#me and all my unfinished stuff

[kinokoshoujoart]

oops all rock (springtime edition)

i’ll be able to draw digitally again soon! ;w; in the meantime i’ve been scribbling a lot on paper…

could not wait for Soon, so i resorted to coloring it using the markup tool in default iphone photos app (don’t do that ever again)

[micamicster]

Super Rich Kids

Close my eyes and feel the crash...

I wrote this one on post-its on a trans-continental flight after my phone (where i was re-reading the raven cycle) died. 0/10 plane experience would not recommend but I did manage to entertain myself! And now hopefully you as well!

When Ronan pulled into Monmouth Manufacturing he knew Gansey wouldn’t be there. Adam Parrish was, though, sitting on the steps in the golden afternoon light, bike dumped to the side in dying grass. He didn’t so much as flicker an eyelid when Ronan bootlegged the BMW into an approximation of parking on the far side of the lot, which was fine because that’s how he would have parked the car anyway, whether or not Adam was here.

Ronan was pretty sure that Gansey had arranged a shift system with the other boys, to prevent Ronan from being unaccompanied on the rare occasions of his own absence. The idea of a babysitter should have rankled Ronan, but Adam did not seem particularly invested in his role. Small favors.

As he got out of the car he gave Adam his customary once-over, as brief as it was habitual. You could notice a lot in a single glance, if you were Ronan, glancing at Adam.

Adam was wearing long sleeves (his father? Or just because it was October?) and his faded camo pants, the ones Ronan said made him look like a jingoistic meathead. They had recently acquired a tear in one knee. Not in the stylish, deliberate manner in which Ronan’s own jeans were shredded, but awkwardly, in an L-shape, where they had caught on some jagged edge and given way before even careful Adam had noticed and unhooked himself. The tear gaped open at times, like it was doing now, revealing Adam’s knobby left knee and, worse, a triangle of his brown thigh.

Ronan looked away.

Ronan never allowed himself, even in dreams, to trespass beyond the carefully demarcated boundaries of Adam’s clothes. And Adam was usually helpful in the maintenance of this boundary. Unlike Gansey, who could be found working on his model Henrietta in boxers at all hours of the night, or wandering to and from the shower in a towel, absent-mindedly forgetting his clothes in bathroom or bedroom. Unlike the boys Ronan played tennis with, who stripped down casually in the locker room after practice. Unlike even Ronan himself, who’d never met a shirt he couldn’t rip the sleeves off; Adam was always fully covered.

This summer, foolishly, Ronan had imagined that this might change. Now that the hideous secrets Adam protected with his long sleeves were no longer his alone. But by now he knew what kept those sleeves in place, something that Adam had already understood: that knowing and seeing are two very different things.

For example: this. Ronan knew that Adam, like most people who walked around on earth under their own power, possessed thighs. Two of them, attached in the normal way to other body parts, such as knees and hips. To know this was one thing.

Now that he’d seen it, he couldn’t stop seeing it. The way his knee bent, and the muscle above shifted as Adam made room on the steps for him. Ronan was looking away, out at the familiar, grounding, skid marks on the concrete of Monmouth’s lot, but he could picture in their place with deadly accuracy the hinge of Adam’s knee, the tanned skin of his thigh, scattered with golden-brown hair. He could dream about pressing his face against it.

He picked up a rock and hurled it. It glanced off the side of the soulless suburban and fell anticlimactically into the grass dying by the rear tire. It didn’t help.

Adam shifted next to him, subtly.

“What?” said Ronan. “Impressed?”

“Surprised, more like. I thought you were supposed to be the tennis star.”

“You think you can do better?” Ronan pried another hunk of gravel or concrete out of the dirt and tossed it in his left hand, tauntingly.

“I know I can.”

“But?”

“But,” said Adam, with some hint of exasperation coloring his voice, “I’m not going to sit here chunking rocks at Gansey’s car to prove it. My ego’s not that fragile.” His accent slipped out on chunkin’, not as if Ronan had pissed him off enough to forget to hide it, but as if it was a word he’d never used any other way.

Ronan threw his rock again. This was, if anything, a worse throw than before, and it skittered harmlessly across the suburban’s roof.

