haha hey so apparently someone stole my whole fic... copy and pasted except for tiny things changed... here is the link to their """fic""" (sorry random person I had to steal the reblog from). they've since deleted the fic off their blog + deleted their ao3 + gone on a hiatus so..... that's cool and whatever....... but they have written a lot of other shit so... don't be a dick but maybe check that for funny business too...
if trump does win in the fall, it will not be the fault of people who are against genocide. it will be the fault of biden, his government, and the DNC for holding onto wildly unpopular and horrific policies that are costing them vast swathes of their voterbase.
ok among my favorite parts of qsmp is the fact that charlie slimecicle can only hold the act of being mad at mariana when mariana isn't in the room. like he successfully rp'd being mad at his deadbeat puta esposa for months while mariana wasn't logging on, like he complained about mariana at the wedding, during the election, in subsequent appearances, and then he's messaging mariana in the chat during purgatory and he's still holding it
and then they're both at spawn like as close to face to face as they get. and bro CANNOT hold the act it drops so fast lmfao he was like "yea cellbit i'm gonna kill mariana" and instead they have a genuinely heartfelt conversation and then rp sexo in the fountain
and i know i'm brainrotting purgatory rn but i'm actually thinking about this bc i saw a clip of mariana and slime talking during the awards show and literally. slime's face goes from 😡🤬 MARIANA'S HERE, SAY SOMETHING PUTA ESPOSA to 😄😁 the second mariana shows up on the screen
like he's still pretending to be mad but dude is grinning like absolute crazy and i love that
hsr's a great game it's like "hey here's this guy who's a cyborg cowboy of all things isn't that fun. look at how wild and flamboyant and entertaining he is! an automatic censor was installed into his universal translator when he got his rockin robot bod so he can't swear anymore and this is especially funny in the cn and jp text of the game because his swears are replaced with things like sweetie, baby, and cutie."
"also his entire homeland was wiped out by the intergalactic capitalistic monolith that's been cruelly siphoning valuable resources from countless planets with little to absolutely no regard for the residents. they spared nothing once their boss gave them the go ahead to use military force. not even his baby daughter, who had just barely learned how to walk."
"he never got the chance to erect a grave for her. or the other loved ones he lost."
really love how throughout a lot of smith and jones martha is really skeptical and apprehensive towards ten (+ one of my favorite exchanges between them - "what, people call you 'the doctor'?" "yeah?" "well, i'm not. far as i'm concerned, you've got to earn that title."), not taking everything he says at face value, even doubting the fact he's an alien until over halfway through the episode.. And like. i really truly think the thing that wins her over isn't him kissing her or any of the other insane mixed messages he manages to send, it's this scene here, where he /earns that title/ in her eyes:
(+ david's bit in the commentary, where he says: "[the doctor] has actually sacrificed himself, and - i would say, that that final act of selflessness is what finally, eventually, welds martha to him. [...] and she now returns it. she returns that act of selflessness.")
this is what their relationship is built on. it isn't about martha being the second-best replacement to rose or a rebound or whatever. bc it isn't really about rose. it's about doctor-in-training martha meeting someone (quite literally, "the doctor") whose ideals she aspires to, and doing her best to be the same person to him as he is to everyone else. it's about ten in return admiring her intelligence and inquisitiveness and how she cares for human life, recovering his compassion, letting himself lean on her for support - and then remembering at the most inopportune moments that he's supposed to not need anyone and be on his own forever. And around in their little nightmare loop they go where they save each other over and over until one of them breaks
i've seen ppl look at martha and go "why she does she admire/why is she so in love with ten if he acts like that to her?" or something along those lines and like. it's not just the fact she's in love with him (in fact i'd argue she actively tries to push it aside post-gridlock). it's the fact that she knows he's the kind of person to put everyone else's lives/well-being over his own. she trusts him to save her when she's in trouble even though it's been like two days at most that they've known one another bc she recognizes that same "deep all-encompassing drive to help others" in him. and she also recognizes, much much earlier than him, that he needs someone to save him, especially when he's unwilling to save himself. and yeah for a bit she thinks he returns her feelings and is just playing hard-to-get, but she realizes pretty early on that this probably isn't the case, and i think that realization fully solidifies here:
(this is when she's listening to ten talk abt gallifrey). And idk it might just be me but i think this expression isn't just her empathizing with his loss. it's also guilt, for wanting something from him that he's clearly unable to give when he's wracked with so much grief. (and you see it in the next episode, where tallulah asks if they're together and martha says for certain that they're not, and that he doesn't know about her feelings for him. she keeps everything to herself bc she now knows that when he shut her flirting down at the end of 3x01 it was the genuine reaction of someone who a) isn't interested and b) is scared of getting close with someone else again)
freema described their dynamic as "she's keener than him" and i think about this all the time. martha doesn't really take what ten throws at her. what she does instead is constantly poke holes in his already-failing front of "i will show someone the wonders of the universe so i can ignore what is wrong with me". what she does is stand up and fight him when he tries to go off on his own. what she does is put aside her well-being in favor of helping someone - just like what she saw him do for the people in the hospital when they first met. tldr, that's the doctor and his doctor and rip martha you would've loved who's gonna save u now by rina sawayama
When it comes to how I learned to draw anything, it's hard to say anything too specific since it's always a culmination of many years of assorted study and practice... but I can try to do my best to explain some of the biggest things that helped me learn, some tips I keep in mind, and maybe at least some places to start/delve further.
