#like how do go from a complex multi-layered character into that

[sbd-laytall]

Daily reminder that Dick had issues with Bruce, but he never had a problem with Jason or treated him badly. Were they close? No. But Dick cared enough about him that he broke down crying when he found out that Jason had died.

Batman (1940) #416

[thewriteadviceforwriters]

Creating Compelling Character Arcs: A Guide for Fiction Writers

As writers, one of our most important jobs is to craft characters that feel fully realized and three-dimensional. Great characters aren't just names on a page — they're complex beings with arcs that take them on profound journeys of change and growth. A compelling character arc can make the difference between a forgettable story and one that sticks with readers long after they've turned the final page.

Today, I'm going to walk you through the art of crafting character arcs that are as rich and multi-layered as the people you encounter in real life. Whether you're a first-time novelist or a seasoned storyteller, this guide will give you the tools to create character journeys that are equal parts meaningful and unforgettable.

What Is a Character Arc?

Before we go any further, let's make sure we're all on the same page about what a character arc actually is. In the most basic sense, a character arc refers to the internal journey a character undergoes over the course of a story. It's the path they travel, the obstacles they face, and the ways in which their beliefs, mindsets, and core selves evolve through the events of the narrative.

A character arc isn't just about what happens to a character on the outside. Sure, external conflict and plot developments play a major role — but the real meat of a character arc lies in how those external forces shape the character's internal landscape. Do their ideals get shattered? Is their worldview permanently altered? Do they have to confront harsh truths about themselves in order to grow?

The most resonant character arcs dig deep into these universal human experiences of struggle, self-discovery, and change. They mirror the journeys we all go through in our own lives, making characters feel powerfully relatable even in the most imaginative settings.

The Anatomy of an Effective Character Arc

Now that we understand what character arcs are, how do we actually construct one that feels authentic and impactful? Let's break down the key components:

The Inciting Incident

Every great character arc begins with a spark — something that disrupts the status quo of the character's life and sets them on an unexpected path. This inciting incident can take countless forms, be it the death of a loved one, a sudden loss of power or status, an epic betrayal, or a long-held dream finally becoming attainable.

Whatever shape it takes, the inciting incident needs to really shake the character's foundations and push them in a direction they wouldn't have gone otherwise. It opens up new struggles, questions, and internal conflicts that they'll have to grapple with over the course of the story.

Lies They Believe

Tied closely to the inciting incident are the core lies or limiting beliefs that have been holding your character back. Perhaps they've internalized society's body image expectations and believe they're unlovable. Maybe they grew up in poverty and are convinced that they'll never be able to escape that cyclical struggle.

Whatever these lies are, they'll inform how your character reacts and responds to the inciting incident. Their ingrained perceptions about themselves and the world will directly color their choices and emotional journeys — and the more visceral and specific these lies feel, the more compelling opportunities for growth your character will have.

The Struggle

With the stage set by the inciting incident and their deeply-held lies exposed, your character will then have to navigate a profound inner struggle that stems from this setup. This is where the real meat of the character arc takes place as they encounter obstacles, crises of faith, moral dilemmas, and other pivotal moments that start to reshape their core sense of self.

Importantly, this struggle shouldn't be a straight line from Point A to Point B. Just like in real life, people tend to take a messy, non-linear path when it comes to overcoming their limiting mindsets. They'll make progress, backslide into old habits, gain new awareness, then repeat the cycle. Mirroring this meandering but ever-deepening evolution is what makes a character arc feel authentic and relatable.

Moments of Truth

As your character wrestles with their internal demons and existential questions, you'll want to include potent Moments of Truth that shake them to their core. These are the climactic instances where they're forced to finally confront the lies they believe head-on. It could be a painful conversation that shatters their perception of someone they trusted. Or perhaps they realize the fatal flaw in their own logic after hitting a point of no return.

These Moments of Truth pack a visceral punch that catalyzes profound realizations within your character. They're the litmus tests where your protagonist either rises to the occasion and starts radically changing their mindset — or they fail, downing further into delusion or avoiding the insights they need to undergo a full transformation.

The Resolution

After enduring the long, tangled journey of their character arc, your protagonist will ideally arrive at a resolution that feels deeply cathartic and well-earned. This is where all of their struggle pays off and we see them evolve into a fundamentally different version of themselves, leaving their old limiting beliefs behind.

A successfully crafted resolution in a character arc shouldn't just arrive out of nowhere — it should feel completely organic based on everything they've experienced over the course of their thematic journey. We should be able to look back and see how all of the challenges they surmounted ultimately reshaped their perspective and led them to this new awakening. And while not every character needs to find total fulfillment, for an arc to feel truly complete, there needs to be a definitive sense that their internal struggle has reached a meaningful culmination.

Tips for Crafting Resonant Character Arcs

I know that was a lot of ground to cover, so let's recap a few key pointers to keep in mind as you start mapping out your own character's trajectories:

Get Specific With Backstory

To build a robust character arc, a deep understanding of your protagonist's backstory and psychology is indispensable. What childhood wounds do they carry? What belief systems were instilled in them from a young age? The more thoroughly you flesh out their history and inner workings, the more natural their arc will feel.

Strive For Nuance

One of the biggest pitfalls to avoid with character arcs is resorting to oversimplified clichés or unrealistic "redemption" stories. People are endlessly complex — your character's evolution should reflect that intricate messiness and nuance to feel grounded. Embrace moral grays, contradictions, and partial awakenings that upend expectations.

Make the External Match the Internal

While a character arc hinges on interior experiences, it's also crucial that the external plot events actively play a role in driving this inner journey. The inciting incident, the obstacles they face, the climactic Moments of Truth — all of these exterior occurrences should serve as narrative engines that force your character to continually reckon with themselves.

Dig Into Your Own Experiences

Finally, the best way to instill true authenticity into your character arcs is to draw deeply from the personal transformations you've gone through yourself. We all carry with us the scars, growth, and shattered illusions of our real-life arcs — use that raw honesty as fertile soil to birth characters whose journeys will resonate on a soulful level.

Happy Writing!

[anxresi]

They're absolutely right...

...It's the writers that deserve the lion's share of the backlash, for poor, innocent, boring-as-hell Zoe is merely a tool of the oppressor, aka Mr Astruc. What's being oppressed, you may well ask? Well, interesting storylines, proper continuity, two-dimensional personalities... I could go on. Everything that makes a show compulsive and rewarding viewing that Miraculous Ladybug conspicuously and utterly lacks in every department due to his increasingly destructive machinations, basically.

This pink-streaked plot device masquerading as a serious character can (along with another equally pointless individual called 'Soquerline' who was so unmemorable I almost forgot she was ever a thing) exists for one reason and one reason only: to diminish Chloe's relevance and role in the show to the sum of precisely nothing. Well after S5, job done I guess guys. Well done. Well done indeed. (Although apparently not... they're bringing Miss Bourgeois back for more torture in the London 'special'. Guess Tommy Boy just can't keep away from his favorite punching bag, can he?)

The irony is though, having such a super-sweet but dull-as-ditchwater Mary Sue to replace a well-established and multi-layered person such as Chloe actually sends out a seriously awful message. Why? Because if I was a bad kid and saw S1-3 Chloe, I'd think 'what a fascinating redemption arc, I can inspired by that and do better.' But after seeing S4-5 Chloe and what an arguable downgrade as a replacement the incredibly tedious Zoe is, I'd be more like 'well, obviously there's no point in trying to be good, because you'll probably turn into a psychopath overnight with no explanation in the middle of your genuine efforts to improve. And if what the show is presenting to me as the ideal for a teenage girl to be is the waste-of-blank-space that Zoe clearly is... then a life of deliquency sounds more tempting with every passing minute! Now, where did I put my spray can?'

The most shameless aspect to this whole argument though, is by those trying to paint the hapless Zoe as some kind of lesbian icon. Pardon? She got a plot-mandated crush on Marinette in one episode and somehow that makes her insipid and needless presence an asset for the gay community? Somehow a few people have got it into their heads if you 'dare' to make someone non-straight in cartoons these days you deserve a big pat on the back for that 'risk' alone. WRONG. They should also be fleshed-out, complex, necessary characters whose sexuality isn't just define them or deflect from deserved criticism as to what the hell they are doing there if they turn up in the middle of proceedings with no prior explanation. See: The Owl House for how it's done.

And that's all Zoe being gay is... an irrelevant trait Mr Astruc can point to cynically and say ' you're a bigot for disliking her whatever your reasons are, so I'm not listening to you' instead of engaging with the actual argument which is SHE IS NOT AND WAS NEVER NEEDED IN THE SHOW. Everything you required to make Chloe the brilliant character she could've been was RIGHT THERE in the script but you CHOSE to rub it all out and scrawl some hastily scribbled doodle with no personality other than being 'very nice' in her place. A tragedy. The worst case of self-vandalism I've ever seen. No wonder Jeremy Zag wants to start from scratch with his rebooted movies. More power to him, IMHO.

