#i don't know what makes my art 'my art' other than the fact i made it. i don't know how to theme my future patreon or my website

[rainyfirecollection2]

out of curiosity what's the moment being a hardcore Ruben stan really clicked for you

Really good question, thank you for asking.

I enjoyed when he was onscreen, even on first watch, but that's not exceptional. Brennan does great voices etc, he's a very funny presence, but all this can apply to Gertie, or a billion other NPCs. His art is so huggable, but that wouldn't be it on its own.

He kept growing on me slowly every time I went back through scenes to fact check and he was there. Even when we actually had the episode where we found out about Jace's involvement in his life and the confrontation with Henry, I got more engaged with his character but I wouldn't say I reached my full tipping point quite yet.

But what happened was, there were a couple posts where people thought it might be a trick, and that Henry was being inappropriate. Jace snapped because he was under stress, but ultimately he wasn't wrong in telling Henry to butt out, kind of thing.

I don't want to shame anyone for having that idea, it's a mystery season and I think it's normal and fine to reach for possibilities that stretch what's likely sometimes. But ya know, I went back through the scene to double-check my memories, and get the quote about Jace saying that he didn't even read all of Henry's concerns. (Which I feel like made Jace pretty clearly Wrong in that scene, even if he had turned out to just be a shitty teacher/administrator and not Ankarna-connected.)

And as I was again going back through his scenes and he kept growing on me, I was making more posts about him and realizing how few other people were posting about him in the tag. I got to thinking about it, like

"well hang on, we have this character with a great design. he's presented a lot like the emo equivalent of Zayn's caricature of gothness in season one. they've already investigated and found out he doesn't have a history of being toxic to anyone even though he's famous now and has the opportunities. and we just got huge evidence that the 'maybe some of the RGs are being manipulated and actually fine' that people wanted for Oisin in particular might actually be true for him."

and my first instinct was to check myself and go like "well remember just bc you're super invested in small NPCs doesn't mean anyone else would be, he's actually very minor and has little screentime-HANG ON A MINUTE. he's had more screentime than any other Rat Grinder! So then why-ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh" And idk something about this kid who had more people going "maybe his uncle is evil for trying to protect him" than "oh damn we just found out he needs to be protected" made me go you know what. if nobody else is gonna take this corner of fandom than somebody gotta

And I rolled up my sleeves.

#fantasy high #fantasy high junior year #fhjy spoilers #ruben hopclap #rat grinders

[voistly]

do you think the obsession with ‘style consistency’ in online art communities is mostly caused by this idea that your art style needs to be easily marketable & recognizable as a brand (especially when you’re working as a freelancer). i see the /least/ amount of progress in my art whenever i try to aim for style consistency. i don’t know exactly where i’m going with this but i think there’s some sort of connection between trying to monetize/market your art & limiting your growth as an artist. and i think it’s very sad.

#in theory i don't really want to monetize my art i just want to make things. but if i was going to make money out of anything #i'd at least want it to be something i like doing. you understand my problem. #i don't know if i posted this before & deleted it. i have a tendency of deleting my thoughts as soon as i post them. but #this is something i think about a lot. especially when i think about my goals for the future. like opening up a patreon. or making a website #i don't know what makes my art 'my art' other than the fact i made it. i don't know how to theme my future patreon or my website #and it stresses me out thinking that i'll do better if i can market it in a specific linear way #that isn't really natural to how i think about art in general

[vargaslovinghours]

EleVeN!11!!1! (1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 10½)

Fuzzy Edgar forever. I don’t remember the context now, maybe there wasn’t any to begin with haha, he’s just so cute with slightly longer hair! And upset :)

Some Diaryfic snuggles ♥ Scriabin can be so sweet to him at the worst time ah, I love Edgar’s hard on his arm and Scriabin’s pulling his hair out of his injured eye 💕

While I was very inspired by the Red Flags meme going around (we’ll get there), I was just as inspired by Mixed Messages - this exchange is so silly and them to me. He’s just trying to flirt back, you don’t have to make it harder! That’s just what Scriabin does haha

🥐 🖕 D:’

What else did you expect Scriabin to do with texting capabilities?? I’m still very enamoured with the thought of Scriabin using emojis and Edgar using emoticons - they are sort of different generations!

Here’s the Red Flags! So gd catchy, damn lol. I was specifically inspired by the X is on a date with themself edits, it was so tempting to consider a Ladyverse version as well haha. Edgar’s uncomfortable smiles were so incredibly fun hehe ♪

Y’see because with that many eyes- you get it

Edgar’s little “Or do I??” makes me laugh haha, anything to get out of this situation!

Waiter Jake ❤️💕💖💞💗 Rescue him!

Very inspired by this one specifically, he’s totally innocent! Not offputting at all! ♥

Alright well good luck with that bye. I love Edgar being menaced into continuing this date hehe ♫

Scriabin just keeping on the pressure for this date to keep going! Slight neg in “Couldn’t you have dressed up a little nicer though? ✨” pft

Brief aside with Scriabin!Edgar out drinking with my OC Mint who has very openly had a crush on the Vargases for a while now, thanks Mint

Honestly it was all just an excuse to turn him down and have Scriabin call Edgar his “landlord” haha; I was feeling nostalgic and went back to reread some old YuGiOh fics and had been so long away that I forgot that was a term used in the fandom to refer to the bodies of people the various Yamis would take over hehe ♪ It felt very fitting!

I can call him that but don’t you call him that >:(

Angy Scriabin!Edgar, the usual

Handplates re/reading doodles!! Hghgh!!! The theses of these stories of codependent relationships cut me to my very core I’ll have you know 💕 I managed to avoid falling down the rabbit hole of Handplates!Vargas but I was this close, lemme tell you. The subtle shift in phrasing changes so much ;; I love them dearly

A kind-of leftover WOY style Scriabin, since I made his hair all pointy in my first doodles - the WOY style is quite soft and round! He looks very silly hehe

Another song that is, yes, unironically in my Vargas playlist. This is a Nny song to me and you can pry it from my cold dead correct hands. That beautiful facial hair ♪

More Handplates/Vargas, this time obviously inspired by my holiday request 💕💖💞 I honestly rather like how calm Gaster seems whenever he’s in Edgar’s vicinity, he is a fairly unassuming human haha. Is it because he doesn’t laugh very often? Oh no that’s sad actually haha

I’m not done with Blank Slate Ch. 4 just yet - hopefully soon! - but this lineup stands out to me especially since I made it while rereading Handplates. Specifically after Gaster is pulled out of the Void - Gaster having to face the people he loves who have no memory of him really spoke to me in a Blank Slate way - the scenario of being able to completely start over and have never done anything to hurt your loved ones, at the expense of never having done anything to them, as far as they’re concerned, ah! It hurts so beautifully!! That’s one of the central themes I’m chasing so it was so cool to see in that context! Very inspiring ♥

So remember how in my Sims post, one Vargas family ended up with two Todds? Well what if that but actually

Twin Todd AU, just try and stop me

The saddest little twins y’ever did see ahh 💔 Having to share Shmee because there’s just the one of him! Who has a greater need :’0

I actually went and skimmed the SQUEE! comics to get a better grasp on the Casils, I’d forgotten basically everything haha. It seemed in keeping that if they could barely keep track of the one Todd, they wouldn’t bother even differentiating between two :’) Taking Todd shifts to better share the load

At least they have each other! More helpful than a stuffed bear who eats trauma? On par at least?

I also happened to catch this screenshot of the Todds gossiping about their shadow-dad, though I’m not sure who had seen him :0 By now I have found an adoption memory-loss prevention mod - thank goodness :D - but it wasn’t installed at the time! :0 Blue Todd is the Todd who’d already been the Vargases’ kid, Red Todd is newly-adopted Todd :)

Greetings in order! One of the Todds came by to scout out this strange new person

It’s a name to go by, if nothing else

Reporting back from the field, he has served his big narrative influence hehe ♥

Uh, yeah, about that- While I don’t doubt you were seeing double at times, uhm-

Surprise! Double the sons!

Only so much space in this apartment! They’re probably used to sharing a space to sleep weh, the implications of this AU are sad! I have no one to blame but myself haha

I have never been able to give up this twisted love I have for Edgar getting flustered about incredibly silly things and Scriabin chiding him with just his name haha ♥ Real twins do not delegitimize whatever the hell you two are to each other 💕

Who me? An affinity for how names shape identity and what it means to be a whole separate person? In love with this story in particular? You must be mistaken. But really, what would their name(s) be? I also love the subtle differences even just here - one Todd speaks up for the other! Dynamics ✨

1994, 2004, basically the same year innit. Scriabin is so much more on the up-and-up about the latest technology than Edgar, that old man

In which the offscreen is me lol, I was so blown away by how much more advanced the Sims 2 was from the Sims 1 ♥ Scriabin doesn’t need a box with a program in it, he has the absolute funnest toy in the world already!

