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fairykery · 1 year

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If not canon, then why flashy?

Eyesex and a smile?

The guy that hates physical contact is smiling as kohaku hugged him? Not only that but he also looked into her eyes tenderly? LIKE? The other girl going "it wasn't that type of hug" was just referring to the fact that they aren't gf and bf because technically THEY AREN'T and the one girl still assumed that they were. So when they got touch- feely and the girl covered her eyes thinking they were a couple(thanks to the kiss situation) the other girl calmed her down saying they weren't really a couple sharing a hug; but two people that care about each other hugging. While Senku did not return the hug because he is never/and has never been forward about that type of situation, Kohaku is the first he's smiles at, lets hug, and has had people wonder the state of their relationship when being hugged by. She is also the only girl he is close with, that has been hinted at having feelings for him.

The KISS

Sorry, No I get it. It was too soon for this to be a romantic moment. I get it. It was for the sake of comic relief. But if you pay attention. The context of the scene didn't necessarily have to be written romantically, NOT EVEN for the sake of the plot. Cause them kissing had nothing to do with the situation; BUT the mangaka STILL specifically chose to go THAT route with the scene. He, HIMSELF, chose to use a romantic excuse(even if a comical one) as a plot device to move the story forward. And on top of that made them kiss(even if they were both uncomfortable by it still at this point in the manga). With that, making Kohaku the girl he's closest to who he has had the most physical contact with and even shared a kiss with(even if it was just a chin kiss and they both were practically uncomfortable for being forced to do.). No but seriously, the mangaka using SenHaku as a plot device to move the story forward WHEN it is NOT needed should provide some insight of what he thinks of the pairing. Which is that: "it is fun to write about" and "he likes to write about it".

NO TIME?

I like how he reponds with something that implies. "Maybe i'll blush later....not rn we gotta find a way out of here". Can we also take a moment to realize the mangaka/writter interrupted this moment before Senku could respond to the: "and the way i see it that is so very-" from kohaku? Subtle behavior on his part. Is there something on Senku's mind he doesn't want fans to know for the sake of avoiding ship wars? I wouldn't be surprised if this was what was stopping him from making the ship more explicit. Cause shippers get kind of crazy with the wars and MOST mangakas KNOW this and dont want that to affect the sales.

BRIDE STYLE?

He specifically chose one of the most romantic tropes to draw them In? Sorry no. This has nothing to do with their dynamic; but he still drew them like this? In THIS pose? Mangaka definitely shipped them.

Nah; but like never have i ever seen him so touchy feeling with anyone?

idk idk they remain sus. Especially with all of his guy friends hoping him to experince romantic love.

SenHaku also kinda parallel His adoptive dad and his lover(maybe not in the sense of dynamic; but in color aesthetic and how they are portrayed in the covers)

[also look at them being bride style like the senhaku cover lol]

I don't know why people say this ship is impossible because Senku says he isn't interested in romance. Like he also hinted at the fact that he has sex drive, just not a crazy active one where he would attack a female for, especially one stronger than him.

And if you ACTUALLY pay attention every time that topic of romance comes up is not that he COMPLETELY dismisses it. It is more because he does not prioritize it or care to look for it, especially considering that he is so goal-driven. At the same time, it is already revealed that not everything he says(especially when it comes to relationships/bonds)does he mean. He only, like i said, likes to remain goal-oriented and doesn't want anything to distract him.

He also acted pretty detached towards his own father and rejected his overly affections of love. So much so, that Byakuya tried to adapt to his own love language of science. But at the end of the day,it is not that Senku is 100% against those concepts(of romanticized bonds) it is just that he finds them to be waste of time. But despite that, he is still human. He still feels despite how much he doesn't allow himself to do so:

And Riri herself pointed how Senku only acts tough and detached when it comes to relationships/bonds(when talking about his care for the village) but a part of him does care. This is because she is the only one whose seen him cry at his father grave, despite how detached he acted about his father dying at the beginning. But again, he remembered that he had a goal, and wiped his tears; because for him "there's no time for that". It's all about prioritizing his goals, especially when about science.

And there's ALOT of emphasis on THAT.

Even so, so many characters in shounen have ended up marrying/having feelings despite saying/or there being no indicator that they are interested in romance. It is a common trope of it. So even if it were because Senku is not into romance it wouldn't sink the ship. I mean look at Sasuke(another goal-oritented character) said that romance had no place in his revolution; but at the end of the day married sakura and even gave her a ring to ward off insects

[note: is important to note that sasuke was not rejecting sakura here. More like trying to convince kakashi that romance had no place in his revolution. Because he was goal oriented, like Senku(that and the fact that he was still struggling with his darkness). In fact Sakura said that she wanted things to go back to the way they used to be and he assumed that was romance, without anyone saying anything of that sort. And Sakura had already left it clear that she wanted team 7 back; but then sasuke mentioned romance lol]

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Something else worth mentioning is the fact that Senku hates clingy overly-romantic girls or the girls that fall in love too fast with him, as we've seen him cringe or act annoyed with those type of acts. But still, he was able to manage to say something about a type, despite his dismissive behavior. Even tho it was just to brush the conversation off, the fact that he answered his type of girl with "someone that could bring him materials" and then calls Kohaku a lioness, and him as a scientist knows that usually a lioness is one to provide their mates with food from hunting. I don't know. It seemed like a sweet nickname to give her. Especially when in his time period, that type of nickname is considered flirtatious. What is more, is that he initially brought Taiju back because of his usefulness in strength(and the fact he knew he could trust him) & Senku himself noticed the exact same quality in Kohaku.

So someone that could fit his description of his type would definitely be kohaku and seeing that she is the girl who he is the closest, and HAS brought him materials before so i dont see why not. I mean he was already pretty impressed with her first meeting her. Even after having worked with her, he was still impressed by her strength, and doesn't stop talking about it:

There's also people who always dismiss Kohaku's feelings. I mean i think it's already pretty clear

His physical aspect she seems pleased with

And well he already fits the EXACT description of her EXACT type. So it is 100% safe to say that she has feelings for him. It may not be explicitly stated but it was just the right amount of sublte. Similar to Mikasa Ackerman/Touka Kirishima, whose feelings were never explicitly stated; but were always quite obvious. That was the type of subtlety the mangaka was aiming at. And i think there's a reason for that.

Because Senku hates fast paced relationships/love at first sight/mushy girls. Building Kohaku's feelings in a slowburn manner makes Kohaku stand out from all the other girls that have feelings for him/have flirted with him/felt attracted to him. Because, as i said, he doesn't like that kind of stuff. And since he is still sciency I don't think he would ever fall for a romantic type of girl; but rather a useful one that can serve as his partner. The way I see them happening would be by Kohaku being accepting of his anti-romantic nature, and Senku seeing her as worthy Mate that he could reproduce with so that the sciene can live on and keep developing. While he did teach Chrome alot, Chrome also says he wants Senku to live. I think he also meant it in a metaphorical way. Chrome, next to his other male friends kept pushing for or looking for an indicator of him feeling attraction for a girl/or at least want him to understand romantic love so that he doesn't keep downplaying the feelings that they have towards their crushes. Even Gen seemed pretty excited at the thought of him kissing a girl lol. So it's safe to say that the mangaka writing this was him rooting for the same thing for Senku; but not in the way that we exepect.

Again, if he ever did develop a relationsip with kohaku to another level. I dont think he would confess/or admit his physical attraction to her, if he did feel any. I think he would find himself content that he has found a useful girl, that can bring him materials, and doesn't ask much of him(in a romantic light). This would push Senku to allow Kohaku as his partner. I don't think Kohaku would mind it either as long as she knows Senku is willing to reciprocate in terms of just the right amount of romantic gestures/or sexual entanglement(when senku finds the time for her)

Because as he has stated he does not NOT have a sex drive(just not active) nor is he COMPLETELY against chivalry (which is rooted in romance).

So i think if he did develop feelings for Kohaku he will not do much to figure out the why and would instead only try to rationalize it by saying Kohaku is the perfect partner. He would agree to a wedding for the sake of his friends and act like he was peer pressured to doing it, and would probably ONLY compliment Kohaku's looks by saying something like "You know, according to the symmetrical proportions of your face, you'd be considered to be living up to the beauty standards of my time" and Kohaku would be fine with that thanks to the reassurance of her sister about how "he is not the type of guy to be completely against the tradition of bonds/feelings. He just doesn't prioritize them". So kohaku would be fine with that. Especially because she herself has been swayed by his way of living.

As long as she knows that Senku considers her his mate, partner, and important person, I think she'd be okay with that. Especially since Senku is logical enough to understand that he needs to put effort into the relationship with his mate. So he'd do soft gestures for her that will keep her happy in order to maintain their relationship, even if she doesn't ask for it. And that will be enough because by the end of the day that's what most relationships are, Senku just doesn't feel the need to romanticize them, unless it's for the sake of following through with a logical situation. And well him maintaining his relationship with Kohaku would be logical as it would avoid conflict and prevent him from seeking a mate elsewhere. We all know Senku doesn't like to bother with those things. He just goes with the flow of whatever is convenient.

I also think that even though he doesn't like physical contact he'd probably do soft things like touch her hand in reassurance,(he's held her hand), smile at her(as he has done so before), look tenderly at her with pride(has looked and felt proud of her) and lean on her when he is tired(they have leaned on each other metaphorically). Those would be indicators.of him caring for her, but he won't ever stop to think about them, even if his heart rate actually does start to raise he will only rationalize it with talks about "dopamine/serotonin" and Kohaku being his chosen partner; but overall, he'd be most ecstatic about having a partner by his side, and the fact that he cares for such partner. Kohaku won't ask for more and will come to understand that she has what any other girl has(when it comes to romantic relationships), and she SIMPLY has a partner that tends to rationalize everything and dislikes romance; but is willing to do it for the sake of logic.

#senhaku #my post #personal #senku x kohaku #kohaku x senku #senkoha #sasusaku #tagging ssasusaku for the filtering #dr. stone #dr stone

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jengarie · 3 years

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#showyourprocess !

From planning to posting, share your process for making creative content!

To continue supporting content makers, this tag game is meant to show the entire process of making creative content: this can be for any creation.

RULES — When your work is tagged, show the process of its creation from planning to posting, then tag up to 5 people with a specific link to one of their creative works you’d like to see the process of. Use the tag #showyourprocess so we can find yours!

Thank you, @rinielle for tagging me! She chose the piece above (original post), and oh boy this one was a whole ass rollercoaster ride! Unfortunately, I hadn't turned on the timelapse feature for this but I'll try to go through each part of the process as best as I can!

The photos I'm gonna upload are gonna be a mix of screenshots and literal photos of my screen, because I'm taking some of them from my updates to friends, since a lot of the steps got lost in my painting process.

But before that, let me tag some other amazing creators!

@dragonji: this gif art!

@candicewright: this yibo painting!

@wendashanren: this gifset!

@mylastbraincql: this gif!

I haven't been able to keep track of who's been tagged so apologies if you've already done this! Also, no pressure to do it at all if you would rather not! <3

Planning

Sometimes, I get an idea first and find reference photos to go with that idea. But for this one, I sought out a reference photo first, and built an idea on top of it!

After that, I roughly sketch out the base pose. Usually, this looks very messy, but it doesn't really matter as long as I understand which part goes where!

The idea for the background didn't really come until the creation process because I don't think I really planned this to be a full piece.

Creation

Sketching

Honestly, from this point on, it's more of trial and error.