Needless to say, nearly all the above in the quoted post about her father loving her (we haven't met him yet, it's DEFINITELY not Andre Bourgeois, his name ends in 'Lee' for a start) her supposed growth (the only 'growth' she's had is when she turned into that giant golden Chloe after being akumatized) her alleged pansexuality (all in the desperate mind of the OP) her 'abusive' family (I think you'll find Chloe had it FAR WORSE over the course of the show in that regard, so why not idolise her?) is complete bunkum. and to be frank I couldn't compose a much delusional post if I tried. Sometimes I wonder: what planet are some people on to reach such implausible conclusions? I don't understand it, I'll never understand it and quite frankly I feel quite sorry for the arbiters of such risibly deluded takes.

Last but not least though, we have...

Now this I ALSO agree with 1000%. And I know just the place to 'flush' her... ;)

[hxhhasmysoul]

General Thoughts on Yuuta?

As few as humanly possible? I wish the fandom let me forget about this boy.

I’ve never found Yuuta interesting. Now, thanks to fandom I find him downright annoying. 

Yuuta has strong Shinji vibes at the beginning of Zero and while it’s realistic, there are people who are like that, I just find it boring. This is a very personal bias but as a person who has several concurrent mental issues, I have a strong dislike for characters and actual people who make their mental illness their whole personality. 

His arc in Zero also doesn’t excite me. He is super powerful from the start but can’t control it. Then he puts practically zero work into it an can control it.. He seems like a scrawny loser but starts to do gymnast shit with a sword really quickly. His CT is Copy, where he just copies the techniques of others and uses them in a more powerful way than they do, with no conditions or downsides.. When he needs to, he learns reverse curse technique and can apply it to others which we learn is super hard… 

Basically, everything he needs to know and be able to do, he is able to do in the moment he needs it… 

And Yuuta has no principles, not ideals. He is unfazed by Getou’s fascist speech. Yuuta fights Getou because Getou directly harms Yuuta’s only friends. It’s really sad because Getou actually is shown to have a vested interest in pursuing Yuuta, or more precisely Rika. I mean Getou’s plan and ideology are nonsense, but what fascist ideology is internally coherent anyway, it’s always reactionary drivel that focuses on targeting the weak instead of trying to get to the bottom of societal (in this case jujutsu society’s) problems. But Yuuta has no personal connection to Getou, no thematic one either. 

I think Gege really noticed what a weak protag Yuuta was because all of this is fixed in Yuuji whose ability to perform gymnastic feats is established in chapter one. Who also has principles and a personality more complex than: I’m depressed.  Same with Getou and his primitive plans are replaced with Mother, the perfect plotter, and their amazing multi-layered plans. The Gege added Sukuna, an emotionally constipated jujutsu and poetry nerd who can also forge a plan of his own. And Mahito, a creepy kid curse who thinks he can plot but alas adults were in the room, so no he can’t And Yuuji has a deep personal and thematic connection to all three of them, and likewise.

It really shows how much Gege grew and developed the world of JJK between Zero and the main series.

There’s a hint that Yuuta’s so powerful partially because of Rika’s love for him. She loves and she stayed with him after she died. “Love is the greatest curse”. So the arc goes that Yuuta is told that he can stop keeping Rika’s soul from crossing over, can break her curse by simply talking to her, releasing her. 

And this is where Gege in my opinion really made a serious mistake. The way this is set up, and later much more well developed in JJK proper, there should’ve been a cost to releasing Rika. There is a strong idea of balance and give and take to jujutsu. Gege had a perfect opportunity here to grant Yuuta space to grow by depowering him. Letting Yuuta lose some of his powers by letting go of Rika. But Yuuta just became more powerful for JJK proper… 

And that meant there was nowhere to go with Yuuta’s character. Yuuta was still unconnected to any of the major villains and barely to any of the important characters, only to Maki and Gojou, though he barely interacts with either in JJK proper. 

I and also other people have written before how Yuuta literally does nothing during the final showdown, how he only pauses the fight, prolongs it and distracts from the people who Sukuna actually connects with during the fight, ie Yuuji and Maki. Or how he wasn’t even necessary to kill Kenjaku.  

And Yuuta has no personal connection to either Kenjaku or Sukuna. He has a forced thematic connection to Sukuna when he takes over Gojou’s body, a pathetic attempt at becoming the strongest. And he has that connection for like five minutes in the story… 

If Yuuta never appeared in the JJK main story… it would’ve been almost the exact same story. Gege needed Yuuta for one moment, just after Shibuya to fake Yuuji’s death. And maybe even that could’ve been handled differently. Someone else could’ve fought in Sendai instead of him, there are other capable characters to fight in the Culling Games.

_________________

More posts on Yuuta by me and others. If I missed any good ones, please tell me and I will add them to the list.

[anbroids]

as homestuck gets older and becomes more and more of a period piece i think it’s really interesting to see how continuations and fanworks take different approaches to maintaining that or not.

and i don’t want to outright say one is superior to the other. i think if you can find ways to introduce aspects of more contemporary pop culture or politics or technology into homestuck as a framework and still make it an interesting intentional choice then that’s a big achievement and not something to be scoffed at just by virtue of it being divergent from homestuck proper.

i think in a lot of ways it can keep it fresh and add a layer of relatability to the fans that grew up on it. after all, i think hussie was intending to make (or perhaps just coincidentally happened to make) homestuck relatable to his particular demographic of young adults on the internet in the late 2000s / early 2010s. i think rereading homestuck in my 20s really solidified this to me that homestuck was not intended to be a story about kids for kids but rather a story for adults about childhood and growing up. it’s funny that it wasn’t more obvious to me back then, or maybe i did pick up on it but i just didn’t really think about it all that much? because it’s so obvious. there’s so much 80s and 90s kid nostalgia in it and the tropes that the characters portray were already outdated or at least didn’t even really exist like they used to by 2009. and in many ways the characters themselves outgrow their own tropes and then later acknowledge it in the work itself both as time progresses and the narrative develops into something more complex and the characters become increasingly multi-dimensional.

i guess it’s just an interesting question to me. is having content in a story that will indefinitely age the work a “good” or “bad” choice? and several years down the line, will we be able to tell what choices were intentionally made so that it would one day be reflective of the state of technology / political landscape / pop culture at the time?

artists who set out to make their work as timeless as possible do kind of miss out on the opportunity to be a time capsule later on. or just generally representative of the climate it was created in, which is something that i think a lot of us can both appreciate but also find pretty unsavory about homestuck proper (cough dancestors cough) but then can i really say i wish those unsavory parts of homestuck didn’t exist? idk. they aren’t fun to read but i like that they make me think critically about the flaws of that particular part of internet history.

politics aside i think the fact that there’s a homestuck panel that incorporates vine is so cool. because it sort of inadvertently swallowed up a piece of internet history that would come to disappear into its already massive time capsule of media and pop culture and hussie didn’t even know. it’s just cool to me idk.

at the same time i think younger artists and writers that really prioritize keeping homestuck grounded in its era of internet and even going so far as to honor the nostalgia of an older generation is something i really admire and appreciate. and this is something that is becoming more common as homestuck ages (and becomes more of a period piece etc etc). i often find myself at a crossroads between exploring contemporary elements in my work and trying to emulate homestuck’s original tone and time period for the sake of preserving that integrity. like man. i could go on about this for such a long time because i feel like it’s just a really interesting discussion to see what we weigh as a meaningful divergence and refreshing change from homestuck proper vs what compromises the (for lack of better phrasing lol) “feels like homestuck” factor.

i think the discussions about sexuality and gender identity towards the end of comic and then further in the epilogues is an obvious example of this. hussie didn’t necessarily shy away from nuances of gender and sexuality but he didn’t really address them outright with labels either for the majority of homestuck proper until the end when other writers got involved. in early act 6 dirk is explicitly stated as gay (insert disney diversity win meme blah blah blah) but the character himself, which i feel like is an interesting reflection of hussie and homestuck’s general feelings about the topic of identity and labels (if i may speculate lmao), considers the act of labeling his sexuality as sort of this out of date, irrelevant thing in the grand scheme of things. whether that be in reference to who he is or what’s going on in the comic or a more metanarrative choice of hussie’s. some people interpret this to be a kind of admission of shame or maybe dirk just being pretentious but i personally interpret this as hussie kind of just being like. i don’t really want to spend too much time Talking about characters being gay i just want them to exist in the story and Be Gay. similarly to how the trolls don’t have a concept of sexuality in the same way the human characters do. it gives hussie an opportunity to have characters do Objectively gay things, from the reader’s perspective, without having to spell out their relationships to their own sexualities by real societal standards in the work itself when he was clearly more interested and comfortable talking about the trolls’ relationships to their fictional societal ones. and i think as a writer i find that pretty fair. (and yeah yeah i know another aspect of dirk’s whole deal is that he’s from the future so of course he would say that / the trolls are from another planet and all of this is in comedic foil to john i am not a homosexual egbert as the protagonist but i digress. idk i’m really only speculating here and maybe projecting lol)

bc tbh i also kind of shudder at the thought of writing gay characters who are always expected to spell out their identities to the audience when i’d rather just have them Do Actual Gay Things. (using gay as an umbrella term for lgbt+ yada yada). personally i’d rather have a scene where a character binds their chest to reveal an aspect of their gender presentation rather than feel obligated to spell out their relationship to their identity in words and explicit labels and also describe exactly how they Feel About All That. not because i want to cop out on representation and have their identities be totally open to interpretation necessarily, but more-so because i think it becomes exhausting sometimes as a gay person myself to have to keep acknowledging a character’s State of Differentness as obviously as possible every time i put a gay person in a piece of art.

