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Gouache, colour edited digitally :)

#art #lovely coloring!

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The specific...register? Mode? that Venture Bros is going for intrigues me. I incorrectly named it a "pastiche" before - turns out, I had the wrong idea of what the word meant, oops! It's very much a spoof, but it covers a fairly nebulous spectrum of Spoofable Material and I think that itself is very interesting... It sort of encompasses the superhero genre as well as old action cartoons and comics, plus Brock himself is kind of a nod to less child-friendly hypermasculine action (anti)heroes - which stuff do all these things have in common?

Parody of something can be done from various angles; superhero deconstructions (and reconstructions) have been done all sorts of ways (What If Superman But Bad can branch out into lots of fun rabbit holes - worth noting that VB lacks several of the standard superhero archetpes), and the manifold chauvinism either baked or tossed into many an adventure serial is ripe for lampooning. But the show neither veers deep into deconstruction nor sacrifices a general sense of continuity and characterization for the sake of over-the-top grim humor (generally); it goes into fun hijinks with the larger than life hero/villain dynamics and aesthetics, but it feels like it's digging into something I can't quite see yet

#vi mumbles

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I just remembered an interesting exchange I've been privy to once in a Discord channel, regarding a black character in a comic written by a white author who didn't "sound" black, and I've also remembered a different conversation elsewhere about white webcomic writers who end up making their black characters adopt typically "white" speech patterns out of apprehension about both employing a speech pattern that might be seen as stereotypical or othering and employing a dialect they do not have a bone-deep familiarity with. I think both the apprehensions and the criticism of them are pretty understandable - though, of course, I'm not exactly speaking from a neutral position here, if one is even possible -, but I also think they both speak to a certain awkwardness somewhat inherent to the mechanics of fictional portrayal as a thing and, on a deeper level, to the broader issue of cultural knowledge (to some extent, knowledge in general) and what the expectations of it ought to be on the part of people who were not immersed in and shaped by it (especially given that we don't exactly live in a world where there's anything resembling symmetry on terms of cultural understanding)

Writers often are expected, to some extent, to have a sense of curiosity about the world around them and an interest in understanding it, even when they write about nonexistent people and places and events; I believe the idea here is both that a) adding believable details, which is termed "versimilitude", to nonexistent things help make them believable or at least illuminate many interesting things about our own existence by contrast; and b) a writer should know what parts of what they write are invented and which are more or less real/realistic, as opposed to someone who writes things that are not really "invented" but more properly "cobbled together from vague/warped/prejudiced/bigoted understandings of how the world around them is and works"

Now, whiteness is infamously a very elusive yet ubiquitous thing; it's not really correct to say there is no such thing as "white culture" - though, as a white person from Brazil, my notion of what that is might differ in some respects from that of a white US American or a white Frenchperson -, but the fact of the matter is that, by its very nature, whiteness has everything to do with hegemonic power by the very nature of how it functions, so no part of that culture is wholly extricable from this power relation (other cultures aren't really untouched by the material relations of society, but we're specifically talking domination here). An inchoate mishmash of cultures gets tossed into the category of "whiteness" (and "the West" and whatnot), but the thing itself is probably something that would not really exist as such in a world without it being hegemonic (or at least vying for hegemony). When it comes to whiteness, this kind of glib blinkered-ness about its own ubiquity is kind of the point (see also: neoliberalism)

That said, though, what is to be expected (as in hoped for, not as in predicted) of a writer about another culture/subculture and the people in it - especially an individual writer as opposed to the dedicated crew of a TV production or such - is...very arguable. Just saying you feel a writer didn't understand something about an aspect of life you know a lot about doesn't necessarily carry negative judgment about it, but it would be foolish to say that there is no distinction whether said "specialized" subject matter is aerospace engineering or living as a filipine person in the US. And all of that then becomes bananas complicated by the fact that people within a culture are distinct from each other despite marinating in that same broth and trying to understand your own sense of self within a particular culture despite not being able to fully extricate yourself from it is one of the classic nightmarishly frustrating human experiences! The balancing act between seeing someone as an extension of their unfathomable Otherness and not assuming they are too much like you is super hard whether or not you're a writer!

Making up a fictional marginalized individual might not be the moral crucible some authors seem to build it into inside their heads, but it's very much something that can feel more Revealing(TM) than trying to write accurate aerodynamics. Leaving nonwhite people out of your story-world is very, very different from not having a book be set on a faulty airplane because you can't seem to wrap your head around all the gadgetry and physics of air travel no matter how much you try to look things up. And mishandling the portrayal of people whose individual and collective existence is bent and twisted in everyone's eyes by the same system you inhabit is not the same as bungling the workings of a made-up cockpit (without even going into all the endless weird nooks and crannies of what "representation" through fiction entails!)

