#im rambling but i just love her so much augh

[sketchy-tour]

Updates on me! Still doing alright and still trying to figure out a new tablet I'd like. Haven't even found time to doodle much between all the running around I'm doing but still! I'll hopefully be able to draw again soon! Here, have a recent messy trad doodle I did for someone!

Also been going golfing! Okay maybe I'm not the one golfing, but im keeping scores while driving the golf cart! Definitely super good at score keeping and don't get distracted at all!

[potatobugz]

Noelle Holiday? (Yes this is a bingo request that I guess is a semi-sequel to the previous one for Susie)

thgey call her noelle holiday the way she. brightens up. your day

[sho-haizono]

YAYYY MISHA THEME!!!

MISHA 💖💓🩷❤️💕💖💓🩷💖❤️💖💓💓💖🩷💓

[sleepys-sunny-garden]

i think if aphrodite was a person she would be my girlfriend

[h0lygh0stlings]

Some doodles of my gal Anita; She's my Titanic / 'periodical era' inspired Oc ! [Caledon stinky gf confirmed]

[gremlingottoosilly]

AUGH Autistic loser König meeting Autistic loser Wifey!!! Not loser as in creepy, she just doesn’t really socialize with people or even want to learn how, and he finds her in the trash can and goes “mine now :-)” and she honestly doesn’t find this too unagreeable

He infodumps about the Roman Empire? I’m infodumping about the Mariana Trench and the Hadal Zone. He tells me to stay inside because he doesn’t want me seeing anyone else? Fine by me, I hate people and prefer to stay indoors and do my own thing. He needs cuddles and fucking? Im touch starved and Hypersexual, get your tall Austrian ass over here! We’re perfect for each other 🥰🥰🥰

This is literally Konig's dream girl! He can roar about wanting a 10/10 Instagram girlboss model with everything going on smoothly because he "doesn't want to deal with her problems," but he would fold for a loser gf who can support the conversation about nerdy things and who needs him just as much as he needs her. Your relationships are going to be very codependent and kiiiinda unhealthy, but no one cares! Konig and his gf(future wifey, he is just not sure about the rings yet) who absolutely adores him, and he just wants to have you all to himself! It's so good that you're so chill with everything, he adores this about you! You're his prettiest adorable girl who is going to sit on his lap like a good pet and choose the figures you are going to display. Even if it's from fandoms he doesn't know about, Konig will listen to your rambling and add stuff that he wants to...your house is going to look like it was decorated by a bunch of kids with too much money, but, honestly, Konig never felt so complete after spending his overgrown paycheck on something. He isn't even jealous when around you - although his loser nature makes him ask dumb questions like "would you love me if I was a worm immigrant who can only speak Serbian", he knows that you love him just as much as he loves you. It is quite funny how he works around not letting you go thought - at first it was bad weather, then it was about bears in the area, then - he was mumbling about not wanting to let you go, so you just let him place his head on your lap and push his face in your tummy because he obviously needs comfort...and you not notice exactly how much of your panties he already took.

[jabberwockprince]

happy pride! here's the fullbody refs for spina venatores <3 I still need to work on other stuff for their artfight profiles like their i2 illustrations and battle chibis but soon ..... s o o n ....

extras and rambles under the cut o7

reworked their manus fits from this old ref and tweaked the colors to make them more blue bc they looked SO purple on certain screens

venison has little to no changes, other than their scrapped i2 outfit, but its really funny how they have 3 fucking refs. 3 of them. plus a whole fucking obsolete i2 garment illustration

favoritism fucking SUCKS

mutton is pretty much exactly the way i pictured her so shes perfect and gave me zero issues <3. then there's chevon who is annoying and wants to exclusively dress up like some dramatic pirate/vampire but his fit reminds me so much of julian the arcana i cant get that out of my head.

poultry and veal are the ones who changed the most in their i2 garments, cause it hit me that poultry cannot be exclusively tied to vertin's team like venison and chevon on account of poultry being a human--she needs ties to the foundation or foundation adjacent groups like laplace to survive storms like ezra (laplace being the one organization she would love to join). but then it also hit me that she would not be allowed to join laplace THAT easily on account of. the horrors the crimes and whatnot, so for now she's on probation working as madam Z's assistant

the arrangement also works wonders bc veal is the one who has the most trouble graduating from the school of discipline, and spina venatores consists of ppl who Cannot Be Separated. so having the two somewhat close and still in touch is good <3 it prevents a lot of accidents. veal wears the foundation uniform just because they want to match with poultry

it also works bc venison's colors outside of manus are very similar to the foundation's palette, so i get to keep the visual dynamic between them, poultry and veal hehehoho

im STILL debating on how to organize their respective banners, since there's 5 characters instead of the usual 3. my brain is still trying to make their event coherent and its a mess in there AUGH. i could always make venison a limited character bc theyre my beloved blorbo. or make veal a limited character bc it would be very fuckign funny to have them randomly shapeshift into a different 6* that you own and just have that be their mechanic

i could also add aianteia to make the numbers even and have four 6* and two 5* but. then i would have to make refs for that bastard. and i dont have it in me. WHATEVER, I'LL FIGURE IT OUT!!!

