#but some parts are weirdly good or at least like decent
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reading blood canticle is officially making me insane why does the quality flip from good to "self insert fanfic on wattpad in 2012" so quickly ...
#it's actually really funny#every time lestat opens his mouth i go “why was he written like this”#but some parts are weirdly good or at least like decent#so idk how i feel about it yet
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Why Is Druid?
Say that like ‘where is Wizard Hut?‘
I love the 4e Druid. This is a marked change from how much I liked the 3e druid, or how often you might see me playing a druid in a Baldur’s Gate game. Back in 3rd edition, the druid, despite being very powerful, never really engaged me, in part perhaps because I was always trying to find something exploitative and powerful rather than merely accepting the juggernaut of a toolkit the game just left in the Player’s Handbook. You couldn’t get clever with the Druid, you just had to pick it up and use it, like some sort of society of creative anachronisms where one of the anachronisms available to the players was has gun. Valid, but hardly sporting.
The Druid in 4th edition is different. Wildly different. Weirdly different, and different in one of those ways that shows what I think of as a seam in the design between 4th and 3rd editions of D&D.
The Druid was one of 3rd edition’s great mistakes, a full spellcasting class with healer capacity to serve as a pinch-hitter healer in a group that wanted things a little more varied, addressing an enormously complex potential build from its earlier edition, 2e, and all in the process, resulting in some deeply confused mash up of abilities that attempted to address confusion with volume. The druid of 2e had a special unique set of rules compared to the Cleric — for example, at a certain level, you passed into a specific category of Druidic ability and now you were technically a Hierophant, and Hierophants had seven extra spells of every level. Of course there was a limited supply of Hierophants in the world, so there was a question of if you could level up if another one existed, and maybe there’s a one-in, one-out policy? First in, first fired?
Anyway, I can’t speak to how it played, but I am at least aware, on the edges of it, that the 2e druid was odd. It had a lot of things it could do, but much of how it worked, reading the books, seemed to be interesting but challenging to manage. You could wild shape, you could heal, you could cast utility spells, you could even fight with some melee weapons — personally, I didn’t see any of it worth it, because none of the things it could do it could do very well.
3e addressed this seeming difficulty by instead taking all those different options and bringing them all up to the same level. Wild Shape worked by checking traits of monster units, which meant that you weren’t limited to specific reinterpretations of animals and instead could do what a druid feels like it should do — you know, turn into an animal. The spells were rebalanced and shared across different classes, which meant that they tended to work in a more standardised way. Armour rules were aggregated, and weapons were made less terrible.
The result was that the 3e druid went from being ‘decent’ at a bunch of things to ‘good’ at everything it wanted to do. The problem of the druid then became about picking the thing you wanted to at every opportunity, and doing a good job of it — you’d have druids carrying wands of healing so they could dedicate their spell slots to more important tasks, like Flame Striking opponents, or messing up the battlefield with roots. You’d also see druids keeping the ‘best’ list of animals on hand, and every new monster book presented a new chance for druids to develop a new best form.
It also created the strange question of What does the druid do?
The answer was ‘everything.’
The 4e Druid, in comparison and contrast to these designs is something very different that touches, at best, on the periphery of what the 3e Druid could be. I mean it stands to reason, you can only ever touch on doing everything when something you’re working from is so powerful. 4e with its role system of Defender, Striker, Leader and Controller, and its reliable, reusable balance math suddenly was confronted with fitting an elephant into a shoebox.
How do you represent something busted that could do everything in the context of a new system that sought to explicitly prevent that? I joked when the game was new that the four roles were Defender, Striker, Leader and Miscellaneous. That any class too powerful, with too much stuff it could potentially do, got thrown to the Controller role as suggested by the first Controller we ever saw being the Wizard. Oh and back in Player’s Handbook 1, the Wizard had a few builds that were pretty ridiculously pushed — the pinball wizard, I’ll talk about it sometime — and that meant that it was easy to feel like the Controller Does Everything.
That impression diluted through experience, of course, and eventually it came to that while yes, the Controller sure has some Miscellaneous vibes, the core of what the Controller was there to do was to attack the enemy action economy. Nice and obvious to a non giga-nerd, right? Okay, how about this: The leader lets you do more things, the controller stops them from doing more things?
And into this space, they poured the druid.
It works beautifully, for my tastes; the druid needs to do lots of things to feel properly druidy, but you need to make sure the doing lots of things doesn’t unbalance the game. Controllers have the widest variety of things they can do and ways they can do them – inflicting status conditions, changing enemy position, preventing specific action types, making areas on the battlefield inaccessible, these are all ‘controllery’ things, and that means there’s a lot of different ways you can flavour them. The Invoker is most famous for making zones in the play space hard to deal with, the Wizard has a build that slides things all over the place, and the psion controls people with immense penalties to their damage rolls.
Obligatory pause where, while reading this aloud, for either Fox or I to comment on how amazing it is that Dishearten is an AOE power.
Anyway, the druid was designed to be a mode switcher class. That is, there are two ways a druid can do things. One is a melee controller that makes a single target’s life harder, the other is a ranged controller that makes a large group of enemies’ lives harder. This mode switching then adds a new element to the class that your powers can interact with, where you now have control powers that can add a mode switching element to them as well. This is your Wild Shape – you transform into some kind of nonspecific beast, which can use your Wild Shape powers. Each form has fewer powers to manage, and you can build your druid to specialise in one or the other or do a mix.
This lets the druid do the ‘a lot’ without letting them actually do everything. You have a lot of choices and a lot of ways to play with those pieces, but even just how often you use the mode switch is part of what the druid does to control the battlefield. When I first played a druid, it was not uncommon to start a fight out of wild shape, use the first turn to make some kind of area control power, then shift into wild shape for the rest of the fight kicking people into that area control power. There are druids builds that work like wizards and only ever shapeshift to get away from problems, and make a hit while scuttling away, or to sit on a specific type of problem. There were druids who focused on summoning monsters and using them as kind of turrets on the battlefield, positioning allies in a way that benefitted them around those summons.
Lone artillery combat encounters, where you have a bunch of stuff in front of a long-ranged attacker? Druids love those. Even at level 1, that artillery is spending their days completely stuck underneath a Fire Hawk power.