not that i don’t find narratives that exclusively or heavily talk about and center themselves around identity and being in a State of Differentness in very outright ways important. to me that’s something very different and meaningful in completely different ways that can’t be accurately compared here. there are plenty of homestuck fanworks that make discussions of gender and identity a large priority that i think are extremely meaningful and one of the biggest reasons why i came back to homestuck after all these years and still really love the community of artists and writers that engage with it in this way. i think it’s an extremely wonderful thing, especially because with the homestuck community so niche, it really feels like a group of people spreading art that is, by a large majority, by gay people and for gay people. but in narratives that are not specifically centered around that, or has not centered themselves about that previously (like homestuck several acts into the comic) i can totally see how it comes across as off-putting. i think sometimes there’s a slippery slope with bigger projects with a large audience where the existence of gay characters in the work start to read as teaching tools for non-[insert identity here] or virtue signaling. i.e. it stops feeling like media that the reader can identity with as a gay person and more like media that is trying to represent gayness “accurately and positively” for a straight reader (or perhaps a gay reader who is completely new to their identity and appreciate this kind of easy-to-swallow and comfortable introduction). i find that in cases like this, the “representation” more often than not falls into the pitfall of being extremely generalized and sterilized or even stereotypical. which is a whole conversation in itself. bc when an identity is always easy to digest and understand, it risks reducing this character to the identity itself. water is wet i guess lol. idk it’s just a tricky balance. but definitely something i think about a lot when i’m engaging with contemporary homestuck fanwork.

long aside but. all of this to say. i just find it interesting to see how homestuck, as a kind of specific multimedia form of art and storytelling online that seemed to set a new precedent for the webcomic format at large, has taken on a genre of its own like any piece of art does that is unique and off the beaten path in its execution. idk it just makes me think of art history in general. like it’s fascinating to me to see something like homestuck which was once very new and fresh to me become a piece of art that has aged enough to open discussion about approaching the framework of homestuck in either a traditional or contemporary way. as a continuation or a fanwork or an homage. i guess the only point i’m trying to make here is that i don’t think one is better than the other and there’s something i appreciate about both.

i feel like i’m kind of avoiding the elephant in the room here which is that there’s a lot of discussion going on right now about maintaining consistency with homestuck proper in the current continuation with homestuck2 and that’s sort of a whole other can of worms i don’t really want to get into. but i would like to acknowledge how interesting it is that these discussions really obviously highlight how fast memes get “stale” nowadays in the current state of social media and everything seems to exist in a perpetual state of blink-and-you-miss-it virality. i really sympathize with the homestuck2 team who i’m sure are feeling a huge amount of pressure to strike a balance between making something refreshing / relatable to the current homestuck audience and also maintaining the “feels like homestuck” factor. all the while attempting to fulfill as many reader wishes as possible within reason. (not to mention the standard of “reason” being extremely subjective) it’s not an easy thing to do and definitely a hugely different creative process than the one hussie went through during early homestuck days. each with their own complicated hoops to jump through in terms of Making Art People Will Engage With.

[sophiemariepl]

I know I’m gonna sound like a boomer again, but I really miss the times when we could appreciate a fictional character without having to morally excuse their actions. And yes, this is again about Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon.

(I know that someone already wrote it here, but I feel like we need to stress it out more.)

Like, one of the main reasons why I find the HotD fandom so annoying and unbearable is that way too many individuals active in it conflate how well a particular character is written with how moral they are as a person.

But here it does not even seem to stem from any good deeds that they do, as it was in the case of Daenerys fandom (or at least, most of the time it does not seem to stem from it). Here, basically, all that matters is personal liking towards the character - if someone likes a particular character, they immediately jump to idealize them. Almost as if people were ashamed to admit that they like a character that is morally flawed or imperfect??

I already wrote in one of my previous posts about the Rhaenyra-Alicent dichotomy which is a great example of this phenomenon in the HotD fandom. I’m not gonna repeat myself here, so if you wanna know about which dichotomy I’m talking, go check out this post.

Coming back to my main point that is complaining, I miss the times when people could freely admit that they loved the Lannisters specifically because they are toxic, cruel and cunning (maybe except for Jeoffrey, I think that Jeoffrey was less appreciated and more universally hated 😜). Because they still appreciated the way the Lannisters were written. The political mind of Tywin, Tyrion’s wit, Cersei’s and Jamie’s toxicity, and the complexity of their characters.

Did they commit awful things, either to advance their family politically or for their personal gain? Yes.

Does that deny that they were extremely well written, as three-dimensional, multi-layered people? No.

Of course, I’m using the Lannisters only as an example, because I cannot list every single character of that sorts in here.

Having given this example tho, it makes me wonder why people cannot adopt the same approach to HotD. What’s the problem with using it in one was or another towards Otto Hightower, Alicent, Rhaenyra, Corlys Velaryon and Rhaenys Targaryen, or perhaps even most importantly, to Daemon?

Does this approach make you feel bad about yourselves, HotD fans? Are you ashamed to think that you like a character that is actually an awful person? Or is it that you just assume that every character that you like has to be a morally good person?

I’m genuinely asking.

[pureamericanism]

It's an almost banal truism that classic science fiction was largely a projection of the Frontier Experience - and, more broadly, the whole world-shaking events of the European Age of Discovery - onto an imagined outer space. Less frequently remarked is that the reverse is also true.

I grew up devouring Golden Age science fiction novels, and was a fervent believer in Mankind's Destiny Among The Stars. Well, the Space Age - like all the great dreams of thr 20th century - has turned out to be something of a damp squib, but I still want stories of fantastic voyages of exploration, adventure, science, discovery, and intrigue in a vast new world of far-flung outposts separated by titanic distances. So to scratch that itch, why not just...go back to the source?

If you want something like a story about an isolated asteroid mining colony, you can just read the memoirs of a surgeon at a Hudson Bay Company outpost! Why bother with Heinlein when you can just read the diaries of pioneer women, the tales of Yankee filibusters in Latin America, the authentic exploits of desert-island buccaneers, or the early adventures of the Portugese in the Indian Ocean? Do you want fraught tales of inteigue and war and high politics that extend to the farthest reaches of known space? A good book on any of the big 18th century wars for empire will satisfy. And can Star Trek remotely compare in imagination and excitement to the voyages of Cook and La Pérouse? "Strange new worlds, new life, and new civilizations?" Boy howdy, we got 'em! If you look at these things with fresh eyes, with the eyes of a science fiction fan rather than those of someone with access to an infinitide of pictures of them online, nothing could be more surprising than a dugong, a platypus, a redwood, a southern continent of solid ice.

All of this is really just an overly long preamble to my main point, though. Which is that I believe the story of Hernán Cortés, Montezuma, and the Conquest of Mexico to be possibly the greatest one ever told. The themes...bro, the themes! There is here a richness, a complexity and depth surpassing almost anything I can think of in legend or literature.

It is, of course, a science fictional First Contact story, in which two shockingly different civilizations who know nothing of each other suddenly find themselves facing each other down. And indeed, like any good First Contact story, one of the principal characters, La Malinche, is an interpreter! See how the resulting clash of civilizations eludes simple stereotyping - sure, it's easy to see the Spaniards as brash young interlopers into the sophisticated and urbane world of the Aztecs, whose capital was perhaps as much as an order of magnitude more populous than any city in Spain. But equally it is possible to see the Aztecs as provincials, isolated from a wider, older world that suddenly irrupts into their narrow one. Consider that Cortés supposedly got practical advice on political machinations and military strategy by - studying Caesar! Access to ancient wisdom penned by dead hands in far-off lands provides material aid to him.

Then there are the religious themes. It can be seen as a story about the triumph of Christianity, of the Church Triumphant, but what does it mean for a religion founded by a suffering martyr to become militarily triumphant? And what does it mean for thr religion of a suffering martyr to become triumphant over a religion of human sacrifice to the gods? This is a complex and multi-layered irony that spares no one. And consider the strange foreshadowing of the legend of Quetzelcoatl returning from over the sea. Shades of Frank Herbert, here, even (especially?) if the tale is a post-conquest invrntion.