So, I redid the the initial base pose—made it cleaner and a little bit more detailed. See: the added definition in their arm muscles, the rearrangement of Wei Wuxian's legs, and Lan Wangji's hand on Wei Wuxian's back. If you look at the second photo, I also changed the pose a bit midway—I tend to edit as I go sometimes when I change my mind. (For this, I thought, given the Lan arm strength, it would be better to make Lan Wangji look more at ease carrying Wei Wuxian. This gets covered by the robes anyway though, so it didn't matter much in the end.)

I also started adding details to the base! I usually start with the face and then the hair! I usually go for the clothes next, but I dreaded the robes in this piece so I guess that's why I ended up with a basic idea of what I wanted for the background instead LOL I also figured out how I want the final crop to look like, so I blocked out all the other areas with an extra layer!

Okay, onto the part that killed me like ten times: the robes. There are a lot of interactions between their robes here given their pose, and not to mention they also have layers upon layers on each of them! So, to maintain my sanity and to keep track of which part is which, I color coded them into the most colorful sketch I've ever made.

Another reason why I filled in each layer of robe with a solid block of color, is so that all the lines underneath gets covered. Without all of the colors, the actual outline actually looks like the one on the right. What a nightmare!

I also ignored the crop again for this part, because it's always better to draw past your borders, in case you decide to rotate or tilt or whatever your piece later on. I didn't do the feet anymore though, because that I was sure wouldn't show in the final piece anymore.

After that, I did the sketch one more time and then started adding the base colors. (I didn't have a screenshot of just the base colors, and the final CSP file is a nightmare so I copy pasted the layers into a new canvas to show you guys :') )

By the way, I drew their robes flowing this way, because I wanted it to frame the lower arch of the moon behind them for the composition. It was a little frustrating that I couldn't get Lan Wangji's robes a little higher because of Wei Wuxian's legs but I later filled in the empty space with his forehead ribbon anyway, so it all worked out in the end!

Painting

Because apparently, I was a masochist back then, I merged the base colors all into one layer and started adding shadows to the robes. (These days, I add shadows first and then, merge. It's much easier this way.)

And then, I started painting! Again, I did the face first and then the hair, before finally the robes. This was my first time painting side profiles and honestly it was quite a pain to figure out LOL but !!! I think I did a good job and I'm proud of how it turned out. I again used reference photos for this one but I can't link any because they were just several random Pinterest photos that I didn't save.

Another thing to note is that I use the mesh transform tool a lot, especially on faces. That's largely why Lan Wangji's face looks so different in the latter two!

And then I went with the robes. Somewhere along the way, I realized I didn't like how I planned to do Lan Wangji's sleeves and the flowy part of Wei Wuxian's robes and I... decided, with much dread, to do them over. So I sketched on top of the painted layers and redid the robes, again.

It was at this point that I decided to take a break from this piece because it was honestly very draining! I think it took about three weeks before I decided to open the file again and continue it.

When I did, I just finished painting the rest of the robes and their hands. The blue details on Lan Wangji's outer robes were painted on a separate layer that I put on Multiply. I probably did more adjustments to the face and hair and stuff, because my painting process is honestly a mess :')

Final Adjustments

I added some correction layers on certain areas to fix some of the colors. See: Lan Wangji's sleeve becoming much brighter and paler; Wei Wuxian's legs having less contrast. And then I merged all of the layers (excluding the background) and added a bit of blur. See: Wei Wuxian's ponytail; the entire lower part; the flowing forehead ribbon. My reasoning for this is so that most of the detail (and therefore the flow of the eye) goes to their faces and expressions!

And then, I put a blue Overlay layer on low opacity to make Wangxian blend better with the background, added a bit of shadow on the inside and the lower sections and added the glowing details for the added flair. I initially wanted sparkles and/or stars but they didn't turn out as well as this did. I also upped the contrast by a little for the entire piece!

Aaaand, that's it! In truth, I did a bit more color adjustments to the whole piece, but I was a dummy who forgot to turn them back on before posting so ... oh well.

Posting

Before posting, I upload it either on my spare private Twitter account or on a drafted Tumblr post so I can check the colors on my phone. This is because the colors on different devices can look very different, and I would at the very least want all my pieces to look nice on both of my devices!

And then, once I deem it satisfactory, I just try to think of a caption and post! Some artists wait for a certain time where most of their followers are active, but I didn't have a lot of MDZS followers at this point so it didn't really matter to me.

It still doesn't really; I haven't actually been able to figure out when my MDZS followers are awake even now.

#showyourprocess #mine #whew this was so long oops #but this piece took like #maybe 1.5 weeks sans the break i had to take #so !!#LOL #tag game

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palmett-hoes · 3 years

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YES. Oh my God you explained perfectly the logic behind Neil getting tattoos. I get that people think tattoos fix Andrew's "aesthetic" more cause he wears all black and all but tattoos nowadays are popular and not really a thing that only alternative people get. Anyway -> if Neil got tattoos, do u have an hcs for what he might?

yea the more i think about it the more i really like the idea of neil getting tattoos. and who knows, maybe if his boyfriend starts to get covered andrew will take an interest too. i mean you're right, it does fit his aes. maybe he gets some matching tattoos with the love of his life

WHAT neil would get tho? oh there’s so many factors to consider

i see him having a similar ideology about it as i do, that his tattoos are to memorialize significant people and events in his life. most importantly though, they’re just,, to make him feel good about himself, so they’re all of happy memories, even if some might be bittersweet

it’s also not about full-coverage. he’s fine if his scars are still visible under the tattoo and probably isn’t going to try to religiously cover every single one. it’s about having something good on his body that he chose to put there to combat but not necessarily blot out the bad things done to him against his will

he tends to collect smaller individual pieces rather than large scale work and he’s not committed to a specific style, so his collection is a bit random and eclectic. but in terms of the style generally drawn to very kinesthetic art with a lot of movement and fluid lines, but also angular and hard-edged. i don’t think he’s color-averse and definitely not a strict black-and-gray guy, but at the same time i can’t see him doing like super super bright color work. he goes for darker, more saturated colors, like jewel and natural tones. also of course i see him as brown skinned so you need to approach color work differently anyway

in terms of what he actually GETS, i don’t really have a lot of opinions on placement or like,, what tattoos should cover which scar, but have some random ideas i think he might get

he has a large piece (like maybe a sleeve or thigh) that’s dedicated to his time on the run, but the good parts. it’s a mix of a lot of images and very chaotic, drawing from like,, the french cafe where his most first bought him a cup of coffee and cottage safehouses in the alps in summer and where they had room to stretch their legs and run and chase each other and hustling three card monty in dubai with his mom and diners in the pacific northwest that sold the best fruit pies

he of course gets a lot of tattoos for the foxes, definitely at least one straight-up fox. tiny pawprints are his go-to filler pattern

he has everyone’s signatures somewhere on him, maybe with a tattoo of the Championship trophy being hoisted up by a group of hands. he also has small individual pieces that memorialize each of them individually

definitely got several exy sticks and various other pieces of gear scattered in various places. dark stadium chairs leading down to a brightly lit exy court

andrew is probably his biggest inspiration. he has the photograph of them together in the airport turned into a silhouette like a victorian cameo. a ring of keys; this one might go on the back of his neck. a tire track skid mark. a skeleton sitting on a roof against a sunrise. andrew’s hand sparking a lighter. the only reason he doesn’t have a full portrait is bc andrew says he’ll leave him if he does it

a rabbit skull overgrown by moss and vines and flowers.

he gets a rook and knight chess pieces tat because kevin says that’s what he and andrew would be

he gets some small cheeky ones too. things like a line of script that says “you should see the other guy” with a gun running under a nasty scar or a skeletal arm broken in half

once he starts to really establish who he is and flesh himself out as a person he gets some that don’t necessarily have a lot of meaning but that he just likes the look of because he has the luxury of having opinions on art now

i don’t necessarily know if i want him to cover his facial scars, but i think that’s mostly because i don’t like facial tattoos very much, especially ones located where neil’s scars are. that’s just a personal preference though. however, i think the idea of a minimalist, abstract take of just like,, adding color to the scars might be nice. something like well-saturated brushstroke work

(addendum: an au or something where all neil’s scars are just covered in abstract brushwork would be so fucking beautiful. like this but full-body holy shit)

(i just don’t think it really fits him in canon to have a full-body tattoo scheme. also those would require so much long-term maintenance you’d have to get them redone like every 5 to 10 years)

he also doesn’t get them all at once, this is something he builds up over years. he also doesn’t want to rush it because he wants to stay open to memorialize things that will come in the future, because he has a future to wait for now

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also i assume you probably want some reference photos too bc this can be a little hard to understand just as words, so here's some of my reference images under the cut

they’re more of a stylistic reference than a content reference. also - as in all things - this will of course also tell you a lot about my own personal taste in tattooing even though i try not to make it based ENTIRELY on what i like and try to factor in what i think neil would like

these were the tattoos that most inspired me about the tattoo idea for neil’s happiest memories with his mother. for some reason my gut really drew me towards architectural tattoos for it. i like the way the perspective on the left image is curved and confusing and it takes you a second to make sense of what you’re looking at. it reminds me a lot of an MC Escher drawing and that’s sort of the exact seeling of chaos and confusion that i think the tattoo needs. but then i was also really drawn to the soft colors of the right image (although they’d have to be adjusted somewhat for neil’s darker skin), because they’re so comforting, and i think that’s the sort of balance i’m looking for out of a tattoo for mary. so like,, compositionally like the left image but colored more like the right

literally every person who’s ever considered aftg and tattoos together HAS to offer up a fox tattoo it’s law. anyway these are mine. or well, the types i can see neil with. also, not aside from the foxes, these tattoos are really the best examples i can find of the angular, kinesthetic art style that i feel very strongly matches neil

inspo behind the tattoo of andrew’s hand with the lighter. also just a good simple style for smaller tattoos or filler tattoos

victorian cameos. inspiration behind both the silhouette tattoos of andrew and neil in the airport and the skeleton & the sunrise. both would be more than just the bust and the poses would be more fluid and they don’t need the brooch design outline. it’s really more of a starter reference or a jumping off point

neo-traditional tattoos. phenomenal style. strong lines and highly saturated color, super important both for a long-lasting tattoo and for tattooing on darker skin. they also just tend to have a certain composition i really like

this is the style i see the championship trophy tattoo, the chess pieces tattoo, the rabbit skull tattoo, and the ring of keys tattoo all in

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okay i’m done now

thoughts?

#txt #pic #neil josten #my posts #im talkin #ask #anon #anonymous #tattoo #tattoos #foxes w tats

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nadziejastar · 5 years

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Isa Was Very Sweet (My Theory About the WINNER Stick)

“From where I stood, the only thing you drew was a big L on your forehead for ‘Loser,’ ‘Lame,’ ‘Laughable’…What did you expect?” Isa said with a roll of his eyes. Ven was feeling the same way.

“Wha—? Isn’t this the part where ya cheer me up or somethin’? ‘You’re just havin’ a bad day,’ or…‘That’s what you get for pullin’ your punches!’ Some friend,” Lea whined, turning toward him.

“Oh, you mean I was supposed to lie,” Isa retorted.

The two of them seemed to be enjoying themselves. Ven was just a tad jealous.

I hate that Isa’s personality seemed to be so misunderstood just because he had a sarcastic sense of humor. Instead of recognizing that he was just playing around, he was apparently seen by much of the fandom as simply a mini Saïx who is cold-hearted and callous toward his friend. I’ve seen people really judge him negatively all because of this one scene. But I think there was evidence in the story that this scene in particular was going to get a twist so that we saw how sweet of a character Isa really was.

