#I made myself an opportunity to draw my versions scars ^_^ | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

morganas-pendragons · 3 years

Text

Trace | Hunter

Fic #2 - this one is for the ad’ika, @kryptonian-sith - and features Hunter, another character I have not written for. This batch of fic I’m dishing out might be the softest things I’ve ever done.

I have seen this concept done for characters from other fandoms before, but not this one, so I ran with it. I hope you enjoy!

***

His skin is soft. That’s the first thing you notice when you touch Hunter’s face. Your fingertips dance across the slope of his nose, noticing the tiniest scar that your thumb hits when you touch it. It’s not noticeable to most people.

It is to you. You make a note to ask him about how he’d obtained it.

Your fingertips trace across his cheekbones, down his cheek, across the stubble that’s begun to line his jaw, around the shape of his lips - which you are growing more and more desperate to see if they taste like you imagine they do - and upward to trace the shape of each eye that remains closed as he sleeps.

“Hey you,” It’s early morning in the cottage that you and Hunter have rented for the weekend, the sunlight of Alderaan just barely peeking over the horizon as he rouses from his sleep. The hills and mountains are peaked with snow that stretches out as far as the eye can see. The air is crisp and cold. You’ve never been happier even without being able to see it.. “What-What are you doing?”

“You’ve always been hesitant about me touching you.” You murmur, tilting your head to rest it against your shoulder as you slowly - he cannot do fast movements, so you’ve been deliberate in ensuring you don’t overload his senses - settle yourself down into his lap. “I don’t know why.”

Ever the bashful, Hunter’s gaze slips to the fireplace on the opposite side of the room. “You know what I want to know?” He muses, desperately trying to deflect the subject matter to something else. “How does a Jedi do Jedi stuff while being blind? It’s incomprehensible to me.”

“That’s a big word for you.”

“Shut up.”

Laughter bubbles past your lips as you lean forward and put your hands in their former spots. “This skin is raised. It feels older.” You whisper, grimacing as a brisk wind slips through the slightly opened window on the opposite side of the room. A quick snap of your fingers rectifies that. “What is it?”

What you’ve managed to find is his tattoo. You can tell by the texture of the thing that it covers a significant portion of his face, and a deeper part of you wishes that you were able to see and admire it with your own eyes.

You do something better. You use the Force to see him.

“It’s a skull. It’s kind of The Batch’s... thing.” Hunter takes your hand in his own and uncurls your fingers before pressing a kiss into the center of your palm. Your heart swells at the motion. It had taken him a significant amount of time to be able to accept physical affection, but he’d opened up to the opportunity so quickly with you. “Do you know what I look at when I see you?”

“Humor me.” You muse. “A blind Jedi? A good looking blind Jedi? Your Jedi?”

“Exactly.”

Your heart drops right into your stomach. The two of you may have been together for a while by now, and you’re hiding away from the Empire in this cottage on Alderaan in what may be the best version of a future you will ever have with him, but you’ve never admitted to one another that you were theirs. “Hunter-” You falter.

The Sergeant catches your hands in his own and rests them against his face, suppressing a shiver as your thumb catches the divot in his lip. “You are ner jeti. I’ve been wanting to say that a while. Guess I was afraid to.” He laughs softly and exhales through his nose at a very slow, steady pace. “I’ve never had anything that was mine before. Kaminoans made sure of it. Then you came storming into my life and created chaos and you just fit in so well with my vode. They knew I was in love with you before I ever did.” Tears blur your eyes as Hunter’s hands skim your thighs and travel upward until they’re tangling in your hair and urging you downward until you’re just a breadth apart and you’re flying. “And now we’re here.”

Now we’re here at the end of the world, when all we’ve ever known has faded into the background, and we’re mid-scene so we can make this decision that will affect the rest of our lives.

You hum thoughtfully beneath your breath and slowly sink into The Force so you can see him. He’s regarding you with wide vulnerable eyes, lips parted and heart pounding as he waits for the reaction to his confession.

Will you love me as desperately as I’ve allowed myself to love you?

You’ve never really needed The Force to see Hunter, to feel him. He’s a beacon among his brothers. The one who always looks out for the little guy - the one who’d tear the galaxy apart if it meant his loved ones were safe - and that was what had drawn you to him in the first place.

His undying loyalty. To them, and now.. to you.

With your fingers tangled in his hair, you use your other hand to tilt his chin upward and whisper, “Yes.” before claiming his mouth with your own. “Now we’re here.”

Unknown to Sergeant Hunter of Clone Force 99, the person he loves in that moment of coming together when the entire galaxy is splitting apart is the same day they imprint themselves, their soul, onto his own.

You are bonded. Both of you.

From now until forever... and as you curl into his side and Hunter’s gaze falls upon those snow-peaked mountains, he thinks that when the inevitable war is over that he could settle himself here. Forever in the mountains of Alderaan sounds like a dream that he’s aching to chase.

“Here I come.” He whispers before the warmth of your body and the roaring fire in the corner draws the both of you back under.

And oh.. how he will run.

#Hunter x Reader #Sergeant Hunter x Reader #The Bad Batch #Star Wars imagines #Star Wars oneshots #Star Wars fanfic #Star Wars fanfiction

117 notes · View notes

koreaweeb · 3 years

Text

Red Strings - Thirteenth String

@underc0vercryptid-reads @laraplisetski @omegahighendpro @thooo0t @t3sselated @youngestdelacour

TW: SWEARING, VIOLENCE, ABUSE, MENTION OF SUICIDE, MENTION OF SELF-HARM, SEXUAL CONTENT

Walking through the hospital even without her iconic red dress, Kurenai was turning heads. She wore a simple white silk camisole with an oversized turquoise blazer on the outside and matching trousers. Her heels were significantly shorter than usual, only about an inch tall, and she had her hair in a ponytail with two loose strands framing her face.

A simple look, but she caught his eyes.

“Good morning, Chishiya-kun. Coffee?” Honoka asked, trying her best not to take note of how he had his eyes on Kurenai the entire time. Even when she did not look in his direction.

“No thanks.”

“Shuntarou.” Calling his name as she poked her head out from the break room, Kurenai smiled. “Would you like some coffee? I brought my Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee beans.”

With a nod, Chishiya was already walking toward the break room.

Honoka could not help but roll her eyes. What a hypocrite Kurenai was. In front of Honoka, she was always acting innocent and implying that she had no intentions of competing with her for Chishiya but her actions were quite the opposite.

When Honoka suggested sushi for lunch with Chishiya, Kurenai would buy sushi for all the staff. When she offered Chishiya a sandwich once, Kurenai brought in a Michelin star chef just to make one sandwich. And that one time when Chishiya wanted a bottle of water, Kurenai had ten boxes of VOSS delivered to the hospital. Not just the normal VOSS, but the fancy lemon cucumber flavoured sparkling version.

How was this not competing with her?

“You went with a different look today,” Chishiya said, watching as Kurenai was making coffee with their machine.

“Hm? You noticed?” she grinned, though her focus was on the machine. It was different to the one she was used to at home. In theory, this was a lot simpler than the one she had, but she was having difficulty figuring out the mechanics. “It’s not really practical to wear a dress in a hospital.”

“You look good in dresses though.”

He walked up to the machine and reached for the back, turning it on. Someone must have accidentally shut the machine off, though it was entertaining to watch Kurenai struggle with such a simple task.

Once it was turned on, everything else was easy enough and before long, Kurenai had a pot of coffee ready and the aroma filled the entire room. She poured a cup for Chishiya before taking a sip of her own. She hummed with satisfaction, sitting on the sofa.

“Where did you learn to make coffee?”

“Coffee is one of those things I prefer to make myself,” Kurenai said, holding her cup with both hands, looking at the liquid inside. “Ayako-san’s coffee is fine but not quite right. So I took a class, and after some trial and error, found a way to make it that is…” She kissed fingers like an Italian chef would.

Frankly, coffee was not something that Chishiya concerned himself with. If he needed one, he would make one in the break room. Or he would buy a can from the vending machine. If he wanted to indulge a little, he would head to the shopping centre nearby and get himself a Starbucks. He would not, however, spend time learning about coffee beans and how to roast them.

But the coffee Kurenai made was especially good.

“Is that Blue Mountain I smell?”

Disrupting the mood, Ichiro walked into the break room. He poured himself a cup of coffee, taking a sip, and let out a satisfied sigh. Instantly, Kurenai’s mood soured and she was no longer enjoying her morning coffee.

“Good morning, Morita,” she greeted, turning her laptop on. “Fancy seeing you here.”

“Well, this is our project,” he said. “You look like a hot secretary today, nice.”

How crude, and classless.

Kurenai had to physically bite her own tongue so she did not blurt out something offensive. As much as she hated Ichiro’s presence, he was on the project. If she got along with him, this would go a lot smoother and that would mean getting rid of him faster.

However, she did not have time nor the chance to say anything as a loud bang could be heard from outside, along with some scufflings and shoutings.

All three of them headed out to see what was going on, only to see a man frantically waving a knife around, shouting something incoherent.

As soon as he read the situation, Chishiya went to grab Kurenai by the arm. He had to get her to safety. Except, he was grabbing at air. In a panic when seeing the knife, Ichiro dove for the nearby ward though in the process, he nudged Kurenai who, caught by surprise, was now standing in front of the knife man.

The man was quick to grab Kurenai, hooking his arm around her neck and had his knife pressed to her throat. “Don’t you dare come closer or I’ll kill her! I’ll do it!”

“Hey! Let her go,” Chishiya said, holding his hands up to show that he was harmless. “Let her go, and we can work this out.” When Chishiya spoke, the man had his knife pointed at him while keeping hold of Kurenai, stepping away from Chishiya. “Do not hurt her.”

“Stop it! Leave her!” Honoka whispered, grabbing Chishiya by the arm to try and get him to hide like everyone else.

He flung her hands away, taking cautious steps toward the man but still keeping a distance. He was trying to think of a way to subdue the man without hurting Kurenai, and so many scenarios were running through his mind. She was too close to the man to get out unscathed.

“You said! You said she wouldn’t die!” the man cried. “Your doctors said they will do their best to keep her alive! Why did she have to die when the punk who hit her didn’t?! Why?!” His knife was back on Kurenai’s throat, cutting into her skin and drawing a little blood.

“Do you know who I am?” Kurenai asked.

“I don’t care who you are! You better bring me to that punk!”

“My name is Chuya Kurenai,” she said, keeping her cool despite the position she was in. “And when I say you do not want to hurt me, you better trust me. Hurting me is not going to bring you anything but misery. If you let me go, however, I can help you. You know the Chuya Group, right? My father is Chuya Atsushi. We have all the money and the power to help you.”

Kurenai’s words were distracting the man as he seemed to be deep in thoughts. Chishiya took the opportunity to grab the hand holding the knife while pulling Kurenai away at the same time. Startled, the man pulled his hand away, slashing Chishiya’s arm in the process. Security was quick to jump in, subduing the man.

“Are you hurt?”

Both Chishiya and Kurenai asked the same question simultaneously.

Chishiya lifted her chin, taking a look at the cut on her neck. Thankfully, it was not a deep cut and she was no longer bleeding. His arm, however, had received quite a cut. His white coat sleeve was dyed red, and only now was Chishiya starting to feel the pain.

How fortunate for them to be in a hospital.

He was brought down to A&E where a nurse stitched him up. Kurenai was waiting outside the curtain, and the moment the nurse walked out, she went in to see Chishiya.

“Hey…”

“Hey,” he smiled.

“How are you?”

“I got six stitches. Probably a scar too. But I’m alr-”

Before he could finish the sentence, Kurenai was hugging him. Her arms were tight around him, like she was making sure he was really there. And while he was rather composed before, Chishiya suddenly felt overwhelmed.

When he saw the knife on Kurenai’s throat, his mind went blank. He could not think straight because fear was all he felt. Not fear for his own life, or of the knife. But fear for Kurenai’s safety.

“Thank you.”

Pulling away from the hug, Kurenai held his face in her hands, stroking her thumb gently against his cheeks. She could not help herself as she was leaning closer until finally their lips met. And before she knew it, Chishiya was kissing back too.

#rs ch 13 #chishiya #chishiya shuntaro #chishiya x oc #aib #alice in borderland #imawa no kuni no arisu #imawa no kuni no alice

39 notes · View notes

salty-ironstrange-shipper · 3 years

Note

7. What element of writing do you struggle with most? 13. First fandom you ever wrote for? 21. Favorite pairing to write for? (platonic or romantic!) 34. Copy and paste an excerpt you’re particularly fond of.

7. What element of writing do you struggle with most?

I’ve talked about this a bit, but dialogue. I’m not too bad at coming up with the words, but I am always asking myself, “Is this how this character speaks?” (I could never write a character who spoke in pop culture reference because your bitch don’t know any). And sex scenes are difficult. They just take a lot of my time and energy.

13. First fandom you ever wrote for?

When I was 13 I wrote a Doctor Who fic about evil versions of the 10th and 11th having sex. It may or may not still exist somewhere in the internet. Good luck finding it.

21. Favorite pairing to write for? (platonic or romantic!)

I’ve written 30 ironstrange fics, and I’ve really enjoyed writing for them!

That said, I do feel a bit wrung out from focusing so intensely on one fandom for so long, so right now I’m diversifying a bit and writing some cherik fic.

34. Copy and paste an excerpt you’re particularly fond of.

This is like, a whole scene, but I’m gonna do it anyway.

Erik would never forget the night they met.

He knew how other people felt about telepaths. Even Raven was likely to snap at her brother if she suspected he’d gone snooping around her head. But the first time he’d felt Charles’s mind in his hadn’t felt like an invasion, hadn’t seemed unnatural. No, it was the most natural thing in the world. One moment, he had been drowning, determined to kill Shaw even if it meant tearing himself apart. The next, he was surrounded by the burning warmth and light and sensation that was Charles Xavier, and the world had new meaning. The submarine ceased to exist for him. His universe narrowed down to this one man, this person like him, with his blue eyes and his red lips and his kindness. He’d never felt anything like that.

He wondered if Charles Xavier could make him feel like that every day.

After they’d boarded the Coast Guard’s boat and headed below deck to change into dry clothes, they’d been standing alone in a small, poorly lit room as they undressed. Erik stretched awkwardly for his zipper. Charles hadn’t even asked, hadn’t said anything at all before walking over and unzipping the wetsuit himself, deft hands peeling the rubbery material off. Erik should have been annoyed, should have snapped at him to keep his clever fingers to himself.

He didn’t.

If Erik was honest with himself, he’d known he wanted Charles even then. But he didn’t said anything, didn’t try to reach out when the telepath laid gentle, understanding hands on his scarred skin. His body was a live-wire, raw nerves laid bare to the other mutant. Any other person in the world, and he would have flinched away, would have growled and grabbed their wrist and twisted until it snapped—

But Charles didn’t have taking hands. His fingers were gentle in a way that was foreign to him. He wouldn’t touch Erik to hurt him, would never take anything that wasn’t offered. Before either of them had even realized what they were doing, Charles was brushing his fingers through Erik’s still-wet hair before drawing them down his cheek and neck, tracing the harsh jut of his collarbone before winding back up. He stopped when his hand was cupping the other man’s cheek and Erik, despite himself, leaned into the warm touch.

It took him a minute to open his eyes. When he did, Charles was staring back at him. The words from earlier rang through Erik’s ears. You’re not alone, you’re not alone, we’re not alone—

Nothing else happened between them that night. The boat was swarming with CIA agents, and there were questions to be asked, mutants to meet, Shaw to track. Then they were on the road, trying to find others of their own kind. There must have been a thousand opportunities then. When he slept, he descended into dreams of Charles’s pink lips, lithe body, and clever fingers. Looking back, he thought Charles must have avoided looking at Erik’s mind after the first time he said to, because he never seemed to know the thoughts Erik had, the desire to reach out and take him. Erik knew that he could have had the other mutant any time he wanted, but it had seemed too risky, their connection too fragile. Charles was the first person he’d cared about since his mother died. It wasn’t his fault that he couldn’t tell how broken Erik was, that he didn’t see how everything he touched cracked and turned to ashes in his hands. Charles may have looked into his mind once, but it was obvious that he was too idealistic to see Erik for the monster Shaw made. After that first night, he didn’t touch Charles again for months.

