yea sooooo I may have or may have not watched and instantly rewatched all kuro musicals in existence in a spawn of one week and now have roughly 40 screenshots to redraw from
i've always wanted to try out this trend! i didnt think i drew him that different. i was wrong. very wrong.
hes so baby girl in my style what the fuck. oh i know, i was just drawing what gege meant to draw. dw, i got his telepathic brainwaves 👍
[time lapse + my headcanons for Noritoshi's appearance under the cut]
some headcanons i have while drawing him are semi obvious while others are bc i like it ahehahhaheha
cupid's bow lips!
this was semi inspired by Mizuki Umetsu, the actor for Noritoshi in the jjk stage play! hes so. pretty. perfect guy for the role imo! i was captivated therefore my views changed.
longer hair!
the thought that his bangs(? are the same length, or longer, as the rest of his hair is nice.. it also makes his inevitable haircut much more refreshing! i also just like long hair and its a fucking waste not to do whatever the i want.
thicker brows and visible eyelashes!
i naturally draw thicker eyebrows because it looks pretty, but the eyelashes is so fucking canon bro. dont even fight me on this, you'll lose. i read a fic about Noritoshi where it said he took good care of himself and his appearance inspired jealousy. that fucked me up man, so now i draw him as beautiful as i can.
monolids!
I've looked through the manga and i think its highly implied that Noritoshi has monolids? yk those lines in between the eye and eyebrow, he doesnt have them in the manga. i thought it was because of the expressions he had, but no. the others have them, except geto! so geto also having monolids is so fr in my head. i like that feature abt him.
loose hairs!
the hairs that i draw on his face. they make him look so cute and a bit more relaxed. he's not trying to be perfect nor have a single strand out of place. he's just a bit more at ease... though if there's something important he has to go through, he sharpens up. becomes.. stiffer?
I UNINTENTIONALLY MADE HIS CHEST LOOK A BIT BIGGER IN MY STYLE AND I WANT TO APOLOGIZE, BUT I'D BE A LIAR.
DOES THIS COUNT AS A HEADCANON??? I JUST THINK... SINCE. YK. HES AN ARCHER. AND DOES TRAINING. AND COMBAT. AND DOES ALL THOSE HIGH JUMPS... HIS CHEST. ITD BE A BIT BIGGER FOR HIS STATURE.. omfg. that'd imply that his legs are fucking insane. and his arms too, since he has to pull back all those arrows so quickly.. oh my fuck. this. this is a revelation. what are you hiding under those robes noritoshi...???? one day.. one day we'll see...
oh my fucking god i forgot that i wrote shit while drawing. please ignore my fucking stupid writings AND THE STUPID ASS THING IN THE MIDDLE I FORGOT ABT WHILE DRAWING..
this moment absolutely destroys me. i mean look at them! the gentleness! the vulnerability! the care! the way gale looks like he’s practically holding himself up with that hand…before what probably amounts to a couple weeks ago, he’d told almost no one about this, and now he can not only tell someone but show them, relive it painfully but with someone at his side who will be able to on some level actually understand it. the moment of a burden — one that had until then been an sentence of indefinite isolation — being shared. and he’s ready for that to be the end! for this to be a goodbye! to be cast out and left to fend for himself with not one but two things threatening to use and destroy his body! none of his usual air of confidence is there; he’s on the ground, all raw edges and open wounds, and you can see on his face that he’s already mourning what he thinks he’s about to lose. he shares the burden and is completely ready for the weight of it to crush this new, incredible, fragile thing they’ve been building…
this is a bit of a random question, but is there any character you dislike, that you havent talked about before?
I feel like I'm pretty outspoken about characters I dislike! Plus, for as hard as I hit my usual suspects, my distaste for them comes from how much I yearn for a version where it was all on purpose.
Like me and my eternal rival, Bramblestar. Im locked in combat with this man, in a cosmic sense. If I were a necromancer I would resurrect his wretched corpse because I couldn't bear the thought of never seeing his face again. Nemesis...
I guess I haven't spoken much about the absolute trainwrecks that were Sharp Hail and Jackdaw's Cry, from DOTC. They're such small characters that there's not much TO talk about
But it's SUPER fucked up that they just dropped Jackdaw's Cry implying Thunder was "stealing milk" from his wife and never mentioned it again. What the hell was the point of THAT when you're only going to stress how sad it is that he died fighting the sister he hadn't spoken about in like 2 books?