“Finally! We got ’em all!” Sora’s Keyblade descended upon the last Dusk.

He heard someone applauding.

“All in a day’s work!” He couldn’t help striking a pose as he turned. But instead of an awestruck spectator, he found someone from the organization.

“Impressive.” Saïx kept on clapping dryly as he strode closer to the trio, who were still poised to fight.

“What do you want?!” Sora demanded.

Saïx paused to speak deliberately. “Have you seen a man named Axel? I believe he’s here somewhere…”

I think Lea did praise Isa and applaud him when he got better at fighting (Fight fight fight). But I think in this specific scene, Saïx was remembering Isa praising Lea. I would bet that Isa was clapping for him in the past, too.

“You did amazing, Xion,” said Roxas. “You deserve a little something extra.”

“Extra…?” Xion echoed in surprise.

“Yeah. I know a good spot. But first, the icing on the cake.” He gave her a grin. “Wait right here.”

And this praise was connected to the WINNER stick. I think it was probably Isa who first told Lea that sea-salt ice cream was his reward for doing such a good job and I have a theory for exactly how that happened.

“Your performance was quite forced,” Saïx muttered, noticing Axel’s gazing at him.

“What is this about?” asked Axel, cracking his neck.

“I’m not all that impressed.”

Sensing an incoming lecture, Axel started walking away. “Well, I’m off to Agrabah. I’ll be back.” His figure vanished into a corridor.

I think Isa praising Lea was what Saïx was referring to when he said Axel’s “performance” wasn’t impressive on Day 96. He was referring to how Isa used to be impressed with Lea and wanted to give him a reward. But Saïx isn’t impressed.

“I checked that place out yesterday, and that Heartless looked pretty darn tough. I reckon it might be impossible for him to get that thing on his own, hmm ~”

“Are you trying to tell me to let them go together?” asked Saïx in a disagreeable tone.

“I’ll go to Agrabah. Then there’s no problem, right?” Axel’s voice was a little deeper.

“Can you really defeat the Heartless in Agrabah?”

“It’ll be fine. I’m tough, you know.”

“But, you can’t collect its—”

“I’ll just keep the thing in check for now,” Axel interrupted.

That’s why Axel was so sad on Day 96. Saïx was tarnishing one of his most precious memories of Isa acting very sweet and cute. I think Lea saved Isa from a bad situation similar to the one with Roxas and Xion. Lea might have taken on a really strong Heartless for him. Isa was really worried that he’d never see Lea again.

It’s possible that this is the last time I’ll see Saïx, Axel thought, as he looked at Saïx, who was sitting down, from behind.

“We’ve known each other for a pretty long time, haven’t we?”

Ignoring Axel’s words, Saïx continued typing on the keyboard.

“Say something. Have you even thought that maybe I can’t erase Roxas?” Axel said, in a playful tone, and Saïx finally looked up. “It’ll be all right. Cause I’m tough.”

“Saying stupid things,” said Saïx, smiling for just a second at Axel, puffing out his chest.

It was a very precious memory, which is why it was what Axel chose to say to Saïx thinking it might be the last thing he ever said to him.

Just then, Roxas could hear clapping coming from somewhere.

“Yo! Roxas. You haven’t changed! Fight fight fiiight!”

Roxas turned, and standing there was… Axel.

“It’s been a while, hasn’t it?” Axel walked casually towards him. “What’s the matter? You look kind of dazed there,” grinned Axel, and he laughed, just like always.

“…They said all the members who went to Castle Oblivion got annihilated…”

Axel stuck out his chest. “Well, I’m pretty tough.”

But something feels off, thought Roxas. Besides, Axel isn’t as strong as he says he is—I think.

“You had me worried,” he admitted.

I think Axel was thinking about that specific situation on Day 71 when he got back from Castle Oblivion. It’s why he didn’t want to report in right away and why he was annoyed that Saïx had no words of appreciation for him. Axel also was upset that Saïx didn’t seem like he was worried about him.

“All I did was find a place to send everyone who was getting in the way.”

And yet, Axel couldn’t keep the sarcasm out of his response. “Well, nice to know where I stand.”

He said it with a grin, but the hint of a frown tugged at the scar between Saïx’s brows. Apparently, the joke wasn’t very funny. “You made it back in one piece, didn’t you?”

Were you worried I wouldn’t? Axel almost said, but he didn’t want to deal with putting him in an even fouler mood. Disgust and rage seemed to linger closest to the surface of Saïx’s memories.

Lea survived but he probably got his butt whooped in the process. Afterwards, he was puffing out his chest, acting like it was no big deal. Isa knew Lea was putting on a performance to show off for him. But he wanted to make Lea happy. So he started clapping for him and praising him, telling him how impressive he was because he knew Lea would like it. Lea probably knew Isa was laying it on thick for him and they both were having a lot of fun.

“These Heartless here are the last, I think.”

“Xion, fight fight fight~” Axel clapped, as she turned around.

“What are you doing?”

“What am I doing… I’m praising your hard work.”

“You’re weird,” said Xion, laughing.

Just then, Axel suddenly felt like Xion’s face had blurred, and he rubbed his eyes.

“Is something wrong, Axel?”

“Nah…” For a second, the Xion I saw there had the face of… Naminé.

This dialogue takes place on Day 117 which was about special Nobodies. Xigbar made fun of Demyx for being useless right before Saïx assigned Axel and Xion their mission. Axel was clapping for Xion and praising her. And Axel saw Xion as Naminé as soon as he did. It definitely indicates that he was remembering something in that moment.

“Sounds like you earned yourself the treat,” said Axel.

Not wasting any more time, Roxas dug in. Axel pocketed the stick from his own ice cream.

Axel and Xion specifically discussed their memories after the mission. Axel seemed sad and said his memories never did him any good. Xion pocketed her shell and Axel pocketed his ice cream stick. Maybe he got a WINNER that day. I think he probably did, but he never told Roxas about it. It just made him sad.

Axel: That’s one of the things that makes the Organization members special. Unlike lesser Nobodies, we remember who we were.

When Axel mentioned that the organization were special Nobodies it was on Day 95 ~Nobodies~. They were special because they remembered their past. This was brought up while they were discussing how Demyx was not really good at fighting and kinda useless. Axel was pretty defensive of him. He said his memories were just baggage here, too.

Saïx: Axel aside, it would break our hearts to hear something happened to you.

Donald: Hearts? You don't have any hearts!

Saïx: True, we don’t have hearts. But we remember what it was like. That’s what makes us special.

When Saïx mentioned special Nobodies in KH2, he was applauding Sora after he finished off a group of Heartless. Right after Saïx got done clapping, he said he remembered what having a heart was like. In the manga, Saïx got very upset when Sora said he couldn’t be worried because he had no heart.

When I’m smiled at with such a happy look… I feel uncomfortable.

“Maybe Xion wouldn’t have been able to make her Keyblade come back, if it weren’t for you, Axel,” Roxas added.

“Thank you, Axel,” they said, in unison.

This is why… this feeling is so hazy. Scratching his head unconsciously, Axel looked away from the two of them.

“Then how about a sea salt ice cream?” Axel asked, his back still turned.

“Huh?” Roxas asked.

This was Axel compromising, grudgingly. Don’t think I can take any more of those thank-yous.

“Then we call it even,” replied Axel. Roxas and Xion looked at each other.

I think Lea did something dangerous for Isa. Then Isa probably wanted to find a way to show his appreciation for Lea. Axel couldn’t stand Roxas and Xion thanking him because it made him remember how much Saïx had changed.

Xigbar, standing and watching their exchange with his arms folded, opened his mouth. “You’ve been working really well lately haven’t you, Poppet.”

“…Thank you,” Xion replied in a small voice.

“Thank you? Why do you have to say thanks?

“Well, you were praising me, weren’t you? Was I wrong?”

“Haha… Yeah, I guess you could see it like that.” He pressed his hand to his mouth and snickered.

“Did I say something funny?”

“No, no. You’re fine.”

Xion looked up at Xigbar, anxiously. Beside them, Saïx didn’t show any notable reaction. He just watched.

This scene is from Day 119, a few days later. This day was about how important things are a weakness. Xigbar was making fun of Saïx and I think it involved the memory Axel had when he was fighting with Xion. Lea probably wondered why Isa had to thank him when they were friends. Friends help each other when they’re in trouble. Xigbar apparently saw this memory and thought it was hilarious. The thought of Xigbar knowing that Lea and Isa had a cute little thing for each other really amuses me. After this scene, Saïx hated Xion and constantly berated her and called her a failure.

“Huh? Why am I a slap on the wrist?” Roxas asked.

“Well, they know how much I hate babysitting.” Axel let out an exaggerated sigh.

“Gee, thanks,” huffed Roxas.

“Sheesh. Would it kill them to give me a day off? I’m exhausted,” Axel whined. “Look at these bags under my eyes. I need my beauty sleep.”

In the novel and the game, Axel made a point of complaining that he wasn’t allowed to rest for even a day after coming back from Castle Oblivion.

Axel: Didn't take 'em long to give me more work. Where's my vacation? Sheesh.

And he said this on Day 150, the day after he returned from Castle Oblivion the second time.

Axel barely slept a wink thanks to all the thoughts turning in his head. He scowled at the throbbing pain in his temples. These sleep deprivation headaches were awful.

Rather than going back to sleep and getting a lecture, he went to the Grey Area before anyone else and claimed the sofa to keep thinking.

The Organization tried to annihilate either Roxas or Xion. I’m thinking about what I should do, what I want to do. I want to know a way to save both Roxas and Xion. I want to respect both their wishes. I wondered all night whether there’s really and truly no way to do that—and, of course, I couldn’t find the answer.

He was constantly sleep-deprived as he tried to find a way to save Roxas and Xion while still respecting their wishes.

“Get up.”

“Just five more minutes…,” Axel mumbled.

“No. Get up—now.” The voice was distinctly annoyed.

Axel relented and opened his eyes. “What are you even doing in here?”

Saïx was standing next to his bed, as irritated as one might have guessed from his voice. Axel hadn’t been so rudely awakened since before turning into a Nobody.

In the manga, Saïx decided to show his appreciation by telling Axel to take a nice long rest after coming back from Castle Oblivion (though it was just talk). I’m sure all of this was referring to a specific event in their past.

Every time he tried to wake up, all Axel could think was how badly he wanted to go back to sleep—although he was getting enough rest. He just wished he could have a day to himself and do nothing but sleep. It was probably some remnant of his human memories.

Axel’s sleep deprivation was a pretty big thing and definitely dated back to his human days. Apparently, all Lea wished for back then was a day all to himself to do nothing but sleep.

“Al said he wouldn’t rely on magic, right? I want to fix it for him, but you gotta respect your friend’s wishes.”

“Your friend’s… wishes…”

So, even if you mean for something to be for your friend’s sake, their wishes are still more important?

I think that was probably what Axel was thinking about on Day 75, which was a few days after he returned from Castle Oblivion. I think Isa was so grateful to Lea that he wanted to grant him his wish. Lea would have a whole day to himself where he could do nothing but rest. Isa would handle himself.

“That Genie person seemed very worried about that Al person. And then he said that you have to respect your friend’s wishes. I guess you can’t just jump in and do everything for them, even if you want to.” Xion bit her ice cream, swinging her feet.