Adam made a small but contemptuous noise.

“Don’t give me that shit, man. You know he hates this fucking car.”

“That was for your shitty aim.”

“Come on then.” Ronan hefted another piece of gravel. “Ten points if you knock out his taillight.”

“It costs a hundred and five dollars to replace a taillight on that make and model. Plus tax.”

Ronan’s brief cheer was collapsing again. “I’ll pay you a hundred bucks to bust Dick’s lights.”

Adam blinked slowly, his dusty eyelashes obscuring the contempt in his eyes for a brief moment. “I’ll leave.” (He wouldn’t).

Ronan dropped the rock. Next to him Adam sighed. Abruptly, he put out his hand. “Telephone pole. Six feet from the top.”

Ronan swept back up the rock and dropped it into his hand. Their fingers did not touch. His heart thudded.

Adam tossed the rock once, testing its weight while his gaze, cool and assessing, remained on the telephone pole. It was a splintered, tilting thing, shamed by his attentions. In one smooth, economical movement, he rose to his feet and let the rock fly. His leg went forward, knee jutting out of his clothes, his back curved, and his arm swept around in an arc, fingers scraping at the blue October sky. Ronan didn’t need to turn his head to know if the rock hit—he could see it in the brief hard satisfaction on Adam’s face.

Adam turned back to him, one eyebrow cocked.

“You’re going to have to do better than that if you want to earn that hundred,”

Adam shrugged. The gesture was disinterested, but there was a quirk to his mouth that contradicted it. “I know nothing blew up, but…”

Ronan already had another rock in his hand. “West corner lightbulb. It breaks or it doesn’t count.” Adam rolled his eyes, but turned agreeably to watch Ronan miss.

“Would you like to get your tennis racket?”

“Eat me,” said Ronan. (Maybe).

They traded shots back and forth for a while, calling increasingly specific and complex plays.

“Bullshit. Bullshit.”

“Get the government to pay for some glasses, Parrish, and then come back and try to tell me that wasn’t a fucking bullseye—”

“It wasn’t even close! You—”

“You calling me a liar?” Ronan loomed, and Adam, as usual, was unimpressed.

“Just because you don’t lie doesn’t make you right all the time! Like when you said that quote on Tuesday was Seneca. It doesn’t stop being Martial just because you’ve got a child’s sense of morality—”

“See, right there.” Ronan pointed triumphantly at an invisible scuff mark on the doorsill, marking where his handful of gravel had made impact.

Adam gave it a skeptical glance. His face was faintly flushed from exertion in the cold air, but his eyes were as cool and considering as ever. “What we need,” he said, “is a knife.”

Ronan was not allowed knives.

~

“Are you trying to stab each other in the feet? Why are your shoes off! It’s October!”

“Equal playing field.” Ronan wiggled his toes against the cold asphalt. “Parrish’s shitty knife is no match for my boots.” Over Gansey’s head, Ronan tried to catch Adam’s eye, to share a ‘can you believe him’ sort of look. Adam’s embarrassment over being caught acting irresponsibly meant Ronan could expect the look to be rebuffed, but he couldn’t help himself from trying it anyway.

Adam was bent over, eyes hidden. He carefully dusted off his socked feet one at a time before sliding them back into his shoes, as though the socks or sneakers could look any worse. A little parking lot crud might improve their appearance, actually.

Next to him, Gansey was still fussing. Without the pressure release valve of eye contact with someone who knew Gansey was overreacting, Ronan snapped, “Come off it, man, I’m not going to slit my throat while Parrish watches. He can’t afford that caliber of snuff film.”

Gansey’s concern transformed into revulsion, but underneath it he looked hurt, which was far far worse.

Adam straightened up. “We were just using it to mark where we hit. Honestly, we could have done it tossing a sharpie, but neither of us had one.” He sounded conciliatory, which pissed Ronan off. But Gansey was letting it go, returning the knife to Adam with an apologetic smile. Sorry for the fuss. Sorry for Ronan. Ronan’s bare feet were cold against the asphalt.

“Well? Are you going to throw or not, Parrish?” he said belligerently.