No, nothing else happened between them until the night after the satellite dish.

Erik wasn’t ashamed to cry when Charles brought that memory forth. He hadn’t even realized he still had any untouched good memories, that he could even feel happiness like that anymore. Two things happened then. The first was that he realized that Charles saw him, truly saw every part of Erik, the good and the bad (and he hadn’t even believed there was any good left in himself). But he didn’t leave, didn’t flinch or look away. The second was that he realized that he could feel that way again, that he could be happy with Charles. It was a revelation. Never before had he imagined a future before himself after killing Shaw. After that day, he started to think there might be one.

That night, Erik gathered all his will to knock on Charles’s door. The telepath answered immediately. He’d probably sensed Erik’s arrival long before, had stood there waiting for the minutes it took Erik to force himself into action, but he waited for the other man to make the first move. He waited until Erik was ready.

That, as much as anything, confirmed what Erik already knew.

He walked into the room and shut the door behind him. They looked at each other, long, drawn-out stares unaccompanied by words. Then Charles was in his arms, red mouth soft against Erik’s chapped lips, hands holding him like he was scared to let go, and it felt like coming home.

He always said Charles had given him a home.

- Chapter 7, A Treatise on Evolution and Extinction

#asks #writing #my writing #fandom #fanfiction #asks game #ask game #ask games #cherik #ironstrange #incorrect-ironstrange #funkylittlebidiot

20 notes · View notes

kashuan · 4 years

Text

All right, there are quite a few things that come to mind with a question as broad as this, so here’s my best attempt to sum up what character design means to me in like 5 minutes :,D. I’m going to start with a few very quick sketches that talk about more my general approach to drawing, but I’m going to build up to how it all connects with character.

Step 1) Find reference! Whenever you can, use reference, it will always make your character’s posing look 100 times more genuine than anything you can pull from your brain, and that’s nothing to feel bad about. It’s not cheating because we’re not stopping at Step 2 either, which is where the misnomer comes in that you’re just ‘copying’ (protip: even step 2 isn’t a straight Copy; as long as you’re not tracing, you’re not copying, and even tracing has its uses for personal studies). I could do a whole answer of it’s own about picking your reference, but I’ll keep it short by saying: not every reference will fit every character. Keep in mind your character’s attitude when choosing your ref. Some poses are so generic they’re one size fits all, but even this very simple pose has unique character to it. The way the legs are posed, to me, gives it a young and girlish feeling, and depending how you played with the expression, you could even make it come off shy. An overbearingly confident character, while also taking an arms crossed pose, will likely position their legs differently, assuming a stance that takes up more space, etc.

Step 2) Draw pretty much exactly what you see first, but keep it simple. Think of the body like individual shapes; anatomy is not the focus right now, and you’ll actually hinder yourself if you hone in on that first. What you want to do at this stage is capture what the pose is generally doing; character isn’t involved yet Step 3) Now, working off 2′s framework, start considering body type. If you skip the previous step, you might have a hard time capturing the gesture correctly, since it’s a lot for your brain to juggle at once. When I sketched these two different body types, I built it straight off the first drawing, erasing lines as needed.

So the first image includes some extremely basic body type variations, this one pushes that idea further. 1 is the basic frame from the last image, while 2 is about playing with proportions. There are a lot of ways you can play with proportions, and as I’ll come to sound like a broken record about: make those decisions thoughtfully. For example, when I made this version shorter than the reference base, I had to consider exactly where I wanted her to lose that height. Here, I made her shorter waisted, took a little length from the legs, and gave her a squatter neck as well. You can do one of these or all of them. Just keep in mind those are all individual options. Letting your train of thought stop at ‘this character is short/tall so I’m just going to generally shrink/stretch their body’ means you’ll run out of variety pretty fast, and sometimes the overall proportions can end up looking wonky (though there’s always exceptions to the rule, remember that the individual body parts should remain correctly scaled in relation to each other). Image 3 is another approach to proportional manipulation, except rather than focusing on height, it focuses on fat distribution and to a lesser extent bone structure. Again, there’s so many individual places you can focus on here, make sure to mix them up. Arm size, shoulder broadness, chest and hip size, leg thickness and musculature, foot and hand size and so forth. Image 4 is a further exaggeration of image 3 and the lines have started to get a little more stylized. While image 3 is still reasonably realistic, 4 is just starting to cross into cartoon territory. Advantage of 4 is that when you are able to push the proportions further due to the leniency of style, you can sell a clearer idea and a clearer character. Downside is, well, it looks more cartoonish now, and depending on the needs of your image that might not be what you want ie: it can look like a mistake rather than a purposeful choice if everyone else around the character is drawn more realistically.

Also… I see variations on this general advice quite a lot for women, but don’t forget about doing the same for men. It’s great to see how eager a lot of artists are to experiment with the female form that is simply absent in a lot of mainstream media, but I find that men really tend to fall by the wayside here even though they often get equally shallow treatment in the mainstream. There’s usually like 2-3 ‘go-to’ body types for men and that’s it. Men’s bodies can have the exact same amount of variety as a woman’s, including the individual ways the fat can be distributed on it, and the assorted ways their proportions can be played with. Whenever I find an artist that does this it’s like striking gold to me tbh.

So there’s some very rough hows. But, perhaps even more importantly than any of that, is WHY you make these choices. This is going to get a little stream of consciousness, but with a question this broad, I tried to hit on as many general points I could think of in regard to my own process.

-When I start to design a character, I really need to have an understanding of them first. This includes things like backstory, personality, habits, so and so forth… Yes, all of this stuff shows up in their design, even if it’s just a drawing of them standing straight up. This isn’t just like ‘this character got this scar at age 7 so I need to know where it goes′, I mean in depth info about them. I touched on this a little bit earlier, bringing up the different ways a character would assume the same general pose, but let me expand on that. -What do I mean by personality? So there’s the most obvious answer, which is that a bubbly character will assume bubbly poses, a sullen character will slouch more, etc… But let’s take it further than that. This is a concept I’ve touched on in past tutorials, but here’s a quick recap. A character’s personality involves their opinions, for one; how do you make that show up in their design? Well, one of the most obvious questions I always ask myself is: what is their opinion on their own appearance (the thing we are drawing)/how do they want to be perceived by others? Consider a strong character. I see a lot of artists who take this thought as far as: okay, this character is strong, so I’m gonna throw a 6 pack on him, maybe a nice pair of guns, and call it a day. Which leads to like, nice art, but also...kind of bland? I think that’s because this is a rather half-baked approach. How can we take it further? Ask yourself more specific questions. Is your strong character concerned with being perceived as an ‘ideal’ sort of fit by others (the type you give that showy 6 pack to) or does that not matter to them? (more likely to look ‘chubby’ if not outright fat, though probably is just as if not more capable of actually doing some real heavy lifting than saran wrapped abs man). If they’re some kind of mystical being that can look like whatever they want (ie: the anime waif that can also lift 1000 lbs-trope), you should still take into account their personal perspective on appearance. Don’t just stop at ‘this guy/girl is strong so they’ll look super shredded’ or ‘they’re magic so I’ll do whatever’. Doing this, you’ve instantly lost a chance to inform the audience more about the individual there beyond ‘they’re strong’ -Break it down further with their habits. What is their daily life like? If they’re running ten miles every day they should probably have some strong looking legs. If their job involves a lot of lifting, maybe focus on the upper body more and leave the legs less defined. Do they eat a lot? Or drink? The way the fat distributes in both these cases will be noticeably different (and this isn’t even taking into account points like an endomorph vs an ectomorphs body, which I always suggest reading up on). I’d definitely recommend drawing as many different body types as you can just as studies, in order to add these variations to your mental library. I’m sure every artist has seen this popular athlete line up by now, but really study images like this. Don’t just mindlessly copy what you see when you create your own characters though; think about why those athletes have the bodies they have, what they specifically did to get them like that, and how that can apply to your character’s own life. -One thing that has always bothered me is how often artists are afraid to use the head (not the features; I’ll get to that in a second) as an extension of the body when it comes to imbuing it with variety and character. While it is absolutely possible to have a thin face and a fat body (as is any combo), it’s another missed opportunity not to experiment with chubby cheeks, a soft jawline, etc. It’s a cliche to mention him at this point as an inspiration, but one of my very favorite things about Mucha’s art was how he was able to make fuller faces look so beautiful despite being a rather nontraditional approach (so many art books try to tell you this is a big NO). example, example. These faces actually look like real individuals to me than a drawing that focuses too hard on being generically aesthetically pleasing. -So, facial features. A face with less traditional features isn’t just going to be more memorable than Stock Beautiful Face #73, but it’s basically a more zoomed in version of informing the audience about the character in the same way the body does. -Know tropes, play with tropes, do not rely on tropes. Sunken bone structure, long features-guy will always pretty much read like a villain (or at least someone off-putting), but find somewhere to make the formula your own. Give him thicker eyebrows or big ears. Give the girl with the standard doll-face a nose that sticks out a little more prominently or a crooked smile. -Speaking of are so many different ways to draw a smile, do not underestimate the mileage you can get out of this one feature alone. Artists tend to have a favorite way to draw smiles, in my experience, but remember your character. Would they have a big toothy grin, a handsome ‘cool’ looking smile, a small shy lopsided one, ones that touch the eyes, ones that don’t… This is probably a repetitive point by now but just do whatever you can not to draw the exact same feature on two different characters, and make sure to think through your reasoning for every choice you make. To me, it’s always immediately evident if an artist really knows their character or if they’re just trying to make something aesthetically pleasing. The former is always more attention grabbing in my opinion. -One of my favorite things to consider when designing a character who’s part of a family: genetics and how you can play with them to inform the audience more about the character’s story. Does this character take after their mother or father? How? Why? Why why, you might ask? This isn’t a photo of a real person, this is an illustration that you should be making deliberate choices about every step along the way. It’s one thing to draw a character that looks like their parent simply because logic dictates they should, another to make meaningful decisions as to where and why they do. Some examples: He has his father’s eyes because they carry the same intensity and other characters are a little put off by him because it (conversely, maybe he’s such a gentle character that this detail stands out twice as strongly). He has the same hair as his father, but he styles it differently to avoid the association. She has her mother’s nose which everyone compliments her on so shes happy to be seen in profile. She has her father’s broad shoulders and she’s a little self conscious about it so she tends to wear baggier clothing. Etc etc! In all these cases, you can communicate these details through even a simple drawing of the character standing alone, and should try to as often as you can. -In the end, the only way you’re going to know how to draw all these different details, whether they be different body types or different facial features, is by studying real people. Draw as many different kinds as you can, add them to your mental library. Your reference will never give you everything you need to work it, and I’m not sure if that’s maybe what this question as getting at-- if I have a reference folder of go-to ‘types’ or something. I don’t. I have a folder of poses labeled with characters I think they’d fit, and that’s about it. If you’re just imitating what you see in a photo, you’ll always be drawing That Person, not Your Character. So you are going to have to pull some of it out of your brain. Note, however, the important difference between just ‘making it up’ and recalling information you’ve studied in the past. That said, while on this last topic of expanding your mental library, that includes not just doing studies, but also learning and observing the ways other accomplished artists work. Here are some of my book recommendations when it comes to those which have most helped me in regard to this particular subject. This includes books that specifically tell you how to vary your body types, but also ones that just have a lot of examples of different kinds: Morpho: Anatomy for Artists Morpho: Fat and Skin Folds Famous Artists School Course in Illustration and Design (If anyone is interested in this one and has trouble finding a non $500 copy, hit me up and I’ll help you out) Spirit of the Pose Anatomy Lessons from the Great Masters Drawing People: How to Portray the Clothed Figure Figures from Life (my favorite currently; not the most varied array of figures but he goes in depth on how to successfully grow an academic study of a model into an illustration influenced by your own ideas and personal style) If you found this answer helpful, although it isn’t specifically about character design, I go a little more in depth about some of the topics I briefly covered here (such as choosing the right reference, good vs bad reference in general, honing in on shapes, pushing the pose, etc) in this short book of mine :>

#tumblr messed up the coding on the original ask so I had to repost this!#art tutorial #hope this helps!!#not sure if got a little too rambly #i wonder if it's hashtag justintpthings to spend 3/4ths of a post talking about how to draw by talking about thinking lol

115 notes · View notes

la5t-res0rt · 4 years

Text

this was written several weeks ago in response to asks i was receiving i am posting it now it is very long the longest i have ever made and it is not very well edited but here it is in this final essay i talk about how shitty rae is about black people in her writing as well as just me talking about how her writing sucks in general lets begin

hello everyone

as you may know i have received a lot of anons in the last week or so about issues of racism in the beetlejuice community both just generally speaking and also within specific spaces

i was very frustrated to not be getting the answers i wanted because i typically do not talk about what i do not see but in an effort to be better about discourse i went looking through discourse from before my time in the fandom and i also received some receipts and information from my followers and from some friends

keep in mind that the voices and thoughts of bipoc are not only incredibly important at all times but in this circumstance it is important that if a bipoc has something to add you listen and learn and be better

i admit that when this happened i wasnt aware of the extent of what occurred and im angry at myself for not doing more at that time and i want to work harder to make sure something like this doesnt go unnoticed again

im a hesitant to talk about months old discourse because i have been criticized for bringing up quote old new unquote but this is very important and i am willing to face whatever comes from to me

lets talk about this

content from our local racist idiot that may be months old but its important

putting my thoughts under a cut to spare the dash but before i begin obviously this is awful

lets fucking unpack this folks

right out the gate op states that she supports artistic freedom but then within a couple words she goes against that statement

being entirely canon compliant isnt artistic freedom and even so if this person has so much respect for canon they wouldnt be out here erasing lydias obvious disgust for beetlejuice in the movie or ignoring lydias age for the sake of shipping that shit isnt canon either

also we love the quick jab at the musical there hilarious we love it dont we because god forbid a licensed and successful branch on a media have any standing in this conversation but whatever

now lets scroll down and talk about the term racebending

the term racebending was coined around 2009 in response to the avatar the last airbender movie a film in which the east asian races of the characters were erased by casting white actors in the three leading roles of aang sokka and katara

whenever the term racebending is used in a negative light it is almost always a case of whitewashing like casting scarlett johansen in ghost in the shell or the casting of white actors of the prince of persia sands of time instead of iranian ones

this kind of racebending erases minorities from beeing seen in media and is wrong

all that being said however racebending has also been noted to have very positive after effects like the 1997 adaptation of cinderella or casting samuel jackson as nick fury in the marvel movies nick fury was originally a white guy can you even imagine

i read this piece from an academic that said quote writers can change the race and cultural specificity of central characters or pull a secondary character of color from the margins transforming them into the central protagonist unquote

racebending like the kind that rae is so heated about is the kind of creative freedom that leads to more representation of bipoc in media which will never be a bad thing ever no matter how pissy you get about it

designing a version of a character as a poc isnt serving to make them necessarily better it serves to give new perspective and perhaps the opportunity to connect even more deeply with a character it doesnt marginalize or erase white people it can uplift poc and if you think uplifting poc is wrong because it tears down white people or whatever youre a fucking moron and you need to get out of your podunk white folk town and see the real world

the numbers of times a bipoc particularly a bipoc that is also lgbt+ has been represented in media are dwarfed by what i as a white dude have seen myself represented in media is and that isnt okay that isnt equality and its something that should change not only in mainstream media but in fandom spaces as well

lets move down a bit further to the part about bullying straight people which is hilarious and lets also talk about the term fetishistic as well lets start with that

this person literally writes explicit pornography of a minor and an adult are we really going to let someone like that dictate what is and what isnt fetishistic

similarly to doing a positive racebend situation people may project lgbt+ headcanons on a character because its part of who they are and it helps them feel closer to the character and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that

depicting lgbt+ subject matter on existing characters isnt an inherently fetishistic action generally things only really become fetishistic when the media is being crafted and hyped by people who are outside of lgbt+ community for example how young teens used to flip a tit about yaoi or how chasers fetishize trans people