And isn’t that the most important part ♪

Scriabin immediately makes himself and hooks up with every Sim he can, Edgar uncomfortable and totally not watching a~ny of the animations hehe ♪ Honestly though, the thought of Scriabin being genuinely excited to virtually get it on with any-and-every delights me haha

Look. Look, okay, look- If I could choose what to be inspired by, I would but sometimes

Obviously Scriabin would be a long Furby lol, this exchange can be summarized to “Scriabin no D:” “Scriabin yes >:D”

He’s complaining that Edgar ignoring him sleeping is boring haha

I did briefly lose my mind over how the Furbish word for “I/me/my/mine” is all the same - linguistically it makes sense, self-possessive, but in this, in their context ♥

Based on that one Wojak format - looks into the camera like “Yes. I am in your head. Insanity tracks” pfft

And it’s @jaspravex with the steel chair!! I hadn’t drawn any of them in like a month and then all of a sudden- I was 1000% not expecting to be hit with such a huge wave of inspiration but gosh and dang did this line of thought light me up. The implication! The jealousy! Wow that’s a lot all at once I wasn’t expecting ♥ Somehow these two never ended up on my shipping chart, dynamics I swear haha ✨

There’s September through February for the fourth go ‘round! Wild when I put it like that :0 Like clockwork, these lads ♪

#💟 #Doodles #Art #Sketchdump #Edgar #Scriabin #Jake #Todd #Shmee #Nny #There's a few errant things in here as well - The Sims 2 - Handplates #......Furbies #Look it's fine don't worry about it lol #Oh this one was so nice to edit <3 I've made it once <3 <3 When was the last time I could say that about one of these ♥ #And you know what that means right? Other than the fact that I've gotten a bit better at making these without breaking them lol #It means my art production is finally actually properly for realsies slowing down! Not as many to compile over a three month period! #That last one really did surprise me that inspiration hit me upside the head after quite literally a month of nothing #Even my scratch pages hadn't taken precedent for a bit! And yeah this technically still isn't all of what I've made in the meanwhile lol #Once I finish Ch. 4 of Blank Slate there might be another :) Or I might let it go for another chapter or so ♪ #Either way! Only took - when did I first go on hiatus lol #July of '22 so a year and a half-ish lol #To finally start to taper off - this is tapering off this is my airtight example of tapering off lol #Handplates and the Sims 2 were my big driving forces this time around hehe <3 Who knows what will catch my attention towards them next! #Lots of Todd AUs around here when I look huh :0 He is best boy he deserves the attention ♪ #As always I'll be back in April as well for my personal Vargasversary and to be a sap hehe ♥ #Never empty of thoughts or love! Just progressively quieter - for now ♪

[daincrediblegg]

no you know what I'm going to scream about the stuff I talked about in the tags of this post publicly

I'm tired of the well-meaning "don't feel bad if your work only gets 20 notes your genius is what counts and do it for you!" bullshit. I've had a good handful of friends who have straight up DEACTIVATED in recent months because their work was not getting reblogged AT ALL. No, it wasn't from lack of not being well-liked, no it wasn't from lack of trying to make sure it was getting out there to the people they knew would engage with it. It was because no matter how much they were praised privately for their work, when push came to shove, absolutely NOBODY reblogged it and gave it the audience that it was due, and I'm tired of people shoving the "unsung genius" narrative as an excuse for it. Nothing excuses that. And the boop event really proved that.

because I know given the opportunity, indiscriminately pressing a button (sometimes 10 thousand times, as I did) is not beyond this website's capability. y'all loved doing that. and look at what it wrought. nothing but love and affection and happiness. just from a couple of quick clicks of a little paw button. sure. nobody knew who you booped but the other person (which is how likes used to work on this website, btw). there was an element of anonymity to it. but that is kind of the core of this website that no other social media platform still has: the ability to be anonymous. and hyper-curating a blog on here like you might on twitter or instagram to project an image is simply not viable. and hey. you wanna know a secret: literally nobody cares what you post or whether it goes with the "theme" of your blog or not. yeah. I know. CRAZY concept in this day and age. but literally. I myself have reblogged things that have had nothing to do with whatever I am currently fixated by and you know what happened to my follower count? not a damn thing. in fact, I actively try to reblog things specifically BECAUSE it's my friends who made them (even though I'm not always good at KEEPING UP WITH HOW MUCH THEY POST @prismatica-the-strange will NEVER GO UNRECOGNIZED by me).

And you know what fucking sucks? I have to deal with this too. surprise right? you ever wonder why I reblog fics or art I post like 20 times the day that I post them? do you ever wonder why I ask about tag lists and beg for asks all the time? IT'S BECAUSE EVEN I GET LIKE. 5 LIKES ON THE THINGS I POST. AND THE REST OF THE REBLOGS ARE MINE SO I CAN MAKE SURE THAT PEOPLE WHO WANT TO SEE WHAT I MAKE GET TO SEE IT. and I say that knowing that I'm certainly not an unpopular blog, or an unpopular writer. I know that people love the stories that I create. Hell, half of the people that I've talked to about lady terror have told me that they consider her to be canon (AND EVEN SOME!! THOUGHT SHE WAS!!! WITHOUT EVEN HAVING WATCHED THE SHOW! WHICH IS STILL SO SO WILD TO ME!!!) But especially in the last 4 years (which really dates this phenomenon), my posts, no matter how well received they've been amongst people I've talked to about them directly, I still go into the notes and at least half (often more than half) are MY reblogs to make sure people saw what I posted. and it happens every single time, and I can't tell you how much it crushes me considering that it used to be that I would be able to post it only once, and people would reblog it sometimes even HUNDREDS of times.

It's not about popularity. it never has been. it's not about anxiety. or shifting website cultures. even if you lurk, the simple fact is, that if you want people to keep making what you love. you have to reblog. your theme won't suffer because you reblogged a fanfiction that you really admire. your posting won't be ruined because you reblogged some fanart from someone in a different fandom. really. I promise. and if people do unfollow you for that? who needs em. followers come and go but you should NEVER have to cater to them. on this website it has ALWAYS been the other way around. lean into it. make it yours. put stuff you ACTUALLY WANT to be seen and that you love and appreciate on your blog. no matter how old it is, how new it is, no matter how niche or off-theme it is.

so please. if you really want to show your appreciation for someone's work? you reblog. it's really as easy as that. check the tags. add some when you reblog if you like. but please for the love of god reblog. it's as easy as booping and even more rewarding for the people who you reblog from. if you want to let someone know that their work is genius and appreciate it? show it. reblog. then DM them if you're too nervous to say what you want to say but not in a public forum. but for christ's sake. REBLOG.

#fanfiction #fanart #reblogging #boop

[weirdmageddon]

i love these tags this person is so right

actually, can you imagine if dave was raised by B1 roxy?

i wanna get into this actually

(ok i had to spend a few hours rewriting this because IT DIDNT FUCKING SAVE AFTER FIVE HOURS OF WRITING WHEN MY COMPUTER UPDATED WHILE I WAS AFK so it would mean a lot to show this post some appreciation. i LOVEEE hearing what other people have to say)

even though these things mom does are presented in an extravagant, kitsch, jokey way, her intentions always came from a place of sincerity. she is simply Funnie

but rose reads too far into it and assumes things that aren't there, that her mother is passive-aggressively feigning interest in rose's interests simply because the things she does are so extra. "why do all of this if not to mock me"

im telling you right now if dave lived in this household he wouldn't assume antagonism, he'd go,

don’t forget who LITERALLY patented tangible jpeg artifacts as their post-scratch adult self and scattered shitty scummed up statue of liberties all over the planet. theres no way some of that overboard artful shit wasnt post-ironic / circling back around to genuine funny sincerity

dave's natural state is funny sincerity like roxy. he's had the natural capacity for this type of humor from the start and this is the direction he goes towards when he grows out of his brother's shadow by the end of the comic. dave and roxy share an earnest “so bad its good” type of humor

(lots more under the cut; the length of this meta analysis just got unwieldly with all the pictures and whatnot)

despite the alcoholism, roxy is a supportive mother. she's not the ideal guardian but hells of a lot more supportive of her kid than bro is. if she knew dave's interests she would totally indulge in them with some over the top silly goofy haha shit as a genuine gesture simply because she loves him

rose isn't too keen on it though. but she is more similar to dirk in her natural state of thinking of overthinking shit and assuming the worst, like the tags said

and yes dave got the sweet cuddly yet sometimes backhanded ouppy gene from roxy, probably even moreso lol

roxy's even said rose "sounds like girl dirk"

side tangent here, but this is something i wanna talk about.

i dont think bro should ever be in custody of children ever but if theres anyone who would be up to the task it's rose probably. i know she'd be able to keep up with him. not only does she have a defined personality (dave is more malleable and absorbs his environment like a sponge), if anyone can pick apart B1 dirk's batshit brain and probably be right on the money it's her. lil cal has been pumping patriarchal nonsense into bro's head and rose would be able to bring the fucking facts to the table without losing her own and being a living example of a badass little girl. i also don't think bro would try to force masculine roles onto rose like he did with dave, seeing as she is a girl, so she would actually have more of a leg up and get some passes that dave was never afforded. and rose wouldn't stand idly and accept any bullshit; she is no doormat. and i think this would earn bro's respect

but anyway, from this, couldn't we conclude roxy "sounds like girl dave"?

yeah okay. we havent even gotten into their penchant for funny typos or misspeaks, deliberate or otherwise

so, dave's environment

the sentiment "god you hope you can be as good as your bro at this some day" might have been genuine at the time when he idolized bro but of course he's not able to express that in any sort of sincere fashion because he's in dirk's fucking household. and this level 10 irony shit isnt doing dave any favors

his role models were the Internet and a vague idea of what Bro was like. So he built up his facade based on irony–not the literary definition of irony, as Rose might be quick to point out, but a popular concept of irony based on the idea that things that didn’t make sense actually made sense in some roundabout way. As a master of irony, Dave probably reasoned, he could see in a way other people couldn’t why a world that was scary and didn’t make sense really did make sense, and could therefore convince those people that he was superior to them. And he would wield his knowledge to maintain the appearance of superiority by calling everything ironic and pretending he didn’t care about things that didn’t make sense, and he would use walls of vaguely rhyming words to keep everyone at arm’s length so they wouldn’t discover his insecurities (source)

roxy's style is the embodiment of post-irony. being raised by mom lalonde would be like being raised by joel vinesauce ok

what can i say ….. (getting meta about this actually, hussie got these jpeg wizard wallpapers from a spyware website. link takes some time to load because internet archive)

rose is quick to read post-irony as actually being a joke/insincere, which in bro's case would be true. but i believe dave's natural instinct, outside of the influence of bro, is to read post-irony as genuine, which is exactly how mom serves it. we see this as early as act 3 from him; he understands her motives better than rose does herself:

and in act 6 intermission 2 i think it's pretty clear

but the thing is, it's always genuine from her. dave wouldn't have to second guess it because he's not one to naturally second guess someone's sincerity; that was learned due to his bro being virtually unassailable

there two types of ironies at play here:

seems like a joke, is actually genuine (roxy)

doesnt seem like a joke, is actually a joke (dirk)

you can make the argument that the second is is more psychologically destructive because it makes you question the reality of what is genuine sentiment and what isn't. dave never knew what was genuine and what was irony so he just sort of existed in this sincerity-ironic limbo and always did the opposite of what he genuinely felt on principle even if it always did originate from a genuine place.

