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atl4ntxc · 3 years

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#devildom's ballerina !

BALLET, imagine.

—character(s), Lucifer, Mammon, Leviathan, Satan, Asmo, Beelzebub, Belphegor, Diavolo, Barbatos, Solomon, Simeon, Luke.

—genre, overall fluffy.

—notes, please do take note that this is fem! reader with the usage of she/her pronouns. if any of you wants a male version, send me an ask! (though, it'll be headcanons since my head is empty)

; Mc has to perform on stage as two of the lead roles in Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake after the exchange program. Little does she know, the brothers and her friends decided to give her a little visit before the show.

—————

They had to come to the human world for this.

Mc is a principal ballerina, though she doubted her skills, it was painfully obvious that the female was amazing at ballet. Ballet is theatrical – performed on a stage to an audience utilizing costumes, scenic design and lighting. It can tell a story or express a thought, concept or emotion. Ballet dance can be magical, exciting, provoking or disturbing.

For this years' performance, the ballet company that Mc was in decided to do the iconic 'Swan lake' performance.

And Mc was cast to play Odile, the black swan maiden and the secondary antagonist in Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. She also got to play Princess Odette, the white swan maiden, who is the heroine of the ballet. Getting two of the main roles of Swan Lake was surely exhausting, hours and hours of rehearsals in the dance studio and inside her own home.

Ballet is not a simple art form, and the brothers absolutely knew that.

"Okay, so the portal should be able to work now." Said Barbatos, smiling lightly at the brothers.

"Ah, I can't wait to see Mc again! It's been such a long month~" Asmodeus whined, putting both of his hands against his cheek and began caressing slowly. "It's only been a month, Asmo..."

"A whole month without Mc was terrifying! I don't have the courage to go through that anymore,"

Satan sweatdropped at his brother and gave him a nervous smile. "Right... Anyway, Barbatos— is the portal ready?" Barbatos looked at Satan and nodded, his gloved hand making its way to the portal.

"Well, what are we all waiting for? Let's go and visit Mc!"

Everyone that was present cheered.

—————

You sipped on your coffee, opening your Spotify playlist in the process as you put your earphones in.

You were on the way to the theatre, the time was currently around 7:30 am. It was the opening night for Swan Lake, and you got two of the major roles, Princess Odette and Odile. When the cast was announced, it was surely exciting but it worried you to the core.

Some would think this is a nightmare, some would think this is a dream. But you'd prefer to keep it at a neutral level like most professionals do.

As you step into the theatre's ground, you were shocked to see the ruler of hell and his butler, standing there, waiting to greet you.

"What the..."

"Mc! Hello, welcome,"

You stared at them when you felt your hands shake, making you drop your cup of coffee (which you paid a lot for), yet Barbatos thankfully managed to catch it.

"Whoops! Don't want to drop that. Here," Barbatos gave the cup to Diavolo, who handed it to you with a smile. "What are you- Why are you guys here?" You fixed your posture and took out your earphones.

"Well, we heard that you had a performance this evening and we wanted to surprise you! So, tell me, Mc. What is this 'Ballet' thing and how does it work?"

You stared at Diavolo with furrowed eyebrows and a disappointed sigh and cracked your knuckles. "Alright, let's get into it."

—————

"Oh, so it's basically a dance concert?"

"Yes, definitely." After showing Diavolo and Barbatos videos of various ballet performances, you decided to shut off your phone and get ready for your rehearsals. "It's kinda complicated but... I kinda have rehearsals in a few hours, and my show will be starting soon."

"Oh right, yes!" Beamed Diavolo, Barbatos smiling nervously in the background. You bid the demons a farewell and walked towards your own dressing room, remembering each move that was required in the performance

As you stepped into the room, you were surprised to see all of the demon brothers, waiting patiently for your arrival. "What kind of witchery is this?!"

"Mc! You're here!" Spoke Asmo, lunging himself towards you but failing after as you got pulled in a hug by Leviathan. "I missed you, my player two..." he whispered, burying his face into the crook of your neck as you lightly laugh at him, combing his hair through your slender fingers.

"Getting bold now are we, Levi?"

"I-" Before he finished the sentence, you were pulled away by the arm. "Hey! I'm her first," growled the avatar of greed, as he kept you in his arms in a protective manner. "Mc isn't yours, Mammon. Let her go!"

"Guys, stop! Look, you guys can quarrel later but I have rehearsals to do. It's already opening night, and I really don't have time to slack off." You exclaimed, pulling away from Mammon and putting your dancing bag on the dressing table. They apologized and you accepted it.

Taking your ballet costume that was specifically designed in white to the dressing area, you changed into it and untied your braided hair.

"Woah, Mc you look absolutely gorgeous!"

"Thank you."

You sat on the vanity seat and styled your hair into a classic ballet bun with braids wrapped around, styling it neatly and putting hair spray right after. "Looking great, Mc~! What about your makeup? Can I do it?"

"Excuse me, That's my job." Asmo turned his head to see a tall female that was around 5'8, with a layered brunette hairstyle. This was probably the makeup artist, thought Lucifer.

"Mc, do you know her!?"

"Anastasia, hey. Uh, she's our professional makeup artist..." You answered, smiling slightly at the brunette and sweatdropping right after. Asmo had a betrayed look cross his face, "You have your own makeup artist?" he whined.

"Usually, I teach Mc how to do makeup by herself, it is my profession after all. But, Mc requested for me to do her makeup for this performance," Anastasia sighed, making Mc smile nervously as Asmo gasped.

"Mc, you could've asked me!"

"Asmo, quit it. Alright, all of you, let's just wait outside." Lucifer kindly interrupted the conversation, pulling Asmo by the collar and making his brothers stand up to leave as well. "I'm so sorry about them."

"Don't worry about it." The brunette shook her head, her long locks falling off her shoulder. "Do you want it light or heavy?" questioned Anastasia, picking up her makeup brush. "Depends on you, of course. I don't mind anything!"

—————

"Mc, I believe you're a little late for rehearsal."

"I sincerely apologize, Madam Maria. It'll never happen again,"

"I'll take your word for it, now chop-chop! We're beginning our last rehearsal before the show." The Russian woman clapped her hands, making both of the male and female ballerinas jolt up to their positions.

—————

"You can do it, Mc!"

"Yeah! Go for it, Mc."

"Solomon, Luke? You guys aren't allowed to be backstage!" As much as you'd like to interact and spend time with them, this was not the time as you were about to go on stage in 10 minutes.

"I'm sorry, Mc! We just wanted to see you before the show." Luke frowned, hugging you as a part of the apology. Solomon nodded, a nervous grin crossing his face as he rubbed his nape. "Sorry if we caused a disturbance."

You sighed and let the corner of your mouth slightly curl up, softly smiling. "Well, you did cause a little commotion back there, but I guess it's fine. I've missed you guys too!" Pulling them in a hug, you were still careful to not accidentally mess your costume up.

"I miss the warmth you all provided, really."

"That's pretty poetic, I like that." Laughing lightly at Solomon's joke, you punched his arm, making him jerk back in pain. "Hey! It's true, what?" Luke cheered on, seeming to like the fact that you were beating Solomon up.

"Anyway, we'll go back to our seats now. Good luck, Mc!" Solomon exclaimed, pulling Luke away who was very angry at the fact that he never got to spend time with you. Smiling at the retreating figures of the males, your smile got wider as the music started to appear, walking onto the stage.

Each move you did was did gracefully, and it made the Devildom residences eyes locked onto your form, which appeared to be glowing as the stage light and music made it more beautiful, to the point where Belphegor was not able to sleep, too mesmerized.

Simeon was so proud of you, from the day you introduced yourself to the day of your last breath, and he made sure to stay that way.

Luke's eyes were sparkling, him silently cheering you on as he had a big smile across his face. Solomon was also smiling, witnessing his fellow human friend becoming and reaching one of her biggest dreams.

Diavolo had a satisfied and proud grin on his face, watching you intently on every move you make. Barbatos on the other hand, had a slight smile decorating his face, complimenting his beauty even further. His hands were rested on his lap, relaxing at the classical music that was presented, watching you perform on stage.

Leviathan and Asmodeus had their phones out, recording everything. Levi had sparkling eyes with a smile and Asmo had his right hand clasped on his mouth with tears in his eyes. "Mc looks pretty." Whispered Beelzebub, who was stuffing his face with popcorn.

"I agree. I can't sleep, but I'm not complaining," Belphegor nodded, resting his face against his palm.

"That's my human! Go human!"

"Mammon, shut up! Don't disturb." Lucifer scolded Mammon, who had his arms up in the air, to show how supportive he was of you. He lowered his arms down and began to cheer more quietly, his eyes full of adoration.

After scolding Mammon, Lucifer relaxed back on the theatre seat, closing his eyes for a mere second before reopening them, moving his gaze to the stage.

The performance ended with rounds of applause from the audience, making the theatre be filled with noise.

Wiping the sweat off your forehead, you sipped on the water that was provided by your ballet teacher. "You did great out there. It was a nice performance," she complimented, which made you almost choke on your drink, as she almost never compliments anyone, but instead insult them.

"Thank you, Madam Maria."

"All of you can head home now, or wherever you want to be. Just make sure to show up at our next lesson!" She announced, letting the ballerinas rest. Some nodded their heads, some ignored the woman's words yet she didn't care.

"That was tough, how was it Mc?"

"You're lucky to get one of the swans... My legs are practically dying out of exhaustion right now."

Whining at your fellow colleague, the female laughed at you before laying on the ground, closing her eyes. "Hah, you wish you were me. My wishes have been granted!" You shook your head and deadpanned at the woman, "You act like you're drunk when you're exhausted, Maribelle."

Maribelle laughed and looked at you in the corner of her eyes, "Ugh, I know, and I'm proud." She sat up, straightening her legs while massaging them, "Is anybody going to pick you up? I can give you a ride."

"Oh, I'll pass. I have some people coming to pick me up, don't worry. You should rest, Maribelle."

"You act like my mother! I mean, not that I mind, but you should take care of yourself more." She frowned, taking a hold of your shoulder, face full of concern. You smiled softly and patted her hand, "I'll take note of that."

—————

"Mc, that was incredible! You were so pretty up there, doing those twirls and making them look so easy," Luke exclaimed, putting his hands up in the air before lowering them down and putting them on his hips, huffing. "Can you teach me?!"

"I don't mind, Luke. It's painful though!"

He stopped walking and shrieked in horror, a scared expression plastered on his face. "On second thought, I don't think I wanna do ballet. Sorry, Mc!" You laughed at him, shaking your head.

"You were great out there, Mc. That was just raw talent,"

"Thanks, Barbs! That means a lot."

"I mean, you're my human! As expected from the great Mammon!" Lucifer hit his head, eyebrows furrowing. "It was entirely Mc, you're not involved Mammon."

"Hey, ya don't have to be so mean about it!" He pouted and rubbed the back of his head, sweatdropping. "It's fine, Lucifer. Let him be, don't be too fussy about it," You commented, putting a hand on Lucifer's back, rubbing it up and down in a comforting manner.

And as the wholesome moment was about to be treasured, Lucifer heard a click from someone's phone. He looked up to see Belphie, smirking evilly before showing the photo he took of Lucifer, sharing them with Satan.

"Belphie, delete that!"

"Make me."

"Anywayy, good job Mc! Though, the pas de deux between you and the prince made me jealous..." You looked to see Asmo, his smile turning upside down into a frown. "Pas de what?"

"Pas de deux is basically a dance for two people, typically a man and a woman." Satan interrupted, answering Mammon's question as well as Levi and Beel's questioning gazes. "Oh, it's THAT scene..." Levi frowned as he recalled the scene between you and Prince Siegfried's performer.

"We're just friends, nothing special." You denied their assumptions, waving it off. Beel looked at you and slightly smiled, taking a macaron and giving it to you. "Here, you deserve it."

Thanking Beel, you put the macaron in your mouth and chewed on it, swallowing it right after, enjoying it fully.

"Mc?"

"Yeah?"

"Would you like to be Devildom's official ballerina?"

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onebizarrekai · 3 years

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v3′s art is comically terrible for a professionally distributed game in a series: a compilation

in this not-essay I will list all of the mistakes and problems I have spotted in v3′s art. don’t worry, it’s entirely for fun and I’m doing this on a whim, so please feel free to not take this seriously but also it’s hilarious and embarrassing how ridiculous this is like what happened did they speedrun the whole production or what

see, there are some things you can take as meta like “they made it bad on purpose to allude to the downfall of tv shows that have been on air for much too long” but I have a very strong feeling this is not the case due to the nature of some of these errors

disclaimer, the more I study this art, the more I fear that the artists were underpaid and underslept, so if this is in fact the case, I am so sorry to all of them but also I’m going to make fun of the art anyway

anyway let’s get started!

if you study this image for longer than 5 seconds, you will see that kaede is the only one fully shaded and keebo is literally just his normal sprite pasted into the image. every other character is just an ordinary ref, hence most of them facing the exact same direction with neutral expressions on their faces. it looks like a bad edit, and is probably one of the worst pieces of art in the game. it kind of gets better from here on, but my roasting will not.

with that out of the way, here’s the problem that officially bothers me the most and clarifies my viewpoint of “this is not meta and an actual lack of company communication”

this freaking cg, which seems normal at a glance, but some wiseass was like “oh, kaede is a girl, so obviously she’s going to be shorter than the Male Protagonist™” ah, that’s funny. because if you look at the character bios, kaede is, in fact, one inch taller than shuichi and not like 6 inches shorter as she is shown here.

also shuichi’s shoulder is disproportionate and horrendous and he looks vaguely like a jojo character, but I wasn’t even thinking about that until right now.

thanks guys, 50% of the fandom who has never bothered to check these bios thinks that kaede is like 5′3 (did the developers really put so little thought into her to the point where drawing her correctly in the game didn’t even matter??)

also I would like to point out that, even though this isn’t related to the art itself, yes, a character kaede’s size being only 117 lbs is unfeasible, but this applies to literally every character in danganronpa ever and it’s not new news that it’s unrealistic

update: someone in the tags informed me that in versions of the game that use centimeters, like the japanese version, kaede is actually shorter than shuichi, which just adds another thing to the list of weird decisions the localization team made for no reason. that said, after confirming this, kaede is 167 cm in the original, while shuichi is 171 cm, which are approximately 5′6 and 5′7 respectively, but one inch is still nowhere near as drastic as it is depicted above. (in spite of this, I would rather depict kaede as slightly taller, so I’m probably going to keep doing that.)

the journey continues!

bro if you want kaede to have shoulder length hair then stick to it to begin with

you can pretend this is at an angle all you want but they definitely committed the shorter kaede sin a second time

wait a goddamn second.

