#so i bond with them differently

[ratguy-nico]

CAUTION

-this is a little spoiler from my work for Geneuary I dont know if this is legal but I wanted to share cause is super sweet. Forgive me, but take it as a little sneak peek-

You know geneuary is just around the corner and i haven't been able to make as much progress as i want. Specially for the holidays.

I was eager to end at least one lineart today but my niece and nephew visited me yesterday and stay until today. So I could only work while they were sleep.

This morning I could succesfully finish lineart and apparently I was pretty loud about my happines cause my niece come to see what I was doing, I tell her I was drawing (she loves to draw too and specially coloring books) She ask me how I could draw on the computer and I show her and we ended with a lil collab. So here it is. I didn't pick any color desision all was her ideas. Im proud of my kid.

Again sorry if this is against the rules of Geneuary but I wanted to share, and nobody actually see my non-art post so the secret is well keep. Still not gonna say the prompt...thou is pretty obvious

[privateolives]

This is probably because I grew up watching 24/7 animal planet, but what finally made the allo/aplatonic thing click for me were the nature's of big cats.

Lions are powerful, regal creatures who are uniquely adapted to pack life. They need these connections to live a healthy life; A lonely lion is a miserable creature indeed.

Jaguars are solitary, beautiful creatures who live happily solitary. They prowl their lush world with self-sufficient majesty. A jaguar is not lonely without a pack. In fact, forcing jaguars to share space with others they do not enjoy is just as damaging as forcing a lion to live alone.

A lion may choose to head out on it's own for the most part, but in the end must return to the pack to thrive. A jaguar can choose to trust and enjoy the company of others, but they never feel the need to form a pack.

Is a jaguar selfish for this? A psychopath, a narcissist or any other such horrid assumptions? Is it a less moral creature than a lion, who seeks others like it to thrive?

Is a lion pathetic, or needy, or selfish for wanting community? For requiring contact with others like they require water? For their inherent need to string complicated webs of relationships that may seem silly or dramatic to others?

Of course not. These are ridiculous questions to even ask.

They are simply lions and jaguars.

In fact, is a jaguar that chooses to spend time with you not as magical as a lion's love? For a creature that needs no bond to thrive to still enjoy your presence enough to share it a time? Is a lion who can prowl the night alone not impressive in its strength and resilience? Is it not awe-inspiring in its ability to conquer a life it was never wired for and reign still?

Are they not both beautiful and awe-inspiring in their own ways, without being wrong?

Alloplatonics. Aplatonics. Are we not both special and beautiful in both our bonds and self-confident happiness equal, in each our ways? Is there not unique beauty in lifelong bonded packs and magical encounters that need no perpetuity to carry life forward?

Are we not but lions and jaguars? Neither wrong, neither selfish, but just different and beautiful creatures in each our ways?

That's how I've come to see it, anyway.

[johnconstantinesdick]

Jeanneil fake besties of all time. Kings of committing to the bit. Neil could say whatever and Jean would (rightfully) assume it’s part of a scheme to keep them alive and would corroborate immediately.

[skitskatdacat63]

Fernando 2012 Chair Lore (source: me)

So I've been thinking a lot about Fernando sitting in this particular chair in the Ferrari garage in 2012 for [redacted] reasons:

Originally I just wanted to find more pictures of it for reference, and then went down a rabbit hole of 2012 pictures, trying to figure out when exactly the chair came to be. There's so many pictures of him in it, and it's so funny to me to imagine them hauling this super villain chair all around the world for him. And so now I'm obsessed with the evolution of it:

Pre-Chair - Australia to Bahrain:

He just had this little stool, well I should say big because it somehow still manages makes him look small. Clearly not comfortable; to paraphrase @sweatyflytrap, it's not conducive to his inner Shakespeare villain monologues

The Chair Appears - Spain

He suddenly now has this, aforementioned, super villain chair. Several things, why is it like this. It looks like a sim chair almost ngl. And then the weird plexiglass support is confusing me, like where did they get that. It furthers my narrative they just had this chair that they couldn't put in a car so they put that clear bottom on it. Anyways yes good, now he has somewhere to brood

The Chair Evolves - Silverstone

Look!! They gave him a booster seat!!!