"it just a joke bro i was just being ironic i dont actually x" is so much more trust-breaking and psychologically damaging than "wait are you being serious" / "i am being so fucking fr rn davy gravy" / "ok thats actually pretty fucking awesome. giant ass wizard statue" / "RIGHT"

how much about dave would change do you think? his character arc would be completely different for one thing, i think he'd have it good aside from mom's alcohol issues. he'd be left with the sweet and funny parts of him that we see at the end of the comic. the fake coolguy stuff is out, but this remains. this is dave in his element and we see it as early as act 1

he'd probably have no shades growing up in the lalonde residence* either cause those were given to him by bro straight out of the crater as an extension of his own cool image. and john gave dave ben stiller’s aviators for his 13th birthday to replace them so he could “spread his wings”

dave said he was wearing them for the ironies but i kind of doubt it. maybe post-irony but there was some reacharound to it being genuine because dave never put those pointy anime shades on his face again.

*though... it’s kind of hard to imagine him without his shades at all? B2 dave still got stiller’s shades from stiller himself so maybe getting them is a universal constant. i can imagine mom getting him them as a birthday gift cause shes pretty wealthy and probably could buy it out in an auction. but also itd be cool if john still gave him it as a gift

dave is actually a lot more genuine and easy to read than he lets on even when grappling with his upbringing with B1 dirk (again, see this post). this can be seen all throughout he comic but a good example is the evolution of thoughts about his interest in the preserved dead things in his room:

if B1 roxy was dave's guardian he probably WOULD have pursued paleontology because she wouldve indulged him in it and probably find it cool and worthwhile to pursue, instead of allowing dave to flounder under ironic detachment, being poisoned by irony to the point of gaslighting himself into believing he doesnt actually believe he thinks this shit is cool. even if it was indulged in this such a way; a superficially kitsch and ironic appearing presentation, it comes from a genuine place and inspires genuine interest. just read the comments.

basically, i think if B1 roxy raised dave, their relationship would have a surface level appearance of being bizarre or over-the-top but they’d have an unsaid mutual understanding that it’s completely in earnest and just build on each other's funny and absurd gestures of affection. rather than seeing it as one-upping each other, it'd more like collaboration of some silly bullshit that you take a step back and look at full and just say, "fucking incredible"

speaking of paleontology, mom had the proto-ectobiology lab. maybe they'd be able to use the equipment to appearify paradox ghost imprints of the dead shit to create paradox clones of things from the cambrian era??? sounds like a fun mother son bonding activity. and theyd actually put the sciencey shit in the household to use

oh god i know exactly the kinds of music shed listen too also growing up as a teen in the 80s. she on that (post)-punk/art rock/new wave/new romantic mtv stuff. XTC shit fr. this is a B-52S HOUSEHOLD. maybe the associates for the campy melodramatic flair. so he gets to keep the record on his shirt cause he is an enjoyer of the shit in her vinyl collection. dave would still gravitate towards musical expression and music itself but of more variety outside of just rap, with an 80s-90s, even 70s flavor due to mom’s influence. see this for perhaps a glimpse. ​she probably visited new york city a lot for business trips and because the music scene was cool as hell around that time, imports came straight from jfk airport, she probably got in on that a bit and have remnants in the form of vinyls and cassettes. in this way she could be distributing void to dave (influencing him with forgotten / presently irrelevant music). now he can REALLY rave about bands none of his friends have heard of. “hey davy grvay watcha listenin to” (he holds up vinyl cover) “omg snakefinger”

btw dave lalonde would look like this to me

#homestuck #homestuck meta #dave strider #mom lalonde #roxy lalonde #hs #strilonde guardian swap

[certified-bi]

Okay all my thoughts because some people have been saying that not supporting this change is not supporting artist and creators and as an artist fuck that.

1. Audiences owe you nothing. You have to convince them to engage with your creation not the other way around. This is something both the nonprofit theatre I work with recognizes and huge companies realize. It's just part of life. There are so many talented people in the world making amazing art, videos, music, writings, and on and on, and there's only so much time in the day. I'm not saying you shouldn't know your worth, just that being flippant about how little you care about those who can't pay isn't a good move. On that note...

2. PR is everything. If you haven't made a visible effort to push patreon, channel memberships or other avenues of making money, don't be suprised that your creation that was previously accessible to those without extra cash and to those who can't support foreign subscriptions due either to conversions or because it simply doesn't work, being made private isn't popular. There's a big leap from "We want to have more artistic control" to "We can't afford to make our content accessible to most of our audience," and people are smart enough to see this. You either have to make budget cuts or give into sponsors. This isn't unique to Watcher, it's part of literally every production from broadway, to Hollywood, to YouTube. Unless you can fund it yourself or get viewers to pay(which given how many are already strapped for cash...) that's life.

Not to mention they simply do not have enough followers to make the switch to a paid only site(dropping the first epsiode only on YouTube isn't going to draw people in, they're just going to say "oh why start if I'm not going to see the rest" and not watch) especially not one that is buggy and a security risk. Even if the switch had been supported its not going to end well. The only reason services like nebula and dropout work is because of the large amount of series and creators and the fact those creators still are partly on YouTube so new people are drawn in.

3. As for the price, 6 dollars a month is a not a good starting price for only their content and that's as someone who pays for nebula. I'd be paying the same amount for a fraction of the access to others work. Actually it'd be twice as much. And before someone says "it's only a coffee-" that's for you. Not everyone has your lifestyle. And with every other patreon and subscription service that says the same thing, it all adds up and I simply don't think 60 dollars for 48 videos a year on a subscription basis where you don't get to keep the videos if your situation changes, some of which don't appeal to every viewer is a good move. If you were able to buy physical copies of your favorite series they've made that'd be different, but that's not what this is.

4. I do believe that the employees deserve a livable wage. I also did not hire them. It is not on the viewers that they hired more people than they could afford to. They can charge that much if they want to to try and balance this out. They also shouldn't be suprised if not many can or will sign up. They also don't have to be based in L.A. L.A has ridiculous costs associated with it, and quite honestly it doesn't really add much to the content. I'm not saying they need to move to the middle of nowhere Kansas. Simply that living and basing your studio in a super expensive city and then being suprised money is tight is just weird.

5. Something that occurs to me is that they might get more views if their playlists were better set up. Only some series are given playlists. It'd be easier to find all of the series and binge them if they didn't just show off their more popular shows. Honestly the only draw the streaming site has to me is that the series are actually labeled well.

Do I think the weird ass energy towards Steven is necessary? No. He's not the only one at the company and they're all adults. I actually liked grocery run and homemade, and like to see them back. The parascoial attachment to Ryan and Shane is annoying in people's criticisms, but that doesn't make them completely wrong. If you're going to brand yourself as the anti capalist underdogs you can't get away with being dismissive of your poorer fans. The dissonance is what is causing this backlash and makes you look like hypocrites. I definitely think Steven is turning into the fall guy which is fucked up, his statement and the fact dish granted is one of those shows that make people uncomfortable about wealth flexs doesn't help matters.

#watcher #they really need a CEO who has business experience first and foremost or at the very least a consultant they actually listen to #they also should put more focus on other personalities and actual give them a chance to stick. none of them got famous or a fanbase in a day #give some of the others time to grab attention

[jonnywaistcoat]

Hi Jonny, if you don't mind I have a question about the TMA TTRPG! So I noticed that on the player's guide there's this guy, who my friends and I assumed is probably Jon. If it is him, is this a canon design, or more like some of the non-canon stuff that's in the merch?

So, I hope you don't mind if i use this ask to go a bit off on one. I'm not specifically dragging you (I'm actualy glad you asked, as I've thinking about posting on the topic), but all the discussion around the RPG art and how "official" or "canon" it might be is, to my mind, slightly silly.

First up, is it "official" art? I mean, yeah, its art for the officially licenced Magnus Archives RPG. This means Monte Cook Games have commissioned someone to do a beatiful illustration broadly based on some aspect, episode or character from the podcast and it goes in the book. But that's kinda all it means. "Official" is a legal distinction, not an artistic one. The fact that it's in an official product doesn't make it any less one artist's cool interpretation of a character that has only been vaguely described in audio.

Second, is it Jonathan Sims the Archivist? I mean, it's probably based on the idea of him, but it's certainly not set in stone. When we were first discussing art with MCG, we advised that character pictures be more vibes-based and not explicitly tied to specific people (ie. a portrait inspired by Tim wouldn't be captioned "This is Tim" and wouldn't be placed opposite a profile for Tim Stoker, archival assistant.) This was mainly because we wanted the artists to have plenty of freedom to interpret and not feel too tied down by the need to know everything about the podcast. But, to be frank, it was also because we know that there are a few fans out there that are kinda Not Chill about what they've personally decided these characters look like and can get a bit defensive over depictions that differ.