DO YOU SEE THIS

no………… it wasn’t kaede who shrank. it was shuichi who got taller

speaking of which, can we talk about how shady the perspective is in this elevator pic? look at shuichi and kokichi in comparison to kaede. kokichi, who is canonically 7 inches (edit: or 5, if you’re loyal to the original) shorter than kaede, looks taller than kaede. he’s growing too. what steroids are these gays taking

running into the room, electric boogaloo: I don’t think tsumugi is supposed to be the same height as kokichi

gonta… gonta you’re lookin a bit like a jojo character there

I love how kaito’s head looks kind of like it was pasted onto his body. why is he the same size as shuichi? shouldn’t he be high school bully size or something? his torso is teensy

ah yes, white angie.

I love this cg but why is shuichi’s right hand so much bigger than his left hand

I also love how this cg looks like they literally took pictures of trees and pasted them into the background, especially on the left. the shadows are so weird, especially closer to the ceiling, it’s difficult for me to believe they didn’t do exactly that.

return of Enlarged shuichi

puberty update: kokichi is now taller than shuichi in spite of shuichi never missing leg day. what crimes will he commit

I have to mention it, guys. this has to be one of the worst danganronpa cgs. kokichi’s facial proportions look atrocious. look at the way his face sticks out like his jaw is in the wrong place. his scarf is a pasted texture. that’s it. this moment was so iconic but the cg just looks so… so… off. like something is terribly wrong, but you can’t put your finger on it.

you know what? let’s get into that ‘pasted texture’ thing.

let’s imagine you’re an artist working on a professional game. you’re assigned to draw cgs of kokichi ouma, who has a checkered scarf from hell. sure, it will be terrible to draw, but you only have to draw it once at a time! plus, perspective is pretty important, right? can you be bothered? nah, actually. let’s just copy paste a checkered pattern into the cg, because I’m sure nobody will notice. it’ll blend right in with the other cgs that someone actually put effort into drawing his scarf in, right?

no. the answer is no and I very much noticed. this genuinely looks terrible and I would understand taking a shortcut like that in fanart or even an indie game but this is a full price pc and console distributed game

(an addition: look at kokichi’s TINY HANDS in that last one)

meanwhile, they straight up forgot to color in kokichi’s scarf in this cg.

dude. I forgot about whatever the hell this cg was. anyway look at keebo please just look at him

lovin kaito’s baby arms

real talk, maybe you could argue that he’s missing muscle because he’s deathly sick, but most of his cgs don’t line up with this, and his arms just look disproportionate to his torso size (granted this is a consistent problem across all danganronpa games and a lot of characters have this weird problem, like hajime, but also kaito is bigger than hajime so I kind of have higher expectations of him) maybe it’s his stupid goatee and the way he reminds me of yasuhiro?? it creates this illusion that he’s older than he is and so I keep expecting him to look more like an adult

oh, also rantaro is missing some of his accessories in that video he made–you know the one–but I don’t wanna go back and screenshot it

also you may have noticed that I’m skipping all of the monokub cgs because I literally do not care about them and I’m not even bothering to check and see if they have artistic mistakes in them

JIMMY NEUTRON???

hey um uh kaito you seem to be missing your neck

hey guys do you like my pregame fanart

so, that done, the sprites are also pretty terrible at times. they’re not as interesting to go through, however, and downloading the full sprite sets for every character and studying every single one of them will drive me insane, so I’ll just sum some of the ones I noticed up. I made things for kaede and shuichi before deciding I wasn’t going to get into it, so here are these.

that said, other mistakes include kokichi missing his purple highlights in all of the sprites encompassing a specific pose, stray pixels all over the place on everyone, and everyone also has heavily inconsistent shading, but literally all I think about is how pregame shuichi is unshaded and two of kaede’s pregame sprites have glaring outfit change mistakes in them

anyway, thank you for taking the time to read my ridiculous ramble. in all seriousness, there’s this looming presence of some lack of communication in the development team, like with all the art and design inconsistencies, pieces and sprites that look rushed, stray pixels, and missing basic proportional stuff. these are the kinds of things that you supposedly have to pretty much have in the bag in order to get jobs in professional businesses, so it’s really weird to me that this game suffers from so many of these problems. it’s like they tried to make the art so much more crisp than the other games, but it fell on its face as they realized it was going to take longer to draw everything and they started to rush. it’s weird, because the coloring itself looks normal–it’s just sloppily drawn, and the proportions are a mess once put into the context of perspective. many of the cgs look like they were drawn by different people, and I’m still not over the fact that half of kokichi’s cgs have his scarf pasted in as a texture.

the moral of the story is that if you’re selling a game at full price that also happens to be in a series that has had 3 very good games in it already the stakes should probably be higher than this. v3 has been out for more than 3 years and it’s still $40 (did it cost more than that before? I sure hope not), and the overarching quality of the game is just not as high as the other games. I’m not saying that the other games don’t have any problems with their art at all, they’re just not as glaringly obvious and every artistic choice in those games feels intentional.

regardless, I had a blast roasting the art at 2am, so maybe you got a kick out of all this chaos.

#god I keep telling myself I'm gonna stop rambling about v3 #v3 spoilers #drv3 spoilers #ndrv3 #random stuff #but making this… it sounded so fun #danganronpa

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henshengs · 3 years

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About Rule 63 fanworks

I was asked yesterday to elaborate on my genderbend opinions, as a trans person, which I’m happy to do, and I’ve thought about it a bit today to make sure I’m not saying something off the cuff and not thought through. Still, this is a sensitive, complicated topic, and I’m open to discussion on it.

This also got long, so I’m putting it under a cut.

So, obviously I can’t speak for all trans people. No minority group is a monolith in our opinions and this is particularly the case for the transgender community because our experiences are so very diverse and individual.

I am very rarely hurt or offended by genderbends/genderswaps/rule 63 fanworks. I know people for whom this is not the case, and I believe the pain involved is very real. The thing is... living in this world is inherently kinda painful when you’re trans. This world’s not built for us. All kinds of random things can cause me pain throughout my day. Store mannequins. My own reflection. Lesbian poetry. Pictures of other trans people. When something triggers my dysphoria or feelings of alienation, I have to stop, acknowledge the feeling, and then consider whether the thing is, outside of hurting me, contributing to the ignorance of and hatred of people like me by its very existence.

I don’t think the basic act of asking, “What if this character who is a cis man, was a cis woman instead?” does that. I think if anything, it opens the door to then ask “what if he was a trans man? Or a trans woman? Or nonbinary?”

Asking “what if this story was about a cis woman” lets cis women talk about their experiences and see themselves in stories, something I think is valuable! and also can lead to stories exploring sexism and misogyny, things which affect all trans people too!

In the rest of this post I’m going to use the terms “rule 63″ and “genderswap” to refer to the act of creating a fanwork changing a cis/presumed cis man to a cis or not-specified-to-be-trans woman, because this is the vast majority of the work under that label, because most fictional heroes and iconic characters are cis men, and because people who create cis man->trans woman or cis woman->trans man content, in my experience, usually use terms like “trans headcanon” instead.

(A lot of rule 63 fanworks don’t explicitly specify that the now-female character is cis. We can presume that most artists aren’t even thinking about the possibility of the character being trans, but we can presume that for 99.99% of all art, anywhere. It’s not a unique evil of rule 63.)

The claims that rule 63 is inherently transphobic, rather than just something where it’s good to be extra careful to avoid transphobia, as far as I’ve seen, use two arguments: A) that making the character a cis woman is wasting an opportunity to make them a trans person, and this is transphobic, and B) that rule 63 fan art is gender essentialist and cissexist, because it ties gender to physical characteristics.

Argument A doesn’t hold up for me,

because couldn’t one then say that reimagining an abled white cis character as an abled white trans woman is racist and ableist? that reimagining them as an abled trans woman of color is ableist? No transformative reimagining can cover every identity. We say “write what you know” and talk about Own Voices, and that includes cis women who want to write about the experience they know.

It’s also not fair to tell trans people that we must always think about trans experiences, even in our fiction. A lot of the time we don’t want to have to write or think about dysphoria and discrimination and we want to live in the heads of cis characters or even just characters whose AGAB is not mentioned!

And it is also, imo, not a great idea to pressure people who may not be educated about trans experiences to write about trans characters just because they want to explore sexism or write about lesbians.

many, many trans people first begin exploring their gender identity through creating cis rule 63 content, because it’s ‘safer’ than directly engaging with trans content.

With argument B, I agree that a lot of rule 63 art looks like this

and this sucks. To me, though, it’s important that it’s not the genderswap aspect that makes it suck. Artists who do this are also designing original characters with sexist, gender essentialist designs. Artists who don’t draw sexist art in general, also don’t draw sexist rule 63.

(yes, I know She-Hulk is not a rule 63 of regular Hulk. But you guys know the kind of art I’m talking about.)

I’ve also noticed a genre of fanfic that’s like, “if these characters were girls, they’d be sensible and conflict avoidant and none of the plot would happen!” or “what if these violent, tragic male characters were Soft Lesbians who braided each others’ hair” and again, I assume these authors write canonical women the same way. The genderswap part isn’t the bad part, the sexism is.

Non-sexist rule 63 actually, in my opinion, fights gender essentialism and cissexism. When a character is exactly the same except for the ways a gender essentialist world has shaped and pressured them based on their AGAB, that’s a strong statement on the constructed nature of gender!

But the argument that making /any/ change is gender essentialist, is... I understand where it’s coming from. I am a trans person who presents androgynously and I am a hypervisible freak because of it. I would love to live in a society where visible gender markers weren’t a thing! Unfortunately, we don’t live in that society. We live in one where we are constantly under pressure to conform to one of two profiles. There are almost no gender non conforming male characters in popular media. And changing a gender conforming cis man into a gender conforming cis woman seems to me to be a neutral action at worst. Not to mention characters from historical canons, who would be under a ton of pressure to conform.

For physical body type characteristics... 65% of all speaking roles in Hollywood are cis and male. It’s harder to get statistics on other forms of media, but it’s undeniable that overall, most stories are told about cis men who do not have breasts or wide hips. Changing the story to be about a cis woman who has those features is introducing more diversity!

I typed “rule 63″ and “genderswap” into the tumblr search bar today, and I saw a lot of art of women with a variety of aesthetics and body shapes and characteristics, who looked like people I’d see out at the mall.

Again, I sure do wish we lived in a post gender society. But we don’t, and in our society, everyone, myself included, looks at a picture of a person and gender categorizes them based on appearance. It is not wrong for someone to draw “Geralt the Witcher as a hot butch woman” and give her some physical markers generally agreed upon to denote ‘butch woman’ rather than ‘gender conforming man’ to tell the viewer that that is what they have drawn. Just as it is not wrong to draw “my OC who is a hot butch woman who fights monsters” and give her those markers.

Finally, both arguments against genderswaps are, in my opinion, flawed because they implicitly posit the act of creating fanworks of the original, cis male gender conforming character design, as neutral. I think this is incorrect. I think that if you’re going to argue that drawing a cis male character as a cis woman is transphobic, you have to also argue that drawing the character as a cis man is transphobic. But I’ve only seen people do this when a trans headcanon becomes extremely popular in a fandom.

Again, I’m just one person. I’m also biased, because firstly, as I mentioned, rule 63 doesn’t usually trigger my dysphoria; secondly, I almost always come down on the side of “don’t limit what people can explore in fiction; ask them to explore it more sensitively or with more content warnings instead.”

I definitely encourage creators to seek out and listen to a variety of trans opinions. But this is mine: I love rule 63, I make a lot of it myself, and I think if no one created it we’d lose something awesome.

At the end of the day, what I really want is more trans content*, but I’d rather have cis rule 63 than just stories about cis men.

Also: I personally have nothing against the terms genderswap or genderbend. I don’t think it reinforces the gender binary to acknowledge its existence by saying you’re ‘swapping’ the character from being cis with one AGAB to being cis with the other. But I can definitely see the argument against it, so I don’t blame anyone for going with rule 63 instead.

If you made it this far, thanks for reading; I hope you have a nice day, and have fun creating and consuming the fanworks your heart desires. I’ll end by linking this comic, which is just eternally relevant.

(*by which I mean: trans content created by other trans people, that matches my hyperspecific headcanons, likes and dislikes, and doesn’t set off any of my often changing dysphoria triggers. See what I said at the start, about transgender existence being constantly mildly painful. There are many awesome aspects to being trans! This is one of the less awesome.)

#rule 63

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clarste · 4 years

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listen-and-reflect replied to your post:

Um, just wondering, why aren't you around much...

… I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on Arknights. I’ve paid no attention to it whatsoever, but if it impresses you, I’m curious.

To boil it down to its component elements, I’d describe Arknights as “urban fantasy catgirl tower defense gacha.” If any of those words viscerally disgust you, there’s probably not much I can do to convince you otherwise, but personally that was enough to intrigue me. And what I found when I tried it surprised me in a good way. Honestly I’ve been struggling for like a month for how to talk about this, but for the purposes of this post I’ll boil it down to three major elements: Aesthetics, Worldbuilding, and Gameplay.

First of all the Aesthetics. Might as well start with a picture or three:

For the record, yes, 90% of the characters in this game are women, and there’s no explanation for that, that’s just how it is. I am 100% fine with that because I am a Touhou fan. Anyway, what I want to draw attention to is the way these women are portrayed. IE: they are posed/costumed to be seen as “cool” and while they certainly aren’t unattractive, it isn’t in a horny way that emphasizes their breasts or butts or anything. It’s not a perfect “practical clothing only,” I mean high heels aren’t great for fighting and there are other characters who show more skin, but the philosophy carries through in all the official art: these are cool, capable women who are never once reduced to sex objects for the male gaze. I respect that.

Also you don’t get to marry any of them which is a huge plus in my book.