but drawing a character with top surgery scars or headcanoning them as trans is harmless and its just another way to interpret a character literally anone could be trans unless if their character bio says theyre cis and most of them dont go that deep so it really is open to interpretation and on the whole most creators encourage this sort of exploration because it is a good thing to get healthy representation out in the world

as for it being used to bully straights thats just funny i dont have anything else on that like if youre straight and you feel threatened and bullied because of someone headcanoning someone as anything that isnt cishet youre a fucking idiot and a weak baby idiot at that like the real world must fucking suck for you because lgbt+ people are everywhere and statistically a big chunk of your favorite characters arent cishet sorry be mad about it

lets roll down a bit further about the big meat of the issue which was when several artists were drawing interpretations of lydia as a black girl which i loved but clearly this person didnt love it because they have a very narrow and very racist and problematic view of what it means to be a black person

and before i move forward i must reiderate that i am a white person and you should listen to the thoughts of poc people like @fright-of-their-lives or @gender-chaotic it is not my place to explain what the black experience is like and it certainly isnt this persons either

implying that the story of a black person isnt worth telling unless if the character faces struggles like racism and prejudice is downright moronic

why use the word kissable to describe a black persons lips now thats what i call fetishistic and its to another extreme if youre talking about a black version of lydia on top of that

the author of this post says herself that shes white so clearly shes the person whos an authority on the black experience and what it means to be a black person right am i reading that right or am i having a fucking conniption

how about allowing black characters to exist without having to struggle why cant a black version of lydia just be a goth teenager with a ghost problem who likes photography and is also black like she doesnt have to move to a hick town and get abused by racist folks she doesnt have to go through any more shit than she already goes through and if you honestly think thats the only way to tell a black persons story you need to get your brain cleaned

you know nothing about the complexities about being a black person and i dont either but you know wh odo black people who are doing black versions of canon characters they fucking know

lets squiggle down just a bit further

so the writer has issues with giving characters traits like a broad nose or larger lips if theyre a woman but if theyre a man suddenly its totally okay to go all ryan murphy ahs coven papa legba appropriation when approaching character design like are you fucking stupid do you hear yourself is that really how you see black men like what the fuck is wrong with you

none of the shit youre spewing takes bravery it takes ignorance and supreme levels of stupidity

do you really think you with your fic where a black lgbt+ woman is tortured and abused where you use the n word with a hard r to refer to her like that shits not okay its fucking depraved and yeah we know you love being shitty but like christ on a bike thats so much

can we also talk about this

what the fuck is this fetishistic bull roar garbage calling this black character beyonce dressing her up in quote fuck me heels unquote are you are you seriously gonna write this and say its a shining example of how to write a black character youre basically saying ope here she is shes a sex icon haha im so progressive and i clealry understand the black experience hahahaha fuck you oh my god

on top of that theres a point where this character is only referred to as curly hair or the fact that the n word is used in the fic with the hard r like thats hands down not okay for you to use especially not in a manner like this jesus christ

oop heres a little more a sampling for you of the hell i am enduring in reading this drivel

oh boy lets put a leash on the angry black woman character lets put her in a leash and have the man imply hes a master like are you kidding me are you for real and what the fuck is with calling her shit like j lo and beyonce do you actually think thats clever at all are you just thinking of any poc that comes into your head for this

also lydia fucking tells this girl that she shouldnt have lost her temper like she got fucking leashed im so tired why is this writing so problematic and also so bad

hold up before i lose my head lets look at some of her own comments on the matter of this character and what happens to her

hi hello youre just casually tossing the word lynch out there in the wide open world as if thats not a problem that is still real like are you fucking unhinged there have been multiple cases of this exact thing happening in our firepit of a country in the last five months alone like how can you still have shit like this up for people to read how can you be proud of work like this in this climate

and also what the fuck is that last bit

what the actual fuck

i dont speak for black people as a white person but you do!? im sorry i had to get my punctuation out for that because wow thats fucking asinine just because one black person read your fic and didnt find the torture and abuse of your one black character abhorrant doesnt mean that the vast majority of people not only in the fandom but in the human population with decency are going to think its okay because its not

i started this post hoping to be level headed and professional but jesus fucking christ this woman is something else white nationalism is alive and well folks and its name is rae

if you defend this woman you defend some truly abhorrant raecism

editors notes

in order to get some perspective on these issues more fully some of the writing by the author was examined and on the whole it was pretty unreadable but i want to just call back to the very beginning of this essay where the person in question talked about holding canon in high regard but then in their writing they just go around giving people magic and shit and ignoring the end of the movie entirely like are you canon compliant or nah

the writing doesnt even read like beetlejuice fanfic it reads as self indulgent fiction you could easily change the names and its just a bad fanfic from 2007

also can we talk about writing the lesbian character as an angry man hater like its 2020 dude and als olets touch on that girl on girl pandering while beetlejuice is just there like here we go fetishizing again wee

i cant find a way to work this into this already massive post but

im going to throw up

okay so thats a lot we have covered a lot today and im sure my ask box will regret it but this definitely should have been more picked apart when it happened

please feel free to add more to this i would love more perspectives than just my own.

#long post #racism #raecism #im so tired #thanks for reading

41 notes · View notes

sysig · 3 years

Text

2020 Art Purge

I had quite a few doodles that I didn’t end up posting ‘cause I ran out of room or they didn’t fit the theme or any number of reasons, so here they are now with a little ramble about what I remember about them

I had a few leftover Camp Camp doodles, especially from earlier on, thus why David can look a little funny and off-model. I very much wanted to see how he’d look in a suit, I got a few different chances to draw him so! I wanted to post the “Break the Cycle” one but never found the opportunity, it was something along the lines of breaking the cycle of abuse, from his relationship with Campbell and Max’s with his parents. And then a moody Max as well hehe, that one was in October so it was the most recent! Just wanted to draw an angry lad

Mostly fanfic or random ZEX doodles leftoever from SCII - DAX’s intimidating figure in one of the fics really stood out to me but I don’t know I fully captured just how freaked out he’d be. I remembering wanting to be very emotive with his pupil, both panicked and high off adrenaline and still maintaining just a bit of his aloofness, it’s hard! And the first draft of YIK throwing down a rope for ZEX from the pirate fic, I liked this one but it wasn’t energetic enough! A quick Captain from the sword fight (still so cool!), and a silly interaction of if Hayes shamed an openly xenophilic Captain lol. I really need to design a Captain myself so I can wander around being obnoxiously alien-loving on main lol

Around the same time smol and I made this beautiful idiot, she proposed the idea of trauma and generational traits affecting bending, which I was all for, and I made a cute little non-bender family with different dominant and recessive traits. They both live in the Earth kingdom, she’s a refugee and he’s been a resident for generations, and they met and fell in love, aw ♥ And then one more Mac n’ Cheese for the road because I drew him once in reaction to drawing the Solitaire crew and then never again

Unposted sona stuff mostly from the beginning of the year and then I posted the rest of it! Sometimes it was just a bad style day, sometimes it didn’t fit or would be very late (cough cough the Valentines’ Day one) or came off as weird (the spare murder was in reference to reading edgy stuff lol - considering I had just come off Put That Kid Down and the Vargas update hadn’t come out yet - phewf! I did get exactly what I asked for, that’s for sure) The daily pages one is especially funny to be because a) it’s true I still do but b) it was immediately before Bar’s redesign and his whole Deal™ changing, so it had to be left out for being too whimsical lol. The last one still makes me laugh, a happy version of “please anticipate my upcoming response”

More sonas! Oh and a Coffee, since he was the only other Just Desserts character to get left out. Well, I guess I had one of Kaiein too, but does he count? Ehh

It was a silly one at least lol.

There wasn’t a whole lot of unpublished AGE this year, or in general, but it’s a shame because they really turned out cute. I remember I was practicing PigPen when I made that Adara, and I just wanted to draw some pretty Zis while I was still working on the animation meme draft. What pretty ladies!

And a couple little doodles of the fantasy duo! They weren’t actually designed as a pair but I can’t stop, so hey why not have them live in the same world. Opal eyes still doesn’t have a name whoops, but their cute little tail pokes out the back of their robe! Lily is a good head and a half shorter, probably about to rib-height on an average human haha

Lots of little and/or original doodles! A lot of these are either original characters, random designs, or brainstorming - there’s the first ever doodle of Marionette! Nice. I also made that lady with the scars and cut sometime around Feb. 2019 but never posted her or her daughter, they are cute tho. The little night and day one was based on a little Insect-based RPG class system I was working on at the time, Butterflies and Moths being Paladins and Warlocks respectively

I’m so sad I didn’t get to post the wives earlier! I love my angels lads, they’re so cute. I went on a bit of an axolotl tangent, the scary one’s name is “J” lol. Lots of silly little things

I also made a bunch of extremely random fanart over the year lol, from Wilbur Soot to Smokey the Bear but On Fire which is a reference to something but I no longer remember what. There’s also Chiffon from Sir Fluff, a Wooper, Barold from the Villager makeover series, CORPSE Husband, ENA from Joel G, and some little Among Us blobs. Fun designs abound!

#Doodles #Oh and of course -#Long post #Very very very long under the cut #There's a bunch of different themes - Camp Camp - SCII - some AtLA FCs - a little Just Desserts and AGE - some original and random stuff #I left out Vargas this time 'cause even tho I still have a few they are just that - a few. Nothing like the sketchdump I made back in Sept.#And obviously there's still 2020 art in the backlog so some of these are from later than will be posting in the next several days lol #I wonder how obvious my style changes are - pretty sure they've gotten pretty subtle apart from cleaning up lol #Traditional art is always harder to tell I think #Like I said before it's been a good year for art I feel like I've improved overall and I'm glad I started scanning again #Sometimes editing is terrible but it's also been quite meditative here and there #I've definitely learned a lot of new touchup tricks

9 notes · View notes

like-twilight · 4 years

Text

The Last of Us 2 thoughts eyyy longgg and spoilers

This is my opinion before hearing anybody else’s opinion about it.

I only want to discuss the story as it is the only thing I can really speak of since I didn’t play it for myself. All I can say is I wish I could’ve and I’ll always regret not being able to because I really wish that could’ve been my experience as it was with the first game that I could play myself. It’s also probably noteworthy that the first game was the first video game I’ve played in my life so I’m probably biased.

So I’ll go all over the place because why not.

The false advertisement is extremely scummy and I don’t really know what to do with it, I blame it all on the No Spoilers Culture we currently have going. I don’t think anybody would’ve watched any of the promotional stuff a better marketing team could’ve put together and said “ah you can’t see old Joel in action, I bet he dies early in the game, I won’t fucking play this”. There was plenty of buzz around the game and there was no reason whatsoever to falsely market it. That part’s bullshit and I condemn the company for this.

From the story side though, Joel dying was honestly not that huge of a surprise or shock to me. TLOU is a game that has you watch a kid die in the first section of it then does more than enough to establish itself as a game without taboos. Now whether that’s something you like or not is not important, what cannot be said about the game is that it didn’t establish itself as a game that would do this.

I also think arguments like “Joel wouldn’t go out like a bitch” are silly. The beginning told me Joel, the badass and smart survivor he is, was very quick to adjust back to a small town life with a now pretty much surrogate daughter. I’m not saying that excuses the unceremonious death but to me Joel is not a gun-blazing badass hero, not even an anti-hero. He’s just a dude. He got overpowered and then he died.

See this is where the game could never win. If you leave Joel alive and he’s in the story then it’s just a repetition of the first game. If you leave him alive but he’s not in the game much then you underutilise him and people miss him. Also if you leave him alive then people will just say you’re a little bitch because it’s fanservice that Joel is technically invincible because he’s the face of the game. But if he dies, people riot. The creators couldn’t win either way and so I’m glad they made up their mind and stuck to it. It’s also very useful to get people talking.

Before I tie that into the rest of the story, I also have to mention that one of the few things I heard about the game was the expression “torture porn” and maybe I’m just desansitised but I didn’t feel like it was that overwhelming or unjustified. I didn’t watch too much of the promotional material but I saw what I think was the gameplay reveal where the devs said in this game enemies would call each other by name when you kill someone or they find someone dead. And I think that’s a neat detail but I think it also has a lot to do with what the game is... about.

That the hundreds of faceless people you slaughter during the game all have a video game or more worth of story behind them. They are people with their own twenty plus years of survival in a world gone to hell whose story ends the way Joel’s did. By meeting a person who just... wins the fight over them.

So that the deaths are really personal and intimate in that way feels justified. You also have this crazy technology that allows them to animate people very realistically. This is the last big game for the PS4 and they really just brought the technology to its limits, I feel. For them to then say “oh a sledgehammer to the face doesn’t look that bad” or “we just won’t add more types of weapons and have one type of death animation just cause we don’t want to overdo it” is just. It’s not gonna happen.

I never felt like those were glorified, I think they all added to that feeling that bubbled to the surface towards the end of Ellie’s first stretch of the story where I just couldn’t stop shaking my head, going Ellie... Ellie, what are you doing, look at yourself... look at what you’re doing. So to me that wasn’t really an issue.

I can imagine some people, maybe even most people would play the first stretch of the game in revenge mode. You know, let’s get this bitch. But in the same time, I also couldn’t really deny that Abby was like... kinda right to want revenge. I’m not saying I’m glad she killed Joel I’m just saying she had a reason to. (On that sidenote, Abby being that surgeon’s daughter did nothing to enhance this feeling. I could’ve imagined Abby in a settlement much like Jacksonville where they’re all hopeful because they found a surgeon who’s leading research about the cordyceps, maybe he’s a super good leader, inspires the Fireflies to keep up their spirits, all that. Maybe Abby’s group could’ve been his super close-knit group of soldiers taking care of him and running errands for him, even then the rage would’ve been justified.

I get they wanted to draw the parallel between Joel-Ellie, surgeon-Abby, dad-daughter relationships but that added nothing to the story for me. It didn’t take anything away either, I just kinda rolled my eyes like okay, whatever.)

So when Ellie was on her revenge quest, I liked that she and Dina were in Tommy’s footsteps, I thought that was a nice touch and kinda foreshadowed another section of the story where we would meet up with Tommy eventually.

Now, Dina and Jesse, I found nothing wrong with Dina or her being pregnant (except that it reminded me of Aniara and I hate that movie with my whole being). I thought it was a good enough source of conflict and I really liked Jesse being around. When he shows up and they’re just saying they’ll get Tommy and then get the fuck outta there you can already tell Ellie is obsessed but you’re still holding out hope that Dina will be enough to get her mind off of it but she’s just too far gone.

So the shift to Abby and the scars.

Jacksepticeye said it while he was playing that Abby’s part should’ve been like a DLC or something but I honestly don’t agree. I mean I don’t disagree but I think it worked the way it was. I definitely think most problems people have with this switch that doesn’t stem from the fact that people disliked Abby or that they can’t admit to themselves that they were caught off guard by the changed narrative style, could’ve been solved with different pacing. Now I don’t know if they would’ve had to constantly switch between Ellie and Abby for it to work or figure some other way out because I’m no expert but still.

I liked the beginning when it switched to Abby, the whole atmosphere was so eerie like you could tell they were on a collision course and it was going to get ugly. Maybe something like that could’ve worked but it could’ve just been either too suspenseful and tense the whole way through that it draws the attention from the gameplay or it would’ve been even more on the nose than it already was with the parallels between Abby’s group and Ellie’s group.

Now I honestly really liked that Abby’s story was so different because when she returns to the stadium, the part of her story that involved Joel is over. She got her revenge then she goes on with her life. She had a life before Joel entered it, she has one after she killed him. And it just so happens to be a good opportunity for the game to showcase some of the shit that goes on outside of what we’ve known so far and what Ellie knows.

I didn’t mind the religious aspect, I think it makes sense, like enough time passed since the apocalypse that the then grown up generation is distant enough from their old lives, and the generations after them are growing up in the ruins of the old society, that a messiah figure like that lady could emerge. That it just had to be transphobic and shit sucks of course and I do understand the frustration with it. I can imagine better writers coming up with a way to make the Scars despicable without them having our current society’s problems. They could still have the trans and the Asian characters still of course, but without them having to face the struggles trans characters do in our current world.

