#stop these bad practices

[katsinspats]

Tragic: Guy you based your entire villain backstory on doesn't even remember you

[puppetmaster13u]

Prompt 126

You know what would be hilarious? 

Constantine comes into one of those meetings as he sometimes does every blue moon. Though the proper word would be storms into a meeting and practically slams a whole stack of papers down. “Can someone bloody explain to me why the American-fucking-government is trying to go to war with the fucking Infinite Realms?!” 

The Justice League is of course alarmed and confused- and also John weren’t you in Hell?! Yeah, he was, where the fuck do you think he found out about this? 

Now if you’ll excuse him he’s going back to the House of Mysteries with his now haunted trench coat. John, John Constantine what the fuck do you mean by that? No don’t just leave, don’t leave this mess just for them- JOHN! 

[cabbagestrand]

day3: still practicing faces so dont mind the hands and the body lmao

[xxplastic-cubexx]

charlies turn for the reference sheet beam

[fellthemarvelous]

I think people have this weird notion that Jedi are emotionless because they don't react to things the way normal people do, and it's because they've been trained to view every situation from an outside perspective without bias, and when they become angry, they don't hide from the anger. They find healthy ways to channel their anger.

It's not surprising that even the strongest minds will break when flung into a war orchestrated by their enemy. The Sith existed in silence for a thousand years after their last war against the Jedi. One Sith survived and created a legacy based solely on revenge against the Jedi. The Clone War was brutal.

Darth Sidious, manipulative and extremely patient, was able to lull the Jedi into the trap he'd set for them. None of them wanted to fight in the war, but the Force was clouded. Their path was clouded. They see through the Force and choose the light, but their paths became clouded as the choices they were forced to make became more and more questionable. I imagine it would be like looking at a map in a brightly lit room before getting hit by a storm of darkness with brief flashes of light passing through. Darth Sidious sent the Jedi to their own deaths because he knew the Jedi would stop at nothing to protect the galaxy from the Sith, but the people lost faith in the Jedi. Without the clone troopers, the Jedi would have been fighting that war alone, but the catch that came with using them was that the clones were ticking time bombs set to go off upon the execution of Order 66.

The Jedi trusted the clones. They trusted the clones with their lives. The clones considered the Jedi their best friends, and if you don't believe me, listen again to what Fives says to that cab driver on Coruscant when he's running from Palpatine. He was horrified to learn that they were created to kill the Jedi and he did everything in his power to try and tell the Jedi the truth, but his own brothers were hunting him down on Palpatine's orders. He died at the hands of his own brothers so none of them would find out the truth.

The only other clones he spoke to before he died were Kix and Rex.

We recognize that the clones were victims in this war, but it was Count Dooku who paid for them. The Jedi were also victims in this war. They were not the villains. They were never the villains. They did the best they could without any help at all from the rest of the galaxy. Palpatine put all the pressure directly on the Jedi to fight their way out of this one with an army of three million or so sleeper agents.

The Jedi life isn't for everyone. The galaxy is vast and the Jedi are but a few small blips devoting their lives to others when you look at the big picture. The numbers will show you that the Jedi were indeed overwhelmed because they were the ONLY THING standing between the Republic and the Empire.

What happened when the Jedi were wiped out?

[artscheese]

Upa styled Mr Ring a ding because I have free will

I found my old sketchbook back in 2020 so now all I draw in that sketchbook is just lux sorry lol-

(Big ol sketch dump I did all day plus some Reggies)

[lgbtlunaverse]

What kind of saber is baxia anyway?

I love my bloodthirsty princess of a cursed blade, and in my heart of hearts i am nothing but a sword nerd, so i've been extremely fascinated by Baxia and how we know frustratingly little about what she actually looks like!

I mean, look at bichen, right?

Bichen in the donghua:

Bichen in the drama:

They're clearly not exactly the same. The scabbards are different, and the guards have a different shape. But these are recognizably different iterations on one theme, right? Thin jian with a white grip silver guard, light blue tassel and silver mounting accents on the scabbard.

Now this is baxia in the donghua:

And baxia in the drama:

????????

