#i’m one of those artists that knows I have a follower that likes a specific character and I will try to draw them ALL THE TIME

[shokupanko]

WAAAA GO PAN YOU CAN DO IT!! FILL YOUR BAKERY WITH CUTE CUTE DOODLES !!!!!! :D

I LOVE YOU!! (இ﹏இ`｡) Today is Flower Friday :D

#vocaloid #art #fanart #vocaart #vflower #vflowerfriday #I haven’t posted in a week so I didn’t want to come back with another Fukase but instead change it up with Flower instead :D #i’m one of those artists that knows I have a follower that likes a specific character and I will try to draw them ALL THE TIME #it makes me happy to see other people happy #also YOU’RE SO SWEET AND ENCOURAGING AHH #love ya <3 #my chibi’s have been gaining weight :( #inbox requests

[kimdokjas]

wait wait, what’s the change tumblr did to the reblog chains ? 🥲🥲🥲 I’m so lost

okay so basically, let's say you see a post on your dash

before the update, if you clicked on a url, you could do 3 things:

view that specific reblog on the blog you follow (A)

view the previous reblog on the blog A reblogged it from (B)

view the original post on op's blog (C)

however, staff recently implemented an update where clicking on a url no longer takes you to that specific post. now, clicking on a url just takes you to the blog itself.

this means that you now get 5 things:

view ONLY that specific reblog on the blog you follow (A) -> changed location near header. also, you will now ONLY see that post and nothing else

view ONLY the original post on op's blog (C) -> changed location near header. you will only see that post and nothing else. and ONLY if the op hasn't deleted it, otherwise it just shows an error

view the blog of the person you follow (D)

view the blog of the person D reblogged it from (F) -> option B no longer exists

view the blog of the op (E)

you might be thinking: "cool! i get more options so that's good, right?" well, no.

there are SEVERAL things wrong with this and it goes beyond the prev tags issue

1) first of all, it's counterintuitive that A and C changed locations to the area near the header, especially if your userbase was already used to the previous functions. it just seems like horrible UX design to me but let's put that aside for now.

2) as you can see, option B which allowed you to see the previous reblog of a post no longer exists.

now, if you click on the previous url, you will just be taken to their entire blog. you can no longer view the post itself.

someone asked staff about this, and they replied in this post that the change was INTENTIONAL and if you want to view the previous reblog you would have to "go through the notes view".

to borrow what someone else said:

basically, this update just killed the prev tags culture in one fell swoop.

(sure, you can still use it to reply directly to the person you're reblogging from, but it's now literally useless to use "prev tags" for everyone else involved. sure, you can choose to copy tags or peer review them, but again, if people will have to copy them then the less people are likely to use them, and not every prev lends itself to peer-reviewing imo)

now, listen. i know not everyone likes the prev tags culture, but it just seems like such a poorly-thought decision to kill a culture that like... half of your entire userbase uses (see this poll as a quick reference) and that's UNIQUE to your site and sets you apart from other social media.

but it's also not even just prev tags. let's say you want to remove an annoying addition on a post's reblog chain? you can no longer do that.

however, i feel like this is the most important point:

regardless of how you may feel about the prev tags culture, the pure UI aspect of it should remain

what i mean by this is: even if you don't like prev tags, simply 1) being able to access the reblog chain, and 2) clicking on a post and actually have it take you to their BLOG (and not just a page with that one single post) is literally essential navigation.

this update threatens to drive down user engagement (which is already critically low) by making it harder to navigate. which is actually another point:

3) even if you click on A and C now to view those specific posts, it's NOT the same as it used to be.

before, you could view the reblog directly on the blog. so you could just scroll down and see the other posts leading up to it. now, you will be taken to a page where you will ONLY see that post and nothing else.

but also, you can no longer easily navigate other people's blogs.

you know how sometimes you would see like 50 notifications of someone going through an entire tag on your blog? that's going to happen a lot less, i'm afraid.

let's suppose you want to go to op's blog because they're an artist and you want to see more of their art. so you click on C and see that the tag they use for posts with their art is "#my art"

cool! before, you could just click on that tag and immediately view ALL of their art as long as the posts have that tag.

but now, if you click on that tag, it will take you to the ENTIRE tumblr tag with literally all the posts that everyone in the history of time has tagged with that specific tag.

now, to do the same thing that just took 2 clicks before, you would have to: click on C to view the post -> look for the tag you want to navigate -> click E to view their whole blog -> scroll and look for a post that just so happens to have that tag (the search function is literally useless) and hope to god that there's a recent one or you'll have to scroll for ages or simply give up -> if you happen to find it, click on that tag to navigate their posts.

you see how this is counterproductive, right? you see how this can literally drive down engagement with content creators, right?

if you make people's blogs harder to navigate, you will literally drive down the number of likes and reblogs on their posts, which have already been steadily declining for years now.

4) options D and E to view the blogs and not the posts are literally useless because you could already access other people's blogs before. you just had to click on their url to view their blogs starting from that specific post AND you could choose to just refresh it to view their newest posts.

either way, the change just seems completely unnecessary. and again, it's not just about the prev tags culture but about basic UI.

so what can we do about it?

i normally don't advocate for flooding staff with messages but i do feel like this is one of the worst updates staff has ever done (and that's saying something) and something needs to change.

even if they don't retcon the entire update, that's fine, but staff could at least add the option to view the reblog chain as a different feature (maybe even opt-in) for example. there are better ways to go about this than just axing an entire existing feature.

also, this same issue that makes it harder to navigate blogs needs to change. i feel like content creators will be especially affected by this unless this changes because you can no longer easily navigate their tags, so it will inevitably drive down engagement.

so please, contact staff and let them know we want a change.

you can contact support here!

here's a template for a possible message you could send, but feel free to edit it. (under category you can choose "Feedback")

Hi, I would like to politely request a change to the recent update that affects the reblog chain of posts. Regardless of the "prev tags" culture itself, the UI aspect of being able to view the reblog chain of a post is essential for navigation on this website. Even adding it as a separate, opt-in feature would be a huge help. Additionally, clicking on a post and then on one of the tags now takes you to the entire tumblr tag instead of the tag on that blog, which makes it harder to navigate blogs. Both of these issues have the potential to drive down user engagement by actively making it harder to navigate Tumblr, but especially for content creators. I hope you can do something to address these issues as soon as possible. Thanks in advance and have a nice day.

also, if you can and/or want, reblogs are appreciated to help spread the word!

that's pretty much the gist of the issue from what i've seen, but if anyone else has anything to add or a different way we could contact staff to make ourselves heard, please feel free to let me know!

TLDR: it's not just about prev tags, this update affects basic functionality and content creators as well

#pls reblog if u can to help spread the word!! #@anon this turned out a lot longer than i expected omg #i hope u don't mind me hijacking this ask to make a general informative post about this issue!! #ask #anonymous #tumblr #tumblr update #prev tags #signal boost #supportcontentcreators #evansyhelp #staff #long post for ts #196

[dollita-fawn]

𝐈𝐧𝐤 𝐓𝐞𝐦𝐩𝐭𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐬 ༆

pairings - Tattoo Artist! Jill x Fem! Reader

𝐂𝐰- readers first tat, vaginal fingering, oral sex, orgasm denial, teasing through the clothes, overstimulation, praise and minor use of pet names ❦

a/n- i hate the flow of this but it’s jill so. based off this audio!! (ive never gotten a tat before but plan to soon, so forgive me if i got details wrong)

tags: @flkwh0re

︶꒦꒷♡꒷꒦︶

Jill is cleaning up from her last works mess when you, her next scheduled client, walks in. She gets the chair ready for you, letting you get comfortable while she gets her needed equipment ready.

“First time?” she inquires, not even looking up from the tattoo gun. “Seem a little nervous, sweetheart.”

“No need to worry, I’m real good at what I do.”

“Sorry, I just don’t know what to expect is all…” you reply.

She shifts her rolly chair to the side of yours, looking you over silently for a bit. She wanted to see what she was working with. “Well,” she starts, “Any specific design you want?”

You nod, pulling up a picture you saved on your phone. The design was simple, something she could definitely do more with if you were willing enough. “A womb tat for your first, hm? You sure you can bare with me? That’s a pretty sensitive spot.”

“I’m willing to try. I have a decent pain tolerance...I think.”

She chuckles a little at the uncertainty in your statement.

“Well we can stop anytime you need to. Just let me know if you want to take a break at any point, okay?”

You try to relax, feeling those anxious butterflies fluttering in your stomach. Jill gets closer to you and you stiffen again in anticipation.

“Relax,” she places a gentle hand on your thigh. “Just doing some simple skin prep first. Not bringing out the big guns just yet.”

She slowly lifts your shirt just far enough to expose your lower belly. “Might have to pull your shorts down a little. Is that alright?”

“Yeah, whatever makes it convenient for you…miss.”

“Jill.” she corrects. “Sorry for not introducing myself.”

Your shorts are shimmied down, just below your bikini line, leaving you to feel a bit out in the open. “It’s gonna a get a little personal with the way I have to go about this. Let me know if you’re feeling uncomfortable.”

With that, she puts a white cream across your skin, rubbing it in as she goes, following with shaving the area, careful not to prick you in any way. She was very obviously skilled in this department as she stated earlier. She was quick and smooth with her movements.

“This might hurt a bit,” she warns when she finishes shaving. She brings out the ink gun, adjusting it as needed.

It turns on with a buzz and she lowers it toward your skin. When it makes contact you again tense up, wincing at the sudden sting.

Her arm rests on your outer thigh as she works from the side, starting the outline. “You’re alright,” she coos softly, tracing comforting circles around your leg. “Is it too much for you?”

“No, it’s fine…i’ll live.”

“Such a brave girl.” she remarks almost flirtatiously, dragging the needle steadily over your skin.

She repositions her arm to rest right on top of your crotch. Guess that’s what she meant by ‘personal’. Every time she shifts her arm it’s enough to make you squirm. You’re starting to get distracted from the pain, more focused on the throbbing between your legs.

The sounds you’re voicing start to sound less like ones of discomfort and more of enjoyment and she can’t help but take notice.

“Hm…that feel good?” she taunts, adding more pressure to your cunt. “Makes it easier to take the pain, huh?”

Clearly she knew exactly what she was doing to you.

You bite your lip, trying not to be so noisy. “Sorry, it’s just-“

“I know baby,” she interjects. “Want me to stop?”

You don’t even think about it, immediately rattling your head ‘no’ and she grins, getting back to work on the outline.

She continues to press against your sensitive parts, sliding up and down as she draws across your lower body like it’s her personal canvas. You feel yourself pooling through your panties, but the teasing’s not enough to make you cum.

Still, it did make the pain more bearable so you weren’t about to complain. But when she again repositions, removing her arm from its placement, it makes you want to cry.

The sting sets in again, nothing to take the feeling away and you feel tears uncontrollably welling up along your lash line.

“Aw, poor girl. Let’s take a break.” she turns off the machinery when she notices, setting it off to the side. “You’re doing so well for me sweetheart. It’s alright. Halfway through.”

To ease your mind, she decides to be a little bolder. She pulls your shorts the rest of the way down. “It’ll be easier with these out of the way, hm?”

You don’t deny her in the slightest. You slip the rest of the way out of them, letting them fall to the floor.

“It’s just the two of us in the studio today…so how about a reward for being such a good girl so far.”

Your legs spread open like they have a mind of their own and Jill hums in approval, gliding her chair to the front of yours now directly aligned with you.

Her gloved hand comes down to toy with you. She traces the shape of you through your panties, amused at how wet you got from simple friction.

When she pulls them to the side, they’re practically glued to you.

She takes off one of her gloves, setting it aside and dipping her two middle fingers into your needy entrance.

Immediately, you clench around her digits and she thumbs at your clit to loosen you up a little. Slowly, she pumps her fingers in and out, curving into that spongy spot almost too accurately causing you to mewl out.

She tucks her hair behind her ears before leaning in closer. Her mouth attaches to your sensitive nub, suckling as if she was trying to drink a milkshake through a straw that was too frozen to come out.

Your hands dig into the leather armrests of the chair, head lulling back and your jaw tightens along with your core.

The pace of her thrusting becomes rapid, bringing you closer to bursting.

She feels the way your walls start to pulse, continuing until you’re on the brink before stopping entirely. You let out a pitiful whine at the sudden emptiness. Was she really gonna leave you hanging?

“Please don’t stop…” you plead to which she only giggles.

“We can do more once you’re finished with the tattoo. I do still have a time limit.” She releases her hold on your underwear, letting them go with a snap against your cunt.

So cruel.

Once again she picks up the gun, returning to your right side for a better angle. She turns it back on, getting back to work.

Your bottom lip starts to quiver again, mind clouded by the burning sensation on your stomach as she continues.

It’s enough to make her feel bad, seeing you looking so helpless in agony. So she brings her freehand back down, cupping your swollen heat and teasing her fingers in and out again. “Be a good girl and sit still for me. Don’t wanna mess up your pretty tat.”

Again you gnaw at your bottom lip, trying to stop squirming and be a little quieter.

The pain is replaced by the pads of her slender fingers, coaxing your insides. She pumps slow and deep, making your toes curl.

“That feel better?”

“Yes ma’am..” you whine out in appreciation, trying your hardest to obey her wish and calm your wriggling so she can finish.

“Almost done with this part,” she reassures. “Then we can take another break before the shading.”

The mixture of pain and pleasure goes on for another half hour or so, leaving jill’s fingers to prune from your soaked cunt.

The break is given as promised.

Her tongue jabs in every slit and fold, sloppily lapping up your sweet juices. Her movement is relentless, making you clamp your thighs around her, practically suffocating her. She goes on, forcing you to your long awaited orgasm. But she doesn’t stop there.

She continues to lick and suck up everything you’re giving, not stopping as your legs shake violently. You’re practically sobbing, pushing her away yet at the same time wanting it to go on.

She doesn’t stop until you beg for her to.

At that point, you’re too dumb to think straight, laying there drained and panting. She uses the opening to finish up the tat, shading over everything.

It doesn’t hurt as bad as what she was doing before, making the hour go by pretty quickly. You almost didn’t want to leave, you’d gotten comfortable, melting into that cushiony chair.

She finishes up, gently applying the after care ointment and wrapping your lower abdomen with a plastic wrap.

She hands you a bag, explaining what to do for aftercare and things to avoid doing for the new few days.

“If you have any questions or concerns, you know where to find me.” She smiles, catching you off guard with a sudden kiss to your lips. She lingers for a while, not wanting to send you off.

“Or, just call me whenever you need me.” she adds, “left my number in the bag somewhere, if you don’t mind a little detective work.”

#resident evil #smut #fanfiction #jill valentine #jill x reader #jill valentine x reader #jill valentine x you #re3make #re3 remake #resident evil 3 #resident evil x reader #tattoo au #jill valentine smut #resident evil smut #resident evil fanfiction #audiomack #soundgasm

[talenlee]

Hanamusa, Explained

There is a nonzero chance if you follow me on tumblr, you’ve seen the term ‘Hanamusa’ attached to something I shared. It’s probably also some super cute art of Delia Ketchum and Jessie Teamrocket, and you may wonder what is going on and also, why is there so much good art of this.

Hanamusa as a term derives from the Japanese names of the characters – Hanako and Musashi. If you’re into shipping name structures, Hana-Musa implies that Hanako is the seme and Musashi the uke, but I don’t think that holds for all use cases of the type of terminology. It’s a ship. It’s an AU ship, as in an ‘alternate universe’ ship, where the two characters are presented in a context outside of the normal context of the anime presentation of them.

The Hanamusa ship as I understand it is set at some point after Jessie and James stop chasing Ash around, and Jessie settles down into a relationship with Delia. There’s tension about her history with Ash and the confusion about finding Your Personal Villain dating your mom, but mostly it’s about showing a sweet domestic life between two characters you know very well in a format I kind of see as like, Comedy-Sabot Romantic 4koma. Like, Hanamusa content is funny (and it is VERY funny) but it doesn’t need to be funny, because the main thing it’s about is showing these two characters and their relationship as they do cute things together.

It’s why people watch shows like K-On basically.

As for where this idea comes from, (EDIT: Slightly wonky wording here, I should have phrased 'this current fandom push' - I don't have any reason to believe Mai INVENTED the ship, just that when you go looking you'll wind up at her work) it seems to have its genesis with the work of one Kiana Mai, who developed this ship some time ago. Kiana Mai is also an extremely skilled artist, and one of those skills seems to be focus, creating these extremely clean-line excellently structured scene vignettes with no unnecessary content in them but also no need to rocket along. It’s amazing, engaging work that uses every part of the small format amazingly well. Which makes sense because one of the things Kiana Mai does is storyboarding work for Disney animated TV shows, a task at which I am sure she no doubt excels.

What I think is the most interesting aspect of Hanamusa, to me specifically, is that it manages to combine three things I don’t actually care about, in a way that doesn’t interfere with something I have unexpectedly strong opinions on. I do not watch Pokemon, and I have not shed a tear for Team Rocket and Ash Ketchum wandering into the sunset. That is a show that is not for or about my interests and that is okay. Indeed, imagining that it should be about what interests me is baffling. I think if I stopped watching a show twenty years ago, I have lost all right to act like I’m entitled to expect it remain the way it was all the way back then.

But I do have opinions on Jessie and James’ character voice. Not their voice acting – I mean, I know for a fact they’ve had to change over time and no voice actor should be obligated to kick it in the same role for what could be their entire career. I mean the way they talk about things and the words they use and kind of emphasis they put on words when they talk. About the way they voice their ideas, or the way they express who they are in the way they talk to one another, that stuff. It’s about affordances and persona, about the kind of people you project being by what words you choose to use and the affect when using them.

It’s why when, if a picture of a character is underneath it, you can read some dril posts as being ‘appropriately’ voiced by a character, even if it’s describing a candle situation that Francis Crozier did not have opinions on.

Jessie has a voice.