So that Abby only realises Ellie’s just one step behind her when she still has the climax of her individual story to get through was just. To me it worked so well. Like here we play as Ellie for half the game, this girl is consumed with rage and then Abby’s just fucking off and doing something entirely different because that’s... how little... it affected her. Or at least she personally got her closure and is ready to move on.

I personally liked the conflicts she had in her group, it was believable, it felt reasonable for the kind of life they lived. Of course we already spent one full game with Ellie so Abby was never going to catch up, but if you’re thinking like me then by less than half of Abby’s story you already don’t want Ellie to kill her.

The confrontation in the theatre was messy but since it’s not the end of the story I sort of don’t mind. I know some people don’t like how Jesse died or how little time we have to process certain deaths and story beats and of course it can just be bad pacing but that was again something that to me just brought the player’s world on the same level as an NPC’s world. That for one enhanced the experience for me.

Okay. Let’s talk about the last part that starts with Dina almost dying at Abby’s hands, especially after she says “good” when Ellie tells her she’s pregnant. Of course there’s the callback to dead Mel. But I liked that Lev was there and his presence sort of switched Abby’s role. Up to that point Abby had been Ellie. But then when she has Lev, and she acknowledges him as “her people”, she becomes Joel. And then she becomes a better version of him. Or at least a version of Joel that has mercy.

And you’d think being this close to losing Dina is where Ellie would snap back to it. And she does, for a while.

Here’s when I admit the pacing definitely needed some work regardless of anything. Up until that point we go through three days, albeit twice, but three days. Then suddenly we’re nine plus months later and the setting is different and we don’t get enough time here before Tommy shows up with the end of the story...rope... we got cut in half in the theatre.

I’ll take some time here to genuinely express my what the fuck at Tommy here.

My memory is a little fuzzy here but wasn’t Tommy on board with returning to Jacksonville when they return to the theatre? I actually just checked, Tommy says “they got what they deserved” to which Ellie says “but she (Abby) gets to live” and Tommy says “yeah”. And then when he visits Ellie and Dina suddenly he’s a dick about it saying Ellie made a promise? Is that something that was supposed to happen off-screen or a plot hole? Did that conversation in the theatre have more versions they went through and the wrong reaction got included? Maybe I just didn’t pay enough attention but it felt out of the blue for me and I can safely say that’s the character moment I’m disappointed in the most, especially because we never see Tommy again.

One could argue that the choppiness of time is supposed to symbolise the dissociation and out-of-body experience you can have when you’re living with trauma but I truly just have it down to bad pacing here. I get that they wanted to show the baby but I truly believe with enough polishing they could’ve come up with a scenario that works better and flows better.

I truly could’ve had Ellie maybe leave with Dina and Tommy and then have her turn back before they leave Seattle and then they have the conversation with Dina and then Ellie starts tracking Abby. Here we could’ve had more of what was in the beginning of the story, sort of switching between the two, maybe slightly altered gameplay, etc. Even though the last level as Ellie was really cool and once again I liked how we just barely got a glimpse of how other people live, you know. Those prisoners in those cells have a hell of a 25 years behind them and being freed by this stranger might be the best thing that will have ever happened to them, but to Ellie they’re just a background noise to her mission.

I truly liked those parts.

I could imagine Ellie being kidnapped similarly to Abby but they are treated differently and somehow still end up escaping together, maybe even helping each other the way Ellie almost did with cutting Abby down and letting her get Lev to the boat. And then you’d have Ellie still be consumed by her rage.

The whole time I wanted her so much to just scream everything at Abby. Because look, life for these people is a whole ass trauma. Some people like Dina might handle it differently, or it’s easier with a community around you, but Ellie’s life has been very strange, with her immunity, with the realisation that Joel killed and lied for her, all that. She would need a fucking good therapist. I wanted that catharsis, for her to scream at Abby, to sob until she can’t even breathe, for Abby to do the same, except she realises she got her closure while Ellie never did, and then maybe for Abby to give some sort of... forgiveness to Ellie. For her life not having meant anything in the end.

I don’t know, I wanted that for her.

If there never is a last fight, if Ellie never so much as punches Abby, that would’ve been fine for me.

Two more things that I liked were that Ellie actually started down a path of forgiveness before Joel died. You know, when we see the scene where Ellie tells Joel off you’re like “oh that’s the last thing she said to him, no wonder she feels so guilty” and then you realise, oh no wait, they were actually eventually going to be alright. They just never got the time. To me that hit so much, that was a good scene.

The other thing I liked is Dina leaving. Once again this could’ve been something like, Ellie goes back to Jacksonville and there they tell her Dina left or sum shit idk how that could’ve worked, I’m just saying that losing that farm life didn’t really make me feel anything because we didn’t get the time to grow attached to it.

So Dina leaves, and suddenly you’re back in the room with Sam in the first game when this bitten boy asks Ellie what she’s most afraid of, and she says she’s scared of ending up alone. And this immune girl Joel killed and lied and died for, eventually ends up alone.

So I understand that a lot of TLOU’s fanbase that belongs to a marginalised group, especially those part of the LGBT+ community would be hurt by this ending. By this interpretation. The LGBT+ community, as far as I know, at least a huge part of it, seeks to heal. We use fiction as escapism in a way people who don’t know, who can’t know our struggles will never be able to sympathise with. And as such, we as a community in a large part, have moved on from stories of pain. Not necessarily in that we turn a blind eye on it or anything, but I think it’s a mostly universally agreed thing that after so much suffering we’re ready to see ourselves, and people like us end up happy. And as such the demand from this community towards creators have shifted to not necessarily fully happy endings, but some sort of relief. And as such, this ending is cruel.

It is heartbreaking. My heart breaks for Ellie because I can practically feel the weight in my chest that she carries around when she walks away. She lost everything and she never got the closure. She never got that relief and neither did we.

Once again, if you personally have a problem with this ending and it ruined the game for you, I understand it completely. That’s your own experience with the story, and even though I feel much of the same things, I’m once again left here thinking this is the way the creators wanted to do this and that they did it like this makes sense. It makes sense for the story, the characters, it just does. If it had happened differently in a way that also makes sense, I would not think “oh this should’ve had a heartbreaking ending, this is bullshit” but I do think the ending makes sense.

Overall, I’m pretty much pleased with most everything, except fuck false advertising, fuck Tommy, and fuck uhhh, I’m pretty sure I mentioned something else too. Oh yeah, pacing. Jack actually offered a really great alternative to the beginning, where the museum scene of Ellie’s birthday should’ve been the first scene, and then you could’ve had Ellie wake up four years later at the end of the countdown. That Joel told Tommy about the hospital could’ve been implied through dialogue and interactions.

I also don’t think Joseph Anderson’s theory is hurt by this, he said personal decisions and morality aside, the Fireflies were fucking idiots and they couldn’t have come up with a cure even if they had given Ellie the chance to say yes, because of how unprofessional they’d been and how much they rushed into the surgery. Just because Abby’s dad was a good dude and a good surgeon doesn’t mean shit when you’re dealing with something you’ve not seen before, such as Ellie’s immunity. And I think knowing that wouldn’t have mattered to Ellie either to change her mind about forgiving Joel. And this is what I’ve always said. Like the Fireflies or not, believe in them or not, taking a choice like this away from Ellie because you can’t stand losing your daughter again (and that is why Joel kills the Fireflies, not because he shares Joseph’s opinion) is objectively wrong and borders on the same obsession we see consume Ellie. Joel is just as unhinged by that point as Ellie is, he’s just more... mature about it, I guess.

That could’ve been even more painful, sort of, to not have Abby be the surgeon’s daughter but just for her and her group believe in this doctor that might just be talking out of his ass so much that them avenging his death sets off this terrible cycle of vengeance. I think that could’Ve been very “gritty” and shit, that would’ve hurt because it’s even more pointless. People killing over lost hope.

So, pacing, Tommy, false advertising, bad points, everything else, yeah alright. 7/10 sounds good to me. I will play this one day >)

#the last of us spoilers #tlou2 #tlou 2 #tlou 2 spoilers #the last of us 2

13 notes · View notes

kolhearted-archived · 4 years

Text

FOUR YEAR ANNIVERSARY STUFF

This wouldn’t be me if it had some sort of fancy banner, so you’re just gonna get my wall of text, lol.

So when I decided to create a blog for Kol, I didn’t have any idea — ANY IDEA — what I was getting myself into. I was happily RPing in the Disney rpc with my Toy Story muse, and had amazing friends over there, lots of muse, and was really happy with where I was, RP-wise.

But I’d just gotten back into The Originals, and had seen Kol’s comeback, and his story began to click for me. I needed that extra backstory — of seeing him, narratively, from the storyteller role and not just as an antagonist — to be able to really understand the potential of his character. We had a character who was introduced as a dark force, unpredictable, who was willing to get his hands dirty to achieve his goals. Originals fleshed out what he looks like from the other side of the story: his motivations, his relationship with his family, and what he is ultimately searching for.

So I decided to make a Kol blog, but I was expecting it to be, like, not a big thing, you know? I was going to make him my “weekend blog” and I was going to have fun on him, but he wasn’t going to be my main muse. But as soon as I started digging into him, and realized how much room I had to grow and develop with a character who had SO MUCH untold story?? I fell really hard, and really fast. Soon, Kol was the only blog I was logging into. And faster than I realized it could happen, there were people who were responding to my version of him! I was being validated and galvanized to just keep going.

I found this weird middle ground where I wasn’t apologizing for the horrific things Kol had done, but I wasn’t focusing on them, either. I was worried about making this blog because I don’t write viciousness that well. I don’t want a character who is in CONSTANT fight mode. I didn’t want every single interaction to be Kol hunting someone, Kol hurting someone.

The last four years has been a series of ups and downs, character-wise. There have been things I’ve tried that have worked really well, and stayed with my portrayal of Kol! And there have been things that really needed to be brought back to the drawing board. Everything has been important and it’s definitely made me a stronger writer.

I want to say THANK YOU to everyone who’s stuck it out, through huge changes on my blog, through me backing away from Kol for times when my inspiration was low, through personal ups and downs which played with my strength as a writer. The opportunities I have are because I have people willing to try things out with me. I appreciate you all so much.

lots of thank you notes under the cut

@seesgood: I want to make this long but I’m going to try to make everyone’s short and sweet. Thank you for taking a chance on a really new blog and being down to figure out what a Caroline/Kol interaction should look like. Thank you for being my Grove sister and I wouldn’t be half the Kol I am without you.

@herstolenson: Thank you so much for finding a way to work Matty into Kol’s life so flawlessly, and thank you for giving our muses the time they needed to figure out what they wanted from this dynamic. Thank you for always being there when I’m having a rough day and just need to whine, and thank you for making Matty <3

@outlawiism: Thank you for always following me no matter where my muse takes me. Thank you for being there almost from the very beginning of my indie career, and thank you so much for the genuine support I’ve always felt whenever I talk to you! Thank you for being the Glitter Queen™ and giving so many people reasons to smile. I am always so humbled to be your friend.

@hauntedgilbert: Thank you for giving me the opportunity to explore the Kol/Jeremy dynamic the way I had so desperately wanted to! Thank you for talking me through Jeremy’s side of things so we could figure out what was happening in any situation. Thank you for always being down to make something crazy, just because it’d be fun. Thank you for all of the AUs and angst that you brought along the way!

@fiercerebekah: Thank you for being there from like the VERY beginning! Thank you for showing me what an “established” blog looks like, and the real fun that can come from sitting with a muse for an extended amount of time. Thank you for the shenanigans you’re always willing to offer up, and for always letting me know what Rebekah’s thoughts are about what Kol does.

@ladamedemartel: Thank you for bringing different aspects to a character who did not originally have that many layers. Thank you for introducing us all to Aurora and allowing us to interact with her! Thank you for always being so fun to talk to, to debate with, and to bounce ideas back and forth.

@hardcoreproved: Thank you for creating the bizarre and delightful ship that is Kol/Bubbles. Thanks for figuring out what that would look like with me, and the why and the how! Thank you for always being one of the single most patient partners, and always know that even when I’m elsewhere and just bobbin along, I see what you’re making with Bubbles and I’m just like “that’s my girl!!!”

@portectorisms: Thank you for bringing some consistency to my blog!! We’ve been following each other forever, and the times we interact are always so much FUN and honestly, I want to make it more of a thing. Whether we have one thread or one hundred, though: thank you so much for your constant encouragement and support.

@grawpiish: Thank you for being so encouraging, and for reminding me how long it’s been that we’ve been in each other’s orbit! Thank you for writing an amazing character, creating depth where there wasn’t any in his canon. Thank you for giving me chances to practice my graphics skills, and thank you for reaching out again so we could reconnect!

@hiddensteel: Thank you SO MUCH for the moments I see you popping in to interact with my posts, to offer advice or support or encouragement. Thank you for writing with my smaller muses, even though I neglect them for so, so long. Thank you for writing an amazing Sansa and giving her the love she so deserves.

@asundrop: Thank you for being one of the first people to really challenge how soft a character could be with Kol. Thank you for dealing with him with a more tender touch, for seeing the scars that are around him and what his potential really is. Thank you for being a rock and a pillar in my RP life, because you, Polli, are a constant for me.

@anditsxsorrows: Thank you for crreating such a wonderful portrayal of Nik, and sharing it with us. Thank you for the sheer amount of time we’ve been in each other’s orbits, and the ups and downs, character wise, we’ve seen each other’s blogs through. Thank you for sticking with Nik so long and providing such a wonderful pathos to his character. You are an inspiration!

@predictableisnotbad: No matter how much time has passed since we’ve last spoken, you’re always so ready to jump back in and have fun. Thank you for your dedication to Alice, and the depth you’ve brought out in her. Thank you even more for being a constant source of support for me, even and especially when I feel like I don’t deserve it. You are a special and kind light and I am so grateful that you are around.

@oliverqxeen: Thank you for your friendship, because it means way more to me than I can ever really say. Thank you for being a source of constancy and support when my anxiety gets bad, or when I back off because my nerves and my thoughts are telling me things that aren’t real. Thank you for always being funny, and for really giving so many people the permission to push against canon if it doesn’t make sense. Thank you for being such an amazing writer and a friend that I don’t deserve.

@yovrstruely: Thank you for always being there, in one form or another! Thank you for always showing how much fun it can be to RP, and for always being true to your muses. Thank you for dancing back into my life, and for offering advice whenever I ask for it. You make the dash feel a little less like I’m yelling into a void sometimes!

@prlman: Thank you for not taking the fact that I know virtually and literally nothing about your muse as a reason why we shouldn’t interact. Thank you so much for sitting down with me and figuring out a way for our muses to meet, for their universes to collide and crossover, and for making Elio one of the very first baby vamps in Kol’s new sire line. I’ve gotten to know Elio a bit better over time — though I still haven’t read or watched his source material, oops — but you’ve provided so many opportunities for us over the years and I so desperately appreciate it.

@relishingvampirism: Thank you for always supporting my blog. You like and comment on so many of my posts, and really make it feel like someone’s watching and gives a care. Honestly, I constantly feel like I don’t deserve it. You make me feel so seen and I appreciate it so damn much. I see it.

@crimscnmalice: Thank you for every moment I’ve run to you to ask for help and you’ve been there. Thank you even more for the times when I didn’t need something and we were able to just talk about life, about our geography, about our characters and what it’s like to find yourself and your creative well in a muse. Thank you for everything you do for the RPC, and a little more selfishly, everything you’ve done for me. You are an amazing person and I am so grateful when you turn your attention to me.

@zcldrizes: Thank you for your constant support, no matter what blog I’m on! Thank you for your enthusiastic encouragement with my portrayal, because getting that “stamp of approval” from a blog I admired so much felt like the sun was shining on me. Thank you for all you’ve done for the GOT RPC and the RPC in general. Every muse I’ve seen you pick up is done with such depth and care. Thank you for letting me be a small part of the world you’ve built for your muses.

@tocxmply / @killthebxy: Thank you so. damn. much. And I can’t even begin to count the reasons why. Thank you for showing me just how far a crossover could handle going while still being IC with the brotp that is Kol and Jon. Thank you for humoring me on Becky ( but I want to talk more about Kol rn ) and everything you do. But beyond all of that, thank you so much for always being someone so willing and ready to be a source of positivity in the RPC. Your cloak of protection is something I will always remember. Your messages to people are always thoughtful and personal and I feel so humbled being in a place with someone as light and good as you.

