#keep seeing him drawn w a mullet but listen

[kookyburrowing]

boba fett with an undercut. send post.

[raiyakun]

Two Worlds 

━━━━━━━ ☆ ━━━━━━━

As always my brain randomly decides to kick into overdrive when thinking of AUs so it took on a life of its own (ADKJSHDKASD), but this was very fun to think of so please have the rest of it under the cut.

(TW for those who might be prompted to check out W: [mostly minor] character deaths, violence, blood, which get more prevalent in later episodes. The music volume changes quickly at certain points too. My concept so far only covers the early half of the series, but still TW for mentions of violence, blood, and minor character deaths.)

(Also a sidenote because I’ve had comments with other AU concepts (；´∀｀) This won’t be a 1:1 AU. The basic premise stands but I make a bunch of changes especially with character roles like splitting and/or splicing roles.) 

❝Keith Kogane is the hero of the immensely popular action mystery webcomic W. Marco McClain, the series’ artist and writer, has become practically a household name as everyone has gotten addicted to the story of Keith, a young man who once rose to fame as the prodigy who became the youngest Olympic judo gold medalist at 18 under his father’s training but gets embroiled in a series of tragedies and injustices as his father is later found dead in their home and his mother discovered missing, with Keith framed and later imprisoned for the murder and abduction by the ambitious prosecutor Zarkon Daibazaal.

Keith is later proven innocent and released following a year in prison, then disappears from the public eye for years only to reemerge later as the successful co-CEO of Voltron Co., and alongside his mentor and brother figure Takashi Shirogane, co-CEO Allura Altea, and assistant Acxa Marmora, he establishes W, a TV program that aims to solve criminal cases and mysteries and give people the justice that they seek for. But Keith’s ultimate goal is to find his father’s killer and his mother’s whereabouts, a goal which he will stop at nothing to achieve.

Meanwhile, Lance McClain is a new resident in the esteemed cardiovascular and thoracic surgery department of the Garrison University Hospital under the tutelage of Professor Iverson, who doesn’t exactly have the most stellar impression of him. That is, until Iverson learns that Lance is the younger brother of Marco McClain, writer and artist of W. Lance sees this as a chance to get on Iverson’s good side and decides to visit his brother Marco, who in reality has had little contact with his family after dropping out of medical school to pursue being a comic artist, much to the disapproval of his and Lance’s parents. His sister Veronica, herself also a doctor at the same hospital, advises him against the idea, but Lance decides to push through.

At Marco’s studio, though, Lance learns through his friends Hunk and Pidge, both assistants to Marco, that his brother has been missing since the previous night, which is a problem since the deadline for W’s latest chapter was the next day. They have absolutely no idea where he could’ve gone, and in the middle of their conversation, Lance finds out about Marco’s plan to kill off his comic’s main character, much to his disbelief. Hunk brings him into Marco’s room to show the last panel he’d worked on his tablet, showing Keith lying in a pool of blood on a hotel rooftop after getting stabbed by the story’s mysterious killer.

After Hunk leaves him alone in the room to attend to a call from the editor, a bloody hand suddenly shoots out from Marco’s tablet to pull him in, and Lance finds himself on a high rooftop, with nobody but a bloody young man with a mullet at his feet. 

Lance is incredibly confused, but quickly jumps into action and helps out the man, saving him from dying from a collapsed lung by puncturing his chest with a pen, the man’s eyes opening for a split second just as Lance does so. After paramedics arrive to bring the man to the hospital (with Lance feeling quite proud he managed to save someone under pressure. Take that, Iverson!), Lance is thanked by the hospital’s manager, and Lance learns the name of who he’d just saved: Keith Kogane.

Wait. Is it a coincidence? For him to have the same name as Marco’s character? But Lance recalls the bloody hand that pulled him in and realizes how the man was lying exactly like Keith in the drawn panel was. And at the corner of his vision, Lance catches the words To be continued appearing out of thin air just before he finds himself back in Marco’s room. 

