#thanks my loves

[1neverendingstories1]

Okay so I have a lot of thoughts. Ant-Man: Quantumania spoilers

This.

Okay. I love the first Ant-Man movie. It's a comfort film, it's what made me watch the rest of the MCU. So you can imagine my utter lack of enthusiasm when I was told that quantumania was going to be large scale. Scott, is small scale. He just wants to be a good dad to Cassie and ogle at all the handsome guys he sees when he meets up with avengers.

He's a light character. He's optimistic. He's the comedic relief in every guest star he's in. His lightness works so well to keep people, viewer and villain alike, underestimating him. It has always been used to give him the upper hand both emotionally and intellectually. Knowing this? Makes Kang's introduction—because that's what this really is, Kang The Conqueror not He Who Remains, is why this movie was made—all the more perfect. Well, it would've been had the writers given it the chance that was so clearly there, had they tried to give it focus.

Kang was mostly a mysterious figurehead who spoke of horrors and wars and destroyed little children's worlds like Sylvie’s for the "sacred timeline" with just the promise of more of his destruction if variations were allowed. That is what I've always considered to be his Thanos introduction. His single appearance in Loki was Kang's version of the multiple teasers throughout phases 1-3 that Thanos had. It was faster, more efficient and more powerful because it told you exactly what he is capable of without making you figure it out or wait. It told you he is the end, no half of the universe no half of our heroes will survive. He did it all in a single episode. He did it all to make you know, so when we next see him we can feel.

Kang and Scott are extreme contrasts. They are light and dark personified. Their power difference ("you're out of your league") is so severe that they don't just not belong in the same fight they don't belong in the same movie. And that's exactly why Scott was the perfect person to introduce Kang.

Scott, while incredibly intelligent and did outsmart the forced field Kang set up, and did destroy the power source, is physically helpless to Kang. He was stepped on, broken and bloodied in just a few seconds under Kang's strength. Just his body's strength. And as Scott was forced to ground Kang looked at him in pity. Kang pitied the man he was killing because it was, laughably, inevitable. Scott has no way of winning. He knew that and said so himself. He knew the only way to get rid of Kang was to lose, for them both to lose and—isn't that a thought. "Our hero was entirely helpless, he could only get rid of Kang if he also lost, are all our hero's going to be helpless? Lose everything to Kang. Is that the only way to be rid of him?" This is how it should've felt at the end of quantumania to properly build the foundation for phase 5.

These two would've been able to bring the full fright and might of the upcoming Kang Dynasty had marvel let the movie be an Ant-Man movie. Quantumania should have been allowed to be like it's previous two in the franchise and been a comedy, had focused on what made this franchise shine: it's relationships: Scott and Cassie, Scott and Hank, Luis and Kurt, the blended family; the light even in the darkest of times. Instead it focused on the VanDyne women. Mainly Janet. Having the focus on Janet, her mysterious-past-arch with knives and fights and guns and the morbidity of being lost from your loved ones—while admittedly intriguing and worth exploring sometime else—that complete lack of light stole that weight the scale put upon this movie desperately needed. And Hope demanded darkness in her scenes with her curiosity of what horrors took her mother from her and ripped her father from her emotionally for years (and this is all interesting and important for her character/viewer and should be expanded upon further and could even be paralleled with Cassie so we can eventually see a bond between those two). However for this film to work, she needed to either learn how to finally accept light with her parents and Scott alike, or have already accepted it. Her scenes with Scott were extremely sweet, I will admit, but her relationship with her parents were more the focal point since the very beginning. Cassie, Hank, and Scott carried the lightness, but it wasn't enough to balance out the scale with the sheer severity of Kang's darkness, and the VanDyne women's additions.

Seeing Janet and Kang interact made me lose the fear of Scott dying. I shouldn’t have lost that fear. Focusing on Janet being relatively fine (considering), and physically unharmed the whole movie, and having escaped Kang even after having destroyed his entire pursuit in life for years eliminated any fear of Scott dying. I walked into the movie believing he was doing to die, and I walked out thinking I was crazy for even entertaining the idea. I shouldn’t lost that fear. We shouldn’t lose the fear of the man who threatened us with multiversal war in Loki. If they used Janet’s and Kang’s bond when he was banished and she was alone, not to show how cool Janet is (though yes she absolutely is for outsmarting and trapping him), but to parallel Janet to Scott it would’ve helped not only the film’s pacing but also to connect the viewer to Kang.

Thanos, he had a reason. His purpose was perhaps one of the simplest motivations to understand. Kang, however, has an infinite amount of variants. What we know so far is that he wants power, he wants to conquer. When he’s done all that he wants to conquer himself; hence the war that started the scared timeline. But. Why did one of his variants decide to stop this? What would cause this variant to suddenly become guilt ridden, compassionate, tired of himself and his suffering he both experiences and causes? Kang is complex. He’s so very interesting. But how can we as the viewers even begin to care about this man who, whenever we see a sympathetic variant, gets killed off (Sylvie, Scott) before we can see why? Why did he change? Why would we care if we’re denied the opportunity to learn.

