#this was kinda hard but also pretty fun

[kanerallels]

bessxhenry and i must know how you'd coffee shop them. (also have you written any other fic for them???)

Oh you have no idea how many different ideas I just cycled through before finally landing on this one I'm still not totally sold on it but I feel like I'm never totally happy with the M Sec stuff I write. I feel like I have a hard time getting Bess's voice right

But in answer to your question yes! I have! I wrote one Christmas drabble for them last year, and I have an unpublished fic about them and Stevie where I basically went "what if they interacted with one of my blorbos?" and didn't wait for an answer. Anyways, without further ado! My much longer than planned ficlet, beneath the cut

The clatter of pans in the background tugged Elizabeth’s attention away from the paper she was writing for what had to be the hundredth time, and she winced. Usually, this off the beaten track coffee shop was less busy at this time of day, leaving her in peace to finish her schoolwork.

But today, it was packed. Every table was full, and there was a long line stretching back from the counter. Things weren’t going to be getting any more peaceful any time soon.

Closing her laptop, she slid it into her bag. It was probably time to head back to her dorm room and see if she could get anything done there. The day had been enough of a loss already.

She grabbed her cup of coffee, which had long since gone cold, and moved to her feet. Elizabeth took one step towards the trash can— and immediately crashed into one of the other customers.

The coffee slipped from her hand, splashing across the front of the man’s shirt, and Elizabeth let out an involuntary gasp. “Oh my— I’m so sorry!”

Hastily, she grabbed some of the paper napkins from her table, apologizing as she did so. “I didn’t see you coming— it’s so crowded in here and loud and I was just leaving—”

“It’s okay,” the man assured her, offering her a smile as he accepted the napkins from her. Despite herself, Elizabeth found herself giving him a quick onceover. With dark hair and warm brown eyes that reflected his friendly smile, he was… definitely not unattractive. 

“It was my fault, anyways— I was distracted, wasn’t looking where I was going,” he continued apologetically. “The least I can do is buy you a new coffee.”

That made Elizabeth’s eyebrow shoot up. “I’m the one who dumped a drink all over you. If anything, I should be offering to buy your coffee.”

“Well, if you’re offering,” the man said with a half-grin. “But it’s not exactly good manners to tell someone to buy you a coffee. This gets the job done a lot better.”

Oh, so that’s what’s going on. Giving him a polite smile that, with any luck, communicated a polite disinterest, Elizabeth said, “I was actually just on my way out, I have some studying to do. I appreciate the offer, though.”

He accepted that with a nod. “Sure. You’re at UVA, too, right?”

“I am,” Elizabeth said, and the man smiled.

“Thought I recognized you. I’m Henry.”

“Elizabeth,” she said, casting a quick glance towards the door. Henry seemed to get the point.

“Maybe I’ll see you around, Elizabeth,” he said, giving her a final easy smile before joining the line for coffee. 

Despite her insistence that she had to leave, Elizabeth lingered just another second to watch him chat with the cashier, wearing that smile, warm as the sun. Interesting, she thought, and almost found herself hoping they did meet again.

However, it was unlikely— she had school to focus on, not a social life. And she wasn’t about to keep pining away for a boy she’d just met that day.

She headed for the door, and had almost made it to the door when she shot a last look over her shoulder. To her surprise, Henry met her eyes, and lifted his coffee towards her in a quick salute. Sending him a quick smile and a nod, Elizabeth pushed open the door. Focus, she scolded herself. She had work ahead of her that was bigger than some boy with a nice smile.

[puppyeared]

updated Sleight ref!!

[mamawasatesttube]

wish more ppl in the timkon tag understood the concept of "best friends to lovers" 😩 where's my "years' worth of stupid inside jokes referenced at the worst moments just to make each other giggle" nonsense. where's the bone-deep understanding and knowing of each other. the ease and relaxation in each other's presence. the "i know how your head works without you having to tell me" of it all. where's the "no one knows me better than you. how could it be anyone but you" of it all!!!

[scificrows]

Okay, my brain refuses to think about anything other than Murderbot, so I looked at every use of the word "friend[s]" in TMBD and... created some pie charts. Normal human activities.