And Sharp Hail is an abusive stepdad who falls out of the sky to throttle Sun Shadow in a bonus chapter. WHY? What is the POINT of all these sudden adoption jabs??
Them aside I've spoken about the cats I dislike. Thistleclaw, Sandgorse (complicated), Sagewhisker, Raggedstar, Clear Sky, Gray Wing... and arcs that were a massive disappointment, with Leopardstar, Hawkfrost, Blackstar, Wind Runner, Thunder, even Firestar post-Darkest Hour.
OH Mudclaw I guess. I think he was a fine character but Mudclaw stans are so annoying I've begun to start actually hating him. It's only partially the writing/character's fault, I'm just developing a Pavlovian distaste of him lmaooo
thinking about the first time will sees hannibal after three years. how the highly sophisticated man he remembers now looks wearier, his hair a little shorter, the lines in his face a little deeper. how he’s been degraded but still holds himself with pride and dignity, refusing to be humiliated. how will is a married man and really thought he was doing okay but knew he was kidding himself the moment he laid eyes on hannibal again because it doesn’t matter how much time passes he’s still horribly in love with him and never truly moved on. he knows he lost his heart the day hannibal gave himself up, and it didn’t start beating again until this moment, three years later. and the ache of it hurts so much more than it did before. if anything, the longer they’re separated the worse it gets
It took me 4 watches of Darkness Falls to realize when Scully starts panicking about the bugs and backs into the lightbulb, Mulder doesn’t even give the bulb a single glance, he’s only focused on Scully
Could someone tell me where the interpretation that, in book canon, the promotion Nie Mingjue gives Meng Yao made Meng Yao's life worse than it was before, came from?
I have seen that claim made multiple times now and I've looked at the text over and over trying to see where the basis for it is and I. Can't find it? Don't get me wrong, it absolutely spells out that it does not and cannot fix everything for Meng Yao, but the idea that it was actively bad for him?
Lacking other evidence, I kind of have to assume that it comes from cql canon being sort of projected backwards onto book canon. In cql canon, meng yao is suffering active and explicit bullying and abuse from the captain while under the nie, and does so because the capain believes he has risen above his station via nmj's promotion of him. (In book canon this... isn't happening. It happens with the captain in Langya instead) However, in cql canon he has also been with the nie for years and is openly close to both Nie Mingjue and Nie Huasiang, whereas in book canon he has only been working with nie mingjue for a few months (though has, in that time, apparently become close enough to him for Lan Xichen to explicitly state Meng Yao is able to calm nmj down in ways no one else can? Ofc he does this... Right after that stops being true. But. Food for thought. Not what this post is about tho.) So, if you project the much more explicit abuse from the nie sect captain in cql back on novel jgy who has a presumably much less stable position in the sect overall you get... a meng yao for whom the promotion only means a bigger target on his back and virtually no protection from nmj, who we must assume he can't trust to talk to his about because he never mentions it. (This also explicitly violates book canon when it comes to meng yao's general behaviour, we'll talk about that in a sec)
And look. We all do frankencanon in this house. I get it. And for fanfiction that is very fun. But for a serious reading of the character, his situation, and the actions that lead from that this... doesn't make much sense, in my opinion.
So. Why is that? Why did I say this was out of character for the novel? Because Meng yao spoke up about the jin captain mistreating him. Multiple times! It's just that none of it mattered because no one cared to listen to him. This is a pretty important line for his character because it flatly shows that meng yao is not and has never seen murder as something trivial. He's not trigger happy. He will only do it if he sees no other way out that doesn't end in himself being seriously harmed. (Whether he's right or justified in these cases is not the point of this post.)
If anything remotely similar was happening in the Nie sect, he would have said so. Cql Meng Yao doesn't do this because cql Meng Yao is a different character, and also the plot wouldn't work if he did. Cql Nie Mingjue, by extension, comes off as a fundamentally less trustworthy figure in cql Meng Yao's life because apparently for whatever reason, he cannot be trusted with the information that the deputy he has already publicly defended is still being harassed, and doesn't notice even when it is really blatant. The assumtpion the audience is given is that, like a middle schooler getting the principal involved when being bullied, it would only make the harassment more viscious.
This... actually has a somewhat solid basis in the book. Because after nmj yells at the bullies in question Wei Wuxian says this.
And it is important to keep in mind that this is Wei Wuxian saying this. Not Meng Yao, not an omniscient narrator. Wei wuxian is drawing on his own experiences, likely from the Jiang family, to conclude that if someone is angry at you and thwarted by someone defending you, this generally does not make them less angry at you.