And that’s how Lance’s curious experiences with moving between reality and (what should have been) fiction begin. What’s worse is that whatever events that happen while he is in the comic world end up getting reflected in W’s story, to the point that Iverson accuses his of forcing his brother to base a new character on himself.

And Marco is little help to Lance’s predicament. He reappears like nothing happened and refuses to listen to his younger brother talking about what he experienced, instead cryptically proclaiming that he needs Keith to die in the comic, even if it goes against what the readers and his editors (and Hunk and Pidge) are hoping he would do.

Lance manages to save Keith’s life a second time after getting sucked into the W world again, and he discovers that the world follows a weird logic that revolves around its main character, and that Lance would only be able to get back to the real world whenever something shocking to Keith happens. 

As for Keith, meeting the man who saved him on the rooftop that one fateful night leads him to believe that he has the key to his existence, his purpose. But the man seems elusive and....very weird. He has a nameーLance McClainーbut it’s as if he swims in and out of existence, with no one knowing him or him disappearing without a trace. But despite his friends’ doubt, Keith is resolute that Lance McClain holds the answer to the mystery governing his life.

The question is, is that a mystery both him and Lance are prepared to unravel?❞

(end of Part One)

This was getting long so I just decided to bunch the rest of some important details into bullet points (；´∀｀) (there’s a LOT more since a ton of stuff happen in the series so there’s a bunch more to come after this. Some might be confusing if you don’t know what happens in the series but I’ll try to clear them up in later posts ksdjfhksdfj)

Romance isn’t a big point in W, but its readers popularly believe that Marco is building a love triangle with Keith and Allura, with whom Keith shares a hatred for Zarkon and some common ground due to her parents also having been murdered, and Acxa, who used to work for Zarkon but whom Keith convinces of Zarkon’s evil and hires as a personal assistant-slash-bodyguard. Lance believed this too, at first, since when they were younger Marco told him about his plans, although at present Lance isn’t sure if Marco still intends it since he’s only played with the idea in the really early chapters but has not touched upon it again. (Later, when Lance and Keith realize they’re falling for each other and the comic IRL begins to turn into a romantic comedy, Iverson rants at Lance about how the story is getting completely ruined by the “new character Lance” and that Keith should’ve gotten set up with one of the two heroines, only for Lance to yell back at him “Well how are you completely sure Keith is into girls in the first place!”)

Shiro’s role is a combination of Do-yoon’s and Hyun-seok’s from W. He was an athlete also trained by Keith’s father and a close family friend. He took Keith in after his release from prison and became the program manager of W. (No, he does not get Hyun-seok’s fate.)

Hunk and Pidge share Soo-bong’s role, although their reactions to realizing Lance can somehow get into the webcomic world are very different: Hunk is extremely anxious while Pidge gets excited and curious.

Keith’s father was murdered by stabbing, and Zarkon framed Keith as the murderer with the knife that Keith got as a gift from his mother as the murder weapon. It’s what Keith secretly keeps under his pillow (which Lance is aware of, much to Keith’s shock. But Lance only knows it thanks to having a lot of knowledge about the webcomic details from the real world).

Lance gets caught by the police in the comic a similar way that Yeon-joo in the series does, but this isn’t due to any purposeful set up by Allura or Acxa the same way the series did for So-hee. I really don’t like how the writing treated So-hee sdjkfsdkjfksf. Lance genuinely becomes friends with Allura and Acxa, and instead it’s Zarkon, thinking that he can use Lance as the key to send Keith to jail permanently, who’s the reason Lance is caught by the police. Allura and Acxa try to help him out but are prevented by Zarkon until Keith’s return.

Marco used to be very close to both Veronica and Lance when they were younger, since all three used to share a love for comics and Marco had a talent for drawing (and although they don’t remember it at first, both Lance and Veronica contributed ideas to what eventually became W). But their parents wanted them to aim for “real” jobs and pressured Marco into studying medicine. While Marco rebelled and left, becoming a small artist that anyone barely knew until W blew up, Veronica chose to bury her love for comics and pursue medicine, thus becoming a doctor. Lance is caught between the two routes they took (wanting to pursue his own dreams like Marco or persisting in the field with Veronica). Despite looking stern most of the time, Veronica is indeed worried and cares for both her brothers.