Jessie, in my head, is someone capable of moments of tenderness and friendship that is normally overwhelmed by an incredible confidence in ability she does not have and mere reality will never be given permission to infringe on it. Jessie is unassailably unstoppably sure of herself, thoughtlessly stupid in a way that doesn’t mean she is stupid, but which exists in a context of someone who has relentlessly pursued excellence in her job which is also the equivalent of being a late night 7/11 manager. She is the Girlboss that is Gaslighting herself into thinking she has something to Gatekeep.

Delia Ketchum by comparison is a very nice piece of wallpaper. Every appearance of her in my mind is someone Very Nice who is Very Patient and Very Supportive and has managed to keep literally all emotionally challenging conversations from happening around Ash, which can be perhaps easier when you remember that he, too, is an idiot. I don’t know how Delia Ketchum talks, but I do know that there are ways that Delia Ketchum does not talk.

This is interesting! It’s interesting because it presents a character where I am very sure I know what she does do when she does it, and a character about whom I can only be sure wouldn’t do some things. It creates a character space, and it creates expectations of affect and performance within that space. Ash and other characters show up as well, but because they get to interact with this already-defined space, you get treated to this really lovely kind of resonance. Would Ash call Jessie ‘dad’? Maybe, to bug her. He was good at being a twerp. Wasn’t he? I mean I remember it that way, he seems to work out that way, but… how would I know?

I know more of this AU where Jessie is studying to be a Pokemon Doctor and Ash wears glasses than I do of the source material any more. And if you’re wondering ‘hey, do Jessie and Delia ever meet in the source material?’ Like, yeah, for a few seconds. What, the point is creating something new.

If you want to check out Hanamusa stuff and read the comics, I recommend going and clicking on the hashtag on tumblr.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

#Anime #Media

#Anime #Media

[betweengenesisfrogs]

A HOMESTUCK MANIFESTO

I want to think about what comes next after Homestuck.

That’s a challenge to the world as much as a personal mission statement.

I want to see writers and artists and creators making the next Homestuck, taking its themes and binding them into new fabrics, giving life to new creatures even more beautiful and uncanny than the original species.

I hunger to see new forms of story and image evolving with Homestuck in their DNA.

This process is already underway. Homestuck is a massive boulder dropped into the waters of culture, and the full wake of its ripples is still to be felt. But let’s call attention to this process and ask: what would happen if we engaged in it more consciously? If we sifted through our feelings about Homestuck to create something new, deliberately, with great and wonderful purpose?

The tools we need are within our grasp. Homestuck presents itself as magic, but it’s a work constructed in time out of specific storytelling choices. So let’s understand those choices. Let’s understand how Homestuck did what it did, and use Homestuck’s tools to build art that grips the soul of future generations as strongly as Homestuck did ours.

What follows is not a traditional literary analysis. It does not cite its sources; it does not seek to give us a comprehensive understanding of Homestuck. If it does, it does so only to the extent it suits its larger purpose.

Our goal here, our quest, if you will, is not to understand the Homestuck that exists, but the Homestuck that comes next.

Let's begin.

0. THE WILD GARDEN

Let’s lay the absolute groundwork here.

Homestuck is constructed as a re-appropriation of itself. Or to put it another way, it’s a big improvisational move, a process of “yes and”-ing so hard it develops a sprawling continuity.

Tiny details are constantly re-contextualized to become part of something else. A joke might turn tragic. A silly aside might turn into something profound.

But it didn’t have to be that way.

It’s crucial to understand that what we experience as continuities were in fact choices made at specific times. Homestuck is a garden where seeds were scattered in every direction, grown en masse, then weeded down to create patterns and forms.

The shape of the garden is designed to conceal the gardener’s hand. But the gardener’s choices are there, every step of the way.

If we are to follow in its footsteps, what choices should we make?

Let’s talk about themes.

1. THE MEANING CRISIS

Nobody in Homestuck knows what they’re doing.

And neither do we.

All the old idols have broken down. The values we were taught in our childhood fail to measure up to the problems of the world we live in. We grasp after careers and lives we were told would make us happy and wonder why we’re left empty. The selves that we were told were us now fit us about as well as clothing we’ve outgrown. Crises loom, political, economic and environmental, and everywhere it feels like the people who are supposed to guide and lead us aren’t doing enough.

It's widening gyres and slouching beasts all the way from here to Bethlehem, is what I’m saying.

The reason people go absolutely insane for Homestuck is that it depicts this crisis of meaning. It shows the questions we might want to ask, and attempts to provide some kind of answer.

The protagonists of Homestuck struggle with what I’ve called “received narrative.” That is, they’ve inherited stories from their families, from the world, that they try to use to define their lives, and it doesn’t work. But these stories are so familiar that it’s hard to think outside them. They have to develop new stories by which to live. Sometimes they succeed, but other times they can’t escape the gravity of the ones they were given.

With me so far?

Great. Now understand that all this was improvised and discovered largely accidentally over the course of ten years.

Here’s a seed that became quite an impressive tree:

The streets are empty. Wind skims the voids keeping neighbors apart, as if grazing the hollow of a cut reed, or say, a plundered mailbox. A familiar note is produced. It's the one Desolation plays to keep its instrument in tune.

It’s a joke. But it was never just a joke. There’s an idea here of dissatisfaction with the stereotypical idea of American suburban life. Egbert here is looking for something more, dissatisfied for reasons they can’t fully articulate. This is typical fantasy protagonist stuff, but there’s something more here, too.

Eventually it’s redirected towards the idea that there really is an unseen riddler. But let’s put that aside for now.

This page, in its moment, says: your life is not the full picture. There’s something else out there, waiting, that’s going to change everything.

That's a potential set-up for a very powerful payoff. It gives us the sense that Egbert and all their friends are going to have to rethink what they know. That this suburban life is not going to be enough for them, that somehow or other they’re going to encounter something they aren’t prepared for, and they’ll have to find a new way of acting and being. That, try as they might to avoid it, they’re going to change over the course of this journey.

But to understand how they change, we need to talk about SBURB.

2. THE PORTAL FANTASY OF IT ALL

A lot of people like to joke that Homestuck is an isekai. I think it might clarify things to use the term portal fantasy instead.

Portal fantasy is simply the fantasy subgenre of characters, usually kids, going to a magical other world. Maybe they make friends, maybe they learn lessons and stuff. You know the drill. I don’t have to to tell you more because the story structure is already so familiar. That’s what gives it power.

Portal fantasy differs from the related Japanese genre of isekai in that isekai in its current form is much more heavily based on video games such as MMORPGs. In the most pervasive isekai narratives, protagonists are rewarded not so much for achieving personal growth as being able to exploit the game mechanics of a game-like system. That’s pretty different from your typical Narnia scenario.

The influence of portal fantasy is everywhere in Homestuck, especially in the beginning. We have nods to the fantasy films of the 1980s that gave us our contemporary idea of this story structure, such as The Neverending Story (itself, in its original book incarnation, a phenomenal commentary on the genre). Our protagonists are genre savvy; they recognize what’s happening here.

But it doesn’t fit quite right. The odd note is first sounded when Egbert asks Nanasprite if what they’re doing is going to save the world. They’re bit unsettled to learn the answer’s no, that something else is going on here. Next we have the fantasy worlds: the planetary lands each present a veneer of exciting adventure. But their inhabitants, the consorts, aren’t fully-realized people, they’re largely cute animals going through the motions, not really understanding the story they’re telling. The carapacians are a little better, but they’re still trapped in a fatalism that feels uncomfortable.

As things rev up in Act 4, we learn about doomed timelines from alt-timeline Dave and Rose, how your entire existence in this setting may be fodder for something other than you. When we learn the true purpose of SBURB and its froggy details in Act 5, we see that SBURB is more like a biological creature, mainly interested in its own reproductive desires. It was never really about the portal fantasy at all. The kids are just along for the ride.

So when we see that Rose wants to tear through SBURB, find out a way to escape fate, and snatch meaning from the jaws of futility, it makes sense. We’ve been given hints already that this is the conflict at hand: the characters vs the story that’s telling them. 

(Note: it’s certainly possible to have a reading that SBURB is not evil so much as empty, that it reflects what you bring into it, that its will for you is your will for you. But that’s also a difficult thing, right? If you lack self-understanding, it’s a struggle to bring about your ideal reality.)

What we haven’t mentioned yet is that this is all mediated through the lens of video games. Which makes perfect sense. Because where do we seek meaning, especially as kids? In imaginary worlds that make more sense to us than real life, that give us achievements to take pride in and clear objectives to pursue.

SBURB evokes mechanics from games like Final Fantasy. We see its players complete objectives, cast magic spells, gain power-ups with colorful costume changes. But unlike the narratives implied by traditional video game progressions, leveling up doesn’t mean you grow as a person or process your trauma. Later, in Act 6, when we meet a player who has made his life about winning the game (Caliborn), it’s horrific to behold. 

Homestuck is a portal fantasy, but it’s fundamentally a portal fantasy about games. It’s a portal fantasy that shows us how characters seek meaning in being the best at arbitrary game mechanics, but ultimately fail to find it.

So I guess…it actually is an isekai? Huh. Wild.

(But seriously, Homestuck is actually fairly prescient in predicting the ideas that come out of isekai and LitRPG. It’s engaging consciously and deconstructively with the weird ideas of self-fulfillment these genres are drowning in.)

So what might a Homestuckian work look like? It will almost certainly critique a false narrative we live by. It may comment on portal fantasy, or our personal satisfaction that comes as easily as playing a video game. But it doesn’t have to be limited to these things. It might talk about our popular TV shows and movies. It may take apart what’s flawed in Marvel, the latest triple-A game, or the modern dark fantasy novel. 

Among its tools will be discomfort. Showing a disconnect early on between our character’s expectations and their happiness can serve as foundation to build on, so that when the flaws of the genre narrative are revealed, it feels like the truth. We may see characters who accept their narratives passively, or rebels like Rose Lalonde, who chose to rip everything apart in search of something better.

These are only some of the possibilities.

When I tell you the stories we live by mislead us, what is your relationship to that? If you were to tear these received narratives apart, what would you focus on, what would you try to say? The art that comes out of this question will be deeply personal to the soul who makes it.

But here’s another question:

Just who is giving us all these narratives, anyway?

3. THE PARENT FLIP

The world we live in was not made by us. It was shaped by forces that predate us, over which we have no control and are born into the grasp of without the knowledge of how to escape.

For instance, our parents.

The guardians who raise us provide our template for how to interpret life. We spend a large part of our lives immersed in the world they built, believing as they believe, living by the values that they instruct us in, so that we might carry their goals forward to the future.

This is an effort that is certain to fail.

Because the problems of today aren’t the problems of twenty or thirty years ago.  At best, their messages can only to help in a limited way with the crises we go through as we live our lives. At worst, they actively hinder us from dealing with them productively.

If we are to escape the broken patterns of our world, then we need break out of the stories an earlier generation gave us.

How are parents discussed in Homestuck?

Initially? As jokes.

If we take our “future knowledge” goggles off for a moment, we can see that the early depictions of the kids’ parents are a goofy parody of standard parental tropes. Mom and Dad are nameless, faceless, exaggerated cartoon stereotypes, and conflict between them and their children is initially expressed through a silly video game fight.

There’s a seed of something real here, though. What we’re parodying is a familiar trope of tension between parents and children in kids’ fiction and YA fiction. But that trope exists for a reason. This conflict is rich with potential for any story about growing up. And Homestuck has smuggled the idea of it in as a silly RPG parody.

So we can extrapolate, for instance, that there’s tension between Egbert and their father in part because Egbert doesn’t know yet who they want to be, and that Rose and Mom’s relationship is awkward and contentious, with alcohol involved. We see that there’s something profoundly uncomfortable going on between Dave and his Bro, and Jade’s life in the shadow of a dead Grandpa suggests a psychology that’s not entirely a healthy one.

Understand that I’m not saying that all this was there from the start. Rather, a choice was made to develop these interesting possibilities out of the jokes, to tell a story about how parents that act like these ones might have affected their children.

A major turning point in this regard is when Egbert learns their father’s seeming clown obsession was the result of a failed attempt to connect with them. It’s quite silly, but it plays around with the idea of a gap in perception between parent and child. It’s also a sign the story’s starting to take more of an interest in character psychology, suggesting that what Egbert processes consciously is not the same as their deeper unconscious feelings. This in turn can become a setup for a portrait of Egbert as someone who represses things they don’t want to think about. From this moment, in the long term, comes June Egbert.

When the psychology machine revs up for all the characters in Act 4 and Act 5, it’s able to do so because this foundation was laid.

We also, as early as Act 3, get hints that the parents have intentions and personalities outside of how the kids perceive them. The original purpose is to hint at a larger conspiracy around SBURB, with Mom building a secret lab, Dad trying to investigate the mystery, and Grandpa jumping in and out of time. But what this suggests is that the psychology of the parents might at some point come into play.

But the most exciting development in the relationship between parents and children is Act 6.

The great role reversal. The parent and child flip.

How do you make your faceless parent figures into characters?

By making them kids.

We’re so used to this concept now t that it’s hard to remember how wild it is that Roxy is a teen version of a main character's mom. But the concept is genius. Meeting these characters on the same level forces our protagonists to understand them as people and reflect on their fallibility.

For us as readers, it adds detail and nuance to the cartoonish portraits we got in the beginning. Conversely, we also see what our protagonists might have been like as parents themselves—and turns it from a story of “parents just don’t understand” to a story of how people, despite their best intentions, can wound each other.

(The Homestuck Epilogues are a difficult text to evaluate, but one of the best things within them is Egbert’s arc in Candy, where we see how Egbert might have done as a parent, how their struggles with finding purpose in the world might lead them to embrace a narrative of parenthood yet struggle to have a good relationship their kid. It’s brilliant, and the culmination of everything we’ve talked about here.)

Thus the Homestuckian work of art will be concerned with themes of parents and children. It will play with the boundary between what children understand about their parents and what they don’t. It will show parents as people—fallible people, who make mistakes with severe costs, whose stories fail their children and themselves. It may build from a simple base of what children understand, or it may weave parent and child perspectives together. It may even show us how children fail when they become parents themselves.  It will show us the cycles we are trapped in, how we wound and are wounded by our context.

And it will force us to look for a way out.

4. CLASSPECTS AS SIGNPOSTS

Hey. You want to know a secret?

Come closer, and I’ll whisper it to you.

Classpects aren’t actually all that complicated. Ultimately, they boil down to one thing:

Symbols we can use to construct a self.

If Homestuck is about a crisis of meaning, then classpects are part of its answer.

What do we do, when the world gives us no story we can live by?

We make one. We make one out of whatever symbols and messages we can find and put together from the stories we’ve read, from the people who teach and inspire us. Such collages are powerful things. They give us a way out of the dark, they give us a sense of something we are and can be, where there was nothing before.

They give us, in short, a personal mythology.

Classes and Aspects have often been read as codes to be unpacked and solved. It might be more productive to see them as creative tools, signposts designed not to narrow down meaning, but to allow us to explore it.

For instance, the portrayal of Light in Homestuck is unique. As a symbol, it combines notions of brightness, knowledge, future, luck, wealth, and narrative focus. These things aren’t inherently linked out in the world, but they are here, and that’s a choice, and an interesting one. It encourages us to imagine connections between these concepts, and to see if they have any relevance to ourselves. Identifying with the concept of Light, in other words choosing to value clarity, luck, and importance, might be a powerful tool for finding one’s way in the world.

Classes play with signposts at an even more basic level. Sure, we can talk about what a Knight does in the context of the story.

But a knight is already a powerful symbol. We bring so much cultural context to it. The word conjures up images and narratives of devotion, duty, violence, the slaying of dragons, armoring oneself against the world, and the rescuing of princesses. If we put that together with a concept like Time, we get a distinct character. If we put that together with our own experience of the world, we can create powerful concepts for who we want to be.

Interestingly, this complicates what we said about SBURB. As much as our protagonists struggle to find meaning within it, there’s still something there that they can latch onto. Classes, aspects, denizens, even consorts and lands—these things don’t have to be devoid of meaning. We can choose to affirm them; we can build something out of them, and say, yes, this is me, this is myself.

But it’s a double-edged sword.

We are responsible for the narratives we choose to live by. And we may find ourselves falling into a narrative that hinders us more than helps us, that creates a self-destructive self.

What does it mean to believe deeply that you are a thief, that taking from others to benefit yourself is the best way or comes to you the most naturally? What does it mean to tell yourself over and over that you’re a prince, with all the attendant baggage of power and grim responsibility that comes with that concept? Or, to follow the path further, what does it mean to tell yourself over and over that you are a destroyer or must be destroyed?

If we are to escape the story we’re trapped in, we must take care, lest we trap ourselves in a story of our own making.

Homestuck never quite resolves the ambiguity around these symbols of self, around whether SBURB hurts or helps, whether classpects are things you create or things that create you. But this ambiguity is a productive one. It gives us symbolic tools we can use in the creation of meaning, and it shows us the side of them that should make us wary.

The work that is to come after Homestuck will be about symbols. It may show us how we seek them in popular culture, or the people around us. It may use some of the clusters of meaning that that we see in Homestuck, but it will not be limited to them. It will write its own language of symbols, joining Light and Time to notions like Memory, Need, Rupture, and War, and be filled not just with knights and princes but brigadiers, lancers, healers, druids, taxidermists, sentries and waifs.  It will build with tarot cards, enneagram types, and Babylonian gods. It will place all the signposts we’ve created in millennia of existence into new contexts and meanings.  

By such means will it show us a way forward.

There’s one kind of symbol we haven’t talked about yet, however.

The kind that holds a mirror up to the world.

5. THE POWER OF ALTERNIA

There’s a reason dystopias have been so popular in young adult fiction. Sure, they’re cliché now, but they speak to something raw and visceral.

When you’re growing up into a world that doesn’t make sense, it’s natural to find refuge in emotional extremes. Stories of blood and violence, fates worse than death, and governments that demand horrific things of their citizens speak to the anxieties of the adolescent mind. They validate the feeling that something is wrong—that the world we’ve inherited is broken and unfair and has no place for us. And they’re right.