The Chair is Now Here to Stay :)

I downloaded a truly horrible amount of pics him in this chair, so now you all must also look at them >:)

*he still had the chair in 2013, but I think they took it away from him in 2014 :( Is nothing sacred in this world??? I hope he got to take it home hahaha

[soundbulb]

I'm not saying this because I actually have beef with anyone who wrote posts like this, but I just saw a true detective post that was talking about how poetic it was that rust cohle covers for marty when he kills ledoux because cohle was thrust into deep undercover narcotics for killing someone, and how he jumps to protect marty because he was left alone with self loathing and the severity of undercover gang work during this period, and he won't let that happen to marty. and this to me is a pretty good example of how fandoms woobify their favorite man at the expense of the actual themes of the story.

both rust and marty murder people and get away with it. we can obviously say that their victims deserved it for committing crimes against children, but that's pretty irrelevant given you're not allowed to legally kill someone out of retribution. if a regular person finds the kids and shoots ledoux, they go to prison. but rust and marty are police, not regular people. if you wanna know the line that's actually connected to rust's story of emptying a clip into a man, and marty killing ledoux, it's "of course I'm dangerous. I'm police. I can do terrible things with impunity." and more on that later.

but the undercover position wasn't penance, it was law enforcement trying to both cover for rust and exploit his act of violence. rust is, quite literally, still doing his job only now doing it with even less constraint. when he displays a capacity for unrestrained violence, they promote him to a position where this violence is a boon. when he's ready to cover for marty regardless of reason, this is not to me an emotional catharsis, but the reality that cops view themselves and each other as above the laws the selectively enforce, even to the detriment and death of others, and have the institution that purports justice cover for them because they're homoousian as that institution. even rust, who everyone hates. in the same way the mayor and the superchurch pastor can get away with killing marie fontenot and hurting all the other people rust interviews; they are the institution that protects them.

this is why it's important in the end that they don't get to catch anyone powerful or notable within that institution, with a literal fringe inbred strain of the childress family as the only one that ever sees any consequence. it's also why it's thematically important that rust and marty aren't cops when they do it and they specifically have to work against the police.

theriot leaves his religious position, and reveals in his 2002 interview that while in the seminary he found pictures of child abuse, and this is what cumulates in his departure from the tent revival. an implied whistle blower who came forward, or would come forward, about the abuse in the christian schools dies in a car "accident" in his 2002 interview with tuttle. the institutions weed out or hunt down those who won't cover for their exploitation of authority. on multiple levels, the story is showing you who is allowed to be protected by these institutions and who isn't. who is "chum in the water" and who isn't. in 1995 rust and marty are protected, but when rust realizes he's part of the system that's killing dora lang and marie fontenot and countless other women -- what he calls the sprawl -- his refusal to cover for it revokes his protections.

I really don't think it's supposed to be character catharsis when we watch them contrive this heroic epic tale of facing down certain death, and then we cut to them, off duty, cornering a naked man out of the shower and shooting him on a whim when he's already cuffed and kneeling. obviously no ones hurting for ledoux, or the offscreen man rust shot, but this isn't the tale of fate helping them thwart evil they told. they bolster the mythos of police as the barrier between darkness and the rest of the world, while the anticlimax of their very banal abuse of power plays out. if you want the actual parallel to marty and rust's ledoux story, it isn't one where rust is the person he needed or anything like that, it's when marty breaks into lisa's home and assaults her and her date. it's when rust is alone in a motel room with the blonde woman buying his quaaluudes, and the scene has him loom heavily on his half of the frame as we cut between him bathed in shadow and green light, and her covered with bruises. alone in this room he could hurt or kill her, she even says she thinks he's dangerous. then as we watch him get closer, standing over her and looking down on her dispassionately, we know the only reason nothing will happen to her is his lack of interest. he's still imposing as the camera shifts under him, and the scene ends with him looking down at us and her, saying "of course I'm dangerous. I'm police. I can do terrible things with impunity." it's marty huffing his own paint, thinking he's a big strong hero, a "real man", and beating the shit out of the men he caught his daughter with, then going out to his car and vomiting from fear.