Some Thoughts™ I had while putting this together (under the cut):

In All Systems Red, Murderbot notes that the PresAux crew are all close friends (twice! and goes on to explain their internal relationships which I think is very cute). This is pretty much the only use of 'friends' in ASR, except for when Murderbot says that SecUnits can't be friends with each other.

It seems that this may be one of the first times Murderbot has ever really been around a group of friends before? Murderbot notes that this is not the norm for its contracts and admits that the fact that they are all friends and the way they interact with each other make it actually enjoy that contract (before!!!! the hostile attack, so it already enjoys this contract before they start seeing it as a person etc ghghhhh). [Inference: Friendship seems enjoyable.]

The first character that calls Murderbot its friend is ART in Artificial Condition. Murderbot immediately refutes this (and then goes on to call ART its friend to its clients for the rest of the book). [Inference: Maybe ART is Murderbot's friend. And maybe that is... agreeable]

Rogue Protocol has more than twice as many instances of the word 'friend' as any of the other novellas. Why? Miki. Friendship and its implications for non-humans are a central theme because Miki is friends with everyone. Murderbot initially scoffs at the notion that Miki and Miki's humans are friends. At the end of the book, after witnessing how desperately Don Abene tried to stop Miki from trying to save them, and her grief after its death, Murderbot has to admit that she had in fact been Miki's friend. [Inference: Humans can be friends with bots and can sincerely care about them]

In Exit Strategy, Murderbot tentatively uses the word "friends" for its humans for the first time (several times actually). It questions whether it can actually call them its friends or not and later realizes that it had been afraid what admitting that the humans are its friends would do to it. At the end of the book, Mensah tells Murderbot the PresAux crew are its friends, which is the first time a human has directly said that to it (at least on-page). [Inference: Humans can and want to be Murderbot's friends]

In Network Effect, Murderbot seems to be more habituated to the word 'friend', confidently calling ART and Ratthi its friends, like it is no longer just trying the concept on unsure if it fits. There are many instances in which other characters refer to MB as ART's friend or the other way around and Murderbot's humans refer to Murderbot as their friend several times. Generally, there seems to be less hesitancy, because yes, all of them are Murderbot's friends, why wouldn't they be. [Inference: SecUnits can have friends. This SecUnit has friends. They care about it a lot.]

Conclusion: The Murderbot Diaries tell the story of a construct that does not seem to consider the possibility of friendship for itself and is fine with that - until it accidentally starts caring a little too much and suddenly more and more people annex it as a friend (ew) to the point where it can no longer deny that this is happening and has to begrudgingly admit that yes, it has friends now and maybe that is actually not a bad thing.

[notmoreflippingelves]

[a-shadow-a-day]

Day 53

[cowardlykrow]

After Cyn's done tryna kill him, she'll eventually relent and they can get to work... whatever that is. I didn't do the outfit any justice, but the second i saw the Cowboy!Curt mega @ricky-mortis made i was literally like, "yes, that is IT."

This is, in my heart, a cannon fit for this au

[crystalpallette]

get you a girl who can give you everything

this started a long long time ago when I made a joke about how sega should put ringo in more dresses, and then my friend reminded me that oh yeah!! I can do that instead!!! and then one thing led to another and we joked about punk ringo and I drew that too. using ringo like a dressup doll is so cathartic it's kinda crazy

some bonuses (original designs, timelapse) under the cut bc I like these designs!! I might do some more with them!! please disregard the band poster in the first second of the timelapse that's something else!!!

[front-facing-pokemon]

[beybuniki]

one thing i noticed (form personal experience and by observing other artists) is that the longer you draw and create, the more boring it gets to simply replicate references, especially when it comes to characers' fashion choices.

with bnha, i keep mine pretty simple and basic because teens ARE very trend-loyal, but mainly im just lazy lol, but when i AM motivated, i love to think about characters' personal style, what could influence them, but also more trivial things such as budget into account, which is why i love to draw Deku in basic tees or clothes provided by his school (while bakugo gets to wear ed hardy and shoto wears arcteryx). i also love to limit the items like its just more realistic to me when someone as ordinary as deku wears the same 5 crewnecks all the time

which brings me to my actual point, namely that the more frequently you draw, the more you learn to do research andto combine your findings into sth new rather than staying faithful to one reference, and i think that's what makes good art so good, being able to draw inspiratioin from all kinds of niches and creating something that feels very authentic and suspends the spectator's disbelief. sometimes i see art and i know exactly which fashion editorial or which kpop idol was referenced, and I'm not insinuating these are bad things i do that too (less frequently now but i sure did!), my point is it's kind of nice to see how ALL artist start out with rather derivative art but eventually move on to create more authentic art that is less about drawing beautiful and perfect people and more about trying to individualize them and that ALSO means giving them weird clothes, scars, asymmetric eyes, a receding hairline etc. like drawing the same beautiful character 200 times gets so boring and it's just more fun to try and make them a bit more human