Problem is, of course, that if you want to do Everything doing a Lot is going to miss something. That was what led to the subclasses of the druid, the ones that added healer elements to the druid, because the druid back in 3e could do that. It added animal companions, because the druid back in 3e could do that. Now I don’t worry too much about these things because if I wanted an animal companion on my Druid, I’d take a theme for that, but also because these changes were introduced in an Essentials book.
Which is to say, they’re crap.
They’re not crap crap, like I try to defend Essentials as giving players a choice for simplified character builds, but in the specific case of the Essentials Druids, in order to work with the simplified choices, these Essentials druids with their animal companions and their healing powers have to look at all other Druid powers and not use them. The only use they get out of their animal companion is using the specific subset of powers that make them work, and that makes combat more samey. But again: That’s a thing you probably want if you want a simplified build.
Still, it gives rise to my favourite joke – I mean like, funny thing, not really a joke, there’s no subversion of reality or anything here – about the Healer Druid. See, every Leader in the game gets an encounter power, usable twice a combat at level 1, that heals an ally with a bonus. Every class gets their own version that lets them distinguish their class specifically and add some interesting detail that shows how this Leader differs from other Leaders.
The Healer druid build gets Healing Word.
The Cleric power.
Literally, the same power, same name, listed as a Cleric power.
Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!
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honestly I feel like the weakest part of elephant was just that it used up so much of its short runtime on unbroken cuts of people walking. that time could've been better used to do a little bit more character fleshing out imo. other than that its a decent solid movie and the multiple perspectives made for some *very* juicy moments of tension. some of the parts did feel kind of stilted but weirdly I liked the fact that the dialogue kind of sounded unnatural at times; at least to me it kind of fit the tone & feeling of the movie.
(Edit now that im not lightly toasted like when I wrote this: im not saying the characters in elephant were too flat or that it wasn’t good because i found it kinda slow at times. it’s got a vision and a point which i think is executed pretty well. part of it was just a personal taste thing (i like detailed characters) but im not tossing out the whole thing.)
#also its two kiss scenes are going to haunt me until my dying days. thank you gus.#elephant 2003#gus van sant
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“Characters in search of a plot” is a pretty good way of putting it. And you aren’t wrong about really weak villains. I think a lot of bigotry allegories tend to fall apart if you scratch them a bit but this one is particularly bad. Mostly I think I just don’t like how the war machines get treated with more leniency by the writing than any human it seems.
I’m pretty new to the franchise and was initially really interested in the IDW comics but the more I’ve heard about them the less enthused I am. I mostly gather wonky characterizations, a weirdly BNF-y trend to the fandom and poorly written space politics.
I also… may have spent a decent amount of time in a fandom with a weird amount of imperialism apologia because “well things had to change!” so I get really antsy if I feel any rumblings in that direction. Pity because I love Space Operas, I’m interested in Cybertronian worldbuilding and I’d like less focus on the humans but little of it sounds done well. I may try them at some point to at least form proper opinions but they sound like an incohesive mess, and not in the fun way.
I do hope that the people who enjoy them are having fun though. And despite my reservations and some issues I am quite enjoying the Skybound comics for the most part! Though time will tell if it stays that way.
There's a decent amount here, so let's go through it one step at a time since I don't want to come off as ignoring things:
One could argue that "characters in search of a plot" is probably a better conundrum than a plot where you just don't like the characters. I fully believe some of the Terrans might get another shot at being featured in something, even if it is with modified backstories not connected to the Maltos. Twitch is probably the most likely to get another crack at a big role, although I could see her being portrayed as just a regular Autobot in a subsequent production. Hashtag, despite a name that might make some cringe, actually seems to be the closest the brand has come to a proper Blaster replacement, and Jawbreaker as the Dinobots kid sibling would make a lot of sense and serve to humanize them in a future work. Unfortunately Thrash, who doesn't have much of a personality, and Nightshade, who has become a lightning rod of controversy, I'm less sure about.
That said, bigotry allegories are tough in the best of times. Even in good cases, they're often subject to bad faith readings, and in bad cases, like here? Forget it. It's an awkward, clunky mess that heavily contradicts the rest of the franchise, in particular the comic they're releasing right now where the Cons could not give a damn about anything other than themselves, and whose Starscream is a sadistic bully. But the writers here are clearly fans of the fanfic Cons, so in trying to make them as sympathetic as possible, their cruelty and issues are swept under the rug. It was worse in IDW admittedly since the Autobots were oftentimes just terrible people, so you were often let with no one to root for. For all its problems, the Autobots in Earthspark are more often than not ineffectual, not evil, which is probably because Hasbro pumped the brakes on having cash cows like Optimus Prime be shown as evil without say, brainwashing.
I would not recommend the IDW comics to anyone. The few gems of characterization and concepts cannot make up for the mountains of coal that was most of their run, and IDW2, the prequel that tries to establish a framework for the Great War? The damned thing was so slow and boring that no one mourned IDW losing the license. Not to mention if you're not REALLY familiar with these characters and why you should care about the variances in how they're portrayed, I find most people would just be completely lost, and if you don't like how the portrayals are altered, frustrated. It's simply put, not a fun comic unless you are in the market for a very specific portrayal.
The main issue with the humans (something the very first Transformers comic writer, Bob Budinansky noted was important) was that without that connection, the Transformers could be anything else. They could be humans with power armor, weird bug aliens, or freakish mutants. But it's that relationship and contrast with the humans that makes them special. That's not to say that there are versions of the story that significantly overdo the human element, because there assuredly are, but to have it be completely absent is to cut off part of why we invest in these characters.
Finally, while the Skybound Energon Universe is a little less than a year old, and there are definitely some concerns as well as plot holes that hopefully the narrative will fill in later, I argue that those comics have bought something that seemed to be missing from so much Transformers media as of late, a sense of actual fun. The writers get mecha and what makes them cool. They get the core of why these characters work. I can only hope that the quality stays high, especially with Daniel Warren Johnson, part of why I think the comics have been so good (no one in IDW would dare think of references pro wrestling or the 08th MS Team) phasing out of the book.
#transformers#transformers earthspark#transformers skybound#transformers idw#skybound#tf skybound#earthspark
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Godzilla x Kong gets... probably a 7.5 or 8 out of 10 from me. I liked it a lot, but the last act felt like it was rushing (which should never be the case for a 2+ hour movie). The action was really good though and the visual effects, while dwarfed by Minus One, were excellent.
