(ID in alt) I literally said I was gonna post this month's ago and then never had the wherewithal to describe it and so I didn't Lmao (said with pain). But since I'm thinking of opening my commissions I figured I should remind ppl that I. Yknow. Can draw.
Lots of Steph here (I had major art block making all of these and my brain worms for her kept me going) + some sprinkles of stephcass for Cass nation to enjoy!
FINALLYYYYYY. My guys of the jury, this has a tracked 30 damn hours and boy does it feel like it. ANYWAYS, I return for more AU shenanigans because Get Redeemed Loser AU lives in my head rent free. Felt like a nice way to experiment with more vertical style comics? Which is SM EASIER TO PANEL THAN CLASS LAYOUTS. I get why they're so much more common nowadays. Comic,,, so satisfying but at what cost,,, i'm tired. So proud of the top half tho :3.
Okay back to AU brainrot, Mark and Wasp fighting over one of their core differences! I think this is early in their relationship where Mark still thinks Wasp can at least understand what it's like being Nolan's son, only to get smacked in the face with how pride Wasp holds in that title. Anyways, look below to see my suffering made into video.
local artist redoes like 4 damn panels 8 bajillion times and screams into the sky ♡ also if you want fic of this au you should read the fic that @avisisisis wrote about it, ooooo you wanna read it so bad, it's good :3
I haven't seen anyone talk about this yet, but there's a difference between Amane's eyes in Magic and Purge March.
In Purge March, we see that her murder is not just motivated by her cult's beliefs; she also sings about wanting someone (presumably her victim) to pay for hurting her. That's a very personal motivation. It seems she chose to do it instead of someone in the cult telling her to kill them.
However, there's still a focus on following the cult's teachings. I believe that her victim might have been a hypocrite who broke one of the doctrines. Thus, they needed to be punished. It's both doctrine-motivated and revenge-motivated.
She's partially letting her own opinions color her view of what she's doing, hence her eyes being half a different color and half some of the cult's color (green and yellow). Since each mascot has a color associated with them, this means that the commandments Amane is thinking most about are
Thou shall deliver unto those thou believest in (Yuri)
Thou shall stay thine course, then perish (Gachata)
Notably, the purple wasn't there in Magic. This may signify that she is taking her own feelings into her view of things more. Gachata's teachings may be becoming slightly less important to her now than before. Meanwhile, Yuri's teachings still hold strong.
The purple could also represent outside influences since the hat is part of Amane's school uniform, which is also purple. Schools tend to teach things that run counter to what many religious cults teach. We know that the hat is part of the uniform since this girl is also wearing it, and I think that it's the same color as the hat.
By popular demand (ie, 7 people who voted in this poll), here is a tutorial on how to do the glass shatter effect I used to create the first gif in this set.
I use Photoshop CC 2015 (yes I know it's old) for my gifmaking, but you should be able to apply everything to newer versions of Photoshop. For this tutorial I'll be assuming you know the gifmaking basics, but if not, I would recommend this tutorial, which is the process I use to make gifs. Note that this particular process involves saving all of the frames, importing those frames into Photoshop, and then using an action to convert to a smart object.
Keep reading below the cut to learn how to do this effect!
Before I could start making this gif, I needed three things; the two scenes that I wanted to use, and a video of the glass shattering effect. I already knew the scenes I wanted, so then I took to YouTube to find a video which I can't for the life of me find again, but it looked like this:
Something like this is what you want. Ideally the green part would be entirely white, but as long as there are two clearly different colours you can usually work with it.
This looks a lot slower than the gif that I made, but that's not because of the frame rate - which is exactly the same above as in the final gif - it's just because there are extra frames in this slower one that I cut out. In the video I used, the glass shattering happened very slowly. I didn't want that, so I ended up skipping several frames when I loaded the frames into Photoshop before using my gifmaking action. I just did this by manually selecting one frame, skipping the next several before selecting another frame, and repeating this until I had selected 60 frames.
