didn’t answer to the Cooperative anymore. “I’m guessing you have questions for me.” Her voice was rusty from disuse. She rarely talked anymore, not even to the nurses; she mostly sat alone, hiding in her thoughts. She didn’t like the way her voice sounded out loud anyway. It wasn't right. “You’re the last one,” Anton said, pulling out a stylus and an electronic pad and quickly thumbing through the pages until he reached a blank sheet. “You’re the only one left. Everyone else is either dead or disappeared. You’re the only one who can tell us why you did it.” “It’s been fifteen years,” she answered, frowning. “I’ve been asked this question thousands of times. What makes you think that this time, you’ll get an answer?”

He smiled a little to himself and rummaged in his suit pocket for a moment. He withdrew with a holograph clutched in his fingers, one she’d thought long destroyed. He placed it on the table in front of her, and the past flared brightly back to life in all its 3D glory. There they were, the three of them, their arms around each others’ necks as they smiled brightly into the camera. The man in the middle had deep brown skin and red hair that shone like copper, and her own dark hair, long then, was in two braids down past the edge of the holo. On the other side was a dark-skinned boy with his hair in short locs, flashing the camera a V-for-victory and grinning wildly. “I know you remember these two,” he said. “They were your best friends in your unit. They helped you destroy the Galway database.” “If you know all this, then why the need to ask me anything?” She crossed her arms across her chest stubbornly. “Roger Frost was afflicted with a similar bout of disorientation and disappeared from the world until his death.” He flicked the side of the holo with one fingernail, indicating the dark-skinned boy with the locs. “Oliver Bukhari disappeared. No one could trace him.” “Nor will they,” she replied defiantly. It was the answer she always gave. “Sarra,” the reporter said patiently. “If you cooperate with me, then I’ll make this easy for you. We’ve found Bukhari.” His words rang through the nearly-empty room. Her whole body went tense, her eyes wide. Her mouth was too dry. She couldn’t breathe. “That’s impossible,” she said. “We’ve found Bukhari,” Anton repeated. He produced another holograph from his jacket, this one more recent. A red-haired man, remarkably free of ghosts in his eyes, seated on a park bench with a small child with Oliver’s familiar features. It was unmistakable. She hadn’t seen that face in fifteen years, but she’d have recognized it anywhere. “Oliver,” she breathed. “So tell me,” he said pleasantly, snatching the precious picture away and stowing it back in his jacket. “Why did you destroy the Galway database?” “I won’t tell you,” she said even as her eyes were still wide with longing for one final glimpse of her friend. She and Roger had lost track of past and present, and she’d thought for sure Oliver was joining them. He’d ridden the knife-edge of sanity in those last days, as mixed up as the rest of them had become. There were days when he hadn’t recognized her, hadn’t recognized anybody but Nathan. “I can arrange a meeting between you and Bukhari,” Anton promised. “It must get awfully lonely in here, locked away with only your ghosts.” “I chose this life,” she said firmly. “I look in the mirror and I don’t know who I am. My mind is filled with thoughts I never thought. Staying here keeps my mind quiet. We all made the decision to step away from the world together.” “All of you except Bukhari,” he said patiently. “All of us except Oliver,” she repeated. “Why did so many of you hide yourselves away?" the reporter asked, but she pursed her lips together firmly and refused to answer. "And why did you destroy the Galway database?” She continued to answer him with silence, so he tried one final tactic. "The world deserves to know why the Cooperative fell." She clenched her jaw. “Re-introduce me to Oliver," she said. "Set up a meeting, and I’ll tell you everything you want to know.”

Ask me about my wips! | Other responses

[neishroom]

y'all i answer the gshade question all the time, my preset I'm using is literally just sumahama with bloom and lens flare, a lil saturation and relight plsssss

i don't want to rerelease somebody elses preset that i honestly didn't do much to lol

[raynecloud06]

This is just a very long and unimportant rant about Project SEKAI limited Gachas on here real quick, because I'd like to let off some steam (and see if other pjsk gacha/card addicts see this and understand the struggle, lol). Rant under the cut, feel free to scroll if you aren't interested, but...

TLDR; there are so many limited cards I wanna pull for and not enough time to save for them all, and I am in dire need of a miracle from Hatsune Miku herself.

Okay, so I've recently decided I'm going to give up impulse pulling on my main/EN account completely (I'm still pulling on JP, since I don't care as much about that account), so I can save up for the limited event cards that I really, really want to actually get when they come out.