This is leaving out two crucial things, though.
Firstly, this worry isn't about the promotion at all.
The promotion hasn't even been brought up. In the novel it doesn't ctually happen immediately, it takes another few battles where meng yao continues to do his job well and nie mingjue continues praising him for him to eventually go "yeah, you deserve a raise."
This is another aspect that is being projected from cql canon onto book canon I presume, because it does happen quite quickly there, and it's a throwaway line in the books so it's easy to miss. I can't be mad about anyone forgetting the difference, but it is important to mention for this particular analysis.
Which is the second point: change in status
Wei Wuxian couldn't exactly change status within the Jiang family. (And if he could, that would just fuel rumours that he was jfm's bastard even more and make madam yu even angrier at him, etc etc.)
This isn't comparable to Meng Yao. The worry Wei Wuxian is talking about is explitly about Nie Mingjue's initial very loud defense of him. Before he has any idea Nie Mingjue is going to promote him.
Promoting him would likely decrease his chances of cultivators coming after him because now he was in a higher standing in the sect than they were. If applied to that earlier metaphor of middle school bullying it's like if the bullied kid suddenly got hired as a teacher. Which. Doesn't work with the metaphor at all. Touché. But what I am trying to say is that any payback they would have planned for him relied on the fact that they could make sure that Nie Mingjue wasn't going to be within very convenient earshot a second time, and as a random disciple Meng Yao couldn't just go complain to him every time.
But as his right hand man? Who spends most of his time working directly alongside him? Lmao. Good luck. Oh, sure, it is very likely that they feel offended a son of a whore has been raised in status above them, and many will continue to do so as jgy rises through cultivation society (in fact, Wei Wuxian's observations are absolutely on point for how Madam Jin will be treating jgy later on). But as we can also see from the way jgy is treated and how he treats others throughout the story: you can be upset all you want, but if that person is higher than you in status there's jack shit you can do about it.
If I am correct and Wei Wuxian is basing this on his experiences with the Jiang family, it makes sense why he'd miss this. Madam Yu gets to be way angrier at Jiang Fengmian as his wife than some random disciples can be at Nie Mingjue. Insulting Meng Yao, suggesting that he didn't deserve his promotion or that he earned it through less than proper means (you know who is mother is) is also an insult to Nie Mingjue and the way he chooses to run his sect. They can't do that.
Another thing I see brought up in this regard would be the tea scene. There may be no explicit harassment like in the show, but cultivators still don't respect him! The disrespect is just quieter and more subtle.
Tiny detail: these are actually not Nie cultivators
They're cultivators Lan Xichen is escorting with him, making a pitstop in heijan.
The book confirms this by basically outright stating that this is the first time they see his face, and recognize him as Jin Guangshan's bastard son.
Now, just because there is no proof that it happened doesn't mean it definitely never happened. Mdzs is a novel that often leaves stuff out or up to interpretation. Similar stuff to the tea situtation could very well be happening in the background. But I do think it is pretty significant that there is no mention whatsoever of Meng Yao having any negative treatment from Nie cultivators betwen him and Nie Mingjue meeting and him executing them while spying for Wen Ruohan, and the most we get is Wei Wuxian's personal speculation, after which he immediately goes to wax poetic about how surprised he is that Meng Yao and Nie Mingjue are getting along super well.
And, again, novel Meng Yao would have said something. He doesn't say anything about the tea scene. - Or? Does he? Notably 3zun have some very long in depth conversations that Wei Wuxian zones out from because he's busy thinking about Lan Zhan again. But let's not rely on what-ifs. Let's say that neither he nor Lan Xichen find it worth bringing up. Major reasons for that would be that a) these are not nie cultivators, nie mingjue wouldn't really have the authority to scold them. Especially because b) it's such a subtle offense it could easily be handwaved as coincidence. "They just always brush their cups clean like that!! It's wartime you know, and they were traveling! They're used to drinking from vessels that aren't thoroughly washed everytime! It's just a habit!" And would therefore not be worth reporting.
But anything worse than that? A "price tens or hundreds of times greater" like wwx mentions? He'd report it! I do understand that "well if it was happening why didn't he say something?" would, in real life, be victim blaming. This is not real life, and I am not talking about this in a matter of blame. If Meng Yao was being mistreated in the Nie and stayed silent about it, it would still not be his fault. I am talking about this in a manner of character consistency.