It’s hard to say any more on that without moving on to the Worldbuilding. Basically, the world of Arknights is both blessed and cursed with a magical rock called Originium which is the source of all their problems. First of all it’s a miraculous power source, the resource that fuels the engine of modern society. Not only that but it can be used as a medium to cast actual magic spells (which is of course a well-studied phenomenon that’s treated as a science). On the other hand, its very presence warps the environment, causing large-scale city-destroying natural disasters on a regular basis. And more importantly for the conceit of the narrative, it can get in your blood, eventually causing an incurable disease called Oripathy which involves your body slowing turning into crystal from the inside out. Basically magic rock cancer. Later stages of it involve visible “crystal lesions” growing on the skin, but even internal growths can have serious medical problems. This is sometimes shown in character designs too:

This is important to the worldbuilding because “The Infected” are a major source of discrimination and political unrest. Oripathy is only mildly contagious (you’re more likely to get it from mishandling the rocks directly), but the stigma of it is such that anyone with Oripathy is immediately quarantined, exiled, or worse. Both the player characters and their enemies are generally Infected, with the “good guys” (scare quotes intended) being a medical institute that takes in patients to treat the symptoms and vaguely hoping for a cure someday, while the “bad guys” are revolutionaries violently overthrowing the society that treats them as subhuman. There are analogies you could make to HIV, leprosy, or heck even current events with COVID-19.

Anyway, I say all this so I can turn to the in-game character profiles and how they’re structured. Specifically, they’re all medical reports written by the doctors of your institute (who are themselves playable characters who are Medics in-game):

(Incidentally everyone uses codenames in this game). Anyway, my point is that these are not neutral, objective “word-of-god” profiles, these are the facts as they appear to some particular person in-universe. In Touhou terms, these are written by Akyuu: some clinical facts mixed in with rumors and speculation. And I absolutely love that.

More than that though, we get this amazing invention:

Why yes, that is an in-game chart of all the characters’ relationships, grouped by people who belong to the same organization, that fills in as you play. And yes, raising trust with characters by using them does fill in the names of people close to them who you haven’t met yet, as well as new connections to unknown people. Who is friends with Croissant?! I must know!

Er... Anyway, I think having this chart in-game is quite frankly a genius move on the part of the developers, since it gets you immediately invested in seeing how the characters are connected. But wait, there’s more! When you pull a dupe from the gacha, you get a little token that can be used to upgrade a character slightly, pretty normal. But even these little tokens have tiny bits of story on them!

These are the items that are important to these characters, and they can change the way you see them. Every little thing in this game has story attached to it! It’s incredible! And they actually tell stories with these things. There’s one in particular that fascinates me (and others), but unfortunately I have exactly 0 of the characters involved so I’ll have to pull quotes from the wiki.

There are three characters from a faction called Rhine Lab: Ifirit, Saria, and Silence. The details are pretty vague, but basically Ifrit is an Infected child with incredible Originium channeling powers who’s been experimented on, and Saria and Silence are two doctors who were involved in those experiments but had a falling out after an experiment gone wrong. But how does the game tell you this? Well, lots of ways. Saria’s profile is the most explicit:

The relationship between Lady Saria and Rhine Lab is very complicated. Though all Rhine Lab Operators who work with Rhodes Island show some amount of respect for Lady Saria, Rhine Lab's Medic Operator, Silence, shows nothing but hatred for her. At the same time, Lady Saria appears unsurprised by Silence's feelings toward her. Whenever Lady Saria attempts to talk with Caster Operator Ifrit, Silence gets in the way. According to available information, the animosity between Saria and Silence stems from an experiment at Rhine Lab led by Silence. The experiment was an unfortunate failure. Lady Saria acted alone in suppressing the experimental materials that had gone out of control. Similarly, because of this experiment's mishaps, Lady Saria left Rhine Lab. It is not known why she chose to cooperate with Rhodes Island after leaving Rhine Lab.

But then you have Ifrit and Silence’s tokens:

A long novel telling a legendary story. It is badly burned and you can only barely make out the words.

A patterned feather decoration. This ineloquent researcher from Liberi shows her sincerity by gifting her own feathers.

But oh gee, guess who are wearing feather tokens in the designs? (it’s Ifrit and Saria)

Also here’s Silence just so you aren’t left wondering what she looks like:

Anyway, the point is that the writers know how to throw tiny bits of characterization and hints of an untold story into literally everything in this game, and that is exactly what I live for.

Oh yeah, there’s also Gameplay.

Game’s pretty fun:

I enjoy it as a game too.

#not touhou #arknights

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skyeofloxlay · 3 years

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Personality / Brief history / important things about MC / Reader for my fanfics or when I make requests.

Okay, I decided to do this more for myself when I make a request to someone, but this is also useful to let you know a little more about the MC / "reader" of my fanfics.

The MC is a cis-woman of almost 1.60cm in height, (age may vary) but generally the age will be between 20 and 23. She is heterosexual/straight (I don't know if there is a difference between the two things, but I don't understand why I would have two words for the same thing) and usually in fanfics she has never had a boyfriend before the character she will be together with (be it Jake (Duskwood), Jason (Todd), Spencer (Reid) or any other character).

She was born in Brazil and lived a large part of her life there, and depending on what story she is in, she makes an interchange trip abroad because of college, and because of that she lives far from her family and lives alone, but she has her faithful companion, a male Schnauzer dog (his name in fanfics is undetermined.)

MC has always been a lonely person, because after several events in the past she does not trust people easily, and the only people she does trust are her family, but she still has trouble talking about her problems to them.

Furthermore, MC is a very shy, introverted, anti-social person and suffers from social phobia, which of course, is a perfect combo to be an alien in society and not be able to make friends, even if she wants to.

MC also doesn't know where it all started from, but she does know that she has probably suffered from anxiety for many, many years, even though she only discovered it a short time ago, and went to get help even less time ago.

Because of anxiety, she ends up being stuck in her own world, or I should call it, hell itself. Her mind is a mess, bad, unreal and meaningless thoughts invade her mind all the time, and because she has been this way for so long without help and not knowing what to do, her situation has worsened to the point where her anxiety starts to change into a depressive anxiety.

However, as much as she has been suffering with her own mind for years, she can always count on her family whenever she needs them, even if they are distant from each other, they are inseparable.

Her father, as much as he doesn't understand most of the things she goes through, supports her and wants the best for MC, and so he does what he can to help MC pay for psychological treatment, and even though he doesn't understand, he always makes her smile and laugh, even when the situations are bad, even though he was always busy because of work, he always did what he could to be together, even in the simplest things, like family lunch, playing video games, watching movies, shopping together.

Her mother, on the other hand, has been through similar things like MC, and always try to help her the way she can, always speaking encouraging words, helping MC to do her things when she couldn't, sleeping next to the MC when she couldn't sleep because of anxiety, always being by her side, always supporting any decision, no matter the situation, MC's mom will always be there to hear her, either to hear about something that MC wants to do a lot or when she has some fear.

And there is also her younger brother (3 years younger), as much as they ended up arguing for silly things, he is her best friend, maybe her only true friend, always having fun together doing what they like, protecting each other, always being one for another, even when it was not known which words were right to say.

MC is blessed to have such an amazing family, and as much as she couldn't say "I love you, you are everything to me" to them, she loved them with all her heart and soul, and she couldn't say what would happen to her if she lost them, but probably something really bad would happen.

As much as it seemed that MC doesn't care about other people, maybe looking selfish and boring to others, she cares a lot about others, but she knows that this is also one of the big reasons why she suffers from anxiety, caring for others more than for herself, and for her own mental health, she had to try not to think so much about the problems of the world that she cannot solve.

Some people may think that she was wrong in doing this, but she wanted to have some sanity, even if little and trying to recover, than to go crazy with things that are impossible to fix, at least impossible for her to fix.

(Some other things about MC, but now simpler, because I'm out of time and too lazy, help me)

- Very distracted

- Very clumsy

- Nerd

- Dreamer / lost in her own world

- Impulsive

- Impatient

- Think too much about everything

- Studious

- Lonely

- Forgotten

- Problems with deadlines, do everything at the last minute.

- Avoid fights / arguments with people she doesn't know, but if it's someone close and it's a silly fight, she'll defend that she's right until the end, if she's wrong in the fight, she'll just be quiet for a while. If it is a serious fight, she will argue for some time until the tears stop her from continuing, and then she will be silent for a long time.

- Too stubborn

- Sarcastic with the closest people

- Always try to look for the good in people, but it is impossible for her to achieve kindness in certain people.

- Pessimistic

- Very sensitive / hurts / cries easily

- Perfectionist

- Very insecure

- She cannot express in words what she feels for other people

Likes:

Chocolate

Coffee

Rainy days

Winter

Music (Mainly, pop and rock)

To drive

Flowers

Taking pictures (mainly of landscapes)

Animals

Old things, like things related to the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s, or things from centuries ago

History

Books

Learn things

Horror stuff (games, books, movies)

Mystery

Horseback riding

Nature

Farms

See the city lights at night

Night

Games (both video games and board / cards)

Comics, Movies, Series etc about Superheroes

Mexican food

Travel

Psychology / Understanding the human mind

Buy drawing materials and books (even though she will never use / read them)

Big clothes

Wind

Ride a bike

Explore Abandoned Places

Dislikes:

Summer

Hot days

Insects

Spiders

Her mind

Who annoy her

People fighting

See things or people comment on things related to death or illness

Having to be patient

Who speak ill of her family

Working in a group

That people belittle her feelings

Parties

People

Delays

Alcoholic beverages

Buy clothes

Make up

High heels

Short dresses

Physics

Fears / Phobias / Things that bother her:

Spiders

Falling / High height

To drown

Die

Getting seriously ill

Dark / Night

To sleep

People

Speak in public

Losing her family

Stay alone

Crowds

Closed places

Tight clothes (Because she feels they are suffocating her)

Arrive late

Forget things

Having a car accident

Never be loved / Stop being loved

Future

May her fears come true

Skills:

- To draw

- Write

- Cook

- Game programming

- Sing

- Play keyboard and guitar

- To compose

- To dance

Hobbies:

Basically, it's her skills + reading + playing video games + taking pictures of the landscape.

Job:

Usually she either works as a waitress in a coffee shop or works in a supermarket (working at the checkout or replacing products on shelves)

As much as many find it strange, MC is very happy in her work, and does not mind working in "simple" jobs (basically jobs that earn little), and as much as she doesn't have much money, just enough to live reasonably well, she is happy with what she has and doesn't care about the money.

College:

She studies digital game design

I think that's it, there are some other things that I only do when I'm writing specific situations, for example, MC's opinions on certain subjects, and honestly I don't have time at the moment to make the MC's different opinions, and just say that she tries to be as neutral as she can, because she knows that extremes are never good, and that when asked which side she is in a situation (depending on what it is, but usually she says), she says doesn't have a side because it doesn’t identify herself by either side, because both are extreme, and this usually leads people to think that it’s on the fence, but it’s not like that, it’s more or less. "You were teleported to a place, there are two paths, one on the right and the other on the left, at the beginning of each of these paths there is a person, each talking about their paths and talking about why their path is the best of than the other and why you should follow their path. And then you must make a choice of which path to follow " But MC does not agree with either side, and will not wait there to see which side gives her the best benefit as many would do, she goes there and moves on, where there is no path, where there is no one, because she doesn't want to be on anyone's side, she wants to make her own opinions, and not follow what a group is saying.

Oh, and one of the philosophies she follows is of yin and yang, which says something like "There is good and there is evil, both need each other to exist, there is no good without evil, and no there is evil without good, and that nothing can be completely good or evil, since, however small, there is evil in good, and there is good in evil. "

Some phrases she would say:

"You can say anything about me, but don't come and talk about my family"

"I can't always do it, but I always try to be balanced, because I know that nothing comes out of extremism, no matter which side."

"I'm a Christian, I may not have proofs but I believe in God, but I don't believe everything in the Bible because it was made by humans, and I know that many of them used and still use people's faith to do very bad things . "

"Sorry, but I suck at remembering names, in fact, I suck at remembering."

"Shit, I knew I was forgetting something."

"I hate logic, most of these things don't make any sense!"

"At least I have you with me here DN" (DN = dog name)

"There is nothing that is not so bad that it cannot get worse"

"I think I celebrated too soon"

"I sleep! But no matter what I do, I will be forever sleepy!"

"No matter what I do, my thoughts disturb me from the moment I wake up until bedtime, and even while I'm asleep. And it happens every day."

"Sometimes ... I think ... people would be better off if I didn't exist. I just hinder and hurt people."

"I don't know when or how it started, I just know that I have been scared forever"

"I don't do it because I want to! It's not my fault if I'm easily distracted"

"I think writing is the only way to say what I feel"

"Yes, I know, I'm crazy, you don't have to tell me that"

"I'm not a normal person. Maybe I'm not even a human? What if I'm an alien and I don't know? A synthetic human? A robot with high artificial intelligence that is identical to that of humans?"

"I don't like to be afraid, but I love to see and read horror stuff."

"I love old things, they are so fascinating"

"What day is it today?"

"I just wanted to have a little courage that other people have"

"I have no hope of anything, as always, every time I had hope, very bad things happened, close people and pets died when I had hope that they would survive. For me, hope has long since died."

"I think, in a way, I am a miracle, just like my brother. I mean, it was almost impossible for my mom to have a baby, and look, here I am."

"I'm not cute!"

"I'm not short, I'm average height, it's the rest of the people who are very tall"

(Maybe I wrote a lot? Did I overdo it?)

Sorry if there is something confusing or errors in English

#I don't know what to put here

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ganymedesclock · 4 years

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Ghirahim and gendered expectations of sensuality

So, as people who’ve seen my previous Zelda posts might gather, I have a mixed relationship with Skyward Sword. On the one hand, I think many of its characters have tremendous potential. On the other, I feel like the game largely did not live up to that potential, and in some areas, it feels rather deliberate. But suffice to say, elements of Skyward Sword have meant that certain characters- Batreaux, Groose, Fi, and Ghirahim are not far from my mind.

A brief primer, for those who might be unfamiliar: Ghirahim is the main antagonist of Skyward Sword, and a bit of an aberration in the common Zelda formula, which tends to introduce a ‘decoy’ or “lieutenant” antagonist who dominates for most of the game and then bows out towards the end as the prelude to the true final boss- usually Ganondorf, in Skyward Sword’s case, it’s the demon god and a figure we are clearly supposed to scan as Ganondorf’s divine progenitor, Demise.