And the role of technology in the tale. Yes, the steel and shot, the horses and hounds, the ships and sails were all powerful allies for the Spaniards, but these would not have sufficed without the smallpox virus - a reversal of Wells that still underlines the power of biology and of the very small even in the face of all our mastery over the brute world. But the conquest also would not have been possible without the alliance with the Tlaxcala and other local rivals and adversaries of the Aztecs. There are very pointed lessons in the social, political, and diplomatic sciences being demonstrated here. Some are obvious, and others very subtle - look at the ways these differing civilizations reacted under the extreme stress of this brutal war to see what I mean about the subtle ones.

I could go on, I could mention the strange aesthetic touches, such as the similarity in climates between the Valley of Mexico and inland Spain, and the parallels between Spain's role to Rome and Mexico's to Spain; or I could talk about the fascinatingly ambiguous characters of all the major players in this story, and the surprising arcs they go through; but not only am I already going on rather long, but I fear I may be making too light of what were, after all, real events, real events that resulted in piles of corpses, and whose tremendous human consequences are still felt deeply by tens of millions of people.

But I stand by my statement that it is one of the richest, profoundest stories I know of. The gods may be cruel, monstrously cruel, but they are artists, too.

[symphonyofsilence]

Thanks for answering my ask before. If you don't mind me asking (again), can I ask, what are your top 7 favorite media (can be books/ manga/ anime/movies/tv series) and your top 7 favorite ships (can be canon or non canon) from any media ? Why do you love them?

Sorry if you've answered this questions before......

My pleasure! Thank you for your thought-provoking ask, and sorry for taking so long to answer.

Oh... that's very hard to choose!

1. Tolkien legendarium

Well... I think this one's kinda self-explanatory. What can I say that hasn't been told in these 70 years better than I could.

2. MXTX's works especially Mo Dao Zu Shi/The Untamed and Heaven official's blessing but especially the former

God I love everything about how she writes! Especially the characters and the relationships between them! They all feel so real... so humane! And the relationships especially the platonic ones are so top-notch that like right now nobody can convince me that Jiang Cheng and Jiang Yanli are not my siblings! The characters and their relationships are so layered. And the subplots! THE SUBPLOTS! So beautiful! So haunting! They live in my head rent-free 24/7!

I love how the climaxes of the story, where everything starts to go down, they go down in such a spectacular way that you honestly can't find a way out of it even from a third-person perspective and they're so devastating they truly leave an impact on you to the point that it'ss hard to rawatch or reread them. I love how connected you feel to the characters that you feel the same love or sadness over their loss that the main character does. I love how things are sometimes so complicated that just like in the real world, there's no simple solution for them, and just like the real world, a magic solution doesn't descent from the skies, but the characters, true to who they are, in their own way try to deal with them the best they can (or not). (like how Wei Wuxian's and Jiang Cheng's love for each other would always be what separated them. And how there was never any way out for Jin Guangyao, ...)

Honestly. It's storytelling at its best!

And I think "The Untamed" is the peak of adaptation even if they had to face censorship from China's government, the adaptation is perfect! Some characters are even better in the show. I have such a deep emotional bond with it that I don't with the book itself.

3. Mike Flanagan's TV series especially Haunting of Hill House and Haunting of Bly Manor

Every single one of his TV shows is written and made in a way that every writer would wish to write! In his shows, Loss is not separable from love, heartbreak, and conflict and unintentional lasting harm is not separable from family, mortality from life, and price from success. They have a way of showing the ugly side, the usually ignored and always feared truths of the most beautiful concepts of life to you, and then show the beauty and grace that humans still can have in the face of it by bravely facing it and doing the best they can, and the solace they find in themselves and in each other. It always has such beauty and such solace and gentle sadness to them.

4. Avatar the Last Airbender

Exemplary worldbuilding, amazing character writings, extraordinary character developments, great relationships between characters, a masterful balance between lighthearted and serious and impactful and occasionally heartbreaking moments, perfect ways to address the many important issues it intended to address, marvelous finale, all in all the most flawless storytelling one can wish for.

5. Asoiaf

it's simultaneously the peak of High Fantasy and the peak of realism. With a few exceptions (Like Jeoffrey, Ramsay, Twyin, Maegor, Walder Frey, Roose Bolton, Gilly's father, and some other few I can't remember), people are not good or bad, people are people. they're multi-layered, they're complex, their characteristics feel real, their decisions make sense from their point of view, so does their mistakes, and they immediately, or sometimes in the long run, get the natural result of their actions. Their arcs and developments are amazing, their developments and redemptions feel earned. And the story! God! The story! What can I say about it! It's phenomenal! The pacing, the structures, the ups and downs, everything! And everything happens as the intertwined and natural result of every character's decision that is perfectly in line with the characters. Every character brings their own game to the table. Every character is unique and has a unique perspective. The dialogues are top-notch. The worldbuilding is extraordinary. The world feels so lived in. The concepts the story explores are explored thoroughly and in such great ways without being on the nose. It's really such a great work of fiction. I just wish GRRM WOULD JUST FINISH THIS GODDAMN BOOK!

And the TV series, the set design, the costume design, the music, the acting, the castings, the direction, the makeup, honestly everything except the writing of the last 2 seasons (and maybe more than two last seasons) was amazing.

6. Jujutsu Kaisen

The characters, heroes and villains and grey characters alike, the character dynamics, the character arcs, the plot, the themes, everything about it is absolutely perfect! The Hidden Inventory arc and Geto Suguru's character arc alone deserve all the awards! The power system is so intricate and interesting. Whether it's heartwarming, funny. or heartbreaking, at every turn the story makes you feel exactly what it wants you to feel. Every emotional peak of the story definitely strikes a chord without fail. It's so well-written in every aspect. The animation is out of this world and the music is great. Definitely one of the greatest out there. I could go on and on about it!

7. Bungo Stray Dogs

Each and every character is written masterfully. They're each unique and endearing. Every side character is as well-developed and as explored as the main one. And there's not a single character you can actually dislike till the end. Every antagonist (except Fyodor) that is introduced in one season is an ally in the next. (Or even before that) And explored more. And don't even get me started on the characters' dynamics! It's the heart of the show. And each and every one of them is perfect! The story and its ups and downs are so engaging and delightful, the pacing and the blend of comedy and drama are great. The way the characters outsmart each other is superb. The way every single character, friends, and rivals and previous enemies alike, with their abilities come together at the end and bring their own game to win against their common enemy is so beautiful and gratifying. The fights are always top-notch. The very interesting ways the lives and the books of the real authors are intertwined with the characters are nothing short of masterful. The way it explores its themes is very impactful. The character designs, the art style (in both the anime and the manga), and the animation (especially the fight scenes) are all perfect. I love everything about it!

the honorable mentions:

The Umbrella Academy

The Last of Us

The Sandman

I really enjoyed MCU while it lasted for a long time

Husky and his White Cat Shizun

Attack on Titan

The berserk

Good Omens

Fleabag

And here are the ships:

1. Satosugu (Gojo Satoru/Geto Suguru- Jujutsu Kaisen)

What do you mean "My six eyes tell me that you're Geto Suguru but my soul knows otherwise"?! What do you mean that 11 years after their breakup, Gojo saw Kenjaku for one mili-second and immediately knew that it's not Geto despite all the evidence, and Geto, 11 years after their breakup, and one year after Gojo had literally killed him still upon hearing Gojo's voice rushed into action trying to choke Kenjaku- his own body- to save Gojo? Not because he was alive but because protecting Gojo was instinct to even his dead body! Something that he didn't do when Kenjaku threatened the two girls he raised for 10 years? What do you mean that Kenjaku, accessing Geto's memories, based his whole plan to capture the strongest based on the fact that Geto would be his weakness and Gojo would turn back and would be too shocked to do anything for a few seconds and his plan actually worked. What do you mean that Geto Suguru is actually Gojo's one weakness? What do you mean that Gojo smiled for a second when he thought Geto was back even though the prison realm was right in front of him? What do you mean that the whole Shibuya incident happened because Gojo couldn't burn Geto's dear body? What do you mean that he only lived one year after Geto and died on the same day as him on the most romantic day of the year because it was the day he chose for his fight to take back Geto's body and give it a proper burial? What do you mean Gojo chose to become a teacher because of Geto after he left, after "he couldn't reach him."? What do you mean that Gojo kept using "Boku" years after Geto left because Geto told him so? What do you mean that Geto wore a Gojo-kesa for ten years? What do you mean they're literally like "and everything I ever did was just another way, to scream your name, over and over and over again."? What do you mean "even so, Gojo's gaze, covered under the white bandages, had always, always been staring at the shape of Geto's soul"? What do you mean that when Gojo found Geto dying he chose to tell him that he sent his students because he still trusted him that he wouldn't do anything to really harm them? What do you mean that his last words made the dying, bleeding man blush and giggle despite him saying moments ago that in this world, he couldn't even smile? What do you mean that Gojo still fondly remembered him as "my best friend, my one and only."? What do you mean that Nanako and Mimiko knew how much Gojo meant to Geto that they wouldn't even direct their rage and hatred towards him even after he killed Geto? What do you mean that till his last breath and beyond, Gojo was thinking of Geto? What do you mean "Since all those years ago, I was left behind, I have to catch up now."? WHAT DO YOU MEAN "SATISFIED? MAYBE I WOULD HAVE BEEN SATISFIED IF YOU WERE AMONG THOSE PATTING MY BACK."