His admission of seeking help in the Jin sect shows that at that time and prior to it (a very good argument can be made that he loses faith in this idea) he believes that if he is being mistreated and someone with the authority to say something about it takes his side, things can improve. If Nie Mingjue standing up for him in Qinghe only made things worse, he would not have tried to ask for help in an even more hostile environment. You can call Meng Yao many things, but naïve isn't one of them.
Meng yao's later habit of completely isolating himself and lying to everyone around him comes from the fact that revealing his suffering would mean explaining several horrible things he's become complicit in and he does not feel safe admitting to that. But he's done nothing wrong here!
The reading where he says nothing would imply an either correct or incorrect belief in Meng Yao's eyes that Nie Mingjue did not much care for his wellbeing or safety. Oh sure he defended him once but doing so again multiple times would be such a bother. This also contradicts his later behaviour, where he banks solely on Nie Mingjue's protective instincts to seal his qi and escape during the confrontation in Langya. After having been caught murdering a man, he is still convinced Nie Mingjue will immediately try to help him when he is in serious danger.
And even if you very badly want to characterize Nie Mingjue as a blundering idiot who is apparently less trustworthy in Meng Yao's eyes than the jin cultivators who had already resoundly rejected him by the time he tries to ask for help with the langya captain. He doesn't say anything to Xichen either! Lan Xichen, who has explicitly and exhaustively been portrayed as kind and understanding to Meng Yao's circumstances and very willing to talk to Mingjue if Meng Yao wants something from him he doesn't otherwise think he'd get. The conversation Mingjue overhears where Meng Yao's new position in the Nie is explictly brought up would be kind of the perfect time to go "yeah I've been promoted but I'm not treated well by other soldiers" aaaand. Nothing. So unless you come to the conclusion that Meng Yao trusted the Jin he told about the captain's abuse more than Lan Xichen you kind of have to conclude that Meng Yao's treatment after his promotion improved significantly. And that even if people still disliked him they could not openly do anything about it because he was high enough in status for that to be socially inappropiate. Which is, explicitly, one of his main motivators over the entire course of the story: Avoiding mistreatment by getting high enough on the social ladder it doesn't matter what people think of him, they can't hurt him.
And I'm not sure how to reconcile that character journey with the idea that he would, at any point, have preferred to keep his head down and stay where he was. When he was so desperate to crawl his way out.
environmental storytelling about how outdated and poorly researched my social media textbook is
LIKE.
revolve festival was like fyre fest 2.0. and i know this because i'm chronically online and love influencer drama which tends to pop up in the form of marketing scandals.
they really just. spent paragraphs hyping up revolve for a specific event that STRANDED INFLUENCERS IN THE DESERT JKL;SDFLJK. but this is how they talk about it
and for a bonus bad look, though this controversy was enough years ago that MAYBE they've incorporated more diversity into their promotion since then...
revolve got in trouble for having exclusively thin white influencers showcased from their brand trips in ~2018.
so the textbook praising them on selective influencer partnerships...
my mom keeps calling me by my abusive brother's name and like the first time i was offended and let it go but was obviously offended -- the 4th time im starting to want to be a little bit dead about it
thinking about how lonnie only ever cared about will when he died and that was just to profit off of his death + will giving a girl he doesn't know his toy truck just because she's crying and he thinks she needs it more even if he knows joyce can't buy him another one + one of the very first things will did upon waking up in the hospital was ask if jonathan was okay + will telling them to close the gate in season two even though he's part of the hivemind and that would've killed him, too + will breaking his own heart by confessing his feelings and giving mike the painting he's spent so long on but saying that all of it came from el thus sacrificing his own wants and self to again help others + how that same selflessness and self-sacrificing nature of his is going to undoubtedly rear its head in season five again because he's at the center of it all and it all goes back to him and vecna is a creature that feeds off of n fans the flames of pain and guilt... feelin very scared n anxious in this chili's tonight over this actually 😳
also this wasn't strictly a tag game when i found it, but @heniareth @wild-houseplant @badartxd @icylook and @apostacism if any of you want to do this, you can consider this an invitation! i put like three little notes in parentheses in this big block of text, you can just cut those out if you do
(Hero Forge mini optional)
Novhen - Fighting style