[bacchuschucklefuck]

Can you expand on what you mean by Baron being "too cool" to really fit a horror monster? It's a very interesting concept and I'd love to hear your thoughts. Is it that they're too active/involved/tangible and it detracts from their scariness?

I feel like I should preface this with a wall of disclaimers lmao 1/I am a hardcore, down-to-the-marrow, avid, deeply sincere horror enthusiast, esp. horror creatures. this usually means my mileage is vastly different from the average populace's, and my scaredy bone has been disintegrated by longterm exposure. most things in a piece of horror media won't scare me! so I practically never use that on its own as the scale to talk abt horror experiences, but when something does scare me it's always a special occasion to be treasured. 2/canon d20 is never really meant to be horror horror, and for good reasons: it doesn't fit the company's output, it takes a kind of carelessness in production estimation that is always a huge risk, it's often vulnerable in a way that kinda goes against how TTRPGs usually facilitates vulnerability, and for most people it's just! stressful! d20, even with the "horror-themed" seasons, generally just plays with horror tropes and stays focused in its goal of being a comedy improv tabletop theater show. 3/fantasy high's chosen system is DnD, which as I've mentioned before is before all a combat-based game system, which means the magic circle of play is drawn based on stats that facilitate and prioritize combat. want or not this affects every interaction you have in the game, and given fantasy high's concept from the ground up (everyone's going to school of DnD stuff to get better at DnD) it's doubly relevant. 4/This Is Fine I have no quarrel with this. my meters are internal, I do not ask this show to be anything it doesn't advertise itself to be, and what it is is fucking great! I like it! when I expand on this ask's question it will be like a physicist going insane in a lab. that's the mindset we're going in with.

disclaimers done. my stance on horror as a genre is that it's a utility genre rather than a content genre or a demographic genre; it is the discard of narratives. it's the trash pile. horror, above being scary, is about being ugly and messy, it's the cracks on the ground any story inevitably steps over to stay a genre that isn't horror. the genre's been around long enough to develop a codex and a general language that medias and makers and enthusiasts of the genre can use to talk about and build onto, but if you go into individual pieces there's really no unifying Horror Story. one person's beautiful life can be another's horror story, it's just how it is.

this makes The Monster a deeply intriguing piece of the genre. thing is a monster is in a decent percentage of any story - it's just when the antagonist force steps into something past a certain line traced out in the story's world. monstrousness is in pretty much every western fantasy story, it's in any story with a hero and something to vanquish or win; more than anything it's a proxy of that thing up there. the line in a narrative's world. the monster is the guard of the unknown lands, where heroic, civilized people don't tread.

what does this mean in the context of horror? the genre is about that perceived lawlessness, that "unknown land" so to say. we're in the monster's home. that's the literary context that we often walk into a horror piece with; the monster knows more than you about where you are. it may not understand you, but it holds more information than you, and with that it moves swifter than you, has more covered than you, and is more assured in its existence in this context than you. it's a struggle to catch up to it, it's nigh impossible to get one over it, and you're never sure it'll 100% work, because you just don't have the information necessary to.