[year2000electronics]

can i just say i LOVE ur world tour AU so much this is so delicious, actively in the middle of my third reread like mmmm the characterization...

obsessed with how u portray JD and Barb, somethin about loner + eldest brother always hits different but JD's entire characterization AUGH i love how u write everyone just obsessed utterly obsessed

thank you so much aaa!! i’ve been having so much fun with the au and writing all the brothers plus the cast of world tour but yes my soft spot is definitely the relationship barb and jd have lol

barb is one of my FAV trolls characters, and just right away i could see the sort of parallels between her and jd where they both honesty believe what they’re doing will end up being a net good for the people they’re trying to help, it’s just that barb cares less about what she has to destroy on her way to do it, because it’ll all be fine in the end when trollkind unites under rock- jd meanwhile is less aware he’s pushing his brothers but he also only sees one way ahead, much like barb’s strings plan

AND THE LONER KID + ELDEST SIBLING THING DOES HIT DIFFERENT i’ve been writing barb and jd with this sort of adopted sister-brother dynamic because there are a lot of barb scenes where she kinda drops her hard rocker facade (like the scene where thrash can’t remember the plan or the scene where barb talks about the pressure of being a queen) and like. she’s very clearly someone navigating adulthood all on her own and deep down she still feels like a scared little girl who wants to lash out at the other kingdoms before they can lash out at her first. she’s someone who could REALLY use a friend, and for jd, who clearly loves his brothers but went solo after the pressure of having to raise 4 little brothers by himself, clearly still has that brotherly love and instinct in him but like. with an adopted sister who’s in her early 20s there’s SO much less stress there. including the fact that she’s technically his boss!

it’s like. AUGH. they make such a fun duo and really care for each other but also they’re being absolutely enablers towards each other where they both nod and are like “everyone who’s raising criticism to us will simply stop raising criticism once i hit the benchmark i need to hit. once i achieve this specific thing, everything will be Perfect and nothing will be wrong anymore”

BAH IM RAMBLING thank you so much for the ask! here’s a barb and jd doodle for your time

[madebyteenagefury]

What do you think about Trina in Falsettos??

what do i think about trina in falsettos??? i wwould do anything for her. but also i think if i ever talked to her i might break down sobbing.

ive mentioned it in ramblings before but trina marvin and jason are like a carbon copy of my family. besides the whole, my fathers a homo part and the whole trina marrying marvins psychiatrist part. their dynamics and everything are pretty much the same as my own parents. i was jasons age when they divorced. only difference is (besides the two mentioned) marvin and trina coexist more civilly than we do.

idk why i felt the need to mention that, i think its important like, background to my feelings about her(and the family in general). Shes amazing first and foremost, everyone always talks about marvin and the work he has to do to improve himself, but trina and what she mustve gone through to forgive him? after everything, its incredible. she cares a lot about her family and marvin is apart of it. and she accepts whizzer too i think, ("he shared my life") by the end of it and thats even more amazing to me. i think she deserves a break. i think she deserves the world. i worry (/lh more like just think) about what happens after whizzers death, how marvin cant be there emotoinally for jason and trina and mendel have to take that responsibility. i see my mother in her, a woman who wanted to be free of her ex and live her life but is still chained to him ("ill fight the gods, ill fight my ex") but augh shes so spunky and joyful despite everything!!! year of the child is probably one of if not my absolute favorite song from the soundtrack because its marvin and trina (+mendel charlotte and cordelia) fawning over jason and just being glad and excited that hes growing up and being his parents. the performance especially, because even though theyre techincally fighting at the beginning of the song, they still hug and laugh throughout it. they banter, and its beautiful. i think shes such a strong and resiliant woman, putting up with what she did, coming out the other side only to immediately find more pain. i wouldve liked more insight to her and mendel and jasons relationship. mostly her and jason. but i think there are lots of implications and inferences to be made, and its nice that some things are still up for interpretation.

I have yet to relisten/or even watch in trousers, but i have listened once all the way through, and re-read the lyrics through. trina in trousers,,, god i love her. like. ugh in trousers makes me so sick, marvin and trina and whizzer. mostly marvin and trina. trinas not dumb she knows. especially with love is blind, all the examples she gave and in im breaking down "i used to cry, hed make a scene" she totally knew! and still she even begged him to stay. she tried she really wanted it to work. but ofc it couldnt and im so glad she got to live a life away from him, and find some happiness. that she knows what love is. (oh also, the like. suspected suicide attempt??? bbyg dont worry ill kms for you-. everything about her makes me so so ill because she reminds me so much of my mom.) she tries so hard, with an uncooperative ex and an uncooperative (ish) child, and godbless. i just adore her and want the best things for her. shes such an incredible woman.

anyway thanks for asking! :]

[localapparently]

i love kimcom so much.. i love them so much..

theyre so..!! honestly if i think about them too much i'll cry.. and I'm rereading a few bits of dark castle to compare the novel and the webtoon and gosh, sleepyc and team's art really allows kimcoms interactions to feel more alive and goofy, silly even,,

epilogue spoilers ahead near the end

and novel's narration are like the gaps to fill in, both sides elevate the story,, i sound like a food critic but like. oh my goodness you read the part where kdj reunites with sys in dark castle after his revival and youre so taken by how sweet and cute it is. and then you read novel and..!!

