crowley is braver than any us marine for being interrupted during a love confession, taking aziraphale’s devastating news about heaven, and STILL following through with it anyways
baby👶 drawings. these are very dear to me rn.. 2nd pic is my Nelavis with @barvin0k's Varonur 🩵 last one is a baby bosmer and snow elf, hairiest of them all. although the bosmer was meant to be my girl Barletta too lols
No but like every time I think about Splinter and what he had to go through just to keep the boys alive, my heart hurts for him so badly. Is he perfect? No not at all, but none of them are and by god does he love his sons.
The fact that all of them are alive, and grew to thrive despite the circumstances surrounding them is a testament of how much Splinter loves his boys. He raised four babies following the most traumatic time of his life, all alone with nothing but the sewers to house them (to hide them.) I feel like he’s not given the credit he deserves for all he’s done.
And I get that it’s easy to hold up his flaws and faults when it comes to parenting, I myself like looking into them because flawed characters are super interesting and said flaws make them more realistic and engaging, but he tries, and again, so many others would have given up on the boys or failed along the way but Splinter didn’t.
He’s their father, for all his faults he did his damndest to make sure they survived.
(@bearerofendlesspain You know... Only after writing this whole thing do I realize that I had read this prompt wrong... WHOOPS! I read it as "Poison Ivy and Tucker are eating blood blossoms to extinction." and not as what was likely intended which seems to have been more along the lines of... "Batman rogue: Poison Ivy. Conflict: Tucker is eating blood blossoms to extinction." ... Which in this particular context are way, WAAAAAY different ideas! I could have saved myself a lot of distress if I had read it correctly... >.> But ah well! Whoops! Hope you enjoy this anyway! Thinking about a plant going extinct like this was quite distressing for me to write! :D)
"Hey. Thanks for helping me out with this, Tuck. And you know... For keeping all of this a secret from Sam." Danny smiled in appreciation to Tucker as they began to break ground with their shovels. "She would probably HATE what we're doing right now!"
"Yeah, of course, dude! It's no problem at all. The more we get rid of these blood blossoms here in Amity Park, the better it is for you and all of the ghosts in the area! Besides, I never want to even think about having to eat another one of these things ever again!" Tucker shivered at the memory of having to eat blood blossoms to save Danny and Sam's lives.
With that, the two got to work killing the bush of blood blossoms. They were digging to expose the roots so they could tear the plant from the ground whole. That made things easier when they would shove the entirety of the plant into a plastic garbage bag along with the other blood blossom bushes they had already uprooted. Once they were done with this area, they would take all of the bushes they had uprooted over the course of the day and bring them to an incinerator where they would destroy the plant- burning the flowers, stems, roots, and seeds all in one fell swoop. They had to make certain to destroy the whole plant, including the roots and seeds, just to make sure that there was no chance of the bush growing back from just its roots or more bushes getting planted in their place. They had been making good progress in wiping out the blood blossoms in this area. They just had a few more to uproot here and they could move on to the next area! They had been at this for months and were getting pretty close to their goal of exterminating blood blossoms in the whole of Amity Park!
But just as they were pulling this bush from the ground, a beautiful red-haired woman started charging towards them. "What do you think you're doing!???" she roared. The woman was clearly frantic.
Danny and Tucker glanced to one another. "Removing a bush...?" Danny answered, not certain what was going on.
"'Removing a bush' ... Alright, kids, stop what you're going and step away from that 'bush' right now!" She demanded. And while Danny complied, letting go of the plant and backing away, Tucker didn't and instead began to haul the shrub from the ground.
"Come on, lady. We're just removing some weeds. This isn't anything to freak out over." Tucker turned to roll his eyes at the woman where Danny could see but she couldn't.
"A 'weed'? A 'WEED'!!? You really don't have any idea what you're doing do you!? Do you even know what these 'weeds' are!?" The woman was obviously distressed, and growing more agitated by the moment.
Tucker let out a flippant breath. "They're blood blossoms, duh."
