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Have you seen Dungeon Meshi/Delicious in Dungeon? I think you would like the monster design!

I do like the creature design but (and I realize this makes me sound really dumb) I get kind of sad watching stuff primarily themed around killing animals

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worst doctor who creature design?

c'rizz because it's really lame to have an alien main character in an audio only series just look like some dude. he could look like anything. the visuals of audio are not constrained by budget or practicality. why is he just a guy. they need to fix this.

#i have been trying to redesign him #but its actually pretty difficult to strike that balance of alien vs casual enough to look like he talks with a normal man voice #at least not without just making the design look like a scalie which isnt what I'm really going for

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which plays are the vortisaurs in?? your designs are gorgeousss

They occur a few times throughout the eighth doctor's run but the main appearances are Storm Warning (his first episode) and No More Lies.

Though because the fx team reuses a pterosaur model to portray birds on gallifrey I personally like to think they show up in the tv show too

#citizen kane pterodactyl moment #they're largely recurring cameo appearances outside of that unless I'm forgetting something #and thank you!

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the vortisaurs from the dr who audio plays

#shockingly the big spacetime pterodactyls are some of my faves #big finish #eighth doctor #doctor who #all the strange strange creatures

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heron puppet wip 3

#the boy and the heron #ghibli #not especially articulate but it's more of a walking puppet than anything #the eyes do move but not in a cool way just in a practical one #space inside is too small for moving eyes

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Hey I love your Heron puppet it’s so cool!! I’m curious: what materials you are using to make it?

it's mostly foam and foam clay. the base is just cardboard and masking tape

#probably would have been better to use purely foam and masking tape for the base but whatever #my most toxic trait is using actual clay for details and then having to sand it away because its too heavy

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What episode is that twisty face thing from?

Hide (2013). Nice little haunted house pastiche

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Wow sorry you can't enjoy a writer's work without people being fucking freaks in your inbox (i saw one post out of contest on my dash and went to read them lol)

And also hello I too love Surface and its cancelation is probably in the top 10 most distressing moments of my childhood. I feel the need to rewatch it now. Your Nim art is incredible and brings me so much joy

My goal is to singlehandedly revive the surface (2005) fandom by 2025

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Instead of discourse about showrunners and lesbians and whatever, I'm gonna bring a different type of discourse...whats ur fav and least Dr Whomst monsters. Hard mode: only the practical ones.

ok so I do like all the obvious ones, I like the angels, I like the vashta nerada, I like the not-things, I like the eternals. Here's a few deeper cuts (focusing on the tv show specifically):

they peaked with these maggots. they rock. pretty sure they're made with taxidermy? really great puppetry. I really like this thing:

what a cool design for this kind of forgotten midseason episode.

this is such a fun design for a langolier-type monster. I love how their crest and tail gives them the silhouette of a grim reaper

The 60s cybermen rock. I feel like they're hesitant to use them often in the modern show because they do look very 1960s but I think there's something really uncomfortable and evocative about the cloth faces that's lost when they're cool metallic robots. The mix between looking like an old diving suit and the implication of there being a chopped up person inside is gnarly and I love it. Simple, creepy, iconic design.

My favorite design in the show is probably this:

The 456 from the spinoff series torchwood. They didn't need the puppet to emote or move a ton since it spends the entire season in a little tank obscured in mist, so they just went crazy with the design and made it really bizarre looking. Extremely top tier alien. Anyways, negative. I really don't like this satan. the satan kind of sucks. the impossible planet is great atmospheric sci fi horror; every image of build up in it is haunting and leagues ahead of the climactic scene where he meets the satan. It singlehandedly kind of kills the vibe.

Personally I would have just kept the actual appearance off screen, just have it be eyes in the dark or something. Apparently they also tossed around the idea that it would end up being a normal little girl who was chained up in the cave and I think that would have visually fit the rest of the episode better.

I'm really not big on the modern design for the sea devils (the green one on the right). I think the classic ones clearly took a lot of direct influence from real animals and generally is a pretty thoughtfully realized design, the modern ones seem like they were first and foremost using the classic ones for reference and didn't quite capture the nuance of the design. Sad, as I would really like to see design for these guys with modern puppetry.