Axel leaned his head to one side. “Your friend’s wishes, huh…”

It feels like I have heard that before, a long time ago, when I was human.

Lea was really worried if Isa would be okay on his own and probably refused. But Isa insisted and urged him to respect his wishes. He really wanted to thank Lea and let him get a day off to sleep. Lea worked so hard and worried so much for his sake, after all. So, Lea reluctantly did what Isa asked.

“Did you think of a way?” Roxas asked, happily. Beside him, Xion stayed silent, face hidden in her hood.

“Roxas, you should just do your best.”

When Axel suggested that Roxas work twice as hard for Xion’s sake, he referred to it as “doing your best” I think Lea “did his best” for Isa a lot.

“It’s okay—go! I’ll catch up.”

Naminé nodded and jumped into the gateway.

“So you’re trying to play the hero now, too?” Saïx said flatly, staring hard at Axel.

I think Lea played the hero for Isa.

“Hmph. I don’t have time for these games.” Darkness welled from a rift behind Saïx. “Do your best to help your dear hero.”

I think Isa also tried to “do his best” to show his appreciation for Lea by letting him have a day off.

“Understood, sir,” Saïx replied, and Xemnas disappeared.

“…Well, do your best. The best a kid without a heart can do, anyway,” said Xigbar, and he too disappeared.

And I think that is probably what got him Norted. Xigbar finds the whole situation amusing.

Axel let out a long-suffering sigh. “Well, I’ll tell you what I’m gonna do. Sleep. And then maybe have a catnap and a snooze after that.”

“Isn’t that what you usually do anyway?”

I don’t really get what he means.

“Usually, I’m making do with how much I get.”

He really wants to sleep that much?

“What are you gonna do, Xion?”

Axel yawned again through Roxas’s question. “If anyone cares, I was just getting back to bed.”

“Wh—? Oh. Okay.” Roxas nodded uncertainly as Axel sauntered off without another word.

How can he be that sleepy…?

Day 117 is when Axel and Xion had their mission together. Then the very next day is the vacation, “Lazy Day” where Axel’s sleep deprivation was brought up.

“Does going to sleep count?”

“What?! Axel, you wasted your whole day?”

“Hey, I needed the rest! I work hard on the job, unlike some people.”

“It’s not our fault you get tired so quick,” Xion shot back, and the three of them cracked up together.

Axel said he works very hard, so he deserved to rest on his day off. He got to sleep all day, just like he wanted to do as a human, and just like he would have done if Saïx had shown him appreciation after Castle Oblivion.

“You’re getting there, aren’t you. Okay, since you worked really hard today, you get a reward,” said Axel, and he started walking.

And sea-salt ice cream is a reward for working very hard.

Roxas: That still doesn't explain what love is... Is love fighting to protect what's most important to you? Where does its power come from?

Axel: Hey, here comes the hard worker.

A perfect reward for someone like Lea.

“Don’t go doing stupid things while I’m gone, you hear?”

“Hey, we so wouldn’t,” Xion replied.

“I wonder now… can I really trust you guys?”

“You’re terrible!” Xion protested. Finding something funny about the situation, Roxas huffed.

“Hey, what are you laughing about, Roxas… hee hee,” Xion laughed. Axel couldn’t help but laugh along.

Right after Axel finished telling Roxas and Xion about his dark secrets, he warned them not to bungle anything while he was gone at Castle Oblivion. But Xion did. She was getting berated for failing her mission as soon as Axel came back.

“…You’re so irresponsible…,” Axel grumbled, his steps faltering under the weight of the girl—the puppet—hoisted over his shoulder. While he was hardly unscathed himself, she appeared completely unconscious.

When Axel at last staggered into the castle, his legs buckled beneath him, and Xion tumbled from his arms as he fainted.

I think Isa probably also bungled things on the day he let Lea rest. Kinda like how Aladdin was really struggling to cope without Genie. But he refused to ask for help.

Genie: Yep! Until Carpet and I took off on a well deserved vacation. What you might call a mini world tour. But we got to worrying about how Al was doing...so we figured we'd pop back in to check up on him.

Roxas: Why were you worried? Is there something to worry about?

Genie: Well, sure! It's only natural to worry about your friends. I worried about how things were going with Jasmine, how the city was holding up... And once I get something on my mind, I can't knock it out--tried everything: dynamite, sledgehammers, tweezers...

Xion: Well, I don't know about anybody named Al, but... The city's in rough shape. They've been fixing it up.

Roxas: Right, they keep getting hit by sandstorms.

Genie: What!? Why do these things always happen the minute I leave town!?

Aladdin’s wish was for for Genie to be free and to just be able to enjoy his vacation. But Genie couldn’t enjoy his vacation until he was free of worry.

Genie: Well, anyway... I'm glad to see Al's doing all right. Now I can enjoy the rest of my vacation free of worries!

Aladdin and Genie are used as the perfect example of best friends due to their mutual concern for each other. Axel was always looking out for Roxas and Xion in 358/2 Days.

Roxas: Just feels strange, that's all. Usually, I do all the worrying over you. I don't think it's ever been the other way around before.

Xion: Well, for your information... I worry about you all the time, Roxas.

Roxas: I'm glad you're back, Xion. I just wish Axel didn't have to be so rough with you.

But he didn’t have anyone looking out for him. This is why I think he was so nostalgic for the past. I think Axel was specifically thinking about the WINNER stick on Day 118. Roxas mentioned it in his diary and Axel was looking at his ice cream stick in the manga, too. And this was the day Axel wrote in his report how Saïx had changed and that he missed what was gone.

“That’s true, but… if you go on like this, you’ll collapse.”

“I said I’m fine, Jasmine. We don’t know when the next storm will come. We have to rebuild the city before the next sand storm comes.”

I think Lea was worried about Isa and went to go check on him, and sure enough something bad happened.

“Xion!” he called, after gently putting her down, but Xion didn’t react.

I was careless. I don’t have a clear answer as to why Xion collapses so often in the first place. Why was she allowed to go on a mission in this condition? The thoughts floated up along with regret.

Lea probably saved him. But he was probably asleep for a while like Xion was.

“Don’t push yourself too hard. Our mission is to put down a giant Heartless—Looks like a pretty tough Heartless, yanno,” said Axel, scratching his head.

“Since we’re in Twilight Town, we can eat as soon as we’re done, can’t we,” said Xion, chasing after him.

“Yeah, that’s true, but… Don’t be careless,” Axel warned their backs as he followed behind.

“Axel is such a worry-wart, isn’t he.”

“Worry-wart—Maybe that’s cause you two worry me far too much.”

Isa probably collapsed. He fought with everything he had to allow Lea a chance to rest. This might be the origin of his berserk state. He wasn’t filled with rage or anything. He was motivated by love. He was trying so hard to protect Lea and used up all his strength.

“He worries too much. Thinks he has to help Sora do everything…” Axel grimaced in irritation.

“But, Axel, aren’t you the one worrying about Riku and Sora?” Naminé giggled softly.

“Me, worry? You think I need to be worried about those two?” He stretched backward and rocked the chair back and forth, like a restless child.

Lea was very scared and blamed himself after what happened to Isa. The whole situation traumatized him. At first Axel brushed off Roxas whenever he was worried about Xion. But after Day 193 he always told them not to push themselves too hard or to take it easy. When Isa woke up, he felt bad. He just wanted to show his appreciation for Lea, but all he did was scare him to death and cause more work for him. He felt like a failure.

“Well, Roxas—why do the three of us eat ice cream together every day in that place?”

“….Huh?” I don’t really get what he’s trying to say.

“I have no use in doing that either, do I? If you think about it, it’s troublesome, right? Do you want me to tell you?”

Roxas looked at Axel, and waited for his answer.

“It’s because we are best friends.”

Lea might have said that Isa didn’t need to do anything “useful” to show his appreciation. He just liked spending time with him and that was all he wanted as thanks.

“Oh, c’mon, it’s not that funny!” Axel scolded. They paused, looked at each other, and giggled again.

“I don’t know why I put up with this…”

“But, I mean…it just didn’t sound like you, Axel.” Xion could barely hold in laughter long enough to get the words out.

A wish that they could always be together—was longing for the impossible. But at least they could always remember one another.

That was what he really wished for. Even more than sleep. So, Isa gave Lea the WINNER stick as his reward. It was a promise that they’d eat ice cream and spend time together in the future, which is why it meant so much to Axel. He was remembering all of this on Day 193. Isa must have known how distraught Lea was back then. Axel was very hurt by Saïx knowingly making him relive that situation. That’s why he told Roxas and Xion that they were his best friends while they were worried about Xion.

I don’t really know what ‘reward’ actually means, but I think it’s definitely a special thing, like ‘Winner’. And so, when Axel comes back, I’ll give him the ‘Winner’ as a ‘reward’.

Xion, eating ice cream beside him, swung her feet.

“You two are really close, aren’t you?” she said.

Sea-salt ice cream was a reward for hard work or doing a good job. It was always brought up whenever Axel left or came back from Castle Oblivion. And going to Castle Oblivion was always a job assigned to him by Saïx.

“Well… it is winning after all, so it has to be something good, right?”

“Something good…?” Roxas asked.

“Hee hee hee…,” Xion laughed. Roxas and Axel looked at her. “The two of you are close, aren’t you?” she said, and then she looked out at the setting sun. “Such a pretty sunset…”

The WINNER stick was obviously special to Axel long before Roxas gave it to him. Axel was lying when he said he’d never seen one on Day 352. He knew exactly what it was for.

“…Was it okay to have said that?”

“What do you mean?”

Axel’s tone is a little lower than usual. “I mean… you and Saïx are usually pretty close, aren’t you?”

“Close, whatever. You’re the one who went and flared up in the first place.”

“Yeah, but…” It feels like some sort of mistake, for there to be a distance between Axel and Saïx like the one Saïx has between Xion and I.

The reason he lied about it is probably because it was a very painful subject, involving his most precious memories of the past. He wanted to keep things lighthearted for Roxas and Xion’s sake.

“We have not confirmed what happened to any spare cloaks in the possession of the members who were stationed at Castle Oblivion. Axel will also be looking into that.”

“Axel this, Axel that… you two are quite the pals, aren’t you? Wonder what you two whisper about,” Xigbar shot, jiggling his crossed leg.

“Now you’ve mentioned it, I wonder the same about you.” At Saïx’s words, the atmosphere froze over.

Xigbar mentioned how close Axel and Saïx were during the meeting on Day 119, right after Axel left for Castle Oblivion again. After that meeting Xigbar praised Xion in front of Saïx, while snickering.

Roxas: But I've heard him say he wasn't cut out for combat. I guess everybody in the Organization is good at different things.

Axel: That's right. Everybody's unique.

Xion: Even Nobodies? Don't you need a heart to be unique?

Axel: Oh, I think we have other things that set us apart. Like our pasts.

Xion: What past?

Roxas: You remember stuff from before?

Axel: That's one of the things that makes the Organization members special. Unlike lesser Nobodies, we remember who we were.

I think Lea saved Isa then bragged about being tough. Isa gave Lea his reward by giving him the WINNER stick after screwing up Lea’s vacation. He felt bad that he wasn’t good at fighting and failed.

“Don’t you remember? I acted like a zombie.” Axel stared at him as if trying to figure something out and then grinned. “Right, that first week you could barely form a sentence. But come on, you’re still kind of a zombie.”

“Oh, thanks!” Roxas huffed, and they laughed.

“Hey, Roxas…”

“Hmm?”