Eventually, Veronica gets roped into the mess as well, especially after Marco gets attacked and sent to the hospital and when she finds a hysterical Hunk and Pidge yelling about them and Lance getting chased by a killer only for her to find Lance passed out and so weak he needs to be hospitalized.

Eventually, both Lance and Veronica realize that they are able to influence the W world too, since the comic’s logic recognizes them as “part-creators” due to Marco having taken inspiration from them when he was originally planning the comic. I may or may not have a Veracxa agenda here KJFHKDJFHDKSJFHD. Bottom line is: instead of just Yeon-joo and her dad in the original, the three siblings can get dragged into the comic. Okay I admit there is a Veracxa agenda here.

Aaaaaannnnd more to come because W has like 3-4 arcs and both my sister and I can’t stop watching it because it’s cliffhangers everywhere KJDHKJSHKSDJFHKDF

[softshelltaakos]

what’s up everybody! it’s time for part 2 of my taz graphic novel review.

part one covered (most of) my beef with the writing and storytelling choices. this part is gonna cover character designs!!! you should know going into this that my opinions are not positive. this post is also a lot less analytical in tone than part 1, because art is not my forte.

disclaimer: i love the mcelroys. i truly do. taz has gotten me through some very difficult stuff and i have a tattoo. all this to say i’m not doing this because i hate them or because i like hating things. if you feel the need to message me about how i am overreacting, specifically to green taako, or about how i should just calm down and ignore it, or about how it’s sad that i’m getting so worked up instead of just enjoying the show, i’ve heard it and i don’t care. you will not be taken seriously. save yourself the energy.

there are spoilers for the graphic novel under the cut.

alright. i’m getting the elephant in the room out of the way first because it’s the most important thing to address, and once it’s out of my system i’ll feel better goofing on the rest of the designs. as i mentioned in the disclaimer: Green Taako Is Bad.

[ID: a panel focusing on taako. he’s skinny and minty green with chin-length light blonde hair and a big, pointy nose.]

now, a lot of people have made posts about this before, and i’m not saying anything new about it by any means. i’m also not the most equipped person to talk about why green taako is bad, because i’m a white gentile (i’ve heard conflicting opinions on whether or not green taako is antisemitic, but it feels remiss not to mention that there’s been discussion) and therefore not part of any groups affected by this whole debacle, but in short: when pressed for more diversity, specifically in taako’s case as a pretty large chunk of his arc involves literally inventing a mexican cultural food (fun note: that’s never mentioned in this book,) carey pietsch decided he should be green and the mcelroys were down with it. this is not an issue that cropped up when this design was released; it was something that there was already a ton of discourse surrounding, and it should never have gotten concepts drawn, let alone made it to publish.

this article by natt cuesta has been linked before on the subject, and i think it’s a good, concise explanation of why green taako is bad as well as why aracial characters in general are bad. this is a racist design.

now that we’ve gotten those ethical ramifications out of the way... i’m sorry, but it’s an ugly design, lmao. he looks like a palette-swapped version of pearl from steven universe with less character. the ONLY thing about this design that i like is the prominent lower lashes, if only because they’re the only thing that keeps him from looking entirely generic. because, like, y’all, when has anything about taako been generic?

[ID: a panel focusing on magnus. he’s a muscular fair-skinned man with auburn hair, a bushy beard, and a scar over his left eye.]

generic is a word that’s going to come up a lot over the course of this review, because i genuinely can’t think of a more apt descriptor for pietsch’s designs. it feels like she went with the lowest common denominator of every character’s design, a synthesis of all of the most popular (and most boring) ones, except in instances where that would lend any personality to a character’s design. magnus fits what brief description we’re given in the podcast: auburn hair. beard. big. and i guess that’s all you need?

i understand that by appealing to the most common and basic designs for these characters you’re inviting a lot less ire than you might by going with something more individual, so i get the motivation behind it -- or i would, if her designs hadn’t always been about this dull. but it’s bizarre to me that in a story as unique as the balance campaign, we ended up with the most basic ass Fantasy Hero lookin’ dude in the world as one of our protagonists.

i just really don’t have a lot to say about this. i’m just bored by it.