THAT'S A COMPLTELY DIFFERENT WEAPON

it doesn't stop there either, the audio drama is kind enough to give us ANOTHER COMPLETELY DIFFERENT BAXIA

pretty! But how is that he same sword??

And when we go back to the novel, we get very little information on her appearance other than the fact that her blade is tinted red with all the blood she's absorbed. Which none of these designs incorporate.

This is not a dig on the designs itself, they're all quite gorgeous in their own right and i'm going to spend a while discussing all of them! Because isn't it fascinating how, since we know little about novel baxia beyond "saber" all of these designs ended up so different? What kinds of sabers are these, anyway?

So, a chinese aber, aka a "dao" (刀) just means a sword that has only one cutting side. As opposed to a jian, which has two.

You can see how that leaves a LOT of room for variaton.

I've actually seen some people get confused because Huaisang's saber in the untsmed is thin and quite straight, making it superficially resemble the jian more than drama!baxia, but it is still clearly a saber!

See? only one cutting blade!

This, to me looks a lot like a tang dynasty hengdao

credit to this blog for providing his image and being a great source for all this going forward.

TANGENT: during all this I found out the english wikipedia page for dao is WRONG! Ths is what they about the tang hengdao!

So that sounds like the hengdao was called that during the sui dynasty, but then, after that, started being called a peidao, right?

WRONG

I LOOKED AT THE SOURCE THEY USED AND IT SAYS THIS:

IT WAS CALLED THE PEIDOU UNTIL THE SUI DYNASTY, AT WHICH POINT IT WAS CALLED A HENGDAO. Which would carry over to the Tang dynasty. This was the source wikipedia linked! and it says something else than they say it does!

Anyone know how to edit a wikipedia article?

ANYWAY

BACK TO BAXIA

Since we're already at the drama, let's look at drama baxia: She's also straight! the general term for straight-backed saber is Zhibeidao, but that's a modern collector's term, and doesn't really say anything about which historical kind of saber baxia could be based on. Another meta i found on the drama nie sabers already went on some detail here.

I'm gonna expand on that a little: The kinds of historical straight-backed sabers we see resemble the hengdao a lot more than they do baxia. They don't go to their point as harsly as she does (she's basically a cleaver!) and they're all way skinnier.

No, my personal theory is that instead of being based on any kind of historical sword, drama!baxia is based on a Nandao.

I mean, come on, look at it!

Baxia!

The Nandao... isn't actually a historical sword. It was invented for Wushu forms. There's a really fascinating article about its conception, but that's why the swords in the images look a little thin and flimsy. Wushu swords are very flexible and light, they're dance props, not weapons to fight with. There are actual steel versions of Nandao, but they're recreations of the prop, not the other way around.

So That's one way in which Baxia differes from the Nandao: she's actually a real weapon. The other is that, as you can see above, the nandao has an S-shaped guard. Baxia doesn't. She's also much more elaborately decorated, of course. Because she's a princess.

Now: audio drama baxia!

This is much easier. with that flare at the tip?

Oh baby that's a niuweidao, all the way!

There are more sabers with that kind of curved handle, but the broad tip is really charcteristic of the niuweidao. The Niuweidao is also incredibly poplar in modern media, often portrayed as a historical sword, but it originated i nthe 19th century! And it was actually never used by the military!

That's right, the Niuweidao was pretty much exclusively a civilian weapon! That makes its use here anachronistic, but so is the nandao, and considering that the origin story of the Nie is that they use Dao intead of Jian because their ancestors were butchers, portraying them with a weapon historically reserved for rebels and common people instead of the imperial military is actually very on theme!

Finally, Donghua/Manhua baxia. These two designs are so similar I'm going to treat them as one and the same for now.

Unlike both previous baxias, The long handle makes it clear this baxia is a two-handed weapon, though Nie Mingjue is absolutely strong enough to wield her with one hand anyway. Normal rules don't count for cultivators.

Now, this is where things get tricky, because there are a lot of words for long two-handed sabers. And a lot of them are interchangable! This youtube video about the zhanmadao, one of the possible sabers this baxia could be based on, goes a little into just how confusing this can get. This kind of blade WAS actually in military use for many centuries, making it the most historically accurate of all the baxias. But because of that it also has several names and all of those names can also refer to different kinds of blades depending on what century we're in.