"Yes. And this specific species of blood blossoms are native and endemic to the Amity Park area!"
"Okay...? So what?" Tucker wasn't entirely certain what she was talking about.
"And they're an endangered species!"
"Oh... I- I didn't know!" Danny swore, suddenly feeling bad about what he and Tucker had been doing.
"So?" Meanwhile, Tucker had the opposite reaction. "What are you, a botanist or something? Who cares if these blood blossoms go extinct?"
"Yes. I am a botanist..." Danny was watching as the horror on the woman's face was slowly turning into fury.
"Tucker...? I think that you should just leave the plant alone..." Danny cautiously advised.
"What!? After all the work we've put into killing off all of these stupid flowers? Now you're starting to sound like Sam! We've been at this months! No way I'm stopping now!"
"MONTHS!???" That was the absolute last straw. These children have been exterminating these poor, defenseless, endangered plants for months!? Dr. Pamela Isley- more famously known as Poison Ivy- had heard enough. These boys were going to pay. "You might not care about these flowers dying, but I do! The land- The Green does! You need biodiversity in order to have a healthy ecosystem, and these flowers play an important role in that! You can't just go around, carelessly digging up and killing innocent, endangered plants without there being... Consequences."
When I see stuff like this I kinda want to bash my head into a wall:
To start off, I’m not sure whether this person was commenting on book or show Cersei, but honestly, it doesn’t even matter because she’s so much more than the ‘ambitious villain’ or the ‘murderous girlboss’ tropes in both the book and show.
(Of course, I do have my issues with the way Cersei was written in the show like most people but this is simply a rant post so I’m not going to go through the differences of Show vs Book Cersei)
Cersei is a female character who was shaped by her environment, who’s insecurities were created by her environment, and she’s a woman who’s idiotic mistakes can be traced back to how her environment shaped her. She’s much more than a murderous girlboss, she’s both a victim of the system and also a beneficiary of it, while also acting as an agent of it to keep the status quo while also desiring what the system denied her.
Cersei is NUANCED and complicated and even now people hate that about her and want her to have been a purely evil woman handcrafted in a vacuum, ignoring the context of her life because readers would rather not engage with Cersei’s victimhood and nuances because that ruins their idea of: She Was The Problem and Always The Problem. (People would rather say that she deserved her walk of shame instead of interacting meaningfully with the theme of systematic gender-based violence that is so prevalent in Cersei’s story. The exploration of patriarchal violence in Show Alicent’s story is done so horribly in comparison.)
And what really pissed me off about these tags is that this person has clearly decided that they don’t care to interact with the nuance of Cersei and are fine with flattening her, and yet they shit on others for not liking Alicent.
Because of the way Alicent is written in this show, she almost always has a ‘woe is me I can do no wrong’ attitude, which of course drives people away from the character (woe is me I deserve to take a child’s eye 🥺). However, what actually annoys me is how she’s made out to be stupid, foolish, ignorant, and inconsistent due to the horrible writing of this show, all of which are deviations from her book characterization. Also, I despise it when people want me to support writing decisions and changes made in adaptations that are downright misogynistic and are meant to attract the male gaze.
But what pisses many people, including myself, off is how the changes made negatively impacted many other characters. Alicent’s terrible characterization is like a black hole that distorts and warps the whole story! It’s annoying af!
So when people like this say: ‘She’s nuanced and people just can’t handle it 🙄;’ I say: No. She’s horribly written and a different character from the book and people have a right to be critical about these changes that stripped a female character of 1) her agency and 2) her intelligence!
And the thing is, there was little reason for the writers to have made all these changes to Alicent’s characterization! In the book she is an interesting character with clear motives and understandable reactions. She’s cunning and ambitious and acts the way a noble lady who became queen would. And despite her clear ambitions and dislike of Rhaenyra, she still makes a comment wondering about who would protect the Princess from Ser Criston, and yet she then takes Cole into her service after his falling out with Rhaenyra. That’s a perfect example of nuance! Show Alicent could never compare to book Alicent’s clear moral values and consistent disregard of said moral values in pursuit of power.