Adam rolled his eyes, but obligingly stooped for gravel and let one fly at Ronan’s open bedroom window, a shot he made easily.

Gansey whistled. “You’ve got quite the arm on you. How come you’re not on the Algionby baseball team?”

Adam shifted his feet, awkwardly.

“Please,” scoffed Ronan, “he’s not a team player.”

Gansey did not let it go. “Bet you’d have a better fastball than both our pitchers.”

There was a pause, during which Adam’s face clearly showed all of the thoughts he was trying to corral into a polite response to Gansey’s unconsidered enthusiasm. Ronan got there first. “Yeah, Parrish, why not hitch your wagon to the star of organized sports, like every other rags to riches wannabe?”

“Ronan!” said Gansey, Ronan’s offensiveness registering where his own had not.

“Hitch my wagon to a star?” Adam was unruffled. “I thought quoting Transcendentalists could get you excommunicated.”

“Who said I know it’s Emerson. It’s a sourceless idiom to those of us who aren’t sad little nerds.”

Adam smirked. The smirk said, I never said Emerson. His words said, “Gansey’s damning me with faint praise. No one’s going pro out of an Algionby sport team. Even tennis.”

“Ouch,” said Ronan, cheerfully. “Hit me where it really hurts. My school pride.”

~

Now that Gansey had arrived, his plans for the day took precedence over noble pastimes such as flipping pocketknives at each other’s feet. His plans involved comparing readings from various instruments and then placing said various instruments in various new locations, all of which were equally arbitrary (to Ronan’s eyes) and inaccessible. Gansey’s plans involved him waiting by the car to monitor the readings while people hiked with antennae to the outermost reaches of the signal. People, in this instance, being Ronan and Adam, Noah having mysteriously and silently fucked off, as he so often did when a job required carrying anything.

Ronan put his head down and trudged. It was brambly here, and slightly damp, and he was beginning to work up the kind of counter-intuitive sweat that appears from working in the cold, the kind that makes you colder later.

As the person leading the hike, custom would dictate that he should catch and hold the long clinging arms of the brambles for the following hiker. This presented a dilemma. Ronan compromised, and set about stomping the multiflora into the ground as he walked. Scarlet hips burst under his feet, invasive and beautiful, spreading their millions of seeds across the damp earth. Noxious weeds.

“It’s too unreliable,” said Adam, into the silence. “Sports. It all depends on… your physical condition.”

“And your condition is shit.”

There was Adam’s ironic smile. “Yes. So.” He shrugged. There was the part they weren’t saying, which was that his physical condition could always get worse. Unexpectedly.

“My dad hates baseball.” Ronan heard himself make the slip—hates and not hated—and a spark of fury burned through him, brief and inconsequential.

“My dad loves it.”

They marched on in silence.

Adam swore as a bramble Ronan had beaten down sprang up again, catching him right across the tear, where his skin was exposed. He bent to unhook it from the camo with deft, deliberate hands. “What?” he said, like he could feel Ronan’s eyes.

Ronan looked away. “Why not the military?” He kicked purposelessly at the bramble and heard Adam sigh. “And don’t tell me you never thought about it. Test scores like yours out in hicksville high school, you must have had recruiters hopping all over you like fleas.”

“Would you believe I had a moral objection?” Adam’s smile was self-deprecating. Ronan studied it.

“No.”

Adam shrugged. It, too, was self-deprecating.

“I think you had a superiority objection. You think you’re too smart for that shit.”

Adam blinked at him. “Do you think I’m wrong?”

Ronan snorted. “Hell no. You can do better than getting blown up in a desert for the United States government.”

The smile, when it came, was small and stunning. “Damned by faint praise again.”

[n3ongold3n]

I am so in love with @tuherrus jerenneito, i need to draw 500 😍

[vanweezer]

coreys in my sketchbook 2/∞

commissions

[caffeiiine]

kiyo redesign i finished last night be upon ye!!!!!!