Alternia taps into these dystopian feelings perfectly. What makes it so fun is that it’s an inversion of a teenage fantasy. It’s a world where there are no parents, where kids can have access to power and violence, where you can sit around and play video games and design your own house. It almost feels like a response to the “parents don’t understand” themes of the early acts.

But the dystopia’s there, and it’s sneaky. A land of lost boys and girls isn’t actually all that great to live in. It’s lawless, survival of the fittest, with children killing each other left and right. And the future adult roles most of the troll kids aspire to are a glamorous veneer over competition for slots in a fascist military hierarchy. Which is to say nothing of the blood caste system as a way in which the kids are taught by their world to abuse and exploit each other. Crushes, personal slights, competition for status, group dynamics, attempts to define identity – all these familiar teenage dynamics play out on a backdrop of maiming and murder.

Which is perfect. Because when you’re young, all those social interactions genuinely do feel like life or death, and adulthood a regime of exploitation and horror bearing down on you. Alternia is a heightened, exaggerated version of reality. It expresses an emotional truth, not a literal one, validating our most intense feelings and giving us a road map to understanding them.

No wonder so many people wanted to skip to Act 5 and get to the trolls.

(See also Hiveswap Friendsim and Pesterquest, which explore these themes really really well.)

And Alternia, for a world where parents aren’t really a thing, tells us a surprising amount about the parental generation. In mid Act 5-2, Ancestors are added to Alternia’s wordbuilding, and we learn that as much as the trolls skipped having traditional parental figures, they were never devoid of role models. The deeds and exploits of notable figures throughout ancient Alternia gave them models to think about each other and themselves—even when those models were toxic ones. In a way, this isn’t so far from the human kids at all.

Furthermore, as time goes on, we acquire an origin for Alternia’s fascist worldview. Doc Scratch, manipulator of society, stands in for all those aspects of the world that work to create the false narratives we are born into, a true evil father figure – or uncle, if you prefer. And he's an extension of the ultimate evil father figure, Lord English, who controls not just Alternia but the timelines of the human children as well, whose belligerence and apathy give us aeons of toxic narratives and abuse. We see that story played out in Alternia in every interaction, in every moment, the beliefs its architects live by.

This is the power of dystopia—it can hold a broken mirror up to the world we live in.

Therefore the Homestuck that will come after Homestuck will worldbuild gardens of horror. It will not pull its punches but show us insidious societal systems and the effect they have on the people who live under them. It may depict fascism, authoritarianism, feudalistic tyranny, or all three. It will be unafraid to evoke blood and guts but use them to paint a picture of what we want, what we fear, and how we break under our false horizons.

As it depicts the path out, so, too, will it have its reverse side—it will show us all the hells and purgatories we’re trapped in.

6. SAILS TO THE WIND

Much has been written (including by this very author) about Homestuck’s metafictional aspects – the way it comes to foreground a more direct clash between character and narrative.

But the point I want to make here is that the metafictional angle wouldn’t work without these earlier choices. They allow the comic to talk about these concerns long before any notion of canon rears its head.

There are many ways of approaching these themes, and we don’t have to be limited to notions of Ultimate Selves and Beyond Canon to explore them. Such things are valuable, but they are only one retelling of the myth. If we are to make the next Homestuck, we must make our own.

I want to illustrate the space of possibility by offering some examples of works that explore similar themes. Note that I’m not saying these works were influenced by Homestuck in any way, but rather that they use some of the same tools to speak to the same questions, anxieties and concerns.

In trying to make what comes after Homestuck, we might consider:

Revolutionary Girl Utena, which foregrounds the archetype of the Prince as duelist, tyrant, and hero and dares its characters to break free from the false reality that shapes even these aspirations and dreams.

The Familiar by Mark Z. Danielewski, author of Houseof Leaves, whose core narrative concerns an twelve-year-old girl in thrall to an entity whose intentions are unclear but may be shaping the fabric of reality itself; which depicts the inner lives and uncertainties of her parents with just as much detail as they struggle, and sometimes fail, to make the right choices to help her; a story which, even in its incomplete form, explores a notion of a greater S.E.L.F that is not just you but also those who share something with you, where characters from other realities blur into transcendent archetypes in this one.

Digimon, perhaps the quintessential work of portal fantasy, not only Digimon Tamers, which steers the genre into a place of trauma, cosmic horror, and adults horrified by children saving the world, but also Digimon Adventure, which creates strong character arcs for eight very different children as they try to navigate a strange alien world, and shows us their struggle to reconcile with their parents as part of the process of understanding themselves.

The Neverending Story by Michael Ende,foundational text for Homestuck, which tells us not only about the rich possibilities inherent in reading oneself into fantasy worlds, but also the terrible potential for harm in making oneself an emperor over them.

Pale, by Wildbow, author of Worm, an urban fantasy story about three teenagers thrust into a world of magic and murder, a world where symbols literally create reality, where concepts like Carmine and Aurum have a powerful pull, where the Self is something that can be nourished or taken apart and put back together, a story where the parents are not just supporting cast but fully realized people forced to reckon with the ways in which they have deeply failed their children, and which contains perhaps the most thorough investigation of the question of “is it good for children to go on magical adventures?” ever committed to the page.

Heaven Will Be Mine, by Aevee Bee,in which the giant robots we pilot through space become the symbolic manifestation of our inner selves and our way of bringing about our ideal reality, and, relatedly, We Know the Devil, in which the repression of those selves causes them to burst out from us in terrifying and glorious new forms.

Crow Cillers, by Cate Wurtz, an often trauma-filled horror comic in which a group of kids and, eventually, adults, tries to fight back against an ever-present death cult that has its grips on every corner, all the while encountering Psyforms, beings made of pure mind, while characters from television and cartoons dance in the margins and all the while the line blurs between audience and art until it becomes difficult to tell who created who—a story that asks what it means to find meaning in stories when the corporate entities that own them are trying to devour us.

It's a tragically short list, I know. But perhaps it conveys some of the angles we might take.

We can also look at works that are known to have inspired by Homestuck. There aren’t many yet, but there are a few.

Undertale is famous for its Homestuck influences, with parallel timelines, an idea of agency that persists across them, and a contentious relationship between player and character, but for my part, I’m just as interested if not more so in Deltarune, which seems to be slowly building a grand thesis about portal fantasy, where the kids' adventures in the Dark Worlds seems to be offering them an escape and helping them become their best selves—but hints at a coming challenge to that simple worldview in the question of who’s really experiencing that escape.

The Locked Tomb, by Tamsin Muir – This is the big one, that really shows what building on Homestuckian themes can achieve. It turns out there really is an audience for weird aggro formalism in scifi publishing if you make it sufficiently gay. But smartly, like Homestuck, the Locked Tomb builds its weird mysteries gradually, adding on layer after layer on the solid foundation of characters we can follow and get invested in. There’s so much to notice – there’s the highly categorized teenagers involved in a murder feud, there’s the constant whiplash of humor and tragedy, there’s the endlessly open spaces in the story to interpret and project on to.

But to me, what stands out the most is the portrait of God and his court as every bit as emotionally chaotic as the sniping teenagers. You go to heaven, and God’s making out in the corner with his friend group, and you look for the adult in the room but the adults in the room don’t know what they’re doing and they never really did. It’s a portrait of the parents, it’s a portrait of the Ancestors, it’s a portrait of the gods of the new world, and it’s exquisite.

The Locked Tomb gives us a world at war with its own mythological narrative, rich with angst and irony. It’s a worthy successor to everything Homestuck was doing. It shows us how much these themes can say to us, and it gives us a hint at how powerful Homestuck's legacy might be.

7. THE APOTHEOSIS OF HOMESTUCK

There’s a lot of discussion about how to continue Homestuck. How to do it justice. What post-canon might look like, and what it might not. What fan comics, what fan fics, what semi-official works truly live up to the spirit of its characters and its multiverse.

To be clear, those discussions are awesome. I’m so glad those things exist, and it’s wonderful to see them unfolding.

But I don’t want the process to stop there. I'd be disappointed if it was only about adding to and re-articulating Homestuck itself.

I want this—

—This multifaceted, complicated, emotionally laden thing that is the experience of engaging with and creating with and interpreting Homestuck—

To go out into the world and to be infused into the world, to become waves spreading further and further. I want to experience the Homestuck artistic movement, the Homestuck school of thought. I want it to be an influence on the fiction of the coming generation of authors, and the next, and the next.

I want Homestuck to be one of those albums that's too obscure to be known by the general public, but everyone who listened to it went on to start an enormously successful band.

Homestuck can appear like a thing that was conjured out of the ether, but it isn’t. It’s a product of a particular time.

But that in itself is profound. When you create art, you reach back to all the things that have shaped you, and you listen to what the world around you needs, and you try to say what needs to be said. Which means you're a part of a history and culture that needs to say those things, which will be different from the things that needed to be told yesterday, and different from the stories that will be needed tomorrow.

There’s no otherworldliness to it, no platonic other reality. But for all I've talked about art being made of choices, there's still something transcendent here.

To make Homestuck—and to make art inspired by Homestuck—means being a node in a web formed of millions of people, where a light passes down the chain to you, and for the briefest of moments, you get to be filled with its presence, before it moves on to the next person in the chain.

That light isn't yours. Not really.

But at the same time, you do get to choose how that light manifests.

And to engage with that process consciously—to think deliberately about what we want to create—that gives us power and agency over that process, our sense of the world, and ourselves.

So let’s do this. Let’s make the thing that Homestuck is telling us can exist, the thing it’s paving the way for, the thing we know in our soul can come to be.

Let’s make the next Homestuck happen.

—Ari

POSTSCRIPT

“To put out a manifesto you must want: ABC

to fulminate against 1, 2, 3

to fly into a rage and sharpen your wings to conquer and disseminate little abcs and big abcs, to sign, shout, swear, to organize prose into a form of absolute and irrefutable evidence, to prove your non plus ultra and maintain that novelty resembles life… I write a manifesto and I want nothing, yet I say certain things, and in principle I am against manifestoes, as I am also against principles… I write this manifesto to show that people can perform contrary actions together while taking one fresh gulp of air…”

— Tristan Tzara, “Dada Manifesto 1918”

"The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence....the cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of re-turning to dust...This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia. It means both building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, space stories...I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess."

— Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto"

“What we need is works that are strong straight precise and forever beyond understanding... let each man proclaim: there is a great negative work of destruction to be accomplished. We must sweep and clean…to divest one's church of every useless cumbersome accessory; to spit out disagreeable or amorous ideas like a luminous waterfall, or coddle them—with the extreme satisfaction that it doesn't matter in the least…freedom: Dada Dada Dada, a roaring of tense colors, and interlacing of opposites and of all contradictions, grotesques, inconsistencies: LIFE.”

— Tristan Tzara, “Dada Manifesto 1918”

“These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they are not original with me,

If they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing, or next to nothing,

If they are not the riddle and the untying of the riddle they are nothing,

If they are not just as close as they are distant they are nothing.”

—Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

𖤓

#homestuck #homestuck analysis #what comes next after homestuck #the future of homestuck #homestuckian art #you are actually 100% sure walt whitman said that

[wishcamper]

Nesta, Interrupted: gendered perceptions of alcoholism in ACOSF

CW: addiction, sexual assault, gendered violence.

Creds: I’m a licensed counselor with a degree specialization in treating addiction. I have career experience with multiple modes of mental health, trauma, and substance use treatment in women-specific carceral, institutional, and healthcare settings. And I know anyone can come on the internet and say that, but I pinky promise.

The short version:

ACOSF stigmatizes alcoholism in line with cultural standards.

Western culture feels differently about female and male alcoholics due to systemic sexism, and thus treats them differently.

Women’s experience of alcoholism is often compounded by or even a result of systemic factors and intersectional identity.

Nesta’s treatment in ACOSF, while repugnant, is in many ways very accurate of attitudes today.

(I’ll be using “women/men” and “male/female” to denote cis afab and amab people. Little research exists on the experiences of queer, nonbinary and gender expansive considerations in addiction and recovery, which is a fuckin’ shame. Studies are also largely conducted with white participants due to enormous barriers to treatment for Black, Indigenous, and people of color, so this convo is inherently incomplete where it neglects those intersections.)

Okay, first things first: ACOSF is a book that stigmatizes alcoholism. I will not be taking questions.

The number one thing to understand is that in America, land of Miss Sarah, we are very bad at addiction treatment (tx). Why? Because our culture hates addicts has as stigma around addiction. And female alcoholics bear a very specific set of stigmas based in their identity.

In Susanna Kaysen’s memoir Girl, Interrupted , Kaysen’s character is institutionalized following a non-fatal suicide attempt. When evaluated, she’s diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, that bastion of diagnoses perfect for people (75% of whom are female-identified) who don’t fit into our polite definition of functioning. As the book unfolds, she reflects on how (white) women are often pathologized when they buck against systems of oppression that create the dysfunction in them in the first place. That is not to say other women in the institution are not genuinely in need of help, nor that mental illness in women is always from a systemic wound. But it’s crucial in the treatment of female addiction and mental health disorders to considered the systemic factors of gendered violence and patriarchy, and the attitudes we hold about women who struggle with drinking.

Think about female alcoholics in media. If she’s young, she’s a loose, reckless sl*t looking for trouble and deserving of the reality check when she finds it (Amy Schumer in Trainwreck, Lindsay Lohan in general). Or if the woman are older, they are discarded, or gross, or pathetic, or evil like anyone Faye Dunaway played or Eminem’s mom in 8 Mile (deep cut lol). Men are afforded a much larger spectrum of experiences and struggles - Ernest Hemingway, Leaving Las Vegas, Sideways, the dude from A Star is Born, Frank from Shameless (brilliant), frat boys, blue collar workers, introspective tortured artists, fucking IRON MAN. I could go on forever, but I hope that illustrates the depth and diversity of male-centric stories of alcoholism not often afforded to women.

One of the most empathetic and accurate portrayals of female alcoholism, in my opinion, is in the show Sharp Objects (the book, too, but actually witnessing it makes a difference). We see Amy Adams’ Camille swig vodka from an Evian bottle while fending off vicious, veiled attacks from her verbally and emotionally abusive mother and experiencing flashbacks of teenage sexual assault. We watch her struggle to find emotional safety in her conservative hometown, both wanting to fit in and get out in order to survive. We GET why she drinks and I have trouble blaming her for it even as she wreaks havoc on herself and others. We can see her clawing just to make it out alive, and alcohol is the tool she’s using to do it, for better or worse.

Which is where Nesta enters the chat. When we get our first glimpse of her alcohol use is ACOFAS, it’s portrayed as something everyone knows about but that she’s still mostly keeping it together - her dress is clean, her hair is neatly braided, she doesn’t need a chaperone to show up to a family event. The deterioration between ACOFAS and ACOSF is alarming, and we know that alcoholism is a progressive condition so that tends to happen. Was there a particular trigger? That’s hard to say. Solstice certainly didn’t help, especially with the pressures to perform and conform to the standards of the Inner Circle aka the people in power. I imagine seeing her sisters bouncey and reveling in the world that stole them and killed their father was probably.. tough, to say the least. The barge party seems to be a turning point as well, though this one is more confusing to me. But given the child abuse, extreme poverty, sexual assault, kidnapping, bodily violation, witnessing her father’s murder, almost dying, WAR - and that’s not even to mention essentially becoming a refugee - it would be amazing if she DIDN’T drink. She 100% has complex trauma, and is looking for ways to cope.

No one with full capacity dreams of becoming an addict when they grow up. Addiction, in my professional and personal experience, is largely a strategy for coping with a deeper wound. People don’t drink to feel bad. They drink to feel good, and to survive. Nesta herself is drinking to survive, but it’s having the unfortunate side effect of killing her at the same time. As she slides into active addiction, the thought of her own death may even be comforting, and alcohol in that way is her friend. (There's some interesting research right now framing addiction as an attachment disorder, but I don't know enough to speak on it much.)

So she obviously needs help. That’s not a debate. What is a debate is how the IC should best go about intervening. A variation on the Johnson method is used in ACOSF (the one from the show Intervention) and appears to be successful only because they threaten her if she doesn’t comply. This method has mixed data to support it, and while it’s very good at getting people into tx, there is a higher relapse rate for those who receive it (1). The “family” gathers and tells her the ways she’s hurt them and tell her the consequences if she doesn’t seek the help they’re offering. And again, so many of their reason are the effects on THEM, how she’s making THEM look, not her pain.

The IC’s ignorance and dismissal of her alcoholism in ACOSF is frankly mystifying. Why do they intervene on all the drinking and sexing, anyway? It seems like they’ve been fine enough with it up to this point. But now it's gone too far, not because of her illness but because she is embarrassing them. And I don’t know about you, but between Cassian apparently fucking half of Velaris and Mor’s heavily documented emotional drinking, that’s hard to square. It makes it feel much more likely that they don’t like the way she is coping, that she is not fitting into their picture of who she’s supposed to be. This picture is inherently gendered, because Prythian society and those who live in it have explicit and implicit expectations of gender roles, whether they’ll admit it or not. Cassian and Mor are playing their roles well; Nesta is not.

That leads me to believe it is NOT all about her, but the systemic and internal factors influencing their perception of her and the ways she’s struggling. It’s distasteful to them for her, a female, to be deteriorating this publicly, despite the fact that her very identity makes it harder for her to function in the patriarchy of Prythian. We hear almost exclusively about sexual violence against women, aside from 2 male characters. Past or present assault of women is a major plot point on multiple occasions (Mor, Gwyn, Nesta, Emerie, Rhysands mom and sister, the lady of autumn, Cassians mom, Azriels mom, I could go on). But something about the way Nesta is contending with that is unacceptable, and I believe it’s because she’s not trying to cover up her dysfunction. In prythian, we keep these things hidden- Mor’s assault is never processed in full, Azriel’s mom seems to be alone at Rosehall, priestesses are literally hidden inside a mountain for centuries. Women process trauma alone and in the dark, but Nesta is in the light and she is loud. She is refusing to hide her problems, and the IC don’t like that, whether they realize it or not.