Ghirahim is quite openly a harbinger of, and servant to, Demise- where he breaks script is by being extremely proactive. We run into Ghirahim in most dungeons in the game, where he is not waiting idly for us, but doing actions that veteran Zelda players might recognize as comparable to Link’s: he breaks into dungeons either chasing Zelda, or chasing information that will allow him to proceed. We also have not one but three different fights with him, personally, and several other times he concedes that he doesn’t have time to play with Link and instead sics a boss monster on him.

The other thing about Ghirahim is, I will outright say it: He is written as a caricature of a predatory queer man.

He’s shown to be literally bloodthirsty, and presented by the narrative ostensibly as someone who has a sinister, perverse interest in both Link and Zelda, a contrast to their saintly, chaste union (which is supposed to read as a union; pursue a romantic sideplot with Peatrice, another girl in the game, and Fi will pretty much openly admonish you for cheating on Zelda, saying that Zelda wouldn’t be happy to know Link’s seeing someone and that Link should know that)

This is, really, a bit jarring, when Ghirahim’s actual dialogue suggests that he has very little interest in Link and views him much like a butler tending the master’s house while the latter is away might view a feral golden retriever that’s running loose in the place and getting mud on everything. His emotional range runs from warmly patronizing to exasperated to a truly dangerous degree (since, in this metaphor, the butler has also been tending the master’s house in near-total isolation for something like several centuries not having real conversations with the other servants and nobody’s at their psychological best in those situations even if they weren’t implicitly born and raised to murder).

Basically: that Ghirahim has no real interest in Link- not his body or appearance or anything. In his own dialogue, he seems confused by the idea that he’s at all interested, is apologetic that he’s wasting his time or dawdling and in his final scene, offers a genuinely flummoxed “you... who are you?” He offers colorful, violent threats, but when Link obstinately faces him again, he’s shown to be almost embarrassed and disgusted by them, and tries something else that almost no Zelda antagonist does: on multiple occasions, he tells Link to just walk away from the situation with what appears to be every intent of letting him go.

Ghirahim does not want Link for himself. He seems to, begrudgingly, against his own intentions, value Link as someone to fight against, but this connection does not actualize within the story- they are not really rivals. He isn’t even that deeply fond of the idea of Link’s blood, though he’s a proponent of blood as a vague concept.

Now, I like Ghirahim. I don’t think that even the read of Ghirahim as a queer man is a terrible one. But it definitely is interesting the lens in which Ghirahim’s implicit sensuality is cast. Basically, he is depicted as creeping on Link, without any real sense that he wants Link. Because it isn’t about what he wants- it’s about that implicitly he has a sexuality, and the idea of a man who might be attracted to other men is threatening, evil, and scary. Ghirahim wasn’t made queer-coded for representation’s sake. He was queer-coded to suggest he was depraved and motivated by a sinister lust. And the cruelty of this depiction is I think made immediately clear by- Ghirahim’s actual interests, passion, or preferences do not factor in here. That Scene Where Ghirahim Does The Tongue Thing is about how it is expected to make the player feel, and how implicitly Link feels.

What is Ghirahim’s type? Does he consider Demise beautiful? He makes it pretty clear he considers Link a brat. These are questions that aren’t asked, because it’s wrong that Ghirahim seems to have any sexuality at all- and, since Link is our lens and our guidepost for how we’re supposed to feel about characters, if Ghirahim behaves in a sensual manner it happens to Link, and to Zelda, invasively. Even though it is shown he feels no desire for any of these people, so that sensuality basically comes across like the game is firmly expecting us to find the idea of even an e-rated sensual male antagonist repulsive.

This led me down a very odd sort of rabbit trail.

Because Ghirahim- a bit indirectly- is inspired off a figure skater.

Specifically, Fi’s design was stated to evoke a figure skater, and we even see her ‘skating’ in several of the cutscenes. Ghirahim’s design matches Fi’s quite strongly; they were designed to be two of a kind.

I am not, myself, a figure skating buff, but a while ago, I happened across youtube videos of a skater named Johnny Weir.

Quickly, you can see the sword spirits’ inspirations; the close-fitting leotards, the lithe, acrobatic capabilities.

But here’s the thing about Johnny Weir: this is a guy putting on a sensual performance that is not a gross-out, a joke, or a threat. It’s basically impossible to find nothing suggestive in his choice of backup movement or the movements he makes running his hands along his body- his costume even asserts these more with the mirrored details on his gloves. This is a dude, acting in a way you could say is objectively sensual even if it may or may not stir every viewer given the individual nature of preference.

But there’s a world of difference to Weir’s performance. Not just that this is a voluntary choice made by a real person, while Ghirahim’s choices, even if they have in-game logic, are largely about Link and about the player- but Johnny Weir is having fun. He has a charming energy to him and is performing to a song he loves.

Watching Johnny Weir, it occurred to me, that regardless of Weir’s own orientation- that I do not know and will not speculate on- there’s a preconception around “being sexy”. Women are seen as supposed to be sexy (but, in many circles, not too sexy. Can’t insinuate they know what they’re doing, or have opinions and tastes...), or, more, “sexy is seen as a job that women do for men specifically.”

So, to homophobic audiences... a man deliberately enacting a sensual performance- a sense of what sensual looks like from a dude- is seen as weird, wild, and out there. If you’re not shocked by the implications that Ghirahim may be attracted to men, may be into Link, may be into the idea of torturing Link- then a certain amount of his writing kind of falls apart.

And comparing the way Ghirahim is animated and shot to Johnny Weir’s performance, it’s kind of... weak? Like, at one point in Weir’s routine, he lifts one leg and slides his fingertips down it in a smooth stroke from knee to thigh. It’s a steamy looking move, and this coming from someone who is so prodigiously ace I thought sexual attraction was made up for the first seventeen years of my life.

Ghirahim does not do that. He’s got thigh cutouts in his very close-fitting outfit, and has lines in his second fight about his body and how beautiful it is, but he does not make these movements that deliberately catch and draw the eye along the planes of him.

To me, I feel like besides this being a general affront against real queer people- the Zelda games have a concerning habit of depicting “eccentric, effeminate” men as either neutral characters or open villains and virtually always with this air of being the brunt of a joke (it’s very hard to imagine ALBW’s Yuga was designed by someone who earnestly loved this character)- it is also a bit rude to the character of Ghirahim himself.

Because Ghirahim, at the end of the day, is someone who ends the story heartbroken literally and figuratively. The entire game, he is driven by loyalty to Demise. He does not care who he hurts or threatens- and this comes back to the seeming implication that he is somewhat bloodthirsty, but vastly plays up his appetite for torture. When he thinks his goal is out of reach, he continues slogging away at it anyway, but listlessly. Everything he does, is for Demise. He is devoted enough to, late in the game, throw himself on Link’s sword for the third boss fight purely to stall for time until Demise revives.

Demise does not speak to Ghirahim, or acknowledge him, or even seemingly notice or care that by the time he comes back, Ghirahim’s metal heart has been torn open by being repeatedly stabbed by Link. (third boss fight is not kind.) Instead, he rips Ghirahim’s sword form out of his chest.

Ghirahim is a danger to Link, Impa, and Zelda, because he attacks them, and his own subordinates, because he threatens them. But to his master, he’s just a disposable pawn. This is a character driven by passion such that many of his poses and scenes show him nearly breaking into an actor’s soliloquy as he explains something to Link- and this is one way he does seem to like having Link around: he craves an audience.

And his passion is, in two ways, depicted as completely futile. First, in the dubious amount of oo scary gay man, watch out Link, he’s doing something weird with his tongue- and second and far more seriously, that everything he works for leaves him with nothing because his life never mattered for a second in the eyes of the person he lives and dies for.

Ghirahim is made a sensual character, but in a manner that feels bad faith- that feels like it has not thought about male sensuality in any direction besides “that’s wrong and icky, so we’ll attach it to our villain, who we want to be wrong and icky, and absolutely not suggest there’s anything particularly sad about what happens to him. His fault for being wrong and icky.”

#Legend of Zelda #Ghirahim #homophobia discussion #readmore

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littleeyesofpallas · 5 years

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Bleach - Name Games

Not a family by name or blood, but a kind of found family. (at least the way they were originally presented) This time I’m tackling the Visored! And while I’m at it I want to address some of the broader thematic elements going on with their original character designs. Buckle up, this is a long one...

Hirako(平子) Shinji(真子)

Shinji’s name is actually kinda of a false start to this one. His names read as “Flat-Child“ and “Real-Child“ but that’s keeping in mind that -ko(子) for “child” is actually just a really common suffix for names, and not one generally used to ascribe literal meaning. (Typically because of its diminutive implications it denotes a female given name, but it applies neutrally to family names, and even generally is not uncommon in male names.) So his name kind reads as “Flat Reality“ or “Flat Truth.“

But this one isn’t actually about the meaning of the words, it’s a different kind of name game. As we all remember, when Hirako introduces himself to Ichigo’s class at Karakura High during his original entrance at the start of the Arrancar Arc, he writes his name on the board mirrored and mentions how he’s “good at doing things backwards.” At the time it was a reference to him being a hollow (Remember that when Ichigo’s inner hollow was given a chapter cover, his “name” was Ichigo’s but written mirrored) and would later influence his zanpakutou, Sakanade(逆撫)

As an aside here, Sakanade(逆撫) has been kind of erroneously translated as “counter stroke” in English, which is technically accurate as a literal translation but is kind of needlessly vague; For one the word “Stroke” here specifically refers to the act of stroking as in petting, patting, or smoothing over, and not something like a sword stroke; secondly the “counter” here should read more obviously as “reverse,” “opposite,” or “inverted.”

Moreover, Sakanade(逆撫で) is an actual verb already, so it doesn’t actually need to be broken down in the first place. The word actually means exactly what it sounds like as well as having a colloquial use as, “rub the wrong way.” Yes, other than just meaning to literally “pet in the opposite direction” (as with petting a cat or dog from tail to head) it means “to irritate” or “to annoy,” (which the former action invariably does) and that is an apt description of Sakanade’s powers.

Anyway... About Hirako’s name not being about the meaning: the joke is that whether you write the name forward or backwards 平子真子 -vs- 子真子平, you still get Shinji(真子) out of it. As in, his name is still legible both forwards and backwards. Plus both kanji, 平 and 真 have horizontal symmetry, so they don’t change when mirrored..

⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻

Okay... let’s do an easier one...

Sarugaki(猿柿) Hiyori(ひよ里)

My personal favorite Visored, has a nice straight forward name Saru(猿) as I’m sure anyone amply familiar with anime knows means “Monkey” and the Gaki(柿) is the word for the fruit “Persimmon.” The image of a monkey in a persimmon tree references an old folktale present in various east-asian cultures about a greedy monkey who cheats other animals before eventually receiving its comeuppance at the hands of the animals it has wronged. In this case it’s reflective of Hiyori’s general image, sandles, track suit, decidedly tomboyish and unladylike; the “mountain monkey” is a poor, rural character type in Japan, not dissimilar to the American hillbilly of the Appalachia.

In that same vein, the name Hiyori(ひよ里) has a peculiar rural slant to it, in that it uses hiragana in place of the first component. The ri(里) is a common place indicator in surnames meaning “village” or “hamlet” but like many Japanese surnames that reference landmarks like -kawa(川)“-river,” “-yama”(山)-mountain,” and “-da”(田)”-field,” the important part isn’t actually the locale but the descriptor preceding it; Which mountain? Which river? Which field? Which village? In the case of Hiyori, it’s not clear... The fact that the village she appears to be named after doesn’t have a kanji again lends to this impression that, like the peasants of Soul Society’s Rukongai, the person who named her didn’t know how to read or write kanji.

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Muguruma(六車) Kensei(拳西)

I think this one has gotten pretty good visibility in the fandom already because of the relation with Hisagi Shuuhei. The eventual explanation of Hisagi’s 69 tattoo would be that it was copied directly from Kensei’s, and that Kensei’s comes from a mix of his name Muguruma, and the fact that he was captain of the Gotei 13’s 9th squad. (Personally I don’t like this explanation, and I think there’s pretty reasonable cause to assume this was a later decision and not a part of Kensei’s original conception or design.) But the reason behind that being Muguruma(六車) Mu(六) which is the Japanese numeral “6″ and Guruma(車) meaning “wagon” and later updated to mean “car.” In the Turn Back the Pendulum sidestory, this name is played upon in how Kubo styled Kensei’s 9th squad as a Bousouzoku(暴走族) the term for a Japanese biker gang (although they often include sports cars), where the “Six Car” reading becomes emblematic of his gang.

There’s a lot about the Bousouzoku that is culturally specific to Japan, but much of the familiar American cliches do actually carry over. One distinct aspect of how the Bousouzoku opperate however, is that they are predominantly a youth culture phenomenon, as any wide spread, organized criminal activity among adults quickly steps on the toes of the much better established Yakuza scene. For this reason it is very rare for Bousouzoku to persist in direct group activity into their adult years, although often bikers become easy recruitment targets for Yakuza.

Kensei(拳西) is actually an odd one for me. It’s both super straight forward yet somehow together really obtuse. Ken(拳) for “Fist” and sei(西) for “West;“ both are pretty singular in their meaning, so it’s not like there’s any uncertainty to what each one means, but I can’t make heads or tails of the two together. For one, Ken(拳) is usually something you’d see put on the end of a compound, and when it’s used that way it tends to denote a kind of martial arts style or technique. It might still be meant to read as “Western Fist” or essentially “Western [style] Fist” and Kubo just liked the sound of Kensei over Seiken. It might be a reference to the fact that Kensei’s original design was largely reminiscent of a kind of military look and feel, with a combat knife for a zanpakutou, short hair, combat boots, and pants that look like they could be part of military fatigues. (the tank top sorta throws the look off, though.) But this was a theme that was dropped by the time the Visored got reincorporated into the story after their long absence.

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Yadoumaru(矢胴丸) Risa(リサ)

...is another odd one. Her surname, Yadoumaru(矢胴丸) has pretty clear implications, Ya(矢) means “arrow” and dou(胴) means “hull” as in the part of a ship, and maru(丸) doesn’t actually have an explicit meaning. The kanji does generally mean “round” or “whole” both in reference to a circle, but it is most notably a suffix used in naming both naval ships, and frequently boys. Given the rest of the name the imagery seems clear, Yadoumaru(矢胴丸) is meant to read as “Arrow-Hull Ship.“* And although the uniform has heavy ties to school girl aesthetics and fetishism (which in turn link to her preoccupation with adult books) the tie here actually seems to be to the origins of the Japanese school girl uniform as a modification of the European naval uniforms introduced to Japan in the 1800s.