fight honorably / fight dirty / prefer close-quarters / prefer range / chat during / go silent / low pain tolerance / high pain tolerance / attack in bursts / attack steadily / go for the kill / aim to disarm / fight defensively / strike first / provoked easily / provoke their opponent / tease / get visibly frustrated / shout while attacking / use strategy / focus on their battle / experience conflicting thoughts during battle / rush in recklessly / try to read their opponent before fighting / fight wildly / fight calmly and, or apathetically / fight with anger / fight with excitement / fight because they have to / fight because they want to / fight without regard to wounds / run away(/hide) when wounded / hide wounds / take a blow to protect another / prefer a blade / prefer to use their abilities / prefer a bow / prefer a shield / prefer a pole arm / prefer a personalized weapon / prefer magic or spells / prefer brawling / their greatest weakness is physical / their greatest weakness is mental / their greatest weakness is emotional / transform for battle / fight as they appear / rely on strength / rely on speed / use everything they have / hide their full potential / exhaust quickly / high stamina / doubt their strength / proceed with caution / behave arrogantly / brag after landing a hit / belittle their abilities / use psychological tactics / use brute strength / avoid civilians / strike down civilians / damage surroundings / avoid damaging surroundings / signature fighting style / making it up as they go / mastered skillset (archery, stealth) / learning their skillset (daggers) / fancy footwork / sloppy footwork / messy fighter / elegant fighter / accept defeat / refuse defeat / beg for mercy / compliment their opponent / insult their opponent / use unnecessary movements / move efficiently / barely move / prefer to dodge / prefer to block / defend their blindside / has no blindside / use all available advantages / strictly use one main method / play around / hold back / fight ruthlessly / show mercy if possible / wait for opponent to be ready / strike when opponent isn’t ready / fear death / fear pain / fear killing / has PTSD / avoid fighting / has lost a fight / has won a fight / has killed / refuses to kill / wants to die standing / would succumb slowly
You know what I hate? When readers claim there’s an ambivalent ending of a book because the author doesn’t force feed it to you.
Except sometimes the author 100% does force feed it to them and they still can’t grasp it.
I’m referring mostly to the death of characters. For example there are heated debates about whether or not Winston dies soon after the end of the 1984. As if it is not painfully obvious that’s what happens. Earlier in the book we hear about a group of men who were executed by Big Brother. It’s said they were arrested and pled guilty to a bunch of horrible crimes and were released (exactly what happened when Winston was captured). They were seen in the chestnut cafe (y’know the same one Winston frequents after being released) where a song comes on (the same one that comes on at the end of the book) and all three men are seen looking at Big Brother’s picture and crying (like Winston does when he discovers he loves Big Brother).
But even if you forget that detail there’s still the knowledge that Winston was told “we’re not going to kill you until you love Big Brother” and the last line of the book was that Winston loved Big Brother.
There’s a similar issue with possibly my favorite book of all time: Ghachar Ghochar
The last line of the book is literally someone (who has been built up as this all knowing guy) walking up to the narrator and saying something along the lines of “sir you should wash your hands, you have blood on them.” The character is referring to the actual blood from the broken glass but come on people. That mixed with the huge conversation his family had about how to kill someone the proper way. And yet when we read it in class even my professor was asking what people thought happened to the wife. Saying it was up to interpretation and there were many possible answers.
No! Just because we don’t see the light leave their eyes in scene does not mean they could be alive!!! Writers should be able to trust their readers. And readers shouldn’t be constantly worried that writers are trying to fake them out.
And you know what? I blame popular movies these days. Not to be a crank academic but like. If you see a building blow up with someone inside they should just be dead okay? I shouldn’t have to think “yeah but the writers are just trying to scare us they didn’t actually kill that character off.” But I have to think these things because now we have Loki back from the dead for the fifth or sixth time and Boba Fett got swallowed by a monster in the eighties and yet here he is with his own show.
Writers should be able to kill people off screen and not have people going “well we don’t know”
But they can’t do that because shitty companies like Disney feel the need to squeeze money out of every character while still trying to have actual stakes. So they only sort of die. They got away from the explosion just in time, or they’re just in a coma (stranger things), or they crawled out of the monster’s stomach after everyone left or it’s their clone with that person’s consciousness (Star Wars) or it’s another timeline’s version of them or he was legally dead for three days but was brought back or the heart monitor was tampered with to fake his death (marvel). This is actually terrible, terrible writing okay? Occasionally a death fake out can work but nine times out of ten it’s just stupid. Because now we have people saying “we don’t know for sure he’s dead because we never see the body and even then who knows”
Anita in Ghachar Ghochar is dead. So is Winston Smith in 1984. Both writers actively killed these characters. They did not leave it “up to interpretation” just because they didn’t show the blood spill from their head.