CATO!!! That thing I’m obsessed with him
I’m playing him in Shadowrun now!!! We’re three sessions in and my friend and I are already squealing over how cute the chemistry is between our characters… now we wait
[Image: a digital drawing of Cato, a chubby, pretty, dark-skinned elf boy with curly, bleached blond hair tinted pastel pink and blue, visibly darker at the roots and at the cornrows across the (viewer’s) left side of his head. He wears bright, neon-pink makeup around his eyes, big hoop earrings, and stylish, futuristic clothes, consisting of a faintly-patterned black halter that looks to be made out of PVC or some such shiny, stretchy fabric, over a mesh top with long sleeves and shoulder cutouts, black gloves and shorts with a garter belt clipped to dark, translucent stockings, and a pair of chunky heeled high-top sneakers, each with a different hanzi character on the tongue (愛 on his right, and 死 on his left). A translucent holographic jacket hangs open off of his shoulders, scrunched around the bend in his arm and dangling loose over his other hand. He stands with one hand on his hip, looking somewhat petulantly off to one side. End ID.]
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at some point it's just like. do they even fucking like the thing they're asking AI to make? "oh we'll just use AI for all the scripts" "we'll just use AI for art" "no worries AI can write this book" "oh, AI could easily design this"
like... it's so clear they've never stood in the middle of an art museum and felt like crying, looking at a piece that somehow cuts into your marrow even though the artist and you are separated by space and time. they've never looked at a poem - once, twice, three times - just because the words feel like a fired gun, something too-close, clanging behind your eyes. they've never gotten to the end of the movie and had to arrive, blinking, back into their body, laughing a little because they were holding their breath without realizing.
"oh AI can mimic style" "AI can mimic emotion" "AI can mimic you and your job is almost gone, kid."
... how do i explain to you - you can make AI that does a perfect job of imitating me. you could disseminate it through the entire world and make so much money, using my works and my ideas and my everything.
and i'd still keep writing.
i don't know there's a word for it. in high school, we become aware that the way we feel about our artform is a cliche - it's like breathing. over and over, artists all feel the same thing. "i write because i need to" and "my music is how i speak" and "i make art because it's either that or i stop existing." it is such a common experience, the violence and immediacy we mean behind it is like breathing to me - comes out like a useless understatement. it's a cliche because we all feel it, not because the experience isn't actually persistent. so many of us have this ... fluttering urgency behind our ribs.
i'm not doing it for the money. for a star on the ground in some city i've never visited. i am doing it because when i was seven i started taking notebooks with me on walks. i am doing it because in second grade i wrote a poem and stood up in front of my whole class to read it out while i shook with nerves. i am doing it because i spent high school scribbling all my feelings down. i am doing it for the 16 year old me and the 18 year old me and the today-me, how we can never put the pen down. you can take me down to a subatomic layer, eviscerate me - and never find the source of it; it is of me. when i was 19 i named this blog inkskinned because i was dramatic and lonely and it felt like the only thing that was actually permanently-true about me was that this is what is inside of me, that the words come up over everything, coat everything, bloom their little twilight arias into every nook and corner and alley
"we're gonna replace you". that is okay. you think that i am writing to fill a space. that someone said JOB OPENING: Writer Needed, and i wrote to answer. you think one raindrop replaces another, and i think they're both just falling. you think art has a place, that is simply arrives on walls when it is needed, that is only ever on demand, perfect, easily requested. you see "audience spending" and "marketability" and "multi-line merch opportunity"
and i see a kid drowning. i am writing to make her a boat. i am writing because what used to be a river raft has long become a fully-rigged ship. i am writing because you can fucking rip this out of my cold dead clammy hands and i will still come back as a ghost and i will still be penning poems about it.
it isn't even love. the word we use the most i think is "passion". devotion, obsession, necessity. my favorite little fact about the magic of artists - "abracadabra" means i create as i speak. we make because it sluices out of us. because we look down and our hands are somehow already busy. because it was the first thing we knew and it is our backbone and heartbreak and everything. because we have given up well-paying jobs and a "real life" and the approval of our parents. we create because - the cliche again. it's like breathing. we create because we must.
you create because you're greedy.
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The biggest misconception in the bsd fandom ever to me is people constantly portraying Atsushi as someone who trauma dumps excessively when he canonically barely talks about it at all.
The entire point is that Atsushi does not talk about his trauma he’s just constantly thinking about/reliving it. He can’t escape the memories of his past so he tries not to acknowledge them.
He only mentions it when asked, either directly or when someone asks him to explain himself.
Atsushi doesn’t even give a cohesive explanation for what he saw while under Dogra Magra, he just apologizes to Haruno and Naomi.
If Lucy hadn’t had her whole “you’ve never suffered the way I have” spiel then I doubt even the audience would’ve gotten to find out about his scars
If Akutagawa never asked him how it felt for the orphanage headmaster to die Atsushi would have never told him that he’s been hallucinating.
In the omake where Kyoka asks him why his hair is like that it’s clear he wouldn’t have told her that unless she had asked.
In 55 minutes Atsushi very briefly mentions sleeping on a dirty floor somewhere to Kunikida because he was trying to explain and justify his behavior.
And the thing is that there are scenes that implies that the other characters see Atsushi behaving strangely and are visibly confused because they do not understand what’s wrong with him.
Remember, we as an audience get to see things about characters that the main cast doesn’t. Just because we see into Atsushi’s mind doesn’t mean the other characters know what’s going on in there.
