Just a lil update on things general that felt like venting but I wanted to just say that my life has been a tad crazy with workload and changing jobs (positive)
I've been drawing a lot but I just haven't posted anything. I probably will eventually, but I've been hyperfixating on my OCs at the moment, and Idk If I concider this a hiatus really, but I have been taking a big much needed break from everything😌
I know the whole thing with eren growing his hair out was because he just didn’t care anymore but I like to think it’s because his mom always told him his ears turn red when he lies and he was about to spend the rest of his life lying to everyone he loved 🥹
You do get the sense that the fallout of Roger's death and the Roger pirates disbanding not so much traumatized Buggy and Shanks indifferent ways but instead generated such drastically different reactions to the trauma.
While the trauma of everything seemed to push Shanks into the future, always constantly waiting for something, putting plans on hold and then later in place, for this great moment, this great coming that he sees on the Horizon. For Buggy it rooted him firmly in the past keeping him trapped in this grief masquerading as anger.
While Roger's death forced Shanks to grow up fast, it kind of arrested Buggy's development keeping him stuck in those same feelings, rooted int that same place.
You get the sense that Buggy's whole east blue schtick is just one long overdue rebellious phase one big fuck you to Roger and his ideals. He's rebelling against Roger's principles. One of their rules was don't steal from innocent people and Buggy was keeping a whole town in poverty. If Roger and Luffy's pirating styles are diametrically opposed to someone like Blackbeard, who might be the most literal pirate in the entire series, then buggy is the parody of that Blackbeard piratism. He is playing up cruelty, being the most piratey pirate possible, hell he's literally a clown on a stage. It's all a show! It's his own special way of trying to "get back at Roger" of trying to discard everything Roger taught him for this overacted, over exaggerated clownish cruelty. Mentally he never left that execution square. He is still 15, alone and scared.
Hell he literally never left either, while I'm pretty sure Shanks' booked it out of the east blue as fast as he could, Buggy never lef, might have never left, if not for Luffy. It's part of why Luffy bothers him so much, he's just like Roger everything that Buggy is trying hard to forget and here comes this kid, whose never even met the Captain but is wearing his hat, shoving it right back in his face.
It makes sense that he never leaves the east blue till Luffy literally forces him out of it (fucking with Luffy gets him captured and imprisoned) and it makes sense that it's Luffy that literally breaks him out of prison, literally sets him free, and on the path to greatness that maybe he was always meant to achieve (even if he trips his way into it). This boy that is tragically so much like his old captain but so beautifully unabashedly himself, is what Buggy needs to start letting go off the past, to start trying to move forward.
Maybe that's why Buggy, at what could arguably be described as his lowest moment, gets the strength to free himself from his own self imprisonment, realizing that even back then he was locking himself away and pinning his own dreams on Shanks. And, maybe for the first time ever, Buggy really own his dream. He declares to his tormentors and his crew and the entire world that; actually He wants to find the one piece, him, as captain of his own crew, this crew, not just a part of someone else's. That's his dream and he's willing to turn the world upside down to do it.
there's such an interesting extra layer to amity and her relationships (especially w luz) that gets revealed when you learn that not only is she an abuse victim herself, but she is also the child of an abusive marriage
like not only was she personally abused/neglected and taught that she doesn't deserve to have her boundaries respected and won't get positive attention unless maybe she "earns it" by being useful and overachieving, but also her main example of a romantic partnership involved one partner exploiting the other and treating him as an expendable tool
in all of her relationships (platonic, romantic, familial), amity learns to give and receive kindness, learns to respect and set boundaries, learns that the value of herself and others aren't dictated by achievements or usefulness. she's breaking the toxic patterns that her parents taught her via their treatment of her.
but with her romantic relationship with luz, not only is she learning all of the above, but she's also breaking the toxic patterns of a romantic relationship that she would have learned from watching her parents.
when she shows kindness to luz, loves luz wholeheartedly even when she makes mistakes or causes problems, respects luz's privacy and boundaries, she is treating her girlfriend in a way that opposes the way her mother treated her own husband.
when she learns that she doesn't need to be useful or else risk abandonment/punishment, she's learning that she shouldn't accept or expect to be treated by her girlfriend the same way that her father was treated by his own wife.
i just. i love stories about characters breaking cycles. and i love luz and amity's relationship so much. it's very much not the kind of relationship i'm invested in the same way i am invested in with ships between adults. but rather like, it's a relationship between these two young people who are learning to healthily navigate this kind of relationship for the first time in their lives and it's really sweet.
Xiaolin Showdown is so slept on, man I miss that show ;w; such a fun concept and characters, it's kind of a shame it didn't get the same enduring fandom like Danny Phantom did 9w9
I was a Jack splicer guy, but hey I can't fault Skyler for Chase Young, love me a spicy evil dragon man
Edit: Yeah I forgot a whole page, I didn't learn how to draw a panther for nothing dangit!
The 7th ward falls, The Lawbearer and the Emissary commune, he communicates everything and she realizes that he is not her servant but her son whose end is written,,,
ONE: ok guys here’s an arc about mob, in his growth as a person, being confronted with an ideology he’s unfamiliar with, and he has to learn from it but also understand why it’s unhealthy and bad to properly grow from it and choose kindness in the end, albeit in a more nuanced way than before, and this will make mob more able to confront later problems in the season that can’t be solved with mere kindness and require a deep understanding of loneliness and solitude, something he hasn’t had much room to speak on until now. To express mob being shown this villain’s ideology we have a sequence where we see how mogami views the world and by extension how he sees mob, by putting mob in the kind of sad fucked up world he thinks exists, but mob will overcome it with the knowledge that in the real world he has people he cares about and that even the people who make the world bad sometimes can change and nobody is a static evil and kindness and courage when you’re going through hardship goes a long way. despite the darkness this is ultimately a very uplifting experience for him and a show that life is always more than its darkest moments, and also how picking yourself up instead of wallowing in your own suffering and trauma is hard but a very courageous act and what makes mob stronger than mogami
mp100 fans with tunnel vision: Oh so mob was tortured for six months and is sad? He’s literally so sad and traumatized and nobody is talking about this?
i feel like im not making any sense but does anyone else feel like there are stories that let u run with them and ones that spell everything out for you
lestat de lioncourt - on the deer which runs faster than itself.
Hélène Cixous, Stigmata / Anne Rice, The Vampire Lestat / Interview with a Vampire (2022) / Catherine Malabou, Ontology of the Accident / Czeslaw Milosz, New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001 / Louis Moe, Allegory / Ovid, Metamorphoses / Ethel Cain, Ptolomea / The Company of Wolves (1984) / Lingua Ignota, I WHO BEND THE TALL GRASSES / Hugh Parry, Ovid's Metamorphoses: Violence in a Pastoral Landscape.