It strikes me as particularly strange to be having this discussion about art that's for a roleplying game book. Something that's explicitly and solely designed to give you the ability to play in your version of the Magnus universe. The idea that this is the thing where we'd for some reason try to immutably establish unchangable appearances for these characters would be pretty funny if some folks weren't taking it so seriously. Similarly ridiculous is the idea we could reasonably have said to MCG "We'd love for you to make a huge beautiful RPG book of our setting... Just make sure you don't depict any of the iconic characters or events from it!"

But... is it "canon"? Now, to my mind, this highlights a real weakness in a lot of fandom thinking around "canon", which is that it generally has no idea what to do with adaptations. All adaptation is interpretation, and relies on taking a work and letting new creatives (and sometimes the same ones) have a different take on it. Are the appearances of the Fellowship of the Ring in the LOTR movies "canon"? How much, if at all, does that matter? Neil Gaiman's book Neverwhere was originaly a 90s BBC series made with a budget of 50 pence; is anyone who makes fanart of Mr Croup that doesn't look like the actor Hywel Bennet breaking canon? What about the novel that describes the character differently? Or the officially licenced Neverwhere comic where he looks like neither of them? Which is his "canon appearance"?

Canon is an inherently messy concept, and while it is useful for a creative team trying to keep continuity and consistency within a creative work, for thinking about anything beyond that it tends to be more hinderance than help.

Anyway, all this is to say that the above picture and all the others in the RPG are exactly as canon as every other picture you've ever seen of the Archivist.

#sorry for the huge answer #been thinking about it a lot recently #and wanted to get my thoughts down

[faorism]

every once in a while, when it's a quiet moment between him and one of his partners—could be anything from a stake out to a long drive in lucille to the warm moments between making love and sleep—eliot will turn to them and say, tell me something i don't know.

parker will usually tell him secrets. the bits of history that only exist between her, bunny, and now eliot. there's a lot from living on the streets, when she was young. she tells him about training with archie; eventually, she tells him what it felt like. she tells him about loneliness and not understanding and frustration and how her hands hurt when she wants to flicker them around; when he asks her why she doesn't let them, she says to ask another night. that's too big a secret to share when another's been revealed already. he does ask, and she does answer. once, she says in a shaking voice, i love you and hardison so much, and parker feels silly because duh eliot knows that, hardison knows that, but eliot heard something deeper than she could express, so he held her tight and kissed her hair as she shivered through the weight of her confession. after sharing with eliot, sometimes parker feels comfortable enough to share with hardison, peggy, sophie, or a client who needs to know they are not alone in the mess and hardship of the world. much later, the fact that parker has shared something once makes it easier to tell her shrink as she gets on SSRIs, which she seeks out after confessing to eliot that even if it had been based on a lie to grift hurley, maybe there was something to her treatment at the second act rehabilitation center that she missed. occasionally, she'll tell him about art. he listens just as patiently as anything else she decides to divulge and she loves him all the more for it.

hardison infodumps. parker didn't press eliot for what he meant the first time he asked; hardison did. eliot had shrugged, anything you wanna share. hardison nips out a testy, so if i go off about (he paused thinking of something that would surely turn eliot off) optimal simcity street design strategies, you wouldn't mind? eliot didn't back down, even when hardison went into a two-hour spiral that branched into different iterations on the concept, including rollercoaster typhoon. eliot made a few comments here and there, asked some clarifying questions now and again, but otherwise let hardison rail on. the next time, the question was framed as what you working on? but the effect was the same. eventually, hardison stopped hesitating and started looking forward to these monologue sessions. hardison doesn't think anything of them other than he's got some quality time with his partner, until one day on a job with some leverage international trainees, eliot manages (elle woods style) to untangle the lie at the heart of a condo scam with a few pointed questions about the plumbing. when one of the trainees asked how the hell he knew that, hardison expects to hear over the comms how eliot once dated a plumber or an architect; instead, eliot scoffs, you met my partner. genius knows a little of everything. which is when hardison remembers once infodumping about sprinkler systems. eliot gets the tightest of hugs when he gets home for truly listening to hardison.

#leverage #eliot spencer #parker leverage #alec hardison #leverage ot3 #thiefsome #faorism headcanons #of hearth and home and other promises

[xamag-draws]

BBR thoughts 2024

Since I mentioned that I finally dusted off an old project of mine and was ruminating on how I'd remake it, I thought I'd elaborate a little, now that I've solidified some concepts. For funsies

This is gonna be a bit of a long and unfocused one, but I don't share my personal thoughts here often, especially the stuff about my projects I always marinate in. And for once it's something that people have existing context for, so hey why not

So for anyone who hasn't been following me for a gajillion years, The Black Brick Road of OZ was a webcomic that I posted around 2013-2015, back when I was in highschool going on college (which is kinda crazy to think about). It was sort of a darker twist on The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, although I definitely leaned a lot more into dark humor more than anything in those first few chapters

I don't think it's available to read anywhere anymore, and I know people have been asking me about it. So here's the full proper archive of BBR, as full as it can be with deceased Flash

I totally used it as an excuse to shamelessly and self-indulgently experiment. It had interactive pages and GIFs and was wayyy too overproduced for what I could handle or what was necessary, but I did have great fun making it while it lasted

Unfortunately, that excess and the fact that I've changed too much as a person by the time I was in college is what ultimately killed it. The direction I wanted to go in was practically unrecognizable from the original idea started back in 2011, so there were many old hold-ups that I felt ruined it

At the time I kinda wished I could start/rewrite it all over, but considering that I pretty much had the entire script done at that point, it felt like a pointless sisyphean task. So I just put it on a shelf and didn't look back for about 8 years, because I didn't know what else to do

Now to be fair, the nature of my art has always been iterative and cyclical; when I feel like my creative juices have run dry I prefer to leave a project to marinate and move on to something else; cycle through other old things and bring in new skills and perspectives into the mix when I'm ready again. Not very productive, but it is what makes me happy to work on my OCs; I'm doomed to hit a wall with them eventually and I need some time to be able to find a new direction

So that said, I'm glad that BBR was left to marinate for that long. I don't think I was prepared, emotionally or intellectually, to tackle it again until now. The Wizard of Oz book (and the entire series of them, really) has always been near and dear to my heart, but there's a lot of context around it that I'm only unpacking now that I'm older

I think I always inherently feel negatively about the stuff I've made in the past, like its faults always jump out to me more than the positives, especially the more time passes. I've never liked that, and I do really appreciate the kind things people have to say about BBR to this day. The fact that it still can be recognized and remembered is very sweet

When I left it, I already found it "kinda cringe", and that feeling only deepened with years. When I took my first look back at it, asking the question "how would I rewrite it now?", at first I took a very cynical approach, as in "everything would have to be torn down"

But the more I sat on it, the more I found that I still see some merit and charm in the ideas I was putting out; I just didn't know how to execute them at the time (not to pretend that I know what I'm doing now, but I certainly know more at least). Turns out a lot of my old concepts could be changed substantially with just a few small tweaks. So I'd say that's a nicer way to think about my previous work

If you haven't seen yet, I posted a first draft of my new designs for some of the characters (the main group, the Goods and the Wickeds). Definitely subject to change, but more or less how I see them now

I'm just playing with these concepts; by no means would I attempt to remake BBR right this moment. Call it a pipe dream among my other ones. But just for fun, this is the direction I'd like to take:

Nowadays I'd probably make it a visual novel, with more emphasis on the visual part than the novel because I'm no English prose writer by any means. It'd still let me play a little with the interactivity while helping cut some corners on the drawing part (only some, I imagine I'd go hog wild anyway)

I've always intended for some events inspired by the sequel books to take place in BBR's past. Stuff like Jinjur's revolt or Ozma's rule preceeds the main events here. So I think it would be fun to follow the past of a few key characters alongside the main story. One chapter focusing on the present quest to see the Wizard, then one focusing on the past events (that are maybe reflective thematically); rinse and repeat

I'm also sticking a little closer to the original text in some regards. Not everything that I enjoy from the books would be translated here, it's still just a very loose fantasy on the material; but I'd like to be closer in spirit at least

I like mature, wise and powerful Glinda, I like kind and vulnerable Tin Man, I like the Wizard being a pathetic yet loveable liar, so I'm sprinkling in more of that for example

I'd like to keep some whimsy, but make it more grounded and a bit more serious to be coherent in tone. I think the original TWWOOZ book was a more realistic fantasy in some ways, even for the standards of the time; I like its simple but vivid tactile descriptions and details like bringing attention that Dorothy needed to eat and sleep

I find it funny that Baum specifically was averse to making his books scary or unpleasant, finding that unnecessary for telling a compelling kids story, but they still can get pretty dark and disturbing, at least for our modern sensibilities. Let's just say that I intend to use the Evoldo and Chopfyt storylines for my purposes. In that way, I feel like a "darker" Wizard of Oz retelling can still mostly be tonally in line with the original and balance it with enough heart and occasional humor

I slowly grew to appreciate the quaint old-timey quality of the original series, as well. The first book is both timeless and very much a product of the 1900s. Originally I tried to give it a little modern or at least anachronistic spin, but it was moreso because it's what I knew best, so these days I'd rather intentionally lean into the time period. Still not fully historically accurate by any means, but at least directly acknowledging the influence