So why don’t the IC understand this? Like I said earlier, as a culture we hate addicts, or what they stand for, in very much the same way I think we hate people experiencing homelessness. We convince ourselves it was a series of bad choices that led someone where they are, choices we would never make because we are smart, smarter than them. We believe are more in control than that. We can prevent bad things from happening to us because we are good, because we are better than whoever it’s happening to. But the reality is almost ALL of us are one hospital stay away from homelessness, just as all of us are one trauma away from addiction. And with female addicts, we have another layer of expecting women to only struggle nicely and quietly, or to go away. Intersectional factors are at play here, too: white women are much more likely to have alcoholism attributed to mental health and trauma factors, where people of color often suffer the same addiction being more associated with crime. You can imagine how that plays out differently.

So what is the effect of all this? Gendered expectations lead to not only external stigma around addiction and tx, but also to internalized stigma which can limit willingness to seek tx. (2) Many social forces encourage women to drink and discourage them from telling anyone. Factors such as poverty, family planning, access to education, racial discrimination, and location can make services harder to access. Internally, women are more likely to enter treatment with less confidence in their ability to succeed, but report more strengths and more potential to grow recovery strengths during and following tx. For men, the pattern is reversed (3). And women have more successful tx episodes overall when gendered considerations are a part of the design and implementation of services (4). For Nesta, the effect is that she’s forced into treatment and copes by having hate sex with her ex and changing herself to conform to her family’s expectations while the House and the Valkyrie’s actually take care of her. I do not see how Sarah drew the line from there to recovery, I truly don’t. If anything, she recovers in spite of the ICs intervention, not because of it.

In summary, Nesta Archeron deserved better. Nesta deserved the same compassion the book gives to men who are struggling, and it’s a reflection of not just the book’s culture but the author’s culture that she doesn’t get it. Female alcoholics are worthy of treatment that integrates their identities, as those identities are often essential factors contributing to their addiction. What's shown in ACOSF is a reality many women live, and they shouldn't have to.

Barry Loneck, James A. Garrett & Steven M Banks (1996) The Johnson Intervention and Relapse During Outpatient Treatment, The American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse, 22:3, 363-375, DOI: 10.3109/00952999609001665

Groshkova T, Best D, White W. The Assessment of Recovery Capital: Properties and psychometrics of a measure of addiction recovery strengths. Drug Alcohol Rev. 2013;32(2):187–94.

Best D, Vanderplasschen W, Nisic M. Measuring capital in active addiction and recovery: the development of the strengths and barriers recovery scale (SABRS). Subst Abuse Treat, Prev Policy. 2020;15(1):1–8.

Polak, K., Haug, N.A., Drachenberg, H.E. et al. Gender Considerations in Addiction: Implications for Treatment. Curr Treat Options Psych 2, 326–338 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40501-015-0054-5

#nesta archeron #pro nesta #alcoholism #mental health #sexism #acotar #acosf #stigma #rehabilitation #prythian university #sjm critical

[not-goldy]

I’m wondering if Jimin loves JK and I say this because all I ever see is him flirting with other members and rejecting Jk, flinging his arm off or suffering out of his hold and then he goes and rubs RMs thighs, or hugs Tae or Yoongi? It baffles me, and it’s so sad to see JKs dejected face. Bless him.

Hmmm🥲

Found: Jk not feeling that Kwenchana

Not gonna lie your insecurity is adorable 🤭🤭🤭🤭

But you don't have to wonder. you have to take Jimin's word for it. He says he loves Jungkook therefore he loves him. Right???

And since Jk keeps following him around I'd assume he feels that good good vibes off Jimin cos Jungkook is a no bs kinda guy and will dip fast if he the energy is off. Coughing in Tae Kook. Cough. Cough.

If you don't think it's Romantic love between them at least don't question that base love. Cos that would be weird af. After everything Jimin has done for him💀

By every thing I don't mean the constant cheering him on like he's his number one fan, speaking highly of him, supporting his career- listen, if a man can risk his hair follicles to dye his hair Golden to support another man's album release MARRY HIM. cuff him. Get the bands on him Jump the broom invoke the spirits of your ancestors and let them witness the I do.

But noo, I'm not talking about that kinda love.

I'm not talking about the absolute fear and panic in his eyes when he hears Jungkook has passed out on stage, or how quick he drops everything to go and see him.

I'm not talking about the concern in his voice when he says "Jungkook you need to pace yourself." When he feels JK is cutting it close.

I'm not talking about studying him so well that he knows just how to confort him when he's nervous

Or being confused as to whom to give the last bite of food to between staff and Jungkook- just so you know Jimin loves everyone but if it comes down to Saving you or Jungkook- do bid your loved ones farewell cos it will never be you💀

I'm not talking about him nurturing Jungkook and providing a safe space around him for Jungkook to share his vulnerability with.

I'm not talking about Jimin offering him his companionship and filling him with laughter to make his heart merry and ease his troubles

I'm not talking about Jimin protecting Jungkook from fans who body shame him but also looking out for him at the company and going out of the way to insist the members respect Jungkook's choices and hearing his voice when he makes contributions to conversations.

And while these days Jungkook has the audacity to insist on being heard at the table especially around cameras, when he needed to be heard at his most vulnerable years Jimin looked out for him.

But I'm not talking bout none of those.

I'm talking about the specific ways Jimin tailors his love to fit Jungkook's needs. Because at the end of the day that's what truly matters.

It's not about YOUR conception of love and YOUR notion of love. It's about WHAT JUNGKOOK UNDERSTANDS TO BE LOVE.

To that I think Jimin loves him when he allows him to be his own man first and foremost. He loves him when inspite of being two years his senior he allows Jungkook to feel just as important and equal.

I think he loves him when he respects him as a man a colleague and an artist.

I think he loves him when he stands by him and trust that he knows what he's doing no matter what.

I think he loves him when he holds his hands after a major scandal and stroll through the airports with him knowing the last thing his pr and solo stans want is for him to be caught in the cross fires.

I think he loves him when he puts in the effort to understand him so he doesn't feel misunderstood around him.

I think he loves him when he is transparent with him and let him in as much as he let's him in.

I think he loves him when he allows him to take care of him and not shut him out by constantly guarding his heart and secrets around him.

There's a mutually shared degree of vulnerability between them and I think that's love too.

Bye

[howlingdemon13]

Betelgeuse I was hugely inspired by a bunch of artists and fic writers in the fandom, as well as a few monster artists who specialize in combining different creatures into beasts that actually look cohesive. I’m not sure how well I was able to execute the vision here, but I’m really proud of it regardless! DiamondZ, nonbinary-arsonist, stinkyhorsebitch, and arbuzyansky were the main catalysts for this, so definitely take a peek at their work or give them a follow. I was initially going to submit this guy for a staff art show, but I don't want to rush the rest of it, so I'm just going to post what I have finished here. Design notes are under the cut.

In earlier drafts, I was looking into more serpentine-looking designs since Beetlejuice turns into a snake in the film. Some of the concepts I was leaning towards looked like either a lindworm or centipede, but I think mammalian fits Musicaljuice since he’s “softer” in a lot of aspects compared to his film counterpart. I may look into playing with a more snake/bug-like design in the future. Beetlejuice’s overall look is heavily inspired by Chalicotherium goldfussi, which were huge Miocene ungulates that are distantly related to things like rhinos and tapirs. Given that Beetlejuice is super old, I felt like an extinct animal was a proper fit. On a more personal level, I really like the way these guys look and it was easier to rework their body plan into something that looks carnivorous. That, and I wasn’t really vibing with other mammalian body plans, especially because I wanted something that was close in shape to a human without being apelike. Huge herbivores also have larger stomachs, which I feel is a better analogue to Beetlejuice’s body type. You’ll have to pry that man’s curves from my cold, dead hands. All his forms are chubby and soft, and I’ll fight you over it in the Denny’s parking lot. I also added some hyaenid traits, especially for the head shape and teeth. Hyenas are very social animals (like Beej, except no one can see him), and striped hyenas and aardwolves specifically have these tall crests of fur that run down their backs and back legs that they can raise and lower to communicate. I’d argue it’s fitting since Beetlejuice’s hair sticks up at odd angles and communicates his mood (intentional or not). And hyenas laugh. Granted they giggle when they’re stressed, but it still fits. I modeled his stripes off of both species as well. His hind paws, ears, and tail are all based off of those of opossums. Beej is very “trash animal”-coded, and I felt like the opossum traits would fit better with the Chalicotherium body than something like a raccoon or skunk. I felt a little bad about not giving him a ton of bug traits, so I tried to add mandibles, but they just weren’t looking right in earlier design drafts. I gave him a bunch of small eyes to compensate, but making him look buggy wasn’t the only reason for the extra eyes. We know from early drafts of the musical script that Beetlejuice’s last name is Shoggoth. These creatures are mentioned by Lovecraft in Fungi from Yuggoth and At the Mountains of Madness, but I’m not sure if this implies that Beej is a shoggoth, or if it more so refers to him being able to manifest multiple limbs/shapeshift/warp reality like one. In that same vein, the mouth in his chest is mostly to look scary and is just another fun little Lovecraftian trait that I felt was needed. Same to the tendrils, but that’s also a common fandom trait that is pretty much canon (to me) at this point. I might rb this with headcanons later on.

#beetlejuice #demon beetlejuice #beetlejuice the musical #howie's art

[chrollohearttags]

𝖗𝖊𝖛𝖊𝖗𝖇 • 𝖊. 𝖏𝖆𝖊𝖌𝖊𝖗: chapter four

synopsis: after a successful performance at Rolling Loud, (y/n) is approached by a member of the talent agency with a proposition that she can’t refuse. Because of this, she finds herself sacrificing her prior plans with EJ. Where she fears that she’s pushed the rapper away. But passing time and building tensions cause the pair to reveal their true feelings that they never got to reveal in person.

prev chapter >>> next chapter

cw: language, mentions of alcohol and weed, sexual themes, phone sex, masturbation, dirty talk

wc: 7.4k

📝: I know you guys have been waiting patiently on this one and I promise I’m not tired of it or anything, full fic chapters just take a bit more time and I didn’t want to rush or half ass it. So I hope y’all enjoy.

“And what would you say if I told you I wanted you just as bad..would you hold it against me?” “When I want to fuck the shit out of you? Not at all..”

“What exactly do you have in mind?..”

the first words to fly from (y/n)’s mouth amid this mystery man’s proposition. True enough, he may have been a representative on behalf of your talent agency but you didn’t know him from a hole in the ground. And why come here of all places? Wouldn’t this be better suited for an office. Still, you’d hear him out for the hell of it. “We want you to star in one of our artist’s new music videos. He begins rolling out his album this week and he’ll be dropping the lead single. We figured what better way to get people talking than to have a rising star like you alongside him.”

what should have been a compliment seemed a bit backhanded in your eyes. Naturally, it made sense to have someone popular as yourself next to him to garner attention but you couldn’t help but think that he was picturing you as more of a controversy piece than anything. Homie hopping through different rappers was not a good look. leaning against the doorway, you’d furrow your brow a bit, folding your arms as well. He could sense that you were a little hesitant of the idea but he was sure he’d sell you on the idea eventually.“I’ll be honest, that performance tonight was incredible. What you did out there was beyond words. It’s only been an hour and the internet is going crazy. You’re a big deal, miss (l/n)..I wouldn’t take it lightly. In fact, he specifically requested you.”

for a moment, you’d sit with his words and just ponder on what he meant. Naturally, you were a bit skeptical that this mysterious man just approached you out of nowhere and asked to be in a music video. The problem wasn’t exactly the offer itself as you were deeply flattered but rather the fact that it was only being extended to you..“No offense, Mr. Smith, but I wasn’t the only one on that stage tonight. My girls were equally as amazing so where is their video shoot?” Truthfully, he couldn’t argue with you there and he understood why it came off a bit shady but there was another part he hadn’t told you. Merely chuckling, Erwin leaned over against a nearby stand. “I agree, everyone has done so wonderful. But simply put..you’re our client and the group as a collective, is not. Truth is, we want to get the ball rolling on this as soon as tomorrow morning. The second he’s done here, he’ll be boarding a flight and headed to L.A and we hope you’ll join him. The way I see it, the more the merrier so if the other lovely ladies would like to tag along and star in the shoot, we’d be happy to have them. Whether you decide to invite everyone or do it on your own..you only have an hour to make your decision. We know it’s sudden notice so we’ll pay you quite amicably..twice as much as the club gig plus full expenses covered. We want to ensure you’re taken care of. So, does that sound like a deal?” after hearing those terms, your mind was all but made up! You had made a pretty good grip off of that club appearance plus the brand deals that followed after so to double that..you were game. Looking up at him, (y/n) flashed the big time executive a smile and assured him that not only would you be there but you’d have the rest of the crew with you. with that, the two of you parted ways for the time being. Leaving you to make a couple calls and get things in order. you couldn’t believe you had been presented with something like this and that this artist had requested you personally! It felt like such a huge honor. Although, it did beg the question….

who the hell was the rapper you’d be working with?! He never told you that part. Surely, it couldn’t have been EJ because he definitely would’ve said something or asked you himself. Which still left a handful of artists signed to them that could be performing tonight. Speaking of, the one person’s set you wanted to see was up next so you’d shoot a text to your group chat, telling all of them to call you immediately and that it was important.

hopefully, they'll answer on time and you could make a break back to the hotel to get packed and board that flight in less than an hour. You had never been on such a tight schedule but it was a sign of things to come you supposed.

maybe you were finally about to ascend into that next level. That your star would be rising a lot sooner than you thought. Now was no time for contemplation anyways. You had to go get this money!

a few moments later, your phone would begin ringing and it was Niesha calling. A complete shocker that she was the one to pick up. But it’s when you swiped over and the video connected, that you’d be greeted by all of their drunken, smiling faces. “(Y/NNNN), hey bookie. What’s wrong?” Niesha, slightly slurring her words as loud music and lights thumped behind her in the background. It seemed like they were having a good time and you hated to disturb that but this was important.

“Hey, listen. I know it’s soon but can y’all make it to the hotel in an hour? I just got us a good ass gig. They said they’ll fly us out—“

however, before you could finish your little rundown, you were interrupted by the sounds of faint groaning. “C’monnn, (y/n). We just got done working. Take a break for a little bit. You’re gonna run yourself in the ground, baby.”

now normally, your best friend never led you astray or gave you some dumb advice but with this much riding on it, you were not trying to hear that bullshit! “Y’all, I’m serious. The man from my talent agency just offered me a spot in a music video and said that if we can all be there, we can all be in it.”

even though you were speaking, there was no way she or anyone else was hearing you. Nor did they care to, honestly..that’s when the more level headed member Brianne jumped in and sounded off. It just wasn’t with the result you expected.

“(Y/N), listen..can’t believe I’m saying this but Niesha’s right. We need a break. You’ve been working real hard and so have we. It’s Rolling Loud weekend. It’s some good parties, go enjoy them and enjoy yourself. It can wait.”

“No, Bri. This can’t wait! Y’all, please. I’m trying to get us paid. You know imma break bread with y’all first.”

that’s when you’d see those pink curls step back into frame and that you were about to get unfiltered advice from the one who always gave it to you straight..

“(Y/N), baby. I’m sorry. I’m sure it’s cool and a legit offer and all but we have three performances in the next month that you have us booked for. You gotta give yourself some time to rest and have fun. Bitch, life is too short to be working all the time. What good is some money if you ain’t here to spend it?” She had a good point and you hated it..but still…you had to take the chance!

“Nieshaaaa, don’t do this.”

“I’m not doing nothing. You know I’m right..”

just then, you’d see another person enter the frame and they were calling for Niesha..pulling her into a bunch of kisses and gently grabbing her waist when they did. “I’ve been looking for you.” And she looked thrilled to see them too. It was the blonde dude from earlier and it was safe to assume she had been doing more than ‘talking’ to him.

“Girl, as you can see I’m kinda busy. Imma call you later, bitch. Byeee.”

before you could stop her, she’d disconnect the line and you were left looking dumbfounded…that was utterly pointless. There was no way you’d get them all corralled and of coherent mind in an hour. As they were right now, they’d do nothing but give Pole Assassins and yourself a bad rap.

letting out a deep sigh, you’d regroup and cut to plan b; taking this gig solo! You wanted to share this with them but you couldn’t beg four grown women to act right. Besides, they had been going hard and you admittedly had been pushing them so maybe they had earned a break, even if you didn’t want one.

just then, your never ending train of thought was derailed by the sounds of loud screaming and chants. Along with that same voice that had you swooning not too long ago.

“Rolling Loud, make some fucking noise!”

EJ’s set had already begun and you didn’t want to miss a single second. It was very rare that he’d even make an appearance and judging by the volume of those shrieks, everyone shared the same sentiment. Rushing over to a nearby tv screen streaming the performance, you’d see him moving across, hype as ever and completely in his element.

one of his newest singles that had been making its rounds was his first track and of course, you knew every word. He left you in awe every single time. That’s when another realization crossed your mind and crushed you all the same…

the two of you had plans! Plans to hang out and hopefully get to know one another better..something you had been looking forward to but obviously, work came first. You couldn’t just abandon such a big opportunity for a man, not even someone as famous as him.

not only would it just be utterly stupid but you’d be a grade A hypocrite as well. Soon, your smile began to fade and the excitement you felt listening to his voice faded to white noise. Right now, sticking around wasn’t an option. You’d only further hurt your own feelings, thinking about someone who was nothing more than an acquaintance to you and time was getting shorter. This was far more important.

taking one final glance back at the screen, you’d then shoot off to grab your things. You could make it back to the hotel in about ten minutes, get your things packed and meet them in the lobby before time was even up. You wanted to show the agency you were serious about building your brand. Anything else would have to wait..

“I’m sorry, EJ. I’m sure you, of all people, understand what it’s like. I’m sure we’ll kick it again soon but right now, I gotta go.”