*edit: I’m an idiot. A Yadou(胴丸) is the sleeveless chest plate and skirt piece in traditional samurai armor, which also carries over into kendo sports armor.

Adding to this, the name RISA (sometimes romanized as LISA) being written in katakana and not kanji or even hiragana works together with the naval associations would seem to imply she’s of mixed birth? Possibly the daughter of a foreign naval officer stationed in Japan, hence a Western name and a ship as a surname? In fact, most Japanese ships would be named after some mythical figure or indeed named like a person, so the literal descriptor of “Arrow-hull” actually sounds like what someone would call a ship they didn’t know the name of, tacking “-maru” on to the end.

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Let me also take a moment here to complain about the fact that Kubo originally wrote Rabu(ラヴ) and Roozu(ローズ) as katakana, pretty clearly denoting them as the English words LOVE and ROSE and while those seem pretty implicitly like nicknames it also implied in conjunction with their designs that they were both foreigners. So the fact that he retconned them to being nicknames based on more conventionally Japanese when he decided to make them previously SoulSociety shinigami names bugs me... But that being said

Aikawa(愛川) Rabu(羅武)

Man, what is it with Kubo and black people and “love” gimmicks? Zomarri’s Amor, and PePe’s The Love, Love’s whole thing... The name Aikawa(愛川) means “Love River,” and Kubo’s clever shorehorning of kanji into the phonetics for Rabu that he’d already used for the nickname Love use Ra(羅) for “silk,” but specifically a thin or sheer kind, and bu(武) for “warrior”/”soldier.“ The associations with sheer silk and negligee seem very intentional, so his name really is basically “flowing love, [sexy] silk soldier.“ And that’s it, it’s actually super straight forward. I dunno why he looks like an unemployed slacker, in a tracksuit and sneakers, lounging around reading manga, though.

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Otouribashi(鳳橋) Roujuurou(楼十郎)

This might be my favorite as far as name games within the Visored. The given name Roujuurou(楼十郎) means “Watchertower 10 Son;” Rou(郎) being an exceedingly common suffix in boys names meaning “son.” (this is incidentally how anyone with a rudimentary familiarity with Japanese knew for certain Yuushirou(四楓院) was a boy at first glance, where as a bunch of other people thought he was a girl. In case any of you were around certain fandom circles for that whole drama... More on him later though, because he’s got a fun name too.) It’s not super clear if the arrangement here denotes the “Son of the 10th Watchtower [family],” or the “10th Son of the Watchtower [family].”

The surname Otouribashi(鳳橋) is a great little work of poeticism, where Outouri(鳳) is the Japanese name of the Chinese Feng(鳳) which in the most colloquial sense could be translated as “Phoenix,” but there’s a little more to it than that...

See, the Feng is itself the male half of the mated pair of mythical birds together called the Feng-Huang(鳳凰). The Japanese pronunciation Outori is actually directly taken from Ou(王) meaning “King” and Tori(鳥) meaning “bird.” The mythical Feng-huang is in fact king of birds, but more broadly represents a union of yin and yang, and is a common visual element of Chinese weddings evoking harmony. As a part of this theme of unity it is said to share features of many different birds, and also of the 5 fundamentally opposed colors associated with Chinese daoism and fengshui: Red, Blue/Green, Black, White, and Yellow. This particular feature has been tweaked over time to depict the Feng-huang as more broadly multicolored, and associated with the rainbow. (it’s also the basis of the Pokemon Ho-oh, if that wasn’t apparent) For a number of different mythological similarities, the Feng-huang have become erroneously thought of as “the Chinese phoenix,” but I’m not going to get into all that here...

So, getting back to the name, Bashi(橋) means “Bridge.” The, again false equivalence based, but more easily understood translation of Otouribashi(鳳橋) thus being “Phoenix Bridge.” But what is shaped like a bridge and directly associated with the Feng? A rainbow. His family name is just a really fanciful and kind of poetic reference to a rainbow. In conjunction with the “Watchtower” referenced in the name Roujuurou(楼十郎) I’m tempted to take to the meaning of “10th [Floor of the] Watchtower Son” as it implies a high floor, and in the common mythological motif of rainbows as actual physical structures, a high tower would be the sensible entry point to a rainbow bridge.

Also this is why he has a bird mask.

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Kuna(久南) Mashiro(白)

Let me just come right out and say that I haven’t got a damn clue on this one. Mashiro(白) means “White.” Ku(久) means “long time,” na(南) means “South.” She dresses like a super sentai character, specifically one of the original Himitsu Sentei Goranger team, and her mask is a nod to Kamen Rider, with its antenna and big round bug-eyes. I don’t really see a connection with the name and the tokusatsu theme though.

Small aside, Tokusatsu is a genre of Japanese TV and film that was originally named for its emphasis on special effects like camera tricks and editing in post, used most noticeably in children’s shows like Super Sentai and Kamen Rider. That distinction became less and less relevant as special effects became more widespread, and so it is now used mostly to refer to live-action costumed super hero shows.

Super Sentai is btw the source material for the American franchise, Power Rangers, from which Saban Entertainment originally bought the footage that they would cut together with their own original footage, and later from which they would buy the costumes in order to shoot their own shows from scratch.

Also of note is that Ishinomori Shoutarou, author of the original Cyborg 009, was also the original show creator of Kamen Rider and Super Sentai. His work created the transforming(henshin) hero, the body suit and helmet aesthetic, and the heroic billowing scarf, effectively inventing the Japanese superhero almost single-handed.

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Ushouda(有昭田) Hachigen(鉢玄)

Another funky one... “[To] Exist [in] a Shining Field” might be the best way to read Ushouda(有昭田)? Its really the U(有) that gives me trouble here, as it just means “Exist”/”Existance.” And Hachigen(鉢玄) seems to read Hachi(鉢) meaning “bowl” and Gen(玄) meaning “deep,” “mysterious” and in certain contexts “occult.” I’m not sure if that “deep” is really a physical deepness or just a sort of “profoundness” that would fall more in line with “mysterious” and “occult.”

Either way I think the general meaning is actually pretty clear, “bowls of rice from a shining field” evoke an image of kind of mythical field of magical produce, eating from which grants a kind of magical quality and sustenance. In other words, his name is saying that Hachi is such a huge guy and so gifted at magic because he ate a lot of food that grants magic power.

I have no idea why he has the tux or the shaved hair though. Stage magician? Fancy gourmand? But again then why the shaved head and the cross bones? And Kubo did eventually come up with for him is strangely Balinese looking? It seems reminiscent of Barong, king of spirits; A benevolent lion/bear monster that defends mankind from Rangda, the demon queen and master of blackmagic. But apart from the superficial appearance and broad ties to magic, there’s not a lot really tying the two together.

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It’s hard not to just go off on all the weird little design choices, and loose ends, dropped plot points, and retcon’d details that surround the Visored in Bleach. They really were just such a great concept utterly wasted by terrible pacing and some truly confusing priorities as far as publication goes, eithe ron Kubo’s part, editorial, or both... But that’s a story for another time...

#Bleach #hirako shinji #sarugaki hiyori #muguruma kensei #yadomaru risa #aikawa love #otoribashi rose #kuna mashiro #ushoda hachigen #visored

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levaer · 4 years

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THE BIG BLEACH HC MEME centering around politics, repost & fill out! For anyone who wanted to explore those aspects more, considering it played a big role in the story. Some things may be unknown to your Muse, just think in WHAT IF then & well, have fun and take your time!

BASICS

Name: Askin Nakk Le Vaar / / / Age: 1000+ / / / Gender: Cis male Race: Shinigami / Quincy / Hollow / Fullbringer / Visored / Human / Other Currently lives: Soul Society / Hueco Mundo / Silbern / Living World / Hell Exact Location: Half of his life is set in the Wandenreich. Post-war, his location varies. Group(s): Quincy / Sternritter / Schutzstaffel

QUESTIONS

- Would your muse consider themselves more: GOOD / BAD / NEUTRAL ? - Would your muse consider their group more: GOOD / BAD / NEUTRAL ? - How does your muse think others see them: GOOD / EVIL / NEUTRAL ? - How does your muse think others see their race: GOOD / EVIL / NEUTRAL ? - How does your muse think others see their group: GOOD / EVIL / NEUTRAL ?

- Is your muse considered a threat: YES / NO ? From whom?: No, because I hc that the Shinigami aren’t actually aware Askin survived; if they knew, however, there’s the possibility he’d be deemed a threat. - Is your muse powerful: YES / NO ? Could they be considered OP: YES / NO ? - Did your muse commit any crimes: YES / NO ? - Does your muse think they are doing mostly the right thing: YES / NO ? - Would society think the same: YES / NO / MIXED OPINIONS ?

- Does your muse think they are treated unfairly: YES / NO ? - Does your muse feel understood from others: YES / NO ? - Is it important for them what others think of them as a person: YES / NO ? - Would they welcome death: YES / NO ? - Will they ever find peace: YES / NO ?

01.0. Do they fully stand behind the group they are part of? YES / NO. Why is that? Explain: Askin likes to think he’s rootless, and that’s true for the most part, but he’s still a human being. He was rootless enough to drop everything he knew, his entire world, and embark on a journey with a blurry destination - but not enough not to feel a little bit of sense of belonging to the Wandenreich, which he has been serving for over a thousand years, and for the Quincy as a whole. They’re not all good or bad, they’re people; he’s not all good or bad, either. But they’re his people, a part of his, even if not aloud, acknowledges this.

02.0. Do they like as things are in Soul Society? YES / NO / INDIFFERENT. 02.1. Is there anything they would change? Explain here: Askin is not one to judge. He would not condemn the many for the sins of the few, but ... he would not forgive the few for the sins of the many, either. He’s not too informed about the specific dynamics of Soul Society, though he’s familiar with the violent foundation of it since he fought against the first generation of the Gotei, during the First Quincy War. Let’s say, he would not change anything in particular, but he would not mind if all got wiped away, either.

03.0. Would they ever actively try to bring change (in general)? YES / NO. 03.1. Is your muse more: passive / active ? Introverted / Extroverted ? 03.2. Does your muse care more about: others / themselves ? / / all of Askin’s life has been projected on someone else’s dream. Ultimately, he looks after himself, but he led a strongly collective life for so long, it kinda shaped him. 03.3. Do they trouble their mind over a lot of problems, others? YES / NO. 03.4. Do they mostly involve: the world / everyone / themselves / comrades / friends / family / elderly / kids / teenagers / home / workplace / strangers / souls / humans / quincy / shinigami / nobles / fullbringer / visored / hollows / espada / arrancar / (former) boss(es) / pets / animals / zanpakuto spirit / enemies / partner / lovers / soul king / god / other…(add more) 03.5. Name (up to) three which are the most on their mind (optional, adding names): Askin has a tendency not to hold onto anything. His own thoughts feel light as clouds to him as they cross his minds, and he’s definitely not the type to obsess over something or someone. After the war, Urahara Kisuke has been on his mind for a while; mostly, he wondered whether he had succeeded in taking him down. Grimmjow too; I think, especially for a Quincy, the feeling of a Hollow’s claws is not something easily forgotten.

04.0. Do they think frequently about politics? YES / NO / SOMETIMES. Why is that? Explain: More frequently than he would like to, actually. His social background demanded of him at least some basic knowledge of the feudal system, administration and interrelations with other Quincy families and with the central power of the Carolingian empire. That said, Askin never let himself got too involved, but growing up witnessing his lord father administering justice, taxes, law-making etc. kind of left an imprinting. He spent a thousand years serving as a soldier in an army where all the power was intensely centralized, so he did not have much to do with politics - that’s how the Wandenreich was, as Yhwach really wasn’t a politician, anyway. Post-war though, if he contributes to the reformation of a Quincy nation, he will have to get involved whether he likes it or not.

05.0. How do they feel in their current location: POSITIVE / NEGATIVE / NEUTRAL ? 05.1. Why is that?: Silbern gives him vertigo. He preferred the instability of the Lichtreich more, but still, he’s not one to complain. The world of the living is as colorful as he remembers, always shapeshifting, and it’s really nice to see the light blue sky again after being hidden in the shadows for so long.

06.0. Does your muse have any goal: YES / NO ? BIG / SMALL ? - 06.1. Does it involve anything world-changing: YES / NO ? - 06.2. If goal or not, any future plans? Share here: You know how Askin is, he goes where the wind takes him. He only ever committed once in his life and it wasn’t even to a dream of his own, it was Yhwach’s design, so it would be really unkind to ask him to think about the future haha. In my rebuild verse, any plans for his immediate future involve making himself useful to the new Quincy state. Best way to keep himself occupied.

07.0. Does your muse know about the Original Sin of Soul Society*: YES / NO ? * curious? Read about it here. 07.1. If they knew, would it change their views on Soul Society: YES / NO ? 07.2. More: POSITIVE / NEGATIVE / NEUTRAL ? / / I’m not sure Askin would care to the point of completely changing his opinion on Soul Society, since it’s already a pretty negative one. It would feel somewhat eerie to him, thinking that the victim of the original sin was Yhwach’s literal father, though.

08.0. Who is the worst person in their eyes?: Mayuri Kurotsuchi. 08.1. What should happen to them? Execution (quick / slow death) / Imprisonment / Stripped of their powers / Torture / Repay for their sins / Pay a Fine / Social Work / lose their loved ones / Exile / other… (add more). 08.2. Explanation: he’d kill Mayuri off quickly, as one gets rid of a thorn. It wouldn’t be a painless death, but it wouldn’t take too long; Askin is not a sadist by nature, and he would just want to make sure the bastard doesn’t take one more breath in the world.