Paralleling Janet to Scott and only through the eyes of Kang would’ve given the casual viewer the opportunity to ask why. Kang bonded with Janet over her kindness in saving his life, he valued her’s because of it. He wanted to eliminate her pain and bring her home to her daughter. But once she saw who he was she left and tried to stop him. That’s exactly what Scott is trying to do here. Get home to earth and protect his daughter, stop Kang when he tries to hurt others. If Kang saw this and still tries kill him? Still tries to hurt everyone for his “great mission”? It would make Kang so much more approachable to understand. You would want to know why he would still hurt people he saw value in. He considers them good, yet he kills, and still sees himself as good?

Ugh I don’t know. I feel like this franchise was the perfect one to introduce the Kang Dynasty but they just didn’t do it well. And they didn’t do it justice to the original Ant-Man or any of its characters.

[kochei0]

I turn to Ares.

Thanks to Tyler Miles Lockett who allowed me to draw inspiration from his ARES piece for page 2! Look at his etsy page it's SICK

⚔️ If you want to read some queer retelling of arturian legends have a look at my webtoon

[retquits]

1.6 is coming—see you march 19th!!! 🥹🌱

[hansoeii]

we go just right.

[britishmuffin]

ATLA sketches because I'm deep into it atm 8)

★ patreon || website || twitter ★

[disgustinggf]

this blog is brought to u by someone unmedicated

[darc-la-farse]

JUNIOR YEAR!!! I BELIEVE IN YOU!!

[clarisse-doodles]

inspired by this post, in which Damian does not know what Vine is

[nessieartss]

Another sibling au featuring megumi (they finally met and sukuna already made yuuji cringed)

Also happy new year!

Part 1 | Part 3

[maria-ruta]

"what if chilchuck was a butch?" we thought

and Ryoko said - "say no more!" - and made Meijack, can you believe it???

anyway I'm surprised nobody's done it before, you can have it!

original panels under read more

p.s. - she just doodled chilchuck genderbend once and couldnt let go of the design and BAM Meijack was born lol its so funnt tbh. but fucking valid

[1neverendingstories1]

as much as I love it being Nya or Cole, I think they’ll be missing a huge opportunity if it’s not Zane to be the one to remind Jay of who he is after everything that happened to Zane in season 11

[lilac-cat-draws]

Little late on this post but me after the thelxie event

[hansoeii]

stuck in the rain.

[wispscribbles]

I love your ghost design. I wanna squeeze him :⁠^⁠)

If no hug then why hug-shaped???

[inkskinned]

at some point it's just like. do they even fucking like the thing they're asking AI to make? "oh we'll just use AI for all the scripts" "we'll just use AI for art" "no worries AI can write this book" "oh, AI could easily design this"

like... it's so clear they've never stood in the middle of an art museum and felt like crying, looking at a piece that somehow cuts into your marrow even though the artist and you are separated by space and time. they've never looked at a poem - once, twice, three times - just because the words feel like a fired gun, something too-close, clanging behind your eyes. they've never gotten to the end of the movie and had to arrive, blinking, back into their body, laughing a little because they were holding their breath without realizing.

"oh AI can mimic style" "AI can mimic emotion" "AI can mimic you and your job is almost gone, kid."

... how do i explain to you - you can make AI that does a perfect job of imitating me. you could disseminate it through the entire world and make so much money, using my works and my ideas and my everything.

and i'd still keep writing.

i don't know there's a word for it. in high school, we become aware that the way we feel about our artform is a cliche - it's like breathing. over and over, artists all feel the same thing. "i write because i need to" and "my music is how i speak" and "i make art because it's either that or i stop existing." it is such a common experience, the violence and immediacy we mean behind it is like breathing to me - comes out like a useless understatement. it's a cliche because we all feel it, not because the experience isn't actually persistent. so many of us have this ... fluttering urgency behind our ribs.

i'm not doing it for the money. for a star on the ground in some city i've never visited. i am doing it because when i was seven i started taking notebooks with me on walks. i am doing it because in second grade i wrote a poem and stood up in front of my whole class to read it out while i shook with nerves. i am doing it because i spent high school scribbling all my feelings down. i am doing it for the 16 year old me and the 18 year old me and the today-me, how we can never put the pen down. you can take me down to a subatomic layer, eviscerate me - and never find the source of it; it is of me. when i was 19 i named this blog inkskinned because i was dramatic and lonely and it felt like the only thing that was actually permanently-true about me was that this is what is inside of me, that the words come up over everything, coat everything, bloom their little twilight arias into every nook and corner and alley

"we're gonna replace you". that is okay. you think that i am writing to fill a space. that someone said JOB OPENING: Writer Needed, and i wrote to answer. you think one raindrop replaces another, and i think they're both just falling. you think art has a place, that is simply arrives on walls when it is needed, that is only ever on demand, perfect, easily requested. you see "audience spending" and "marketability" and "multi-line merch opportunity"

and i see a kid drowning. i am writing to make her a boat. i am writing because what used to be a river raft has long become a fully-rigged ship. i am writing because you can fucking rip this out of my cold dead clammy hands and i will still come back as a ghost and i will still be penning poems about it.

it isn't even love. the word we use the most i think is "passion". devotion, obsession, necessity. my favorite little fact about the magic of artists - "abracadabra" means i create as i speak. we make because it sluices out of us. because we look down and our hands are somehow already busy. because it was the first thing we knew and it is our backbone and heartbreak and everything. because we have given up well-paying jobs and a "real life" and the approval of our parents. we create because - the cliche again. it's like breathing. we create because we must.

you create because you're greedy.

[punkitt-is-here]

transformers are so cool