And because of this, Book Alicent isn’t easy to stomach. It’s hard for most people to come to terms with a character like her and it’s even harder for people to feel sympathetic for her at the end when she went mad with grief.
On the other hand, Show Alicent was designed in a way to garner pity, and when the writers felt like her current arc wouldn’t be enough to garner the specific reaction they wanted they would then throw in a time skip and suddenly she’s completely different and yet still Thee victim. She’s designed to be as sympathetic as fucking possible! The camera angles, the background music, and the lighting is set up in a way to make sure you the viewer feels pity or sympathy for her! Cause that’s her role in this series! She’s thee Ultimate Victim!
But too bad for the writers as many people are fed up with this kind of inconsistent writing. Even when the writers created a whole new challenge for Alicent where she’s shitted on by the green council and forced to face the beast she helped to raise, I and many others could never feel any satisfaction as it was clear that once again Alicent was being made to be Thee Ultimate Victim who was just led astray by the patriarchy and was a victim of it and was only just realizing it so don’t you pity her don’t you feel sad for her and now she’s trying to do the right thing so pls pls pls pity her 🥺~ So it shouldn’t be surprising that many people are annoyed by these eNLiGhtEnEd changes that have led to a complete deviation from the source material.
To summarize: Cersei is an excellent fucking character who’s by no means easy to stomach, and because she’s not easy to stomach she’s often reduced to annoying ass tropes by dumbasses who are reading above their comprehension level. But when you actually try to understand her, you can easily see why she turned out the way she did and you can feel sympathy for her while understanding that she’s both victim and perpetrator! On the other hand, Show Alicent is a mess and HOTD is trying to make her serve a different narrative role than she did in the books so ofc people are going to be unhappy with the changes as book readers are once again faced with the annoying reality that the writers don’t give a fuck about the source material.
Sometimes (oftentimes) it's true that all you need are Balls. I personally absolutely love Balls. I'm a big fan! Ekhem. Today I'm using the help of (I mean, copying most of the passages from it) my earlier Balls rant that I have written down after my first listen of it back in January. I really love this album and I don't want to completely skip over saying a couple words on it at least but I really don't think I have the headspace to write anything very good for it today. I'll still try though!
So yeah, Balls. It's a great album, fun and chill (in my sense of what I call and consider chill anyway), consistent, as Sparks albums tend to be, and as I suspected / hoped it does fit this specific vibe of driving around at night somewhere city-like and illuminated. Or being on a train deep at night and looking at the world zooming by (if you'd even see much of it on a train at night anyway.....). And I do think that it's not so dissimilar to Gratsax (I'd say now that it's definitely darker and moodier than its predecessor...). So it's interesting to think about how it's considered to be one of the "weak" ones (by music reviewers at least) while Gratsax is so beloved in comparision.
I will admit, I don't really know what the big problem with this album could be. As I said, it's fun, it has the melodies, it has the energy, it has the theatricality (I like seeing how more and more orchestral instruments such as strings are being incorporated into the music, in a way the jump into Lil' Beethoven two years later doesn't come of as THAT much of a shock because of this. The evolution of sound here is fascinating!) I really like the intense beats, just as much as the more laid-back and moodier pieces. And there's lots of gold to be found in the lyrics department as always.
One more thing I wanna say is that at some point I wondered if this music sounds older than it is. Maybe it does? But then I remembered that this was 2000 and honestly when I think about it, there just IS something about this album that fits so well with the Y2K image and vibe and all. Sparks 2000 and all that.
Favourite songs (and other highlights):
Balls: I mean. It's Balls.