09.0. Thoughts on: Quincy Massacre if they knew: POSITIVE / NEGATIVE / NEUTRAL ? 09.1. Would they be alright with such thing happening again: YES / NO / INDIFFERENT ? 09.2. Would they try to prevent it: YES / NO / DEPENDS ? 09.3. Explanation: I said this already, the Quincy genocide is a generational trauma for the Quincy, even those too young to be born at the time. Askin is unmoved by most things, but he witnessed with his own eyes those of his kind that were captured and killed and experimented on. It’s something you just don’t forget, and Askin doesn’t forget easily anyway. If such a thing were to happen again, and lbr there’s a possibility since the numbers of the Quincy are always carefully monitored, Askin would fight, despite his general dislike for overall idea.

10.0. Would they ever switch sides: YES / NO ? 10.1. If yes, What could bring them to do so?: - 10.2. Would they create a new one: YES / NO ? or join a current one? If so, which: Until his defeat, Askin’s allegiance is to Yhwach and betraying him / switching sides like some Sternritters did is off the table. After the war, however, he’s free of bonds, so if someone were to try and gain his loyalty, he’d consider it. He doesn’t fuck with Soul Society, though.

11.0. Does your muse follow a certain moral code*?: YES / NO / GRAY AREA ? * (ethics) A written, formal, and consistent set of rules prescribing righteous behavior, accepted by a person or by a group of people. 11.1. What does it involve?: it’s more of what’s in his character than a real set-up code, he’s not so chivalrous. He lives by the principle of letting people live their lives without prying and being chill, mostly. 11.2. What does it NOT involve?: Askin is not a sadist, although he can be a real bastard if he commits to it. He has no problem killing, no matter how gruesomely, but he’s not entirely comfortable with harming children. He’s also not a creep lol, he wouldn’t give someone unwanted attention.

YOUR MUSE’S VIEWS / OPINIONS ON THESE GROUPS ?

Central 46: positive / negative / neutral. ━ because: the core of Soul Society executive functions, and by extension, the most fucked up.

Four Great Noble Clans: positive / negative / neutral. ━ because: he’s not knowledgeable enough about the specifics of Soul Society politics to have an opinion on its nobility. Askin is nobility too, after all.

Royal Guards / Gotei 13: positive / negative / neutral . ━ because: they’re the ones primarily responsible for the genocide, the ones Askin fought against during the first and the second war, the ones who reinforce the violent supremacy of Shinigami and who openly oppose his people.

Fullbringer: positive / negative / neutral. ━ because: doesn’t really know them, doesn’t care. A human with hollow-based abilities is somewhat of an abomination in the eyes of a Quincy, I believe, but Askin is an open-minded person.

Visored: positive / negative / neutral. ━ because: Shinigami AND Hollows? Ew.

Espada: positive / negative / neutral. ━ because: his only experience with an Espada in canon was Grimmjow, and it’s a tricky subject. He’s never come in contact with Aizen’s whole elite, so not much of an opinion could be formed.

Quincy: positive / negative / neutral. ━ because: he’s a Quincy. It doesn’t matter how disconnected Askin might feel from his people, he devoted his entire life to the Quincy as a group, though indirectly. Askin has a cynical and disenchanted look on the world, he doesn’t buy into the romanticized concept of ‘Quincy pride’, but at the end of the day, he remains a Quincy. The millenary story of his people, their culture and powers are integral to Askin’s upbringing. He thinks he’s rootless, but he’ll never be able to uproot the Quincy in him.

YOUR MUSE’S VIEWS / OPINIONS ON THESE (IMPORTANT) PEOPLE ?

Aizen: positive / negative / neutral. ━ because: he knows Aizen by reputation alone, as one of the Five Special War Powers; he’s been told the guy is a real asshole, but Askin doesn’t judge.

Yhwach: positive / negative / neutral. ━ because: Yhwach is awe-inspiring. The sense of wonder he got Askin to feel, unmoved by the passing of centuries, is the closest thing to feeling really alive he ever experienced in his life. It’s not that Askin is loyal to Yhwach himself; he’s loyal to that deep-seated feeling of wonder, the thrill of diving into the sea without knowing what’s awaiting under the surface.

Mayuri: positive / negative / neutral. ━ because: his gratuitous cruelty and the horrible things he did to Quincies viscerally nauseate Askin. And you know it takes a lot to upset him.

Kurosaki: positive / negative / neutral. ━ because: he’s just a boy. Why is everyone obsessed with this boy?

Soul King: positive / negative / neutral. ━ because: Askin is, and always has been, quite divorced from religion. He knows the guy is literally God. He knows Pernida and Gerard are directly linked to him, parts of him, and that Yhwach is his son but ... that’s about it.

EXTRA(optional): add more characters which hold some meaning to your muse.

Grimmjow: This is largely self-indulgent, but being (almost) killed by Grimmjow was like catching an disease you have been vaccinated against. The illness is meeker, sort of slowed down, but you feel the clash with the vaccine within your veins, you feel it distinctively. For one who lives between life and death, the experience Grimmjow gave him, that of a frozen instant in which he’s both alive and dead, is something Askin will never forget. He will never forget the feeling.

CONGRATS, you managed till to the end, now tag your fellow bleach partners!

TAGGED BY: myself, @senboago and @tatarfora TAGGING: steal it.

#ch study.#this DRAINED me

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elusianknight · 4 years

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a poc being like a slave or a object in utena is still a stereotype regardless of fleshing out & so is Having queer characters turning into kappas in Sarazanmai so even shows and directors you are recommending me isn't without it's stereotypes. and the is good queer rep is C&T there is a balance. Gus’s ex wife is bi with her lesbian girlfriend, Benito (male bi Dark skinned judge), Pyotr ( his 2nd song love yourself ) is about him coming out.Dahlia is portrayed as neutral. DJ ertegun.

I'm not going to debate what Anthy is or isn't because I've watched Utena but am by no means an expert on it, and I'll leave people's discussion about how she was handled as a woman of color to women of color. Her design might be stereotypical for an Indian character(?), but I don't think her actual role in the story is (trauma survivor who has basically learned helplessness and apathy toward her situation, eventually asserting her own agency and unlike the damsel in distress people thought she was, getting herself out of her own horrible situation). My point was, the fact that she's a fleshed out character means that she can't just fit into a simple stereotype, unlike all the little tiny background people from c&t, where most of them are just jokes. They are nothing besides whatever caricature or stereotype they fit into. How is Benito bi..? How is it meaningful when he appears for like a total of 5 minutes? Same wirh Maria or whatever her name is. It's empty low effort bs, though Maria's dialogue had probably the most going for it in terms of seriously representing a bi woman. But even then, it boils down to set dressing as she's not a main character.

Never said sarazanmai was good. Never recommended it. Never watched it. because it looks bad! Ikuhara is weird and there are PLENTY of things in Utena I don't like. But he did make a whole anime that tore down gender stereotypes and social expectations and had an actual meaningful message that was amazing for its time, especially when most anime made today is worthless misogynistic male power fantasy bullshit. Utena isn't my favorite show, nor my favorite on the list I mentioned. I think Bloom Into You or Wandering Son would be the best in terms of anime. I really don't know why you're still spamming me with messages.

Nothing you say is going to make the horrible portrayal of queer people in Carole and Tuesday any better. I am criticizing a director and creator who should know better than to include homophobic, transphobic and possibly racist caricatures in his work. That's it!

And yes there were plenty of people from around the world on it... But that's just the music artists. If there was a diverse writers room I'm not sure we would've had the same show. Or maybe Watanabe just didn't feel like listening. Or maybe the whole writers room thought these were okay. Doesn't change the disappointing final product.

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cherry-valentine · 5 years

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Spring 2019 Anime Season

Here’s what I’m watching: Gunjou no Magmel is definitely my favorite new show of the season. It has a fun setup that lends itself well to lots of different stories: a mysterious new continent suddenly appears one day, full of new animal and plant life and inspiring people across the globe to explore it. Of course, the place is incredibly dangerous, which is why many people work as professional “rescuers” hired to go and retrieve those who have been lost or trapped in the new continent. The protagonists of the series are a pair of rescuers: the highly skilled and unflappable Inyou and his tech genius sidekick Zero (who doesn’t physically go to the continent but instead controls a drone). Right away the series provokes a feeling of adventure that reminded me somewhat of One Piece. The new continent, known as Magmel, is beautiful and teeming with life. The series wisely presents it in a neutral light. There are dangerous creatures there, definitely, with some seriously horrific body horror imagery (much of it veering into nightmare fuel territory), but the series is quite clear about the fact that these creatures are just behaving naturally. There’s no malice there. In fact, the only truly malicious and cruel actions are performed by the humans who go to Magmel to take advantage of the creatures there for their own profit. Inyou understands this, and is generally sympathetic to the animal and plant life, while still prioritizing the preservation of human life. It’s an interesting balance. It’s also interesting that a show with the above mentioned body horror and nightmare fuel is presented with bright, cheerful, cartoony art and peppy, upbeat music. This is an adventure series, not horror, and sometimes there’s even a degree of beauty in the terrors seen in the mostly standalone episodes. The two leads, Inyou and Zero, are entertaining and have a fun dynamic between them. They act more like family than anything else, with no romantic tension at all so far (and I hope it stays that way). Currently sitting at the top of my watch list.

Ace of the Diamond Act 2 is the sequel series I’ve been looking forward to. The original series was a favorite of mine, with a fairly realistic portrayal of baseball and a team of fun, quirky characters, including Miyuki, the only character that springs to mind when I think of the term, “husbando”. He’s a fan-favorite and incredibly popular for a reason. He’s sharp-witted, the most skilled player on the team, and also has a rather twisted sense of humor (he’s the kind of guy who, upon realizing a new member of the team doesn’t like him, is totally delighted and thinks of how fun that’s going to be). Miyuki gushing aside, the show has great art that rarely goes off-model and somewhat smooth animation. The music so far is okay, nothing special (the opening and ending themes were hit and miss in the original series as well). Main character Sawamura is still annoying (like Asta in Black Clover, he tends to scream rather than speak) but his underdog status and genuine love of the sport and his team make him endearing enough to overlook his negative traits. My only real gripe with the show is its tendency to recap that last several minutes of the previous episode in each new episode, making you wait quite a while to get to the new content. This would be a much bigger deal in marathon viewing, but on a weekly basis, I can deal with it.

Hitoribocchi no Marumaruseikatsu is a cute series about cute girls doing cute things. This is a genre I’m generally not fond of, mainly because the girls in these types of shows tend to be sexualized in a creepy way and their “cute antics” tend to be banal and annoying. In this show, however, neither of those two problems are present. In fact, if the show had a male love interest, it would feel very shoujo to me. The focus of the story is on a shy girl with severe social anxiety trying to make friends in her new school. She’s a bit awkward but cute and earnest, so watching her attempt to talk to strangers is funny but also heartwarming. The small circle of friends that begins to form around her is made up of equally cute and funny girls, each of whom have distinct personalities and character designs. Surprisingly, considering this is based on a manga aimed at male readers, none of the girls seem specifically designed to appeal to a male audience. They come across as genuine, well developed characters. The art and music are cute, but not very notable. My only complaint is the subplot involving a young teacher who takes one look at the blonde, tanned Nako and immediately judges her as a juvenile delinquent and is thus afraid of her. It’s meant to be funny, I suppose, but I find it annoying that a teacher would be so judgmental, especially considering Nako is a quiet, well-behaved student who gives absolutely no indication that she’s a delinquent. Ah well, it’s a relatively minor subplot so I can overlook it.

Bungo Stray Dogs Season 3 was hotly anticipated after a strong season two and the amazing Dead Apple movie. Following a group of supernaturally “gifted” members of a detective agency and their conflicts with other “gifted” groups (including the ruthless Port Mafia), this show is one of the best series of the past several years. It has a bit of Durarara!!’s cool vibe and style, but with a more straightforward story. This is a series that handles all of its various story elements very well, from the action scenes to the heartfelt moments to the comedy, and looks great doing it. I still prefer the comedy and characterization of season one, but only because they were done SO well. The more serious, plot-driven arcs of late are still fantastic. The music is great too, with my favorite opening theme of the season (and there were some outstanding ones this season, so that’s saying something).

Kimetsu no Yaiba might just be my second favorite new series. Every season has a new show that gets a lot of hype, and in my experience around half of those shows actually live up to that hype. This show is definitely in that good half. With fluid animation, excellent music, and an interesting setup (a young boy’s family is slaughtered by demons, leaving only one sister behind who has become a demon herself, so he trains to become a demon slayer and find a way to turn her back into a human), this series seems primed to become a hit. The protagonist, Tanjirou, is a fairly standard kind-hearted hero training to join a group and accomplish his goal. The series doesn’t tread a lot of new ground in that respect, but it does everything so well that it’s easy to forgive it for not being the most original story. The most interesting aspect is the sister, Nezuko, who instead of being a delicate young flower for him to constantly protect is a demon herself who, in an early scene, literally kicks another demon’s head clean off. She’s a powerful ally in battle, which is refreshing. The other characters haven’t had much screen time yet, but seem fun so far. Overall, it’s a very well-done, if somewhat unoriginal, show. Highly entertaining and high on my watch list.

Midnight Occult Civil Servants is much better than it seems at first glance. Protagonist Arata joins a particular group of civil servants that deal with mythological creatures called “Anothers”. They range from fairies to gods to Japanese-based creatures like Tengu (this mishmash of mythology actually reminds me of Shin Megami Tensei). Arata quickly realizes that he’s the only member of the team who can understand the languages used by the Anothers, and so he becomes a valuable tool when dealing with them. The show presents a variety of creatures with a variety of behaviors. Some Anothers are friendly to humans and mean no harm, while others are outright malicious. Others still are just indifferent. At first, it seems like the show is going to be about Arata clearing up misunderstandings that his fellow team members have about the Anothers, but then the show lets us know that not all Anothers are friendly, and being able to understand their words doesn’t mean Arata can understand their motivations or can do much to stop them from doing bad things. The episodes are often inspired by real life urban legends, and overall has an air of mystery. The art is fine, with interesting, varied character designs but animation that’s just okay. The music is above average though, with my favorite ending theme of the season. It’s not my favorite new show, but it has a secure spot on my watch list.

Attack on Titan Season 3 Part 2 really doesn’t need much of a write-up, since it’s just a continuation of a season that was delayed (and that I already wrote about). I’ll just keep it brief and say it’s still great, is finally getting into one of my favorite arcs from the manga, and has a gorgeous opening theme.