“Bet you don’t know why the sun sets red.” He eyed Roxas mischievously. “You see, light is made up of lots of colors. And out of all those colors, red is the one that travels the farthest.” He finished with a boastful grin.

Roxas laughed. “Why do you look so smug about it?” He shoved him, and Axel gave another little laugh.

I think Lea gave Isa his reward some time later when he was “broken” and then suddenly spoke, telling Lea why the sunset was red. He was proud of himself. Everyone is good at different things. Lea was good at fighting. Isa was knowledgeable about stuff. Lea was so happy Isa still had his unique personality, he wanted to reward him. If they were in Twilight Town at the time, maybe Lea actually used the WINNER stick Isa gave him to get him the ice cream. Then they watched the sunset. Essentially, the WINNER stick is the equivalent of the wooden sword that Terra gave to Ventus.

#kh #kh meta #kh lea #kh isa #kh axel #kh saix #leaisa

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nibscribs · 5 years

Photo

So uhhhh I drew a lot of RWBY this year... only two of these are non RWBY and tbh I could have just as easily put something RWBY for June Template

Retrospective under the cut bc it’s LONG

RETROSPECTIVE January: First piece of the year! I still like this piece and I think it shows how much I improved from the original version of it. Also I just like looking at it bc it's soft content of my rare pair. I do think I made the rose look photorealistic which looks... bad esp with all the other more stylized flowers, and I got lazy with the bleeding hearts by just drawing one set and flipping them. Emerald's hair also could look better. February: I made this around GNG week, which was a fun, good time, long before the server imploded on itself. I got really lazy with the backgrounds, obviously, but I do like the poses in this one, tho it helped that I based it off of screenshots from Young Justice. I also just really like how Merc looks in this one. March: March wasn't a very prolific month for art, I don't think I produced much besides this and one comic piece for GNG week. I'm not sure why exactly, I can't find any specific reason why I would be unproductive that month. I'm gonna just assume I was drained from work all the time and didn't have the energy to put out good art, and also I was getting into a slump bc all my art was starting to look same-y. This piece isn't very good, but I chose it because I did it without a reference, and at this point that was going out of my comfort zone. It's obviously not super dynamic, but at the very least you can tell I intended there to be motion to it. April: This also wasn't a very prolific month for art, not as bad as March, but for the same reasons. I was also really starting to feel burnout from the RWBY fandom, specifically wasps and conflict within the GNG server. This was also when the Art vs the Artist meme was popular, and I realized I didn't want to do that meme because my art was too similar and boring, which also brought me down a peg. Though I put out a few good chibis in April, I chose my Mercury redesign bc I was really proud of it. I could never get the Emerald redesign to mesh quite right, but I can say I'm really proud of how Mercury's came out. May: May had me bounce out of my art slump and in full force trying to expand my skills! Specifically exploring painting. Although May was about as prolific as April, what I did create I put a lot into. It was difficult to pick between this and my app of Edison, because I'm really proud of both, but in the end I went with this commission of Mercury because I pushed myself to try and use an interesting perspective for the piece instead of my usual stand still and face the camera pose. Because I pushed myself out of my comfort zone, this was one of the best things I made all year, and may be my favorite piece of the year. June: TIME TO STRESS OUT ABOUT CONNECTICON! So if you follow me on twitter, you might have noticed I made a lot of posts at the beginning of the year low key throwing shade at myself for drawing my oc's instead of more "important" art. Well, that important art that I was procrastinating was con merch, and con was the second week of July, so I really had to get my ass in gear to finish merch on time (spoiler, I didn't finish a lot of it on time). This piece and July's piece are both posters I made for Connecticon, and while I like July's much better, that doesn't mean I find this piece bad. I really should have known that no one at con would realize it was a goonies reference tho -_-; I also lost a lot of love for this piece after season 6 of Voltron, which I watched while I was about 60% of the way through this piece, so I had to force myself to finish it. July: I love this piece!!!! Don't get me wrong, I know it has flaws, but look at it! The lines are so crisp, the colors look good, Roman and Merc's expressions are mwuah chefs kiss, and I just love all of them!!! ... except for Neo. I really didn't do her justice in this piece, her hair is too fluffy, her head is way to oversized to the point that she looks like a bobblehead, and her eyes are too close together. Really if you take out Neo's head that whole problem goes away. I also love all the tiny details I put in this one, from emerald's chaps to roman's rose to Neo's lace parasol. You can tell I was way more passionate about this piece than I was about the Voltron piece. August: pretty sure this is when I quit my job cashiering, and thank god bc customers suck. If I was going off of sheer popularity, Chibi Pyrrha would have taken this slot no contest, and while I love chibi Pyrrha, I don't think it was the best of the month. I chose this little princess and the pauper au doodle because I tried a year ago to draw these two dancing, and it looked like dog shit. It was flat and ugly. But this has motion to it, and even looking at it now makes me feel warm and happy inside. It's just a good cute drawing of my otp. September: My piece for the RWBY tarot project! I have a lot of mixed emotions about this one. on the one hand, I love how mercury looks, his expression, the lighting, the visceral gore from his legs (ESPECIALLY THE VISCERAL GORE ON HIS LEGS) and the hands of the undead, all look stunning and I don't think I could be more happy with how they turned out. And then we get to the background. The caduceus isn't the worst thing ever, but it's severely lacking in quality compared to the rendering on mercury in front of it, and a lot of it is clearly pixellated from me trying to stretch and squash it just right. And the fire is a hot (no pun intended) mess. It's flat, incoherent, and doesn't lead the eye anywhere. It's a shame too because I wanted to do more with it, but I a) didn't have enough time or patience to figure out what I needed to do to fix it and b) didn't want to go outside of my comfort level, so I gave up and decided to be satisfied with what I had. October: October was another good month for art, I made a turnaround sheet for Moss, painted a full body (and slightly lewd) Rudy, and made a decent attempt at inktober. Ok, so I got like 2 days in, but I improved a lot on inking from last year! Fun fact! this piece was originally going to be fan art of Lindsay Jones, but after I did some thumbnails to figure out a pose, I thought it would suit White Diamond better, and I could also sell it as merch. I love this piece. I think I captured the sinister mood well, and conveyed the story I wanted to without any dialogue (at least the notes on Tumblr make me assume I did a decent job, lotta people really wigged out lol) I really worked hard to get the lighting right on this one, and I think it shows. My absolutely favorite thing about this piece funnily enough, is Amethyst. I think I just did a great job drawing her and I'm proud of myself ok. Stevens bubble and my trouble figuring out how to get WD's leg just right are the only things that I dislike about this piece, but I might go back and fix those. November: IM SO PROUD OF THIS COMMISSION!!!!!! I worked so god damn hard on this chef's kiss poifect, and it really shows. I started using a new brush at this point, the Ojing series on Clip Studio Paint, which I recommend and have been using a lot since. I've also been using this shading technique since drawing this. I love how it sort of fades out but it's still really crisp. I also love all the little details that give this piece character, like her shoes and the stripes on her jacket. This piece really takes a lot of the stuff I learned over the year and combines it into one piece, and I could not be prouder of it. I have absolutely no problems with this one, though I do find the weapon a bit plain, but it's what the client described. December: AND NOW IT'S CHRISTMAS!!!!! I had been working on this piece since August, going back to it every now and then and getting frustrated. I'm really glad I came back to it and finally finished it, since I love this pair and I put a lot of effort into it back in August. However, I'm also really glad I completely overhauled a lot of it, specifically the flowers. Though I'm not 100% happy with the mums in this one, they look a thousand times better than the mums I had originally sketched back in August, and were part of the reason I had such a hard time finishing this for months. I also thought it would be nice to end the year on the same note it started; with a flower couple. I've definitely learned a lot since January, and I hope to continue growing in 2019! 2019 GOALS!

Work on backgrounds for the love of god

Draw more stuff that isn't RWBY

Perspective

Make more speed paints and post more to youtube in general

#2018 summary of art #2018 retrospective #art progress #year in review #not art

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resbang-bookclub · 6 years

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AMA Transcript: Close Your Eyes

Next up, @redphlox & @mrsashketchum stopped by to chat about their Resbang, Close Your Eyes. Here’s some of what went down:

Q: What inspired the concept behind the fic?

redphlox: WELL, I've had the idea to write a left-at-the-altar fic for a while, but I never quite had it envisioned in my mind scene/plot wise. I only had the premise. Then this year I decided to research wedding planning and ask my married friends [about] their wedding planning experience, and after brainstorming/talking it out with @professor-maka I had a solid idea finally. I love writing about emotions, especially coming-of-age/working through difficult situations, but writing this was difficult because I've never been in that situation (being left at the altar) so it was a journey.

Q: Mak, what went into how you chose which scenes to art/gif?

Mak (mrsashketchum): I actually had to work closely with Julie on what scenes to art and for the animatic :D But for the first piece, I really loved the bathtub scene and I thought it was such a unique challenge for me to draw the backgrounds and to bring the scene to life visually :0 If it makes sense?

redphlox: Mak drew the bathtub scene first right after she read the first chapter, like she mentioned, and we worked on picking out the scene for the icon collage together! I had the characters closing their eyes during specific moments and wanted to highlight those, and Mak brought them to life!

Q: Jackie/Soul brotp is a thing that you've created in not only this fic but some of your past ones as well! What inspired that? :D

redphlox: I LOVE Jackie so much, I think it's because I see her as a snarky, quietly sarcastic type that I relate to, so writing her with grumpy ass Soul just makes sense to me. They both are so reticent in canon, it just fits to me to put them together and have them be BFFs :D

Q: Mak, what made you decide to do an animatic?? It was so cool I looooved it.

Mak (mrsashketchum): I enjoy making animatics so much and I've always wanted to be a storyboard artist. I've also been planning to make an animatic anyway for Resbang, but when I saw Julie's fic summary I knew that the animatic was absolutely something I wanted. And I thought a trailer-like thing would go very well with the story? (This is definitely not because of watching so many wedding themed movies before, nope, lol).

Q: For Julie: There were a lot of feelings spread out through the fic, some that nearly brought me to tears. Did you have the same reactions to writing it? What emotions exactly were you trying to bring out in the reader? (because you brought out a lot).

redphlox: Hmmm, well... I wanted to bring out a sense of loss in reference to relationships, and rebuilding, and growing together after the trust is lost or the other person seems to be changing in a way you aren't. I also wanted to touch on Soul and Maka's separate and individual relationships with other people outside of their relationship, if that makes sense? I also aimed to highlight all sorts of love, so it was important to me to talk about everyone's relationships with each other. Friendship, lala, haha. My reaction to writing it was... ahh, frustration, because certain scenes were beyond reasonably difficult to write.

Q: What brought about the Soul and Wes conflict? Because like I was telling you in DMs, that wounded me ahahaha it was way too real.

redphlox: The Soul and Wes conflict was something that came up as I writing. Originally Wes was supposed to be the all-knowing, all supportive and understanding brother, but the more I wrote the more Soul started to resent Wes's blind optimism, and it makes sense - Soul can be a negative person, and it seems like he needs to sulk to process, and Wes just wasn't having it. Their personalities are too different, and showing that was important because it's okay to love someone and not know how to comfort them.

Q: That felt so real julie I loved it. As the owner of many siblings it read as absolutely true. Did your life influence that?

redphlox: Wes and Soul's relationship issues are inspired by some self-reflecting I've been doing, and taking the Love Languages test and comparing it to my loved one's results.