Such devotion, such longing, such yearning, such an everlasting bond despite all the years and everything in between, such a burning loyalty, such love, such grief!

2. Soukoku (Dazai Osamu/Nakahara Chuuya- Bungo Stray Dogs)

The way Chuuya is the thing keeping Dazai alive and Dazai is the one that makes Chuuya feel the most humane. The way both of them can be just normal teenagers around each other. (Even way into their early twenties). The trust they have for each other! The way Dazai gets himself captured every time and even dies once fully believing that Chuuya will come (and succeed) to save him and Chuuya does, and every time Chuuya uses corruption he trusts Dazai with his life and Dazai never fails him, the way in the Dead Apple Chuuya knew Dazai so well and had such a faith/or maybe just hope in Dazai being alive that even knowing that he'd die using Corruption if Dazai were truly dead and weren't there to nullify his ability, still risked his life and used Corruption and single-handedly fought and destroyed a dragon made of all the abilities and saved Japan because of Dazai. The way Dazai risked the destruction of Yokohama and got a great portion of the Port Mafia killed to fight Verlaine just for Chuuya because Chuuya didn't want to go with Verlaine. The lengths they would go for each other!

The way with all Fyodor's genius, the one flaw in his master plan was that he didn't consider that there wouldn't be a moment when Chuuya wouldn't be on Dazai's side.

They work so well and so naturally together. They don't even need to communicate to know what to do it's like they just know and work in harmony together by instinct.

True soulmates!

They fit each other perfectly and are just what the other needs. They're both adrenaline junkies and in one way or another, adrenaline is what they provide for each other. Chuuya reminds Dazai why life is worth living. (Like 15-year-old Dazai before meeting Chuuya is like "Is there any value to this thing we call living? And 15-year-old Dazai barely a few days after meeting Chuuya says that he thinks living is worth trying), and Dazai firmly believes that Chuuya is human and makes him feel every human emotion possible. He makes him feel the moment so he doesn't keep troubling himself thinking about the past. They challenge each other, they support each other, they work perfectly together, they make each other feel alive.

3. Braime (Brienne of Tarth/Jaime Lannister- ASOIAF/GOT)

I love that they bring out the best in each other. I love the relationships where the ones involved are the best of themselves when they're together! I love it that when they're together, they both can the honorable knights they always dreamed to be. I love that with each other, they are for once, accepted, understood, believed, and believed in.

4. Xuexiao (Xiao Xingchen/Xue Yang- Mo Dao Zu Shi/The Untamed)

Oh, the Yi City arc was a novel of its own. One of the greatest arcs ever! The agent of chaos and a kicked abandoned kitten in the world that has seldom shown him any good, being helped and gently taken care of by someone he swore revenge on, someone who's captured him and insisted for justice to be brought upon him, and then in the middle of enacting his perfect revenge plan he realizes that he's actually enjoying this little life in this little corner of the world that they have together. Realizes that he's experiencing warmth, peace, normality, affection and a home for the first time and he doesn't want it to end. He wants to play house just a little longer. Only for it all to come crashing down in the worst way possible. Only for the man who showed him nothing but kindness, and wanted to do nothing but good, to kill himself when he realized he's made his hands bloodied and even made him kill his own best friend that he gave his eyes for. Only for Xue Yang to realize, after Xiao Xingchen's death, how much he has meant to him and how he can't go on without him. Without the only one who showed him kindness. And he has no one to blame for it but himself. He risked his life, and eventually died clutching to Daozhang's last candy, trying to bring back Xiao Xingchen, who was shattered by this horrible betrayal beyond repair.

And they were so genuinely happy together and enjoyed each other's company!

Xiao Xingchen laughed easily and Xue Yang was funny and enjoyed making him laugh. Xiao Xingchen wasn't good at telling stories but Xue Yang was and told A-qing stories when they gathered around fire at night. XXC gave them candies because XY said he loves candies. XY would voluntarily go grocery shopping, he'd volunteer to go shopping for clothes with A-qing, he'd make her bunny-like slices of apple and give her advice against bullies! They were really like a little happy family in that coffin house.

But the tragedy of it all was so epic and so twistedly beautiful you can't help but love it!

It's a twisted found family, it's enemies to friends but not really, it's enemies to lovers but with a twist (they're still enemies), it's got fluff but makes it dark, it's got angst, it's got betrayal, it's got self-made tragedies!

It's wretchedly beautiful and perfect in every way!

5. 3zun but especially Xiyao (Nie Mingjue/Lan Xichen/Jin Guangyao- Mo Dao Zu Shi/The Untamed)

This absolute trainwreck <3 It's so horrible I can't help but love it! The gothic horror of Nieyao, the being stuck in life and literally in death in one coffin, the way they'd never meet each other at one point in the middle because everything about them is polar opposites (as MXTx said, Nie Mingjue was written to contradict JGY in every sense) yet NMJ is so obsessed with JGY and they are stuck together!

The way NMJ was the first one (in the show) and or the second one (in the books) to respect JGY for his many capabilities and give him the status he deserves and JGY felt indebted to him for it but eventually JGY killed NMJ after NMJ's many attempts at his life and NMJ brought JGY's downfall and didn't leave him be even after his death and they'll be stuck in one coffin fighting each other for hundreds of years and won't ever find peace or get back to the cycle of reincarnation.

The way NMJ only saw the bad in JGY and LXC only saw the good.

The way JGY risked everything by saving LXC for no reason other than his kind heart, the way LXC always saw the best of him and was so understanding and considerate towards him. The way he always saw him and took his situation into account. He was the one who noticed others' behavior towards Meng Yao when he was serving them tea and shamed others by showing him respect and gratitude, he was the one who knew about his home situation in Jinlintai and explained it to NMJ and asked him to act more considerate towards him.

The way he always trusted him so much. in his capabilities, in his goodness, in his words, in whatever he did. Like even if he kept stepping up to protect him, the moment JGY indicated that he's got this handled, he'd step back and let him handle it. He said that it's not like he didn't know that JGY was doing fishy things all these years, but that he believed that he had good reasons for doing them.

The way they not only respected and admired and loved each other so much, but they really enjoyed each other's company and they kept seeking it. They used any chance to spend time together. They gossiped about Wangxian's love life!

But all this wasn't enough in the end. And LXC by mistake killed JGY but was still willing to stay and die with him in the end. And yet JGY even then couldn't Let that happen and used his last ounce of strength to push him away. And LXC was never the same person again.

And god! "Of all the evil in the world, what haven't I done?! But I've never even thought of harming you!"

The way this triad ended up ending each other!

6. Qijiu (Yue Qingyuan/ Shen Jiu- Scum villain's self-saving system)

Ah, the curse of Yue Qingyuan always being too late to save Shen Jiu. how he only ever wanted to save him and was never able to. How he spent his life trying to make up for it but even that wasn't enough and he was bound to lose him every time. How once Shen Jiu said that he'd give YQY all his loyalty and even after many future grievances he never stopped being loyal and always tried to save him. Even in his last days even with everything that LBH had done to him, he used the one chance he had to talk to YQY to break his heart so he wouldn't try to save him and endanger himself, but he didn't succeed and died knowing that YQY had died trying to save him. But in both the worlds he died without knowing why YQY never came back for him. all this tragedy! the way at the end of SVSSS everyone's got their happy ending except YQY and SJ. The way it's one tragedy if YQY never knows that Xiao Jiu is dead and one even worse tragedy if he finds out. There's no happy ending for them in any universe, but the love was and will always be there.

7. The ineffable husbands (Crowley/Aziraphale- Good Omens)

They are every Hozier song!

They've been together and loved each other since before the world was made. They're both too inquisitive and strong-willed to have a place among angels and or demons. They have a side of their own. Their bond prevented armageddon. They're so wholesome! So fit for each other! So... ineffable!