I get that rust cohle is memed on, like very babygirl-ified. but this to me begins to favor him as a personal figure of comfort rather than a character in a story that's interested in the way institutional power interacts with and exploits the unknowable and unpredictable powers of our world. I do like thinking about the emotional lives of these characters, even relating to them -- I don't shit on that instinct at all because it's the natural response to characters, especially such intense and tragic characters. but I do notice a lot of posts in these tags have a "poor rust" sentiment to them. talking about how he's used and never treated with tenderness; how he's ready to show up for marty in a way "no one showed up for him" when the reality is we are very intentionally not shown rust's past before the dora lang case, the case that is the infrastructure of our narrative, and the only detail we are given -- that he was allowed to keep his job after committing a shockingly violent murder -- says that he was sufficiently looked out for by the institutional power he would later try and fail to indict, and he in fact repeated this cover up for someone else, perpetuating over and over the cycle of violent men doing anything and never paying for it, while everyone else pays for everything just by existing.

[spinnysocks]

the frenemies of all time

it was so hard to find pictures of them in the same shots 😭 they're in the same scenes all the time but not the same shots- i think it's actually a purposeful choice by the animators to show they're not actually allied, which i think is cool

[comradekatara]

I meant Hama and Katara... But thank you for the Kanna & Katara Link. I'll go theough it.

ohhh yes i obviously have so many thoughts on hama and katara as well..... hama is the embodiment of who katara could have become had a) her circumstances been slightly different (and worse) and b) had she had less emotional strength & resilience & desire to cling to her own humanity at all costs. like, the fact that katara gets multiple figures who embody the terror of her submitting to her most vengeful instincts and perpetuating the cycle of violence instead of working to end it is honestly quite beautiful, as that tension culminates in "the southern raiders" and katara lets herself prioritize her own humanity over her pain and rage and (totally justified) desire for revenge.

i know a lot of people think that hama and jet are the most politically confused aspects of the show, since they do play into the thing lok does where it's like "all oppressed peoples who employ radical means of resistance are simply cackling mustache-twirling terrorists," and while i do think that the way hama is framed at the end of "the puppetmaster" is in poor taste and lacks nuance, it's also pretty clear to me that a) their trauma is portrayed as sympathetic b) their stories are depicted as tragedies and c) atla doesn't actually demonize violent methods of resistance. like if katara wasn't literally the main character i'd feel much more comfortable making that critique (because lok does do this and it's liberal bullshit and it sucks), but we see katara use violent means of resistance as early as episode 6 of the whole show. she's literally framed as a hero for doing ecoterrorism; even when she's actually in the wrong in that situation, her desire to do whatever it takes to help people and encourage them to fight back against their oppressors is celebrated unconditionally.

the lesson katara has to learn from them is that she must never let her anger and desire for revenge consume her over her love for humanity and her drive to help people. jet and hama are both deeply traumatized in a way that made them prioritize wanting to wield power over others in the same way that they were once made vulnerable and helpless, and katara recognizes that instinct in herself too, that instinct in every person who has been subjected to that degree of violence. hama targets fire nation civilians out of spite, because she was once a regular girl from the southern water tribe who was targeted for reasons beyond her control, made to fight and treated like a villain. the reason she goes after "regular people" instead of targeting actual combatants is specifically because she knows that if the roles were reversed, the fire nation wouldn't care about differentiating her people in those roles; she's giving them a taste of their own medicine.

she used to be a resistance fighter who fought back against the imperialists on her land with everything she had, and it didn't work. she suffered unimaginable horrors, and in the process discovered an ability that would allow her to make others suffered the way she did. no, she's not a good leftist or whatever, but her motivation is understandable. she's driven by pain, not reason, just as katara and zuko are in "the southern raiders," just as aang is in "the desert" when he loses appa, just as sokka is in "the boiling rock." when one is hurting that badly, the desire to ease one's pain supersedes logic, supersedes one's core values in general, the values of grief taking its place. hama has been grieving her entire life; whoever she was before the raids is gone, and now she is someone shaped wholly by pain. and had katara not met hama, been traumatized by her, and thus vowed never to be like her, who knows whether she would have had the ability to take a step back and recognize within herself that she is standing over that precipice, and instead walk away from the threshold of violence, and back towards herself.