The events of the story span across 40 years of these characters' lives, so I'm drawing inspiration from the entire so-called La Belle Epoque: the time period around 1880s-1920s. Basically I'm cooking, and my soup is old Victorian fashion morphing into Edwardian fashion and slowly inching towards flappers

Some new Dolly outfits

Lots of crazy things, political changes and innovations were happening at the turn of the century, which I think is noted and reflected by Baum in the books as well; the character of Tik-Tok might not blow any minds now, but he was one of the first robot characters in literature at that point; and don't even get me started on Jinjur, etc. Plenty of really interesting stuff one could lightly ponder in an Oz adaptation these days

Aesthetically, art nouveau has always been a big artistic influence for me, and it'd definitely be its time to shine here. John R. Neill's illustrations of the Oz books often keep me company as well. Nouveau architecture in particular fits that fairytale whimsy extremely well imo

I'd allow myself a little bit of art deco here and there, but ultimately its intimidating geometrical splendor is an antithetical to the flowery nature of nouveau and I associate it with a completely different era. Definitely fitting some characters like my Wicked Witch of the West, but shouldn't be overused

One of my main problems with the original BBR was that eventually I lost track of what it was even about; and the original ending felt too mean and unfulfilling to be worth it. Now I'd like to stick to the theme of home and family as my main theme, but in a different, more bittersweet way than in the book

An interesting connection I made is that a lot of my aforementioned older key characters (the Witches, Jinjur, the Nome King, etc) all came from the same reformatory as kids, that's how they know each other. In my recent research I learned that in those reformatories it was usually frowned upon to release the children back to the families, which were seen as the original corrupting influence regardless of the circumstance. The reformatory did everything in its power to cut that connection and make itself the only family those wayward kids were supposed to know and love. That's an unexpected tie into the theme of home that I'd like to explore as well

So yeah that's the current state of it. I have a bunch of outfit concepts I'm slowly cooking, although I'm now sure whether I'd post them... But I do miss these funny guys, and I'm glad some people still do as well :)

#my art #xam rambles #the black brick road of oz #long post #ohsees tag

[happilyhertale]

Shared future – Daemon Targaryen x fem!reader

Summary: As on so many other nights, your betrothed Daemon sneaks into your chambers. But tonight he has other plans for you.

Pairing: Daemon Targaryen x fem!reader

Warnings: Smut; 18+; NSFW; Oral (f receiving); Fingering

Author’s note: English is my second language, please forgive me if I made any mistakes (:

Word count: 1.6 k

Shared future Masterlist

Other stories of mine

12 days of smuff

As the last candlelight fades, you retreat into the cosy embrace of your bed, snuggled up in the warmth of your blanket. Listening to the muffled sounds of the night, you wait patiently for the inevitable. Quickly and quietly, the hidden door in the wall of your chambers swings open, an enchanting routine that unfolds with each passing night. Your gaze turns to the entrance, a smile curling your lips as a figure with silvered hair slips gracefully into the room.

A slight bite on your lip betrays your anticipation, and your grin widens as your betrothed approaches. He removes his waistcoat and trousers and lies down in bed with you, immediately wrapping you in his arms. The gentle press of his lips against your hair, soft kisses and the familiar rumble emanating from his chest create an intimate atmosphere that you never dreamed possible with your future husband.

His fingers run over your form with a delicate touch, caressing the soft expanse of your skin. To the outside world, the rogue prince may appear to be a figure without such tenderness. But inside your chambers, a transformation is taking place – he longs to give you tenderness. And he has mastered the art of cuddling and caressing to perfection – and he honours your wish to defer the surrender of your maidenhead for the time being.

But that doesn't mean he keeps his fingers still. Daemon has already driven you to ecstasy countless times and pushed you to the limit. He has made you squirm and whimper and awakened a desire in you that makes you crave more and more.

His fingers slide southwards, but somehow it feels different this time. His fingers seem greedier and there's another slight grumble in his chest as he gently kneads your bum. "Love... come on, sit on my face," he suddenly murmurs into your neck as gentle kisses caress your skin. And never before has the blush rushed to your face so quickly.

"What...?" you mumble a little incredulously and feel a grin forming on his lips.

"Sit on my face..." he repeats, gripping your bum a little tighter.

"I-I heard you..." you whisper, "but... your face?". The familiar warmth in your lower abdomen spreads despite your irritation as memories of the wonders Daemon can perform with his tongue come to your mind.

A slight growl sounds again and vibrates in his chest, "I expect my future wife to take a seat on my face with her elegant arse... so that I can enjoy her to the full," he murmurs.

You're lost for words – not even a "what" leaves your lips. And as the silence spreads throughout your chambers, Daemon slowly pulls his head back and turns his gaze towards you. His purple eyes meet yours and he simply grins, enjoying the fact that you are at a loss for an answer. His princess, who is never at a loss for words, is speechless.

You're breathing a little heavily, your lips are slightly parted, but you feel his hands suddenly grab your hips and make you move slightly. Your gasp fills the air of your chambers, but you follow his movement.

"Daemon..." you say quietly, but you only feel his hands gripping the back of your thighs as you sit astride him. He smiles at you, and although you usually can't get enough of his smile, you know he's happy that you're so shy right now, and you'd love nothing more than to make him suffer right now.

His big hands don't let go of your thighs and push you further up and instead of a cheeky statement, you just gasp a soft "Daemon" as your hands grab the headboard of your bed and your warm core hovers right above his face.

You bite your lip lightly and look down. His smile remains hidden from you, but you are sure that the grin has not left his lips. His hands slowly slide up the back of your thighs under your nightgown and are suddenly on your bum. He grips it firmly, making you whimper, and then you feel him pull you down. The unforgettable sensation floods through you as his tongue glides through your folds. You whimper again and your hands literally dig into the wood of your bed.

Another "Daemon" escapes your lips and breaks the silence as he begins to slide his tongue inside you. His hands push you further down, further onto his face, letting his tongue penetrate you deeper. The worry that he might not get enough air leaves your mind as his tongue glides all the way through your wet folds and the vibration of his moan literally flows through you.

You moan as his tongue caresses your bundle of nerves. He only chuckles softly as you breathe heavily and moan again. But the artistry of his tongue doesn't let up. Not even when you finally grab your nightgown and pull it over your head.

It falls to the floor beside your bed, accompanied by Daemon's grunts as you move your hips and he continues to pleasure you with his tongue. He savours the sounds of your pleasure, the way your body writhes above him as he devours you with a possessive hunger.

He buries his face deep inside your most intimate part of your body as you suddenly feel him insert two fingers inside you.

As his lips close around your sensitive bundle of nerves again and he begins to suck, your moans echo through your chambers as his fingers continue to penetrate you. Daemon's tongue dances over your clit, applying just the right amount of pressure to elicit another moan from your lips. He plunges deeper, his tongue swirling around inside you, soaking up every drop of your arousal.

As if of your own accord, you push your cunt further towards him, wanting – no, needing – to feel more. Daemon grunts slightly as he senses how eager you are, angles his fingers differently and rubs the rough patch deep inside you.

"You like that, don't you?" he purrs against your folds, his voice full of satisfaction. "You like it when I taste you, when I make you cum," he growls as his tongue flicks faster and harder, his hand on your hip tightening as he pushes you closer to the edge. He's determined to bring you to the peak of pleasure, to make you scream his name once more.

But you can only moan loudly and bite your lip quickly so as not to make too much noise. But Daemon is watching you closely as he savours you. Your eyes are closed and you relish all his movements and caresses. Your mouth is open, but your breathing is intermittent and a whimper that ends in a moan leaves your lips.

Daemon inserts another finger into you and you cry out a little. Your one hand slides from the headboard of your bed into his hair, gripping it tightly as his tongue circles your clit faster and his fingers thrust into you.

"Daemon... Daemon... Daemon..." escapes your lips again and again as you breathe heavily. You feel him moan again as he notices how your cunt begins to clench around his fingers. And then it comes over you – you cry out slightly again as you come. Your eyes are closed as your hips continue to move.

But this time it feels different.

"Daemon.. stop," you whimper as his lips close tightly around your pearl again, his fingers thrusting further into you.

"Daemon..." you whimper again as a strong pressure builds up inside you. But he only growls again as his fingers continue their work, sucking even harder on your clit. Your eyes open again, your breathing quickens and you realise from his gaze that he's not going to stop.

"Daemon, stop!" you gasp, trying to sound serious. But then it happens. You cry out again slightly as the pressure suddenly eases, then moan out loud.

Daemon grunts loudly, swallows all your elixir and savours how you lose yourself completely in ecstasy. When the overwhelming feeling subsides, you look down into his eyes again. Your breathing hasn't calmed down yet, your cheeks are all flushed. Daemon sucks on your pearl one last time before letting go of you. You move slightly away from his face as his lips release you. A grin plays around his lips – his lips and chin are soaked.

You bite your lips a little embarrassed, "Daemon... I-I made a mess," you whisper.

Daemon wipes his mouth with his hand and pulls you down to him in one movement, wrapping you in his arms.

"I don't want to hear that, love..." he murmurs, showering you with soft kisses.

"My wife won't apologise for the climaxes she's about to experience... I want her to enjoy the full ecstasy," he whispers.

You look at him and suddenly a warmth flows through you that has never made you feel so good. You lean your head slightly in his direction and kiss his lips, your lips meet almost greedily and move in unison.

Over the muscles of his chest and stomach, your hand glides gently to his crotch and he responds with a slight growl as you rub his hard manhood, which presses almost desperately against his undergarments.

"Love... don't start something you can't finish..." he whispers against your lips.

But your fingers continue to glide slowly along his length, "Then.. show me how to finish it," you whisper a little shyly.