I wouldn't have been able to run straight here if it wasn't for this feeling. I saw Shin Yoosung crying and thought that parents probably felt like this.

GOODBYEEEE I AM SO DEADDDD LIKE OH MY GOD YOU CAN'T DO THIS TO ME???

and webtoon chooses to let kdj maintain the same composure he had when he talked to jihye after saving her just moments prior,, and it works because now i read his inner thoughts in novel and I FEEL SO INSANE?!?!?! YOU BITCHHH SAY IT SAY YOU MISS HER?? no wait .. im getting off topic. this is becoming a kdj sys ramble

Honestly even though i call them found family I don't really classify them as a family either, they feel more like a home? at least at the first half of the story.. In an apocalypse where everything feels uncertain and you've lost all your close friends, you'd end up wandering aimlessly, so sticking to a group is moreso a temporary means of survival than friendship of any sort. It's also why kdj is so essential to kimcom as their glue, as the person who gathered them together, he provided them with that temporary party. and having that 'constant' you can return and realign to in that setting is so.. augh...

not to mention that three of the kimcom members are kids and kdj is their form of stability. lgy and sys hug him whenever they see him because he's the first adult that had ever shown them care. jihye is probably shaken from the first scenario but while she clings to yjh and admires him as her master, he probably doesnt do enough to reciprocate her respect or communicate as enthusiastically. now that i think about it, jihye feels kind of lonely, not young enough to get along with the kids particularly closely and not old enough to be buddies with the adults. does she make up for it by being talkative?)

And at this point in the story its evident that theyre not even that close !! singshong's writing style isnt one that elaborates on emotions and descriptive fluff to begin with, but sys is stated to not be so fond of jihye in ch162 because jihye was rude to kdj, they still feel like theyre in their own cliques. sys and lgy stick together as kids of similar ages, jhw and lhs get along normally, hsy is. hsy. lhs for one narrates kimcom as his 'companions' quite early on, but i'm unsure whether that choice is becuase thats just a suitable word for people closer than 'allies' but not close enough to be 'friends'. ultimately its just a buncha people who are trying to survive, and care about the guy that brought them tgt. it doesnt really feel like anything more than that.

and then as you're caught up in kdj's shenanigans, small snippets pass by and they feel a bit warmer yk. like sys and lgy having a coin flip whenever they're uneasy. (sys states that lgy has "done this before", like he's the one that has suggested the past coin flip(s). it feels like its implying that hes initiated this game system just to cheer up sys because shes a lot more transparent about feeling sad that kdj isnt there.) sooyoung of all people, willing to get an outer god contract to save sangah. jihye, hyunsung and seolhwa chilling in the room during proof of stars, and hyunsung was picking his nose like are you fr they are so unserious,.

in jttw arc ch 433, yoosung growing close enough to joonghyuk to not get intimidated by him and (forcefully (forcefully is a strong word but she straight up just puts it on his cheek unprompted and that is so funny of her)) apply seolhwa's ointment, even giggling when he allows her to do it after she brings up doctors orders.

after proof of stars, theres a portion that goes

The party members supported each other. (...) I saw the white lines connecting the empty universe. The stars, that seemed like they would never meet each other, were facing each other.

please know this: i wanted to cry and scream so bad. ive started to spell out kimcoms names rather than address them in their shortforms, that writing inconsistency is how emotional i am right now.

I can't do the justice of listing down every instance where they've grown a little closer, but i'm hoping to remember more on my second reread.

because orv is such a long novel, the way they gradually grow closer also feels realistic.. and by the time you're in the ch400s, its so clear that they wouldn't go anywhere else without each other.. if i start talking about vacation arc i'll just start sitting and staring at a wall again.

"you're explaining how an average found family trope is realised" Youre right!!! youre right!!,, me when the found family is actually found family.. don't shame me like this.. i'm just an emotional person..

Ah and then you get moments where their unity really shines, and they become god pummeling probability festering forces of nature... and its when one guy's life is in jeopardy. even when they weren't all that close yet, its when they save kdj where they feel most strong. and its a bit obvious because its like, common goal makes people group together yknow, but god the adrenaline and relief when they appeared in demon king selection.. the way their names pop up one after another when they vote for jung heewon's skill..

and 1865 !! 1865 was really the epitome of it all!! oh my god they were all so reluctant to return to the hell of the scenarios but they dragged themselves back because of one fucking guy that they loved too much. and i'm rereading 1865 a bit as i write this but the way they all yelled at their sponsors to pick them is so so funny and the whole speedrunning thing really shows their desperation to quickly find him but also feels a bit fun and even exhilirating with how theyd already beaten the game once, and they were going to storm through the whole thing again to reach kim dokja. like a fuckin earthquake. the lines in ch 536

They had to be insane. (...) These people who lost their minds were clearing the scenarios with insane methods.