[closeups + extras under the cut like usual <3]

[also small note: the left hand scarring hc comes from @/kijimha + his kiyo blog @/korkshinguji !!!]

i had two drafts for this fun fact :3

[draft 1 -> final design]

also total time bc i think it’s cool

[canneddolts]

would-be promotional art

[anneapocalypse]

On Dragon Age II's Ending

The ending of Dragon Age 2 has always felt to me like the least morally ambiguous of any of the games' mage-templar decisions and frankly one of the least ambiguous "big" decisions in the series.

DA2 makes it extremely obvious that the Circle mages are about to be executed for something that absolutely none of them had any part in and no one, not even the Knight-Commander, is arguing that that isn't the case. You can feel whatever kind of way about what Anders did, and still recognize the staggering injustice of killing all the Circle mages for something that everyone, including the Knight-Commander calling for their deaths, is fully aware they did not do.

And just in case that wasn't clear, someone made a point of dropping in that bit of ambient dialogue telling us that Meredith is already trying to get clearance for the Right of Annulment before the explosion; she's just looking for an excuse. The game is pretty clear about the injustice of this situation, regardless of how many demons and blood mages there may or may not be in Kirkwall.

I'm a chronic replayer who enjoys making up new characters every time to see things I haven't seen before and I didn't have a particularly difficult time coming up with in-character, circumstantial reasons why a character might annul the Circle in DAO or recruit the templars in DAI and believe they're doing the right thing. For the former: dwarven noble who knows little about magic and believes what the Knight-Commander tells her, and chooses the wrong dialogue option with Morrigan in the party so Wynne attacks and therefore is not present in the party as an emotional anchor and a voice for the mages, and listens to Cullen when he says it's too dangerous to let any of the mages live. For the latter: non-mage human noble from a Chantry-connected family who just implicitly trusts templars, as he was raised to. Or Dalish elf who walks into Redcliffe, sees a magister stinking up the place and says "Well, the Dread Wolf take the lot of you then" and turns around and marches straight to Therinfal, conscripts the templars, disbanding the Order in the process. Just a couple of easy examples I've actually played.

But the ending of DA2 is a choice between "Yes, I will help to execute these people for something everyone knows they didn't do" or "No, I will not do that and I will help them defend themselves and escape." Of course it's possible to come up with in-character reasons to make the former choice, and I have! But it's much less of a choice a character could just stumble into, and you have to do a lot more ideological contortions for a character to do that and believe they're doing the right thing.

Yes, there are a lot of blood mages and demons in Kirkwall. While we don't get a lot of opportunities to treat blood mage NPCs with much nuance apart from Merrill as most blood mages are programmed to attack on sight (and this is likely a product of the game's tight development deadline), the game itself offers an explanation for this in the writings of the Band of Three, the Enigma of Kirkwall codex entry that you can collect throughout the story. While you have to look to find it, this history does make it clear that Kirkwall is meant to be an outlier, for reasons both political and historical (which is another post for another day). And Merrill herself, whether you agree with her viewpoints or not, does offer an important counterpoint: a character designed to be sympathetic while giving a more nuanced perspective to the player on why a mage might choose to use blood magic.

And yeah, even with the fact that the game makes you fight Orsino in the mage ending, I still think this. It's clumsily executed, yes, but Orsino going all blood magic harvester abomination is just one more example of what the game has been showing us all along: that mages (like most people) turn to extreme measures when they're backed into corners with no sense of hope, and the templars then use those extreme actions to justify further abuses of mages. I don't think it was strictly necessary (and for what it's worth, Mark Darrah agrees with that; it's a decision that was made out of concern for gameplay balance more than narrative and in hindsight he's said that he thinks it was a mistake), and I definitely think it could have been executed better, but as it stands it does fit an ongoing theme, and Orsino's actions still do not justify the murder of every other mage in the Circle.

And then there's that thing where Hawke can only receive the support of the nobility and become Viscount if they side with the templars, thereby agreeing to uphold the existing power structures in Kirkwall. It's easy to miss if you've never played through the templar ending (and also because Hawke doesn't hold the position for long and Inquisition doesn't really acknowledge that they ever did Correction: It is actually mentioned in the Champion of Kirkwall codex entry, and possibly other places as well, my memory just failed me), but to me that outcomes is absolutely inspired. It serves to highlight how deeply intertwined the nobility are with the Chantry. The nobles of Kirkwall want Meredith deposed because they feel she's overstepped her bounds by denying them a proper viscount, but they are not anti-Chantry or anti-Circle; they still want mages locked up, and they probably also remember what happened the last time Kirkwall's nobility decided to try and contest the Chantry's power in their city (see: Perrin Threnhold).