(just a little disclaimer it's not like my drawings here are going to be 100% medically accurate.. they're just to illustrate concepts!)
The main thing about learning various physiques is understanding anatomy. Which feels obvious, but I don't mean proportions; these are important, but perhaps more important is understanding the skeleton and how it moves and learning where muscles connect to bones and where fat grows on the body. When you understand how these function on a more mechanical level, depicting form and movement in a way that feels natural comes in tow.
For instance, understanding things like the pronation and supination of the radius and ulna, as well as the fact that muscles can ONLY contract or relax, will help you understand a bit better which muscles will be flexed and which will not while someone moves. It's inherent to the positioning based on the structural makeup of the body... It's not like you NEED to memorize all the muscles and bones, of course, but understanding and gaining at least a passive familiarity with the concepts really helps.
In tandem with this concept is the way parts of the body flow into eachother. Muscles ALWAYS come in groups because they can only contract. Whatever muscle is there to lift something, there is a muscle on the other side to pull that bone back down. What this results in is a series of straight edges next to curves, which gives us a lot of really lovely "s curves" and dents and folds and so on and so forth just naturally occurring.
I would suggest at least learning the "bony landmarks", which are bones (usually) visible on the surface of the body. things like the iliac crest, the great trochanter, the 7th vertabrae, the acromion process... These can be used to help you understand the parts of the body as angles and relationships, rather than trying to remember lengths and sizes, which vary immensely... (since you asked about steve, he can be our model... also study these on your own don't just take my word for it haha, these are the ones I personally keep in mind)
I've done the same thing with body hair... learning where it grows and in which directions... It helps me make up variations without needing reference, because I have a set of rules I can follow.
The biggest thing that helped me understand all this on a much deeper level was my ecorche course. I sculpted this guy. We started by sculpting the entire skeleton to understand the bones, and then we added muscles on top. Not every single muscle, of course, but the "artistic muscles" AKA the ones which directly affect the surface of the body. Doing this let us see where muscles connect, because we would make a shape, put it on the bone where it actually goes, and then you get to see how other muscles overlap that.
This helped me, perhaps, more than anything else. But I also didn't just start with this course, I had been drawing for years before I even took it. I had been in school for years before I took it. Not that I think it wouldn't be helpful to someone just starting out, but I do think that the more you know going in, the better an in-depth course like this will help you and stick with you. Classes are also expensive, though so I'm not really like... recommending you pay potentially thousands of dollars to take one... But it did help me a lot, personally.
I also, of course, have done many figure, gesture, and master studies...
These just help you quickly gain a stronger understanding of generalized anatomy, and gives you real life examples of and practice with of how people move and balance.
What all this does when combined, is gives me a very solid ability to depict movement and form in a way that feels relatively natural from my subconscious without the need for reference.
The rest of how I've learned to draw his physique is honestly mostly just stylization. I understand the body, and this is how I am depicting it for his level of musculature.
And as I move into depicting him in other ways, either moving in comics or in animation, realistically rendered, or extra stylized, these concepts inform every step of that process for me! When he keeps the same/similar relationships between parts, he gets to still look like himself.
