#it feels so distinct and unique

[ouroborosorder]

this thing. this thing is fucking insane. how do i even quantify this thing. this is, EASILY, the wildest design for a main gundam i think we've ever had. the gunpla of this shit is ABSOLUTELY coming with a stand for free

[theartingace]

A question for the centaur back-pocket, but what, if any, do your centaurs do when it comes to courting and romance? Do they have any particular traditions that stand apart from the mixed rider or non-centaur cultures?

always love a back pocket centaur question for when I inevitably wheel back around! So thank you! I don't have TOO much specific thoughts when it comes to courting centaurs, as the main two-ish cultures in my world generally have pretty loose courting rituals that vary primarily a lot by individual and culture. The Merchant culture in particular is pretty rangy and depending on location and social status it's going to look very different- higher echalons of city folk are most often poly while successful outlying settlements are matriarchal holdings with migratory bachelors, those lower on the totem poles are usually more human standard monogamous but larger groups are preferred so families are often heavily blended. Riders are more family and rider-pair oriented in regards to customs with romance and creation of children largely left to individual preferences and just fuel for the family spinners to gossip about while watching the goat-pull games. There's not so much many hard rules in the overarching cultures? The only one that probably WOULD have stricter rules around courting would likely be the mountain folks, who are a bit more conservative and structured in their daily lives and lovers of rituals- but they don't like to tell me of such private things, i need to get to know them better!

The one thing I do know across almost all centaur cultures is that courting always involves some measure of dancing!

In my mind dancing is a large part of centaur culture at large, with large syncronized dances being at the heart of most large celebrations, and those dances are a PERFECT place to show off to the hotties, establish new bonds, and generally connect with a crush!

and then synchronizing steps and movement is the base of centaur dancing, like dressage but with multiple horse bodies in a small area, so it's generally regarded as a way to get your body in synch with a partner along with your mind and heart!

It's not just for lovers, like us it's for self expression and connecting with other folks, and definitely some centaurs really like dancing and some hate it! But overall for my centaurs it's an important tentpole of all their cultures and a large part of that is it's role in connecting folks to both a partner and their community

[sunnibits]

some more Arthur practice from being bored in class today

[cipheramnesia]

Probably the most heartbreaking thing about my big all any queer gendery wendery sexery wexery donations post is how many people put "i don't know if i count" somewhere in their reblog. I'm just... like, of course you count, ya always count, c'mere lemme hug you.

[gummi-ships]

Kingdom Hearts Dream Drop Distance - Symphony of Sorcery

[snobgoblin]

thinking about the ring thing and the hat thing and the grief and the things people we love leave behind as reminders of the absence of their presence etc etc. sigh

[abyssalzones]

I'm probably nonbinary but I have college so idrc about that rn

[corviiids]

THANKS @kimdokjafan you are so kind and generous. ok im cashing in the first of three blank checks to talk about faith trust and pixie dust (most recent chatfic) because the last two directors commentaries were too serious so let's do a silly one.

some p5r spoilers, and this is mostly about sumire, and it's long again. do i need to keep disclaiming that these are long? you should know me by now.

i had this written for a while before i started formatting it because i wasn't really sure if i should post it? i feel like silly chatfic is something people go to for predominantly lighthearted nonsense so i was like, maybe there's too much plot and dramatic misunderstanding and i should just keep this one for myself. but then i was like well nothing matters and maybe someone will have fun with it. it's kind of terrible how much fully or mostly completed fic there is my docs that just doesn't see the light of day lol. write for yourself etc but i like sharing! too bad it comes with the mortifying ordeal etc. anyway that was a tangent

potato counter is a neopets game. there's no deep lore i just like neopets. i guess in this universe ryuji doesn't play neopets? or maybe he's just never played potato counter specifically. i also have a different fic where ryuji DOES play neopets. it's about neopets and ryuji and goro talking on neopets.