@atomiism: Thank you for giving me the opportunity to explore Kol as a sire. Thank you for your amazing Ray, and giving me even the littlest chance of writing with him, because as soon as we started plotting, I couldn’t contain my excitement. Thank you for the moments together that we’ve gotten, and please know that I cherish each and every reply we get done.

@fire-hoes: Tagging you over here, but honestly this counts for any blog. Thank you for your enthusiastic support and encouragement you’ve offered me over the years. You made me feel like I was a part of something real and really special and I always felt so honored and grateful whenever we talked. Thank you for your support that spans muses for both of us, and always being up to trying something new. You are one of my true constants around here, and I am so, so, so, so grateful for you.

@itsgclden: Thank you for all of the time you’ve put into Rapunzel, because every time I see your posts, I just get so excited and sit down and read. Thank you for being willing to find ways for Kol and Rapunzel to interact. Thank you for the light you spread on the dash. Thank you for caring so much about someone who is so special to me, because I always feel like they’re in good hands. Thank you for being a real-life Rapunzel and spreading light and happiness.

@livevl: Thank you for encouraging me no matter what blogs we’re currently on. Thank you for always being one of the first people to remind me that there’s someone in my corner always, and that you like what I’m dong here. Thank you for being that special kind of person who reaches out and says a kind word, because there aren’t a lot of people who think to do that, and it really matters. You make it feel less isolating on here. You are so damn good, so damn special, and so damn talented. I always feel a great pressure of gratitude when I think that I have the support of someone as amazing as you.

#i. ( ooc ) — blogaversary 2020

27 notes · View notes

landeg · 4 years

Photo

31 Days of Apex: A Retrospection

I participated in the incredible #31DaysOfApex challenge hosted on Twitter, where fans created new content for every day of July based on a one-word prompt. I’ve signed up for/started lots of similar challenges in the past but always ended up having to drop out or trail off before the end... but this time, I managed to complete something for every day of the challenge!

My only goal was to make something by each day’s deadline, and it was a really interesting exercise both in technical skill and also in my management of not only my time, but my expectations and energy. Below, I go into more detail behind each piece.

To preface; the beginning of this challenge coincided with the beginning of a new personal time-management exercise where, for 5/7 days a week, I would only go on the computer at night. Combined with the deadline, this had an interesting effect on my time management and the quality of certain pieces.

Day 1 - Memory

From the start, I wanted to use the challenge as an opportunity to do more studies and to push myself wherever possible. This was the first piece I did and I had more time to work on it, so I used it as a digital painting study. I still think it’s a strong piece and it’s probably my favourite of the month. Symbolically, this character’s backstory doesn’t match up with her own memories, so the idea is she’s missing information she can’t quite place or remember, and this both scares and comforts her.

Day 2 - Blood

Another digital painting and lighting study that didn’t work out as well as the first, mostly due to time constraints meaning I couldn’t scrap it and start again. While I don’t like how it turned out, I did learn a lot. The character on the right is a field medic, and my intent was to show the calm after a successful rescue.

Day 3 - Mercy

Some days I relied more on the humour of a piece’s concept than the skill of its execution, though I also liked how this piece turned out artistically. After two days of intense studies, though, this was very quick and easy for me to turn out as it relied on existing skills.

Day 4 - Prize

This one thankfully came together very quickly, which I credit to the two previous painting studies making it much easier to achieve what I wanted. The character is searching for the disembodied head of the man who killed her parents, who is now acting as a robot, hence the vaguely half-machine-half-human silhouette in her hand.

Day 5 - Family

Another quick, simple illustration under a time crunch. The character framed by the nameless foreground figures has no memory of herself or her family.

Day 6 - Noise

For some pieces where I was under a time crunch, I experimented in an opposite direction; instead of studies, I played loosely with different techniques/brushes/etc to see what came out. This was a lineless style I ended up employing a lot when short on time. The piece pictured here was just one of four alternate colourways, presented in a pop-art style. The character is almost always depicted with thick coverings over her ears, so I thought she might be sensitive to auditory overload. This particular piece was retweeted by the character’s voice actress!

Day 7 - Mask

More relying on humour for lack of time/a better idea. A fun experiment in colour, though.

Day 8 - Healing

Another technically “easy” piece but with a stronger concept. It was actually pretty hard to get the reflection & condensation elements balanced right. The character pictured has a narrative thread relating to an old ex he has trouble moving on from.

Day 9 - Weapon

While obviously another joke, and made to be finished quickly, it was surprisingly difficult to get the duct tape and knife to read clearly without over-cluttering the lineless image. This little ‘bot is a drone used by one of the playable characters to hack areas of the map; it’s not NORMALLY an offensive weapon. This image was promo’d in a video stream by the character’s voice actor!

Day 10 - Truth

I only had less than an hour to finish this one by the deadline, but I still tried to experiment with silhouette and colour. It was surprisingly hard to get the interior silhouette to be legible. The outer silhouette is a playable character (not easily readible unless you’re familiar with his design) and the inner silhouette is his sister, whose disappearance he is trying to investigate.

Day 11 - Shield

A fun, self-indulgent one. Had a blast simplifying the game’s characters down into little caricatures. The character in the centre has abilities related to shields and protection, so many other people were drawing him for the prompt; I wanted to try and flip it, so I picked other characters he would be friendly with, and picked a non-lethal, lighthearted setting.

Day 12 - Ruins

Short on time so did a quick lighting study. A recent game plot has changed one of the areas of the map, submerging it in water and leaving it to “ruin”.

Day 13 - Hero

Another painting study. Really didn’t like how this one turned out, but had to turn in something, and I did learn a lot in the process. If I’d had more time I probably would’ve scrapped it and started again. This characters had recently been revealed to have been manipulated by another character who used gas-based offenses, whom she admired.

Day 14 - Rest

I was going to be away from mt computer until after the deadline, so I decided to make a traditional piece. I ended up enjoying it so much I tried to take the time to do a few more traditional pieces later. This piece was sort of a comedy of errors; I had to do it while I was out, and the pen I had brought with me to ink my sketch ran out, so I had to make do with a blue ballpoint pen, and I was missing several colours of coloured pencil. I think the finished piece reflects how rushed it was, and it did’t meet my concept, but I do still like it.

Day 15 - Skull

Another quick one but I wanted to experiment with a different line style. Wanted a sort of “graffiti” effect. One of this character’s skins includes a skull-shaped mask.

Day 16 - Growth

Extremely quick play on words because I didn’t have the time to work on anything meaningful and couldn’t think of anything better!

Day 17 - Home

Another traditional piece, this time by choice and with more time. Markers. It looks extremely like some janky art school homework on 2 point perspective because it extremely is. Perspective and backgrounds are very difficult for me - they just don’t “click” - but I had a lot of fun with this one. I kept my mistakes intact because I didn’t want to edit it too much. A lot about the technical perspective is wrong, but I think I achieved the “mood” I wanted. This location is a bar owned by one of the player characters where many of the other characters are shown to meet.

Day 18 - Sky

Very happy with how this one turned out, even though there are still lots of problems. Markers again. There’s a lot I would fix next time, and I think technically it’s lacking, but there are some specific areas I feel happy to have achieved, such as the almost brushed texture of the curved metal above his shoulder and the values of the shadow/reflections on the underside of the head piece. I’m also happy with how I was able to draw from my shoulder rather than my wrist when inking the curved lines, something I struggle with.

Day 19 - Target

An experiment in pushing the lineless style I’d already been playing with for a stronger likeness. The pose and expression in this could both be pushed more but I like the result. This character had just learned that one of the other players, whom she had trusted, was actually sharing her secrets with her enemy, and she didn’t know which one it was.

Day 20 - Friendship

I had this one concepted from when I first looked over the prompts. It was a fun challenge trying to simplify all the elements into the lineless, blocky style while being legible. This character has a strained relationship with one of his friends, and finally pushed her too far with his selfishness, and she now no longer responds to him.

Day 21 - Scar

Quick joke. This character was introduced briefly as a red herring for another character before being killed off. He was stabbed through the chest by another character’s hand, hence the scar pattern.

Day 22 - Dream

I wasn’t sure about this one while I was making it but I ended up liking how it turned out. I wanted to capture the character’s robotic legs bent at an unnaturally straight 90 degrees, like a Barbie doll. The flat background and lighting make it feel like an indoor stage. The little “electric sheep” are inspired by iDogs.

Day 23 - Meal

After a few days of not having time to really spend on any piece, it was fun to get to spend time on concepting and composing this. I always admired these kinds of watercolour-like food illustrations and this is the first time I’ve had any success in creating one myself. I concepted and sketched out the individual items traditionally before working out the composition within the box digitally. Each food item/utensil is inspired by the different characters’ design elements. Only two of the now-current characters are excluded due to plot reasons. In particular, I like how one of the character’s dome-shaped shields acts as the base and cover of the box.

Day 24 - Hobby

Wasn’t a fan of how this one turned out. I think the likeness is a bit off, and his facial anatomy is skewed. But I also like how the general composition, tone, and bee turned out. This character’s concept art originally imagined them as a beekeeper who would use smoke to fight.

Day 25 - Fear

An incredibly rushed piece that I intended to go back in and add more detail to, similar to day 4, but I actually took a step back and decided I liked the blocky, flat-colour version. This character is the youngest of four, all of whom are MIA or worse, along with his father, and his mother is losing her memory. He’s talking to her through a handheld holographic device. This piece gained more traction, most likely thanks to the subject matter since this is a popular character.

Day 26 - Holiday

I didn’t want to do a religious holiday like Christmas or Easter. A lot of other people also interpreted the prompt as a vacation, but I had already done a sort of “beach vacation” piece for day 11, so I instead went for a “public holiday” and chose NYE/NYD. This was fairly quick but the lighting was an interesting experiment. I knew this one wouldn’t be as popular because it wasn’t as “flattering” but I personally really like it. The girl on the left is kind of goofy and completely un-self-conscious and I think it’s captured here.

Day 27 - Music

Really didn’t like how this one turned out. I don’t think the likeness is good at all, the lighting is poor, and the gold detailing feels lazy. But I liked other elements, such as the pose and the clothing.

Day 28 - Treasure

This is my least favourite of the entire month, but I also had the least time available to work on it before the deadline so I had no opportunity to scrap it and start over, which I sorely wanted to do. The likeness is terrible, but more than that the base anatomy is off, the pose is stiff, and the lighting/colours are cheap. I wish I could’ve done better by this character; but, I am glad I had something finished at all.

Day 29 - Skin

This was probably my third attempt at this picture and I’m still not happy with it, but again, I had to finish something. I almost considered scrapping the concept entirely and choosing something easier but ended up seeing it through. The concept itself is actually recycled from an older piece of mine for an entirely different fandom, because I didn’t think I did it justice then, either. Would still like to revisit this concept with this character and take more time.

Day 30 - Trust

After a few days of feeling really dissatisfied and uncomfortable with the art I’d been making, I finally more time to dedicate to a piece, and I’m overall happy with how this one turned out. I decided to go for a different medium entirely with pixel art, which also gave me the opportunity to try and animate it. I started off confident and then started to get worried towards the end, but all the elements came together when I added the portal colour effects. This is an alternate reality version of one of the player characters, who appears through a portal and allows that character to escape the facility she’s being kept in, encouraging them to trust the “voices” she hears which are actually versions of herself trying to help her. This piece was retweeted by the official Apex Legends Twitter account!

Day 31 - Freestyle

I had this planned out early in the challenge and I’m really, really happy with how it turned out. It’s probably tied with my favourite along with the very first piece (how fitting). I was worried about how I was going to capture the movement without over-complicating the lineart, having so many people in one image, etc. before I realised the focus was entirely on gesture, and then everything clicked. I went for a thicker brush, which forced me to conserve my lines, and tried to simplify each character down to the bare minimum needed to recognise them. They’re also all wearing new non-canonical outfits so I used their familiar colour schemes for the same purpose. It’s not perfect, but I love it, and it’s everything I’d hoped I’d be able to end the challenge on.

I really, really enjoyed the entire month and the way it tied in with my new time management schedule. It gave me some achievable short-term goals which added up to this long-term achievement I can now look back on; I learned a lot both about balancing my energy and about technical skills, I found ways to stay motivated, and most importantly I learned to not get caught up on the individual slip-ups and pieces I didn’t like as much and to instead focus on the bigger picture. Thank you to everyone involved in organising and supporting this event! I found so many other incredible fanartists, writers, and content creators through this challenge and I can’t wait to see the bonus content released over August!

#31 Days of Apex #31DaysOfApex #highlights

4 notes · View notes

daily-rayless · 4 years

Text

20 Years of Art

2000

(OC / Celes from Final Fantasy 6 / OC / OC)

The influence of Final Fantasy 6, off of the Anthology collection, and Yoshitaka Amano caused a significant shift in my art, leading my human figures to be very slender, graceful, and frequently pale. Most of it was of women, some of it was of horses, and by then I was very self-consciously starting to draw men. I mostly worked in pencils and colored pencils. Faces were oval with high hairlines and long, sharp, narrow noses. Also note my evident fear of mouth-seams and lower eyelids. I was pretty terrible at coloring, often feeling that coloring one of my sketches ruined all the nice linework.

2001

(Quistis from Final Fantasy 8 / Rosa from Final Fantasy 4? / Schala from Chrono Trigger / Dark Knight OC from Final Fantasy 4)

This is where more anime influences came in, and I consciously took on a semi-anime, semi-realistic (in my own mind) style. My ideal of beauty was overbig eyes, overlong nose, and oversmall mouth, and I stuck to it pretty relentlessly. Trying to figure out shadows and face structure. Still bad at coloring. I was incredibly proud of that charcoal picture. Was also going through my mandatory Dark 'n Edgy phase, with a big helping of Phantom of the Opera, Sarah Brightman, and my attempts at designing supercool clothes, many of which I wouldn't have actually worn, even given the opportunity.

2002

(Me trying to recreate “Flaming June” / OC, who incidentally looks almost exactly like Sarah Brightman and whose diadem was bodily lifted from a Jodi Lee painting / angsty symbolic wet chain lady / OC)

Deep in the Dark 'n Edgy. Faces are still very heavily made-up, with big lashes, defined upper eyelids, and dark lips. Trying very hard to be a good artist though, have high expectations for the future. I was so proud of that final pose and worked so hard on it. Lined paper? So not a problem. Besides, how else am I supposed to draw during class? A sketchbook would've been even more obvious than the incredibly obvious I already was. I'm able to listen while drawing pretty reliably, and I did manage to take detailed notes while doodling, so at least I had that going for me.

2003

(Celes / OC / OC / Hermes-inspired wing lady)

I was focusing (at least some of the time) on backgrounds and trying to make my work detailed and polished. Coloring is still hopeless. Often when I colored, I would go super light, even when I was using dark or intense colors. It would give my pictures a sort of faint, half-assed hazy look. I remember an art teacher urging me to use more color, but I probably resisted because I knew that way lay total destruction. I'm sorry, well-meaning art teacher. You are unversed in the ways of my pencils. I have killed too many sketches to take those kinds of risks.

2004

(Rosa? / Meliara from Crown Duel / willow-dress lady / Geddoe and Queen from Suikoden 3)

See the Meliara picture? That's supposed to be a night scene in a forest. Front-lit by blazing firelight. I was too afraid to make the colors darker. This is dark enough, okay? Anyway, this year, along with being utterly obsessed with Suikoden 3 and Crown Duel, I was letting my art head in a more realistic direction...

2005

(OC / Queen / Queen / part of Zetta and Salome from Makai Kingdom; I remember deliberately copying those swoopy Ss from one of my friends’ handwriting. Wishes ended up being the first longform fanfic I posted online.)

...that really flourished this year. It's not actually realism, but I made a point to give my characters, especially the women, more realistic bodies. Faces are very round in this period, often with soft features. Noses are prominent. I'm also, finally, using more vibrant colors. I probably got my first Prismacolor pencils around this time. I also got some really cheap markers, but had no idea how to use them so mostly stuck to pencils.