Daemon hesitates, looking at you questioningly as you suddenly free yourself from his arms and move downwards, just grinning slightly. As you kneel between his legs, you pull his undergarments down. His hard member springs free and you bite your lips as you see it twitch slightly.

"Show me..." you whisper a little uncertainly and look up at him a little helplessly. But Daemon just nods slightly and guides your hand to his hard member.

@hoshi-miharu-blog @arryn-nyx @aemonds-eyeball @praline357 @melsunshine @drinking-tea-and-be-obsessed @lauftivy @valeskafics @bl4ckph0enix @autumnhymns @fan-goddess @msmorningstaarr @dreamlandcreations @hopelesswritergall @wetbitchlibrary @aemondsbabe

#12daysofsmuff #12 days of smuff #house of the dragon #hotd #daemon fanfic #daemon targaryen #daemon x reader #daemon smut #daemon fic #hotd daemon targaryen #daemon targaryen fanfic #daemon targaryen x reader #daemon targaryen imagine #daemon targaryen smut #daemon targaryen x female reader #daemon targaryen x y/n #daemon x y/n #daemon x you #hotd smut #house of the dragon daemon #prince daemon targaryen #the rogue prince #prince daemon #daemon targaryen x you #matt smith #daemon stannies

[mollyjames]

I made this post the other day on impulse, it's mostly just me banging the old "reverse the nsfw ban" drum that I'm sure staff has already heard a million times. It wasn't meant to be like a researched thing, but I do want to say like, I know staff can't just flip a switch and magically turn the porn back on. I know FOSTA-SESTA is a thing, I know credit card companies are getting stricter, I know tumblr doesn't want to get pulled from the app store. I get all that. I'm sympathetic even. That doesn't mean I think it's impossible, or that it wouldn't be worth the effort both from a cultural and a financial perspective, but I get it. But folks

Folks it has been such a shit year to be an artist.

Between AI art, Imgur banning nsfw content, reddit's impending implosion, and twitter asphyxiating... it's fucking rough out there right now. And I'm lucky. I stayed on tumblr, and my content all falls comfortably within the (poorly defined, arbitrarily implemented) nsfw guidelines. There are thousands of artists way more talented than me, way bigger than me, who are starting from essentially scratch. Who are now picking up the pieces and figuring out where they can even go from here. You know how we always joke about how if you wanted to make money as an artist, draw furry porn? That... can't really happen anymore. You can open a patreon, get lucky, get some commissions, but the platforms for building a robust audience just aren't there like they used to be. It sucks.

Look, fact is tumblr doesn't have to do anything. They can do what they like, keep the nsfw policy in this nebulous grey area where they don't have to commit to repealing it or enforcing it. And that's probably fine enough for them. But if it's not going to be tumblr? I don't think it's going to be... anything. Not for a while. Not until we get something new.

#ah but what about xyz platform? #thank you for asking no one is using them next question #this post also applies to sex workers #I didn't mention it because it's not my field #but we are together in this

[dogtoling]

RE: Question about whether the Deepsea and the Octarian Domes are directly connected to each other. sorry i'm stealing your reply @bucketsquid but i see a chance to talk about this i have to take it. So idk let's try to decode how they might actually be connected.

This is the obvious conclusion. For the record I think it's the RIGHT conclusion after Side Order because they seemed to REALLY imply it this time. I thought for a really long time that the Deepsea and Octarian domes HAVE TO be connected because not only are they both subterranean but also literally how else do you get that many freaking Octolings in there? Since the metro is connected to the Inkopolis subway anyway wouldn't it be WAY EASIER TO JUST GET SQUIDS? (though to be honest i still stand by this.)

Anyway the obvious assumption is that the Deepsea and Octarian domes connect to each other. though it's not so straightforward. How they connect to each other exactly? we don't really know. Anyway let's get back into this in just a second i need to show what absolutely dashed my hopes and made me really mad when it happened

THIS MAP. THEY POSTED THIS MAP. Before this map I was having a great time because this is what the map was in my head:

"why was that the map in your head" idk. the giant stretches of water surrounding both canyons and inkopolis stretching into said body of water gave me the mental image that the canyons were in the ocean by inkopolis' coast. alongside some of the very old concept art that shows some of the domes even being underneath inkopolis if i'm not mistaken!

from the art of splatoon 1. this is an ancient and I MEAN ANCIENT manga depicting what is obviously an early concept of the story so it shouldn't ACTUALLY be taken as fact (almost nothing in this manga holds up anymore). But some of the things WERE kept! I have to assume this is also why you get into Octo Valley through the sewer in the games because the story mode was meant to take place literally straight underneath Inkopolis... it makes a lot less sense in the final result when you supposedly take the sewer like 50 kilometers (i dont know the actual distances but i think they're able to be deciphered) underground to a canyon in the middle of nowhere.

Why is there even continuous sewage all that way. What is happening. Is it even a sewer or a really long underground secret tunnel that Captain Cuttlefish dug because he's been really bored for 100 years.

kind of besides the point. back to the issue of the deepsea and the octarian empire being connected. You know, with the Deepsea Metro being located in Inkopolis Bay and the domes supposedly being all over the Inkopolis underground and the surrounding locations, it didn't seem that far fetched that they could siphon Octolings from the underground (where they live) to another very close-by fork of the underground (the Deepsea). However,

1. the Deepsea is NOT Octarian territory, but its own type of society. which is really weird considering how much Octarian iconography is down there, let alone how many OCTARIANS are down there

2. We have SO LITTLE knowledge about the true scope of the Deepsea that you can't even say for sure whether the Deepsea is *JUST* the Deepsea Metro and the facilities and industrial cities in that exact specific area, or if it's a big underwater and underground empire similar in scope to the Octarian domes, maybe even built in the exact same dome network - or a neighboring one. (This would mean they have a border somewhere undefined, underground.)

3. At face value with only the map, this is the distance for a Single Octarian to travel in order to get from where they live/are stationed, to get to the Deepsea Metro which is cluttered with one billion octarians

HELLO? THAT IS SO FAR. it's even worse than the distance Agents 3 and 4 are swimming through the god damn sewer. This also makes very little sense if we assume all the subterranean domes in all of these locations are exclusively under their surface counterparts... which... well, we don't know.

We know that the Deepsea Metro is connected to the Inkopolis Underground (it even shows this on the map with the little dotted line). I don't really know the significance of that but I've taken it to mean that the Deepsea Metro that is highlighted in the map shows specifically the area covered by the Kamabo Corporation and the tests there, and honestly again, I don't even know if the Deepsea is any bigger than that. Since it's been stated to be an independent society from Inkopolis or the Octarians, you would ASSUME there'd be ample space for people to like, live, and maybe work, and produce stuff you need to like, live. Instead of the test facility being literally the only place that exists plus a city built around only that to sustain everything.

Furthermore, we don't know if Octarians have cities on the surface in their part of the surface world! This is something that really bothers me because I think knowing whether or not this is the case would change SO MUCH (i'm currently under the assumption it is a barren wasteland with Literally Nothing). However given the location of the Salmonid Swim Zone, we can SEE cities in the background of multiple stages, and judging by this map those would be mainly on the Octarian coasts. This could mean that Octarians have surface cities where they coexist with the Salmon, it could mean that they USED TO have surface cities and abandoned them, OR it could mean that Salmonids actually live on Octarian surface turf while the Octarians themselves live underground! Idk! There's a lot of options!

I kind of doubt Octarians have cities on the surface because if they did, then it would feel redundant for the game to keep coming back to "the Octoling world" being this horrible military regime underground that people try to get to the surface from. If it was that easy to get to the surface it feels odd that it would be a big deal. We know that the Octarian domes, at least in Octo Valley, are specifically an underground *secret* military base.

(*Secret* being explicitly stated before and it would imply that they wouldn't necessarily NEED to live underground, but it's just way easier to do Secret Things underground. Plus the surface is a wasteland so honestly not a lot to lose there.)

We still haven't really seen what they have aside from that. We don't know where they get their food, for example. There's got to be farmers in a society. There HAS TO be some kind of surface access or activity, and if you squint, Octo Canyon IS a surface city that they seem to have free access to. So why not have others? It seems only logical to have more. In this case the oppression of the Octoling world and being forced to stay underground feels really case-specific, but it seems to also be an overarching thing that's quite widespread, so... I don't know, I WANT MORE OCTARIAN WORLDBUILDING *PLEASE* i'm working with crumbs here.

Anyway. my current assumption of the subterranean areas of the Deepsea and the Octarian empire goes something like this, all things considered that I've talked about...

(Not exactly that but you get the general picture)

When you put it this way, it suddenly makes a lot more sense that Octarians would be getting into the Deepsea. Generally I tried to keep the locations of Octarian tunnel systems to their turf, and the locations of Deepsea tunnels under the ocean floor, though with Octarian domes explicitly stated to have been dug by humans there's. really no reason they couldn't stretch into Inkling territory. We have no idea how big these tunnel systems are in scope, NO idea.

And that's also the problem with trying to solve this part of worldbuilding, because my concept could easily be right but it could also be COMPLETELY wrong! It's totally possible that the dome networks are actually secluded and tiny and are *just* under the Octarian craters and nowhere else, and it's totally possible that the entirety of the Deepsea is JUST Kamabo Co and the few settlements surrounding it. I'm not that confident that I'm right but I'm not really confident that we'll get answers to these questions either, at least as long as the story modes keep intentionally avoiding expanding on existing game locations and pretending theyre not in the splatoon world at all by making their key locations abstract and closed off bubbles on purpoCOUGH HACK who said that

There is 1 thing I've completely failed to mention in this post and it's that Octo Valley and the Deepsea Metro are like, explicitly connected. Which by the way makes NO SENSE given they're on opposite corners of the map. But between what we know from Side Order and from this Official Snippet from Splatoon Base, the Official Splatoon Story Resource By Nintendo,

Ignoring that none of this makes sense anymore or is intentionally misleading compared to what we know from Agent 8's memory loss now. Anyway. This seems to just imply the Deepsea is *under* Octo Valley. WHICH WOULD LINE UP WITH SIDE ORDER, weirdly enough. It is possible that the Deepsea domes could actually OVERLAP with Octarian Domes, it's just built FAR under sea level, not bound to the actual location of the sea itself.