with that framing you can kinda see where I'm coming from here: horror's often about the breaking of rules. I always think a monster's most effective when it breaks well-established rules of both existence and visual storytelling. think Possum (2018) or Undertale's Omega Flowey or the Xenomorph Queen - unique change in medium, unique change in graphic, unique change in design language, etc. in that sense I actually really like how canon baron plays out: they don't really function like anything else in the fantasy high universe, the bad kids have not managed to kill them when they've felled literal gods, their domain in fhjy literally introduces new mechanics to encompass their existence! from an experience design standpoint they slap mad shit. BUT! I can't help finding their character, like as a character riz (and the other bad kids, eventually) interact with, to be very... coherent? in design. this is kinda hard for me to articulate in words, it's more often a sense you get once you've looked at enough of these scrumptious fuckers, their general design and the way they show up is just kinda too clean, so to say. always kinda newly made? fresh unboxed. it, once again, makes sense for their lore - they are looking for more about themself from riz - and their function - they're an antagonist in a game experience, they're meant to be interacted with in a way that produces results and meshes with the existing magic circle - but that shininess takes away from the implied history they should have dominion over and the person they're haunting doesn't.

from another angle there is kinda something there about how put-together canon baron is as a concept; the domain they call home is riz's deep-seeded fears, extremely vulnerable things he's drawn borders around to quarantine and refused to walk into. things that from his perspective would irreversibly shatter certain pleasant fictions his world is built on top of. canon baron, While Extremely Cool, I feel is kinda too neat to connect with and signify the apocalyticized mess that'd result from this paradigm shift. the part where they're in riz's briefcase and looking through every mirror is Very Cool And Fucked Up! but ultimately the show draws a line around them as well, by making game-physical, tangible spaces they're in (the mirrors and the haunted mordred manor) and put riz and the bad kids there only when they need to confront stuff. riz is meaningfully narratively away from baron's unknown land for most of fantasy high.

with that and all of my disclaimers in mind my conclusion here is if canon baron wants to be a Horror Monster they'd have to cross way more lines. be a Lot more invasive. hence (holds up my class swap baron like a long cat)

[tswwwit]

I know Bill's the big bad demon everyone is afraid of and he will protect his husband at all costs (when no one's looking), but I think it's also worth mentioning that Dipper, even being the dorky, squishy human that he is, also cares about his dumb demon hubby and wants to keep him safe, even if it annoys Bill, and really, he doesn't need protecting the way Dipper does. He isn't going to puff out his chest and get in someone's face like some macho man, but I think Dipper knee-jerk reaction when Bill's in "danger" isn't to just shrug because he's an all-powerful demon who can handle it. If a blast that could level a whole town was aimed at Bill's head (for him, this just means a bad hair day and a new body), Dipper's immediate impulse is to push him out of the way or defend him against whatever wants to kill his familiar. Because he's not thinking "Bill could literally end this match in .3 seconds." He's thinking "if you touch even one hair on that asshole's head, I'm going to knock yours clean off your shoulders." I don't know what the point even is in this post, just that Dipper is this nerdy, unassuming guy who ends up being viciously protective under the right conditions. Like I think Dipper pulls off the bloody and vengeful look SO well that Bill immediately melts and just lets him handle the situation, even though it's not really Dipper's fight to begin with. He's beating the guy to a pulp with zero reserve, and Bill's off to the side swooning and twirling his hair over his man for getting his hands dirty for him.

It's true! While Bill's not the type to enjoy being underestimated, he has to admit! Seeing his adorable husband all riled up on his behalf is a hell of a sight.

The thing is, Dipper's a good guy! He can't help but put himself in danger over others. Even when all reason and logic say that Bill would be absolutely fine if he got his head exploded or a shiv in his kidney, Dipper's instinct is to fully and immediately get in the way of that. To, in fact, be protective.

Mostly this is only evident when Dipper has to stand up to Ford. Yes, yes, Bill's a vile horrible monstrosity, but he didn't do that particular thing you're accusing him of. Watching him stand up to his uncle is a particular treat!

For bigger threats, though - Well. Bill's gonna be absolutely fine, no matter what happens, thank you very much. But he's definitely not opposed to seeing some guy who was about to literally stab him in the back get a few of his teeth knocked out.

[puppyeared]

started stardew valley for the first time. born to remember villager likes and dislikes forced to immediately forget it the moment i take my eyes off thw wiki

[cursezoroark]

edens!

requested from @emissary-of-dog

[razzledazzletrassh]

no major fic updates just yet guys TAKE MY WOY OC I MADE LIKE. April of last year IM PLUGGING SOME INFO ABOUT THIS GUY IN THE TAGS.

I may also redesign her soon or something. Make her more bug-like with some stuff. I can cook guys let me cook !!!

[sysig]

Sweet dreams, for a time (Patreon)