[ID: a panel of merle. he has medium-dark skin with a smooth white bun and beard.]

merle is simultaneously the design i like most out of the boys and the one that throws me the most, because i feel like he’s the most out on a limb one. which... oof. most merle designs i see give him a floral motif (i guess he has a few petals in his hair, maybe?) and big coke-bottle glasses, and i miss those things with this design, but at least it doesn’t totally feel like pietsch threw every merle she could get her hands on into a blender and poured it out on a page, although honestly, that might have been more satisfying. people do some really fun shit with their merle designs, but again, he’s. generic.

as the cuesta article mentions, with how much of an issue it was to get any of the boys to be poc in the first place and in conjunction with minty up there, this design also feels like tokenism -- an appeasement rather than an honest attempt at diversity or god forbid because the artist actually headcanons merle as a person of color. personally, i wish that she’d gone a step beyond re-coloring his skin and idk given him a natural hairstyle or something. he still feels very much like a recolor to me rather than a character who was designed as a person of color from the beginning.

i feel like he looks more like a cleric than he looks like a merle, which i feel like is pretty contradictory to who merle is.

[ID: a cutaway showing griffin, a white man with brown hair and glasses wearing a collared shirt.]

i’ve said before that it feels a little odd to talk about her design of a real person, so i’ll keep this brief, but... you know how every drawing of a basic white dude looks a little bit like griffin mcelroy? you know how that one arthur character looks a little bit like griffin mcelroy? you know how everyone is constantly messaging mysillycomics about how her avatar looks like griffin mcelroy?

how did carey pietsch manage to actively attempt to draw griffin mcelroy and miss the mark? it boggles the mind. he doesn’t not look like griffin, i guess, but he doesn’t look like griffin, either. i don’t know, man

[ID: a generic gerblin. he has yellowy-green skin, slight tusks or fangs, and weird, nubby little horn-type things.]

i hate these gerblins. they are ugly. next

[ID: two images of klaarg/g’nash. he’s a bugbear with brown fur and yellow eyes as well as a mouth full of pointy teeth. in the first image he looks pissed off; in the second he’s starry-eyed and delighted.]

klaarg is probably my favorite design in the book, and that’s just because he looks like a cute dog for most of the time he’s on the page. he’s fluffy and i love klaarg anyway, so like. did not take a lot to reach this mark. especially considering how i feel about most of the other designs lmfao

i do definitely think he keeps up the trend of looking generic, though.

[ID: an image of barry bluejeans. he looks like tom arnold, kind of; he’s square-jawed and white with thick-rimmed glasses. he also has a light brown mullet.]

i hate this. i hate the mullet. i’m sorry, y’all, i really, truly, cannot stand the mullet. i don’t feel like barry has mullet energy. i feel like it’s too powerful a move for him. it wouldn’t be a good move, mind you, but it would be a big one. i don’t know y’all it’s just bad

[ID: an image of killian. she’s a green-skinned orc woman with prominent eyelashes, eyebrows, and tusks, and straight brown hair.]

i can’t have been the only one who was hoping for a badass, visibly muscular, maybe even butch killian design, right? that wasn’t just me being a big old lesbian, that’s a pretty common theme of killian designs? i guess kudos for going out on a limb again, but then, like, take the kudos back for going out on the most boring limb possible again. i could hang with the face if her hair wasn’t so boring, but it’s... it’s so boring

[ID: an image of magic brian. he’s a drow with long white hair and an oblong face and oddly shaped nose.]

for how many of her designs are syntheses of popular ones, i..... don’t understand how this happened. i don’t understand how whimiscal and flamboyant magic brian who’s often drawn as taako-but-a-goth-dark-elf ended up looking like this. he looks like he used to play football and got his nose busted up and peaked in fantasy high school. he looks like the first quarter of a monster factory video where the thing’s just ugly but doesn’t have a personality or any endearing traits yet. he didn’t have to be the goth twink we all know he is but what.......... is this

[ID: an image of gundren rockseeker/bogard. he’s a light-skinned dwarf with dark long hair and a matching beard.]