After using my gif action, I had a smart object of the glass shatter effect that looked like this:
That's a much better speed! It still wasn't quite where I needed it to be though. I needed this in black and white, so I slapped a hue/saturation adjustment on the smart object and set the saturation all the way down to -100.
Okay great, I could start putting the gif together now.
First, I made a copy of the glass shatter smart object, because I'll need that later. Then, I pulled in frames from the scene that I wanted to appear in the hole after the glass shatters, and I used those to create a new smart object with my gif action (we'll call it Scene-bg). I pulled Scene-bg into the same window as the glass shatter objects. Then I created a new smart object by combining one of the glass shatter objects with Scene-bg, which I did by selecting both layers right clicking, and selecting "Convert to Smart Object".
I renamed this smart object to Shatter-fg. I opened it by clicking on the little icon next to the layer name in the layers window here:
The most important thing here is that the shatter effect object should be the top layer, and I set the mode to "lighten". This will make sure that the lightest colour of either this layer and the layer behind it is displayed; that means that anywhere that's white in our shatter animation will still show up, but anywhere that's black we'll see what's in the layer(s) behind it.
Then I threw some adjustment layers between them to get the colouring I wanted. I used a curves layer, a hue/saturation layer, and I also added text with an outer glow layer effect. Here's what the layer order looked like and the settings I used for each layer:
After this process, Shatter-fg looked like this:
Okay nice, this is starting to look like something! I saved this and went back to the main file with the other glass shatter object.
I needed to invert that other glass shatter object. There's a weird quirk with the version of Photoshop that I use where it doesn't like it when I apply specifically an invert adjustment to a smart object (it appears correctly when editing, but not on export) so I did this by creating a new smart object which included a separate invert layer, but if you have a newer version of Photoshop you can probably just apply the invert adjustment directly. Just note that you'll need to do one of these options; it won't work if you add a separate adjustment layer in the main file, it needs to be applied specifically to the smart object (which we'll now be calling Shatter-bg). It looked like this after I inverted it:
Once that's done, I made sure Shatter-fg was the layer directly above Shatter-bg, and set the mode of Shatter-fg to "darken" and Shatter-bg to "lighten". Since Shatter-fg is set to darken, it will be visible only when it is darker than the layer behind it. By setting Shatter-bg to lighten, I've guaranteed that the layer behind it will always be lighter (ie, white) in the places we want Shatter-fg to be visible, and will be black otherwise. Once I update those settings, this is what the gif looked like:
This is all there is to the glass shatter effect itself. Next I pulled in frames from the second scene to fill in the black areas. This layer needed to go below both glass shatter layers, so that it only shows through where the black. Then I added adjustment layers and some text. I used curves, hue/saturation, and vibrance adjustment layers, and I also added the "archer" text below the glass shatter layers so that it would be hidden to reveal the "prey" text. The other text I added above all of the layers, since I wanted this to be visible all the time. Here is the layer order and all of the settings I used for each of the layers:
I also grouped Shatter-bg and Shatter-fg and shifted them on the timeline so there would be some time to see the background gif before the shatter effect starts.
And that's all! Then it''s just a matter of exporting the finished product:
This is the first gifmaking tutorial I've ever made, so I hope I was able to be reasonably coherent and helpful! I'd love to hear if you make anything by following these steps, or even if you just feel like you've learned something reading through this. And if you have any outstanding questions, feel free to reply or send me an ask and I'd be happy to answer!
saw a post questioning shipping Senua and Thórgestr and started to reblog it with a tag novel-- felt weird about doing that since this is lengthy and potentially derailing, so making my own post instead. Spitballing under the cut:
First off, any time someone is like, "the real reason people ship this is because they find the dude attractive," this is SO funny to me as someone who doesn't find men attractive IRL and has fiercely loved Senua since I played the first game, like-- actually I find the dynamic between those two characters to be compelling and interesting precisely because of all the baggage between them re: their backgrounds, the rough (put mildly!) beginning of their relationship, all the things they don't talk about, and them finding a common enemy/common ground to work with. The explicit parallels between them stated in-game scratched an itch in my brain. The minute they pointed out the dark rot on his arm, it was like, "oh! hello there! NOW I'm interested in whatever your whole deal is" for me. Also, idk man, I too would follow Senua around after she knocked me into the dirt and then showed me a way to fight the giants that I very much wanted to fight instead of appease.