YEAHHH THATS MY FUCKING KIMCOM WOOOH OH MY GODD THEYRE SO INSANE!!!!

kimcom's bond was strengthened because of their love for kim dokja, kimcom drifted so close because of how much they wanted to save kim dokja. whenever i think about the 'found family' trope between kimcom, it exists because they love kim dokja, and once again i'm reminded of how much that bastard is loved and how he denies that he is anything else but a reader outside the covers of the story.

It's not to say that all of kimcom's bonds were because of him, but it's clear that had it not been for him, they would have dissipated so much quicker.

agh. what was i talking about again..

genuinely i dont know if ive proven anything through this. i just had to talk about it. i havent even talked about the relationship between kdj and each kimcom member but then the post wouldnt end. sys's section would be thousands of words and i would even have a portion for gong pildu and jang hayoung..

i love kimcom. thats it thats the post.

[gubbles-owo]

i adore seeing brazillian miku make the rounds, and by extension all the other regional variants that proudly showcase all these rich cultures. it's super sweet (while also demonstrating just how malleable miku is as an icon!) but i suppose it's also brought a long-standing personal frustration to the forefront of my mind again, namely... i don't really have a heritage or culture that i can call my own. be warned, stupid american white girl rambling under the cut lmfa o

so yeah im like. "white", or whatever. it's critical to acknowledge that "whiteness" is ultimately a contrived social construct meant to elevate those to a certain class above others in order to oppress and silence those who did not fit this construct. it's fucked. the definition has changed and morphed over time, blurring those included into some homogeneous mass devoid of any real culture, but its purpose remains much the same. so in order to break down this shitty concept of "whiteness", i break down my roots into components, right? a more detailed, nuanced set of backgrounds and traditions that all define me as a unique being, yeah? it just kind of... doesn't work in my case. my own heritage is.... murky. my father's side of the family reportedly includes a mix of things— welsh, german, fuckin english— but all of those were rattled off once by my father in a tone bereft of confidence, pausing for long periods between each as he struggled to recollect any of the details. so very broadly some sort of "western europe" deal, but not much specific beyond that. i cannot recall any particular traditions or anything from his side of the family that were drawn from these various cultures. here's the real kicker: my mother? adopted. legally could not dig up who her biological parents were until legislation allowed it... after their passing. for the longest time we had zero fucking clue where she really came from, the circumstances of her birth and subsequent adoption, all of that. the non-biological maternal grandparents i grew up with at least had their own strong ties; my grandfather immigrated from france after WW2, and my grandmother and her family from poland around much the same time. they spoke their respective native languages alongside near-flawless english, and god, during large family gatherings around christmas and whatnot i ate the best goddamn perogies i probably will have ever had in my life. but see, that's the thing... that's the only time i ever really had those. or had all that much cultural interaction, really, were confined to those transient blips of holidays and events. it was all with extended family that i barely knew because i only ever got to see them once or twice a year. somehow they all knew my name, but i never knew theirs. it felt so... distant. like i was observing a warm and loving family behind a thick wall of glass. it's not like they ostracized me or anything, i just. felt so hopelessly out of the loop. my mother never learned of her true background until very recently. lithuanian, as it turns out. at least for her mother, no clue where her father was from. so in a way, lithuanian is the single one hereditary thing i can point to and say "yeah, i guess that is technically me," but it's not like i grew up around it. i never met my biological maternal grandparents, or Anyone biologically on that side. i know nothing about the culture or the language or their traditions. perhaps if i had grown up with some of that it would've felt more core to my being, but learning so late after the fact feels... almost pointless? like what am i supposed to draw from this?? -------- An idea introduced to me at one point was the idea of region as culture. but augh. oouuggghhh we are opening a nasty can of worms here. (thanks tumblr for nuking this next paragraph for no fucking reason, so u get a screenshot, sry):