Spoiler-y opinions below:
Okay so- Kong's portions of the movie were actually really strong. Granted, I'm easily amused by anything that involves monkeys falling down a lot. But in all seriousness, you can tell they had the most story ideas for Kong. His fights are good, the monsters his arc introduces are cool, and the way they've aged his design is also pretty nifty. You will believe a gorilla can be daddy.
That said, the strength of Kong's part of the movie brings me to my main complaint. The other two focal points, Godzilla and the human cast really didn't feel like they had as much to do. Less so for the human cast, which I'll get to in a moment, but it kinda felt like Godzilla was sidelined.
Weirdly, that isn't to say he wasn't in the movie. Godzilla's scenes are almost as plentiful as Kong's, if not equally so. The movie, to its credit, does a pretty good job of giving everyone equal-ish screentime, so Godzilla does get plenty of scenes. The problem is that most of them are just him going from point A to point B to point C and so forth.
In fairness, Goji's scenes are at least entertaining. He gets some superb city destruction and the best fights in the movie (and it has plenty) are his. Though speaking of fights, I am disappointed that we didn't get to see any new-old monsters. Scylla is a cool enough design on its own that I don't mind it, but Tiamat is similar enough to Manda that I felt like SOME acknowledgement could be made. I mean shoot, just have them be called Titanus Ebirah and Titanus Manda on the computer radar thingie they keep cutting to. Problem solved.
At least we get Godzilla sleeping in the Colosseum like a cat. It's a cheap pop, but I'm still here for it.
The human story is decent, if nothing special. The only returning cast are Rebecca Hall, Kaylee Hottle, and Brian Tyree Henry. Dan Stevens joins them as... I guess Kong's veterinarian for lack of a better word, rounding out the quartet of focal characters. I don't know if I enjoyed his character or if he annoyed me. Hottle and Hall deliver more of the "constantly mildly uncomfortable deaf girl who just wishes everyone would leave her pet gorilla alone and her overprotective adopted mother" stuff. It was fine in the last movie, it's fine here. Henry's conspiracy theorist character is... less irksome than he could have been. While in the previous film he was a surprising amount of depth for the archetype he was portraying, here he's firmly in the comic relief role. It never quite veers into annoying, but there are parts where it does leave you going, "okay, but why does he need to be here?" He at least makes it out better than Stevens, who may be the world's first example of a token white guy.
All that said, the human plot was actually kinda working for me. The whole "lost civilization deep within the hollow earth that harnesses mysterious natural powers and also worships/summons Mothra" thing felt like a really fun tribute to the kind of story you'd see in the classic Showa Era films without being anachronistic.
As much as I complain, there was something I noticed beyond the movie itself that made me happy. The theater was packed, which is great to see, but more than that there was a ton of kids in there, right around the same age I was when I was first getting into Godzilla. The same age I was when I got picked on for liking it. I couldn't help but look around the theater after the movie and feel vindicated. I was right, this shit is cool as fuck. Suck my ass, Samuel from fifth grade.
Anyway yeah it's fun. Worth seeing.
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Dejiko!
recently I’ve had some trouble with finishing drawings so it’s nice to finally finish one. Maybe I’ll post the unfinished stuff later.
in fact, this drawing had a whole, other half that I cut out. There was a picture of a mad Dejiko. I was tired and didn’t feel like drawing another one so I didn’t.
Dejiko is weirdly hard to draw for me. Frills and middles parts are stuff I struggle with, but I think I did good (or at least decent)
Made with:
ibisPaintX, phone, finger
~3 hours
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i’m sorry but my mind has been rotted with steamer! rin, hiori, and nagi ideas recently
like imagine them collaborating and steaming shit like dbd with each other all the time
i can imagine hiori having the prettiest most aesthetically pleasing layout out of the three but when he gets mad and opens his mouth, oh baby does he get vileeeee. it’s hilarious to watch him switch from sweetly talking to his chat then cursing out some teammate he randomly matched all within a span of one minute.
i feel like rin would have the most generic layout from a free template he got off of google images. he’s pretty much what you would expect from an emotionally repressed 16 year old male streamer: the most vile yet weirdly childish insults you’ll ever hear in a span of five minutes while borderline violating tos and his fans constantly defending him because “he’s just a minor who doesn’t know better🥺” (oh he knows honey he knows…)
nagi wouldn’t even gaf. if we’re lucky he would maybe just maybe have his webcam in the left hand corner with absolutely nothing else (moistcritical ass layout) even then his face would just be his classic neutral :x all the damn time no matter what happens
on their own, i feel like hiori and nagi would just stick to typical fps games (with hiori leaning towards the gorier ones ofc. i mean he gotta release his parental frustrations somehow). meanwhile rin would honestly stream any type of horror from triple a games to a free indie rpgmaker game he found on some random kinda sketchy looking website. he would gain such a loyal niche audience from that
hiori would hire a really good editor to edit and upload his streams to his youtube channel. he would most likely gain a whole separate youtube audience from that. prob has some youtube exclusive stuff as well.
nagi would just upload the whole damn archived stream to youtube, that is if he actually remembered to save the vods and not permanently lose the stream. he doesn’t even care that the uploading takes forever he still can’t be bothered with cutting down the video. (thank god twitch has a feature for viewers to cut out their clips from a stream cause lord knows nagi wouldn’t have done it)
rin would actually edit the clips all by hand, mainly bc he could only trust himself to edit them the way he wants. he can only spend a little time editing tho since he has a pretty busy schedule irl
i can imagine hiori being the most popular one out of the three with how much effort he would put into stuff like self promotion, connecting with his audience, plus him just having an overall nice and likable personality, etc. (also the sight of him and his cute face raging would be pretty fucking funny for his audience to watch)
rin would be the second most popular since he does put plenty of work into making his content at least decent since this is something he does in his free time. plus his channel name would be on twitter trending every now and then because of some iffy ass take he said on stream
nagi would be the least watched out of all of them since despite being pretty damn good at games, he would be pretty boring to watch tbh. he wouldn’t put much time into the self promoting part of it either. that is until he meets reo. when reo finds out about his little streamer side gig, he would totally have him put more effort into it, even if it’s small things like actually announcing stream times since that’s all nagi is willing to do. he kinda becomes nagis de facto manager. before then he just piggybacked on rin’s and hioris clout whenever the trio collabs together
an: ok so i’m gonna stop this post here since i have so many more ideas i want to vomit out but i don’t want this post to be too long so part two coming out shortly.