2006

(All OCs)

I look back on this as a good year. I was learning better coloring techniques. (Bold colors! Press that pencil down! Okay, I still had much to learn.) I got an Elfwood gallery while the site was doing its slow mosey into oblivion. But that was an important step, not just looking at other people's art online, but putting my own up as well. There were downsides though. I began to feel more insecure – or maybe more realistic? – about my art, on this site with so many highly talented artists. Still, 2006 is a good year. It was a lot of fun, and I learned a lot.

2007

(vampire and hunter / Fleur from Harry Potter / OC / Avril from Wild Arms 5)

The year of Fleur Delacour. This is when I was writing Kindred. I think it was because I was trying to depict Fleur as distinctly non-human that my art shifted away from that more realistic style. Fleur, and my other figures, became very tall and slender. The anime DNA is still there though. For a long time, I felt the lying-down picture of Fleur was my best work.

2008

(Revya and Gig from Soul Nomad / my attempts at being “abstract” / OC / OC)

This was the year of Soul Nomad and, towards the end, Tales of the Abyss. Unsurprisingly, the anime influences start moving back to the fore. The eyes are becoming larger again, the features a bit more angular and stylized, mouths are shrinking. I'm still desperately trying to figure out markers and wondering why it's so darn hard (I don't try to educate myself, I just flail), but I was proud of that blue OC picture. It made me feel like I was getting somewhere. 2008 is when I started my deviantART gallery, right when everyone else was moving on to Tumblr.

2009

(teacup lady / Persona 4 noir-style comic / Revya / OC)

Then Persona 4 hit. Shigenori Soejima was a huge influence in this period, especially in eyes and faces. Pupils, chins, and jawlines shrink, eyelashes are sparse and stylized, noses are simplified. 2008 and 2009 are about as pure anime as I've ever gotten. Meanwhile, I'm really exited about my dA gallery and trying lots of different combinations of media. I'm super active on dA and FFN at this point, writing Elysion and then a slew of shorter Persona fics.

2010

(Minako from Persona 3: Portable / concept-art-version Minako / lady with dragon ferret thing / other lady with dragon ferret thing)

I'm still drawing with a lot of Soejima influences. Additionally, bodies are becoming even longer, taller, thinner, and bendier. Some of them look absurd to me now. On the other hand, a lot of pictures from this period have a nice elegance to them. I was still using colored pencils a fair bit, but more clumsy markers are showing up. Persona 3: Portable came out, and this is when I was writing Death and Ker.

2011

(mask lady / hat lady / Archaya, Duphaston, and Iryth from Eternal Poison / symbolic autumn lady and her winter baby)

Midway through this year, I hit a breakthrough when I got my first set of Copics – and skin tones, no less. Even though I was still flailing, I was so thrilled with my results. That Eternal Poison picture left me enormously proud, as did the mother and child one. My style hasn't changed all that much, but it's starting to feel less extreme. The focus on big eyes and tiny little mouths remains.

2012

(Elza from Suikoden 2 / Daryl and Setzer from Final Fantasy 6 / Killey and Lorelai from Suikoden 2 / Lyssa, Greek goddess of madness)

This is the year of Elza. Lots of delicate sketches of this lovely scarred lady, and lots of colored pictures too. I've definitely shifted away from pencils towards markers. The Daryl and Setzer one was an attempt to use both, and I was very happy with it. These pictures show their age, but there's still a lot here I like. Mouths are larger too. However, my online activity was starting to lag.

2013

(Rydia from Final Fantasy 4 / Nia from Infinite Space / the prophet and Schala / Argos and Io from Greek mythology)

The mid-2010s weren't entirely great for me, marked with a lot of frustration and discontent. And that definitely carried over to my art, making me feel very disappointed with myself. There was lots of marker work this year. Probably the standout picture is Argos and Io. This is also when I played through all three routes of Fate/Extra, and my art was suddenly full of Hakuno and Emiya.

2014

(Minako / butterfly lady / Marta and Tenebrae from Tales of Symphonia 2 / Elza)

Looking at it now, this was a good year. Lots of nice marker art. The butterfly one was a big step up for me in terms of coloring. The Marta and Tenebrae has a really cool stylized look to it. But I was becoming less enthusiastic about sharing my art with others. I started to post less and less.

2015

(evil Hakuno and Emiya from the Fate series / Mitsuru from Persona 3 / half moon cookie lady / Hakuno)

I barely posted anything this year, though I was still drawing a ton. As far as making strides, this is one of my better years. Coloring will never be my strong suit, but it's a lot more fun, and it looks a lot better. It's almost entirely marker-work at this point. Despite my, er, angst, a lot of people are smiling this year.

2016

(OC / doodle lady / Luna from Roman mythology / hair bow lady)

At this point, it's feeling too recent for me to really see what's changed. I did a fair bit of eraserless work. One problem I still have – and, yes, it involves coloring my pictures – is losing some of the image's personality after I've inked it and erased the initial pencil work. The picture's still there, but not as nuanced as it originally was. The results often feel stiff to me. Doing the first linework in ink, or not inking at all, allows me to keep that sensitive, spontaneous quality. Luna and the bow and doodle ladies were done without erasers. Another thing I did a lot this year was fill backgrounds with busy shapes and colors, which is a trend I’m still following today.

2017

(flapper and dog / Alcyone and Ceyx from Greek mythology / flower hair lady / Kida from Atlantis)

Not a good year. Not that the art is bad, there just isn't a lot of it, and what there is often isn't very finished. I was still mostly dark online, wondering if I should take down my dA gallery. Drawing and knowing I wasn't going to post something took off some of the pressure of my own expectations, but I was still unhappy.

2018

(Altera from the Fate series / Elizabeth Bathory from the Fate series / OC / Aranea from Final Fantasy 15)

This was a really important year for me. I wrote a novel I'm really proud of, and it's done a lot to give me confidence and a sense of creative direction. I also decided that after New Years, I was going to start a Tumblr gallery...just as everyone who was still on the site was jumping off of it. Much of my 2018 work is still sketchy and unfinished, but I also think it's loosening up some. It feels less stiff than the stuff from the middle of the decade.

2019

(Aloy from Horizon Zero Dawn / medievaly lady / Red from Transistor / Red)

The year of Supergiant Games, which led me to focus more on bright saturated colors. It's really hard for me to analyze these objectively. Coloring is better? I worked more on details? I used my metallic gel pens a ton and did shape-cluttered backgrounds? These aren't new things, but I think they paid off okay. I'm more at peace with my level of ability, I've finished more complicated works, and I crawled out of my den and started posting regularly online again. So that's all good. Curious to see what the art looks like in twenty more years.

#art progression #20 years of art #2000-2019 #i'm not tagging all the characters #this is a terribly long post #and shouldn't clutter up too many search results #thank you if you read the whole thing #i apologize for typos #art meme #art summary

8 notes · View notes

natsubeatsrock · 4 years

Text

My 10 Favorite Posts, So Far

Well, tomorrow makes 5 years of blogging as natsubeatsrock. It’s been quite a crazy 5 years and I’ve made a number of crazy posts in the time between starting this blog and today. To celebrate I wanted to talk about 10 of my favorite posts over the past five years. This list isn’t necessarily ranked from least to most favorite, but there is one post I can call my absolute favorite.

Let’s go!

Honorable Mention: The Rewrite of Fairy Tail: Part 16 (Lisanna) [originally posted March 27, 2019]

As an honorable mention, I want to shed some light on my favorite post from last year. I started making this post months before the series was on the verge of ending. As I was working on this post and decided to work on rewriting Fairy Tail, I started to rework this series as a defense for keeping Lisanna in the series, as opposed to cutting her. This has been a theme in a lot of the posts I’ve made about Lisanna since a post I made before that one and I do plan to talk about that in the future.

#10. My Incredibly Unpopular Thoughts on: Ships/Zervis [originally posted October 25, 2015]

This is the earliest post in my top 10 and it shows. Around this time two big things happened: I made a post on August 31st called My Incredibly Unpopular Thoughts on: Juvia and the fandom exploded over Zervis, due to the revelations in canon. I intended to make that first post a part of a series and this was too big of an opportunity to pass. I remember that writing this was ridiculously easy for me. In fact, it’s one of the shortest posts for me to draft and upload with its relative size.

While I’m not as proud of how my writing prowess shines in this post, almost everything I’ve said in this post has become my philosophy on ships since posting it. My thoughts on shipping fandoms? Check. My thoughts on canon weight of ships? Check. My wishy-washy feelings over Zervis? Check. For a long time, this was my favorite entry in this series, but we’ll ge tto that soon enough.

#9. Bye, Bye Lucy: Part 4 [originally posted May 20, 2017]

A lot of you may be shocked to see this post on the list. “Bye, Bye Lucy“ was a series of posts I did explaining all of the issues I have with the infamous subset of fanfics that has Lucy get kicked off the Strongest Team in favor of Lisanna, resulting in her leaving Fairy Tail. I had a ton of fun working on this series. So much so, I actually ended up writing a story based on the idea I posit in Part 3 of this series, which I released earlier this month. But, individually, Part 4 is my favorite individual post in the series which focused on the idea of Lucy leaving the guild over the whole situation.

Originally, this whole series was going to be one really long post at just over 10,000 words. However, around the time I was working on the part that would become this post, I realized that these stories fail with each successive plot point important to this trope of story. At this particular point, any stories lose me as both stories inspired by Fairy Tail and as their own type of stories. No good story that I know even tries to play with these tropes has Lucy actually leave the guild, even temporarily.

#8. Why I Still Ship Nali (Even if Most of the Rest of Fandom Doesn’t) [originally posted March 1, 2020]

I didn’t want to add too many posts from too recent on this list. As much as I think my current writing is my most consistent writing, it would be hard to say that too many of my posts now are at the same level as many of the posts coming up on this list. But, I’m honestly glad that I made this post, especially considering some of the things surrounding its creation.

About three months into my blog, I made a post called “What I Need to Stop Shipping Nali (and why I still do)”. Around the time I was going to post it, I guess someone made a post questioning why people would still ship Nali. It’s become one of my least favorite posts and I’ve felt it desperately needed to be updated for a while. I decided to tackle an issue I’ve had seen in much of fan interpretations with Nali: doing nothing past Edolas with Nali. I wrote the first draft out months ago and waited for a good opportunity to type it out. When I got the hate messages, that felt like as good a time as any. Speaking of which...

#7. My Response to Anon-san [originally posted March 31, 2016]

A bit of backstory may help with this one. I posted “My Incredibly Unpopular Thoughts on: Lisanna” on Easter that year. I check my phone coming out of my church’s night concert and I got the two messages I respond to in this post. When I first saw I got messages, I was worried because that was the first time I ever got negative anon messages. But when I read them, I knew I needed to talk about this as my 3,000th post on this blog - a milestone I was on the cusp of approaching when I got the messages.

While I like the precedent my response seemed to set for my dealing with this type of stuff, the reason this post is here that I legitimately love the messages I was responding to. Every now and then, I read them to myself just to remind myself they exist. I’m not even sure why I got them in the first place. They don’t even seem terribly connected to that Lisanna post. While complaining about fandom has been something I’m apt to do for a number of reasons, I can’t imagine which post got on their “nevers”. But believe me when I say that I am feeling very cooling about the fact that I did.

#6. My Incredibly Unpopular Thoughts on: Nalu [originally posted July 9, 2016]

I’m sure this one isn’t much of a shock too many of you. Around the time I made this post, the “anti-Nalu“ community was very different from how it is now. I had made a couple of posts about some of the issues I had with the ship and its fandom, but nothing on this scale. As a part of Fairy Tail month, I figured should try to explain everything I saw wrong with both.

Even as I wanted to do this and made plenty of similar posts before this, the thought of backlash terrified me. I made sure to set it up to post when I knew I’d be away and wouldn’t be able to see how it was received. When I finally did see the responses to this post, all of them were positive and from people who agreed with me. It’s become my favorite post in the series and still seems to serve as a great primer for people who don’t ship Nalu.

Though I’m kind of sad that a lot of the stuff I talked about in that post regarding the development of Nalu and fandom habits haven’t changed almost four years since I first posted it. When I went to make the sequel for this post, I was shocked how little fandom changed and how stuff inside and outside of canon seemed to embolden fandom to be worse about other actions over abour 18 months. Though, I didn’t hate Nalu when I made this post, even as I stopped wanting to ship it around that time.

#5. Opinion I’ll Probably get Stoned For #100 [originally posted April 29, 2016]

I really have to get back to making these. “Opinions I’ll Probably get Stoned For” was the series I was known for starting less than two months into making this blog. It’s a series where I drop spicy takes ranging from Sweet Bell Pepper to California Reaper. I’ve gotten into it with fans over more than a few of the posts in this series. However, my favorite of the series is one of the longest editions in the series.

Months before posting this, I remember seeing one of my favorite Graytear bloggers get into trouble with Gruvia shippers. One point brought up that particularly pissed me off was the moment that Gray was about to used Iced Shell against Silver. According to the Gruva shipper, the fact that the panel remembering Juvia is bigger than the panel remembering Ultear showed enough of Mashima’s priorities. This argument literally made me sick to my stomach. For months, I’d privately joke that this proved the exact opposite: Gray went through with Iced Shell because he remembered Juvia.

To celebrate hitting the milestone of 100 posts in that series, I decided to make a longer version of the series and explain my thoughts in depth. As soon as I had the idea, I knew that had to be the one. My favorite thing about this post is that, despite clarifying that I’m not terribly serious about this argument twice in the post, I actually got blocked by a Gruvia fan over this post. I guess they didn’t see it as that funny of a joke. Weird how that works.

#4. Nali Week: Scars and Unkept Promises [originally posted July 24, 2016]

Every once in a while, someone will make the remark to the effect of “People should stop complaining about the ships they don’t like and make stuff for the ships they do like”. Thank goodness no one has actually said that in regard to my posts. As much fun as I’ve had over the years complaining about the stuff I don’t like in Fairy Tail and its fandom, I do make a point to talk about the stuff I do like and why every now and then. While the series was running, ship weeks usually meant meta posts from me and this is my favorite of them.

This post was born from my own musings about how the anime dealt with Natsu and Lisanna’s relationship. I wanted to talk about its handing through the perspective of Lisanna being an important person Natsu lost and how that works with his desire to see Igneel again. The big moments I draw on is his promise in episode 75 where Lisanna asks Natsu to save her if she ever gets lost and their reunion in episode 79.

The perspective I took in that post is one I don’t really take a lot. I’m not arguing against an idea a lot of people in fandom agree with. I’m not even really arguing that my perspective is the correct perspective. I’m explaining the thought process that Natsu, as I interpret him, has regarding someone he cares about. The stuff I talked about in this post has become part of my interpretation of Natsu and traces of it can be seen in a lot of the posts I’ve made since. We have to bring Nali Week back.

#3. An Open Letter to the Nalu Fandom [originally posted October 1, 2017]

I love satire as a rhetorical tool. I love taking an idea I disagree with to so large an extreme that the problems with it are obvious to even the people who agree with it. While many of my posts have drips of sarcasm and irony, I love making an entire post based on the idea of pointing out the problems with an argument. Consider that I’ve done similar things with Opinion #100 and, to an extent, my most recent story.

The trick is finding something with problems that are so glaringly obvious, you can’t imagine people actually taking its side. In the case of this post, it was a hilarious letter addressed to the “anti-Nalu’s”. Apparently, the idea that people openly didn’t like Nalu got on “the nerve of every last one of their pussy hair“. So they wrote a short letter they meant for fans who don’t like Nalu to read. I would give them a pass becasue they were apparently on their period, but they were defending those Twitter pics of Natsu and Lucy on chain leashes.

It’s worth mentioning that this was a few months after the original series ended. I had been trying hard not to make a post about Nalu and the stupid things I saw their fandom do. I didn’t even talk about the pictures they were defending. When I made this post, I figured that I was probably not going to be making many more posts about Nalu for a while. So I decided to throw in every issue I had with the Nalu fandom between talking about it a year earlier and then.

As you can probably tell, I haven’t stopped complaining about Nalu and its fandom. This post seems to have set the tone for how I would deal with the ship and its fandom this side of the ending. Instead of pointing to why a ship fails for me, I’ve been talking about why others should have expected the ship to fail. And, if recent events are a sign of the future, it seems like I’m going to have stuff to say about it for a while. Yay?