Q: For Mak: What inspired your color palette for the bathroom scene? It was very warm and it brought out as much emotion through visuals as the words themselves did. Was that intentional?

Mak (mrsashketchum): Yes it was definitely intentional! Like I said in my previous answer, I worked so closely with Julie (we fangirled so much over everything honestly), she helped me with colors and their poses and if there were tiny details I missed. She sent me a lot of references too which is very helpful for me since I tend to make use visual references more. It's always helpful to work closely with the author so that the feeling of the artwork doesn't wholly overwhelm the feeling of the writing style? Like I wanted it to match as well :") I'm glad it turned out amazingly.

Q: I was wondering Julie how you came up with the concept of the radio confession. I loved that Jackie's show was commandeered.

redphlox: Well, I was thinking, what's the opposite of having Soul be constipated with his feelings?? Blurting them out in public of course, haha, so that's how I came up with that scene. It's the first scene I had actually, and I plotted the fic for that ending. I also have Jackie as a public figure in many of AU's, she was a blogger in my model au, so the role seems a running gag in my writing.

Mak (mrsashketchum): Constipated was the best way to describe him with his feelings.

Q: So weird question for Julie: There's a movie I remember watching years and years ago, that I was reminded of when reading the radio confession scene, unfortunately for the life of me I can't remember the name of it. Did you draw that scene up from what would have fit into the story, or were you influenced by an outside source, like perhaps that mystery movie?

redphlox: I like to listen to the morning radio and always wonder how people are brave enough to go live on air and talk about their relationships or embarrassing moments etc, so that kind of inspired the radio scene too!

Q: I really enjoyed TsuWes btw, and it's not a ship I've really seen. What made you decide on it?

redphlox: AHHH well, they're both Tall, and I love both of them so.... I made them love each other. Also the ship name WesTsu Bestu got me.

Mak (mrsashketchum): I always thought that Tsu and Wes love to tease Soul and Maka together, so the ship happened like that haha.

Q: Btw Tsubaki owning a flower shop is greaaat was that always the plan?

redphlox: Tsu owning a flower shop was also one of those things that just came about because I needed someone to deliver those "I still love you" flowers, but it fit so perfectly because of how Soul fit into learning flower arranging from her and thus getting him to stay in Death City. It was one of those things that fell into place.

Mak (mrsashketchum): Those stuff in AUs that fall into place are the best accidents, if u can call it that.

Q: Question for Mak; the animatic, that collage, the illustration; how did you manage to capture the fic in its entirety, while still giving each piece made its own personality so to speak? For example; the bathroom scene with your color choices made it warm, melancholy, touching, the watercolor for the collage was deep and soothing at the same time, intense, and the animatic, the monotones give it a blank canvas for each viewer to create their own emotional interpretation. How are you absolutely amazing I guess is my overall question??

redphlox: This is the most important question of this AMA tbh. I love the lighting in that piece akfdsgnfkdfdss. I felt it in my heart.

Mak (mrsashketchum): Oh my god. Thank u for the question!!!! I... actually honestly have no idea haha. I guess it's just that when you love a concept so much and completely have a wonderful connection with your partner that it just flows? I wanted to really make the artworks fit into the theme and the feel of the writing. I made sure that while Julie checked if my artwork had the feel she was going for, I also wanted to make sure that what I was feeling was gonna reflect on it as well. This is for the bathtub scene btw haha. The collage was actually supposed to be monochrome as well but I wanted to give it some color too? Like the fic in its entirety is just blasting with emotions? And yet it's generally so soft to me. The animatic was really supposed to have that gray background because I've seen a lot of animatics drawn that way haha. But I did make it work to my advantage that it wasn't too overwhelmingly dark but it's so that you could see the tears as well? It would be hard if the background was white and the tears were white too, right? :0

Q: By the way I loved the weddings in the fic. Like I wanted to attend them they sounded gorgeous. How did you decide on those elements?

redphlox: I have an aesthetic/personal blog where I reblog a lot of pictures of flowers and I came across one that was a ball room covered in flowers and I thought - yep, Wes and Tsu would be married here. As for Soul and Maka's wedding, I LOVE being out at night, and I love soft lighting and would like a night wedding if I ever get married, so yeah. Aesthetic, haha.

Q: How did you manage to capture a canon-like Soul in an AU?

redphlox: Ahhh I just... plot out the fic centered with feelings first and go from there.

Q: I wanna know more about this fantastic partnership. it sounds like you guys were a great team and worked so well together - any tips on communication for anyone out there who may have felt shy? Also, give us the beta comments >:)

redphlox: Okay I LOVED working with Mak! Even though we're like, what, twelve hrs time difference??? we still managed to be online at the same time and work on our projects together. She'd draw line art and show me and I'd write a scene and show her and we'd keysmash at each other. It was soooo rewarding and fun!

Mak (mrsashketchum): I would like to say that Julie and I are the Angst Twins actually. I love working with Julie too???? Like everything just really worked out.

redphlox: It wasn't even planned tbh, I would see her online and go like :eyes: and she'd be like "im working on the collage!" or vice versa. It really felt like it was OUR resbang and not just MINE y’know? Tip wise, I'd say find a platform you really enjoy being on/are available on the most and communicate through there, that really worked for Mak and I.

redphlox: Since this was a srs fic most beta comments were of surprise and like, offended bc I did something Bad.

Jaded [@jaded-envy] made a lot of silly comments! She is amazing. Like when Maka is at the bookstore and looking up self help books for looooove, jaded titled them after some fics i've written.

Q: Question for both Mak and Julie; your partnership sounded like it flowed like a dream. Did you guys ever feel like you were overpowering one another? I know alot of partnerships struggle with the "am I bugging them too much" or "what if i'm doing it wrong" mindsets, so how did you guys get past that, for anyone who suffered from those feelings.

Mak (mrsashketchum): Oh that's actually an interesting question! I never thought of me overpowering Julie or her overpowering over me? It's more like I want to be able to do as much work as she does? Since we're partners we must work hand-in-hand and not with one of us being the overpowering one? So to speak.

redphlox: SAME what Mak said, I always offered her to give suggestions for the fic and she always asked me for advice on colors and we listened to each other. Basically we were considerate of each other, it was/is amazing :' D

Mak (mrsashketchum): aaaaaaa true ;w; Since it is technically a partnership, we treated it as if it were like something we needed to work on together, and doing stuff at the same time really helped put it into perspective in a way?

Q: Where did the inspo from the bathtub scene came from? Did you draw from a specific experience/influence for that?

redphlox: Hmm... well, no specific experience influenced that, it just like, happened? I thought like, "ok where would Maka be if she were crying?" and it made sense to put her in the bathtub after she spilled the ink on herself, and she prob had no energy to leave, so there she stayed until Soul found her.

Q: Also Julie, I know you suffered from writers block I kicked your butt into gear once, lol. How did you overcome it? When I get to a sentence or idea that I can't exactly word or find a way to explain, I usually drop it for weeks and then come back to it. Can't do that with Resbang to an extent so how'd you get past it within a limited amount of time without rushing the pace, or glossing over an idea that was meant to be incorporated into the fic?

redphlox: ahhhh WELL, I wrote 40kish between Jan 1st and Jan 16th, so a deadline kicks me into high gear. A lot of the block was not knowing what happens in weddings and doing research tbh x) I died a little but it made me stronger.

Q: Okay you broke my heart a number of times, can you explain the thought process of why Maka never texted Soul?

redphlox: Maka was just too shook to think rationally :0 Have you ever been so anxious it feels like you're going to die? That's basically how it was for her, the emotion was too strong. She realizes later she could have done better and coming to terms that she makes mistakes is also a lesson she had to learn.

Q: How long did recording voices for the animatic take? And did you have any silly moments while doing so? haha

Mak (mrsashketchum): I actually had the weirdest time doing every voice, it's crazy. It took half an hour to be honest? It didn't need to be perfect, it just needed to have the right emotion. I had to channel every angsty fiber of my being for crying!Maka.

Q: For Mak: Do you feel like you grew in your art skills through this bang? If so, how?

Mak (mrsashketchum): I actually did grow a lot in my art skills with this bang! I felt that giving myself more challenges in backgrounds helped a lot in dealing with drawing perspective. And also with hair. I learned so much with color as well and how each shade and palette is definitely super important.

Q: What are you most proud of for the piece/pieces you did?

Mak (mrsashketchum): I’m really proud of all my pieces! But if i could only pick one then it would be the bathtub scene for sure! I spent most of my waking hours for it and I even made a 3d model for the perspective just for a reference.

Q: What are you working on next?

Mak (mrsashketchum): I’m definitely working on some more animatics and animations and my Vday art will be super late haha. Also SoMa Week is near and I'm planning really big things!

Q: Favorite/least favorite moment/scene to write?

redphlox: Mmm my fave scene to write was all of them, I felt like I looked forward to all of them now that I look back to it, if that makes sense?

Q: Hardest scene/part to write?

Redphlox: A difficult scene to write was the very end where Soul and Maka finally talk it out bc I felt that I had gotten them in SO MUCH TROUBLE that I was like "how the fffff do I fix this?" But luckily I had the best betas, jaded and proma, there as I wrote it and we were all on the doc at the same time and we were all just, live writing/betaing. I’m v happy to have explored Soul and Maka's friendships and family life. One of my favorite scenes was the scene where Liz talked Maka through some Hard Truths. I love Liz. I think there was a scene I had to delete bc it just wasn’t fitting, it was with Kim and Soul, but I ended up using bits of it later.

Q: Tell us about your writing process.

redphlox: My writing process was basically writing like a turtle at the beginning/struggling to find inspiring music to write to/plotting, and then the last bit was writing 7k daily and going !!!! internally. Lots of keysmashes to my betas.

Q: What are you most proud of this Resbang?

redphlox: Im really proud of writing and finishing this resbang tbh, I had an amazing partner and had fun with my betas, and I pushed my writing speed/abilities because I explored some feelings I hadn't ever experienced before (being left at the altar) I'm happy with the outcome!

Q: Was music important to your process at all, and if so, are there any songs/playlists that were relevant?

redphlox: Yesssss so jaded made a playlist! Lemme get it. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7rssdV2CkoNRl4-cPWuqm7ocC-QxP0Vn

Q: What are you working on next?

redphlox: Next, I'm working on plotting this year's Resbang, finishing Siren AU, writing and posting my longfic Sailor Moon AU, and aside from writing I'm working on being a better reviewer/commenter and beta :D

#AMA transcripts #close your eyes #rbbc #resbang book club #resbang 2017

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reximonite · 5 years

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Character mini brief

For the character mini brief i chose the space pirate theme and the objective was to design my own character. now that i think of it when i was much younger i naturally just used to think of my own series/ animated films and draw my own characters as a hobby. they were usually inspired by an original source that i loved e.g the first one that comes to mind is ‘the meerkat brothers’ which was inspired by ‘Alvin and the chipmunks’.but i never actually drew turnarounds, pose sheets etc since i wasn't familiar with those at the time. as i grew older i lost that big imagination and passion so i eventually stopped but i digress.