#★ snail.writes ★#i love these hc vomit posts i should do them more often#don’t mind me just projecting my secret dream of becoming a streamer onto these characters#blue lock#hiori yo#nagi seishiro#rin itoshi#blue lock headcanons#blue lock hcs#wrote this while watching nothing surprisingly
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Ranking (bullying) LD Curtain's season 2 fashion choices
Because even if the show seems to have forgiven him, I sure haven’t.
DISCLAIMER: This is in NO WAY criticizing the costume designers of this show- it couldn’t be farther from that. They’ve done an amazing job with every single piece in the show, and all of these fit Curtain’s personality and aesthetic perfectly. This is just me mocking the in-universe fashion choices that the character makes, because he needs to be bullied more. All lighthearted, all in good fun.
Disclaimer #2: I know literally nothing about fashion, please don’t attack me.
Okay, from least heinous to most heinous, here we go!
First up:
As much as it pains me to admit this. I actually. Really like this one. (”And if you told me I would never say something like that, well, I would never say something like that, but here we are.”) I think the silhouette is interesting, and all of the pieces come together well. Plus, in some of the tighter shots you can see that the fabric texture and detailing is really cool:
The leaves as clasps and that crinkly texture kind of really slap, and I really love the way the collar sort of wraps into the placket.
8 / 10
Interview outfit:
Wow, look! Another one that doesn't inspire immediate feelings of rage! We're doing so well.
This one isn't as visually interesting as the first outfit, but I do sort of like it. The collar folds create kind of a cool shape, and the grey accents under the top is a nice little contrast. I don't know how I feel about the zipper right below the collar, it's kind of a weird choice and might look better if it wasn't so visible, but I'll let it slide for this one since we have a much more heinous zipper situation coming up later.
I like the contrasting shades of blue with the button up shirt, and the lavender shirt he wears under it later in the episode, and the fact that part of the collar can kind of fold down to make a different shape.
6 / 10
Clown sleeves:
So the sleeves on this one are. kind of a lot. But they gain a couple of points for being the only thing in this outfit that really pops. They're sort of weird, but I can see the appeal of them standing out against the black vest, and being a pretty nice contrast that draws the eye.
5 / 10
Meh:
Time for the part of the post where I include 6 outfits that I just kind of don't have strong opinions on, mainly because they feel like pretty standard, decent outfits with no real reason to bat an eye at them.
The last image is saved on my computer as "are those your pajamas?" but. acceptable.
sure / 10
Dancy dance:
🧍♂️
I don't have much to say about this one other than, for some reason, the visual of him wearing tennis shoes makes me viscerally uncomfortable.
🤡 / 10
Elizabeth Holmes Chic:
He looks like a kid playing dress-up in their dad's giant overcoat, except someone let him go outside looking like this. I know oversized clothing items can be fashionable but here he's like drowning in it.
And then when he takes the coat off:
This maybe wouldn’t be a terrible outfit, it’s just so goddamn pretentious. He seems like he's trying to look like Steve Jobs, but ended up looking more like Elizabeth Holmes.
about to start another pyramid scheme / 10
Vacation dad (derogatory):
On someone else I might like this outfit, but on him it just looks so dumb. He looks like he's about to go skydiving with how much he's buttoned up. Better watch out or he could get carried away and spend 20 minutes unstrapping and unbuttoning it to reveal his fun little vacation shirt underneath! It's somehow stupidly formal and stupidly casual at the same time, and I just think it's a very silly little outfit. He's joining the army as penance for his fashion crimes. If you ask very very nicely he might tell you what's in his four huge, weirdly-placed pockets.
what's in the pockets / 10
And now.
We've arrived. We're finally here. The last one. The moment we've all been waiting for.
The worst of the worst:
I'll be honest, I don't really know where to start this one. There are too many things to choose from. Do I start with the weird asymmetrical pattern on the sleeves, with the red and blue stripes that aren't even made up of the same type of pattern?
Or maybe the fact that the buttons (and the piece of fabric they're attached to) ends too high above the neckline of the top layer?
Or we could talk about the fact that the top layer looks like one of those smocks you'd wear to get an x-ray at the dentist, made in a fabric that must have been rescued from the back of a fabric store after 50 years of not being bought.
I think by far the worst part is the length:
The fact that those strange little smock flaps go almost a foot past the zipper, halfway down to his knees. It swallows like 2/3rds of his body in this horrible block of grey fabric, and this man has the audacity to carry himself like it’s fashionable, instead of an assault on the senses.
I want to set it on fire. I want to burn him along with it. I want to gently take his tailor aside and ask if Curtain held him at knife point and made him design this monstrosity. TEAR IT TO PIECES, GET IT OUT OF MY SIGHT, TURN IT INTO SCRAPS FOR SQ'S ART PROJECTS.
Anyway.
This outfit is such a menace to this world that I thought everyone should get a chance to tear it to shreds, so presenting, the communal roast:
“GROSS. SHUN.” -@mvshortcut
"prison chic. dentist x-ray chic. ugly." -@mysteriouseggsbenedict
“the terrible zip up vest that just keeps on going fucked a potato sack” -@bi-demon-ium
“runway model for the most pretentious fashion designer who ever lived” - @sqenthusiast
“Trying to be casual but also Better Than You. The definition of 'you really thought you did something there'” -@echo-delta
“Child with one of those books where you can draw clothes over top the shape of a person” -@mysteriouseggsbenedict
“Mr Curtain sir I don’t feel very happy looking at this. I think it’s a little counterproductive.” -@mvshortcut
Truly horrendous.
borrowing constance's acid to destroy the outfit and then clean the eyes of anyone who wants to forget they saw this monstrosity / 10
Thank you so much for coming on this journey with me, and as always, send the x-ray bib to hell.