i think this might literally be the first time ive written sumi in a fic because i haven't actually written that much fic for royal, like, now that im looking, literally almost none? and none that had a group dynamic. so it was kind of fun to find her voice for the first time in a silly groupchat like this. i was worried people would find her exclamation marks annoying but i personally thought it was endearing so i added it in there.

every time i do a gag where a character corrects their own typo i have to code more stupid little bubbles to make it happen but i think it's worth it. all the effort that goes into making tgis look as much like a real chat as possible

this obviously doesnt take place in the canon p5/r universe, but im imagining sort of a postcanon sumi personality where she's more comfortable being herself and isn't borrowing kasumi's brand of confidence, but she's visibly a really anxious person without that kasumi veneer. i also think in this universe sumire is a fairly recent addition to the friend group, and while everyone likes her a lot and she really likes them, i kind of wanted to emphasise that feeling of being in a friend group where everyone's established and you're sort of a plus-one? you don't really fit yet. part of that is her being new, part of it is her anxiety, part of it is just the kind of person sumi is where she's so polite and self-conscious she ends up taking herself out of things with her own good intentions. stuff like her interrupting the flow of an existing conversation by greeting everyone instead of jumping straight in because she doesn't feel comfortable inserting herself, which means everyone else stops to greet her even though that doesn't normally happen in a friend group, or making a point of thanking everyone for being invited to events while the others take it as a given.

idk i love that she feels a bit out of place with the phantom thieves in p5r. and part of that is a natural consequence of being a new addition in royal who can't be naturally integrated with an existing dynamic but i honestly feel like the writing team realised that and acknowledged it, and really leaned into it, and that made it work incredibly well for me. like, it's part of her character that she's sort of an outsider. it's not like p4g's incredibly clumsy integration of marie and subsequent attempt to shove her down everyone's throat as the canon love interest in p4ga (knife). sumi has that outsider vibe on purpose and it makes me really like her dynamic with the thieves as an individual

goro also feels slightly out of place in these chats, but his conversational style blends more naturally with the other thieves at this point and he even uses their codenames sometimes. i keep saying my chatfic series isn't a real Series because the lore keeps changing, but if we accept that they're all kind of following a General Continuity, assume this takes place some time after the last fic in which ren added goro to the groupchat and they made an effort to integrate him into their friend group. he's kind of there now and has settled into being the weird boyfriend. that's his role.

every time goro says something like "ren and i" assume it's the text equivalent of him talking to the group with his arm around ren's waist.

ok i got really fond of this silly running joke where sumi brings up the weather when she's feeling uncomfortable. she's so polite. i like this thread because setting it up meant i got to tie it off like this:

this just made me happy lol i liked writing this. i tried to use it to demonstrate that despite goro's abrasiveness he obviously knows sumire pretty well, he's attuned to her quirks and knows how to tell when she's having a bad time with her anxiety, so he uses her little weather habit to ground her.

i honestly dont think goro and sumire could be considered close in p5r and as much as i like the "royal trio" in canon they're not really... like... friends? with each other? they're both attached to ren, so it' more a V shape than anything else. but that said, i really LIKE goro and sumi's canon dynamic. he takes a really grouchy but politely attentive supervisory role to her during their few forays into the palace as a trio where he doesn't really know her well but clearly identifies her as a harmless little tryhard who needs some guidance and steps into that role grudgingly, and she immediately looks up to him despite being very wrong footed by his ruthlessness, which i find incredibly charming. i think given time they could be good friends, they just didn't get much chance to know each other very well in canon. so i tried to kinda do that here.

once goro stops being evil and joins the group they all kind of tiredly accept that his role is to occasionally push a cup off a bench while smirking and refuse to clean it up. emotionally, i mean.

wait i need to backtrack chronologically to talk about akeshu.