I often wonder if maybe the defensiveness felt by people writing minorities they don't belong to who then get criticized might be less about wanting to "be a Good Person" and more about the harrowing, continuous realization that your very imagination, maybe even your very sense of self, is shaped and demarcated by this amalgam of cultural norms and notions and power dynamics and warped images and material conditions that are not unique to you. Like realizing you're some sort of cell in a large, viscous, pulsating organism or a link in a large, but not as viscous or pulsating chainmail piece

I dunno, this post has gone on for too long already but I just think this is a sort of dynamic that's both pretty interesting and worth thinking about

#vi mumbles #long post /

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Taylor Swift is honestly just like any other Taylor, but faster

#pffffff

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Expanding on the tags I left on the post I reblogged earlier because the whole "I'm a communist because I want people to have free shit" is like. Such a fundamental misunderstanding of what communism is.

I think it's a topic that also popped up last year when the banana discourse was going on (a.k.a. when global north "communists" were throwing a fit when confronted with the idea that a communist world economy might involve bananas being slightly less available in global north countries because massive amounts of worker exploitation in the global south are currently required to make it possible for bananas to be not only available but commonplace year-round in the global north) and a bunch of people were going "well how do you expect me to support this as a communist, i thought communism was about wanting people to have nice things!"

(Of course I'm simplifying a lot of stuff here but) Communist politics exist primarily in the realm of production. Communism is primarily concerned with the question of who owns the means of production and thus gets to decide what gets made, how much of it gets made, how it gets made, and how it gets allocated and distributed once it's made. And the answer that communism gives to this question is that it's workers who should get to own the means of production and make all these choices, either through the state apparatus, through a decentralized federation of labor syndicates, through workers's self-management, or whatever other medium depending on the specific branch of communism.

Meanwhile, "I want people to have free shit" or "I want people to have nice things" are statements that I think most communists agree with, but these statements themselves are not what communism is, because they are statements made from the angle of consumption, not production.

#communism #labor

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Honestly the whole Tall-Man thing is such an elegant solution to the whole human problem in dnd. So much language like "have some humanity" gets so awkward when there's a group called humans. Having humans instead refer to all humanoids just makes so much sense in this context!

High key gonna bring this up to my dnd groups and am gonna hard code it in if/when I make my own system.

#dungeon meshi

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flashy armless friends

#homestuck #homestar runner #fanart #cuteness #d'awww

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I am not Jokerfied but Riddlerfied, which is when, instead of enacting individual, shocking displays of violence - in ways that are not particularly conducive to successful class struggle, I believe - I instead become haunted, overwhelmed and depressed by endless questions

#vi mumbles

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still thinking about "decolonising" missionary work.

the way you decolonise missionary work is by not doing missionary work

the way you decolonise missionaries is like this:

#imperialism #blood /

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suddenly orca twins

#art #monsters #others' characters #cool!

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Some stray observations thus far about Venture Bros:

Dr Opheus rules

There's a fair share of humor there that wavers between "grim" and "edgy in that very 2000s Adult Animation way" but it's mostly relatively restrained so it doesn't turn me off nearly as much as some other stuff might. I do feel sometimes like they just use people saying slurs as a quasi-punchline, which I do find pretty distasteful

I keep mistaking Brock's name for Hank's. I feel like Hank just looks like A Brock

The way the show pastiches a lot of adventure/superhero stuff is...intriguing. It's not always a straight up parody - I dunno exactly how I'd describe the distinction. That said, though I am enjoying myself, this series does feel like a case study of the thin line between "pastiche of racism in media" and "straight up racism"

#vi mumbles

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such beautiful interesting dragon illustrations, going through your blog has made me so happy.

I'd love to see what about a dragon inspired by fern leaves, no pressure though if you are working on other suggestions.

#102 - 龍頭 (lóngtóu / dragon head) - A pretty sight for over 360 million years! 🌿☘️🌱

#art #dragons #cuteness

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Final design and turn around for my swamp witch character design. Wanted to do a turn around of a more stylized character.

#art #monsters #others' characters #a cute!

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Nobody in this game has any chill

#ace attorney

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Dio Brando is such a world class hater it's insane. Kid hated his adoptive brother so much he decided to make it his whole family tree's problem. Haunted an entire gene pool for over a century just cause his punk brother got in the way of his inheritence. It took a temporal armageddon and a full world reboot just to scrub away the consequences of his fuckin around and he still shows up as a cowboy weredinosaur to ruin everyone's day. A master class in causing problems on purpose.

#JJBA

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mushi-shi

#mushishi #fanart

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Arbok

#Pokémon #fanart #arbok #WOW that lighting RULES #snakes /