══✿══╡°˖✧✿✧˖°╞══✿════✿══╡°˖✧✿✧˖°

12:35am, departing from Miami International Airport

Just as Mr. Smith had promised, you found yourself boarding the steps of the private Boeing 747 jet a little after midnight. For a while, you’d be saying goodbye to Miami and headed to the second infamous Sunshine State.

what awaited you was a mystery, as it’d be your first time doing a music video. Not only that but starring in one as well. All of these huge opportunities are coming your way and yet, you couldn’t help but feel a bit of anxiety and guilt. You knew that it was of no fault of your own that your girls chose to stay behind but you weren’t the type to switch up on the people you started with just because of a little bit of money. But now wasn’t the time to sit and contemplate your decisions. You had to go into work mode and get your mind right. Once you made it to the top step and onto the mahogany carpets of the plane, you were greeted by two faces you had only seen in pictures and friendly gestures. “So you did make it..man, I’m so glad.”

it was none other than rapper Prince Cee, aka Connie Springer. He, along with the man sitting across from him, Onya The God, were both a part of the same collective as EJ and were super talented. You were a fan of their whole group and couldn’t believe that it was him requesting that you be in his video. Although you hadn’t been formally introduced, neither of them had a problem standing up to greet you with a giant hug. Dressed in all of their designer clothes, chains swinging from around their necks and smelling like Baccarat cologne, you couldn’t help but shudder a bit..was this man and his whole crew this fine?!

“Well don’t be a stranger, lil mama. Go ahead and get comfortable, we got a long flight and I know you probably tired.” and he’d be correct. After being in seven inch stilettos for nearly an hour, twirling nearly twenty feet in the air, exhausted would be an understatement. How your girls had the energy to go party after performing, was insane. But you’d accept Onya’s offer and take the third seat across from them. You had only been on a few planes in your lifetime but this was nothing like you had ever seen. Red leather seats that resembled sofas, foot rests, silver buckets housing unopened bottles of champagne and a spread of delicacies that they were more than happy to share. just then, you’d hear the pilot signaling for takeoff and you’d feel the plane began to lift up.

“Yeah. I appreciate you guys inviting me for this..I honestly can’t believe it.”

“Ain’t no problem, baby. You was our first pick when they asked us. We know it was a little bit late to but we happy you decided to come.”

Connie, who was in the midst of opening some champagne, poured you all a glass once the fluid fizzled out. After such a successful performance and the beginning of his album rollout, he was going to enjoy this tiny break and celebrate to his heart's content. Just for the occasion, he had been given a new chain that was currently laced around his neck.

meanwhile, you sat cross legged away from the two gentlemen, taking a bite of some snacks before engaging in the conversation. “What about your homegirls though? They didn’t want to come?”

to which you’d simply shake your head as you sipped your drink. “They had something else they were working on so they couldn’t make it.” Not wanting to let these strangers in on their laxed attitude and refusal to show. You didn’t hold it against them. If they wanted to rest and play, that was fine by you. But nothing was going to stop your grind.

“That’s too bad. Would’ve loved to had the whole crew but we gone have fun, promise. If it’s anything we can do to make you feel comfortable or make it easier, just let us know. We wanna take care of you.”

if it were one thing you were incredibly grateful for, it was these guys’ kind hospitality. You were admittedly a little scared to take this leap alone but you didn’t have to be so closed off. They were like coworkers; employed under the exact same talent agency as yourself but to them?

“Yeah, we like family now!” Connie, who had raised his glass to propose a toast on behalf of yourself, their performance and the pending success of the album. Prompting both you and Onya to follow suit. You were so excited for what was to come. There was a nine hour trek to California so it was best to become friendly.

the three of you eventually began talking, drinking, listening to music and just having a good time. They were both so respectful and nice. Complete opposite of what the media portrayed of their personas. They asked about your pole dancing, told you how crazy you guys’ dance went and that they’d love to have you on stage with them some time. it made you feel so much better about things and that you felt as if you made the right decision. However, it wasn’t until he brought up a mutual acquaintance that the guilt kicked right back in.

it was when you asked about what type of concept he was going for in the shoot and what to expect that it came about..

“Well we just wanted this shit to look like one big party..cameos from all our friends…have some pretty women slide through. Just have fun. We even tried to get EJ in it but his ass don’t even know how to just relax and play.”

EJ! The same EJ you had just stood up without so much as a word! How the hell could you have forgotten that he had just invited you out.

taking a hard swallow, (y/n) tossed the remainder of your champagne down your throat and kept your eyes focused on the two of them, so as not to appear nervous. You were incredibly frustrated with yourself right now. “EJ was going to be in the video?”

“That’s what we had planned. We asked him to get on this flight with us and come out but he said he had something more important to do. That he had plans tonight and tomorrow.”

right then, your heart damn near sank..you were almost certain said plans were hanging out with you and selfishly, you just abandoned them to chase a dollar. Could’ve at least had the courtesy to apologize but with you all thirty thousand feet in the air, you doubted any correspondence would make it through to him at this altitude.

the best you could do was perform some damage control when you landed and try to apologize. But with someone like him, excuses probably didn’t mean much. He struck you as the type of person who was very strict in his boundaries and you had once, maybe twice as best to do him dirt before dismissing you altogether.

“I’m telling you, that man don’t know nothing but work. Only way he’ll pop out at a club is if they pay him. He won’t do parties, it’s always serious with his ass.” Connie expressed as he rubbed the back of his neck, seemingly uncomfortable with his friend’s behavior.

“Is it that bad?” Pretending to be oblivious to his behavior, even though you witnessed and heard it from his mouth firsthand. Chuckling as you took a bite of a strawberry.

“He wouldn’t even let me record on the first day because I showed up five minutes late and he hated the song! Kicked me out and told me don’t come back until I had something better.”

now you couldn’t help but laugh a bit because he himself had told you that he didn’t play when it came to recording and producing for people. He hated having his time wasted and he said from his own admission: “I won’t put my name on some bullshit. I refuse. Waste my time with some dumbass song and I’ll put you out.”

it would take only one conversation to realize how much of a no nonsense person he was. So it came as no surprise that he didn’t want to participate in this. As to why he didn’t want to go to his little friend’s get together and why he preferred to chill with one person. Which made you feel all the more worse because he looked so excited to hang out.

“Don’t worry, he’s not as bad as you think. He’s actually pretty cool when you get to know him. He just stays to himself and don’t really be with all the drama. Would be nice to see his ass relax though. Be making me fucking nervous..gone fuck around and have a heart attack before he turns thirty.”

Onya, shaking his head as he drank the remainder of his glass. It seemed that these dudes cared deeply for Eren, as your friends did for you. When they told you to take it easy, they meant it from a place of love. Not of laziness..maybe when you got back to Miami, you’d take some time off and possibly get a rain check for your ‘date’. That’s if he’d even talk to you again!

for now, you’d enjoy the venture through the skies and the remainder of your long night.

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meanwhile, a blacked out sedan transporting the Grammy award winning rapper was slowly peeling from the parking lot of the arena when it was bum rushed by a bunch of rabid fangirls. “We love you, EJ!” “Marry me!” Could be heard from behind the glass as Eren attempted to ignore it. This was all but inevitable every time he made a public appearance. Hence why he preferred to stay home! He had just finished up his surprise headline performance and it was every bit of the amazing experience everyone knew it would be.

he had ‘crashed’ his friends’ performance, coming out during him and Prince Cee’s joint song..only to steal the show and finish out the night with a few of his own tracks.

somehow, it always ended like this. Him chasing women off with a stick and not being interested in the slightest. “You’re a lucky man, Mr. Jaeger. Not many people can say they have women chasing them down the street.” Currently, he was sitting spread legged in his seat, nonchalantly igniting his blunt as his assistant chimed off.

he wasn’t concerned about them at all. Half of them just hopeless groupies; probably married or had a man and was hoping he’d snatch them up instead. It wasn’t uncommon for artists to hook up with fans but he’d never do such a thing and cross that boundary. Besides, he didn’t want something everyone else could have.

“Mhm. If you say so.” He really wasn’t in the mood to entertain anyone right now. Except the one person he had invited out..yet, when he left, there was no sign of (y/n) anywhere. He assumed that you’d be waiting for him backstage or in his dressing room. Perhaps it was wishful thinking of a dynamic that didn’t really exist between you two like that.

maybe he had been a bit too forward with inviting you to kick it with him..seeing that he was visibly annoyed, his faithful assistant Floch tried to change the subject.

“So Mr. Springer has already left to shoot his video, he told me that he wished you would’ve joined them but he knew you’d probably decline..” as he was rambling, Eren just peered down at his phone, mindlessly scrolling at nothing..hoping he’d get a response from the one person he wanted to hear from. Not paying him any attention until he said something that piqued the artist’s interest.

“They left with some girl who’s supposed to be the lead. She was stunning too..I seen Mr. Smith from the talent agency talking to her. I think she was one of those pole dancer girls from earlier.” Just then, his head rose up slowly and he’d shoot him a glare.

“What did you say?” And by his tone, Floch became terrified because he wasn’t sure if he had something wrong.

“I—uh, just saw Mr. Smith talking to her. Apparently Mr. Springer asked her to be in his video so she left.”

“What’s her name? The redhead suddenly shifted in his seat; he had to think about it for a moment but just then it clicked as he recalled seeing a name inscribed on the back of her jacket.

“(Y-y/n)..I believe.”

just then, he felt a feeling that had never registered with him before..was this sadness? Jealousy?…less known over a woman?! He barely even knew this chick and here he was getting possessive and upset that she left to go be in a music video with one of his friends.

and he knew Floch wasn’t saying any of this to be condescending or funny because he had no idea about the little bond that had formed or the rumors that were circulating. He was a true professional to his core and made it his mission to stay out of his boss’ private affairs.

however, Eren was losing his mind a little. On one hand, if he became irate, it’d give away the fact that he had developed a bit of a crush on the influencer. On the other, he couldn’t believe that Connie would ask for you specifically, especially when he was somewhat aware of what went down.

“..I see.” nodding his head and glaring aimlessly from the window. Letting a smirk crack across his lips eventually..hell, all he could do now was charge it to the game and go on about his business. No time to be jealous or get in his feelings. Instead… “Hey Floch. Set me up a flight to Atlanta. First thing in the morning.” For now, he had to get you off his mind and he knew just the way how.

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page break and time skip

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“Beautiful! Love it, guys.” the voice of the video director echoed through a megaphone at studio set six. You all had just finished out the remainder of the music video you were shooting. Things were wrapping up and it was yet another task you could check off your goal list. Saying you were the star of a music video was going to be huge.

“Aye, (y/n). That was perfect. Thank you so much, beautiful.” “Yeah, you did your thing, ma. We appreciate you.”

the two gentlemen you had attended with came over and greeted you with giant hugs as a show of their gratitude. It had been a few days since you touched down in Los Angeles and it was nothing like you had pictured. Then again, you were here partaking in work rather than leisure. You were behind studio walls instead of walking Rodeo so naturally, it all looked different. But it wasn’t all too bad.

plus, with the hefty paycheck that Mr. Smith had deposited to you, you had no complaints!

“No, thank you both for inviting me. This has been so much fun and I can’t thank you enough for the opportunity.”

needless to say, the shoot was a success. It involved a pool party, riding a motorcycle and you even dancing on Prince Cee’s lap. And you couldn’t lie..it had been a hell of a long time since you’d had a man grip your waist like that so you enjoyed that part a little too much! It’d be a shock for sure when it was finally released to the world to see yourself being felt up by him.

but this was just business and nothing beyond it. People do that all the time. Once they finish all the editing, it’d be released later this week, along with two new songs from the duo and you were so excited for both of them. You had no doubt that his album would be a huge hit. You were truly rooting for them.

“It’s all good. Like we said, we family now and you did us a big favor. Let us take you to dinner tonight and show you around. I know you said you ain’t never been out here before so we gotta take you to one of the best spots out here.”

“I’d really like that, y’all. Thank you so much.”

with that, plans for the evening had been set in motion. It would be nice to actually get out and enjoy LA before you had to leave..and who knew the next time you’d be able to visit? It was around seven at night over here on the west coast and you couldn’t help but wonder how your girls were spending their night. You had heard from them earlier in the form of a FaceTime call..all of them congratulating you on the video and saying they couldn’t wait to see it. meanwhile, they had been partying nonstop. Sailing on yachts, going to clubs and Niesha was being pampered by her little producer boyfriend. You were truly happy for them and loved to see their smiles.

but you also couldn’t help but to think about how a certain someone was doing. The second you touched down, you sent Eren a text apologizing for standing him up. Explaining that it wasn’t intentional but you had a job come up and if he were still interested in hanging out once you got back to Florida, you’d love to.

however, it went unanswered and you felt terrible. He wasn’t like everyone else nowadays. You couldn’t go stalk his social media or see what he was up to because he was so tight lipped about his life. Which you couldn’t fault him for at all but it didn’t stop you from worrying. You guys were constantly texting and even talked on the phone. Per your last conversation, you seemed fairly close but maybe he was mad at you. Someone like him didn’t put too much stake in people so you were probably not even on his mind now.

which sucked to think about…because he was a lot of fun. He made you laugh and not to mention, his playful flirting invoked feelings in you that hadn’t ever been there with anyone else. You saw his comments he had left on your last video from Rolling Loud and it made you laugh a little. “👀 damn.” Because the two of you knew it was a troll but everyone else was scrambling to make him out to be a simp.

“Alright, everyone! Thanks so much for your hard work. We’ll see you all next time.”

with that, the entire crew gave themselves a round of applause and proceeded to clear out of the set room. You’d probably head back to your hotel, get changed and grab a late night dinner at one of these lofty, upscale restaurants with the two guys. However, nothing could have prepared you for what was really about to take place when you made it back to your room and retired for the evening. Things were about to get much more heated than you expected.

two hours later…

it was nearly ten o'clock when you finally made it back to the Chateau Marmont; one of the city’s finest resorts and where you had been resting these past few days. It was beautiful..rich with history and decor. It was an absolute haven and although you were enjoying all of the amenities it had to offer, you were most looking forward to being swaddled up in the comfortable bed. Having settled in for the evening, (y/n) began removing your makeup and getting ready for bed. Connie and Onya were nice enough to treat you to a five star dinner, letting you order whatever you wanted and being all around gentlemen.

but it was as you were putting your hair up that you’d see your phone ringing and it was a FaceTime call.. “..at this time of night?” Questioning as you went to accept the call with a furrowed brow and confused expression on your face. Still, you were more than happy to see it!

“Eren..what a nice surprise!”

“I could say the same. Didn’t think you’d pick up, honestly.”

on the other end was the one person you had been hoping to hear from. It’d be nearing a little after one am on the east coast so he must’ve really wanted to talk to you. As always, he was facing a blunt, taking the roll between his pretty lips and lying in bed, shirtless. He had that exhausted drawl and deep tone that you’d heard the first time around. “Well I was just getting ready for bed. Just got back from dinner so I’m ready to lay down.”

smirking at your response before blowing another cloud from that spliff. You hated how attractive he made everything look! Including the facial hair he was starting to grow out and his long locks cascading around his face. However, you couldn’t help but feel a bit of guilt..you just disappeared on the man without so much as a word the other night and here you were pretending nothing had happened!

“I don’t blame you. How’s LA?” The words felt condescending because of your own conscious eating away at you. You ended up confessing that you took the flight in your text and that you were sorry but maybe he hadn’t forgiven you for that. A pang in the pit of your stomach resonated and you were growing nervous. “It’s pretty nice. Can’t complain, honestly.” “I’m glad to hear that.” His words trailing off as he lazily eyed you up and down yet again. He always did have a habit of doing so when you were in his view. As sexy as you were, he couldn’t help it.

eventually, you couldn’t take the tension and addressed the elephant for yourself. “Yeah..listen, I’m sorry about the other day. I didn’t mean to dip on you like that. They just asked me so quick that I—“but your explanation was quickly halted by a hand into the camera. Truth was, he didn’t care. You didn’t owe him any sort of answer. He was not your man nor was he the one paying your bills so that bag came first. He understood that better than anyone..

“Why are you telling me? I’m not mad at you, mama. You did what you had to do.”

widening your gaze, you’d be taken aback by his reaction. Most guys would’ve been feeling a way or swearing that you were on some sneaky shit..even if you weren’t dating! Hence why you strayed from relationships. But this man was much different! “You’re not upset?…but I— “but you what? Done your job?”

when he put it that way, he made you realize how silly it sounded. Leaning up into the camera as you walked back to your bed, Eren glared directly at you. “I’ll be honest..had you picked hanging out with me over something like this, I probably would’ve never spoken to you again and I’m being serious. Besides, you did the little bald bastard a favor so don’t feel bad.”

still, his statement was so matter of fact that you couldn’t help but laugh a little! “Wait? Why not?” But the answer was simple. It was such a pet peeve, among many other ticks of his when women would rather cling on to him for a come up, rather than make her own way. And vice versa. That’s why he fucked with you so heavily. He saw your work ethic and it was so sexy. It was so attractive how you maneuvered and handled your business. Also, he knew your homegirls were back in Miami partying with his best friend so the fact that you made this trip alone was commendable.

in fact, he was glad you did so he could finally get the one on one time he had been craving..he would’ve never been able to do so with four other women running around. What you didn’t know, was that he too had made a little trip himself: to Atlanta to help out with another friend’s project. Who was ironically beefing with the man who you had just shot a video with! It was amusing to him because the disagreement wasn’t even serious and having to record these two idiots throwing slams at each other in a track over something so trivial was hilarious.

that and he was a bit salty with Connie for nabbing you away. Especially when he had some things he wanted to say to you..preferably in person but it’d have to do right here..