Honorable mentions:

Dani ClaitonXJamie Taylor (The Haunting of the Bly Manor)

GutsXGriffith (Berserk)

YumiHisu (Ymir Fritz/Historia Reiss- Attack on Titan)

Fengqing (Feng Xin/Mu Qing- Heaven Official's Blessing)

Beefleaf (He Xuan/Shi Qingxuan- Heaven Official's blessing)

Wanda/vision (Marvel)

Russingon (Maedhros/Fingon- Tolkien legendarium)

Nerdanel/Fëanor (Tolkien legendarium)

Ranwan (Mo Ran/Chu Wanning- Husky and his white cat Shizun)

Light/L (Death Note)

Hannigram (Hannibal Lecter/Will Graham- Hannibal)

Obanai/Mitsuri (Demon slayer)

Rapunzel/Eugene (Tangled)

[unnursvanablog]

And now it has arrived!

One of my most anticipated sageuks of the year, Queen Woo - but it has been on my tbw list for AGES because all I really needed to know is that is was a historical drama with Ji Chang Wook in it and I am not about to pass the opportunity to witness that again. I adored him in Warrior Baek Dong Soo (the lighter and more campy version of My Country also starring my all time fav Yoo Seung Ho) and in Empress Ki (which was the first looooong historical kdrama that I stuck around with and watch from beginning to end).

Also, it's not a sageuk set during the Joseon times… which is honestly just such a breath of fresh air. We get so many of them. I adore a lot of them, but Korean history also has so many other stories to draw inspo from.

That was sort of all I sort of knew about it before I went into it. I knew it was about Queen Woo and how she married one of her husbands brothers and was fighting to keep the throne after her husband died. I didn't know it was rated 19 for violence and… nudity, but that isn't really something that bothers me all that greatly if it just works with the story. I doubt this show is going to go all Game of Thrones on us and just show that sort of stuff in there just because.

If anything those scenes that we got actually just sort of amused or make me go… sure, ok.

And since I knew Ji Chang Wook would die (very sad, I wanted to watch him in all his sageuk glory for 8 episodes) so I spent the entire first episode just expecting him to drop dead and just exit the story every moment that he appeared on screen. But we are seeing quite a bit of him, and he seems to have a much bigger role within the story than I thought he would, which I am glad about. I was expecting a very kickass guest role or a cameo or something.

This show so far, I am on ep 2 because I am in my heart and soul not a binge watcher and I prefer to watch my kdramas on a slow but steady pace, and it is sort of the standard sageuk fare… with some added sex which we see way more in like historical movies but not in dramas. But with 8 episodes this will probably just feel like one long, epic movie anyway. It seems to have that sort of feel to it.

There is some scheming old men who want a better position or they want a better way to rule the country without really being on the throne and having to deal with stuff that comes with being a king. They want to rule from the shadows so to speak. There are ladies who want to be queen and scheme and plot to try to get to that position and so forth. it got flashbacks to the times they were kids and it got a man with a heart of gold (probably, or that is how it starts out) who is also a bit of a scoundrall running through the streets, jumping on roofs etc. It's a sageuks, you are having a fun time, you are pretending that you are learning some history and it's bloody and gory, it has Ji Chang Wook looking moody and sometimes covered in blood… what's not to enjoy.

It's all very standard for the genre, but I was very much entertained through it all... or the first two episodes. I just really enjoy this sort of more serious toned historical dramas. The politics can be dry, sure, but if one does it well and have enough of multi-layered and complex characters where we understand everyone's motives and such it actually is a very fun time.

I do think the drama is still very much setting the scenes in episodes 2 and we are still getting to know the main players. And I am still very much learning their names. There are some interesting characters there, like the priestess lady and the lady, the queens sister no less, one who accidentally killed the king because she wanted to fuck him, as well as Queen Woo and the former kings closest advicer, but they aren't the most complex characters yet, but with time they could be.

The queen, who is our main character and the main player in all of this, is somewhat of a girlboss female character and idk if she was adapted that way, of being this girl who wants to be a general but can't because she is a girl, for modern audience or if she was actually like that. But I do find her to be a character who is more than that and she is someone who is easy to root for. And I am excited for her politics and her plots and more of her backstory.

[imperiuswrecked]

Designing an animated character means more than just creating how the character looks. As three TAG Character Designers share, it requires an understanding of physical movement, technology, and the art of collaboration. By Kim Fay MULTI-LAYERED MAGIC SPIDER-MAN: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE CHARACTER DESIGNER: KRIS ANKA In Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Miles Morales is catapulted across a multiverse filled with Spider-People. All of them are charged with protecting its existence, and all of them have very different ideas about how to do this. Especially Miguel O’Hara, AKA Spider-Man 2099. Unlike Miles and his predecessor, Peter Parker, Miguel intentionally altered his DNA to become a Spider-Person. Because he played a role in his own transformation, he is as multi-layered as the movie he inhabits—literally. Character Designer Kris Anka approached Miguel in stages, adding layers throughout the process to develop the complexity of this superhero. When Anka was invited to work on Across the Spider-Verse by Joaquim Dos Santos, the film’s director, he was already familiar with Miguel. A CalArts graduate, Anka had been working at Marvel comics for eight years, even designing one of Miguel’s suits. He had worked in animation before his Marvel stint and was ready to return. Little did he know that his three-month contract would extend to three years, with much of his time focused on Miguel. While Miguel exists in comics, and screen audiences got a glimpse of him briefly in the end credits of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Anka says the sequel’s creative team wanted to take a new approach to the character. Some early pre-concept work had been done, and “they knew the vibe they wanted,” he says. “They wanted Miguel to be someone who was very proactive. He always had to have a presence. When he walked into a room you think, oh, this guy takes things more seriously than everyone else. He had to move in that intentional way—I’m on the hunt—physically intimidating.” The film’s Visual Development Artist Spencer Wan did physicality animation tests, giving Anka an understanding of the impact of Miguel’s weight. Miguel has claws and doesn’t stick to walls, “and he’s not lithe, he’s not an acrobat. He’ll go through a wall rather than find some artful way around it,” Anka says. Working with his musculature, he had to figure out how to make Miguel fit in with the visual language of Spider-Man while at the same time stand out among the other Spider-People from the previous movie. “We had two very separate approaches with him,” Anka explains. The first was translating the comic design into a character that would work in animation. While the strong red and blue silhouette would remain, in animation action scenes with a lot of movement, “Miguel could accidentally become a muddled mess because of all that blue,” says Anka. He added red to Miguel’s palms and soles, designed red arm bands that angled in specific directions, and created a red design for the back of his suit that looked different from the front to make sure the audience could always tell what side of his body they were looking at. With this initial design done, Anka sent Miguel down the pipeline. Then the vis-dev team told him they were working Mesoamerican Burle Marx-influenced patterns into the backgrounds. Marx was a Brazilian landscape architect whose style had distinctive patterns. Like the other Spider-People, Miguel inhabits his own universe—Nueva York in the year 2099. Anka was asked to return to Miguel to unite the character’s look with his world. “To make everything feel that Miguel was born in this culture,” he says. Anka spent the next six months focused on working in patterns without breaking the original silhouette. The blue parts would have a faint pattern underneath the digital texturing; the red parts would have the same pattern, but it needed to be stronger. Overall, they wanted three different layers of detailing to the suit, and the challenge, Anka knew, was to “add a sophistication to the design without it being ham-fisted and too noisy. Things can get really loud really fast.” Anka was given some loose patterns to work with, but nothing lined up. He researched everything from Marx’s designs to Mesoamerican textiles to architecture for inspiration—and set about experimenting. He tested what would happen if the pattern was curvier, straighter, softer, or more hard-edged. Then he had to ask, “Where does everything fit so it all looks intentional to the anatomy?” His method was to take all the red parts—the mask, the chest, the arm bands, and the legs—and use each to show how he could break down the pattern and still retain the silhouette. He had vis-dev choose which versions of each body part they liked best. Once he had that, he says, “I would try to holistically find commonalities between those patterns and bring it all into one unified piece.” Now that Miguel was ready to move down the pipeline again, it was decided that Anka would translate the geometric patterns he had designed directly onto the model—not a usual role for a Character Designer. But nothing about Miguel and the rest of the Spider-People was usual. “Every design is wildly asymmetrical including Miguel’s body,” Anka says. But because he’d been thinking about the patterns for so long, “I could figure out, how does this all really sync up, [so] when it went into animation, everything lined up already,” he says. On and off, Anka spent 16 months working on Miguel. It was a laborious process, but one he gladly undertook in service of the ultimate payoff—a design, he says, “that feels effortlessly that character by the end.”

Kris Anka interview on Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse with Key Frame Magazine (issue no. 22)

[bigmammallama5]

Just finished the first season of the x-files and while I loved looking at Gillian Anderson in impecable fashion for 20+ episodes, I have to ask: is there ever more of an overarching plot beyond “aliens are real and the government is hiding it”? Because it feels like that was the main conclusion at the end of the season, but it was pretty much established by episode 5, so what was the point of the rest of it?? They kept introducing different aliens with not a single reference to events of previous episodes, save for Tooms, and I walked away from the season feeling a little like nothing of meaning had happened for 15 episodes!

So, two things I really miss most about TV is the serialization of longer seasons, and the Monster Of The Week format.