..........listen i know they’re cousins and distant cousins at that but all of merle’s cousins are light-skinned and, like, not to say that that can’t happen but having them be anywhere near merle’s skin tone would’ve been such an easy way to help bolster the obviously inaccurate idea that this is a work concerned with diverse character designs, or rather to help ppl claim it was being bolstered, and yet

[ID: avi, a fair-skinned man with long dark hair kept up in a ponytail and slight scruff on his face.]

i feel like maybe avi is intended to be east asian so i think at this point that brings the count up to a whole two characters of color. we’re almost done with the book. cool. he’s cute, i guess, but guess what word i’m about to say again (it’s generic)

[ID: a panel of several unnamed cameo characters. from right to left: carey fangbattle, a light blue dragonborn; brad bradson, a green orc man with a long brown ponytail; and presumably lucas miller, a tan human with glasses and dark hair.]

ok. deep breaths.

first off, there’s another panel w these three as well as boyland, who looks fine, but i didn’t grab that one bc it’s harder to make out detail. carey is cute. brad is fine.

i assume the third guy is lucas miller because i’m not entirely sure who else he would be, and... oof! as you may know i can’t stand lucas miller, which has nothing to do with his necromancy or nerdiness and everything to do with the various human rights violations he commits in the small time he’s got focus as well as the fact that he’s got a theoretical redemption arc that’s not actually an arc so much as us being told he’s better now. lucas is an entitled jackass who repeatedly uses other people’s bodies and minds without their consent, from the obvious offense of using the bugbears as brainwashed chore-doers (read: slaves) to the less-oft discussed dragging of noelle and others out of the astral plane into robot bodies, again to do his chores for him. because of this, it has always sat very uncomfortably with me when people make lucas a poc, because everything about him screams Shitty White Nerd Boy to me. it sits extra uncomfortably coming from carey pietsch, given how white all of her other designs are.

it’s a little hard to tell because i took all these pics with my phone camera in my room’s lighting so they’re not super high fidelity or anything, but pietsch’s lucas is noticeably darker than any other character we’ve seen so far save merle. maybe he’s just a white guy with a tan, but all the same, it strikes me as incredibly skeevy to have one of so few characters of color be this fucking guy.

[ID: johann, a black man with an oblong face and textured dark hair.]

johann’s design is fine, although this is a similar face shape to that brian from earlier and i just. i don’t. understand it. it’s not especially interesting, but hey, at least he’s not another generic white guy.

that being said, as i mentioned in part 1 of this review, johann’s role is severely cut in this -- he’s reduced to three panels, when in the show itself he’s the one who escorts the boys to the voidfish’s chamber and inoculates them. as i mentioned in that post i understand that they shifted it some to give lucretia a more prominent entrance, but as i also mentioned in that post, they should have compensated for that. three panels.

johann is not a character with a great deal of screentime as it is, but he’s a character with a major impact. he is the reason story and song happens. his song serves as a direct foil to john’s nihilistic conversion of his own home plane into the hunger. the fact that he’s been reduced to three panels with little to no characterization at this point, especially in conjunction with the fact that he’s one of very few poc, makes me really, really uncomfortable. avi is in more panels in this book than johann is, and while i love avi and as i said i am parsing him as an asian dude, he’s also still light-skinned enough and the style is nondescript enough that there are definitely people who will parse him as white, and also, avi’s role in the story is not as big as johann’s.

it doesn’t sit right with me.

[ID: an image of davenport, a fair-skinned man with a big red mustache and slicked back red hair.]

ginger davenport with a big mustache. groundbreaking.