#the mysterious benedict society#mbs disney#mbs#mysterious benedict society#ld curtain#this post has been in the works for a WHILE so I hope people enjoy it#we don't need to talk about how long it took me#this post really just devolves as it goes on#a portrait of me losing my mind#i could also scream about how much i love the costume design of other characters on this show#but this was the funnier option#on any other characters i would be complimenting them for their bold fashion choices (except for maybe the last one)#ledroptha curtain
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Digimon Adventure 02: Revenge of Diaboromon
Wow...somehow this one just completely fell off my radar, otherwise I would have watched it a long time ago lol. I seriously thought I was all caught up with pre-Tamers anime until I saw this on the 02 TV Tropes and was like "oop..." It was a good surprise though, I can never get enough of these Mamoru Hosoda style shorts! (Looks like he didn't actually work on this one though).
I watched this dubbed first to take screenshots and then subbed. It's hard to find a non-crunchy version of the subbed short. The OG Japanese was a lot stronger imo because, as usual, the dub ruined some stuff with it's jokey tone and music choices. Still decently faithful though. Full thoughts below.
Notes:
So this is like a midquel, I guess. I don't know if there's an exact place within 02 I was supposed to watch this, but I didn't feel like my immersion was wrecked or anything haha.
While the aesthetic of the short was great, I felt the story was pretty redundant and eye-roll worthy. "Oh Omegamon/Omnimon is back for some contrived reason and the OG chosen children's digimon can't defeat him like they did last time...for some contrived reason. This looks like a job for the 02 protagonists!" Whatever, it doesn't have to be deep to be fun.
The early 2000s CG looked pretty good actually. I thought it added a fun otherworldliness to the Kuramon.
Kuramon look a lot like Takodachi (Hololive fans know what's up). I wonder if there was some inspiration there on a subliminal level.
I wonder if Daisuke's character designer intended him to be from a southern part of Japan. His tan skin sticks out more in this art style.
I feel like Diaboromon got uglier somehow compared to Our War Game lol. Armagemon's design was deliciously creepy though. He looked like something out of an Alien movie. His entrance was epic and probably would have freaked me out a lot as a kid. Weirdly, they never actually said Armagemon's name so I just assumed it was Diaboromon until I googled it just now lol
Sora and Mimi were like two sides of the same coin in this. Mimi was useless, but in a delightful way. Sora was useless, but in a boring way lol. Seriously, she didn't need to come all the way home from her tennis club trip to just go "I'm here!" and then do nothing. I'm not saying there was much she could do anyway, but I get really pissed that they never gave her character a real point aside from "bland love interest" in any Digimon show/movie.
Loved Mimi's interactions with Koushiro. Their awkward "we're in the same friend group but have nothing in common" chemistry is so fun.
Yamato seemed extra cool with his rings and stoicism. I do kind of wish he and Taichi got a little more dialogue though.
Really didn't like the direction of the fights inside the internet. They were either animated too up close or too distant so I felt like I couldn't really follow what was going on half the time. Also, the choreography wasn't that inspired. The IRL fight at least had a cool Evangelion vibe going for it. The harbor was a really aesthetic setting for a final fight.
I've started shipping DaiKen for funsies (there's some really cute fanart) so it was nice seeing them together in the elevated art style hehe.
Daisuke has a Yamato phone strap! So cute and supportive
It's funny how the digimon sizing suddenly changes when we're in movie-mode. Angemon and Angewomon were huge in this! I was excited to see the 02 digimon, but they mostly looked the same as they looked in the show tbh.
The Shibuya vibes, complete with Hachiko statue, were fun. Was 02 set in Tokyo? I honestly don't remember...
Seeing all those children running around at night without any worries about safety...must be nice, Japan.
When Omegamon "ran out of energy," I had the thought of like "can a jogress digimon die in the real world or would they always just de-digivolve??" I guess they'd never go that far for plot reasons anyways
Imperialdramon gets a new mode! Paladin mode, according to Google. Were these names in the credits or did they just decide things later for the TCG or something...?
We got the 02 theme inserted towards the end and even the OG show's theme as a ring tone. Really cute touch. (I was a little triggered to hear Bolero again for the millionth time though).
All in all I'm glad the 02 kids got their due in this style. Was it groundbreaking? No. Was it worth 30 minutes of my time? Absolutely!
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I’ve been reading a lot of 40k fiction in between painting recently, and I’ve gotten a good bit of progress done on both. I’ll start with a little reading update.
Horus Rising
False Gods
Galaxy in Flames
Flight of the Eisenstein
Fulgrim
First Heretic
Know No Fear
Butcher’s Nails
Betrayer
Wrath of Khârn
Khârn: Eightfold Path
I finished Betrayer just a couple days ago, and holy shit. What an incredible book. I am a strong Khârn stan (Argel Tal, too) and I am more convinced than ever that I’m a World Eaters gamer.
I plan to read the three (or four) Unremembered Empire books before I loop back to A Thousand Sons to read the “main” Heresy storyline through to Slaves to Darkness, and eventually Siege of Terra. But for now, I’m making a little detour through all of the books that Khârn takes center stage for, so that I can satiate the hyperfixation and figure out what he’s up to in the 42nd Millennium. I also plan to finish most of the World Eaters books, as that was the whole reason that I started reading the Heresy in the first place.
Betrayer is by far my favorite Warhammer novel. Fulgrim was my top for a while—I may be a closeted Emperor’s Children enjoyer, don’t tell Blood Daddy—but man. Betrayer blew it out of the fucking water. What an incredible ending to an incredible trilogy. My biggest takeaways were as follows: nobody fucking likes Angron, and Khârn is my favorite guy ever. Enough gushing, though. Time for painting stuff.
The second Ultramarine I’ve ever painted, weirdly enough. My first Ultramarine was my first model, so my second being a keychain-corpse for a new army is weirdly sentimental
Since we’re on the topic of Khorne, I finished up the torso of my old school Daemon Prince. I’m exceptionally proud of this! I think the shading and blending is maybe some of my best, most advanced painting yet, and I pulled out just about every technique that I know for this thing. I even did a little drybrushing on the Necron skull. Here’s to hoping I can maintain this level of quality across the other pieces of this mini once I get some more primer.
Getting some good use out of my technicals, and finally utilizing my skull box
Still on Khorne, here’s some more progress on those Bloodletters from last post. They’re just about done, complete with horn blending and everything. I’m planning on doing flaming blades for them, but I’ll have to buy some more paints before I tackle that. I’ve got a handful more of primed and based Bloodletters, so they’ll probably be my backup easy paint for a while. The bases are simple and easy to make, but decently visually effective, which I think is good and fitting for such a massed unit.