I think this is actually a pretty contentious opinion but the work of the specific studio who headed this redesign generally wasn't my favorite. Apparently there was some sort of major, semi public falling out between the fx studio that had been working on the show since 2005 and the people who started running the show in 2018, and they were briefly replaced with a much less experienced studio. No hate to them of course (I think this was actually their first job like, ever, and a lot of the work was done in crunch time?) but the difference did stand out to me:

#creature design ramble. this is more on brand for this blog

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#I have sketches for all of these already #ive lost followers and aim to gain better ones now

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girl steven moffat isnt gonna fuck you

bro but i thought he fetishized lesbians

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If you want my two cents, which you probably don't to be honest -- steven moffat HAS made some writing choices that I would consider somewhat sexist or racist or whatever else, in the sense that they may play into stereotypes or whatever, but like....so have so so many writers, many of whom get wayyyyy less shit than him. And he IS a good writer!! His seasons of doctor who are bomb! They have such a mystical feeling to them that most of the other seasons didn't have. He's a damn good writer and he's made lots of good writing choices. He's just had a few shitty ones, like all writers, and they've gotten majorly blown out of proportion. We can accept he isn't perfect (which you never claimed he was! but people seem to think that's what you're saying) and still appreciate his talents. Take the good with the bad, right? He's a person who has inevitably fucked up, like everyone else. We can call him out on that and then MOVE ON (which is the key part). Still definitely a fan of his work.

Anyway. Have a good day op, lol. Sorry you had an opinion on tumblr dot com and people thought it was an invitation to like dogpile you.

Exactly, yeah. I generally don't think arguing over whether a writer has ever made anything problematic is a particularly useful way to come at this sort of conversation (as it's inevitably true of any artist). Rather, I think it's worth pointing out when a writer's reputation is extremely disproportional to the actual content in question or when things are actively being misattributed in criticism of them

#i think it's slightly crazy people are in my inbox angry about my “defense” #when I'm just pointing out that a lot of this is very old discourse that didn't have a lot of basis in anything that actually happened

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Even if a creator is a bad person it's still okay to like their work. People need to mind their own business.

Honestly it's not really that sort of situation. I'll actively defend Steven Moffat here.

There was a huge hate movement for him back in the early 2010s - which, in retrospect, formed largely because he was running 2 of the superwholock shows at once, one of which went through extremely long hiatuses* and the other of which was functionally an adaptation of an already well regarded show**, making him subject to a sort of double ire in the eyes of a lot of fandom people. Notably, his co-showrunner, Mark Gatiss, is rarely mentioned and much of his work is still attributed to Moffat (and yes, this includes that Hbomberguy video. Several of "Steven Moffat's bad writing choices" were not actually written by him, they were Gatiss.)

People caricatured the dude into a sort of malicious, arrogant figure who hated women and was deliberately mismanaging these shows to spite fans, to the point where people who never watched them believe this via cultural osmosis. It became very common to take quotes from him out of context to make them look bad***, to cite him as an example of a showrunner who hated his fans, someone who sabotaged his own work just to get at said fans, someone who was too arrogant to take criticism, despite all of this being basically a collective "headcanon" formed on tumblr. Some if it got especially terrible, like lying about sexual assault (I don't mean people accused him of sexual assault and I think they're making it up, I mean people would say things like "many of his actresses have accused him of sexual assault on set" when no such accusations exist in the first place. This gets passed around en masse and is, in my opinion, absolutely rancid.)

On top of that a ton of the criticism directed at the shows themselves is, personally, just terrible media criticism. So much of it came from assuming a very hostile intent from the writer and just refusing to engage with the text at all past that.

Like some really common threads you see with critique of this writer's work, especially in regards to Doctor Who since that's the one I'm most familiar with:

A general belief that his lead characters were meant to be ever perfect self inserts, and so therefore when they act shitty or arrogant or flawed in any way, that's both reflective of the author and meant to be viewed as positive or aspirational.