Over the seasons the main theme is, yes, the government is hiding the existence of ETs, but there is a more complex arc of a planned invasion to also go along with the building multi-layered relationship between Mulder and Scully. But other than that, it's probably like (and I'm being generous here) 40% plot and 60% monster of the week, where you get fun creepy paranormal one-off episodes that usually don't tie back in! Which is the format a lot of longer-episodic shows used to do. That's how Xena Warrior Princess and the Hercules show were also made. AND Buffy, Doctor Who, Smallville, Supernatural, Charmed, Scooby-Doo, and Sailor Moon.

Some current shows do attempt to do some of this format, but [insert rant about the greed of networks pulling reruns and screwing over cast and crew pushing everything to streaming to circumvent paying out residuals] the length of seasons has drastically shrunk and this format has largely been put on the shelf and why I personally think neckflick shows are exhausting. With these older shows while nothing may happen to tie in to the plot every single episode, you get these nice character-heavy one-off episodes of "what would they do in This Situation™" (also allowing better pacing through the 24-28 episodes of a season).

So uh. Yeah. Those gaps were on purpose LOL.

[cosmicgardencreative]

(Ismaire here:) ~6 hr speed-paint, + 1.5 hrs to tweak for the second version.

I love Resident Evil. I won't go through my whole personal fan history or journey, but it's my favorite franchise. I've loved the Resi Remakes too. And like it seems a lot of people did, I absolutely loved the new Separate Ways.

And this is just a personal opinion, I'm not saying that anyone needs to agree - but I adore Lily Gao as Ada Wong.

Every actress who portrayed Ada before has their place in Resi history and I'm grateful for the work they did in the franchise, but I think Lily Gao did such a perfect, snappy, subtly multi-layered version of the mysterious mercenary I was familiar with.

I always loved Ada, so I say this with love and appreciation:

She's taken Ada from femme fatale spy stereotype to a fleshed-out individual, from an archetype to a complex woman who has her own ideals, feelings and struggles, and has to juggle them with the decisions that got her where she is now. Obviously the writing was great too, which played a huge part in setting up Lily Gao's acting to absolutely sing (at least to me).

She's a different Ada, for sure. Was I caught off-guard by her voice at first? You bet. She doesn't have the airy, playful, motherly (sometimes kind of condescending?) tone about her anymore - she's got things to do. She's as sharp and cunning as she is quietly compassionate. She's willing to cut off Albert Wesker mid-sentence, but she's just as willing to call Leon and tell him where to find Ashley. She feels like a merc who's had it rough and made her way by sheer hard work, not a model who gets out of bad spots by blowing kisses and tossing a perfectly timed grenade.

Now, I love over the top badassery, and I love how that was rehashed and still fit back into Ada's character. But she felt like a human first, and like those "glorious moments of awesome" came out of painstakingly honed skill, not absurdly sturdy plot armor.

What I stated here applies to a lot of things about the Resi remakes, of course - not just Ada. So much has been tweaked, amped, remixed, and so on. Ada is just maybe one of the most prominent parts of the remakes that made me really pause and go "oh my God, I can't believe how much I love this!"

I don't have a problem with the originals - I loved them (camp and all), grew up with them, etc. As a whole package, the series is just my jam and it would be hard to lose me as a fan. I even got used to first-person play so I could enjoy 7 and Village - they were awesome. (Bless you who already love first-person games. I... don't, haha.)

But back to Ada - I just thought this was the most well-rounded performance her character has ever gotten. Anyone else can read her any way they want to. She's fictional, let's all remember. But Lily Gao is not, and she now has my heart and my vote as a fan!

[ofsilentthings]

Writer Interview Game!

Thanks @kalmiaphlox for tagging me!

When did you start writing?

I've written since I was a kid. Got heavily into fanfiction as a teenager ... and then promptly stopped when I entered college*. Didn't start up again until about 2020; there were stories I wanted to tell of my D&D characters that didn't come up during gameplay. (Having a pandemic to keep one at home helped as well). Picked up fanfic again in 2021 when, after beating Bloodborne, I found a little site called Archive of One's Own...

* I did co-write a play that was produced at my college; it was about Lewis Carroll's relationship with Alice Liddell, the girl for whom he wrote ALICE IN WONDERLAND I ended up playing Lewis Caroll in the production, which was a treat. Probably fed a secretly-held love of men's 19th century fashion.

Are there different themes or genres you enjoy reading than what you write?

I love shows like Babylon 5 or Deep Space 9, as well as a good documentary. I also like reading play scripts.

Is there a writer you want to emulate or get compared to often?

Someone once compared my writing to F. Scott Fitzgerald and I about exploded with joy. Other than that I love a good (translation) of Gabriel Garcia Marquez or the aforementioned Fitzgerald. Edgar Allen Poe in terms of sheer variety of word use, as well as horror inducing terror.

Can you tell me a bit about your writing space?

I have an office with my various fandom paraphernalia around me; but I do a lot of writing on the couch so I can be in the same room as my family. If I get to be alone I love writing outside, or barring that, my local library.

What's your most effective way to muster up a muse?

Listening to music. Even if the lyrics aren't exactly what I need, the tone or mood of a piece can be enough for me to start imagining.

Then again, some of my favorite fics have started from dreams I've had.

Are there any recurring themes in your writing? Do they surprise you?

I write a lot about parenting, because I am a mom; perhaps it's a way to explore the ways parenting can go wrong (and how it can go right). I also seem to write, at least recently, about marriage. I have a lovely happy marriage, but I'm not sure people would know that by the demented marriages I often write about.

What is your reason for writing?

I have fun making up stories, but I find myself needing an outlet to explore some idea of humanity - often an aspect of some part of my life or past that I want to understand better. My stories are me showing my work about various themes in my own life. I don't want to provide solutions or definite answers, but rather, present a situation or feeling and go, 'what do you think?'

Is there any specific comment or type of comment you find particularly motivating?

If I touched a single person with my prose or character situation or if I even made something beautiful from something horrific, then I consider it a win.

How do you want to be thought about by your readers?

An engaging writer that makes a reader think about their smut.

What do you feel is your greatest strength as a writer?

World building and, occasionally, dialogue.

How do you feel about your own writing?

I think I have a strong command of a scene - dialogue and scenes between two people are a strength of mine. I have a strong understanding of character motivations and how to present multi-layered characters to an audience, hopefully without judging them too much.

I'm proud of how far I've come in terms of descriptive text; sentence variety, invoking memories and all the senses is something I am experimenting with. (Not every sentence needs to be complex.)

That being said, I wish I knew more words. I'll read something and be reminded of words that I had forgotten, or, even better, learn new words. I want to fill my writing with texture, so that when you read it it tickles all parts of one 's imagination. (I like words.)

When you write, are you influenced by what others might enjoy reading, or do you write purely for yourself, or a mix of both?

I have struggled a lot with writing what I like, because I know what I like is a specific niche; I try to find a way to write things people will like or comment on but also speaks to bigger themes. I can't write just smut, for instance - there has to be some sort of pathos or character change. In the end I do like most everything I write, because otherwise I wouldn't bear to see it on the screen/print.

tagging @wikipedianna, @karnaca78 , @slothquisitor, for writer fun.

[purble-gaymer]

just because you are the beloved meta knight moot and i'm really sleepy i'm going to rant about metadad for a little while because it's hard to find people who think metadad can kind of be a double edged sword (haha sword pun). or just care about this in general.

imo metadad is really good and i like it. i think it's a fun concept to toy with and there's some evidence to back it up (ie: face reveal, that really cute itsudemo kirby book, sakurai and ohmoto's comments about his relationship with kirby).

here's the thing that really gets to me though. metadad falls into "soft father figure in a nuclear family unit" so so so so so much. which is so weird, because the dream team isn't a soft nuclear family at all! these people all have very similar skill + competence levels, and they're constantly physically fighting each other. this is like, a constant rivalry thing. these are people that deeply care about each other but aren't constantly babying each other.

like, metadad. i said there was evidence, and there is. and it's a cute concept! i like the idea of mk seeing kirby as a son! i like the idea that they can be soft and tender and loving with each other! but meta knight is like, notoriously irresponsible, and kirby can handle himself on his own. he doesn't need to be a responsible dad type, nor does he need to handle all of kirby's problems. this carries over to animeverse, even. it just feels like we're skipping the whole "rivarly" and "violence" and "similar power level" to have the cutesy dad stuff exclusively. maybe. maybe i can see it in animeverse. but it's circumstantial. it's really circumstantial. yeah. i should be writing.

yes yes yes. these four go through a ton together and boiling their dynamic down to something so strictly familiar feels…demeaning.

i’ve mentioned before that i sprinkle a bit of metadad into my work. it’s fun, like you say, and it makes sense with how they support each other and are always trying to help the other improve. the dream team works together in a way that is easy to read as a family. but, mostly i do it in a mentor-student way more so than father-son. i’ve grown fond of the ‘mk raised sailor dee’ headcanon lately, and even then he isn’t really a father type. he’s still more a mentor and a friend than anything else.