And checking how much time we have between now and when they come to EN... I am so royally fucked.

To start, some time in November, we're supposed to have the first rerun of the Spooky Forest Gacha. I have been wanting to pull on that one for a while now, because the cards are lovely, and I really really want Little Lamb Minori especially.

However, I'll likely end up skipping that one, especially since this is gonna running either before, during, or after the Nightcord at 25 World Link, and I really want the cards for this event sooner rather than later. A; because they're beautiful and B; N25 are my second favorite unit.

Directly after that is Tsukasa4, which I'm not pulling for even though it has my favorite Tsukasa card in the whole game, because directly after that is The Best Picture Wrap, which is another event I really want the full set from, and I will never be able to pull for both.

(And I want to try and save enough crystals to spark, so I can guarantee at least one of the cards, but if I don't get any of the cards from my pulls, I'll have to pick between sparking for Nene (which I have no 4*stars for) or for Len (who doesn't have any 50% event bonus options and is better gameplay wise), which is a decision I Do Not want to have to make.)

Then, only two events after that is Next to the Unchanging Warmth, which is a colorfes (so 2x chance for 4*stars + chance to get colorfes cards) and a Mizuki focus mixed event (I love Mizuki so much, and this is definitely one of my favorite Mizuki cards in the game), so this is another event I really really want to pull from.

THEN I have to skip the VBS World Link (which I'm not too sad about) and Blacklight Lens Flare (which I am quite sad about), because during the next four to five event periods after them there are EIGHT FUCKING LIMITED GACHAS RERUNNING I WANT TO PULL FOR. EIGHT.

These limited Gachas include:

- Graceful Marriage

- Knights of White

- Photogenic Valentine

- Sweet, Cute Valentine

- What Awaits at the End of War

- Imperial Soldiers

- Wanderer's Journey

- Secret Teatime

(In vaguely that order, I think)

The fucking cherry on top of this crystal sapping sundae??? The fucking Wonderlands x Showtime World link starts four fucking events after Blacklight Lens Flare. WxS is my favorite unit, followed closely by N25, and I love the WL cards for both these units.

(I first downloaded the JP server so that I could play Blacklight Lens Flare, and every time another rerun of a limited Gacha I really wanted the cards from popped up, followed by WxS WL, I felt my hopes and dreams slowly die. At this point, they are nothing but cremated ashes.)

After the WxS WL, Toya4 comes out and is immediately followed by Rise As One, aka 3.5 anniversary, which means the colorfes typical 2x drop rate for 4*stars + the colorfes cards for Saki, Tsukasa and Emu, which I also really want and will definitely not be able to pull for while also pulling for the world link.

Thankfully, if I decide not to pull for literally anything before it (including the first ever bloomfes, the MMJ and Leo/need WL's, and others), I have 13 events to save up for the Virtual Singer/Vocaloid World Link. It's not all great, seeing as I want to get all six cards during the event since I likely won't have many more chances to get my hands on them, but it's better than everything, I suppose.

If I do manage to get them all in minimal pulls, I might even be able/willing to spare a few for the second Spooky Forest rerun, and The Divine Beasts' New Years Gacha (another one I really want all the cards from), but that's very unlikely, especially considering the Project SEKAI drop rates and how amazing their recent cards have been looking.

If you've read all the way through this, thank you for listening to me complaining about the consequences (being able to get all the cards I really want) of my own actions (impulse pulling/not saving my crystals).

[batshieroglyphics]

DC TV (Arrowverse) Scene Breaks

As per previous scene break posts, these were created because I wanted fun scene breaks that were screen reader-friendly at AO3. The images on AO3 are smaller than the versions shared here—I like the larger versions that let you see a bit better the specifics that aren’t always visible in the smaller versions—and due to the coding I use, they only exist when you have creator’s style on, and cannot be viewed as an image.

There's 8 scene breaks for this series, and they're mostly variations on the same theme, lol.

I actually had a terrible time with the sizing for these, because I didn't add any embellishments on the ends to widen them enough to make up for how tall they are, especially the pairs.

Minor edits were made to the colour Flash symbol—mostly in adding the lens flare—so it matched the official Legends of Tomorrow versions of Len and Mick's symbols. Otherwise, those symbols are all as found on the web.