algonquian. quinnipiac. pequot. mohegan. connecticut. those sure ain't names carried over from england unto unclaimed soil that's for fucking sure. thanks the horrific methods of colonialism, the place i grew up and hold dear to my heart is, ultimately, built on tainted soil. how closely can i really hold onto any of that when it is built up on the very names of those that were eradicated?? god it is all just so fucked. yeah, i know, fuckin, "privileged white girl whining" here. and you'd be correct. i'm not holding the short end of the stick here, and it's necessary to acknowledge that. sure, i can stake claim to "gay" and "transgender" and "chronically ill"— but my heritage, and the ground on which i've lived all my life, is absolutely not one of them. what our dumpsterfire of a country did to the indigenous people that once thrived here is just... absolutely fucking horrific. ------- to be clear, i don't think there's anything inherently wrong with mixing cultures. like i'm not really on about some """purity""" shit where i have to have One Single Background; i'd say it's probably good and healthy to have different things to draw from! but i dunno, there's a point for me at which it all feels so fractured that it's impossible to derive any sort of identity from it all. where do i come from? what am i?? and at the end of it all the only really thing i can say for myself is.... "white". and i fucking hate that. it feels as if trying to further adopt traditions of any of these aforementioned cultures feels like some sick and twisted form of cultural appropriation. it feels wrong. it's theft. to tie it back to where this post began, how would i design a fuckin miku to represent where i'm from? and i just... don't have an answer. i have nothing. i remember a poll going around here on tumblr that was like "which of these languages would you want to learn?" and while i considered picking smth and rbing it i just could not pick one that didn't somehow feel wrong. the closest from that list i could answer was like... danish. why? not because i have any ties to denmark. but because there is a single prog metal band from denmark that is incredibly important to me. but they don't even sing in danish!! all of their lyrics are in english!! i don't even know what the language sounds like!! in fact i keep mixing it up with dutch!! fucking hell my uncultured ass needs to learn a Lot of things. i just wish i had roots that i could be proud of, rather than confounded by and ashamed of.

[iknaenmal]

hi jade harley fan can you explain why you love jade so much im curious

Oh boy I'm about to ramble SO HARD

So first of all, her design

^well that's a solid design right there imo

Her shirt with the cute little changing icons before and her doggy ears and skirt and the little shiny bright Wizard of Oz Dorothy shoes.. her design is quite simple but it's great!

So that's it for the design now let's go on with the character per se

So! You know that she woke up on prospit when she was very young, right, so she was used to seeing the future in her dreams, and Dave and Rose were convinced that she was a seer or a witch of some sort, that she could see the future. Turns out she WAS a witch, but that's a different topic

But later, when her dream self died, she couldn't see the future in the clouds so she didn't know what she had to do to avoid a doomed timeline, so she just did whatever felt right, which was for example prototyping her dead dreamself with becsprite, which didn't turn out great at first but later gave her doggy ears and first guardian powers which if I recall correctly were important later!

Shes also SO COOL like, look at this and tell me she's not cool. I dare you

The thing she had to do to enter Sburb was also wild! They covered her eyes and gave her a piñata, so she made what was logical, which is hitting the piñata. But then it EXPLODED and threw her off the window, so she decided to shoot as a last resort. Luckily the bullet would've hit the piñata wherever she shot, because Bec was there to redirect it and she didn't get hurt because bec cushioned the fall by teleporting her to the bed iirc

It's also really sweet how there's isn't a single character who dislikes her

Like, John and Jade are brother and sister, but are also great friends. She didnt talk to rose much, which is a ROBBERY, but you can clearly see theyre good friends and care about each other so much augh <3 and then theres dave who I like to think is her moirail, like a childhood crush to moirail or something, thats how I see it at least.

Then for the trolls.. Aradia and she get along pretty well! To the point that Aradias most iconic line was kind of reused later by jade which is really cute :] there's also Nepeta, who said Jade was her favorite human, and Kanaya who helped Jade with the frog breeding! She didn't really talk to every single troll, no one did, but if she did I think she would get along with everyone, she's just so lovable <3

And this doesn't even START to cover all the good things she has! There nothing in her not to love <3

So, in conclusion

[cubedmango]

hi!! i just wanted to let you know that i started reading cherry magic in july last year after seeing the anime announced on toyota-sensei's twitter! i couldn't even rlly translate the announcement myself without the help of google translate LMAO but her illustration of them looked so sweet i had to snoop around. more than half a year later. i am no longer normal and my brain is fully rotted over and i think of those two nearly every waking moment!! your art, along with so many others feeds me and your translations are So Appreciated thank you for doing gods work. i usually don't get super involved in fandom or w/e other than consuming fanart or fics so the fact i find myself actually drawing them is so new to me...idk cherry magic really is so refreshing and it's just nice as an adult to see a mature relationship between two working adults. there are callbacks to childhood or childlike behaviors or interests sprinkled throughout the manga's dialogue and i always appreciated how they weren't seen as embarrassing or immature to embrace or learn from as an adult, but encouraged or seen as a valuable part of balancing work, life, and love. idk it's def one of the more subtle and less expanded upon parts of it but i love how adachi's and kurosawa's love of manga, though seen as a children's activity (from how kurosawa thought people saw it) was actually one of their first mutual hobbies. it's also interesting to see how many things about kurosawa's psyche are remnants of ideas probably for a lack of better wording, were taught to him from an early age. his self-image, how he tries to uphold certain societal standards, etc etc. im glad he found refuge in adachi that way. im sorry for rambling for so long but i've just been thinking about these two so much ldks

anon pls u never have to apologize for rambling abt my fav guys of all time, u should actually talk w me about them more i want to hear ur thoughts !! the eng speaking fandom isnt that big (or at least i dont get to interact w a lot of ppl personally) but its fun making art and doing the translations for my blorbos so im happy other ppl enjoy it too 🥺