“Well you know me..I gotta get mines. But I promise the second I’m back in Dade, imma come see you. I might take a little break so I’m gonna need you to help me relax.”

hearing you say those words invoked something in him..feelings he had been all but trying to conceal. But there was no need. It was obvious that tensions were boiling over between you two and there were only so many subtle innuendos you could throw before someone got the hint…

inhaling once more, Eren laid back against his pillows, raising the phone a bit and you were angled to where your head (and exposed chest) were sitting upright; amply cupped in that tank top you had on. (Y/N) was hoping to play it coy because you didn’t want to appear as easy but hearing his voice again and having these talks..you couldn’t help but to feel some level of intimacy. It was a bit forward for just a friendship but it wasn’t as if you two were even remotely close to a relationship either.

so what exactly was this?…why did you feel so comfortable with him? Why did you want to be more open than you already were….

you’d have your answer shortly when the topic got a bit more escalated. “Shit, you’re not by yourself. I mean, I’m up in Atlanta at the moment but for sure..I got you, gorgeous. We’ll have to link.” That tone causing tingles up your spine again. Truthfully, you had been drinking a bit and having pent up, unreleased feelings were getting to you.

moving a hand down to your stomach, you’d toil with the thin material as he watched you through the camera. Eventually watching his own disappear downward. It was crazy how much sexual frustration and attraction the two of you were harboring right now. Yet, neither of you wanted to make the first move! Was it respect? Shame? Worry that the other might not view you the same afterwards? Still, he had to go for it because he had been waiting days to see that pretty face again and it didn’t help when you posed the question:

“..I’m down. So what you tryna do?” Almost as if you two were playing a game of chess and you had just set the pieces in motion for him to make his move. Almost as if you were hoping he’d take the bait and initiate this intimate moment.

“What you mean?”

“When I get back. What you got in mind?”

furrowing your brow and biting at that lower lip so gently, (y/n) waited patiently for what he had to say. And it’d be an unexpected answer. Peering over his shoulder once as to not make sure anyone was around, Eren stared back at you; glazed, glossed over green eyes barely even open but he was looking right through you and knew what you both needed.

“I mean, if we being real..we don’t even have to wait. Cause I’ll tell you what I want right now.” Closed mouths didn’t get fed in his opinion. It was obvious that you weren’t scared or acting all innocent so why should he? Why should he hold back on how he felt about you? So another man could come swoop you away when he obviously wanted you so bad? Hell no. Instead, he’d make certain that even though you were miles and states apart, EJ the Don would be the only one on your mind for days to come!

“Talk to me then.” Slickly setting the stage for him to get his sentiments off of his chest. “Tell me what’s on your mind, sweetheart..”

his lips cracked into a faint smile at the mention of the moniker, licking his tongue around them before he focused on you again. “I already told you, baby. I don’t do rumors and I don’t bite my tongue..”

you hadn’t felt anything like this before. Someone who wasn’t afraid to tell you exactly what he wanted. “What if we quit all the playing and did what was on both of our minds?..cause I’ve been thinking ‘bout you like crazy..” the more he spoke, the more you craved this man. The urge to say the hell with morals and touch yourself to the sound of his sexy voice. Which was the exact goal!

“And what would you say if I told you I wanted you just as bad..would you hold it against me?” “When I want to fuck the shit out of you? Not at all..”

just then, a pang would catch in the pit of your stomach and you’d begin to part your legs slightly. That alcohol was working its way through your body and going straight to your pussy so if that’s what he was on, you’d meet him right there!

not to mention that he got out of his head when he was high so he wasn’t responsible for what he said right now. Both of your views were jolting a bit as you shifted around in the sheets; (y/n) massaging your own breasts as you popped them from your shirt and Eren grasping at his covered crotch, that wouldn’t stay that way though because when you began whispering those sweet nothings to him through that speaker, you’d have this man acting out of character and coming out of his clothes. And vice versa..

“Then I guess I can tell you that I wanted to fuck on you the first night. That I would’ve let you get this pussy if you asked for it..” moaning softly into the mic whilst letting your idle hands scale your bare skin. Those thin panties hanging at your waistline by now…and your fingers dancing across that aching clit and slippery folds.

you proceeded to tell him all the things you wanted him to do when you made it back into town. Including letting him eat you out until you came all over his face, how you wanted to look him in his eyes while you suck it slow and even rub up on his chest while you rode him. All of which had him jerking himself off from the other end. When he readjusted the camera, you could see his fingers cradled around his swollen cock and to no surprise, he was big! Longer and thicker than anyone you had ever seen..thinking about all of that being inside of you had you frothing in more ways than one. And when you’d see him pump that pre-ejaculsting tip appear in your view as he swiped it with his thumb..(y/n) sank your fingers inside of that tightness. Putting it in the perfect position for him to watch you finger yourself. but you weren’t alone. Having come completely undone, Eren let out a gently grunt, even laughing because you were exactly the type of woman he had been waiting for! A freak in private but about her business in public? Perfect..and now it was his turn for confessions.

“Shit…damn, baby. Well since we’re being honest. I’m fucking you on sight. Putting my tongue all over that pretty body…I swear I’m giving you all this dick..” finding yourself whimpering at his words as you closed your eyes and imagined the scenario. He talked you through it so well and you just knew things would be even better had you been in his bed. “You look so good playing with that pussy..you that wet for me?” Teasing as he heard your sweet cries and sloshing wetness. It was so sloppy; dripping with arousal, all due to thoughts of him.

“Y-yeah..this all you.”

“And those titties..they’re so fucking pretty. God, I want you so bad.”

admitting through heavy huffs as his pumping grew faster. The two of you went back and forth, exchanging filthy words and freaky thoughts until neither of you could stand the swelling pressure any longer. “F-fuck! Imma come..” letting out from behind those hotel room walls and hoping no one heard him yelping like a little bitch, Eren raised his back from the mattress as he stroked himself into a mind numbing climax.

but just as he released everywhere, you followed shortly behind with your own squirt soaking those fingers and the sheets. Having full blown fucked yourself to tears! Needless to say, it had been a while since you’d came so it was a lot to come down from. The orgasms ripped though both of your bodies and left you trembling. Unashamed and unabashedly reveling in that afterglow together. But once your favorites met yet again, he’d give you that warming smile and the realization hit as to what just happened.

both of you having exponentially increased your own highs. And not wanting to come down anytime soon. “I swear you’re trouble..goddamn.” But it was him that had awoken that sultry side. Making you act in ways that you never would have normally…and he’d keep it happening until neither of you could even stand anymore stimulation and nearly fell asleep. Having steamy, nasty phone sex for nearly an hour. It was an insane experience! Disheveled and discombobulated, you guys eventually had to hang up and get some rest. “Goodnight..sweet dreams.” Giving him a kiss into the camera. “Trust me, imma sleep very well..” Eren’s lids half shut and dimmed in pure bliss as he returned your peck.

once you both disconnected and bid adieu, (y/n) sat with those feelings and thoughts as you glared up at the ceiling. Who knew how this would lead up and where this left you two but one thing was for certain: things would never be the same!

.･*:｡.･*:｡.･*:｡.･*:｡.･*:｡.･*:｡.･*:｡.･*:｡.･*:｡.･*:｡.･*: .･*:｡.･*:｡.･

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[lexosaurus]

The Fog Around Us: Chapter 2

My 2nd fic for the Ecto Implosion (artists go first, writers go second)

Check out the fic art if you haven't already! Done by @nightwanderers12081

read on: [ao3]

[see all chapters]

Characters: Danny Fenton, Valerie Gray Tags: Amnesiac Danny Fenton, Enemies to Friends Chapter WC: 3933 Summary: Two weeks had passed since Danny Fenton went missing. Two weeks had passed since Phantom had disappeared as well. It couldn't be coincidence.

****

“So, hang on. Let’s start at the beginning.” Valerie made to pinch her nose, but her freaking faceplate was in the way. She sighed and retracted her helmet, watching Phantom peer at her in curiosity but not recognition. “So, how long did you say you’ve been a ghost for?”

“Um, I don’t know?” Phantom stood, brushing his hands against his thighs. “Well, I only remember the past few weeks, I think.”

“Right, that’s what I mean. According to you, you’ve only been a ghost for the past few weeks. And where exactly were you in that time?”

“It’s like I said before. I’ve only been in the Infinite Realms.”

But, how? How could Phantom just forget everything? Had he run into a ghost with those kinds of powers? Did such a being even exist?

“What’s the first thing you remember?”

He turned his head up at the sky. At first, he didn’t speak, apparently too busy studying the thousands of lights sparkling in the sky. It was a look Valerie recognized, and then her heart panged all over again because shit, her one lead had forgotten everything.

“We don’t have stars like this in the Infinite Realms,” he mused. He shook his head, seemingly coming back to reality. “Sorry. But, honestly, I just woke up in the Realms. I was in my suit, and there were a few islands around me, but nothing else weird. I felt like there was something…I don’t know, something I was trying to do, you know? My heart was racing a little bit, like—like adrenaline. But then, I don’t know. I looked around, and there was nothing there.”

An odd sort of desperation crept onto his face as if he were almost begging Valerie for an answer. As if that first memory, that first feeling in his body haunted him even if he tried to brush it off.

But Valerie was too hung up on one specific word. His heart. He’d mentioned having a heart. But…ghosts don’t have hearts. 

Valerie supposed it could be possible that new ghosts would forget that they don’t have hearts and maybe their minds would convince them they did. Or, perhaps Phantom had spent so much time with humans over the past year that his body was beginning to give him “human” powers, such as a beating “heart.” 

But she had to keep the conversation flowing. It was the only way to figure this mess out. “What did you do next?” 

“Well, I don’t really know. I couldn’t figure it out, but I felt like I was supposed to be somewhere. So I just started flying.”

More than likely, he was either supposed to go wherever Danny was being held, or his amnesia was actually a total coincidence and he was just trying to find his…wherever he lived. Amity, probably.

“You floated around aimlessly the entire time?” Valerie asked with a touch of disbelief.

Phantom grimaced. “Sort of. I was trying to follow instinct, but I didn’t know what I was looking for.”

“Did you ask the other ghosts? The ones you saw? Did they say anything that sounded weird to you?” 

“I don’t know. Everything sounded weird to me. I didn’t—I don’t—” He gripped the back of his head with tight fingers, and the metal bracelet glinted under the moonlight. “Listen, I don’t know who that—what was his name?”

“Danny. Danny Fenton,” Valerie said, maybe a bit icily.

“Yeah, him.” He paused, and just before Valerie could maybe be convinced that Phantom might have remembered something, he shook his head, saying, “I’m sorry, but I really have no idea who he is. I think I might recognize that name, but I don’t know where it’s from. Maybe I knew him when I was alive?”

Valerie stared at him, cataloging his every twitch, every pinch of his brow, every little potential clue to tell her that Phantom was lying, that he knew where Danny was.

But there was nothing there. Nothing. Just a lost ghost with locked memories.

“Shit,” she whispered, ducking her head to cover her face with her hand. She’d been so close, so freaking close to figuring out what happened to her friend, and now it was all gone. It had all slipped through her fingers faster than water pouring down an open drain. And now she was back at the start. No leads, no clues, no idea what happened to her friend. 

No, it was worse than that, she realized. At least before, she had some idea that Phantom had to be involved. But now, even if he was involved, he had absolutely nothing to show for it.

“I thought I had it. I really thought that I had it,” Valerie muttered.

“Had what?” Phantom asked.

She didn’t want to tell him, but suddenly, she couldn’t hold back. She turned to him, frustration and sorrow spilling out of her at once. “You disappeared at the same time my friend Danny did, and everyone was saying ghosts were involved. I thought that you were the key to figuring out what happened. That either you took him, or you knew who did.”

He reached a glowing hand to her, and then thought better, retracting it to his chest. “I’m sorry,” he said, cradling his wrist close. “I really have no idea what happened to him. Believe me, if I knew, I would tell you.”

Valerie let out a bitter laugh. She couldn’t help it. “No, you wouldn’t.”

“I would!” he insisted, his eyes glowing alight. “I would tell you! If he’s missing, then I would help you get him home.”

“No, you wouldn’t. Just trust me.”

But Phantom leaned closer. “I know I don’t remember much—or anything, actually—but I know myself, and I would help you. I wouldn’t let your friend get hurt.”

Whatever little bit of patience Valerie had left in her system drained instantly. She turned on him, eyes blazing. “You wouldn’t. I know you better than you know yourself right now, Phantom! And I hate to break it to you, but the Phantom I knew was a selfish, life-ruining asshole who was more than happy to step on other people if it made himself look better!”

Phantom looked stricken. “What are you talking about?”

Valerie wiped the corners of her eyes and the tops of her cheeks because damnit, she wasn’t crying in front of this stupid ghost right now.

“Listen, I’m sorry if I’ve hurt you in the past—”

“When,” Valerie amended.

The tips of his pointed ears lowered slightly. “What?”

Hurt thudded against her stomach and throat as she tried to ready herself for the inevitable. She’d always envisioned the moment when she finally got to give Phantom a piece of her mind and tell him exactly every which way he’d hurt her and her father. She’d rehearsed it, practicing it over and over in the shower, while doing her makeup, in the daydreams of her mind just before she slipped into sleep like some sort of psychotic lullaby. For months, she’d waited for this day.

And now it was finally here, but it didn’t mean anything because the Phantom standing before her, the one she had been prepared to tear a new one, wouldn’t understand. 

Her speech was useless now. And with that realization, all the anger dissipated from her muscles, and she felt her shoulders sag with the weight of gravity, months of stress, and the overwhelming burden of loneliness.

Then, even though there was a dangerous, amnesiac ghost that possibly was connected to Danny’s disappearance at her side, she slid down till she was seated on the roof with her legs splayed out before her.

“I’m tired, Phantom.” She was tired of being angry, of constantly being strong, of being so goddamn alone. “Just…tired of this shit.”

He shifted awkwardly beside her, probably unsure if this was his cue to leave or sit down and join her. “I’m sorry.”

Valerie made that decision for him, patting the seat next to her. “Come on.”

He hesitated, and Valerie could feel the tension radiating off him, but eventually, Phantom sat beside her. Though, he didn’t look at her, instead choosing to look out at the night sky.

“So…Amity Park didn’t used to have ghosts,” Valerie started. She wasn’t sure how far back she should go, but then again, it wasn’t like Phantom had anywhere to be tonight. 

He was a ghost, after all. 

“Most people didn’t even know they existed, I don’t think. I guess there weren’t a lot of portals between our worlds before. Then about a year ago, something changed, and ghosts started appearing.”

“And I was there too?” he asked.

“Yeah, you were. You were one of the first ghosts to appear, actually. Not the first, but one of them.”

“Um, what did I do? When I would appear?”

“The same thing the other ghosts did. Terrorize the city and fight each other. Then, after someone would win, you’d both disappear and leave all the damage behind.”

He blinked, and Valerie could see the hurt melt onto his face. “Really?”

“Yup,” she answered. “And then, one day, you brought a dog along with you. One that could grow to the size of a truck. You set him loose in this tech company that had started making anti-ghost technology, Axiom Labs, and the dog absolutely tore that place to shreds. My dad worked there as the head of security and lost his job because of that.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, oh. And since Axiom held my dad personally responsible, he got ruined. We lost our house, our furniture, everything. We moved to Elmerton in some crappy apartment. It fucking sucked, and I was pissed. So when I got an offer from a benefactor to start hunting ghosts, I said yes. And that’s how I ended up in this suit fighting you all the time.”

“We were enemies, then. Not allies,” Phantom said, his voice strangely shaky.

Valerie squinted at him. Had he not just heard her entire speech? Why the hell would she be allies with him after that?

Also, why would he be upset by this information? “Since when do ghosts care about that sort of thing?” she accidentally slipped out.

“I don’t know. But I…this is going to sound strange.” He put a hand to his chest, where Valerie suspected his core was. “I feel like I’ve always cared about that.”

“You haven’t,” she rebuked.

“No, I…” His voice drifted like white dandelions swept away by a passing breeze before he seemed to grab hold of himself once again. “Listen, I don’t remember what happened before, but I’m sorry. I know it doesn’t mean anything when I say this now, but that was a horrible thing that I did to you, and I’m sorry. I don’t know you, but no one deserves that.”

It stung her throat to hear him finally say that—not that she ever imagined him apologizing to her. No, in her fantasies, she gave her impressive speech and then punched him square in the face. No apologies, no remorse. 

But that was fantasy, and this was reality. And even if it wasn’t the lullaby that sang Valerie to sleep, it was strangely comforting in a way.

“Thanks,” she whispered. “Even if I don’t forgive you.”

“I wouldn’t expect you to.”

Now it was Valerie’s turn to feel out of her depth. Where was this weird maturity coming from in Phantom? Had it always dwelled dormant under his skin, something he suppressed in favor of that cocky bravado hero bullshit? Or was it new, brought on by this sudden clean slate?

She glimpsed the metal bracelet wrapped around his wrist, and that wave of confusion began wrapping its tendrils in her mind again.

“And I know you might not believe this,” he said, snapping her out of her thoughts, “but even though I don’t remember any of that happening, I…it’s weird. I feel it, if that makes sense. I don’t remember it, but some things sound familiar. Like…like they’re on the tip of my tongue.”

She nodded. That made sense, of course. The mind could be erased, but muscle memory was difficult to trick.

“And I feel like something was wrong. Like something was missing with all that, everything you said. Because I don’t think that I was acting in some sort of psychopathic, sadistic intent, you know? Like, I don’t know, something is missing. I know it.”

She sighed, drawing in a heavy breath like it was the greatest burden to her body. “Phantom, I told you—”

“I know. I know, I know, and I’m sorry.” He clutched the logo on his chest. “Maybe being back here has brought something back, but I don’t think—no, I know I was never trying to hurt you or any other human in this place. I know it.” Turning his attention back to the sky, he added, “Just like how I know that I loved stargazing and that I—I—I had human friends. And a family.”

His wide eyes locked onto hers, and Valerie felt her breath stop in her throat.

Alarm bells rang in her mind so powerful, so deafening that Valerie couldn’t hear anything else. Not the spattering of cars below her, nor the music playing from some apartment across the street, nothing else except the ringing “what the FUCK” from her brain.

“I had a human family. And friends. I did!” He jumped up, then seemed to regret it as he bent over, clutching his skull. “I don’t remember them. But I had them.”