[thestirringpot]

more [wips] chuga chuga!!!

[uncanny-tranny]

And another thing that gets me about the human condition is how we weren't even meant to survive this world alone - humans with humans. We chose to trust certain animals, to nourish them, to be symbiotic with them, to love them like we love ourselves. I think a lot of people talk about how selfish it is for humans to take advantage of animals, but I think that's too simplistic. It's closer to friendship - if you do not foster the relationship, then it simply won't go anywhere, and I think the implication that animals can't ever know anything for themselves, for their survival, is also human-centric and selfish (selfishness not inherently being a bad thing).

It's just nice to know that we want to be around people - we want to be around comfort and security and safety so much that we now have animals by our side. Every time I cuddle with my cat, I think that we weren't meant to survive this world alone; she is shaped to fit in my chest, and my arms were made to wrap around her.

[d-lissa]

I am biting anyone that takes Tashi out of the throuple of doom and say that the guys only actually love each other and not her, or would've been better off without her or whatever.

Just say you can't conceive being in love with more than one person at the same time and move on, because that movie was not for you.

[ifindus]

We did not in fact win that race.

The World Championship in Biathlon 2024 just finished up today! Congrats to France for being the best nation, Norway for getting the most medals, and Sweden for taking their first ever gold medal in a biathlon world championship 🥳✨

Sometimes the Norwegian commentators just say something so weird I need to draw it

[dittolicous]

"anti-zosans just dont get it! the appeal IS that they hate each other!"

me, a zosan shipper:

[trashhole]

Companion piece to the shut up starscream sketch because starbee are funny and I need them in earthspark

[crazysnor1ax]

Thinking about queerplatonic Calf1sh….

[seyaryminamoto]

Fic-to-Art #27: Azula, Mai and Ty Lee's friendship

This month's prompt was friendship, and while the contest was fierce, ultimately the oldest of Gladiator's friendships won out. Therefore, I drew these small pieces to show the progression of the bond between these three within the story :D

The first two scenes aren't 1:1 with anything shown in the story, they're more along the lines of things I never got to write but always imagined likely between them. I'll always believe Ty Lee was the instigator of this friendship, and I can't imagine anything more suitable for her than to pick out the two girls she found interesting in school and deciding they would all be friends, while the two girls in question remained entirely confused about the whole thing.

Fast forward a few years later, and as a lot of the baggage and chaos from canon never happened, Azula, Mai and Ty Lee get to stay friends as they grow older, bonding over things that weren't depicted here (such as their experience in Ember Island, sans Zuko, where they got to understand each other better, Ty Lee's fall from grace, Mai's choice regarding who to marry...), mainly because I really didn't have the time to expand on everything. So, as tough as things could get, these three stuck it out together and no matter if Azula is too busy to hang out with them sometimes, theirs is the kind of friendship that all of them can always return to, with full awareness and trust that they'll always have each other's backs.

The last scene is my favorite scene between them altogether, and it's their conversation right before Ty Lee's wedding. It's a really heartfelt moment where Ty Lee is unusually vulnerable and very honest about what these two mean to her, and this time both Azula and Mai drop all pretenses and are completely honest about how much they care about her too. It's pretty much the crystallization of that friendship in one of my favorite chapters to write, ever!

So... there we go! Hope you guys like it! If you want to be part of the creative process behind these pieces, a $1 pledge is enough to make you eligible for suggesting and voting for prompts, as well as reading Gladiator snippets 6 days before the new chapter is released!

[loosescrewslefty]

Me- The response to my SxF Floriography post was incredible! Maybe I should do one for the Second OP too?

2nd OP-

Me-