#2. Why was Ichiruki Popular? [originally posted July 6, 2018]

What does it say that this post is among my top 10, both on this list and in terms of most notes on a post on this blog? This is a Fairy Tail blog for crying out loud. I shouldn’t be able to get so much attention for talking about a series that isn’t Fairy Tail. It almost certainly shouldn’t get more attention than most of my posts about Fairy Tail. A few people even liked and reblogged it this week.

Then again, this wasn’t my first time talking about other series. I’d already spent time talking about Rave Master, Naruto, and Monster Soul on this blog. I asked my followers if it would be cool if I spent time talking about other series, now that Fairy Tail had ended. Since I got a fairly decent response I decided to talk about a few series, including Bleach.

I got into reading Bleach about a year before it ended. At the time, I was following people who were already into it and was well aware of the popularity of Ichiruki and infamy of its fandom. I was fairly behind but I didn’t see much reason to ship Ichiruki when it ended and I saw the fan meltdowns. Imagine my shock when I got to the end and felt exactly the same about its chances when Rukia said Ichigo’s just her friend. I made this post to vent.

If I started reading Bleach about a year before getting into Fairy Tail, I likely would have been a Bleach blogger. This post served as an interesting glimpse into what that timeline might look like. It’s also one of the few posts that sparked actually interesting responses. While many have pointed to the anime as a reason for its fan popularity, I can’t tell how the staff came to the conclusion that Ichiruki needed to be portrayed as more romantic than in the manga.

#1. I’m late to the “Nalu wasn’t the original plan” party, aren’t I? [originaly posted December 10, 2016]

I’ve made a lot of posts on this blog. I’ve said a lot of things, done a lot of analysis and meta, and shared a lot of opinions here. And yet, I can’t say that too much of the stuff I’ve said is important. Not to say that my insight into certain topics isn’t appreciated. It’s just that much of what I’ve said over the years, even in some of the posts on this list, likely has been and would have been said by anyone else if I didn’t say it. The biggest exception to that has been this post.

A few months before this post, there was a leaked image of Mashima’s afterword in Fairy Tail S regarding the extra chapter Special Request, which happens to be one of my favorite chapters in the series. In it, he admitted that he didn’t originally plan on writing Natsu and Lucy’s relationship as romantic and was currently writing them as somewhere between friends and lovers.

When I first saw it as an image on a Tumblr post, I was extremely hesitant to say anything about it. I didn’t know about Fairy Tail S and assumed it was a troll. When it was confirmed by another blog, and it source was ultimately verified, it was a dream come true. Mashima had vindicated my thoughts on the ship literal months after my big post on Nalu. And yet, not many people were talking about what this actually meant for Fairy Tail and the fandom moving forward. So came this post.

In many ways, I’m still shocked that I still have to point people to this afterword and what it means for Fairy Tail. I’m sure many people know Mashima didn’t plan on making Nalu happen, but I doubt many people understand that fandom is outright incorrect to say that Nalu hsa been obvious from the jump. In a weird connection to the previous post, Mashima’s comments on Nalu are similar to comments Tite Kubo made regarding his writing Ichiruki. Even now, it’s hard to say that Nalu will become canon knowing Mashima’s original intents.

Of the most important thing to come from this post, this marked the start of me starting to hate Nalu. Up to this point, I went from being indifferent to it to not liking it. However, once this came to light, I came to actually hate the idea of Nalu as romantic. I’ve had even less patience for the fandom that made itself near synonymous with the Fairy Tail fandom at large on every site ever. I doubt that will change anytime soon and I’m not sure if that’s a bad thing anymore.

Well, that’s my list of my favorite posts. I’m sure you guys have favorites among my posts and maybe some of them are on this list. If you want to see more of my other personal favorite posts and reblogs, I’ve tagged all of them as fav on my blog, including this one. Here’s to 5 more years of whatever the heck I’m doing on this blog!

See you!

#this was fun #i spent too much time through the anti nalu tag for this #i've made a lot of fun posts #fav

1 note · View note

werewolfdays · 5 years

Text

drabble - We Match

this is dumb and cute, and they’re dumb and cute, and also this is canon-

Jayde and I lay in bed, watching each other in the calm silence of the late morning. Both of us had been awake for a long time, but neither of us wanted to get out of bed just yet. I leaned up on my elbow, resting my head on my hand, and let the tips of my fingers trace some of the scars that marked her exposed skin. I wondered if any of them still hurt her. The new scar I got from the crossbow bolt still hurt sometimes, even after a couple months of healing. My index finger traveled across her collarbones to a scar on her left shoulder that could’ve been a bullet wound. I smiled to myself as I circled around it gently. It was almost in the same exact place as mine, mirroring in size and shape.

“Look,” I pointed out with a small nod at the mark. Jayde turned her head to glance at it. “We match.”

She scoffed, shaking her head at me. “Not really the kind of comparison I’d like you to make, Nadya.”

I gave her a sly grin. “What? I think it’s kinda badass. Maybe I’ll look like you one day.”

“I will do everything in my power to make sure you don’t.” Jayde said seriously. “Why can’t we be normal and have, like, matching shirts or tattoos…”

“You want to get matching tattoos?” I asked with an amused grin.

“So not the point I was trying to make.” Jayde laughed.

“I know. Still think we should get tattoos, though.” I half joked.

She continued to chuckle at me, “What should we get, huh?”

I thought for a moment, “What would you want?”

“Well... I’ve actually always wanted a constellation.” Jayde reached for my hand, directing the tip of my finger across her left collarbone. “Here.”

“What constellation?” I tried to picture it on the spot she showed me.

“Canis Major. Skye made fun of me for it when we were younger. Said it was too obvious, but I didn’t care.”

I smiled at the thought of a young Skye making fun of her older sister. “Why haven’t you gotten it?”

Jayde shrugged. “I kinda forgot that I wanted it. And it’s hardly a necessity. Do you really see me taking the time to go to a tattoo shop?”

An idea popped into my head. “Do you really want it?”

“If the opportunity ever presented itself, I would definitely get it, but I doubt it’ll ever happen.” She answered.

I sat up in bed, looking down at her. “Okay, how much do you trust me?”

Jayde stared at me with a suspicious glint in her eye, “I trust you more than anyone, but that look on your face is making me hesitate.”

“I might be able to do it for you.”

She pushed herself up too, a slow grin appearing across her lips. “You can?”

“When I was in high school, there was a little bit of a rebellious phase.” She gave me a level stare, not fully believing my words. “Okay, so your version of rebellious may be a little different than mine, but I almost gave myself a tattoo. Looked up how to do it and everything. I even practiced on fruit.”

Jayde actually took a couple seconds to laugh into her hands. “Are you serious?”

“I am!” My hand came up to playfully shove her, “If I didn’t chicken out, you’d be seeing a little, poorly drawn campfire right here.” I pointed at a spot on my wrist.

“Okay.” Her tone was one of resolve.

“Okay, what?”

“Okay, I want you to give me a tattoo.”

I smiled at her excitedly. “Really?”

“Yes.” Jayde let out an amused giggle, “Though, I do have to point out how ironic it is that you, of all people, are going to give me a homemade tat.”

“It’s not ironic at all.” I said, jumping out of bed and rushing around our room, gathering the things I need. “Of all people, I know how to be sterile. Plus, you’re a werewolf with super healing and a natural resistance to infection and disease.”

Jayde’s eyes tracked my every movement with a crooked smile across her lips. “Good point.”

I dropped everything I collected on the bed beside Jayde and put my glasses on. The keys on the laptop made a few loud clicks as I made a quick search. “This the one?” I showed Jayde the picture of the constellation.

“That would be it.” She confirmed.

“Good.” I grinned, positioning the laptop on the bed next to her, so I’d be able to see the picture. Then I climbed on the bed, swinging a leg over her lap to straddle her.

Jayde’s eyebrows shot up as I tugged the strap of her tank top down to fully expose her collarbone. “Just a tattoo?”

I scoffed at her suggestive expression. “Maybe.”

My eyes went back and forth from the picture to Jayde’s collarbone as I marked the constellation out with a pen. Jayde remained still while I did it, even though I could sense her urge to tease me in some way. It took me a few tries to draw out the constellation to my liking, but I eventually got something that resembled a what a decent artist would do. Though, I knew that the tattoo itself could produce a different story.

Once I finished, I asked for Jayde’s confirmation, “How’s that?”

Jayde looked down at what I marked on her skin and smiled back up at me. “Looks good.”

“It might be different when I actually tattoo you.” I felt the need to give her another warning, “Just remember I’m not a professional. There’s a good chance that it’ll look like a kid did it.”

She laughed at me, “As long as it’s you that does it, I don’t mind.”

“This is a pretty big step in our relationship.” I told her as I started sterilizing a sewing needle. “I mean, what if you hate me in a few years? Then you’re stuck with a crappy tattoo.”

Jayde didn’t seem at all concerned. “That sounds like a problem for future, alternate dimension me, where I’m stupid enough to hate you.”

I shook my head at her in amusement, “Well, present, current dimension you is stupid enough to get a homemade tat from her girlfriend, so,”

“This ranks pretty low on my impulsive decisions list.” She jibed.

My shoulders lifted in agreement. Everything was pretty much ready, I dipped the needle in the bottle cap filled with ink and hesitated for one more moment, “Last chance to back out.”

Her crooked grin was both smug and attractive, “Does it look like I have any doubts?”

“Okay,” I said, leaning in to give her a quick peck, “Just in case you hate me after this.”

Jayde gave both an amused and exasperated look, “Just stick me already.”

Surprisingly, some of my muscle memory activated once I started working on it. I guess spending hours in my room when I was a teenager, practicing on any kind of fruit that resembled human skin even a little bit, finally payed off. Jayde remained still, not wincing in the slightest, which I was grateful for. It allowed me to put all of my concentration into making the tattoo look as good as I could manage. Obviously, it wasn’t phenomenal or anything, but I was actually shocked at how well it was coming together.

I lost track of how long I was working on it. Eventually, I sat back in Jayde’s lap to study it for anything that I had missed. The final product was far better than I thought it was going to be. The dotted lines that connected the stars sometimes crossed over an old scar, making it kind of look like they tracked over ghost trails to invisible constellations. If I looked at it without my glasses, I would almost think that an actual tattoo artist did it. When I glanced up at Jayde, I saw that her head was resting back against the wall with her eyes closed, but I knew she wasn’t asleep.

The silence in the room remained for a few moments longer so I could stare at her. Jayde had let her entire body relax when I was working, she almost looked like she was supposed to be at a spa or something, with cucumbers on her eyes. I smiled to myself at that mental image.

Jayde finally spoke, “Are you done?”

“I think so.” I nodded, kind of reluctant to get off of her, but now that my mind wasn’t occupied, I could feel my body aching from being sat and hunched for so long. “Go look in the mirror and tell me what you think.”

Once she was no longer being held down by me, Jayde got up and walked over to the bathroom. I followed close behind, suddenly nervous about what she would think. My gaze watched her as she looked at the tattoo through the reflection in the mirror, studying it for a long time, turning her head to look at it in person, then back through the mirror. Every second became longer than the last, thinking that she was hating it.

Then her eyes met mine in the mirror, and her cocky grin made me realize that she was just messing with me. I shook my head and laughed at her. “You’re an ass.”

“I couldn’t resist.” Jayde admitted, “You’re so cute with that worried look on your face.”

“Your verdict?” I asked sarcastically after rolling my eyes.

Jayde turned around to face me, wrapping her arms around my waist to pull me against her. “I love it.” Her words were genuine, and I didn’t bother to hide how relieved I was. “And I love you.”

That was the best outcome I could’ve hoped for. My hand came up to cup the back of her neck and pull her into a kiss. Jayde showed me just how much she approved with how her lips eagerly parted mine. I savored every movement that her lips made against mine, accepting it as a sincere thank you. I kissed her back just as deeply to wordlessly say you’re welcome.

When we pulled back, Jayde started to chuckle to herself.

“What is it?” I asked, the corner of my mouth turned up in anticipation at what she found so funny.

“Skye is gonna give me so much shit for this.” She laughed.

I giggled too, knowing that she was right. “She’ll just be jealous that she doesn’t have a cute girlfriend to give her crappy homemade tattoos.”

“That is a precious commodity.” Jayde agreed jokingly.

“Don’t you forget it.” I told her, pulling her in for another kiss. I kept this one short, breaking away from her and saying, “Now, sit down. I need to put healing cream on that.”

Jayde rolled her eyes, but obeyed. “Werewolf with super healing, remember?”

I took out the things I needed from the medicine cabinet. “Don’t care. You’re treating it like any other wound until it’s healed, got it?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Jayde sighed.

#ocs #original characters #original writing #original story #My writing #im house sitting/dog sitting and these pups are SO distracting #so this was the only writing I could manage to get done this week #and its my birthday tomorrow!!#anyway this is a concept i've had in my head for a while #Nadya giving Jayde a tattoo #its one of there rare times where Nadya does something irresponsible and impulsive too #and hey it pays off #Jayde #Nadya #Nadya pov

