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MICAO (Mika Hirasa)

Lion parents and cubs

ライオンの親子

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I loved painting this one. It was truly a delight to create and I hope that shows 💚

Full process video over on my Patreon!

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"a sith wanting an acolyte is an abusive power dynamic"

have you considered that it's hot? look at them

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The female gaze centers emotional sensuality as much as it admires objects of physical desire. Occasional vulnerability creases Qimir's face: longing, tenderness, compassion, frustration, concern. In the finale...he indeed moves to console Osha after Sol's death. Qimir witnessing Osha's descent enhances their bond. Both of them believed in the Jedi and endured betrayal. She crosses a line most consider irredeemable, and he's neither gleeful nor condescending toward her visceral agony. He just understands. Most pivotal of all, it's Osha who initiates their mentor-apprentice relationship. The woman once intent on killing him extends her hand, and they bargain like equals.

--Kelcie Mattson - Qimir and Osha's Dynamic Is What We've Been Waiting For in Star Wars (Collider)

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Your anger betrays your thoughts.

THE ACOLYTE | 1.06: TEACH/CORRUPT

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MANNY JACINTO, about playing the role of Qimir / The Stranger in The Acolyte (source)

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george lucas couldn’t do it

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cover for INVERTED DAWN. 44page comic by SIMON HANSELMANN and HTML FLOWERS. limited to 50 copies. OUT OF PRINT.

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oh man I'm re-reading Fire and Hemlock for the first time in a long time, possibly the first time in my adult life, and like, this book defies so many categories. It's fantasy, but the magic is so subtle until right near the end. It's a book about childhood, but it's not exactly a children's book, and it's nothing like our modern category of "YA." The "No Where/Now Here" vases aren't hugely important to the plot, but they embody everything that this book is thematically. And once I'm done I'm going to have a full essay on the gender of it all, because I'm not saying Polly or Tom are trans, but they both do a lot of transing; the hiding in plain sight, the saying by not saying, the tension between perception and being perceived... there's so much going on here. I always struggled with this one and never really "liked" it as much as I liked Derkholm or Chrestomanci, but so much of it has stuck with me in ways that I keep going back to and being like "oh, I get it now!" which is exactly what Diana intended when she wrote it.

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Peter Ferguson (Canadian, 1968) - The Grotto at St. Michel (n.d.)

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Fire and Hemlock!! Aka the one with like a gazillion recommendations for other books 😂

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the more i sit and think about it, fire and hemlock wasn’t the only tam lin retelling that diana wrote.  howl’s moving castle is another - not as explicit a retelling as fire and hemlock, but a remarkably faithful adaptation of tam lin in its own right!!

there are references to the child ballad scattered all throughout howl’s moving castle:  howl is not in possession of his own heart; he can’t call his soul his own, because he is under the thrall of the witch of the waste, this story’s stand-in for the faerie queen. sophie, just like janet, leaves her father’s house and literally BREAKS INTO HOWL’S CASTLE just as janet plunges recklessly into carterhaugh.  tam lin has a running symbol of picking the roses red and green; sophie wants a nice house with lots of flowers and ends up with a sprawling meadow garden and a flower shop.  janet returns to carterhaugh to pick the poison rose - sophie creates her own extra-toxic daffodils and the infamous weed-killer.  

sophie remarks that there are such a lot of different aspects to howl that you never know what to make of him - tam lin changes in janet’s arms, from adder to lion to wild swan.  the analgram of a man that the fire demon miss angorian makes with parts of suliman and prince justin is this story’s version of the year-king, a straw-man that she will use and then sacrifice to build up her own power just as laurel planned to sacrifice tom in fire and hemlock.  sophie is the one to return to howl his heart and to initiate his transformation back into a human man - she even holds a flaming calcifer in her palm just as janet holds the burning seed while tam lin undergoes his own transformation.  and sophie holds howl in her arms as he changes - his eyes go from glassy to a normal green.

and, in keeping with diana’s views of possession and attachment from fire and hemlock, sophie must let howl go the same way polly must give up tom: beliving that howl is in love with miss angorian, sophie leaves the castle to save miss angorian from the witch.  in this version, sophie rushes off not with the intention of rescuing howl - though she does, in more ways than one! - she goes to the waste to save whom she believes is howl’s true love!  which is just.  it’s SO MUCH the same as polly letting tom go, knowing that the only way to save him is to lose him.  and howl tried to bind sophie to him the same way tom tried to use polly, with attachment and clinging jealousy - howl even remarked that he’d thought that sophie’s jealousy of miss angorian would provoke sophie into bullying miss angorian away from him.

it’s just SO fascinating to see how diana plays with her own themes from fire and hemlock, reusing the same elements but shifting everything slightly to the left to create a completely new kind of story, with a totally different emotion and feeling to it.  fire and hemlock is a story told from the depths of despair: at the bottom of nowhere, as polly says, while howl’s moving castle is told with such utter joy in the act of creation and chaos.  they’re nothing alike - but they are so similar!!

i’ve always sort of felt that fire and hemlock and howl’s moving castle are sort of bookends to each other - they both tell the same kind of story, from opposite ends of the spectrum of joy and grief, and it’s so interesting to see the differences between them.  it’s like looking through a kalediscope.  

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Mon oncle ~ 1958

Jacques Tati

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3 images réalisées pour le magazine allemand Mobil. Dessins réalisés à partir des premiers chapitres d’un roman, comme un teaser. Le roman mêle différentes époques de l’Allemagne, la seconde guerre, la séparation Est/Ouest et l’Allemagne contemporaine.

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THE MARVELOUS MRS. MAISEL (2017–2023)

Mike! Mike! Mike! Mike! Mike! Mike! Mike! Mike! Mike! Oh, my God! What?! What, Susie? What the ever-loving what?

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inktober days 9-16