First up, ColdFlashWave (Len Snart/Barry Allen/Mick Rory) with their TV-canon symbols. Have a minor hate/love relationship with Mick's symbol, since the flames at the top means his circle never matches up right. UGH

FlashWave (Barry Allen/Mick Rory), which is actually the couple variation of this poly that I tend to write most, in part because canon makes it easier—Len has more appearances in Flash episodes, I think? But Mick's character survives longer, due to actor choices—but also because there is plenty of ColdFlash filling the fandom, I don't need to be adding to it, lol.

ColdWave (Len Snart/Mick Rory) I've written...a couple of times, usually as part of a lead-up to the poly. I did, actually, use this one in my coffeeshop winter holiday ficlet from a few years ago, because while that's a poly setup, Barry doesn't actually appear in the fic.

ColdFlash (Len Snart/Barry Allen) is the one I made because I already had all the component parts and it was easier to just create it, but I've yet to use it for anything.

The oddball option is intended for David Singh, the police captain of Barry's precinct. It's the CCPD symbol—comics, I think—in between mirrored police captain rank markings. It is 100% for my fic, The Trials of the Hero's Beleaguered Captain, which is from David's POV.

These next three (ColdWave, FlashWave, and ColdFlashWave) were created for my soulmate AU, Only Half the Rainbow, which is a 'meeting your soulmate lets you see colours' variation. Recoloured each of their symbols with a slightly metallic variation of a single primary colour—red for Mick, blue for Len, and yellow for Barry—and only made the three variants that I would use in the fic, so no ColdFlash.

[sanctus-ingenium]

WIPs of some of my drawings where i made a full little painting for the sketch to nail colours or values first. i thought it would be fun to do a Behind The Scenes and also show u how some drawings changed, what i kept and what i discarded and at what point i just started adding unplanned details

all these were done using a mixture of sai and procreate

more comments on The Process under the cut

eye of the otherworld is inspired by a real photo i took two weeks ago!

i soooo wanted to draw water that looked like this, weeds and all, so the original colours of that sketch were picked direct from the photo. but i wasn’t satisfied with it so i changed it using a gradient map (you can see it’s crunchy on the borders between colours). for the final, i re-painted everything again using the sketch colours as a guide so that i would not end up with the crunchy edges a gradient map will give u, and so that i could add in extra contrast over the top. the black swirl pattern in the final was an ad lib lol but i’m really happy with how it gives the impression of water or liquid even if it’s not realistic... i will try again to recreate something like this photo tho because i am obsessed. the birds were originally swans but the necks were driving me crazy i needed a bird with a shorter neck and grebes are associated with this location in canon so it was perfect. they have very funny feet. the last detail i added to this was the white flashes in their primary flight feathers (which do not occur in nature btw)

hanged man was an interesting one because it’s based on a sketch i made in 2020 when i first wrote this fun impalement scene

here is félix being impaled for the first time in 2020 by a rusted harpoon that essentially rips his human disguise off to reveal the black carapace underneath

for the coloured sketch in the photoset i re-lined this exact sketch in sai to update it to match my current lineart style, but as you can see i realised the pose itself needed work and not just a re-line so i completely redid it in procreate to exaggerate the pose and gestures. i went into this one already knowing exactly what bg colours i wanted so that was no issue but the hardest part was weirdly figuring out what he was going to be standing on. in canon he is standing on top of a very high wall and leaning back over a fatal drop. the black pencil lines in the clouds and the bird were ad libbed but i liked the idea of throwing the bird in as some extra symbol of freedom the likes of which you will not experience if you have been shot with a harpoon. the green was not working at all so the swap out to more purpley pink tones was last minute. i unified the different colours by using a colour-shifting brush (you’ll see that his gaiters are different colours - i didn’t hand pick those, the colour jitter did)

for Big Pascal... originally it was going to be a confrontation between the guy on the ground and pascal but i wasn’t feeling the standing pose and it ended up being... if not restful then at least maybe a little more benevolent than the shadow of colossus shit it was before. the white cracks in the sky were originally going to be black but it just didn’t work. a lot of people tag this one as some form of cowboy aesthetic which is funny to me. there’s no cowboys here

i do like the lens flare effect in the b&w thumbnail tbh and i think i kind of lost the low camera angle effect in the final

i drew a bonus comic of the two characters interacting during this scene (mostly the lil guy just trying to ignore what’s happening in the sky)