12 notes · View notes

lyricalafrica2 · 5 years

Photo

‘Emergence’ National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Bulawayo September 6th - 19th October 2019 A few pics that I’ve finally managed to upload and a summary of my processes and review of the show and how I felt it went. In my usual way, fairly personal in places. I wrote it immediately after the show and views are always going to change within time. It’s been a few weeks now and I’ve made the transition from Zimbabwe to Botswana, I’ve had time to recover and chill for a little while. Not much drawing going on, but a whole load of sweating as the the season heats up! I feel at this point to write a review of the creative processes of my show may be a little warped in light of the fatigue I’m feeling, however my intention is to do one again come the end of the month when the dust settles to see how my opinions change. Given the subject matter, I’m also curious as to the impact on my own sense of self, immediately after and going forward. I found it strange that immediately afterwards, my focus was drawn to myself, how I looked in publicity photos and not the actual way the show went. Vanity you may think, though that old devil of self-consciousness. This hit me within a couple of hours of the show ending. Going from the heights of adrenaline and excitement, swiftly to over tired and self-critical. I questioned why more artists didn’t attend, berated myself for looking fat, my habit of nervously over gesticulating and the over animation of my facial expressions. Being struck with all of this just after midnight after two hours sleep if that and venturing onto social media in an attempt to quell my restless mind. Before bed, I’d bounced around the cottage in a fir of sheer delight, like an excited child might, amazed and happy that I’d successfully made it to completion. This midnight hour saw me overanalysing everyone and everything, even down to a known artist who turned up, said nothing to me and shuffled off into a corner to eat popcorn and nuts on his own. Not a well done, nor a comment on the content, just nothing, perhaps a slight look of disdain though. Was I just imagining this? Was this silence comment enough on what lay before him? These thoughts are just as responsible for limiting behaviours and in voicing them honestly, I’m hoping they simply release into the ether and just disappear. So, the exhibition was divided into three rooms, for which I wanted to take people on a journey, from conception. Not to say I incorporated every bit of work that I produced. I tried to curate carefully, it was interspersed with pieces that were a bit more literal, leading to much more abstracted concepts. Wording and symbolism, not just because; but because they are a powerful means to switch on the brain and indeed the heart. Positive and powerful. If you think positive, positivity will perpetuate, and vice versa with negativity. You don’t make it anywhere telling yourself that you’re wrong and a terrible person. For this reason, I was pleased that there were a number of children attended. I think instilling in children how important it is to love and respect themselves properly, allowing those little flames of excitement to become brightly burning and sincere passions are important. Most realise only too late where they went wrong and how detrimental it can be in trying to adhere to societal norms. Be yourself, they’re the most important person you will ever encounter. I tried to covey through my mixed media approach, the fragility, but also the resilience of the human spirit. How it could be quashed when handled wrongly, we’ve all had our wings burnt so to speak, we’ve no doubt all had our wings clipped too. Been told to be too cautious, know our limits, not been supported properly at the mercy of someone else’s ego. It can be hard not to absorb these things as we make our way through life, we are constantly in awe of someone else, rather than looking within for the amazing facets we already have. I hold my hands up and confess I am absolutely guilty of this, but in also being a therapist, it becomes so clear how things invariably work. It can be heart breaking to watch someone go through life, never realising there potential, thinking they have to conform to x, y or z, just to be accepted, so they can consider themselves a worthy human being. Whatever happened to simply being a good person and just allowing yourself to shine? Doing your thing, being encouraged to discover all that you are? I have that philosophy of, if we all learnt how to truly accept and love ourselves, our lives would be far easier. We would be able to perpetuate that to our neighbour, to the animals that surround us, to our environment. Can you imagine if we all lived consciously taking a little more care like that? The recurring themes of fragility, fractured, bound and freedom were used throughout the exhibition, never asking people to see the point, but encouraging them to come to their own conclusions. Flashes of mirror, captured people in the moment and very much made them a part of the exhibition pieces. Veining, flight paths, patterning and themes which were very much more emotive were all explored in different ways. Liberal and freeform use of diluted oils on damp surfaces allowed mixed colours to merge and bleed, blown, feathered allowed to run and bloom. Free to behave how they needed to behave. Added texture and collage offered additional light, movement and the suggestion of dynamism to these much more abstract pieces. I’ve never used oils in this way before, but I enjoyed it and would explore it further in the future, potentially with more colour in the background. The mainly white backdrop was an attempt to maintain some form of purity, as in the essence of just being. Smaller pieces formed a panel, with suggestion of cuts and scarring that can be recovered from. It’s never too late to learn to use your wings and take flight! Again the use of the wording ”Public Notice”, I wanted these pieces to be vital in drawing people in, in for introspection, an invitation to look for their own potential. To untangle themselves from societal norms and controlling hierarchies, to find what they were really about and to love and accept that. I wanted people to walk away with a sense of wholeness, or at least an impetus to do some self-exploration. A deeper sense of knowing that they are about so much more than the façade they present to the world every day. The façade that they have built in in reaction to the rules and regulations laid down to keep us all in line. The final room was a room I set aside to be filled by my installation pieces. The recurring symbolism of the eyes, the distorted, obstructed retinas, the colours that represented the opportunity to discover potential. The gaze, from one eye to the other, connected by the knowing, the denial, one an authoritarian with the same infinite potential as the next. Likely undergoing their own demons and using that control to supress and satiate their own need. But what if they found themselves a little more, looked at themselves a little kinder, would there action on the rest of the world still have to be so outwardly commanding? Is all this required because we can’t validate ourselves, we seek to control others, because we can’t control or accept ourselves? Paper bark, shards of blunt glass, fishing wire and chicken wire were all used to create a somewhat ethereal, spiritual effect, because well this was a fairly spiritual topic, but not in the head in the clouds kind of way, more a put yourself up there with the best kind of way. Take accountability for your own height, don’t accept that ceiling just because. It’s usually glass and if someone has led you to reinforce it, it’s about time you smashed it down yourself! So why leave the comments on the butterfly till now? Aside from the very free nature of the butterfly and the way it emerges from the cocoon to reveal its true identity, I wanted that sense of liberation. Detachment from what had come to be expected of it. The Commodore butterfly really did bring it home and in that sense, never accept that you have to be second in command. Be the captain of your own ship. Know that you are precious and that you deserve to be the best version of you, which can only be granted by you and only ever you! The fractured painted mirror adorned with glimpses of butterfly and glass again, was there to suggest that we can all be a bit broken, but we’re still beautiful. Use you power to transform that power into something positive, let it make you strong, don’t let it drown you. Life is tough yes, but it’s also sweet and beautiful. And in that, my final piece invited people into a little box, through the abstracted eye, to see what they could see. I see you, what do you see? It seemed an appropriate if more abstracted carry on from my oil portraiture collection, “Who Am I?”. After having seen my exhibition for the first time alone since Friday need to summarise my feelings here. Am I happy? Yes, after feeling so out of sorts over the weekend. Could there be improvement made on the way that I broach the subject? Of course, but isn’t that the meaning of life? To live and keep learning and to try and improve oneself and approach daily? I really enjoyed the installation and sculptural work. It’s not something that I generally do due to constraints on space, tools and materials aren’t so hard to source back home, but I tend to simply get caught up in painting. It was good to be able to combine that and be able to produce such a multifaceted body of work. I’d very much like to continue exploring this. Feedback from the audience was positive and most people pointed out at least two favourite pieces. The large bright eye and butterfly, the fractured mirror piece and the other sculptural pieces went down well and were said to be a quite unexpected addition to the exhibition. In this sense I was pleased I managed to offer something that was different to the usual standards of exhibition. If I were to do it again, what would I do differently? I’d perhaps pay more attention to the interactive element, maybe think it through for longer, use ribbon instead of thread as it is fiddly and time consuming to tie onto the chicken wire backing. I’d also likely do more sculptural elements. That for me has to have been the highlight, besides the different and at times intoxicating use of the oil paints. Of course the invitations went out rather too late and the carefully selected soundtrack went virtually un noted, the aromatherapy oils that I had infused the room with evaporated and disappeared off into the ether through the open doors. All things that need tweaking, but as they say, not bad for a first attempt at a National Gallery.

#female artist #fine artist #art exhibition #a life less ordinary #contemporary art #africa #travel #artists adventures #art blogger #fine art #National Gallery #my amazing life #beautiful life #inspirations #artists on tumblr #life as an artist #visual arts

3 notes · View notes

elfnerdherder · 5 years

Text

The Gunmetal Kiss: Chapter 6

[Support my Patreon] [Read on Ao3]

Well, guys, it’s here! This was a baby fic, but I’d love to thank all of you for the time and patience you’ve shown through the last couple of years of stagnant posting and random rambles of how much work sucks. I think I’ve settled into a groove of my new job now, and I’m hoping to get into a once a week update, kind of how I used to. Baby steps!

A special thanks to my patrons: @evertonem @starlit-catastrophe @kenobi-is-king @sylarana @frostylicker Duhaunt6, Mendacious Bean, Superlurk, and Cecily! You guys are the best!

Chapter 6:

May 8, 2017:

Nothing.

May 9, 2017:

Nothing.

May 10, 2017:

Nothing.

July 28, 2017:

Nothing.

October 13, 2017:

Nothing.

December 25, 2017:

Nothing.

January 1, 2018:

Nothing.

February 1, 2018:

Nothing.

March 1, 2018:

Nothing.

April 1, 2018:

Nothing.

May 1, 2018:

Nothing.

June 1, 2018:

Nothing.

July 1, 2018:

Nothing.

August 1, 2018:

Nothing.

September 1, 2018:

Nothing.

October 1, 2018:

Nothing.

November 1, 2018:

Nothing.

December 1, 2018:

Nothing.

December 31, 2018:

Nothing.

January 1, 2019:

And Time Froze.

Will Graham died often. He died often, and nothing happened. People died, and nothing happened. Sometimes, he was commended for his work. Sometimes, he had a desire to put mirror shards in the eyes of his targets.

He doesn’t, but sometimes he thinks about it.

He’d told Alana it was a mirror, but it wasn’t, was it? He became, but he could become anything, and was he truly a person when he was constantly becoming something else? He thought of how Hannibal looked at him, hungry. How he’d slid that knife so smooth.

He’d wanted to confess something about Mason Verger. Will Graham did work outside of the United States.

Time passed, and nothing happened. Nothing happened because Will Graham was not a thing to retain information, but a thing to mirror the world around him just long enough to pass the power along. Never for himself, never himself, and nothing happened as the time passed. Will Graham wasn’t truly Will Graham. He was a ghost.

Ghost Agents aren’t people. Will Graham never had feelings for Hannibal.

Dying this time wasn’t anything special. It was nothing, but he knew it’d stain his ex-lover’s eyes forever, make them cry themselves to sleep. Enough they’d never know he was alive. Enough to know they’d not pry for him.

Enough to know he’d never again exist to them.

Despite the smell, sewers were the best of exits. Most of them were scarcely occupied by humans, and it led to avenues of quick getaways. Climbing out of the gutter and sliding out of the stained and wet jacket, he tossed it in the dumpster nearby and rounded the corner, picking up his bug-out bag.

Standing poised before a bleeding sun and Will’s only escape, Hannibal Lecter’s knife glinted, reflected and nearly blinded Will. He paused for the briefest of moments, his mind reflecting, turning in on itself. He stood slowly and gripped the duffle bag tight, calculating.

He couldn’t speak. He swallowed, throat tight, and his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. Nearly two years. Nearly two years, and Hannibal looked good.

Hannibal had a knife in his hand. Hannibal’s hand cut throats so smooth.

“You found me,” he said, hoarse.

“I never lost you,” Hannibal explained calmly. “You simply kept your head down and refused to see.”

Will held his breath just long enough to make it hurt. He exhaled slow, allowed it to burn.

“You going to stick me with that?”

“You were telling the truth the whole time, I think,” Hannibal said. “Bits and pieces, but true. I wondered, long after, if you had to doctor your own wounds most times, and that’s why they were so gruesome in the aftermath.”

“I’m not going to get into a knife fight with you. I’ll subdue you and move on.”

“I thought to throw away the hideous canvas, but it was a ship adrift at sea. It seemed somehow fitting for you.”

“Enough, Hannibal.”

“It was not enough,” Hannibal interrupted, curt. “It was not so near enough time as I’d have liked, and in truth, Will Graham, I don’t believe it was near enough time for you, either.”

He tasted Ortolan and brimstone. Will bit at a dry spot on his lip, tore hard enough bleed. His grip on his bag didn’t falter, but his breath did.

“I thought you a remarkably difficult read until I realized it wasn’t that I couldn’t read you, but that you were never quite yourself to read. I miscalculated your affections, or so I supposed until I saw what it was for you to mirror someone’s affection back onto themselves. Then, I felt rather lucky in realizing I was able to experience a genuine intimacy with you.”

“You walk a fine line between arrogance and confidence.”

“You’d claim what you and I shared somehow compared to the watered-down version delivered in the coffee shop to Abigail Hobbs, whose grief and anger towards her father drew her into witness protection after your death? Or your romantic interludes with Nathanial, who could not convince you to come back to bed after you’d sufficiently pleased him?”

“If I was so unobservant I didn’t notice the third man in the room, I should retire,” said Will. It sounded far droller than he felt.

“You’re hungry for something, aren’t you?” Hannibal asked, and there it was: that look in his eye, that hungry look that made something inside of Will hungry, too.

“No,” Will rasped.

“You once wanted to get to know me,” Hannibal urged, and his voice softened. It wasn’t rough, but hesitant, something smacking of vulnerability, but Will didn’t want to think of that right now. “I had thought you’d maybe like to know me still.”

He thought about fighting the Great, Red Dragon, how Hannibal had slit his throat so smooth. How his eyes burned, and there was a set to his jaw that hinted at a protective nature, an urge to act because he wouldn’t stand the notion that Will could get hurt again.

Will stupidly thought of Alana wondering who’d first got in his head and scrambled it all up.

“We have to go,” he said, and he glanced to his watch.

“Will –”

“I’ll…I’ll talk, but we have to go.”

Hannibal looked likely to resist, but after a brief, taut second, he relaxed. “My car is less likely to be found.”

It wasn’t a lie. Will gripped his duffle bag tight, then relaxed. He gave a brief nod and gestured for Hannibal to lead the way.

There was a certain edge to be the one holding the keys to the car. It was a fucking Bentley, and Will allowed himself the luxury of melting into the leather. The last mission had been tiring, in truth.

There’d been a lot of missions that’d been tiring, if that was something he was willing to admit. Maybe not yet, not at a moment like this.

His duffle bag rested between his legs. In it held the key to a thousand identities, a thousand opportunities. He wasn’t sure if his mind was turning or reeling. “Tell me about Mason Verger.”

Hannibal held both hands on the wheel as they peeled through casual suburbs and took stop signs rather than street light intersections. Will saw the care of it, and his fingers fidgeted with the lock button.

“Mason Verger was a pedophile, and my work colleague shared it with me after a troubling day at set when she broke down crying and couldn’t continue the scene.

“I…do not have a tolerance for those that think themselves above the repercussions of harming the innocent that are in no place to protect themselves. I thought it important that I convince him of his wrongdoing, therefore I set out the careful planning of our friendship and his inevitable destruction.”

As orange, dull streetlights striped and skewered his face, it made his grim smile feral. Will liked it. It made him remember Dolarhyde dying. Will was shot, and Hannibal hadn’t hesitated in stabbing Dolarhyde so that Dolarhyde couldn’t stab back.

The scar was ugly, hidden only by a beard Will painstakingly maintained. It was difficult to blend in with a scar like that. Difficult to do your job when people kept asking questions.

“It was only one party, but it was enough. We procured drugs from his personal stash, and he didn’t notice that I mixed a potent blend of psychedelics into the powder. He took them without thought, and I’m sure you know the rest.”

“How the hell did you get a hold of something like that,”

“I have a friend in the pharmacy business. Big pharma is actually a large problem that the federal government should look into,” he chided lightly.

“Not my job.”

“No, but I’d like to know about that,” he replied, and at the next stop sign he grabbed one of Will’s fidgeting hands, letting it rest in the neutral space between them on the armrest.

“Hannibal—”

“You said you would talk.”

He did say he’d talk. Will chewed his bottom lip and nodded in approval at Hannibal’s turn of head towards the interstate. Interstates were safe at night. Safer than people thought, so long as you didn’t drive like an ass and draw attention to yourself.

He waited for a few miles before he spoke. Hannibal’s patience was fine-tuned and calm, not at all intrusive. He knew Will had no sort of idea where they were going, knew he was at the mercy of Hannibal’s need to know.

And Will had known that walking towards the car, yet he’d gotten in anyway.

“What you saw was me using my hyper-empathy disorder in order to so completely ingrain myself into the space of another person that I’m able to aptly anticipate their needs or any potential hazards of them being within my workspace and mission. I was recruited because despite that, it doesn’t hamper my ability to kill someone, should the need arise.”

Admitting that was easier than admitting to the rest of the job. Other people had scrutinized his psyche before; one more was nothing.

“You’re good at it.”

“As are you,” Will countered.

“When I care about something, Will, I will protect it at all costs. I know what it is to be unable to protect the things that I love, and I promised myself that it would never happen again.”

There was something in the way that he said ‘love’ that made Will’s breath stutter past his lips.

“You don’t know me, Hannibal. You can’t suggest you love me.”

“I know more than others, otherwise you would not be so defensive of it. Instead, you’d be cruel, as you were to the rest of your targets that now think you dead.”

“You want me to be cruel to you?” Will asked –he didn’t appreciate the sound of it being more incredulous than threatening.

“No, I’m informing you that if you didn’t want me to follow you, you should have made me think you were dead. You ensured such a thing from every target after me, which leads me to assume you wanted me to find you.”

Will was still more baffled than angry that Hannibal had found him. Of all the stupid, risky, outlandish things someone had done just to get his attention…

“That’s not unreasonable, given the evidence,” Will allowed. Begrudgingly.

“And given how good you are at disappearing, I’d promised myself should I get you in this car, Will Graham, I wasn’t going to let you out of my sight again,” he continued, amiably. “As I said, I want to get to know you. I think I’d be more than pleased with what I find.”

Will looked at their hands clasped. He thought of the boat adrift at sea, likely still on the wall of that bedroom inside of a house that was dusty and abandoned. He wondered if Jack would comb through that house and find himself standing in front of that canvas. If he did, he would more than likely think of Hannibal asking Will if he wanted it back. He’d ponder it for years after, should they get away with this. Had that been a codeword? Did Will betray the organization, and I was too stupid to see it?

The bag at his feet held enough futures to last a lifetime of over and over again. Rebirth and death. Rebirth and death.

Red Dragon had tied Hannibal in a fisherman’s knot. In his spare time, Will quite enjoyed the sport of it. Maybe he’d like to know about that? Maybe they’d find a place in the forest where no prying eyes could see?

Will smiled. “I’d like to get to know you, too.”

There was nothing but miles of road behind them. Just ahead lay every possibility.

#LiaS scribbles #hannibal #hannibal fanfic #hannigram #will graham x hannibal #hannibal au

17 notes · View notes