“Alive?” Valerie finally choked out.

“What?”

“They were alive?” she repeated.

“Yes, yes! They were! All of them!” 

Phantom had never even mentioned having a family before. Valerie always assumed that all ghosts forgot everything about their human lives once they died.

But he remembered, and he didn’t tell anyone, apparently. She’d never heard even a whisper of Phantom’s reason for hanging around Amity. And Valerie had asked before. Many times. 

She wondered if his family even knew their son was Phantom or if he kept it a secret from them too. 

But why? Why go to such lengths to keep his family a secret?

Was it some sort of taboo for a ghost to go back to their family once they died? But if that were true, why was Phantom telling her this now?

He looked back over at her, and Valerie could see the stars shining in his corneas. “They were alive. That’s why I was here! It’s why I didn’t go to the Realms with the other ghosts! I was…I was protecting them.”

And then the oxygen was sucked out of the air again. 

What the fuck.

Did Phantom just tell her his purpose? The entire reason why his soul never moved on? 

But he didn’t look anywhere near as afflicted as Valerie was. Instead, a sort of warmth was spreading across his face, and he beamed. Literally, his aura dazzled like a solar light removed from the shade. 

“It’s why I was here,” he insisted, except it didn’t really sound like that, Valerie realized. No, he looked relieved. 

“Phantom…?” she tried cautiously. “Do you know where your family is?”

His face fell, taking some of the shimmering aura with it. “No. I guess I don’t. But I did. You know, before this.” He froze, then looked at her lost again. “What’s your name again?”

“You call me Red.” Just because she was having a moment with Phantom here didn’t mean she was ready to tell him her name. 

“Okay, Red,” he said, testing it out. “How do I get my memories back? I need to see if they’re alright. I feel like there was something wrong and I think they might be in danger. Please, I need to see them again.”

Valerie was no ghost psychologist, but she had some idea of what happened to a ghost who was barred from fulfilling their obsession. And dealing with a distressed, pissed-off Phantom wasn’t exactly on her to-do list tonight, tomorrow, or ever, she conceded. “I don’t know, but I’ll strike you a deal. I’ll help you figure out your amnesia, and in return, you’ll help me find Danny.”

He nodded too eagerly. “I’ll do it.”

She stood, then stuck out her hand. “I don’t know what ghosts do when they make deals, but humans shake on it.”

Now, he hesitated, his hand curled at his torso like one hint of physical contact with a human might break him. But whatever internal battle he seemed to be having, he got over, clasping his cold hand into hers and shaking. “Okay. It’s a deal.”

They broke apart, and his cold wash of aura left Valerie’s skin. She suppressed a shiver, unsure if she’d ever get used to the way ghosts felt when they got close to the living. And then, her attention could finally zero in on the one thing that had been bothering her all evening. “Now give me your other hand.”

“Huh?” He glanced down at the arm currently hanging limp at his side. “Why?”

“Because I wanna check something, that’s why.”

“Check what?” Phantom asked but gave her his arm anyway.

Valerie grasped his wrist where the bracelet was. It was smooth and shiny with not a scratch in sight.

Brand new, she noted. It could be a coincidence, or...

Of course, he could have put it on himself just before his memories disappeared. But even if she didn’t know Phantom well, he never struck her as the kind of guy who’d touch jewelry with a ten-foot pole. 

“What are you doing?” he asked as she raised his wrist, checking around and then under the metal band for a single hint as to what this was for.

And yup, there it was.

Valerie shouldn’t have been so surprised. Well, actually, no. She wasn’t surprised. Because really, she should have expected it. That slimy, good-for-nothing, manipulative ghost would be involved.

Perfectly etched underneath Phantom’s silver bracelet was a VM logo, circled in what Valerie could only imagine was real gold paint. 

There was only one man who could have done this, and that man was Vlad Masters Plasmius, the half-ghost half-human who had conned the entirety of Amity Park into following his leadership. Even the mere internal mention of his name had Valerie feeling revolted, and—oh, wow. Phantom must have really been telling the truth about his amnesia because when Valerie’s focus flickered up to his face, there wasn’t even a hint of indignation in his eyes.

And Valerie had seen Phantom try to play nice with Plasmius before. There was absolutely no way he could suddenly become an Oscar-nominated worthy actor out of nowhere with this logo in his view.

But just to confirm, she held up his wrist and asked, “This logo mean anything to you?”

“Should it?”

“Yeah. You’d be pissed if you were you right now.” She dropped his arm. “It’s Vlad Masters.”

Phantom’s blank expression didn’t change. “Who?”

“Vlad Masters. Or, I guess, Vlad Plasmius to you.” When recognition still didn’t spark in Phantom, Valerie continued, “Listen, Mr. Masters is…a long story. But basically, he’s not a good guy. He’s the mayor of this town, and I’m pretty sure he pulled some trick to get there. Because—well, I know this is going to sound crazy.” Valerie paused, scrunching her eyebrows. 

How the hell was she supposed to explain this without sounding absolutely insane?

“What?” Phantom insisted, his voice teetering on whiny.

“Promise you won’t think I’m crazy first.”

He nodded in earnest. “I swear.”

“Okay.” Valerie blew out a long breath. “So basically, I’m a human, and you’re a ghost, right?”

Phantom seemed to be following along so far.

“So I’m on one end, and you’re on the other end of the alive-to-dead spectrum. But somehow, Mr. Masters is…in the middle? He’s a ghost, but he’s also a human. And know! I know, I know how insane that sounds. I know, trust me. I didn’t believe it either when I first found out that humans could also be ghosts. But somehow, that’s a thing. I don’t really get how it works. Maybe he died and came back to life?” Valerie was rambling now. “But somehow, that’s what he became. He’s a human, but he has all the psychological traits of a ghost.”

Phantom blinked. “What psychological traits do ghosts have that’s so bad?”

Valerie was taken aback. Of all the things she’d just said, that’s what he focused on?

“Well, you guys are all violent. And obsessive. But that’s beside the point!” Valerie waved her hands.

“What’s besides the point?”

Her mouth was agape now. “What?” she sputtered once she got ahold of herself. “Did you not hear anything I just said?”

“Yeah, and I don’t really get what’s so bad about ghosts,” Phantom said. “Sure, some ghosts may be bad people, but there are bad humans too. Most ghosts just want to be left alone, you know.”

Valerie genuinely couldn’t grasp the sheer audacity of Phantom’s philosophy right now. “Phantom, did you not hear anything I said about Mr. Masters? Being a half-man, half-ghost?”

Now it was Phantom’s turn to look at her like she was crazy. “I heard you.”

“And that’s not at all surprising to you?”

Phantom—that fucker—actually pondered for a moment before deciding, “No, I don’t think so.”

“I’m sorry, is the knowledge of half humans half ghosts just common knowledge to only ghosts or something? Because any other human would never believe me if I told them that.”

Phantom shrugged, then pressed a hand back up to his chest. “I don’t know, maybe? I definitely already knew about that, though. Actually, it seems like the one thing I know most of all. I don’t know, maybe I knew Vlad was a halfa before this.”

“You did,” Valerie said, then froze. “Wait, what was that you said? That word?”

“Halfa?” 

“Yeah, that one. Did you…is that a ghost term for half-humans, half-ghosts?”

Phantom shrugged again. Valerie was getting really sick of shrugging.

“Probably,” he said. “But I definitely know a lot about halfas. Maybe I was good friends with one?”

Valerie needed a nap.

“So why did Vlad stick a bracelet on my wrist?” Phantom asked, holding the bracelet up and pointing to it with his free hand.

Valerie had been so taken aback by whatever the hell this conversation was that she’d almost forgotten her hypothesis. “Oh, I think Mr. Masters put that on you to get you out of his way. You guys are enemies, and I think he is trying to get rid of you.”

Phantom nodded, his brows furrowed. “Yes, that makes sense. You said I had a lot of enemies from…fighting the ghosts? I think? It would make sense that one would try to do this to me. Okay!” Phantom brightened, his mind seemingly made up.

God, ghosts were so strange. 

He clapped his hands. “We should go there and get him to remove the bracelet.”

“Yeah, I don’t think asking nicely is going to do much for this guy. He’s a really slimy dude. He doesn’t even know that I know about him being a half-ghost, by the way.”

“Well…” Phantom paused, glancing between her suit and his steepled fingers. “We’re both good fighters, aren’t we? Do you think we can take this man?”

Valerie weighed the pros and cons in her mind. The list of pros was tiny, and the cons were immense. But on the list of pros was the possibility of finding Danny, so she couldn’t say no.

“Yeah,” she lied. “We can definitely take that asshole.”

****

previous / next

#danny phantom #ectoimplosion2023 #phicc #my writing #the fog around us

[essycogany]

Amy’s Eye Color

Since I couldn’t get this off my mind I’ve decided to dive deep into the abyss of character design. I’ll mostly add on to what I said in my tags in the, “What Eye Color Looks Good On Amy Rose,” voting post and elaborate.

Short History

Amy’s eye color from the start of her redesign in Sonic Adventure has always been the same as Sonic’s. A warm green that use to be apart of Amy’s classic dress. Which is a nice detail in my opinion. The pink hedgehog’s eyes has been somewhat consistent with Sonic’s from official art, 3D models, to the comics.

It almost always been that way aside from Sonic X. Where her eyes are on the cooler side then Sonic’s. Jade or Emerald to be specific. Her eyes are closer to the color of jewelry. While Sonic has a warmer grassier colored green. I like jade or emerald on Amy’s eyes as well, but I want to keep the topic consistent and less complicated then it already is.

Anyways, I think the minor inconsistencies was done for artistic vision or whenever the lighting would change in the comics. To be honest I’ve noticed color inconsistencies all the time when it comes to Sonic characters. Which isn’t a bad thing. It just shows how much variety you can have when it comes to these characters.

My Thoughts On Amy’s Eye Color

I don’t mind Amy’s eyes being the same as Sonic’s. It doesn’t look bad on her and is one of the reasons her design is as iconic as it is. Especially since it’s been a part of her for so long.

But let’s get into why I personally prefer teal.

I’m no color theory expert, but I’ll do my best. Also, not every Sonic character or cartoon character period, follows these rules. Just a good majority of them do.

Sonic: Blue is a primary color and green is a secondary color. Because green complements blue Sonic’s eyes stands out. Not to mention they symbolize his energy and love for nature.

Blaze: Purple is a secondary color and gold is a primary color. Her purple fur works amazingly with her harsh gold eyes. Symbolizing her fire powers. Also I’ve noticed a few artist add a bit of a reddish orange to her and Silvers eyes and I think they look lovely.

Amy: She’s a bit complicated. Since her red dress takes up most of her design I’ll use it as Amy’s primary color. I believe teal would be a better secondary color for Amy because it stands out a bit better and is less harsh then green. It gives Amy a softer look too.

Teal and pink is also a wonderful combination in general because they balance each other out. With pink’s warmth and energy going with the teal’s calm and coolness. Giving off a more enchanted and mystical feeling to Amy’s eyes. It perfectly compliments her personality too because she’s an energetic character with a soft and sweet nature.

Here are some characters with similar color tones:

They’re not all similar characteristically, but what most of them have in common is they’re kind natured and they’ll protect the people they care about. Just like a certain pink hedgehog.

See how the eyes are the first thing you notice?

These are around what I have in mind( jade/emerald are cooler greens so they work too):

The main reason I prefer Amy’s eyes to be teal is due to a lot of amazing fan-artist. I won’t give out names, (because there’s a bunch of them) but they are so brilliant and I appreciate what they bring to the Sonic feast of wonderful art.

I’ve seen it so much to the point when I think “Amy Rose,” I see her with teal eyes. I know it’s silly, but that’s genuinely what I feel works for her. Besides I enjoy talking about weird topics like these. It keeps the mind turning, you know.

I appreciate the official artist and 3D models as well. Even if Amy’s eyes are barely ever teal, she still looks wonderful without them because of those talented people.

Conclusion

Will Amy’s eyes ever be teal? Probably not. Does any of this matter? No.

Teal eyes or not Amy Rose is a wonderful Sonic character. I hope you had fun with me on exploring this wild world of colors and character design.

Stay Creative! 💜

#sonic the hedgehog #sth #amy rose #amy rose hedgehog #sonic and amy #fluttershy #jigglypuff #angry birds stella #gigi #blaze the cat #silver the hedgehog #sonic art #sonic x #sonic idw #sonic fanart #sonic fandom #character design #I adore our energetic girl regardless of eye color #fan artist ROCK #Offical artist ROCK too

[mariusroyale]

tips on how to draw raph? :3

I’m a raph lover but he is so hard to draw 😔

hey an!! listen i get u completely, this big spikey boy can be a real challenge

my main advice would probably be to recognise raph’s structure? his shapes and how he’s formed, etc. and the best way for that imo are references! i have a tag for this actually

and here’s some raph refs!

if u wanna know how to draw the entirety of the best boy this post wouldn’t do it justice so here’s some main things:

if you’re trying to replicate the show’s style keep in mind how angular everything is. raph's main shape is a square because of how bulky and rigid he is (helps to encourage his character's role too! love that they made him such a fucken tank)

raph’s head shape is basically if you widened leo’s head- they’re both pointed too

one main thing i do for any head really is keep in mind the eye placement and the cheeks

if u happen to draw faces with the fabled circle and two lines- i use the horizontal line to mark where the bottom of the eyes are- and where the start of the cheek begins (i’m doing my best not to make this into a ‘now draw the rest of the owl’ moment)

if that makes any sense. heres a really shoddy 'tutorial'

i kinda just blank out on my canvas and raph appears out of sheer will

but also just like.

figure out how you like raph's head to look (maybe u want his snout longer, or his jaw shorter, etc etc)

figure out where his brow ridges are located and how they're moving (is he grumpy? is he angry??)

make a mask for his eyes to go in (jebus take the wheel)

pronounce snout (it protrudes, which makes it easy to figure out his facial planes)

do whatever feels right for his mouth- im not exactly rigid with how i draw as of rn, i just do what feels right

ive drawn raph with a more pronounced snout too, and oscillate between designs if i feel like it (truthfully i also sometimes begin his head shape with a square (i mean if im doing a different style), feel free to do that if it helps i dunno-)

if you want to draw his shell and plastron here’s what i do:

being able to carve out 3D shapes will help a lot with the border of his shell

by blocking out the main shape and then carving away at it you can then see how raph’s shell is structured (just. try decipher my sketch if u can pfghjhj)

for the actual shell itself it’s a lot like mikey and leo’s where it has a big curve and then dips at his midsection (where his belt goes!) also keep in mind the spikes of his shell follow those same curves (ft. dr belle)

with his plastron (chest plate) i basically make sure it’s the same length of his clavicle? the jagged edges of it i mean. it helps a lot to map out where his shoulders meet his arms

(pls keep in mind my art’s inconsistent and i don’t even follow my advice- the hole in his shell changes every time i draw it 💀)

his body shape is also just in general wider and stockier- if i ever see people draw him skinnier than he is you'd be able to hear my soul exiting my body

all of him is wider in general! hes bigger than the rest of his brothers so dont forget to show it instead of just giving him a height difference. he BEEG.

i’m not sure how else to describe the process of drawing him other than just. draw him?? 😅 my best advice would be to draw him repeatedly based on references- and study your favourite raph artists’ way of drawing him (mine would be jacocoon and itz_jazzy_jazzin)

and it helps to study bc it can answer these questions

how do you want to draw him? do you like the way a specific artist stylises his features? do you want him more spikey? more sharp? maybe you want to draw him bigger! (i myself like to give him a tail, extra markings on his spikes + a few scars post movie and his mismatched eyes)

repetition is super important to get it all engrained in your brain- and it’s why i don’t really even use refs for him anymore fldjs

dont forget a very important rule: appreciate the big boy in all his glory

#im not exactly the artist to go to for help unfortunately dfkdjhsdh #hoping this helps somehow #its better to understand his structure #every now and then i apply it to my sketches #most times ill just dick around on my canvas #feel free to dm me if you want more in depth stuff ajhddgh #rise raph #rottmnt #rise of the teenage mutant ninja turtles #rottmnt raph #ask

[anotherbluesunday]

✨Teaser: In Technicolor✨

So some of you may know this, but my next fic that was set to release was originally called “Ballad of a Teenage Dream” and was a Wednesday x Skam crossover that showcased all the highs and lows of high school and the growing pains that come with the transition from teenager to young adult.

Well that story has been reworked, overhauled, and given new life.

I present to you my high school dramady, In Technicolor.

Set in Los Angeles, California, the story follows two groups of friends as their worlds collide. A modern spin on the social dynamics of Romeo and Juliet where two factions are warring but cannot remember why or why their bitter rivalry is so important to their identity, In Technicolor highlights the feuding of the wealthy and the everyday citizens to show the consequences that come from stripping culture and history from the city streets in the name of gentrification. It explores the complex relationships of families on either side of the fence to reveal that wealth does not always bring happiness. And finally, at the center of it all, the complicated friendships and relationships of the members of these two groups as they meld into one.

For our East LA champions, we follow the Addams siblings and their mismatched group of skateboarders, graffiti artists, musicians, and street racers.

For our Palisades elite, we focus on the Blossoms and Galpin’s—two families from extreme wealth that are not entirely honest about what they show the world.

.

.

.

Important Story Information: If the visuals were not enough to give it away, this story will be a crossover with a different fandom. Entering the mix is the ensemble from Riverdale. I do want to caution readers now, there will be crossover pairings, character retcon on both sides, ageing up, ageing down, and changes to character personalities.

One such example is that Wednesday isn’t allergic to color and isn’t entirely unapproachable. She smiles and laughs but only when around those she trusts like her family and friends. Pugsley has been aged up and is Wednesday’s twin brother. My face claim for this version of Pugsley is Xolo Mariduẽna and I have made Pugsley (who also will be going by “Lee”) more confident and hotheaded with some snark and sass. Second to that, my face claim for Pubert “Bertie” Addams is Malachi Barton and Pubert/Bertie will be one year younger than his siblings—the twins Wednesday and Pugsley age 17 and in their senior year and Bertie age 16 entering his junior year.