Also little footnote here that I think the scenes with Lucy and Akutagawa in specific are probably references to the moon over the mountain but I digress
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Secondhand Solutions
Mur gave me a smug look, curling and uncurling one tentacle like a yo-yo. “Told you it was a waste of credits,” he said.
I sighed. “If those human ships were here, it wouldn’t be. This stuff is prime Earth nostalgia.” The small pile of items on the hoversled had seemed so full of promise when I’d bought it at our last stop: cat posters, harmonicas, and a dozen packs of googly eyes.
“Pity we’re far from Earth,” Mur said.
“Yeah,” I agreed, eyeing the locals of this alien marketplace. Lots of scales and exoskeletons. Not many hands that would appreciate the softness of a cat’s fur, and very few mouthparts that would be able to do much with a harmonica. The merchant I’d gotten the stuff from had been a Heatseeker all too happy to unload her stock of cut-rate human nonsense. These folks would likely have similar opinions. I said, “At least it doesn’t expire.”
Mur straightened the individually-boxed harmonicas. “And it shouldn’t take up too much space in your quarters until we meet up with more humans eventually. The captain won’t want to hang around here waiting for them to show up.”
“True,” I admitted. It was gossip from our last stop that had told me they’d be here now. I should have known better than to trust it.
“Well, back to the ship,” Mur announced. “Maybe you can cheer yourself up by decorating your quarters with eyeballs.”
I had to smile at that. “Maybe.” He was already walking back to where we’d parked, on the far side of an over-cultivated garden area. I towed the hoversled after him.
Then I caught sight of some locals who’d run afoul of multiple birdlike beasties, and an idea started to form.
The locals, a half-dozen Heatseekers whose scales ranged from red to pale yellow, were trying to eat a nice lunch at the dining section of the garden. The squawking bird-things, which were half-lizardy with speckled brown feathers and wide beaks, had apparently claimed the bushes for their own. They were contesting this claim by spitting at the Heatseekers every time their backs were turned. These looked like pretty gross spitballs, impressive for birds.
It occurred to me that I’d seen those feathery characters all over the place here. A look behind confirmed it; they lurked in nearly every tree I could see. And judging by the way the locals were abandoning this picnic table, they were a known hazard.
They still only spat at fleeing enemies, hiding or freezing in place when pinned by eye contact.
And that was my idea. “Hey Mur,” I said. “I’ll bet you one shanty sung on a table that I can sell some of these googly eyes right now.”
He stopped and looked around, full of skepticism. “To who?”
“Do you take the bet?”
“Ah, sure. There’s no way anyone here is interested.”
“You say that now,” I said, grabbing a pack and waving down one of the hurrying locals. “But you don’t know how we deal with tigers and magpies.”
“With what?”
I didn’t answer, busy as I was explaining to the local that the false eyes were adhesive, and would give the impression of eye contact from both directions. They were just as interested as I’d thought they’d be.
After a demonstration, during which I strolled through the picnic area and didn’t get a single spitball on me, the birds were unsettled and the locals were more than happy to buy everything I had.
This was a new colony town, you see, and no one had come up with a good solution for the annoying fauna that came with the territory. But these folks were prepared to make everyone’s day.
They certainly made mine. That was five times as much as I’d paid for the stuff in the first place. And they didn’t even want the posters and harmonicas.
I waved goodbye, but they weren’t paying attention, so I turned my grin on Mur instead. He had draped a tentacle around his pointy squid head in exasperation.
“I knew I shouldn’t have taken the bet,” he declared. “But I was so sure it was pointless.”
“And I am sure that whichever song you choose to regale us with at dinnertime will be delightful,” I said, tugging the hovercart around the bushes. The birds watched me carefully, noting the eyes still stuck to my hair, and leaving us both alone. “If it’s a song I know, maybe I can play a backup melody with a harmonica.”
~~~
The ongoing backstory adventures of the main character from this book. More to come! And I am currently drafting a sequel!
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Prompt 278
You know what I’ve gotten obsessed with and inspired by? Dredge.
You know what is also fun? Merfolk. What’s even better? Lovecraftian corrupted merfolk. Especially if say, one goes with the Lazarus Waters being a form of ectoplasm. So, in this? Lazarus waters are like lakes, while Amity Park, thanks to the Portal, and the barriers? It is an entire sea.
There are islands, small areas that were once the tips of buildings that have gathered more landmass around them. There are mangroves, trees not like anything on earth or anywhere else stretching up in canopies dark enough to block out the sun, yet lit by the green waters.
It goes deep. Mariana Trench deep, despite it being impossible. The GIW have explored for caves or tunnels, they’ve tried to find some sort of explanation, but there isn’t one.
Now all that ecto? That has an effect on people. They mutate, they change, they adapt. Anywhere else would have been a slow death- something the GIW might have even been counting on. But Amity Park? It was founded by witches, it was the hotspot for the supernatural, even before the Fentonwork Portal.
They’ve been dealing with this sort of energy in microdoses from the moment they first began to live in the city in any generation.
But they begin to adapt. Shift into something… other. Some stay contaminated, clinging to human forms as they form homes on the tiny islands, fishing and farming what they can. Others become Liminal, almost seeming to meld with fish, some similar to ones of the Living and others something just to the left. Similar yes, but not quite… right. And then there are those that have truly melded with the energy of the dead, forms torn asunder by it, ripped apart and made anew by it.
The first sign back when the barrier was activated, when they could no longer leave and were trapped were the fish in the lake. And now they are the same, with gazes of something Else, with gnashing teeth and a hunger gnawing at where hearts once were.
But they aren’t monsters. They’re still themselves. Just a little… Other now.
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