I find the templar ending genuinely interesting to play through in terms of seeing the story from that angle, and in terms of what it has to say about power structures and politics in Thedas generally and in Kirkwall in specific, which I also wrote about recently. (To say nothing of how differently it frames Varric in Inquisition when the Hawke he idolizes is the Hawke who slaughtered Kirkwall's mages to a one.) I would honestly recommend playing it at least once for lore reasons if you're into that sort of thing. But I would hardly say that you as a player come out of that ending feeling like you're playing the good guy.

And I'm not even arguing that all choices in the games should be this in-your-face. On the contrary, I don't think they all should. I like it when it's possible for a character to make a choice with unintended outcomes, or get accidentally locked into a worse choice because of previous decisions (like annulling the Circle and then being forced to kill Connor or Isolde). Those are some of my favorite kind of choices in these games. In this particular case, I do think the extreme nature of the choice is important to the story, both as the catalyst for the mage rebellion and to underscore why Anders did what he did.

So when people tell me that DA2 "both sideses" the mage-templar conflict... I respect that it's possible to feel that way about it, but I just don't see it. The game allows the player to role-play a character who might make various choices within its narrative; that is not the same thing as presenting all choices as morally equivalent in-universe, and it has never been the same thing, in any of these games.

If you're looking for one mage-templar choice that puts the injustice squarely in your face, I think the ending of DA2 is very much that.

[tsukasalover]

This is the exact reason why I hate when people ask to go through my phone. Its always Tsukasa’s fault just remember that.

[lunasilvis]

Bits from my wednesday 👋💨

[krbk-notebook]

hey @real-life-cloud @thatsgaybro @lyricalvicki @tempestaurora @sweetietenya @greyladyblue @moumjn

we‘re either mutuals on my main (@pecuirlig), on here, or you follow this blog — and it looks like we all like krbk ! :‘)

first of all, feel free to decline <3

would anyone be interested in making a little krbk discord group or something? :‘)

as a casual fun hangout spot for people of similar ages (i think we‘re all 20+, most early 20s?), for talking about krbk (& maybe other ships/characters/shows etc too), sharing or talking about fics, or art, or whatever we want :‘)

i know i‘ve wanted to have a space like that for years tbh lol, since i haven‘t had the luck to meet anyone irl who‘s also into fandom or specifically krbk, back when tumblr group chats were a thing they weren’t very lively lol, and the krbk discord groups i‘ve checked out so far haven‘t had active members my own age.

i would be super happy if any of you might be interested too ! :‘) but i will continue to suffer alone lmao if you should not <3 (/lighthearted)

(btw— i‘m super open to other people joining this too, so please do feel invited if you are 20+ and you want something like this too ! i just only @'ed these people because there‘s been Some interaction between us already. not having @'ed you doesn‘t mean you‘re not welcome :‘) !)

[xxjeffthekillerxx]

that one mystreet episode

(dont tag as zanmau pretty pls)

[riacte]

in an alternate universe, the early 2020 hc7 jungle neighbours (inc ren) took off the same way boatem did and it would be my roman empire

[minqueee]

hiii i made a little animatic for my hero :> (wip bc i am tired and take so long to make stuff like this)

+ nx's room in serenity's inn [and dog bed for nemesis] and also nem making biscuits my silliest guy

(Audio: 9 to 5 by Dolly Parton)

[spidertroupeart]

Have you ever wanted to draw something but you fought due to your skill level at the time you decide not to do it

All the time actually, but it made me more full of spite and stubbornness

Now most of my unfinished drawings are just things that I got distracted from

[throughdarkeningskies]

trying to write a book about the same 2 characters for like 5 years except I never figured out what was wrong with the story and now I have mega turbo writer's block that I might never recover from. the two of you are never getting out of here, but neither am I. do you want to get ice cream

[icewindandboringhorror]

Recent game related things .. hrmm...