and yess everything u said abt the childlike/immature stuff krdc enjoy like the fact that their interest in manga and stuff is never made fun of or anything (which would be ironic anyway since theyre In a manga themselves fdkjskf) but actually one of the things that gets them closer is So good augh?? (also spoilers for the radio drama if u havent seen it yet, but to me one of the best changes they made was changing the port scenes setting to an anime con instead like Yeah!! theyre little nerd guys of course theyd attend a con!!!! that plus how they both like watching animated movies and playing games too like its a very specific thing to Me but that relatability w stuff i do myself makes them both feel a lot more human? if that makes sense)

also w kurosawas whole deal its Definitely a longterm thing hes had for a while, and in canon its mostly been his friendships/relationships that affected him (probs the most clear in ch45 my beloved) but from the way the meeting w his parents went theres for sure a lot of parental/family pressure involved too?? this is going into hc territory but i have like a whole Thing brewing in my head about kurosawas and maris relations w their parents and how that affected their self image and all growing up too and i rlly wanna make stuff for it someday (idk if anyone would be interested but id probably do it regardless so fkdjksjfk)

[themetalvirus]

augh i have so many egghogs thoughts but im having a Brain Blockage

amy ramble

something something amy something something injustice. egghog sonic is in the wrong for toying with her feelings, obvi, but i havent really discussed how AMY feels about it when SHE IS THE ONE BEING TAKEN ADVANTAGE OF. feminism loses. i feel like such an asshole. ik shes not real but still cmawn get it two gether

like. she extended her goodwill, a warm hand, over and over and over again, and she just keeps getting burned. she's pulled in and out of what she thinks is a will they won't they where she is actually being emotionally abused and thought of as a tool, being the end point of the cycle of abuse that sonic ends up perpetuating while his brothers end up breaking out of it. she deserves more agency as a character, i think. again i feel like kind of an asshole because of how little agency amy really has until, like, the end of the story

i also don't rlly talk about how often she's fucked up eggman's schemes (a lot) and made him start from scratch. and killed gods and such. but the focus of the main story is on the One Plan that actually temporarily explodes the whole universe out of desperation for one teenager's quest to affirm his delusion that his father really loves him. he's not the hero but he's the protagonist in a lot of ways and it feels like amy should be the focus despite egghog sonic's arc being more interesting i think. amy doesn't really have a lot to learn

actually that's wrong. she DOES have an arc. she DOES have a lot to learn. how the power of love can only be effective if one is willing to receive your love. to not self narrativize so much that you lose touch of the pain of the people around you. how excessive optimism can hurt you and the people you are trying to interact with. the theme of fantasy vs. reality is strong with this story in particular i think

like, it's not just sonic; she ignores tails' boundaries and makes some freshly-not-evil traumatized and violent teenagers live with him. the way she's trying to stay cheery just ends up salting the boys' wounds and she needs to figure out how to level with them. i like to imagine that she's used to solving big problems, killing monsters, using hammers to fix things, but this kind of delicate operation is new and uncomfortable for her. i think i take back what i said about her emotional intelligence; it really doesn't start off great. she has to learn about how to navigate both her and others' feelings in a healthy way. she feels very deeply, yes, but the way she handles those feelings needs Work. because of my low empathy high compassion sonic characters agenda i like her wanting to help So Bad but not understanding how the others truly feel thus making things worse before they get better

plus, like. FUCK dude. learning that your crush has been purposefully making you believe he may like you back because he sees your infatuation as nothing more than a tool to get what he wants. some guy you thought was your frenemy was really just an enemy. she put so much faith in him to be worth changing, to be capable of changing. you can't fix him, girl. you never could and you never will.

i guess she also needs to figure out how to better allocate her time and energy towards people who Want to be helped and Can be helped; the problem is that because she takes sonic's place as the Big Hero she already spends a lot of her time, like, saving villages and kissing babies and stuff. she very much helps people who need help. and making it so that the help is impersonal feels like a deep betrayal to her character, something unfair to put on someone as loving and passionate as amy rose, to make her so arrogant would be a failure to respect her. i guess i could lean into her getting Really Invested into helping individual people, but like, she already also solves a lot of the Big Problems except for not killing eggman because it Feels Wrong.

i guess having her be a sonic stand-in and Big Damn Hero™️ while also giving her interesting character flaws WITHOUT taking away her agency is hard. pardon me while i smash my face into a brick wall

[sleepys-sunny-garden]

was texting my gf and she had to go do something so she said she'd be right back and i said ok and then i almost started crying bc i miss her and love her so much

i think i am a little too sleepy and emotional and clingy rn oh well

[branmuffins22]

for the toh ask game- 2, 8, 12?

from this ask game:

2. Ramble about your favorite character of all time as much as you want. We're listening

Ohhhh boy. Oh man. Oh geez. You play a dangerous game, starting out with the kicker.