Looking at my first ever character turnaround i think i could improve on the anatomy of the drawings especially that 3/4 back view but that was mostly because i using a method which i’m not used to. i was more so ‘constructing’ the character rather than ‘drawing’ like it was advised in the blackboard resources. to be more specific i was first drawing the characters framework using small circles to represent the joints. i then layered the clothes on top whereas before whenever i drew a character from scratch i would draw the clothes and the body as one. i think i did better when it came to the head angles and the facial expression. By the way i prefer the term ‘model sheet’ or ‘reference sheet’ as opposed to ‘turnaround’ Because in my opinion ‘turnaround’ sounds a bit unprofessional but maybe turnaround is used in this case because its more specific whereas reference sheets can feature a mixture of things. when drawing the pose sheet i learned and applied techniques like the counter-pose and line of action for more appeal although i could have used those more. i also learned how twinning isn't good for pose sheets as it is unappealing so i avoided it. i used a reference for one of the poses i didn't feel too confident drawing and it helped. Again i used the same construction method which i used in the turnaround which didn't really work when it came to the anatomy because i wasn't used to drawing that way. i think this really shows in the tired pose where he is looking down but i would say my favourite pose is the running pose especially because he has a very expressive face and it think the sweat makes it even better. speaking of faces, i like how i used a variety of facial expressions as well as poses and i was able to make the character’s facial expression suit the action. next time i should probably fill up the page more though and maybe add some colour. when it comes to the colour way. i really like the colour palettes i used, they reflect the characters different personalities but i definitely could have paid more attention to the smaller details too

concept art:

character turnaround:

character pose sheet:

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how2to18 · 6 years

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This piece will be appearing in the next issue of the Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal: Comedy Issue, No. 17

To support the Los Angeles Review of Books and receive the next issue, donate to our fund drive today or become a member.

“Laughs exude from all our mouths.” — Hélène Cixous

“Comedy, you broke my heart.” — Lindy West

IN A BIT about sexual violence in his 2010 concert film Hilarious (recorded in 2009), the now-infamous Louis C.K. says: “I’m not condoning rape, obviously — you should never rape anyone. Unless you have a reason, like if you want to fuck somebody and they won’t let you.” I was delighted when I first encountered this joke on Jezebel in July 2012 in a post called “How to Make a Rape Joke.” Lindy West was responding to the social media controversy surrounding American comedian Daniel Tosh, who had recently taunted a female heckler with gang rape. West’s insightful essay later led to a 2013 TV debate with comedian Jim Norton as well as her best-selling memoir, Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman, where she describes the fallout of becoming one of the United States’s best-known feminist comedy commentators, including her subsequent, painful decision to stop going to comedy shows.

In “How to Make a Rape Joke,” West wondered whether it is ever okay to approach sexual violence with humor. She wrote that she understood and respected those, like the woman who called out Tosh, for whom it wasn’t, categorically. The sexual assault of women poses a special problem for comedy, she reasoned, because it is an expression of structural discrimination against women. That is, unlike misfortunes such as cancer and dead babies known to befall people at random, if you’re a woman, not only do you face a one in three chance of becoming a target of sexual violence, but you will also likely be held at least partly responsible for it. To illustrate the inappropriateness of jokes about this kind of a situation, she drew a comic analogy between patriarchal society and a place where people are regularly mangled by defective threshing machines and then blamed for their own deaths: “If you care […] about humans not getting threshed to death, then wouldn’t you rather just stick with, I don’t know, your new material on barley chaff (hey, learn to drive, barley chaff!)?” Compassion about a culturally loaded form of suffering would seem, automatically and intuitively, to preclude humor about it. Yet West’s own humorous reframing demonstrated what she ultimately decided: that you could be funny about sexual violence if you “DO NOT MAKE RAPE VICTIMS THE BUTT OF THE JOKE.” In particular, Louis C.K.’s rape joke then earned West’s stamp of approval because, in her words:

[It] is making fun of rapists — specifically the absurd and horrific sense of entitlement that accompanies taking over someone else’s body like you’re hungry and it’s a delicious hoagie. The point is, only a fucking psychopath would think like that, and the simplicity of the joke lays that bare.

Though her recent New York Times piece “Why Men Aren’t Funny” makes it clear that West now regards her defense of Louis C.K. as a relic, her sharp distinction between acceptable and unacceptable jokes in “How to Make a Rape Joke” set the standard for mainstream feminist discussions of comedy for a good five years.

While I find West compelling, in my own efforts to navigate the contemporary feminist ethics of humor throughout this period, I’ve been resisting the impulse to draw limits. Instead, I’ve been looking back to the debates over sexuality that were central to North American feminism in the late 1970s and early 1980s. During the so-called sex wars, feminists agreed that sexuality had always been held in a patriarchal stranglehold but disagreed about what to do about it. The Women Against Pornography saw explicit sexual representations as the very basest mechanisms of female sexual oppression and so focused their energy on educating the public about their harms and prosecuting pornographers. By contrast, sex-positive feminists, as they came to be known, claimed that trying to shut down or cordon off unacceptable expressions of sexuality only exacerbated the problem. They argued that the history of criminalization and widespread fear of any sex but the reproductive, romantic, married kind had not only led to the marginalization of sex workers, lesbians, gay men, trans people, and many other so-called sexual deviants, but also cast sexuality as such into the shadows. Targeting pornography was therefore counterproductive. As Susie Bright, vocal defender of the sex-positivity movement and founder of the first women-run erotic magazine, put it:

porn [can be] sexist. So are all commercial media. [Singling out porn for criticism is] like tasting several glasses of salt water and insisting only one of them is salty. The difference with porn is that it is people fucking, and we live in a world that cannot tolerate that image in public.

Sex-positive feminists actively chose not to contribute to this climate of moral panic, focusing instead on unearthing the deeply embedded mainstream prejudices around sexual practices and fantasies. Instead of turning away, they faced sexuality head on, acknowledging debts to the small minority of people — sexologists, fetishists, queers, sex workers, erotic performers, and indeed pornographers — who had already begun exploring human sexuality in all its complexity, often with little socioeconomic support and at the risk of criminal charges. By many accounts, it was this unabashed approach to sex that led to the development and popularization of safe-sex protocols and consent education later in the 1980s.

There are of course, limits to the comparison of sex and humor, especially given that the impact of hetero-patriarchy on sex is much more immediately visible. Nevertheless, I would suggest that sexuality and humor are not merely analogous, but are in fact overlapping categories of feminist experience. Both are understood to be culturally coded but with powerful bases in the body. Like sex, laughter has historically been considered an unruly instinct, even by the very philosophers who have most rigorously examined it. As scholars like Anca Parvulescu, John Morreall, and Linda Mizejewski have variously shown, the stigma of humor, like that of sex, has been intricately interwoven with its designation as an irrational impulse and with gendered and racialized notions of embodiment. Moreover, there is a shared double standard regarding both laughter and sex: both have been imagined, paradoxically, as things that men have to cajole “respectable” (implicitly white, cisgendered, pretty, heterosexual) women to do and, at the same time, as things that transgressive women instinctively want to do, in excess. The dangers of both sex and humor have been encapsulated in the figure of a woman open-mouthed and out of control. In the early ’80s, the influential sexuality scholar Gayle Rubin observed that the most common symptom of our culture’s general fear of sex, or “sex negativity” as she called it, is the very impulse “to draw and maintain an imaginary line between good and bad sex.” That is, while various mainstream discourses of sex differ from one another in terms of the value systems they deploy and their level of overt misogyny, their views of sex are, ultimately, remarkably uniform: “Most of the discourses on sex, be they religious, psychiatric, popular, or political, delimit a very small portion of human sexual capacity as sanctifiable, safe, healthy, mature, legal, or politically correct” and, once the lines are drawn, “[o]nly sex acts on the good side […] are accorded moral complexity.” Wary of simply rerouting sexual shame, sex-positive feminists instead actively cultivated a nonjudgmental stance.

This might seem the worst possible moment to advocate for an equivalent form of humor positivity, let alone with reference to a joke about sexual violence by Louis C.K. In the wake of the public exposure of numerous celebrity serial sexual abusers such as Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby, the viral #MeToo campaign has uncovered thousands of male harassers and abusers, and pointed to millions of others as yet unnamed. Since C.K. confirmed reports of his nonconsensual exhibitionism, some of the feminist anger and despair that was already rippling across popular and social media is being directed specifically at the industry that gave him his power. Many mainstream feminists, not least West herself, feel more prepared now than ever to throw the bathwater of comedy out along with the many baby-men who have been cavorting in it. Yet, as I see it, it is precisely in the context of our well-justified outrage that humor positivity is most needed. Humor is a vital, elusive, and continually evolving aspect of human experience. Like sex, it has repeatedly served oppressive ends, but it is no more essentially or necessarily discriminatory an impulse than sexuality is. It is undoubtedly important that we probe and resist the misogynist culture of mainstream comedy. At the same time I propose a change in the way we personally and collectively engage with the material this industry trades in — that is, the jokes themselves.

How might we ensure compatibility between the jokes we hear or make and the tools and concepts that shape our responses? How can we prevent our resistance to certain jokes from reproducing the (historically patriarchal) marginalization and stigmatization of the desire to laugh? If we get used to approaching jokes with trepidation, expecting offense, how might that wariness affect our political movements? In the current feminist conversation, these questions have begun to be raised in, for instance, Cynthia Willett, Julie Willett, and Yael D. Sherman’s “The Seriously Erotic Politics of Feminist Laughter,” Jack Halberstam’s “You Are Triggering me! The Neo-Liberal Rhetoric of Harm, Danger and Trauma,” Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai’s “Comedy Has Issues,” and Berlant’s “The Predator and the Jokester.” My sense is that what we especially need now are some clear and concrete principles and practices for humor-positive feminism. Here are three lines of inquiry that I hope may help us to develop a richer set of responses to comedy going forward.

Can we develop a more complex and flexible view of humor’s power dynamics?

One of the major contributions of sex-positive feminism to our current understanding of sexuality was the recognition of seemingly counterintuitive forms of agency from below. Sex-positive feminists showed us the through line between the patriarchal suspicion of sexuality and certain feminist critiques of sexual exploitation. Though the fear of sex was originally and widely promulgated in medical, religious, and legal discourses, some of the alternative schemas of anti-porn feminists heightened the idea that most sex is inherently terrifying. For instance, Catharine MacKinnon’s view that “the social relation between the sexes is organized so that men may dominate and women must submit and this relation is sexual — in fact, is sex” — while it helpfully exposes sexual violence as a structural problem — also makes it impossible to distinguish consensual heterosexuality from rape. Sex-positive feminists turned to the less moralistic disciplinary frameworks of sexology, sociology, and anthropology. Inspired in part by the subversive theories of power of French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault, they insisted that saying yes or no to sexual contact, including sexual domination, was a fundamental form of sexual participation. Moreover, they saw that the patterns of giving, taking, and sharing power through sex are much more various and unpredictable than — and sometimes run counter to — the arrangements delimited by basic socioeconomic and patriarchal paradigms.

A first step for developing a similarly nuanced take on the power relations entailed in humor could be examining and loosening up our often-unconscious obsession with the cruelty of laughter. In the philosophy of humor there are at least three ways of characterizing laughter, which can help to parse the differences between various jokes, as well as modes of delivery and reception. Today humor philosophers are most convinced by the idea, first fully elaborated in the 18th century, that laughter is a response to incongruity: something familiar suddenly looks strange, and the resulting sense of surprise pleases us. Another branch of humor theory draws on psychoanalytic notions of the unconscious. Relief theorists, most famously Freud, have emphasized the way that jokes, like dreams, trick us into considering ideas that we normally repress: laughter specifically manifests the giddiness of released inhibitions. These two modern theories of humor are largely compatible. Amusement does not necessarily degrade its objects but may imaginatively reframe or transform them, circulating power between tellers, laughers, and their objects in any number of ways.