It ALSO really helps when putting clothes on, because the way cloth falls and bunches and lifts is all directly related to the form it is on... So the more you understand that form, the more you can depict clothing and movement in a way that feels natural.
This is all, of course, true when I draw anyone, you asked about Steve so I'm trying to mostly show with him! But because I'm just drawing from raw information of general anatomy rather than trying to study one body type at a time, it allows a lot more "give," I think!
Like, here's most of the cast from TTA so far... actually, they're not as varied as I thought they were nevermind LMAO ignore this part
But, it also makes monster and alien design much easier! It's a lot easier to come up with non-human anatomy when I understand human anatomy, because I can manipulate the knowledge I have...
There is infinite more to study in the world of anatomy... The complexity of the human body goes extremely deep. For our purposes as artists, we need only depict a fraction of it, but more information rarely hurts the process.
I'm sure there's something in here that's wrong on a technical level, I'm mostly going off of memory. But that's kind of my point - I understand enough generally and conceptually that when I am missing something and need to find reference for it, I understand what I'm looking at. It's much easier than trying to learn AND draw at the same time.
I hope even one thing in here helped you! Sorry it's so long.
familiarity, the lack thereof, and the only way it could have ended.
the thing is, ultrakill is a very diegetic game. near everything, from the style meter to the bottomless arsenal to the shitass graphics themselves, are explained in some way by some in-universe fact.
so, what with violence and the implication that V1 was designed to counter earthmovers
what with 7-4 and the fact that it is a culmination of this implication
i wonder. when V1 looked up at that earthmover, did it know, with whatever passes for instinct in a machine, exactly what to do? and if it did, then, how is this conveyed to the player?
diegetic as the game is, how does it engineer a situation in which the player, themselves, knows exactly what they have to do?
the biggest factor, i think, is the fact that the earthmover's health bar appears the moment you lay eyes (or camera, or whatever) on it, and it does not leave until you have finally killed this colossus.
but this factor is much more subtle than it appears at first glance. yes, big honkin' boss healthbar on screen for the entire level, what more to it. there's a good deal more, it turns out.
first off- this is the shortest leadup by far to any bossfight in the game. you slide through a single vent, and you are greeted with benjamin right out in the open. even P-1, devoid of any other hazards as it is, gives you a long trek down the spinal staircase before you reach the flesh prison. 7-4 has none of it. you enter the level, you enter the stage, and there you have it. you know exactly what you are up against right from the outset, and it's not quite a feeling of familiarity but it tells you exactly what you have to do. which is the point of this all, isn't it?
7-4 is also... not a bossfight! it is a full level! it is a full level framed as a bossfight. the health bar frames this full complete level as a bossfight.
and on one hand, this is not new news. on the other hand, i think this is the crux of it. the thing is, most bossfights are near-to-entirely new. you do not know how the boss acts. you do not know their attack patterns. you do not know their capabilities. you are learning something new. levels, though, you have done a thousand times over and so the player knows how they need to play through this bossfight in a way that is not quite present with any other boss in the game.
the content of the level is new, of course, because that's how it goes. but you know the motions. you have done this for two acts prior, you know the motions. you know exactly what to do.
also! this level does not exist in a vacuum. what i am saying is this: the rest of violence layer shifts its storytelling and its tone and even its graphics. it is something completely new in contrast to the rest of the game. 7-4, though, returns to environments and graphics more akin to what you have experienced before, bringing you back to familiarity and again knowing what to do here in a way the rest of violence hasn't let the player experience.
one more thing about this level: it plays directly into expectations. which is something that the rest of the game actually does not tend to do.
the game, at base, is just not a typical FPS. it gives you movement like a roguelite or a platformer, it takes guns you expect to know the mechanics of and goes utterly wild with how far the archetype can be changed.
in a smaller scope, here is a comparison of the earthmover and the corpse of king minos as two separate colossal bosses foreshadowed in similar ways. and i mean, minos's bossfight isn't unprecedented in other works. but i think the thing that matters here is that you are not, in fact, the underdog as is the case with so many other bosses of its ilk. riven of many voices, destiny 2, similar bossfight similar scale. you are hiding from her you are a fireteam of many you are triumphing over a dragon larger than life. project gestalt, madness project nexus, you are pulling out every stop you can to take down something so far over your head (both literally and metaphorically). corpse of king minos- V1 looks up, stands its ground, and parries his god damn fist.