Next up, I decided to give highlighting a go with one of my newer Thunderbearers, since I’m trying to boost my painting technique all around. This is definitely my best highlighting work yet, certainly leagues ahead of my first try from last year. I think he looks pretty clean!
I’m also experimenting with new photography backgrounds since I got kinda sick of having pasta or hamster cage cleaner or whatever the fuck in the background of my poorly lit update pictures. Think I may have stumbled upon a good method for backgrounds.
I love you, empty white void
Last but certainly not least, I finished up the first bike for my lone Outrider Squad. I’m really happy with him, as well. The hardest part of painting these dudes is definitely base painting. They just have a lot of ground to cover with your brush so they absolutely devour paint, but it’s cool cause I finally finished him up after like, actual months of sitting half-painted in my vehicles box. I’m a particular fan of the little white lens glare in the top left of his eye. I just think it’s neat.
This unit is gonna be mad satisfying to finish, and I can’t wait to get more work done. In the meantime, I’m chugging away at my first 5-man Berzerker squad, including their bases, which are gonna be pretty unique. They’re like, black mountainous rocks littered with skulls and blood-stained snow. Alongside that, I’ve also been stripping my Custodes, so I’ll have a bit of an update about that next time, too.
#warhammer 40k#miniatures#painting#book club#adeptus astartes#chaos#thunderbearers#world eaters#khorne daemons
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A problem with Scott
I should probably make a proper post about it at some point but like my annoyance at when the Wolfpack say gross stuff in Roadtrip is partially due to Scott and the Narrator's responses.
Like, I don’t like Leonard's inclusion in Prom but at least every time he says something awful every single character reacts like 'woah wtf that sucked' and whatever. You at least know the main characters are decent people in that regard.
But when the Wolfpack do stuff like heckle Polly in an objectifying way, and she gets mad, Scott doesn't like try stop his cousins, he's just like 'aw cmon Polly I know they're a handful but never mind'. He never steps in to tell his cousins their behaviour is inappropriate and he still like brings his female friends to hang out with them even though Polly clearly dislikes them, probably partially because of that behaviour. At that point, either Scott is a problem because he doesn't understand that their behaviour is bad, or he does but is unwilling to stand up to it, either by intimidation or because he loves his cousins or he knows its bad but doesn't think it's a big deal. Obviously the main problem is that the wolfpack are being douchebags, but Scott is being part of the problem as a guy by not standing up for Polly / women in general to them.
And like, characters don't have to be perfect! Scott having this blindspot and issue can be like an interesting thing to explore I'm sure, maybe it brings tension into his friendship with Polly, it should definitely add tension to his love for his cousins. And maybe him addressing this with the Wolfpack could be part of him growing up and like standing up for himself against them too. There's stuff that can be done there.
What I find weird is when like Polly will be clearly mad at them, the narrator will be weirdly like 'well these guys suck lol but what can you do' and Scott won't even acknowledge it but the game continously tells us he's a good pure soul who tries hard to do the right thing.
I guess it makes me wonder when I see these lines where the wolfpack are outright misogynistic like... why are these lines there? What’s the point? It isn't being used to develop Scott or his relationship with other characters. It's not like actually addressing the misogyny. Is the joke just like 'some people say objectifying things haha isnt that funny?' And like I said before they show up fairly often for such minor npcs, so it's weird having some characters regularly say gross stuff for no good reason. I'd find it off-putting even if they weren't my favourites and I felt like opportunities for depth were being missed. So yeah I think there's lots of fun things that could have been done with them with having them say gross stuff that would have actually bettered the game without making Scott seem like a worse person.
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I should get around to writing a new "About" page, or at the very least an "About" post that I can pin. The above introduction from my old blog is a little dated and I no longer like how I come off. The only parts that are still entirely true are that that I've persisted at being tall, having not stopped being 6'3", and that I still own more books than I have available shelf space. The rest is all varying degrees of untruth these days.
V. has said that I'm "weirdly good at self curation" and back in the days when I was on OkCupid I averaged about a message a week that was some variation of "how do you write about yourself like that?" There's no trick, it's really just a downstream consequence of a well developed sense of self and being a halfway decent prose stylist. But I'm sort of at a loss now, so many of the activities through which I used to define myself I'm no longer capable of performing. I'm sure I'll hack something together at some point though.
Also should I go to the trouble of personalizing the layout again? It wouldn't be hard to do, I still have all the assets and I've even written down the specific hex codes for each of the colours I used, but doesn't seem like anyone still does it. If you're looking at someone's blog you do it through the pop-up overlay on the dash, and I sort of doubt that anyone was even aware that my blog looked like this the last few years.
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Sorry to turn your blog into the dog pound ask game but just to offer up an alternative read, while I think there are plenty of times Kendall was not a good or even decent big brother I actually didn’t read the dog pound as super sinister because I think it’s actually kind of (at least conceptually) a common game kids actually do play at that age. While I understand the interpretative view that harmless things that are normal in other families are often twisted funhouse versions in the Roy family, I think there’s a valid reading that this wasn’t one of those times. While S3 was airing Kieran Culkin gave a great interview where he talked about dog pound and described it as something rewritten in Roman’s mind. (“The dog-cage moment, Roman had rewritten it as he had been bullied by Kendall. I don’t think he ever was, but I think there was something in him as a kid that felt like a victim that as an adult he has tried to process and make into something else.”) Apparently, he and Jeremy agreed on that interpretation, and I think that’s a fair way to read it (noting of course everyone is allowed their own interpretation and there is no one/right/best way to interpret a scene). Personally, I viewed the hug and sibling brawl in S4 as variations on a worsening lifelong theme – semi-new steps in a progression as opposed to one-to-one evidence of how the characters behaved in childhood but that could totally just be me…anyway, happy to provide a link to the Kieran interview if anyone is interested. I just feel that in all the dog pound discourse I almost never see anyone reference Kieran’s take on it which I do think is interesting as it really goes to that whole “what even is the past” thing the show likes to play around with but in a slightly different direction than I usually see on tumblr.