So here's our options: i'm going to dismiss the wodao and miandao, because these were explicitly based on japanese sword design, and as we can see manhua baxia has that very broad tip, so that won't work

(Example of a wodao. According to my sources Miaodao is really just the modern common term for the wodao, and the changdao, and certain kinds of zhanmadao... do you see how quickly this gets confusing?)

Next option: Zhanmadao.

Zhanmadao stands for "horse chopping saber" so... yeah they were anti-cavalry weapons. meant to be able to cut the legs and/or necks of horses. That definitely sounds like a weapon Nie Mingjue would wield. But if you watched that youtube video i linked above, you'll know the standardized Qing dinasty Zhanmadao looked very different from earlier versions. It was inspired by the japanese odachi, and more resembles the miandao than its ealrier heftier counteprarts.

Earlier Ming dynasty Zhanmadao on the other hand were... basically polearms. the great ming military blog spot, another wonderful source, says these are essentially a kind of podao/pudao (朴刀) which looked like this

Now that blade looks a lot like baxia, but the handle is honestly too long. Donghua!baxia straddles the line between sword an polearm a little, but while zhanmadao have been used to refer to both long-handled swords and polerarms, this was undeniably a polearm, not a sword.

If you want to know what researching this was like, I found a picture of this blade on pinterest-- labeled as a "two-handed scimitar"-- and the comment section was filled with people arguing about whether this was a Pudao, Wudao, Zhanmadao, Dadao, Guandao, or a japanese Nagita.

So... that's how it was going. This has kept me up until 2 AM multiple times.

However! Thanks to this article on the great ming military blog I found out there have historically been pudao blades with shorter handles!

Specifically, Ming dynasty military writer Cheng Ziyi created a modified version of the pudao to work with the Dan Fao Fa Xuan technixues-- aka technqiues for a two-handed saber, which would alter heavily influence Miaodao swordmanship-- thereby, as the article points out, essentially merging the cleaver-polearm type Zhanmadao with the later two-handed japanese-inspired design.

This is the illustration for the Wu Bei Yao Lue (武備要略) a Ming dynasty military manual

This blade shape in the illustration doesn't match Baxia exactly, but since it's a lengthened Pudao-like blade and we've seen above that those can match Donghua Baxia's shape, i'm gonna say that calling Baxia a Zhanmadao with a two-handed grip isn't all that innacurate!

However, because all of these terms are so intertwined, there are a dozen other things you could call her that would be about equally correct.

To show that, here's a lightning round of other potential Baxia candidates:

Dadao (大刀)

Which are generally one-handed and too short. However!

Another youtube video i found of someone training with a Zhanmadao that resembles baxia a little also calls it a "shuangshoudai dao" (雙手带 刀) shuangshou means two-handed, and while 雙手带 seems to refer to a longer handled weapon, when looking for a shuangshou dao or shuangshou dadao (双手大刀) we find a lot more baxia-resembling blades like here and here

I also found that, while the cleaver-like Dadao is strictly a product of the 20th centuy, since dadao just means big sword or big knife, it has been used to refer to loads of different weapons! Some people could've called the zhanmadao and pudao "dadao" during the Ming dynasty as well.

Another potential baxia candidate that mandarin mansion classifies as similar to the later dadao (though longer, as seen in the illustration below) is the "Kuanren Piandao"

Which piqued my interest because this diagram classifying different tpye of Dao:

Claims that a Kuanrenbiandao (diferent spelling, same sword) is the same as a modern day Zhanmadao.

(So once again, all of these terms are interchangable)

Another opton Is the Chuanmeidao/Chuanweidao (船尾刀) below you can see a diagram, based on the Qing dynasty green standard army regulation, of blades all officially classified as types of "pudao"

The top middle is the Kuanren Piandao, and bottom left is the Chuanweidao.

Both of these have a lot of baxia-like qualities.