The idea that Thórgestr was part of the Orkney Raid that killed and mutilated Dillion is VERY interesting food for thought, even if I don't personally have that headcanon (surely there are more viking raiding groups than just the Bjorg). I think the Furies or the Shadow said something similar about Fargrimr (his kin murdered yours, you shouldn't save him, etc.) so I completely get that line of thought, but I think the game left it ambiguous enough that it's up for interpretation. Would I read fic with that premise? Yeah, I'd check that out. Could Senua forgive Thorgestr if his people were involved? Sounds fun to explore.
If (ha, when?) I write fic, I'd have to think more about it especially wrt timelines, like when did the Bjorg start specifically raiding for slaves for giant food sacrifices vs. killing people for resources and wealth? How far off are we from the old gods "dying" and the volcano erupting? Was it indeed a different group of raiders who made a deal with Zynbel, attacked Senua's home, and made the sacrifice at that time to Hela?
At the very least, I think there's a time jump between the end of Hellblade I and the beginning of Hellblade II since Senua wasn't alone on that slave ship and at least one of the (brief) survivors knew her by name. I wouldn't mind exploring that gap of time, too.
In any case I do agree that it would take a VERY long time for Senua to consciously catch feelings for anyone let alone Thorgestr with all their collective baggage. The idea of them having a relationship beyond friendship in the far off future of an AU where he survives is the only one that can make sense in my brain, personally. It would take time! Time they didn't get in the game! But I think there are a lot of different roads that could take, and some of them might be healthier than others. Shipping them certainly isn't forgetting or excusing what happened to Dillion-- or even mutually exclusive from still shipping Senua and Dillion. Or, frankly, also shipping Senua and Astridr, because I can see that ship too.
One of the nice things about all the details Ninja Theory didn't expand upon and that they left that ending so open is that the sky's the limit. I'm VERY interested in seeing fandom tackle this game as we get farther from the initial release.
My top songs (of the first half) of 2023
✦ Boys Planet edition ✦
tagged by @lunetual @jikyu @leewonseo @lee-minhoe ty 💕
I've listened to over 300 new releases from over 100 different kpop artists this year so picking my top songs felt like an mnet-level survival show 😭 the irony that i never watched Boys Planet AND one of the songs is literally a Peak Time song is not lost on me ! 🙃 but i wanted to pick a trendy format so here we are 😈 anyways i included albums instead of songs that didn't make the cut since there's too many honorable mention songs that i have had on repeat this year 😭 but most of them are in these 22 albums (oo-li is on here twice and istj isn't out yet !)
if u like my gif template, here's the link ! pls credit me ty <3
tagging (no obligation ofc and if you've already posted will u tag/send me so i can see 🥺): @bahngentertainment @chrisbangs @coupsnim @dakbees @dive-in-the-blue @hannahbahng @hyunfelix @ingblr-s @jinniebit @kyubins @losergirlz @quokki @shorelinnes @starcatching @userjiung @userwoodz @wabisaba @woodziecup @yohanblr + anyone else who wants to share just say that i tagged u <3
i hate how people can just easily erase and forget and overlook a platonic relationship that had key importance to the show/movie they're apart of, like people talk about them at first, but when the second a romantic relationship is "more important" to talk about, most of the fandom drops it and forgets it when it's convenient for them because apparently it's not as important as romance 😒