mk gets softened a lot. like, more than he would realistically be. i love getting to see him lower his guard and be vulnerable for once, hell one look at any of my knights-related work is enough to know that, but he has a limit. he’s still a powerful warrior with years of experiences weighing on him. we don’t know much about his history in the game-verse, but there’s probably something hidden away in the memory vault. he’s mature in a way many kirby characters aren’t.

and that’s not to say someone like kirby himself isn’t mature. he is, in his own way. he’s younger, is all, but he’s not a baby. he’s been through his own struggles and has learned from them. he’s grown and changed since dreamland 1 and adventure, and that’s a conversation for a different night with how much i have to say about it. even in the anime i feel like the descriptor of “he cannot speak, he can hardly think” is much too harsh (and i should point out, meta knight is the one who says this! he’s war-hardened and difficult to impress, and over the course of the show he grows to understand that just because kirby is young doesn’t mean he can’t conquer challenges the knight may see as impossible).

sometimes their actions can be read as friends, sometimes as rivals, sometimes as father-son. they are multi-layered, complex characters with an incredibly strong bond. there is so much more to these two, and dedede and bandee as well, than “soft happy family living domestically in dreamland.” domestic isn’t even in their vocabulary. they just are, and they’re just doing whatever they want, because that’s what you do when you have people you trust to such a degree. they’re whatever they are in the moment and it’s great. such a developed dynamic should be explored, not ignored. these four have limitless potential in the ways that they interact.

compare adventure and super star to robobot and triple deluxe, to forgotten land, to return to dreamland and star allies. you can tell just how much love has been poured into these characters, and how much love they have for each other. they go to hell and back and they always do it as a team.

[abeautifulblog]

What was the verdict? What did you think? Is blood origin worth watching?

Yesssssss, question mark?

[My thoughts/opinions on Blood Origin, accompanied by screencaps from the groupchat liveblog -- spoiler-free, actually!]

Blood Origin has a more interesting story than TWN S2 (it's the story of how the Conjunction of the Spheres happened, and how the first witcher came to be, eyyy! :D), and the actors do a better job convincing the audience that their characters actually care about the other people onscreen.

In fact, coffee-mage said, "Honestly, Blood Origin is rekindling my enjoyment for Witcher more than S2 did, just because this is such an interesting universe"

The scenery is quite beautiful, and so are a lot of the costumes. The empress's costumes in particular have that gorgeous, hedonistic opulence reminiscent of Queen Amidala's outfits, stunning and original, legitimate works of art in their own right -- although they are offset by a lot of pleather armor with no coherent aesthetic, and wigs that are worse than what you'd find at Party City.

I didn't even hate the het romance, because it was a friendship first and a romance second, and it was built on a foundation of earned mutual trust and respect. (And it's enemies-[to-friends]-to-lovers, if that sweetens the pot for anyone.) It was a bit zero-to-sixty when they make the shift from being friends to making cow eyes at each other, but a lot of things in the show were, which brings us to Blood Origin's two main failings:

1) That the story was too rushed. This show had kind of the opposite problem from TWN S2 -- that instead of fucking around and wasting time in order to make a thin amount of plot stretch to cover eight episodes, Blood Origin was frantically trying to cram a complex, multi-layered story with a large cast (like, 8+ primary characters?) and all their backstories and motivations and character arcs into four episodes.

2) That the writing is just. not. good.

I'll be blunt with you guys -- whoever's writing for TWN is simply not smart enough to tell a grown-up story, not on an individual level, and not a world-building level. Blood Origin is supposed to involve a lot of complicated political maneuvering, but these writers' idea of what makes up the mechanisms of power is childishly, cartoonishly simplistic, and it could not be more clear that they have no idea how empires are administrated, how diplomacy and soft power work, what kind of time scale these things run on.

Which isn't even touching on the nonstop abuse of As You Know, Bob dialogue, and how, thanks to the time constraints, almost everyone's backstory is told-not-shown. "AS YOU KNOW, I WAS A FOUNDLING AND YOUR PARENTS TOOK ME IN, AND THUS I GREW UP TO REGARD YOU AS MY OWN SISTER--"

Like, guys. GUYS. This is the kind of shit I wrote in middle school.

It's better than TWN insofar as they remembered that they needed to actually introduce us to these characters, tell/show us what they're like as people, what their relationships and conflicts are, but MAN the dialogue is clumsy as fuck. Character interactions are as basic as can be, and any nuance or complexity there is coming from the actors, not the writing.

The premise of the show -- the story, the characters -- is not fundamantelly flawed. It had the potential to be very good, but it's not, because the execution was hot dogshit.

Joey is a delight as always, but his role in this show is so tiny and SOOOO pasted-on, just a sliver of framing narrative at the beginning of the first episode and the end of the last, so if that's what you're coming here for, you're going to be disappointed. I truck with the theory that they shoehorned him in at the last minute to try to draw in Jaskier fans and keep Blood Origin from being a total flop, because he's not integral to the story at all -- you could remove the framing narrative without a single hiccup.

(Although from a meta perspective, a lot of the plot holes make so much more sense if you interpret it as Jaskier making shit up. Something unbelievable happens and you're just like, LOL, OH LOOK, THERE'S JASKIER BACK ON HIS BULLSHIT. XD)

Michelle Yeoh is also a treat, though god only knows how they roped her into this trashfire. To be sure, her role is so thin that she's basically doing nothing but serving stage presence, but by god she's serving it in spades.

Anyway, tl;dr --

C+

High production value, and a concept with a lot of interesting potential, but foiled yet again by the holistic incompetence of TWN's writing team.

(Seriously, just -- HIRE. BETTER. WRITERS. It blows my mind that they pour all this money into these shows, but then don't think it's worth their time to find people who know how to tell a story?? Like they don't seem to think that part MATTERS? When to my mind, it's the only part that matters??)

So, is Blood Origin worth watching? I can't say, that is a question you will have to answer for yourself. *I* had a great time, but that was more about the day-drinking and getting to share the experience with friends.

So yeah, I guess that's my recommendation -- watch it with friends.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[sadistpet]

Questions for the mun. A series of questions for the mun / the person behind the muse(s)

@gcldfanged / @valour-bound :

What caused you to start writing? What was your key point?

OH MY GOD UM im really not sure???? as far as i can remember ive always been writing

i was a freakishly verbose child ( I CALLED MY SISTER AN IMBECILE WHEN I WAS 3??? ) and very ahead in terms of reading and writing because kno. The Autism. i was reading like actually Reading adult-level encyclopedias for fun from when i was like, 3 or something so ive always been into literature and i think it just kinda spawned from there?? i was writing stories and keeping them in punched pockets, writing plays and fanfiction and stories on microsoft word, so it was something i always did afaik

if there was a key point i don't remember it, but there are some things that stick out to me; once when i was around 11?i got a pokemon fan magazine that had honest to god fanfiction in it and that was like. immense to me. like you're telling me other people write about their favourite franchises like this?? and after that i really started taking stuff more seriously in regards to how i was writing another was when i was. ??? unsure but my teacher at the time wrote on my work "remember me when you are a famous author :)" and that sticks with me to this day. she was kind of a huge bitch but that was such a genuinely moving comment and i think abt it a lot sometimes

and a lot of little things too. like being told by online friends that i was an amazing writer for my age, or my english teacher being legitimately visibly excited to talk about my writing. so yea :3

Are you happy with how your favorite canon muse was portrayed in canon?

HMMM. in terms of raikov i Think so ? but i do wish we had got more of him. and specifically more of his relationship with volgin because they're very cute together. idk if i've mentioned it here before but i theorise that their relationship was initially meant to play a larger part in mgs3, because mgs is known for having very multi-layered and complex villains, and volgin isn't really shown as one. and yeah that's likely what they were going for with a more bond-esque narrative, but the fact he's constantly portrayed as evil personified WHILE ALSO having parts that shows he genuinely loves and cares abt someone... idk. it feels like they wanted to make that more prominent to add more depth to his character but they just didn't

SO REALLY thats my only critique, i wish we had seen more of him interacting with the other characters rather than nameless npcs. i'm kind of content with him being a mostly blank slate, though -- it means i can do a lot more work on him :3

What are your biggest (personal) Tumblr crushes?

gonna do this in rp sphere only bc otherwise i think ill die of embarrassment BUT i literally have so many like oh my god if i fucking. follow you then you can assume i look up to you because WROW i follow such cool writers. my main ones if i had to choose are han (@cwarscars), hope (@viruslearnt), jason (@tacticalvalor), soda (@gcldfanged) and ryder (@zendatsu); theyre the ones i look up to the most i think :D theyre all genuinely such sweet people and terrifyingly amazing writers like hoyl fuckign shit