[ID: an image of lucretia, a slender black woman with short white hair dressed in blue layers.]

and finally, lucretia. now, i’m biased, and it’s hard for me to see a lucretia design i don’t like. i also think that this is, compared to a lot of the others at least, one of the more interesting designs in the book, at least as far as her clothes go. it’s not a long robe that would be hard to move in, and i appreciate that -- it strikes me as a pretty practical outfit while also being ornamental and wizard-y. and she’s pretty, and she’s not whitewashed, and that’s all great. i like her earrings.

all that being said, i feel like it’s not enough. luc’s hair continues a theme with merle’s and johann’s (as well as the preview we’ve seen of angus,) which is that it strikes me as very low-effort on pietsch’s part. it’s short and it’s definitely not straight, but it doesn’t feel to me like it had as much thought put into it as, say, minty green taako’s hair. we could’ve had a lucretia with a big beautiful afro, or long box braids, or so many other natural hairstyles; we got this. it’s not bad, but i do think it’s disappointing. without going looking for it and without being a person who reads a great deal about character design, i’ve seen a fair amount of discussion from black women (artists, writers, and none of the above) about the portrayal of black women as it pertains to their hair. they’re never designed to be as feminine as their white counterparts. their hair is never treated with the same amount of detail or respect as their white counterparts. it’s short, maybe curly if you’re lucky.

i’m gonna circle back quickly to killian’s hair. it’s long and smooth and kept down, despite the fact that killian is an action-oriented women and might not want it to be in her face all the time -- it could have at least been braided or in a bun. it could’ve been short! and that would’ve made sense. and i don’t mean to say that lucretia couldn’t have short hair, but she’s a very elegant woman whose dress is described as intricate. she wears business regalia. she could have any number of hairstyles, from something elaborate to something simple but more out-of-the-box than this, but she doesn’t. i found this on a quick hunt through my ref tag -- it’s a tutorial for drawing black folks with just a small selection of interesting things you can do with afrotextured hair. these resources aren’t hard to find! and i’m doing this for fun -- carey pietsch is a professional artist who was paid for these designs. if she’d put in more than the bare minimum effort, we could’ve had some really interesting shit going on, but she didn’t.

and that’s the core of the issue here. i truly do not feel like pietsch put the same amount of care into the designs for the few characters of color we see as she did into the white ones, and that’s upsetting and emblematic of a larger problem in the work: neither pietsch nor the mcelroys put in very much care at all for the fans of color who spoke up and asked for representation.i know i said i was getting taako out of the way first so the majority of the post could be goof-heavy, but goddamn, y’all, it’s hard to goof about when it’s so blatantly shitty. pietsch’s designs are boring at best and racist at worst, not to mention conspicuously lacking in anyone who is not skinny, muscular, or a dwarf. people have praised this thing so uncritically, including people whose opinions i generally really respect, as if the fact that the mcelroys signing off on green taako made it above reproach.

it didn’t, by the way. there’s no such thing as an unproblematic fav, because everybody fucks something up now and then, but even then, this is a pretty egregious fuck-up! and it was willful!

i’m not saying y’all need to burn your copies of the gn or stop listening to the mcelroys entirely or anything of the sort -- you may remember the disclaimer at the top of the post where i say i really, really love them, and more specifically, i really love taz: balance. but i am BEGGING YOU to think critically about their work. good, good boys can do bad, bad things. white people can produce work that’s racist even if they’re gay women. it’s not mean to critique the boys and it’s not homophobic (or god forbid reverse racist, which is still not a real thing) to critique carey.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ the real kicker of this whole thing for me is that there’s a small fanart gallery in the back of the book. most of them aren’t labeled with the artist’s handles, just their names, but there are some truly beautiful pieces featuring diverse designs -- galacticjonah and milkychai both have beautiful latino taakos featured! galacticjonah’s is fat, too! but even after the backlash against green taako, even aside from that being the design that people are going to accept as canonical, there are pieces in the gallery of green taako, as if doubling down on it was the right move.

and by the way, yeah, i’ve read griffin’s apology. but i thought we all learned in kindergarten that an apology doesn’t count if you don’t act on it.