I want to point out that this segment in the splatoon base and the game itself and dev interviews all tend to contradict each other in some ways when you look at them side by side, which is frustrating, but also serves as a reminder that sometimes the official resources don't know exactly what they're talking about either. so it's often not worthwhile looking them up and trying to conclude something based on it just to find out that it's literally contradicted in the game itself.

anyway, we know One Thing now and it's that there's at least no way that Octarian domes and the Deepsea AREN'T connected to each other in some way. this post doesn't exactly solve the issue of How but there was an attempt. I don't think this is ultimately something you can come to a concrete foolproof conclusion on until there is more information. But in the meantime I guess there's speculation.

#rambles #squidthoughts

[mordredisacoolname]

BRIDGERTON BROS FALLING FOR A MALE READER

Male reader

HEADCANONS

Characters: Anthony, Benedict, Colin

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Anthony

-this boy is in DENIAL

-what do you mean he's in love with a MAN??

-he's so doomed

-you were very tight before

-spent every day together

-he really enjoyed your company, more than anyone, and he didn't understand why

-but when he realized he loved you he started avoiding you like the plug

-you don't understand why

-even tho you made peace with liking men and than fact that you're in love with your best friend, you didn't think he returned the feeling

-so you think you did something wrong

-you try talking to him but every time he finds an excuse to be somewhere else

-he is jealous of every man you talk to

-he doesn't have the right, but he still feels it

-after weeks of avoiding you he realizes the feeling won't go away

-so he with Benedict to a party, and sees you kissing a man

-you mean he has a chance with you???

-he barges to the room, his fist aching to punch the other guy, but he controls that feeling and just orders him to get the fuck out

-you're shocked, both just standing there staring at each other

-anthony steps closer to you starting intensely at your eyes

-"I think..." He doesn't finish the sentence and just kisses you

Benedict

-he first meets you in an art class

-watching your hand gracefully moving the paint brush on the canvas

-his starting is interrupted by lord Granville, asking him why haven't he started sketching

-by the end of the class you compliment him on his painting, making him feel something funny in his chest

-next time you're both in the studio he gathers the courage to talk to you, learning you'll be at the Granville's party next week

-you both meet there and spend the whole night together, you invite him to your studio, just the both of you

-he spends the leading days thinking about you

-"so, you want to pose or should I do it?" You ask him once you've taken out the canvas

-"I'd like to paint you" he saying with a playful twinkle in his eyes

-you settle into the chair in front of the canvas, posing for him

-"you know, I've been wanting to practice some anatomy"

-you understand the hint and take off your top, smiling to yourself

-after he's finished for the day you get up to look at what he did

-"so, what do you think"

-"this is amazing" you tell him

-"well, the muse is all to blame" he gets closer to you, looking briefly at your lips

-"oh sorry, next time I'll make sure to move in my sit and not let you work"

-"I won't be complaining if you were the one distracting me"

-he smirks looking into your eyes

-this waiting is killing you so you lean forward pressing your lips against his

-"we'll see next time" you say and leave him standing alone in the studio, eager for your next session

Colin

-you're a featherington relative visiting your family

-you're the closest to Penelope, always getting along

-you arrive together at the ball, all dressed up

-you're in a middle of a conversation with Pen when a man interrupts you to say hello to Pen

-"oh hello, I haven't seen you before" he looks at you in slight awe

-"I'm Penelope's distant relative, 'name', nice to meet you Mr....?"

-it takes Colin a couple seconds to respond "oh right, I'm Colin bridgerton"

-"the famous bridgerton, what a pleasure"

-"famous? You've heard of me?"

-"of course, Penelope never stops talking about you Mr bridgerton" you smirk at her red face

-"ah, that's nice, I think"

-"well, I shall go speak to other people, enjoy your night, Colin"

-he's absolutely smitten

-your voice, your smile, everything

-he visits the featherington house every day after that night, just to see you

-you talk a couple of time, and once he invites you to play cricket with his brothers

-you have am absolute blast, winning against Colin all the time

-he's usually good at this, but he can't seem to pocus

-except he does focus, just not on the game

-one day you sit together on a bench, watching people pass by

-"I'm returning to my hometown in two days" you suddenly say

-his heart sinks

-"what?"

-"yeah, I don't really see a future here, I thought that I'd find me a...wife, and settle down, but no such luck"

-his mind goes blank, he can't lose you

-he's next day he hurries over to the house, asking for you

-you're in your bedroom reading something when he storms in

-"is everything well Colin?"

-"don't go, stay here"

-"I told you, there's no reas-"

-"stay for me" he tells you before he overthinks it too much

-you're surprised, not because you didn't feel something going on between you, but because he actually said it, you thought it would never happen

-you're kinda relieved Colin presented a reason for you to stay, with him

#male reader #male reader insert #x male reader #bridgerton #anthony bridgerton x reader #Anthony bridgerton x male reader #Benedict bridgerton x reader #Benedict bridgerton x male reader #colin bridgerton x reader #Colin bridgerton x male reader #bridgerton x male reader

[colleendoran]

Misunderstanding

I received a note from someone who was upset I “failed to cite Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics” in my research for my work on Neil Gaiman's Chivalry and the essays I wrote about it. 

I really appreciate that people want to make sure credit goes where it's due, and I have a lot of respect for Scott McCloud's accomplishment with his wonderful book.  

I haven't read it myself in some years, and didn't cite it in my articles because I didn't reference it. I don't even know where my copy is so I don't know what McCloud referenced, either. 

The information in my articles re: illuminated manuscripts and the Bayeux Tapestry, as well as other theories about the development of sequential art from prehistory, not only predate McCloud's work (and in fact, predate McCloud's birth,) but they are so common and so well known in comics circles that asking me to cite them seems as weird to me as asking me to cite the information that George Washington was the first President of the United States.

A part of me wonders if someone is trying to play, "Let's you and him fight." 

No.

But I’m happy to bring to your attention some reading material.

Stephen Becker in his 1959 work Comic Art in America: A Social History of the Funnies, the Political Cartoons, Magazine Humor, Sporting Cartoons, and Animated Cartoons was among the first to discuss the Bayeux Tapestry as comic art. I read that book sometime in the 1980’s. I think a lot of people assume the Bayeux tapestry as comic art was McCloud’s idea, but we don’t all walk around with a reference library in our heads, so there you go. I can’t find my copy of Becker’s work to quote, but I did find an article by Arthur Asa Berger with a mention of the Bayeux Tapestry as comic art in the summer 1978 issue of The Wilson Quarterly.

My first exposure to the idea of comics as descendant of fine art was Maurice Horn’s 1976 The World Encyclopedia of Comics which was my first read re: comics history. I still have my tattered 1976 edition. 

While Horn scorned the idea that tapestries and manuscripts could be comic art (see, it was a matter of discussion way back then, so much so that authors were writing snarky asides to one another about it,) he believed the origin of sequential art was in the Renaissance sketches of Leonardo da Vinci - which I think everyone now agrees is kind of a bonkers idea.

I think Horn was just intent on elevating the comic art form by hooking up with da Vinci.

You go, boi.

Comics as descendant of art on scrolls is a very common theory, the easiest to trace being in Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics by Fred Schodt published in 1983 when I was still a teenager. I can't find my copy to show examples, but this text is still in print and you can go read it for yourself. 

I was introduced to manga by cartoonist Leslie Sternbergh and bought Schodt’s book at Books Kinokuniya on (I think) a trip to New York around the time of first publication of Schodt’s work. And years later took a trip to Japan with Fred Schodt and a group of cartoonists including Jeff Smith and Jules Fieffer, Nicole Hollander, and Denys Cowan as the guests of Tezuka Productions.

Here we all are.

So, I’m familiar with manga, see.

As for comics as descendant of cave paintings, hieroglyphics and ancient art in general, Will Eisner’s 1985 Comics and Sequential Art not only made all of those points, but made those points with comic art examples. Like these.

And this.

And this.

And more than a few words on this:

I find it amusing that someone is questioning why I didn’t cite McCloud when what you should probably be questioning is why more people don’t cite Eisner who produced his book eight years before McCloud published his and who is well known to have influenced McCloud.

Whatever. My book's autographed.

I also danced with Eisner. Eat your heart out.

Understanding Comics is a terrific work with huge advantages over every book (that I know of) about comics that came before: it taught comics entirely in the language of comics. 

But the discussion in it about the origins of comics and my work especially re: illuminated manuscripts/tapestries, did not originate with McCloud. I research illuminated manuscripts because it’s my hobby and it informs my art. 

I encourage everyone to read Understanding Comics because it is an outstanding work.

But it’s not the book that introduced me to the concepts of the development of comic art. It’s not even the point of origin of those concepts. So, there is no reason to cite it.

Also, shocking as it may seem, I occasionally come up with ideas on my own. While I'm younger than McCloud, I've actually been a comics pro longer than he has. So I've had plenty of opportunity to, you know, read things and toss things around, and decide for myself.

When I first read Chivalry and first begged Neil Gaiman to let me adapt it, my head full of the work of Alberto Sangorski and his art for Tennyson’s Le Morte D’Arthur, Understanding Comics hadn’t been published yet.