The obvious choice would be Luz, right? because she's like, the perfect main character. Lovable, relatable, flawed, believable (mostly; those fireworks were a bit much), clever, emotional, funny, the list goes on.

But.

However.

I have to go with Vee.

To me, Vee is all those things and more. She's still relatable, but for completely different (some unaddressed by canon, some completely made up by me) reasons. She's the cutest sweetest little shapeshifter we actually got the chance to get to know (sorry Stringbean). She's flawed, she'd completely given up on Luz's return and was ready to throw away whatever parts of her life she didn't jive with, and then even after most of a day of hanging out with her, she was STILL kinda mad at her! She's got confusing emotions and she was able to admit it! She's a tortured and traumatized kid who's trying maybe a bit too hard to put it all behind her, and even her more fantastical struggles are made to make perfect sense in that context. She's clever and observant enough to blend in with humans (and even convince Camila she was Luz for a while), and she was instrumental in solving the rebus. She's funny not just in her sense of humor (which is anywhere from awkward to earnest to dry, all hilarious), but also in the dichotomy of being one of the more "normal" "human" characters in the show, despite not really being either of those things (part of a thought-extinct species, and unique even among others of that species. said species is a kind of magic-eating shape-shifting demon from another realm, and here she is in suburban connecticut, idly learning spanish with her friends).

She's my precious baby blorbo and I love her. She's chubby (I'm chubby), she's awkward around her crush (I'm awkward around my crush (and also in general)), she likes to wear warm colors and big boots (I like to wear warm colors and big boots (not that I have any that fit well enough for daily wear)), she's got a bit of an overbite (I had one when I was young), she is (or, I guess, was?) kinda sorta something like a twin (I'm a twin), her hair is poofy and long (at least in her epilogue design) (my hair is poofy and long), augh, she feels basically tailor-made for me. I'm not exaggerating when I say I learned to love certain parts of myself by loving them first in her.

She's perfect.

also. im gonna rant about her even more in the next bit, sorrynotsorry.

8. Any headcanons? If so, which are your favorite?

Soooo many. Like, enough that I'm writing a whole ass barely-even-canon-divergent AU just to give myself the excuse to explore them. Actually, kinda writing two if you count MatVNN, but it's more of a post-canon affair.

Probably my favorite, though, is Vee being trans (and a bunch of other flavors of queer). I'll admit, a lot of the things that make me like Vee so much are just Sorta Plausible Shit I Came Up With, and chief among them is my trans Vee theory.

So, I'll start with the canon stuff:

Vee is rather unique, even among basilisks. Her tail has 3 fins rather than the other basilisks' 1 or 2 fins, her eyes have a different structure (and more individual colors) than the others', and she has a distinct head and neck that the other basilisks don't have. She's also a lot smaller than the other basilisks: about half the size of III and IV, and even smaller compared to the "greater basilisk" which attacked Hexside (we'll call her the Inspector). In the epilogue, Vee's size doesn't appear to have changed much, if at all (hell, even in her human form, she doesn't look much taller), nor have the sizes of III and IV. The only change any of them appear to have gone through is that Vee has more/longer hair, some of which is a lighter cyan than the previous navy blue, which still remains at her roots and on her ears.

Those are the facts. Now, there could be any number of reasons for her unique traits.

The doylist reason is the easiest: she was designed to look smaller and more humanoid to appear to the audience as more sympathetic. Her strange eyes could just be a bit of fun character design, something to make her stand out on screen. No biggie.

The watsonian reasons are a lot more compelling to me though.

She could very well be quite young for a basilisk. Perhaps their eyes change shape and lose some of their color as they grow up. Perhaps the neck becomes less distinct as they get older. Perhaps even after the 3+ year timeskip before the epilogue, Vee was still prepubescent for a basilisk.

Perhaps the various basilisks are representative of different species within the same family (ex. the Inspector is called a "greater basilisk", but the others are just referred to as "basilisks"), and Vee's unique traits are staples of whatever specific species she is (I first came across this theory in A Blight on Bonesborough, by GeminiAlchemist, and they proposed "fat-tailed basilisk" as the name of Vee's species, mostly for the sake of a gag)

One of the more interesting theories is that she's only half basilisk. I wasn't the one to come up with it, but I don't remember who was, so for that I apologize, but basically, there was a theory going around for a little while after her introduction, that Vee was actually the bastard child of one of the other basilisks and Warden Wrath. The biggest point of evidence was the yellow pupils, a trait only shared between Vee and Wrath, as well as the fact that Wrath was clearly involved in the basilisk project, as shown in Vee's flashbacks in Yesterday's Lie. It's not my favorite theory by any means, but it's a super interesting one, very angsty.

My personal theory, however, and the theory on which I base a few of my other Vee headcanons, is that all the myriad differences between Vee and the other basilisks can be explained away by a simple case of sexual dimorphism in the basilisk species. "Number 5" was simply the only "male" basilisk shown on screen.

Now, what's the evidence for this theory? There is none! As with all the best headcanons, there's no real reason it should be true, but there's ALSO no definitive evidence it isn't true.