Ah right, that's a valid point too. Tbh I think I do tend to pick and choose when I factor an actor's interpretation into my reading, and maybe even some part of me is weirdly overcompensating for being a Kendall girl by fixating on him doing fucked up stuff.
At the same time though, while I do believe things had gotten much worse than they'd ever been after Logan's death because of how he and Roman had both differently felt compelled to fill that hole, I don't really see it as all that unprecedented either. Like, there was him brushing off Roman being upset about Shiv saying one day he's got to fuck something, Kendall saying "he loves it" and that he's probably jerking off over it, there was the "who'd you suck off to get out" when Roman came back from the hostage situation, the famous "you're not a real person", etc.
But also, I think part of how I view Kieran's take is that Roman is recasting Kendall as the primary aggressor in their childhood because he happens to be a safer target of his anger than Logan or any of the other people who may have hurt him or made him feel inferior. After all, he did feel comfortable enough with Kendall as a little boy being taught how to pee standing up. So it's not that he was ever purely an abusive presence in Roman's life, but these things are rooted inside of them and come out whether they mean it or not.
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Do you have any thoughts on Wanda and Hank (McCoy’s) relationship? They seem like decent friends when they’re on the avengers together (and they both kinda dated wonder man), but idk where they stand (and have stood) post m-day.
Things are obviously even more complicated with beast being a fully blown supervillain now, but they also all-but-declared evil x-force villain Hank a different character than avengers Hank. I know it was a throw away gag, but I so wonder about that email from him to her in strange academy. What were his intentions there?
I'm going to be completely honest, Hank is one of those characters I just don't think about very often. I'd have to re-read a lot, and I mean a lot, of comics to make any kind informed statement about his relationship to Wanda prior to M-Day, so I'm not gonna do that.
I will say, though, that out of all the original X-Men, he definitely has the closest relationship to Wanda by virtue of proximity. He's certainly known her longer than most people, and we can definitely infer that they had a friendship just based on how well Wanda usually gets along with her teammates, and of course, their mutual affection for Simon. In fact, I'd say they have the potential to be great friends-- they're both people who are very good at overlooking differences, and at one point time, they were both written as very outgoing, charming individuals. She probably responds really well to his overly-genteel manner-- when Hank addressed her as "Dearest Wanda" in that email, I was like, "oh, of course this is how they talk to each other."
After the Decimation, Hank threw himself into researching the cause and trying to develop a cure. This was a big turning point in his life, as he ended up working with Dark Beast and crossing a lot of moral boundaries. His search actually led him to finding Wanda when she was living as an amnesiac in Transia, although it's not clear whether that was actually her or the Doombot. Although he certainly holds Wanda accountable for M-Day, he didn't betray her location to the X-Men, and later, during Children's Crusade, he was actually sympathetic to Wanda's circumstances and wanted to help her use the Life Force to undo the Decimation. Compared to most of the other Avengers and X-Men, I'd say he was one of her very few allies, and he's on the short list of mutants that I would expect to advocate for her, if only because he believed she'd be part of the solution, not just the problem.
Avengers: Children's Crusade #15
The thing with Hank's psychic backups is really weird, but it gestures at some of the more philosophical questions that Krakoan resurrection poses-- or at least, the questions it would pose if the writers would actually commit. If the "self" is a replicable, modifiable computer file, then the idea personhood begins to lose coherence. One of the things I find frustrating about the Krakoan era is that they don't often follow through on the bigger implications of their world-building, and this is one of those subjects where they'd clearly rather divert into cape-comic genre beats then get into the speculative philosophy. It's probably for the best.
Anyways, Beast. In Wolverine #31, we learn that Hank has built his own little clone lab and taken charge of his own resurrections. To that end, he basically stole his backup files from the Cerebro system, but, weirdly enough, he left the records of his time with the Avengers untouched. It's not clear whether or not the backups Hank is using to clone himself include that period, but we do know that if the Five wanted to resurrect him at this point, they'd be bringing back a version from before Krakoa-- which is to say, a version which hasn't yet taken the same moral downfall. If I had to guess, I'd say this is the loophole that they'll use to bring the character back without having to worry about "redeeming" him or reconciling his actions. This is a staple move for supherhero comics-- come up with an excuse to for the character to say "that wasn't really me"-- but I don't think we've seen it played straight with Krakoan resurrection yet.
Oh, and as for the e-mail-- I wrote a bit about it here, but I genuinely think he was just trying to test out whether the gates would recognize her. It came across as very sinister at the time, since this was before Trial and Wanda was still basically an enemy of the state, so inviting her to the island definitely felt like a trap. At the time, I said that this page was probably non-canon, but then the exchange between Wanda and Magneto ended up being a lot more prescient than I could have anticipated, so I guess we should take it seriously.
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now, i'm not a Movie Review Guy, and have in recent years found that i prefer to keep my Media Watching Experience more to myself, but i watched both puss in boots: the last wish and strange world in the cinema just now and i DO need to yell a little bit.
these two movies aren't related beyond being Two Animated Movies Being Available To Me At The Same Time, (and i saw them both dubbed to norwegian,) but i feel like the difference in Expectations VS Reality is fun :')
the strange world recommendations came by way of tumblr going "YOU HAVE TO SEE IT BECAUSE THERE IS AN ACTUALLY ON-SCREEN GAY PROTAGONIST IN IT AND DISNEY ISN'T PROMOTING IT LIKE AT ALL" which is true, although i reaaaally don't like the concept of "this movie is having a rep but isn't getting attention and therefore you MUST see it so they get the message that it's marketable" like I KNOW... WE LIVE IN A SOCIETY.... i just prefer to watch movies for fun and not to make a statement... but ALSO it's an adventure movie and i DO miss adventure movies. some of my favourite movies of all time are atlantis: the lost empire, treasure planet, and sinbad: legend of the seven seas. i am VERY easy to please, just give me some vibes and some creatures and preferably some charismatic characters if you've got some to spare. i'm probably the only person on the planet that thought The Good Dinosaur (2015) was a nice movie because i liked the vibes of it. so i figured strange world is at LEAST going to be pleasant to watch on a big screen!