Mobile Suit Gundam Origin is the tv series version of an OVA that details the origins of one of the Gundam franchise’s most popular characters (and one of my all-time favorites): Char Aznable. I never watched the OVA (despite intending to for the longest time) so this is all new content for me. What I find most interesting is the visual style, which looks very much like the classic Gundam art style of the original late 70‘s tv series but with more modern, smooth animation and some CGI mixed in. There’s a strange awkwardness to the art style that feels oddly natural. It was present in the old tv series and it’s present here. It’s kind of hard to explain if you haven’t seen it yourself though. Art aside, the story is definitely interesting. While Char’s basic history had already been revealed years ago, we didn’t really know the details. Char is a complicated character, which explains his popularity several decades after his debut. He was ruthless, cold, and calculating even as a child, but he loved his family very deeply and was surprisingly emotional. There are also badass lady characters to enjoy (who also appeared in the original series - I’ve always found it interesting that a show made in 1979 had more complex, strong, and generally well-written female characters than more modern Gundam series like Wing, Seed/Seed Destiny, and Iron Blooded Orphans). The music is fantastic here, and it’s overall a very solid show. Now I wish they’d remake the original series with this kind of animation (and cut out some of the filler).

Shoumetsu Toshi is, honestly, at the bottom of my list. The animation quality is just okay, with questionable character design choices (for the first few episodes, there were two unrelated female characters with such strikingly similar designs that it was very confusing). The story is a bit of a muddled mess. It mostly follows a young girl who survived a bizarre event where a whole city full of people suddenly vanished (later dubbed “The Lost”), and the young man who has been hired to help her return after she receives a message from her father, who was one of the people that vanished, telling her to come back. The setup is actually very interesting and mysterious. The problem is that the series throws too many concepts and ideas at us way too quickly, and explains none of it. It might be because the show is based on a video game, and the writers assumed people watching the anime would be familiar with the game and its various elements. Already in the show we have time travel, undefined magical powers, totally different powers that allow people to summon the souls of the vanished victims to fight for them like Persona, shadowy organizations doing human experiments, fancy artifacts that grant even more abilities, phantom thieves, idol groups, hackers, detective agencies, and double agents that have infiltrated the police. There’s just way too much going on, and as a result, the core plot that was actually interesting gets crowded out and choked. I’m still watching because the show is still entertaining in a strange way, but it’s a shame that it wasted a lot of its potential.

Carry Over Shows From Previous Seasons: Black Clover

Best of Season: Best New Show: Gunjou no Magmel Best Opening Theme: Bungo Stray Dogs Season 3 Best Ending Theme: Midnight Occult Civil Servants Best New Male Character: Inyou (Gunjou no Magmel) Best New Female Character: Nako (Hitoribocchi no Marumaruseikatsu)

#Anime #Anime Reviews #Seasonal Anime #Anime Recommendations #Text #Spring 2019 Anime

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athetos · 6 years

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🗻👑👤🐾🎭👎🎼🌊🚻🕛 (the treble clef is supposed to be the two barred eighth notes emoji but i have no clue where that option was i dont use any emoji except the horn...rip)

It’s ok cloud I can’t find emojis I need either lol

Favorite game environments/worlds: obvious answer but breath of the wild really blew me away. There were a ton of cool, tiny areas most people would miss that were real treats to find. And it was huge. Zelda games in general have great environments. Super Mario sunshine ranks up there too, I don’t think any game will be that island aesthetic.

Favorite boss(es)? Gigyas from earthbound is always a standout, it really sticks with you and messes with your head. The final neutral boss of undertale is another one like that. The final main story boss of the world ends with you, the final boss of devil survivor 2, and the final boss of paper mario: the thousand year door are also top notch.

Favorite game characters? Vivian from the thousand year door, neku, Shiki and beat from twewy, nanashi and nozomi from smtiv: apocalypse, Pauline, yoshi and Rosalina from mario, guzma and Roxie from Pokémon, urbosa from botw, frog and marle from chrono trigger, Cecil and Rydia from final fantasy iv, there’s just so many!

Favorite video game companions? Yoshi! Also love the frog from donkey Kong country even though it was an asshole to control

Favorite plot/story? Chrono trigger and the world ends with you probably. Bravely default grated on me a bit but definitely kept me hooked. Zelda and shin megami tensei are always good.

Favorite underrated/unpopular games? The world ends with you is very niche, i feel like, and I guess the switch version hasn’t had good sales so far, but it is truly one of the greatest games of all time PLS check it out you won’t regret it! I also don’t see a ton of stuff on the Devil survivor games and yeah they’re basically anime shin megami tensei and all the bad things that comes with it but they’re good games I promise. And Zelda games are always popular but everyone overlooks the oracle games, or the minish cap, and they’re amazing. They deserve way more recognition than the ds games

Game with the best music? Undertale, earthbound, chrono trigger, anything from grant kirkhope or David wise, castlevania in general, celeste, super Mario 64, the absolute beast of a soundtrack that will be smash ultimate

Water levels in games, scary or no? Scary because most of them are bad. Nobody can apparently figure out how water physics and puzzles should work. Swimming is almost always a chore in games. Look at all the water levels in zelda games! Always hardest dungeons.

Which gender do you play as? Depends which character design I like more, and what customization options there are. I typically wind up picking male characters because all the woman customizations are overly feminine, whereas it’s usually easier to make an androgynous character using a male avatar.

Opinion on timed challenges? If they’re done right they’re okay, I mean, I love speedruns and those are self-imposed, but sometimes the time challenges are ridiculously difficult, with almost no room for error. They have to be feasible!

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maiji · 6 years

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Process and wip images for A House That Holds Long Limbs (Part 8)

Previous process and wip documentation: Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4 / Part 5 / Parts 6 and 7

Read the pages here: Part 8 (full complete version will be linked from YYH North Bound master post)

I personally love exploring character dynamics and character interaction! It's definitely what I tend to focus on in comics and stories. Plus you get to draw lots of closeups of people's faces and have a lot of fun with expressions. And that's what Part 8 is full of.

IN THIS EDITION, after the usual script and thumbnails, I'll take a bit of time to talk about expressions and characterization (my thoughts on Raizen and Hokushin specifically, but also some general thoughts on how I approach writing characters and character interactions). More details of some of the panels from part 8 so you can see the faces better!

Script and thumbnails

(If you look closely at the top of pg 2, you can see the page behind was where I started drawing my random dream sequence hahahah)

It’s always kind of funny to look back at the script and see my rushed typing (or texting on my phone, since I’m often doing this on mobile...) - odd typos and dangling/incomplete thoughts like ”my blodd” (lol).

Part 8 was one of the first sequences conceived in the development of this story. As a result, the script and the thumbnails both line up very closely to the final, because I’d already been thinking about it for so long and playing the scene out repeatedly in my head. I had a very concrete sense of how I wanted to direct it, unlike many of the action sequences from previous parts. The main areas I struggled with were historical details (the karaginu was originally labelled “tarp” in the script as a placeholder until I decided what it would be), and the biggest pagination change was probably moving Raizen’s “Maybe you just didn’t take enough off lol!” to the previous page so that Hokushin’s (literal) punchline would be at the beginning of the next.

Expressions

I have a huuuuge soft spot for subtle expressions - the kind where just a bit of extra line or texture around the eyes or the mouth, plus the dialogue or context of the scene, adds nuance to an expression. Especially ones that otherwise can read as relatively neutral. Even a very simple expression that’s just dots for eyes and straight lines for the upper/lower lids and eyebrows can have a lot of variation in how you interpret them, simply based on context and slight adjustments. Here are some examples with Raizen, where his face is super basic:

A: pretending nothing is wrong, calmly answering question

B: pleased with self for being smart - clearly a happer expression than A

C: similar to A, chillaxing and answering question

D: no big smiling mouth so he looks more like he’s focused on intensely sniffing the air

E: same as B basically, but a bigger smile of “everything’s fine!” (when you read the text)

F: extra thickness for his upper lid gives the sense that he’s in the middle of his casual sexy/chivalrous how ya doin’ expression

G: ... which changes in this panel to be more a realization (“oh shit I’m on fire”)

Actually, Raizen and Hokushin are both pretty difficult face types for me, being more “mature” looking male faces with stronger features/jawlines and narrower eyes. Hokushin especially has been challenging because his design has really low eyebrows which result in a default glare. Togashi still manages to make him fairly expressive and not look like he's glowering all the time. With my more limited art skill and lack of confidence, I tend to soften his expressions by really laying on the top line of his eye (this sounds like I'm putting mascara on him or something lmao), and also adjusting the size of his pupils (within reason or it starts to look even less like how I draw him normally, which is a big problem since his shaved head is a defining aspect of his series character design so he already looks pretty different). Here are some comparisons of his face - bearing in mind I had to keep his eyes wide open because of the seals in the story:

A: crying/relief

B: this one here is supposed to be a bit miserable/self-loathing because he really didn’t think Raizen was going to look for him

C: shock, unexpected

D: thinking + “ugh plan B”

E: worried/apologetic and then “OOF/URK”

F and G: a progression to show the differences in rendering the eye. First is a bit angry because he’s realizing where all the blood for the seals came from, then he notices Raizen’s hands, and G is that example of softened expression (more lines on the top eye, larger pupil) to show how bad he feels about Raizen’s injury.

One last thought on expressions. They can easily lose their nuance when inking (the slightest shift to a line can change the expression completely), and especially for someone like me who has unsteady hands it can be a bit of a nightmare. The nice thing about ballpoints is that they can retain a bit of the pencil sketch quality, which helped me freak out less when inking the last page with Hokushin’s glare. Here’s a comparison of the progress:

Though this particular expression isn’t that subtle, you can still see some differences as the drawing gets built up. When the pencil lines are gone and the drawing gets rendered in bw only, a lot of shading is lost. The messy lines can be interpreted more flexibly by your brain since they’re less defined and you haven’t “committed”, so the final version looks and feels less expressive. (This is why a lot of artists prefer their sketches to the finished piece, myself included...) Characterization This will get very specific to this comic, obviously, but hopefully my approach (and biases haha) will come through. With something like a fancomic, there are obviously existing expectations around the characters, but the benefit of working with these guys is that they’re not as prominent in the story or the fandom, so I feel more comfortable playing around and filling in the gaps. (This is probably why I like minor characters so much.)

In the case of Raizen and Hokushin, we know these two have a close relationship and history only through assumption and insinuation. We never see them interacting directly in the series at all. Actually, we don't see Raizen interact with anyone except Yusuke in non-flashback sequences (aside from the kudakusushi. In the anime, more scenes were added with his estranged friends, mostly their fond memories of him beating them up lmao). But it's very clear that they're extremely important to each other. Hokushin obviously speaks of his king in an exceedingly respectful fashion. Meanwhile, Hokushin is actually the last name Raizen says before he dies - his second last line, to Yusuke, is "Take care of Hokushin and the others" - or in my Taiwanese edition, "I leave Hokushin and the others to you". (Lol “the others”. Also I need to draw a comic about this at some point.) Despite this zero actual interaction, it's still extremely easy to imagine it because their characters are so clearly defined. In fact, they're both such consistent archetypes with enough particular quirks that they practically write themselves. So it wasn't difficult to extrapolate and imagine much younger versions of them, and how they may have interacted if they had only just met, which is the foundation of North Bound. Archetypes and stereotypes walk a fine line together, but they do serve as really useful building blocks for sketching characters quickly. This is why I really enjoy symbolic systems like astrology (or some of the the modern incarnations - personality assessment frameworks) because of all the character sketching it helps you do really quickly. Astrology in particular because, without even caring about birth dates or charts or whether astrology is "real" or not, the basic idea of a sign and its bucket of traits and symbols is simply a great resource when you want fleshed out character archetypes to build off of. I talked a bit about this in my Lenormand post, but I think of zodiac signs as one of the many games humans have developed in our attempts to categorize our world into recognizable patterns, and since we've been at it for thousands of years, there's a wealth of reference material, scenarios, analyses not only of the individual archetypes, but for all sorts of combinations and relationships. Some of it very well-thought out, and some of it just lots of fun to read. For my purposes, applying this to North Bound, Raizen is basically a Leo. He's dramatic, positive, powerful, passionate, a straight-shooter. Not only does he embody its main traits, he's literally a king (or eventually one in this story, I guess). And he even has a mane, for crying out loud. Meanwhile, Hokushin is a solid depiction of a quintessential Virgo - hardworking, practical, analytical, stoic, kind - and literally the loyal servant that typifies the Virgo paradigm. The Leo/Virgo duo is a classic partnership, and at the point where we meet them in the series, the relationship we can see has stabilized to exactly that. At the same time, there's tons of potential for a hilarious dynamic as well, especially imagining how they got to that point. (If you wanna have a laugh, look up some analyses of Leo and Virgo relationships and you'll see what I mean.) His freakouts next to Raizen's "hahhaa everything's fine!" carry most of the humour (similar to how his freakout at Yusuke's vandalism of the rurimaru stones carried a ton of the humour in that episode lol). Obviously there are other things that further finetune their characters so that they're more than bland cookie cutter personalities (Raizen's deep thinking about the future of the Demon World, for example, and Hokushin's sense of humour and appreciation/enjoyment of fighting), but in broad brushstrokes, these archetypes work incredibly well, and make it so easy to come up with scenarios and write interaction to the point that I'm now ridiculously behind in actually turning them into comics ahhhhh...

#yu yu hakusho #raizen #hokushin #comics #fanart #process #wip #swearing #profanity #character analysis #character thoughts #expressions #art by Maiji/Mary Huang

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bevercges · 3 years

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🐭 • Okay so it’s Munday, I’m two days away from my last final (which means that I gotta prepare myself for it), and I have some stuff to do that will prevent me from sitting down and focusing on replies today so: how about I talk about my muses and why did I pick them? Yes, nobody asked, but I don’t care.

So I’m a very, very picky person. There are more chances for me to dislike or to be neutral towards something than to like something. But when I like something I tend to be pretty loyal to it, and it never leaves my side; hence this small multimuse with characters that I have been writing for years now (some of them at least). Yeah, this is just me rambling, so I’ll just go from muse to muse and close it off with a neat little bow.

Okay so, probably for the surprise of nobody, Pip is my most long-lasting muse ever! I’ve been writing him since 2013 and that’s because he has been my favorite character since Day 1.