So, Number 5 escaped the labs, wandered into the Human Realm, took the form of the only human he'd seen, and spent 3 months at summer camp incidentally trying out being a girl. Turns out, she liked it! So when the time came to give Luz back her identity, Vee made her own new form a girl too.

Now, this headcanon comes with some... caveats? Complications? Sprinkles of realism? I like to imagine some extraneous silly little plot points surrounding this.

Gonna mention 'nads & stuff in purple, so skip past it if you're squeamish about people having body parts or whatever.

When Vee took on Luz's form, she didn't really know what was going on under all those clothes, so she improvised, and kept things as close to her basilisk form as possible. It was partly to conserve magic during the shift, and partly just because she couldn't imagine what to put there. This meant she had a dick, and probably a pretty funny-looking one, too, until she came across a human health textbook and got a better picture of what that whole situation is supposed to look like.

Eventually, during an accident with someone in the Cabin 7 crew (probably standard "woops, didnt realize you were changing in here" shenanigans), someone catches her with her pants down, and she accidentally makes them think Luz is trans. A silly little mixup, definitely no consequences in the future, for sure.

After this, Vee ends up learning about pride flags and their meanings, and starts collecting those things like trading cards. She is staggeringly queer. I tend to think of her as bi/pan/demi-rose, genderqueer, genderfluid (usually on a sliding scale between fem and neutral, but outside that range often enough to be noteworthy), and polyam (in theory, anyways, but even by the epilogue she's still only had one partner, Masha. Granted, she's only maybe 18 by then, so she's got a LOT of time left to try things out), but because that's So Many Labels, she tends to simplify down to Queer. Am I projecting? Yeah, a little. Maybe a lot. So what?

Anyways, when Luz comes back and Vee picks out her own human form, she mostly performs a 1-1 translation from her basilisk form to her human form (matching her standing height, size, approximate face shape, etc), and in so doing, takes on a few typically-masculine characteristics (like a mostly-flat, somewhat-wide chest, bodyfat mostly at her belly, and of course, a (normal, human) dick (most of the time, anyways; she is a shapeshifter, and can do whatever she wants forever)), resulting in her rather androgynous appearance. If her human form is gonna be her, it's gonna reflect her truth: she wasn't always a girl, but she is now. In the epilogue, her human form looks a bit more feminine/less androgynous than before (most notably with wider hips), as if she'd been on HRT for long enough to see some changes.

Now, I've also got all manner of general Basilisk Biology Headcanons, such as how shapeshifting works (magic is used to perform transformations, and reverting to their natural form doesn't use any; holding a transformation only burns calories, not magic; transformations are holistic, inside-and-out, with the two exceptions being the brain and whatever organ stores collected magic), how magical hunger works (it doesn't quite exist, they're not vampires, eating/draining magic is just a thing they Can do in order to transform, not a thing they Have to do to live; however, when a basilisk is hungry, it begins burning through its magic to stave off malnutrition, causing them to seek out magically dense food (really just magic in general, kinda maladaptive like humans' sugar cravings)), how mass distribution works when they transform (they retain their weight when they take on new forms, which limits their transformed size by how far they can compress/decompress their mass. this is part of why the Inspector was so hungry; they were near the limits of how far they could compress, and burning through calories like crazy to stay that way), their natural habitat (fins on their tails suggest they're at least semi-aquatic, but the fact that they stayed on the Boiling Isles as they fled from Belos suggests that they're not immune to (and thus not native to) the Boiling Sea, therefore I propose that they were native to lakes, the only bodies of water shown not to be boiling all the time. also they use their shapeshifting to change their bouyancy as they dive for mollusks or whatever), reproduction (internal fertilization, followed by egg laying; they can change their physical sex pretty much at will, because they're shapeshifters, but if it's not their "natural" form, it still consumes magic to get into that form and burns extra calories to hold the form; fertilization and pregnancy tends to go quite poorly if a basilisk changes/reverts to a form that doesn't have the proper equipment for whatever child they're currently bearing), and so on (basilisk eyes are adapted for underwater, leaving them relatively nearsighted unless transformed to be otherwise, and they have a short-term photographic memory to make assembling accurate disguises on the fly easier/possible), but I don't really feel the need to go tooooo into detail with all that >.>

12. What do you consider the most memorable scene? Why?

That's a very tough choice, between the graveyard fight in Thanks to Them (Very intense. Very beautiful, very powerful) and the Lumity dance in Enchanting Grom Fright (Very romantic. Very beautiful, very powerful). They both basically defined the fandom brainrot after their respective releases, and unlike the various season finales, there was little else cutting in to interrupt and distract from them. Just tasty, tasty action, one at the breathtaking height of fluff, and the other in the soul-crushing depths of angst.

A close third, to whichever one of those is only second-best, would be the duel for the portal key in Eclipse Lake (Very dramatic. Very beautiful, very powerful). Another big action scene, who'd'a thunk it, and another angsty one, too.