like it's a perfectly decent movie. disney has every resource in the world so their BASELINE is decent movies. it's very pretty, i DO like visuals, the atmosphere is nice, and they play the instrumental parts from lone digger by caravan palace at some point to my absolute delight. there is at least one shot i thought was absolutely stunning and impactful. the message is also a good one! like it's all Very Fine. i was right about watching it on a big screen and i'm glad i went. but it's... my impression of it is very much in line with my feeling about how disney movies are just getting Too Smooth for me. obviously as an adult i want media with some more crunch to it! something a little more complex!!! i know this movie is for kids!! but like it just feels like they're playing it SO safe. very "i heard kids these days like stories about generational trauma... an environmental message... explicit gay rep... people of color... cool and badass women...." so they tailor made this movie to be the safest bet possible AND THEN DIDN'T EVEN PROMOTE IT?????? and like i think all of those checklist points are swell things to have in movies and i do not doubt the people who made it put a lot of love and care into this!! it's a fine movie!! but it could have been MORE... it could've had some crunch... some flair... like i get that atlantis has its issues but at least atlantis had some BITE to it, a little bit of commander rourke going "i prefer the term adventure capitalist :) if we returned every artefact to their culture our museums would be empty :)" like hot damn
maybe the dub made the dialogue stand out weirdly but i felt like 90% of the dialogue in this movie was just "but i'm NOT you, dad!!!!" AND IT GETS A LITTLE HEAVY HANDED... they could have done a teensy bit more showing and a little less telling. like i don't know if kids enjoy watching familial disputes THAT much, especially if they're there for Funky Creatures. it forgot to have a little bit of Fun and Shenanigans!!!
so anyway yeah it was kinda mediocre, i had a perfectly ok time, still think it's absolutely bonkers how there's just absolutely no advertisement like. what gives
i didn't even realize there was a Second puss in boots movie until i saw a gif of Cool Sickle Wielding Wolf. and like, the first puss in boots movie is... forgettable. like it sure exists! it sure has puss in boots in it!! from shrek!!! it's a shrek spinoff but with less of the satire that made shrek popular!! so it's like, why WOULD you go see a SECOND puss in boots spinoff movie all this time after the shrek franchise heyday? BECAUSE IT HAS A COOL SICKLE WIELDING WOLF. and then you see it and it's like HANG ON THIS ANIMATION IS KINDA GOOD. and then you're like WAIT I'M ACTUALLY INVESTED. and then you're like WAIT I'M HAVING FEELINGS??? and at the end you're like HOLY FUCK WHY DID THIS MOVIE GO SO HARD. yes it's a little sappy and a little predictable and doesn't lean into any of the satire and cynicism you'd expect from a shrek spinoff BUT IT HAS THE GALL TO BE SINCERE. like im starting to feel more and more >:( when i can feel movies PURPOSEFULLY tugging on my heartstrings to make me cry with CHEAP TRICKS but this movie GENUINELY. MADE ME TEAR UP IN WAYS THAT FELT WARRANTED. it went "yeah maybe it's a little corny, a little cringe even, but wouldn't it be nice to just enjoy life? :)" and like man, is it speaking UP AGAINST the cynicism towards fairytales THE SHREK FRANCHISE POPULARISED?? HELLO????
like yeah maybe i'm overhyping it. who's to say. BUT if you want to see a cool as fuck sickle wolf that is genuinely terrifying in the most awesome way...................... we can all enjoy a cool sickle wolf every now and then i think
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003 for Tsukiyama??
Creature.
How I feel about this character:
Grabs him by the collar and shakes. I need to put him in an empty aquarium and study him like an exotic turtle. No rational thoughts around this guy. The reason I read Tokyo Ghoul, I spotted him in the wild and needed to know everything. I love his pinstripe pants, I hate his early haircut, he deserves the world, kick him in the shins. We both play piano.
Any/all the people I ship romantically with this character:
If there is a Shuu ship I can probably get on board. As long as it’s legal, who can I ship with Shuu? The answer is Yes. Still very passive about it because like most characters I value the individual over potential ships for the most part, and some days I don’t want to ship him with anyone at all, but I just want to see him be loved alright. I read a pretty good fic where he bonded with Hide in the wake of the wedding once and that was really sweet. I don’t remember how it went or who wrote it because it was about 4 in the morning but I distinctly remember going “aw” also shuunaki is hilarious to me.
My favorite non-romantic relationship for this character:
Chie, Rio, Kanae, or Hinami. Worst older brother of the year award, I’ve made several very interesting scenarios in my mind thinking up what would happen if he recognized shikorae but I’m pretty sure he never actually met Rio in canon. Alas. Also though I think they’ll never fully trust each other, or at the very least it’ll take years and years given the kimi incident (and reasonably so on the ginger’s part) Nishiki and Shuu are a very funny duo to me.
My unpopular opinion about this character:
Everyone should love him. If you were born in a weird upper class family and told that eating people is nice and treated like god on earth for all of your formative years you would be decently overconfident too. He is obsessive over his food, vaguely uncomfortable, probably doesn’t know how to navigate a grocery store because it’s “beneath him” but he’s not NEARLY as much of a creep as people make him out to be.
One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon:
Healthy resolution to the obsession. He serves as a call to action for GOAT and admits that he genuinely wants to see Kaneki happy but then immediately takes a really fast turn into “...so I can eat him and his kid!” We were so close. I like obsessive dynamics a lot but he's been through the whole gauntlet at this point I just want to see him happy.
Favorite friendship for this character:
Chie or Kanae. He has about three or maybe four living people (and one of the people here is not them) who genuinely see him as a valued individual and one of them is his dad so it’s not exactly a wide range of choices.
My crossover ship:
Not romantically because Legs should not be in a relationship without literal lifetimes of therapy, and even then please don’t, but Shuu and Legato can bond over being obsessed with someone they serve to the point of allowing them to get away with literal murder despite the fact said person barely cares they exist, weirdly sharp teeth, blue hair and pronouns, unnaturally long tongues, probably hitting their tall heads on door frames, interesting fashion decisions, spikes coming out of their shoulders, eccentricity, instrument appreciation, being incredibly fond of food for one reason or another, and then Shuu mentions he had a relatively normal childhood and Legato says he’ll literally eat anything because he’s still not accustomed to having a choice and it all devolves.
I will never get him out of my head. (small edit because despite thinking of kanae throughout I somehow never wrote their name.)
#tokyo ghoul#tsukiyama shuu#miscellaneous not-art things#zeph answers questions about media/characters/ships
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