It's been a good twelve years since I last read McCloud's work, and I don't think I've spoken to him five times in the last three decades. But I'm pretty sure he never mentioned Sangorski.

I hope that clears everything up, and maybe introduces some of you to some works you might not be aware of.

Have a great day.

#understanding comics #comics history #neil gaiman #scott mccloud #chivalry #jules fieffer #tezuka productions #manga #will eisner

[suzannahnatters]

Let Your Knights Weep

One of the big things I've had to train myself out of when writing medieval historical fiction?

The stiff upper lip.

This used to really bewilder my editor, who for some time attempted to nudge me away from having my grown men weep and wail and blubber, but for me it's an essential part of the setting. Whether in grief or fear, medieval people did not hold things back.

Here are some of my favourite quotes to explain.

First, a couple from two great 20th century medievalists:

CS Lewis in his Letters put it this way:

“By the way, don't 'weep inwardly' and get a sore throat. If you must weep, weep: a good honest howl! I suspect we - and especially, my sex - don't cry enough now-a-days. Aeneas and Hector and Beowulf, Roland and Lancelot blubbered like schoolgirls, so why shouldn't we?”

Dorothy Sayers, in her fabulous Introduction to her translation of THE SONG OF ROLAND, speaking of Charlemagne discovering Roland's body on the battlefield:

Here too, I think we must not reckon it weakness in him that he is overcome by grief for Roland’s death, that he faints upon the body and has to be raised up by the barons and supported by them while he utters his lament. There are fashions in sensibility as in everything else. The idea that a strong man should react to great personal and national calamities by a slight compression of the lips and by silently throwing his cigarette into the fireplace is of very recent origin. By the standards of feudal epic, Charlemagne’s behaviour is perfectly correct. Fainting, weeping, and lamenting is what the situation calls for. The assembled knights and barons all decorously follow his example. They punctuate his lament with appropriate responses:

By hundred thousand the French for sorrow sigh; There’s none of them but utters grievous cries.

At the end of the next laisse:

He tears his beard that is so white of hue, Tears from his head his white hair by the roots; And of the French an hundred thousand swoon.

We may take this response as being ritual and poetic; grief, like everything else in the Epic, is displayed on the heroic scale. Though men of the eleventh century did, in fact, display their emotions much more openly than we do, there is no reason to suppose that they made a practice of fainting away in chorus. But the gesture had their approval; that was how they liked to think of people behaving. In every age, art holds up to us the standard pattern of exemplary conduct, and real life does its best to conform. From Charlemagne’s weeping and fainting we can draw no conclusions about his character except that the poet has represented him as a perfect model of the “man of feeling” in the taste of the period.

OK, now let's dig into some quotes that I found just in Christopher Tyerman's Chronicles of the First Crusade and Joinville's Life of St Louis:

Truly you would have grieved and sobbed in pity when the Turks killed any of our men....

As for the knights, they stood about in a great state of gloom, wringing their hands because they were so frightened and miserable, not knowing what to do with themselves and their armour, and offering to sell their shields, valuable breastplates and helmets for threepence or fivepence or any price they could get....

When Guy, who was a very honourable knight, had heard these lies, he and all the others began to weep and to make loud lamentation....

They stayed in the houses cowering, some some for hunger and some for fear of the Turks....

Now at vigils, the time of trust in God’s compassion, many gave up hope and hurriedly lowered themselves with ropes from the wall-tops; and in the city soldiers, returning from the encounter, circulated widely a rumour that mass decapitation of the defenders was in store. To add weight to the terror, they too fled…

In the course of that day’s battle there had been many people, and of fine appearance too, who had come very shamefully flying over the little bridge you know of and had fled away so panic-stricken that all our attempts to make them stay with us had been in vain. I could tell you some of their names, but shall refrain from doing so, because they are now dead.

I could go on looking for quotes in all the other medieval literature I've read, but that would be beyond the scope of this Tumblr post.

In the meantime, this leads me to make some comments on how trauma was perceived.

In Jonathan Riley-Smith's The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading, the author discusses the mental breakdowns suffered by the first crusaders during the second siege of Antioch, which caused many of them to flee at the moment of direst need:

In these stressful circumstances it is not surprising that the crusaders were often very frightened. At times, indeed, they seem to have been almost paralysed by a terror that they themselves could hardly comprehend. … When the crusade was bottled up in Antioch by Kerbogha's relief force it was gripped by such blind panic that there was the prospect of a mass break-out and on the night of 10 or 11 Juney 1098 Bohemond and Adhemar had the gates of the city closed. It is worth noting that many of those whom later chroniclers, writing after the events in comparative comfort in Europe, vilified for cowardice and desertion seem to have been treated more charitably by their fellow-crusaders, who must have understood what pressures they had been under.

--

In conclusion: the way we feel about things today in the English-speaking isn't necessarily the way people felt about things in the past (and this goes for other cultures, real or imagined, too). I'm continually catching myself writing people with stiff upper lips and emotional reservations, and having to remind myself that the culture was different back them. If a grown man wanted to weep, he could. That's a good thing. (Oh, and my medieval historical fantasy? Check out the Watchers of Outremer series on Amazon or wherever books are sold!)

#history #writing #historical fiction #medieval history #medieval #middle ages #historical #masculinity #history of masculinity #toxic masculinity

[avelera]

Let's Play: What's Wrong with this Sculpture?

Following in the theme of sharing astonishing moments of ancient sculpture pedantry here on Tumblr, based on my brief undergraduate stint as a T.A of ancient art history, I thought I'd share one of my other proudest moments of being an absolutely insufferable know-it-all about ancient sculptures.

In the process, I hope I can also share some of the sort of largely useless (from a practical perspective) information that Tumblr tends to glory in, so buckle up buttercups.

This question was posed to me on a walking tour of the Capitoline Museum in my ancient art history class while I was living abroad. Our professor, a delightfully curmudgeonly Belgian, stopped in front and asked us to figure out why this sculpture is just plain wrong.

I intend to walk you through the process of how I got the right answer and, after gaining my teacher's rare approval, glowed with enough serotonin to power a small nuclear reactor.

So, let's return to the original question: what is wrong with this sculpture?

Because if you are truly eagle-eyed you should be able to spot what very famous sculpture this actually is, before an overly imaginative Frenchman brought it back wrong.

Hint #1: It was incorrectly restored.

Look closely at the the difference of the patina, or color of the stone. It's a bit hard to tell in this photo, but the head was added later. It's a paler white than the core of the torso, which is what we have of the original sculpture.

Hint #2: It was incorrectly restored in the 18th century by a Frenchman (Pierre-Étienne Monnot) who made some, shall we say, creative interpretations of what's going on here.

You can tell it's by an 18th c. Frenchman because the facial features are so delicate. Ancient statues tend to have less narrow and delicate chins and noses. In general, that is a dead giveaway when something is 18th century French vs. Ancient Greek or Roman.

Here's a good example. The first sculpture is 18th c. French, the second is the famous Venus de Milo. Note her blockier chin and less delicate features. So in the future, you can tell these sort of later additions to Greek or Roman sculptures if they added a new head because 17-19th century sculptors in Europe had tools (like finer drill tips) and tastes (beauty standards that favored more delicate men and women) that led to a pronounced difference in the faces.

Hint #3: Check out the anatomy of his lower shoulder. That's another addition, that arm should not be coming straight out of a torso where the muscle, if you look closely, is turned inward.

Seriously, that looks painful.

Hint #4: The sword he's holding up is just total nonsense for the Roman era. I mean, the restoration makes no secret of the fact that this sword is a later addition, but it's also just an absolute nonsense sword with its silly little curved cross guard. This Frenchman literally just made it up.

Here's an ancient sculpture with a sword in it that actually looks right:

From the Ludovisi Gaul, a famous Hellenistic Baroque work of Greek sculpture. Note the much blockier sword though I will admit, it could be a later addition, I don't know for 100% certain, but I'm pretty sure it's the original. Regardless, it fits the sculpture much better and let me add that sword I'm criticizing is completely made up for the sculpture we're talking about and is not there in the original sculpture that was incorrectly restored.

Ok, so those are all the hints.

Look closely at the body of the first sculpture. Cut away the arms that are not connected to the body correctly, the sword that shouldn't be there, the face that was far too delicate. When you separate those later additions out, can you tell me what sculpture that actually is?

Because here is the reveal!

The Discus Thrower, aka, the Discobolus by Myron.

The French restorationist got carried away by his own imagination, saw a twisted torso and thought it could only possibly be a warrior in the midst of twisting around to fend off a blow, not an athlete in the midst of a demonstration of skill. It's a martial, fanciful read that completely misinterpreted the subject.

This is why most restoration today employs a much lighter touch, rather than trying to reattach pieces incorrectly, they tend to just outline where the missing pieces are with a light sketch of an educated guess of what might have actually been there. Faulty restorations like the Capitoline Discobolus is one reason for this modern stylistic principle when it comes to restoration work.

When my professor asked us to identify the correct original sculpture that day on the museum tour, it was the sword that pinged me as wrong first, but zeroing in on the core of the sculpture, the torso, is what revealed the true statue underneath.

This notoriously difficult to please professor was very proud when I blurted out, "It's the Discus Thrower!" and the high-octane serotonin I got from his approval probably could have propelled me into the sun that day, and brought to you Yet Another Moment of Ancient Sculpture Pedantry.

#ancient history #ancient rome #art history #discobolus #there are very few things I'll brag about but naming this sculpture correctly is one of them #in part because there was so little to be gained lol oh well might as well make a tumblr post about it