in this scene they're in the same room lol talking and snickering while typing. im trying to get at that vibe of the annoying couple who is flirting with each other, via you. you know? like ostensibly they're talking to you (sumire) but everything they say to you is part of their stupid game. sumi is incidental to goro and ren teasing each other about flirting with someone else, goro is reporting everything ren says because his boyfriend is so eye-rollingly foolish in a cute way. they're very tickled by how amusing and charming they are. gross. disgusting. sumire im so sorry for putting you through this

anyway here are too many of my favourite jokes from the fic

[cerealmonster15]

i forgot grunt meant like henchman or whatever for a second i thought they were like yeah leonas bitch ass grunts and growls are partial proof to savanaclaw being an athletic leaning dorm lol

[cc3204]

Took a stab at coming up with Linked Universe dragon (龙) designs? Some of these came easier than others, and they're gonna stay sketchy noodles for now haha

[corvidcrybaby]

Hello! After scrolling your blog, I must say, you have a very unique and pretty art style, i absolutely adore it. You have fantastic art I must say. Any inspiration for it?

OMGGGGG this is such a sweet message to open up to, thank you for this compliment, I take it as a high honor to have people wonder about my inspirations hahaha

As for the big one, it's honestly the man himself, Hirano. There's just so much of his approach to art that I've been so taken with ever since I first discovered it. His rendering is utterly jaw-dropping, and his sense of unique style never fails to inspire me. I love how distinctive and evocative all his trademarks are - all the duster coats and the creative ways he uses them in his panel compositions, the iconic facial expressions (I especially love how he draws scared faces and the way he draws teeth on characters when they're in a predatory position in the story, human or vampire) and his methods of hatch shading and rendering. More than anything, though, I love his sense of posing and character design and how those interact. His art has such a striking marriage of those two things and the aforementioned panel composition. His art inspired me to try to understand anatomy better and the elements of character design that might allow me to one day compose something that has the sheer level of coolness that bleeds from every page of his art, especially the title pages. There's such aesthetic maximalism to all his characters. That, and I love his use of heavy lines, sharp, angular edges in his lineart, and just GAAAAHHHHH I love his art so damned much. It makes me turn to my own art and say "how can I make this cooler," and especially in the aspect of visual storytelling that one can accomplish with a character's design. I'm aimlessly rambling but this is really the biggest one.

Beyond this, I've drawn from a really random grab bag of interests. There are a handful of artists online throughout the years whose work I've really enjoyed and found evocative inspiration in. Back in my teenhood I was enamored with the Nuzlocke comic community, with entries like this one and especially this one and the artists respectively, and even attempted one of my own that is now lost to the sands of the internet's endless aether (but if I'm being honest, I'd probably be wildly embarrassed if somebody found those, hahaha). Beyond this, it's a hodgepodge of inspirations like graphic novels and video games I've been super into. Halo, Borderlands, Fallout and the like all get a nod here, in that order. Zemira herself is basically an ODST. I also tend to absorb elements from more cartoon-leaning elements that I really like from random artists that cross my dash. I'd also give a nod to the 2003 Star Wars: The Clone Wars series in terms of the way it exaggerates certain features for stylistic ease.

Thanks so much for the ask!!

[always-amity]

Potential design for Innocence, Arrogance and Patience

It's very simplistic, which I think can be good for more "main" dragons in the series, but also compared to some of the more varied designs I've made for other species it just makes them look very Generic Dragon, and I'd like to base them more on some real creature, like I've done with a lot of my other designs. I'm not quite sure what though.

[skrunksthatwunk]

just finished the original devilman manga. wuh!!

[the-valiant-valkyrie]

me writing a letter to schell games about how much i love their female characters in ieytd ESPECIALLY WHEN COMPARED TO THE SOURCE MATERIAL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (scary) (horny)

[arttsuka]

For the trademark ™️ tag game:

I'd say yours would be "Distinct Art Style™️"

Distinct as in 'clear' or 'unique'

Well, I guess it makes sense either way.

[kitonmitons]

It’s kind of weird like… how much emphasis is put on liking “obscure music” and “obscure genres”. Like idk that doesn’t make you cooler than anyone and I think calling other people basic for liking pop or other popular genres is honestly weird