On the Riverdale side of the crossover, I have made certain changes that I don’t want to reveal just yet for Archie’s character. That surprise will come soon enough because next I will be posting moodboards for specific couples that will be at the center of this story. But one change I will discuss now to get it out there to avoid hate comments and harassment is the issue of is Cheryl bi or is she a lesbian. In my story, she’s bi and will be paired with a male lead. I understand that the actress for her character went back and forth on Cheryl’s orientation but, to me, Cheryl reads like a chaotic bisexual that goes back and forth on her identity because being bi is confusing enough. And as someone who is bi, I would like to see more representation and fiction for people like myself because fandoms are so quick to erase bisexuality and pansexuality and criticize us when we speak up about it. So in this story, Cheryl is bi and she has broken up with her most recent girlfriend before meeting her next partner who is a man. And it’s fine.

If this upsets you, just swipe off of this post. Don’t leave mean comments or take digs at me because I’m not for any of this fandom infighting nonsense. It’s fiction and these characters can be whatever you want them to be in your stories.

However, if you don’t mind Cheryl liking both men and women, you don’t have an opinion either way, or your curious to see how this’ll pan out, stay tuned. I’d love to share this story with you. All are welcome so long as things stay civil and breezy.

So with that, I look forward to updating with the couple’s board and then the first chapter titlecard along with the chapter itself. Until then, stay lovely and stay groovy.💜

#wednesday netflix #riverdale #tyler galpin #wednesday addams #pugsley addams #pubert addams #wyler #weyler #kent and divina #bianca barclay #bughead #cheryl blossom #jason blossom #betty cooper #jughead jones #polly cooper #archie andrews #reggie mantle #veronica lodge #josie mccoy #enid sinclair #ajax petropolus #enid x ajax #betty x jughead #sweet pea riverdale #joaquin desantos #kevin keller #moose mason #xavier thorpe #josie x sweet pea

[bakuhatsufallinlove]

Hello, I hope I can ask you this. I was exploring the Jp side of YouTube and watching review and discussion videos on MHA. I found a couple of popular videos on the potential future relationships of all the characters, and as expected, they were all the default m/f pairs. But the comments took me by surprise. Most of them were about “greentea,” obviously, but I could also see comments on very odd pairs like Eri and Deku, Mahoro and Bakugo, and even Eri and Mirio quite frequently! (Even typing it out is making me cringe)😭😭😭 However, I also saw a couple of comments on Bakugo and Deku, but very few, probably 1 out of 100. I’m really curious about how bkdk is perceived by the general Japanese audience, is it even taken seriously? Maybe I just couldn’t find any review videos that even considered them as a pair, but the ones I saw were kinda popular too; they had plenty of views. So yeah, I’d love to know your thoughts on this, again I hope this is ok to ask🥹

Also I just discovered you and I love all your content!😭 I’ve exhausted them haha, thank you so much for your work! Lots of love! 🩷🩷🩷

First off, I want to mention that I have a hitherto unspoken rule to not comment on ships other than bkdk. I know you are asking about bkdk specifically, but the framework of the question brings other things into the discussion, so I want to say this clearly to discourage follow-up questions from others which may be angled toward different ships or ship discourse in general. Bkdk is what I’m here for, so bkdk is what I’m going to talk about.

In regards to your actual question, I’m gonna answer by giving you some information about how fandom works in Japan.

Bkdk is the most popular mha ship in Japan in terms of fanworks, by a wide margin.

Japanese fandom is, compared to English-speaking fandom, heavily centered on fanart. Japan has frequent doujinshi (independently published comic) events where dozens or even hundreds of artists come to distribute their work, and many of these have been going on for decades. It is not hyperbole to say that some kind of doujinshi event, showcasing brand new work, is going on in at least one major city in Japan every single month, and these events are attended by hundreds and sometimes thousands of people. Sometimes there are two or more events in a single month.

To be clear, doujinshi are not only fanworks, which is why I specified “independently published comic.” Lots of doujin are original works, and many now well-known mangaka got their start, gained connections, and built their early fanbase through participating in doujin circles (collaborative groups of artists who create work under the same independent label). My point is that visual art and comics are so huge in Japan it is hard to overstate their prominence in the culture as a whole, let alone fandom culture.

So, fanart and doujin are huge, and among fans who make fanart/doujin, bkdk is wildly popular.

The thing you have to ask yourself is, does fanwork represent general readership? Drawing fanart is the most common way to show your love for a series in Japan, but that definitely doesn’t mean every reader is drawing fanart. In my opinion, fanfic is prominent in USA-centered fandom, but obviously only a fraction of the people who enjoy a series are going to write fanfic for it.

I don’t think we can really quantify the opinions of general readership this way. I mean, when you scroll through the comment section of the same kind of clickbaity, hot-topic videos about anime/manga that English-speaking audiences watch, do you feel like those comments accurately reflects what most people think? I know I don’t. There is always going to be a selection bias, because “people who comment on youtube videos” also only represent a fraction of “people who read mha.”

Japanese fandom is significantly more segmented and considerate of differing tastes than English-speaking fandom.

Japanese fandom is pretty strict with its rules of engagement. Personal privacy and respect for others are very important factors. Artists don’t want to be recognized at their day-job for their R18 doujin. Shippers don’t want their comments or cutesy fanart to be algorithmically-fed to users who have no interest in it. This is seen as polite and correct; it is respectful of the fact that people have different tastes, and not everyone will share yours.

See, Japanese fandom recognizes that the internet constitutes public view.

So fan language is coded: words are spelled slightly differently; characters, events, or ships get unique euphemistic nicknames; words or names are replaced with emojis. All of this is to prevent their stuff from being seen by someone just casually searching “Bakugou.”

You have to be in the know to know how to find stuff. You have to actively search for like-minded fans and curate your space, expanding your circle typically through word of mouth. And you have to abide by the rules, or else everyone is going to think you’re an overbearing jerk and not wanna be around you.

If you are just using google translate on social media posts or videos visibly labeled under the series title, you aren’t going to find much in regards to active shipping. Frankly, you aren’t going to see the whole scope of Japanese bkdk fan activity in any one place using any one method. This is how Japanese fandom is designed, and people work pretty hard to keep it that way.

Japanese fandom does not generally engage from the perspective that their desires will be validated by canon.

This is one of the biggest differences. In English-speaking fandom, you see people argue left and right about what’s going to be canon, who’s the endgame ship, and so on. People are very preoccupied by the idea that their ship has to be “validated,” and this validation comes from the notion that canon will reflect their personal preferences and fulfill their hopes for how the story will go.

This is just not the atmosphere in the vast majority of Japanese fan spaces. Remember how I said that jpn fandom recognizes that people have different tastes? This means people also tend to think that it is rather arrogant and demanding to think that your wishes are the only ones that should come true. It is also disrespectful of the mangaka’s artistic vision and hard-work to expect them to disregard their own desires to satisfy you personally.

So, when you ask, “are bkdk even taken seriously?” the question is built upon the idea that people who enjoy the series expect an outcome catered to their tastes.

As you said, most of the comments were for heterosexual pairings, which are the most obvious to predict considering the endings of other popular series published in Weekly Shonen Jump. Furthermore, Yashahime—sequel anime to shounen manga Inuyasha—confirmed that a character roughly ten years of age later grew up and had children with a (slowly-aging but adult) supernatural being who served as her caretaker and protector.

Maybe the video commenters were reflecting personal interest in those ships, or maybe they were just spit-balling off stuff they'd seen before. I can tell you I haven't really seen fanart for any of that, but I don't go looking for it, and m/f ship spaces will be separate from m/m ship spaces.

Still, it is important to remember that audience expectation is not directly correlated to outcome. When the online Shonen Jump+ manga Blue Flag was first published, the vast majority of readers did not expect that one of the characters in the love triangle would be gay. Hell, they expected it so little that the reveal went viral!

Audience expectation may be interesting to think about, but it is not a prediction method.

To sum it up:

Bkdk is extremely popular, but jpn fandom is very private and structured differently than English-speaking fandom.

Any metric of measurement for reader opinion will have its flaws, and audience expectation is not a foolproof way to gauge real outcome.

Personally, I think we should all take a cue from jpn fandom and just have fun.

I hope that answers your question and gives you some context, anon. Thank you for the kind comments on my work, I really appreciate it. <3

#asks #anon asks

[peaterookie]

Most of us know by this point that the Lupin III manga series doesn't particularly have the best reputation, but why is that?

Is it simply because of the content itself, or is there more behind it?

It is August 10th, the 56th anniversary of the og manga, and I will be exploring the causes of the manga's poor reputation in the Lupin community with as most detail as I can try to be.

Bluntly put, I will not hide the fact that the manga series as a whole contains extremely problematic elements. All three series, OG manga, New Adventures, and Shin Lupin III all contain instance of Lupin and other characters raping and sexually assaulting women.

It certainly gets better as the series goes on. At the last three major arcs of Shin Lupin III, Lupin becomes almost entirely sexless, with some instances of plain pervertedness. However, it is not an issue that cannot be glossed over and it is the by far biggest burden that this series has to carry over its 56 years of existence.

OG manga is the biggest culprit of this, barely two chapter goes by without an instance of Lupin pulling his sexual advances onto random women and succeeding. Those moments of the manga are extremely gross and uncomfortable- and it really makes our protagonist extremely unlikeable, which brings me to my next point:

The fact that the OG manga is the first of the three manga series contribute heavily to its poor reputation.

"Aiee!! No way that the biggest manga preacher in tumblr is slandering the manga! Isn't that out of character!?"

It quite is, luckily I can think. As someone who has spent about 5 months reviewing almost all of the chapters, I can say that I know quite a bit about what it does right and what it does wrong... and it sadly does many things wrong.

Of course, the main thing is the sexual violence, but it is also the series with the least interaction between each member of the Lupin gang, who are characters people already come to really like. Lacking that element takes away what many people regard to be the best part about the series.

The beginning chapters of the og manga are also poorly paced. A bunch of things are going on, and the panelling certainly makes it hard to follow as well.

And to even add to the original issue, the english translation provided by Tokyopop also fucked everything up too!! Many of the extreme dialogues that you come across, including ones that make jokes at Monkey Punch's expense, are done by Tokyopop. Tabbiewolf explains this much better than I can:

"Just remember: a LOT of the…more offensive stuff in the manga is from the TokyoPop translations. I’m not excusing ALL of it, mind you — it was the 1960s and this was an adventure/spy manga marketed at cisdudes, after all — but the script writer for the English version was extremely, uh, artistic, with his localization of the translation."

"it was the early 2000s, manga was trying to appeal specifically to people who didn’t read it: teenaged cisboys who watched South Park, basically ;) So a fair amount of the stuff was very much the new English script, NOT the creator ‘s original work! Some plots got changed entirely just because the Japanese slang from the time didn’t translate."

First impressions matter, and the OG manga makes a very bad impression for people attempting to get into the manga series. Many readers are most likely taken back by how different it is from what they are used to, and they are definitely not going to like the problematic elements.

Those who still try to give it second chances are going to be met with disappointment when they find out these glaring issues are only partially fixed further into the series. Believing that it won't get better, they end up dropping the manga altogether and generalizing the rest of the manga series as depraved nonsense.

And I can't simply blame Monkey Punch for all these issues!! It was the first of what's to come, and he was not aware at the time just how big Lupin III would become in Japan and eventually worldwide. The og manga is very experimental, and you can tell he was only trying to figure out what works. I also cannot blame the people that dislike the manga. People naturally dislike something that is problematic and different.

Heck, most manga fans feel indifferent about the og manga as well, with the majority of them liking Shin Lupin III much better.

I have the statistic right here!!! It's not a lot of people, but there's an obvious majority choice here.

(By the way, if you're enjoying reading this so far, you should totally join my Lupin III server ahem cough cough nudge nudge)

So not even the manga fans love the OG manga. In my opinion, I would definitely not recommend people to read that as their first Lupin manga either. It is the type of media that if you really love the source material in general, then it'd be ok to read.

It is quite a shame to say that the series that does a better job at getting people in the manga, is the third one of the bunch. Most people aren't going to know that however, and they end up reading something that is going to likely give a bad image of the manga.

Ok so I dont have a good segway to the second part of this post so have a panel.

Now I'm gonna talk about how the fandom itself screw up it's reputation!!

(Before you get further I have to say that I have nothing against anime fans, if I do sound like I don't like them it's just sort of poor wording on my end)

Many fans of Lupin III start with the anime, if not probably all of them at this point. This causes a huge skew in public opinion, where those who are pre-exposed to the anime are probably going to view the manga as something lesser than its animated counterpart.

This can be seen particularly in CloudConnection's video of his manga analysis, which is concerningly just a portion of this 18 minute video, but I'll look over that. The portions of the video where he analyzes the manga contain a large amount of negative opinions about it.

A lot of his points are very good, and a lot of them I agree with, like his issues with the rape and sexual assault and how its a good time capsule but definitely not something that people should start off with. But a rest of the points seem a bit unreasonable to make and rather biased, like how the characters feel inconsistent, the bad pacing, and really emphasizing how dark and grim the manga is (it is very goofy and nobody ever talks about that)

And I have to state- It's totally valid for someone to prefer one thing over the other, but my point is that when this opinion is overwhelmingly the majority, it is going to cause the general public's opinion to unfairly be against something, ignoring what it does good and pinning the focus on what it does bad.

That video example was very popular, and I know someone personally that got the wrong memo from it and hated the manga without reading it for a long time, so you can see how it can probably effect the rest of the people that viewed that video.

So what can we learn from this?

We now understand that two of major reasons responsible for the manga's bad reputation is one: the unfortunate circumstance of the OG manga being the first series, and the overwhelming public opinion being unfairly skewed against it.

To wrap this up, I ask you to please give the manga a chance!! Read Shin Lupin first, and be aware of its flaws while also appreciating what it has contributed for the franchise and anime as a whole. I hope you enjoyed this little essay I wrote, and happy birthday Lupin III!

#lupin iii #lupin the third #lupin iii manga #monkey punch #peater rambles

[mcromwell]

Ayo! New follower here. I love your art and your mind set of just messing around to make cool stuff. but I’ve also seen you love been to at least one convention (I didn’t scroll far enough to see more about conventions) and I wanted to ask. How you did it? I really enjoy making art and I would love to make it a career so this boils down to :

how did you do it? And how can I do it too?

not just like first steps but what happens after that? I’m young enough that if this doesn’t work out I have plenty of time to look into other careers before worrying about paying for rent or necessities with money from my future occupation. I know that everyone’s experience is different but I still hoping you can give me a somewhat clear answer.

thank you for inspiring me

(sorry this ask was so long)

Hello there! Thank you for your message.

These questions are large and hard to answer. Being more specific in your questions helps. "How I did it" is very... large in scope. That question could be answered just by saying, "I did it by never wanting anything else and never losing sight of my goal." But that doesn't help you much. So I'll just try to touch on some key points and contexts.

I'm 32. Only in the last couple years has my practice been enough to make a living doing it. I've always wanted this and literally everything I've done in my life has been to get here. I've worked two jobs my entire working life (age 19-now): retail/customer service and art stuff on the side. Because of the pandemic, I got double unemployment and stimulus checks, which became my initial investment into merch and savings safety net to get started. I started therapy to address my fears of asking for help, my negative self-talk, and catastrophic thinking. (Therapy has helped me with my art so much.) Then I was laid off for real in 2020 and hit the ground running with art. I split rent with roommates, I live very very cheaply, and art is my passion. If art for a living is what you want to do and you're happy to make lots of concessions to get it, this career works. It takes a while to get momentum and regular sales/attention-- just don't quit. The more stuff you do the more people will recognize you and like your work.

It would be dishonest to not address my privilege here, too. My parents have always emotionally supported my practice, my friends too, and I got to go to art school with no debt. I did outside of school art mentorships. My art education experiences taught me a lot of art techniques and self-employed skills and that only happened due to the support of my folks. I had resources a lot of people don't. (Which is why I want to help new artists learn this stuff as much as I can; not everyone is as lucky as I am.)

My advice for you if you want to do what I do, which is being self-employed making and selling art and art merchandise for a living:

Get used to making concessions right at first. Your art career will probably not start out gangbusters, so get used to low sales and saving money and working hard. Make things within your means and grow from there.

Fuck around and find out. Try making merch, try making videos, try things you see other artists doing, try everything and see if it works for how you like to make stuff. I learn so much from YouTube, to be totally honest. Artists are good sharers.

Follow a shit ton of artists and see what works for them. Join artist groups and ask thoughtful, specific questions to learn from those already doing it.

Learn how to write about your art. Write about why you make it. It helps make it more compelling to others. "How to Sell Your Art Online" by Cory Huff is a good book to read for tips on this.

Develop a healthy relationship with art-making. If you sit down at a blank page and it terrifies you: address that first. Don't try to start a business if you're still struggling with making art regularly.

In fact, don't start a business until you're really ready. Art comes first. You can easily do art and build skills and do commissions and run an online shop along with working a job that pays bills reliably while you grow into the artist you're meant to be.

Don't pigeon-hole yourself into only one channel: don't JUST apply to cons, try street fairs too. Don't JUST sell online, get your work into cafes as well. You'll see which routes are more profitable/worth the time as you try them out. Eggs in many baskets, you know.

There's probably a whole essay I could write on this. And you're right--mileage varies between person to person vastly. The part of the world you live in, your access to transportation, education, your mental health, what type of work you like to make, etc. Art careers almost never look the same 1:1 even in fandom spaces like furry/anime. If you're self-made, it will reflect that.

I recommend the YouTube channels Rafi Was Here, Robin Sealark, Cat Graffam, and the website The Abundant Artist (again by Cory Huff) for more resources.

Don't be afraid to take leaps of faith. Try everything. Be true to what works for you and what doesn't feel sustainable. Be authentic with your art and stay true to your interests. And good luck.

#art career #freelance artist #independent artist #art job #self employed #art