So there you go! live action baxia is based on a Nandao, audio drama baxia is based on a Niuweidao, and Manhua/donghua baxia is some kind of two-handed Zhanmadao/Pudao/Dadao depending on how you want to look at it.

I'm honestly surprised no one has made the creative decision to portray Baxia as a Jiuhuandao, aka 9 ringed broadsword yet.

I mean look at it! Incredibly imposing. Would make for a great Baxia imo. (@ upcoming mdzs manga and mobile game: take notes!)

[skunkes]

[lavellaned]

How to flatter a grumpy immortal mage 101

[bucketwritingpail]

Thinking about Danny wishing to go back to a time where he wasn't constantly in danger, and Desiree not being able to find a time in his life that can fit the bill so just,,, nothing happens.

[geekeryisafoot]

It is hilarious reading superhero comics- which purport to be action comics- and Kagurabachi at the same time because Kagurabachi so utterly blows them out of the water. Superhero comics spend so much time on action and they're not even good at it.

Superhero comic artists and writers, I am assigning you homework to better your skills and that homework is reading Kagurabachi

[copia]

i've done some horrible things to copia in the notes app but i draw the line at giving him a hip replacement. so my personal hc for his cane situation — disregarding the alternative of him taking one onstage just for the vibes — is that he developed early onset osteoarthritis from ballet and began to manage it. the rats mv was the last time he danced properly, then after the threat of replacement, it was strict physiotherapy and steroid injections until the cane wasn't as necessary as it once was. you can get footwear designed to help with oa, so i'm sliding the shoe moment from rhrn into this self-indulgent ramble ('i'll get injured' = 'things will be worse for me later'). he'll jump around the stage as often as he dares to the frustration of doctors and his mother — and his ghouls, who will help him limp offstage at every show towards the end of the tour and take care of him after treatments. limited movement frustrates him to no end but he'll put on a mask of cheery positivity until he's too tired to maintain it any longer. he'll manage it to the point where it's easier to live with than it was when he danced for the last time, but it'll never be like it was when he was young. he struggles with this more than he does the physical pain. who'd want a reminder of their imminent demise burning at their side with every step? still, he pretends, even if it's obvious to everyone close to him that it's a problem — no need to give them any more reason to end his reign earlier than he'd like

[nightfal1n]

Surprise, I like manga!reno's messy hair (and sharper eyes) more than I anticipated (feat.Kafka, Iharu, and 9)

[openheartcavity]

Wilds lips parted, his eyes lingering on decapitated statue overgrown with a light blue moss that gave off a small glow within the abandoned church he took refugee in.

Mindlessly, he slid his hand over his belt, eye stuck on the statues fractured body covered in such a delicately colored batch of moss he'd never seen before- atleast for what he remembered- and pulled his Shika slate out.

For a moment, his eyes snapped off of the carved rock before flicking back onto it as if it would disappear if he'd stare a moment longer.

Snapping a photo, he dared himself to step closer. Just for a moment, he wanted to feel it, smell it and tell you about it.

On Hylias very being, he couldn't keep you out of his head for very long. These thoughts of his began to feel parasitic, filling his mind and forcing reactions out of him even at the most dangerous of moments, but yet you still managed to linger in his head.

Wild smacked his forehead, rattling his thoughts to make him focus on the room. He felt relieved no one was around to see his flustered self suddenly unable to properly conceive a steady thought.

Awkwardly, his fingers felt over the soft texture that tickled his fingers and filled his nose with a wet, earthy smell. Was this what rain like smelled to you? Pressing deeper into the moss, he moved a small chunk to the side, looking deep into the chipped chunk covered in roots and a thin layer of dirt.

[il3x]

Any idea how more power solves the problem of being a good person?

With more POWER, you can protect your teammates. With more POWER, you can defeat the Aberrant criminals who kill and extort and farm children for Rapture. With more POWER, you can avenge Jaeil. With the right kind of POWER, you could reform the Aberrant Corps from a killer, his killer, into a true hand of justice. You could impose Goodness across the entire world. With enough POWER, you wouldn't even need violence to do it.

And on the smaller scale... POWER can erase your mistakes. Good? You could be perfect.

[stormyrainyday]

MY EXAM WENT REALLY WELL