An overarching thesis that his characters are "too important" in the narrative due to the writer's arrogance and self obsession

A lot of focus on the writer personally "attacking" the fans or making choices primarily out of spite.

A tendency to treat the show being different to what it's adapting as inherently bad and hostile towards the original

Just generally very little consideration of the themes, intent, etc.

This one's a little more nebulous and doesn't apply to all critique but a lot of it, especially recently, is clearly by people who haven't seen the show in like 10 years and their opinion is largely formed secondhand through like, "discourse nostalgia". Which. you know. bad.

I think these are just weird and nonsensical ways to engage with a work of fiction. I also think it's really sad to see the show boiled down to this because that era of who is, in my opinion, very thematically rich and unique among similar shows, and I hate that it's often dismissed in such a paltry way.

This isn't to say people aren't allowed to critique Steven Moffat or anything, but the context in which he basically became The Devil™ to a large portion of fandom and is still remembered in a poor light is very tied to this perfect storm of fan culture and I just don't agree with a ton of it.

* I'm sure most people have seen the way long running shows and hiatuses will cause people to fall out with a show, with some former fans turning around and joining a sort of "anti fandom" for it while it's still airing. That happened with both these shows. ** Doctor Who will change it's entire writing staff, crew, and cast every few years, and with that comes a change in style, tone, theme - the old show basically ends and is replaced by a new show under the same title. As Steven Moffat's era was the first of these handovers for the majority of audiences, you can imagine this wasn't a well loved move for many fans. *** I know for a fact most people have not sought out the sources for a lot of these quotes to check that they read the same in context because 1) most of them were deleted years ago and are very difficult to find now and 2) many of them do actually make sense in the context of their respective interviews

#and yeah i think the hbomberguy video is kind of bad #I can pull up examples but a lot of what he's saying is very rooted in this sort of critique #maybe most egregiously he sometimes just explains something very poorly or outright incorrectly to make it seem worse or more nonsensical #ex. saying a scene in doctor who 'steals a huge chunk of the plot' when it's less than 30 seconds long #saying two characters randomly start hanging out again while not mentioning the episode entirely dedicated to this #or the way her decision to keep hanging out with him is the emotional turning point of the entire season #etc etc etc.

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lesbians arent a monolith cmon now. pretty ridiculous to act like just because you specifically disagree, prev anon is speaking over lesbians or whatever. they could *be* a lesbian for all you know

That's not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying it's weird on a individual level to say I like a writer's work on my personal blog and immediately receive an ask (several asks) implying some level of homophobia on my part and/or trying to force me to engage with a nebulous accusation that the work is fetishizing a group I'm a part of.

#also just really hate 'i didn't see the work in question but it's bad and you should also find it bad or else you're complicit' #really poor and hostile way to look at fiction #like it's a tv show not a tumblr callout

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moffat's weird fetish for lesbians and general misogyny turns me off everything he does. he creeps me out. that said, he does make very good one or two episode stories, like empty child. but every time he gets to write a story that goes longer than four episodes, like some of his work outside dw, hyde comes to mind, it turns into a poorly written convoluted mess with the most insultingly written women and ridiculous plot revelations. i had to ditch 11th era who bc it got intolerable and it turned me off the show entirely till 13. but he could be the best writer of all time, and i'd still think he's a lesbian obsessed weirdo who can't write a realistic woman if he had a gun to his head.

weird ask to send a gay woman talking about how they like his work, especially since you say you didn't watch the show I was referring to...?

But yeah I, again, strongly disagree, I think his character work is compelling and his plotting is very layered and thematically rich, and I don't think the one lesbian lead in that era of doctor who is fetishized at all.

#it's kind of hard to respond thoughtfully to this because it isn't really applicable to the show i'm talking about #anyways i don't want to ramble about stuff I like on main

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TBF Steven Moffat still sucks as showrunner, but he makes great episodes when RTD is handling the big picture and character development

strongly disagree, my favorite showrunner by a significant margin

#(sorry deleted the post that this ask was in reference to) #but yeah I personally find his character work and storytelling very good

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heron puppet update

#puppets #the boy and the heron