Scheherazade: absolutely LOVE this one and I had the strangest impression of it sounding very familiar when I first heard it. Months later I found out that it was just briefly featured in TSB so I think that explains it (I will talk more about my TSB viewings on TSB day. EVERYTHING has to be explained in excruciating detail, lmao)
The Calm Before The Storm: bugsonas 4ever. Song itself is amazing too
How To Get Your Ass Kicked: how can a song about getting your ass kicked be so pleasant and relaxing, it always keeps cracking me up, how perfect that is actually
Bullet Train: I love it how introducing the topic of the song with a "It's the [topic of the song]" is a reoccurring theme on this album. Thank you Sparks for this ode to technology and art (these lyrics always have me giggling). And also it just goes hard as heck
It's Educational: a perfect fusion of / sequel to I Thought I Told You To Wait In The Car and Progress (it's mostly the vocal delivery that reminds me of the latter)
The Angels: such an odd one here but I still like it a lot, I apparently said that it sounds "surprisingly mainstream for Sparks but somehow in a positive way". It's very sweet and I absolutely love how Russell sings here, it's so different from what we're used to but that only makes it hit you even more in the feels, lol. And I actually prefer the alternative version of this song that's featured as a bonus track, and I do think that's in big part because you can hear Russell better on it (or that was my first impression of it at least and it kind of stuck)
I literally woke up in the middle of the night like God will dark rise is so fucking screwed. The line that’s like. “Everyone wanted to kill the Dark King.” What’s the part where he looks at Violet helplessly, haunted, almost pleading for mercy? But of course he reveals nothing of substance to anyone. Elizabeth is too young to understand but the reader knows what “Her relationship with that boy was…unnatural” can mean. Tying him to bedposts? Failing to strangle him? What else? Never not even once seeing beyond a mythological identity Will himself didn’t know he had? What did he think was the reason? That he was just intrinsically hateful? Of course he says nothing. Of course Violet can’t trust him- he’s given her nothing as painfully real as what she’s given him. So he gives her the sword hoping at least he can die at the hands of someone he loved, but even that doesn’t work out - she gives the sword to a Visander still furious at SARCEAN. The pattern continues; no one looks at Will, who vomits when he realizes what’s happened to James, Will who is much of a liar and killer and sneak as Elizabeth accuses but nonetheless wants to be different. Even when he doesn’t remember his own past. There’s no way out for him that doesn’t hurt. Hope this obsession passes soon given the one and a half years of waiting required for book 3
yu junghyeok and prince cedric have like practically the same design (+v similar personality) but listen the Vibes they have r diff... idk if this makes sense but u know charas w tired dilf energy... YJH has that but not cedric.. hes like a baby.. the way I describe it is YJH is babygirl but cedric is just my baby🫂🔥🔥🔥*gets incinerated* SKJDJ idk if it's noticeable at all but I try to capture diff vibes when I draw them....
when i draw cedric i try to go full shoujo... he is a romance novel male lead... sparkly eyes bright colors 90s anime blush... goes full squish mode when drawing him chibi MFNSKJ🤭
but when i draw yjh im like... no i have to convey the Angst and Depression.... *gives him dark circles and takes the light from his eyes*😇🖤
idk if it's noticeable but I also try to differentiate their designs in subtle ways (besides eye color etc),,, I give them diff eyebrow shapes!! I like YJH with triangle brows(thicker at the ends) and cedric w tapered brows(thicker toward the middle) like the webtoon... I also try to make cedric's hair a bit curlier than YJH🥹
no but for real not to beat a dead horse that i havent seen and dont plan to but they keep trying to do live action atla and i just Do Not Get It? its already been done? quite well? the original cartoon is very good and it doesn't feel like its actually really lacking in a way that a remake would improve upon, and it doesnt seem like either remake has improved upon it, and it doesnt feel like they ever get the tone right either? and why are they only ever trying to adapt atla? why not the comics? or korra ? the adventures of fire lord zuko. i mean fuck i dont even like that they turned toph into a cop but they could do a Toph crime drama procedural. probably shouldnt i dont think that would be good but at least it would be like. a new idea. fucking, adapt the kyoshi novels maybe. i wont forgive you if you fuck them up of course, but im already not forgiving the live action ATLAs so like idk. why not try something new. something a little more original.