The oldest and still most popular notion of humor, however, is one that presupposes and depends on hierarchical and unidirectional power relations. Superiority theory perceives laughter as the expression of unexpected pleasure at discovering our own excellence relative to the things we laugh at. In Thomas Hobbes’s famous formulation, “Laughter is nothing else but sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others.” Superiority theory initially emerged alongside and is consistent with explicitly elitist political ideologies. It may be the only theory of humor children instinctively grasp: even at an early age, the phrase “That’s not funny!” is understood to mean not what it literally implies — “What you’ve said is not amusing to me and could never amuse anyone” — but rather “That hurts my feelings.” For kids, joking about the wrong thing is an ethical violation; it simply moots the possibility of laughing. These days, distinctions between acceptable and unacceptable jokes seem to put a modern, grown-up face on superiority theory. But jokes labeled as “offensive” or “inappropriate” are determined to be “not funny” in more or less the same way that kids mean it. The tropes that oppose “punching up” to “punching down,” coined in the early 1990s by the feminist satirist Molly Ivins, have been crucial in the popularization and liberalization of superiority theory. Those phrases also put a deceptively simple spatial spin on the relative socioeconomic power of laughers and objects. Reinforcing a David and Goliath moral code, the tropes imply that jokes are crucially aggressive in form, but that in some cases violence is justified. It’s okay — heroic even — to take on a bigger meaner guy, but undoubtedly a bad thing to pick on someone littler and weaker than you.

Of course, jokes can be hurtful, sometimes intentionally so. However, taking cues from sex-positive feminists, we might want to stop simply assuming that they are. Just as consensual sexual relations of domination and submission may look like abuse to those who don’t understand the rules, so might some apparently mean jokes. Think of insult comedy or a roast, where the target welcomes the jokes that really sting. But the larger and more important point is that, more than any other factor, our theories of humor will determine our perception of any joke and of the social and political arenas in which they are being made. Keeping our minds open to the possibility that surprise or relief rather than aggression may be the primary affect or intention will better equip us to see the various, potentially contradictory, facets of any comic provocation. Mainstream feminist critics have specific reasons for rejecting jokes about sexual violence: for some survivors suffering from post-traumatic stress, the power dynamics of humor and of assault can sometimes feel so painfully intertwined that certain jokes are experienced as violations akin to the initial trauma. Yet it is precisely because the very perception of aggression can recharge past suffering that it seems important to remember humor’s other impulses. Recently, artists like Emma Cooper, Heather Jordan Ross, Adrienne Truscott, and Vanessa Place are turning to humor expressly in an effort to destigmatize the experiences of sexual assault survivors and change the tone of our conversation. How might a more general focus on humor as incongruity or relief also help to reduce the frequency or intensity of fight-or-flight responses and open up new aesthetic, therapeutic, and political prospects?

Can we develop a more thoroughgoing and flexible view of the rhetorical and performative aspects of humor?

In recent years, I’ve often been surprised to hear irony or ambiguity denounced in feminist humor criticism, as though it would be possible, if people would just say what they really mean, to be assured of a perfectly direct transmission of ideas or a fully inclusive joke. For example, in her study of the dangers of rape jokes, Lara Cox reiterates the superiority theory view that the pleasure of irony depends on “the idea that there is someone out there who won’t ‘get’ the nonliteral nature of the utterance” — and these dupes are “the joke’s ‘butts’ or ‘targets.’” In his study of race humor, Simon Weaver distinguishes between polysemous jokes, which inadvertently reinforce racism, and clear jokes, whose antiracist message cannot be mistaken. I worry that such arguments seem to disavow the fundamental slipperiness of language. Contributing in their own way to North American sex positivity, Frenchpoststructuralist feminists such as Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous underscored that words have never been equipped for transparent representation. While many jokes do depend on linguistic play, comedians are not responsible for the essential arbitrariness of their medium. Words will always interact and impinge on one another; signification will always be subjectively, historically, and politically inflected, by both speakers and listeners, in myriad ways. Reminding ourselves of the basic wildness of language — and the range of meanings and identities that this wildness makes imaginable, especially in jokes — can temper our anxiety about the inevitability of misinterpretation.

At the same time, let’s attend more carefully to the theatricality of humor, including the jokes and quips that bubble up spontaneously as part of ordinary conversation. In particular, stand-up comedians are in character even when they speak as themselves, and many comedians regularly adopt multiple personas, some of whom channel views that they find especially awful or absurd. Very often these views are already in the air, and the comedian, by giving voice to popular perceptions, hopes to draw fresh attention to them. Moreover, comedians tend not to put on and take off these various personas like so many hats, but rather to alternate and layer them, turning some up and others down, as if each one was a different translucent projection on a dimmer switch. These uneven amplifications of characterization actually generate the dialogic structure of comic performance, as stand-up scholar Ian Brodie explains: “The audience is expected to try to determine what is true [that is, closest to what the comedian generally thinks] and what is play. The comedian[’s] […] aim is […] to deliver whatever will pay off with laughter.” Staying conscious of these shifts will help us to recognize that the most challenging moments — those moments when we don’t know quite where to locate a comedian’s values and commitments — are not incidental but central to the interpersonal dynamics of stand-up comedy.

How can we expand our theories of laughter’s social conditions and effects?

Our most definitive and intense experiences of laughter tend to be in groups of three or more. For most of us, sex and humor are different in this respect. And humor theorists have written very engagingly about the feelings of communion potentially generated through laughter. Ted Cohen writes, for example, that laughing together “is the satisfaction of a deep human longing, the realization of a desperate hope. It is the hope that we are enough like one another to sense one another, to be able to live together.” However, as Robert Provine and others argue, we have so much more to learn about humor’s social aspirations, from the vantage of evolutionary biology, neuroscience, philosophy, psychology, and many other disciplines besides. Feminists will have a lot to contribute to this inquiry, not least because we know to be skeptical of any account of collective social experience that neglects to factor in the uneven distribution of socioeconomic resources and respect and because we are acutely aware of the likelihood of exclusion and humiliation within any diverse group, and the likelihood that these bad feelings will remain invisible to the most entitled people in the room.

As we help to flesh out our understanding of the social benefits and costs of humor, however, I hope we will get better at waiting for the initial wash of feeling to pass before assigning political positions and moral values to jokes, their tellers, and our own and others’ responses. Drawing on the insights of cultural studies, some pro-porn feminists have recently been exploring the consumers’ prerogative in shaping their reception of any sexual representation, regardless of its intended public. In an essay called “Queer Feminist Pigs: A Spectator’s Manifesta,” Jane Ward contemplates her taste for mainstream porn and proposes that,

We need […] a means of “queering” porn that doesn’t rely on filmmakers to deliver to us imagery already stamped with the queer seal of approval, and that doesn’t automatically equate queer viewers with queer viewing. […] Can we watch sexist porn and still have feminist orgasms?

Many of the most successful comedians purposely write material that can reach very different audiences. What if we were to recognize that as listeners or consumers of jokes we have a comparable level of freedom in determining a joke’s meaning, of finding a place from which the joke can be funny to us? Adapting Ward’s question, we might consider: “Can we have a feminist laugh at a discriminatory joke?” Especially given the current state of US and world politics, some humor researchers have been perturbed to discover that certain satires appeal to both progressive and conservative viewers alike. But if humor, like sex, can make strange bedfellows, that capacity to bring people together may be something not — or not only — to fear, but also something to maximize strategically and even celebrate. Even when we’re laughing for different reasons, couldn’t the fact that we’re doing so across too-familiar divides be invigorating in unpredictable ways?

To consider how humor-positive feminism might differ from the censuring approach that is dominant now, let’s return to C.K.’s 2009 joke. It starts with a basic prohibition — “I’m not condoning rape, obviously — you should never rape anyone” — then follows with a rationalization of nonconsensual sex that completely overrides that prohibition: “Unless you have a reason, like if you want to fuck somebody and they won’t let you.” The statements contradict one another and the speaker’s casual diction suggests that he has made a habit of justifying acts of criminal violence. In 2012, West’s superiority theory of humor dictated that her central critical task was to work out who was most hurt by this crazy illogic and determine whether or not that hurt was deserved. She implicitly centered the shift in C.K.’s delivery from one statement to the next, reading these lines as a joke that mocked the perpetrator-persona’s twisted thinking. Feminists had permission to laugh, and in fact wanted to laugh, she argued then, because we felt confident that all of us, including C.K. himself, were not just much nicer but also much smarter than the asshole he was briefly inhabiting on stage. However, C.K.’s recent confirmed sexual misconduct has thoroughly destroyed this version of the joke by eroding the distinction between C.K.’s own voice and that of his perpetrator-persona. As playful distance has given way to painful alignment, the liberal superiority theory must seek a new target. From this vantage, the 2009 joke — insofar as it can still be construed as an utterance capable of eliciting laughter — has to be recognized for what it actually always was: a trivialization of rape.

When West was writing “How to Make a Rape Joke” in 2012, C.K. was appreciated by feminists for regularly raising difficult questions about white heterosexual male privilege. This status provided an important touchstone for West’s feeling that his rape joke, unlike many others, was critical of rape culture: “Louis CK has spent 20 years making it very publicly clear that he is on the side of making things better.” Already by the time she was writing her memoir, however, West had stopped actively defending this joke — “I should have been harder on Louis CK, whom I basically let off on a technicality.” In recent weeks, C.K. has been made a symbol of one of the most insidiously misogynist formal features of confessional stand-up comedy: the way the whole audience is made to share in the comedian’s personal shame. According to this revised binary feminist view, everyone who ever laughed at this joke bears some responsibility for pain it may have caused to assault survivors and for contributing to rape culture.

But is it necessary — or advisable — to turn against our desire to laugh, even as we shift our attention away from C.K. himself? A humor-positive feminist frame invites us to remember the other laughs that we have lost now that C.K. and his perpetrator-persona are not fully distinguishable. We can see that it was previously available as a relief joke that provocatively illustrated the kind of exceptionalism to which we are all capable of falling prey. And as an explicitly anti-sexist incongruity joke, about the tendency of oft-repeated prohibitions to become empty slogans, especially where endemic, shame-inducing patterns of sexual violence are concerned. Paradoxically, though C.K.’s long history of abuse has destroyed his credibility as a critic of the ineffectiveness of liberal platitudes, it also proves the urgent necessity of the kind of critique he was trying to offer.

In December 2017, as I write this, a humor-positive frame also allows us to turn C.K.’s lines into a dark feminist superiority joke that, instead of stressing our own pain and disappointment, capitalizes on the situational irony here. This once-celebrated self-exposer has been exposed as yet another man with a consent problem. That is, since his accusers bravely went public and Louis C.K. affirmed their reports, the coyness of the original lines may be unraveled through a revenge joke: like a deranged wooden puppet, the comedian punches up at himself much harder than he intends. Feminist humorist Jill Gutowitz effectively put this metajoke into circulation when she posted links to C.K. telling a variety of rape jokes over the years, including the one discussed here, below the Tweet: “Surprised about Louis CK? Here’s every time he told us, to our faces, that he was a creep.” Because righteousness isn’t my favorite flavor, I don’t find this new version of the joke as funny as the one I thought that C.K. was telling in 2009. But I do like knowing that it’s going around.

Danielle Bobker is associate professor in the English Department at Concordia University in Montreal, where she is also co-organizer of a working group on Feminism and Controversial Humor.

The post Toward a Humor-Positive Feminism: Lessons from the Sex Wars appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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