I like underdog characters and he was the earliest underdog in the series (in my opinion, that is). He was also very different from other characters at the time (before fucking Butters came around), so it was easy to sympathize with him or to dislike him just like the cast did. For me it was the former, I found his misfortune both sad and amusing and I couldn’t help but liking him (was it out of pity tho’? Not sure, it’s been years). I also like gentleman characters a lot (especially the bowties and the suits, I like some well-dressed fellas in my life), so even if his color palette is outrageous (because it is, red, blue and purple shouldn’t be together like that) he looks pretty charming to me!

There is also the fact that, to continue with the unpopular opinions, I enjoy the first four seasons of the show quite a bit, and for me Pip pretty much symbolizes that era since that was when he was a secondary character the most often. Before he died, you know. For me, there is a sense of nostalgia to be had when it comes to Pip in general; he’s an older character, from the oldest seasons, my oldest muse and, well, just OLD in general, he comes from a book from the Victorian period after all.

Speaking of which, as cheesy and extra as this may sound, Pip got me interested in literature. My degree involves a lot of reading and writing about old English and American literature; and I don’t think I would have ever made this career choice had it not been for becoming interested in Great Expectations after I came across the episode and watched it. God, I love that fucking episode even tho’ most people hate it LOL.

Idk, I suppose the reason I still write him is because the show did not give him enough spotlight and I’m willing to take care of that myself. Though, I may admit, sometimes he’s too much for me, but I guess it’s because he’s more on demand than my other muses. He’s just that likable!

With Scott my history doesn’t go as far back, though. Sure, he was there since season 12, but most people probably started showing interested for him in 2017, when Fractured But Whole was released, and that was my case too. Scott couldn’t have had a more solid main character role had it not been for Captain Diabetes; he’s charismatic, excited to participate into the game and he’s a great teammate! He drags you in with his character alone and, taking into account that this was his first main role, he was sort of an underdog as well. Yeah, I guess that’s a running theme with me.

A lot of my characterization and love for him came from FBW and I will be the first one to admit it. Scott has a very strong personality and it shows; I usually write characters that are, for a better word, “softer”, but I honestly liked how he is usually very cool and chill, not losing it whenever Cartman picks on him like Kyle could, but can still stand up for himself and show that he has a backbone, so he became a staple for my private RPing on Discord to the point of becoming one of my favorite muses in general. Though, another reason for him to become one of my main muses was his dynamics with other characters from the show. He’s so easy to write and to have click with other characters it was a breathe of fresh air for me!

Personally, I don’t see Scott as a replacement for Pip or Butters, but he’s still a black sheep character like them. He’s just having an easier time breaking out of that mold, I think? Probably not even on purpose, though, since another thing I like about him is how he seems to be a bit scatterbrained but also really genuine. Idk, I find how simple-minded he is to be adorable... actually, Scott is just adorable. His character design stands out in comparison to other background/secondary characters’? From his hair to his ears, he’s got a lot of uniqueness going on!

I just wish they would give him the spotlight more, I guess, so this is another character I write for that reason. Though, I also started writing Scott because of the pre-established relationships I have with him (at least in private), and I hope I get to have him make more friends for as long as I remain active on this blog.

So as I said before, I first liked Bradley in an ironic manner, then it actually become a genuine feeling and now, pretty sure, he’s ascended beyond being just a favorite character of mine. Idk man, he’s funny. Mintberry Crunch is a hilarious concept and I love it, I have said that in the past, and I suppose this was one of those cases in which you just wanted to insist you were into something ironically and then it went too far.

Anyways, what haven’t I say about Bradley yet? I enjoy how much of a Dennis the Menace kind of unapollogetic twerp he is, his sibling rivalry with Henrietta is one of my favorite things about his character. Sure, it’s an annoying archetype, but it was one of the reasons I had to use MBC in FBW outside of his powers, because of his dynamic with his adoptive sister. It makes me wonder what could have been his dynamic with the other goth kids since it’s canon that he steals stuff related to the occult from them..

I will admit that the reason I like him is because I think he’s a funny character. Bro, he’s hilarious, his entire superhero persona is a cereal mascot that keeps throwing lines akin to a cereal commercial, gotta love the surreality of it. Hell, he’s so surreal, so disconnected from the other kids’ superhero personas, that he was totally the underdog during the Coon & Friends trilogy. Everything was revolving around the Coon and Mysterion? Bam, not anymore, suddenly MBC, the character nobody expected anything from, the most useless concept out of the bunch, is the one who unironically has a backstory and superpowers to boot. Hell, he’s also the best (if not broken) support character in FBW? What is there not to ironically love about the cereal alien child?

Of course, I love the possibilities he brings to the table when it comes to RPing. He’s an alien so he can be in any setting in the galaxy! He can interact with other species and it won’t be weird for him because, hello? He’s an alien himself! Tho’ I also really like to think that he’s a “how do you do fellow humans” kind of alien these days so that’s extra points in the funny department. His personality, overall, makes interacting with him a very entertaining experience to watch.

I haven’t been writing him for long, though, only since around 2018? Yeah, he’s my newest muse, the characters I have been writing for the least time in this blog- but GOD I would defend him with my life. I just think he’s neat! And that’s basically it.

🐭 • So, in conclusion? I like my underdogs a lot. Some of my muses are more popular and loved than others, sure, but I’m attracted to underrated characters, which is something all of my three boys have in common.

Also, before anybody asks: yeah, I only write male characters, so what? I don’t really enjoy most female characters in the show and those I DO like I just don’t think I would ever be able to make em justice. There are people out there that would do a way better job at writing Henrietta or Estella than I ever could, and I shall wait until the day comes in which I get to write with em. ♥

This is basically it, I’m going to go chillax now LOL.

#📁 • OOC.#cw long post #(Just talking about the main three for today; I'm tired.)#(Lately I've been here and there in terms of mood and motivation to work.)#(So this may be quite disorganized and stuff; bear with me.)

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demonganggg · 4 years

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Vernon

[TW for wings being r/pped out and mentions of war]

(Warning: long and detailed)

picrew: https://picrew.me/image_maker/125919

picrew: https://picrew.me/image_maker/125981

Basics

-Name: his real name is unknown and unable to be pronounced by humans, so his alias/human name is Vernon.-

-Nickname: his friends call him "gargoyle" because he likes to sit atop high places and observe and brood over everything-

-Species: demon-

-Mental age: teenager-

-Gender: male-

-Pronouns: he/him-

-Romantic orientation: demi-panromantic-

-Sexual orientation: asexual-

-Alignment: True Neutral-

-Myers-Briggs: ISTJ-T-

Appearance/Clothing Style

-Pale blue skin-

-Long, black hair; keeps it braided under his cloak-

-Long, wavy black horns-

-Long, brown gryphon tail-

-Pointed ears-

-Large, mechanical goldish-brown wings that he made himself; they’re too heavy for humans to lift, and only he can wear them. Can attach and detach when needed.-

-Has specialized metal holes in his back where his mechanical wings fit into, like a lock and key-

-Black rimmed glasses-

-Light grey irises; diamond-shaped pupils in his demon form, and regular pupils in his human form-

-Doesn't stray from dark-colored clothing; usually wears casual clothes, and he always wears a black cloak over whatever he's wearing-

-Wears black sneakers for leisure, and black leather boots for work or combat-

-Two eyebrow piercings and some ear piercings-

-Skinny, lanky build; 5'5-

Traits

-Has sight issues; can't see much without his glasses-

-Sunlight hurts him; he gets a bad rash if he's exposed to it for too long. This is why he wears a cloak all the time-

-Unlike humans, his strength not only depends on his physical state, but also his willpower, mental state, and mood at the time. For example, if he is in a deep depressive state or very anxious, he does far less damage than when he's feeling mentally well.-

-His tail and pale blue skin are a mark of his family line and heritage, and began from different races of demons crossbreeding many demon generations ago; so he isn’t a “purebred” by any means-

-In Vernon’s universe, a lot of demons choose to transform into animals to suit their needs, like animaguses from Harry Potter. Vernon and his friends all chose to be birds; Vernon’s bird of choice is a Raven (I mean, really, what bird is a better fit for Vernon than a Raven?).-

Powers

-In Vernon’s universe, demons have the ability to telepathically communicate with one another. It takes a lot of energy to do, however, and usually requires a clear mind. So if a demon is in trouble, they have to remain calm in order to contact other demons for help.-

-Some demons, including Vernon, also have the ability to influence others’ emotions via eye contact; mainly with humans. They often take advantage of this to make humans they’re interacting with be infatuated with them, fear them, etc.-

Preferred Weapons

-Precision-based (crossbow, throwing knives, axe)-

-If he loses his glasses in combat, he’ll use melee weapons (axe, bat, combat knife)-

Fighting Style

-Vernon usually takes a very planned and methodical approach to combat. He’ll rarely charge in guns blazing without thought; instead, he’ll try to take a sniping/long-ranged approach with his crossbow. If he’s in close range, he uses his cunning and agility to his advantage. He also heavily relies on stealth tactics.-

-In TF2 characters: Sniper (stealth+ranged) and Spy (stealth); somewhat Scout (agility)-

Pain Points

-His back where his wings used to be. He has nerve damage there due to his wings being violently ripped out, so not only is it an emotional weak spot, but a physical one as well.-

-His tail is very sensitive; during combat or a risky situation, he tries to keep it out of the way by tucking it in his belt-

Hobbies

-He is very fascinated by humans, their culture, and their history, and likes to study them in his free time. He sees them as an inferior species, but doesn’t have any interest in harming or manipulating them for personal gain like other demons do. He thinks they should just be left alone and studied, and demons should complete their own goals themselves instead of forcing humans to help. He likes to spend a lot of his time disguising himself as a human to blend in to their society to study them up-close and firsthand. He’ll often enroll in a high school somewhere for a month or two, and then drift to another school in another town before anyone in the school or community suspects too much. He’ll be the one kid who sits in the back of class, quietly doing work, not interacting with many people (unless it’s part of his ulterior motive to study them), and never really goofing off or getting into trouble.-

-He likes to brew potions, and often makes potions to help with his human disguise, such as ones that change his skin color to caucasian and hide his horns and tail. However, he is unable to better his eyesight or remove his negative reaction to sunlight, so he still has to wear his glasses and cloak on Earth.-

-He also likes to dabble in magic, and uses a small magical box to shrink and keep his wings in when disguised. That way, he can inconspicuously keep his wings on him at all times.-

Personality

-Worldview: very depressing and cynical. The world is burning and there’s not much we can do about it. Everyone is a possible threat; you can’t truly trust anyone.-

-Cynical and bitter-

-Contemplative, intellectual, curious, thirst for knowledge-

-Insensitive and doesn’t have a lot of empathy-

-Can sometimes be anxious and insecure, but he has an air of confidence and arrogance. He never shows his insecurities or doubts to anyone, but they’re there.-

-He always hides his emotions and likes to keep a stoic mask on for his own protection, but he does have more sensitive sides to him. Good luck ever seeing them, though.-

-He’s usually pretty calm, but when he gets upset, he can become pretty destructive and reckless. He doesn’t like it when he gets like this, however, because he views losing control of your anger as a weakness. He also takes pride in being very careful and thinking things through, and loses these abilities when angry.-

-Very paranoid of people, whether angel, demon, or human, and it’s really hard for him to come to trust people. He likes animals, though. There aren’t many animals in hell, so he likes to study and spend time with them when he makes trips to Earth.-

-It’s pretty hard for him to forgive people, but if someone really shows that they care about him and regret their mistake, he eventually will forgive them. If someone wants to be forgiven by Vernon, they have to be patient and give him space after apologizing.-

-Sometimes feels detached and estranged from his friends-

-It’s easy for him to hyper-focus on things and lose track of his surroundings in the process-

-Most likely has PTSD from the war he was in-

Pet Peeves

-Hates having his horns, hair, or tail messed with, even in a friendly way-

-People trying to hug or touch him without permission-

-People being behind him, or approaching him from behind without warning. He hates standing in lines and people sitting behind him in theaters, stands, bleachers, etc, so he always sits up in the very back. Relates back to his pain points in his back; he also gets nervous in general when he thinks people are looking at his back. Even though no one can actually see his back, he still feels like people are staring, and this feeling can bring on panic attacks and he’ll try to leave whatever situation he’s in. He also flinches and goes into fight or flight mode when someone gets too close to his back or touches it without permission, even if that person is a close friend. TL;DR: don’t pat him on the back or put your hands on his back when hugging. In fact, he doesn’t even like hugs.-

-He absolutely despises getting wet. Squirting him with a water gun or pouring water on him, even as a joke, is a very quick way to get on his bad side and make him hate you.-

-He hates it when people constantly apologize to him; the only person he tolerates it from is Novius, because that’s just how Novius is.-

-It really bugs him when hair gets in his eyes, because he doesn't like it when things block his vision. He doesn't have bangs for this reason. (The first picrew is a bit innacurate because of the lock of hair falling down over his face)-

Mannerisms/Misc

-Furrows his eyebrows and shakes his leg/taps his shoe on the floor/fidgets when focusing. He hates when other people make noises when fidgeting, even though he does it, because it can be distracting for him-

-Fidgets with and cleans his tail when nervous-

-Sort of freaks out when his tail gets dirty. After losing his wings, he’s very overprotective of his tail, since that’s one of the only demon extremities left that he has pride in-

-Despite hating getting wet, he loves the rain. Hell’s weather is very static, so he appreciates it when it rains during his trips to Earth. He likes nature in general, and likes to take walks in the rain, but he doesn’t like to reveal this part of himself, because he sees it as a “sensitive” trait.-

Background

-He fought in one of the many great wars between angels and demons many years ago (a long time for humans, but not that long for demons). This is when he lost his wings. They were a beautiful reddish-gold pair that never ceased to shimmer, even in the dark. They always gave off an air of importance, and were his main source of pride; they also gave him very powerful strength and energy. But unfortunately, they were ripped off by an angel in a demon prison camp. He was very emotionally attached to them, and thus doesn’t like to talk about the war much for that reason.-

-Both of his parents died in the war. He wasn’t very close to them, but he still wonders what it’d be like if they were still around and he had their support. Things work a lot looser in hell; no one really looks after him, so he mostly just goes wherever and does whatever he wants. Hell’s system of government makes sure he doesn’t get into too much trouble, but are otherwise uninvolved in his life. The only real connections he has (as of now) are his two friends.-

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