and the thing is, the earthmover plays into a different expectation, but it's playing into an expectation nonetheless. you look at this thing and you climb it and you dismantle it from within, like you have done in many games prior. you know what your goal is from the moment you see that healthbar and you hook onto the conspicuously placed hookpoints that tell you- you will climb this machine; you will fight your way up to whatever its core is and you will kill it. you play through the entire level with this expectation and you get exactly this expectation. you destroy its core and it begins a countdown, and so very many games have countdowns before the collapse of whatever level you have just beaten, and you know exactly what you have to do.
i don't know. i love diegetic storytelling. i love this level.
it's just familiarity, i think. this level runs off familiarity. it gives you, the player, things and tropes and designs you are familiar with. it signals to you that you should know what to do, and it lets you do exactly what you expect to do.
if i were any more cheesy i could absolutely end this by restating something about the only way it could've ended, but uh. i am not that cheesy. this time.
aw crud now i don't know how to end this oh well goodbye then
Shuggy from Mihawks perspective must be so funny because he knows both of these idiots. I choose to believe he’s actually more perplexed when Buggy tells him (drunk, way too drunk. overly emotional.) that he has feelings for Shanks than it would be the other way around.
Usually people are flabbergasted when they realize Shanks is in love with Buggy of all people, but Mihawk just looks at the clown sobbing and his head lying in a puddle of his own tears on the floor and tries to reconcile the image Buggy has of Shanks “brilliant, shining, like the sun, the one I would have followed till the end, the one I looked at and realized I could never compare or be worthy off” with the mental image Mihawk has of Shanks.
“Powerful emperor not to be underestimated. And yet the last time I crossed paths with him he was nursing a hangover after a night of drunken hedonism and awoke to me tapping my sword against his boot with a confused grunt, like an inebriated hog, before yawning and scratching his privates shamelessly with his remaining hand before he even greeted me."
Why's the drama between Shuggy and Cross Guild quite literally the lesbian teenage experience in high school? Because I swear to god I think I've seen this film before (in my own life. Hey). Mihawk is so,, Tired,, The thing is Buggy sees Shanks like that because he won't stop comparing himself to the things people around him say about Shanks. And he knows Shanks is a fucking loser but the jealousy and the love he has for him still remains. Mihawk is more brutal with his opinion on Shanks. Like yeah, talented pirate, but really? Him? Buggy? C'mon. Even you deserve better than somebody who dresses in pants that look like my grandma's curtains.
thinking about Bodkin again bc I mean,,, ALL THE SYMBOLISM OHHHHHGH. i NEED some tumblr film analysis hobbyists to watch this show and tell me all the themes n such
i tried for a well thought out post. instead you get this mess that i’m begging you not to twist:
the outraged cries of “cliques” are people being actual friends with each other. the people complaining about certain blogs or creators being on pedestals are usually the same people putting them there. i’m not one to belittle feelings - i understand where the upset is coming from. i even understand my place in it! but at the end of the day, we’re working ourselves up over what? notes? followers? hits on a fic? things based on luck and timing??
i can only speak for myself, but i work a full time job and i’m hard scheduled 45 hours a week. all of my free time goes towards fic writing, because that’s For Me and that’s what’s important for my mental health, and even then, i am usually too exhausted to do that. i would love to read fic and interact more! my to-read list is a mile long! it is just genuinely hard for me to find the time. i prioritize my friends because they are my friends — real, actual people i know beyond tumblr mutualship, who i talk to about more than just fic writing — and even then i am late getting around to it. i’m not saying this as a “woe is me, my life is hard” moment, but moreso trying to offer a perspective that is not even being thought of. and i get it, no one wants to hear it, because you’re frustrated, and being vocal about frustration feels nice (i know, bc here i am)!!
someone is going to come for my throat for making this post as a “big author” and “part of the clique we’re all vagueing” and maybe it’s juuuuust me but like. if you’re that unhappy, log off. if seeing a friend group you’re not part of interacting makes you unhappy, log off. if seeing the engagement other people get on their posts or fic or art makes you unhappy, log off. you cannot force people to interact with you or your creative work, and aggressively posting about it when they don’t is not inviting them to. i am begging you to stop having expectations of people you do not know, because at the end of the day, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment.