Between this and Heath... man.
My problem isn't his face, it's that (from this admittedly close-cropped picture) the male characters get such boring clothing designs compared to girls. Mouscedes and Skunkrates aren't even on the same level here.
They could have used such interesting aesthetics and styles for him (and Heath), and they just drop the ball. Could have continued some kind of punk/scene/emo/etc. aesthetic from his earrings & hairstyle, but all he has is a hoodie?
I know higher-ups expect only girls to actually buy the Monster High dolls, and that designing characters for the dolls plays a part in what they look like on the show. But are they seriously actively discouraging giving male characters interesting fashion?
(post edited to remove targeting the character designers on the show's crew; their creativity clearly shows with the female character designs, and the merch is (unfortunately) exclusively expected to be bought by girls, so it feels likely that Mattel is mandating that male characters not outshine the girls)
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more zombie au :] (1.2k words)
The odor of rot has joined the damp growth of life from pots. Even if some things die off without human aid, there are always stronger elements that thrive in their absence.
The aisles are overgrown. Ritsu brushes past the vines as gently as he can, wooden floor groaning under his worn soles. There’s a gap of empty space in the middle of each aisle that he slots through, eyes roaming the shelves of largely useless things. Stronger stems snag onto his backpack and he tugs distractedly while perusing the labeled pots along the tables.
The barn is quaint, and Ritsu thinks he would love to stay. Moss eats at the boards under his feet and bugs swarm around him in the hot air incessantly, but it’s peaceful and there’s a constant sprinkle of sound to his ears that have grown so used to silence. Whoever owned this place beforehand put up a few wind chimes indoors—they must’ve always had the front entrance open for customers.
It’s a quiet little homemade garden center, or something similar, on the side of the highway. It’s an overgrown property with something dead in the backyard that Ritsu refuses to acknowledge or let Shigeo near. The shingles and boards in the roof have been replaced with polyethylene sheets—a barn-turned-greenhouse, uprooted from the hay and cattle it likely used to house and settled back into the Earth to be a paradise for plants.
There’s a large branch hanging through a hole poked into the plastic overhead. It sways with the wind and the chimes that follow, and Ritsu whistles with the leadless melody and gives it a direction while he studies old seed packets.
They didn’t stop here for any particular reason—a garden center doesn’t have much for apocalypse survivors, but Shigeo has always liked overgrown things. He’d always enjoyed taking care of their mother’s plants back home, and then Reigen’s at the office. His brother likes the humidity of greenhouses and the smell of soil and dirt and must.
He sees the top of Shigeo’s head over the aisles, across the barn. He walks past a shovel hanging on the wall and yelps out a grunt when it clangs to the floor behind him. Ritsu shakes his head and smiles, running his fingers along faded price tags.
The feeling of greenhouses has always had this… wet fullness, to Ritsu.
When he breathes in it’s like he can taste the life that breathes out and it feels like a conversation, a question and an answer, both of which he’s not sure how to articulate. The leaves wave to him and he waves back, the once-active sprinklers pepper his skin with dots, with compliments, with proclamations they are eager to share. The vines weave between fencing just to reach him, just to talk.
He understands why Shigeo likes it, and why he’d always asked to accompany their mother on trips to get new seeds. Ritsu hadn’t really understood, then, how pretty it could be, how full it could feel.
Shigeo had always been right about loving the little things. Ritsu wishes he’d seen that sooner.
His brother ambles down the aisle ahead of him and he listens to the quiet patter of his sloppy footwork, moving around a table of seed trays. His whistles carry across the barn, sort of aimless in their own right instead of leading the wind and the chimes somewhere worthwhile, but the sounds soak into the overhead plastic nicely, so he keeps going.
He pulls back a layering of vines and leaves to scan the contents of another shelf, and then he notices Shigeo stop in his peripherals. His dirty shoes stay planted in the corner of his vision, leaves burying the toes, and Ritsu looks away from the products.
He means to say something, to ask him what’s up even if saying things to Shigeo very rarely results in productivity, but he stops when he realizes his brother’s head is… tilted.
He’s looking at him with as much inquisitiveness as his dulled down awareness can muster, pale eyes flickering across Ritsu’s face like he’s working out some puzzle. He instinctively stops whistling, brain lagging behind on this new info of this new behavior, and the sound fizzles out into a little huff of air that leaves the greenhouse feeling oddly empty.
Shigeo studies him for a moment longer, blinking slowly, and then he straightens his head out as Ritsu stares back. His brother’s gaze lingers there on his mouth, like he’s still confused, like he still expects something to happen.
Ritsu blinks once, twice. The wind chimes call as wind pokes at his greasy spikes, as it prods at the ends of his jacket and fills the silence with a different flavor of itself. The interest in the zombie’s eyes fades a little, gaze straying to the vines around them.
Very tentatively, Ritsu wets his lips and blows. The whistle grabs his brother’s attention immediately, and he’s suddenly tilting his head like a curious dog.
He can’t help the laugh that spills out and makes the whistle a mess of exhales. His shoulders shake a little and he hurries to keep the tune steady and consistent; a few seconds pass and Shigeo tilts his head the other way, exhausted eyes big and more alert than they’ve been in days.
Ritsu experiments, and ventures around with the sound—goes lower and higher and watches his brother twist his head back and forth like he’s trying to understand calculus. There’s something very innocent about it, about the look in his eyes that reminds him of when they were kids and their father would show them magic tricks.
It’s muted by the ever-present fog there in his pupils, but Ritsu thinks he sees a spark of that life in them, of that curiosity born from a mind that knows little. He gives him a simple sensation, a simple experience, and his brother is eating it all up like he’s four again, like he’s new and everything is colorful and unknown and big.
Ritsu watches Shigeo tilt his head back and forth, watches the rusty gears behind his window panes move. He changes tactics, because some sad part of him tells him to, and whistles Shigeo’s favorite song instead.
He remembers the name, but he doesn’t need the name because when he thinks of the tune he thinks of his brother, and that’s all that matters. It’s happy, because Shigeo likes happy music. It’s chipper and yet it meanders, like it’s willingly getting lost, like it’s wandering where it wants to and it’ll eventually find its roots again. It’s happy the whole time. The whole adventure.
Shigeo stops tilting his head, and the gears behind his eyes churn a little bit faster. His gaze clings to Ritsu’s and his brother makes actual eye contact, sinks his own being into Ritsu’s head when he’s least prepared for it. The recognition in his gaze has his soul souring.
He keeps whistling. He doesn’t want to stop, because Shigeo feels like Shigeo right now, and he doesn’t want that to stop.
His brother stares. Ritsu’s grief tints the music.
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talked w/ a friend about this and wanted to post something similar yesterday after a convo i saw also
about people criticizing ttcc / ttcc fans for just... being cog fans? being cog centric? usually coming from people who only like the toons.
and everyone likes what they like! it's okay! but saying that people who like the cogs are horrible and support the bad things they do, is just blatantly wrong. i thought we knew that enjoying villainous and morally Bad / grey characters is... okay? it doesn't mean you support what they do. it's interesting to explore these topics.
i've seen many people just... paint anyone who likes the cogs as horrible because they're "apologists of x and y" and... i dunno. rubs me the wrong way! you do have a point and recognize the cogs do bad things, but liking them as characters means nothing about who you are as a person.
and this is not to say that people who are in toontown for the toons are bad. hell! they are right this IS toontown. i may be on the cog liker side but i like the toons! maybe ocs more than the npcs - mostly because i like my friends and the sheer creativity the toons can bring out!!
SO what i wanna say... i dunno. let's not point fingers...? let's have fun in a goofy cartoon game together??? also complaining about people liking VILLAIN ROBOTS on TUMBLR is kind of funny to me. do you realize where you are. but then again a lot of this i see on discord and in-game as well since i avoid things on tumblr... i am a sensitive little fella i avoid misty fight bc of One Really mean "Critic" guy i saw there and i have been shivering in my bootsies since. so you get me
but like yes ttcc is more cog centric but... that's okay? things could be written better and i still wanna speak on it, and i do thing the toons deserve attention and better writing... but the fact it focuses on the cogs isn't... bad? if you don't like how con centric it is you can go play ttr...? god forbid people have fun and explore the villain's side of things...? i'm not saying either toontown server is better or worse than the other... and everyone can like their own things!!
but like... people will just like the cogs and that's okay and it doesn't make you bad. let's all be friends okay? both sides may be going at each other's necks in-game and the cogs in fact do horrible things - but it's what makes them fun, and it gives the toons things to do in the game!! but we don't gotta !!!!!!!! i may be really sarcastic and sometimes mean in private but like that's me just privately sassing, deep down i think people should just... y'know..? enjoy things.
so yea that's the guzma / cathal thought of today. toon people cog people both people are all awesome as fuck and you keep doing what you're doing i love you toontown isn't toontown without you
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your perception of itafushi. my beloved. my favorite little barbie dolls that gege loves to wind up. i miss them.
like the idea of yuuji being so jealous over megumi? the sunshine himbo…losing it at the sight of megumi smiling at this perfect little asshole who is totally hiding under an anxious mess facade. there’s no way someone could have it all and their this good guy. yuuji is waiting for the day yuuta messes up i just know it.
even with yuuji finally understands their dynamic i just know that those two have subtle competitions over megumi attention. like…it gets to the point where throwing cars at each other is the norm. (cue nanami being horrified at his legal and emotional children throwing cars at each other over a child of gojo. like yes he adores megumi. but somehow this is all gojo fault. don’t ask nanami how.)
BUT THE IDEA OF THE ZENINS BEING SO YUUJIPHOBIC? like the idea of them shuddering at the idea of megumi fucking around with the vessel of sukuna? that they had to set a bounty on him just to keep him away from their precious runaway heir? i just know mai pops out to the school just to bitch about megumi and his boyfriend being like modern day romeo and juliet.
i also love to imagine sukuna being a firm zenin hater. like he’s not even willing to eat them. he firmly believes that all of them taste like shit. especially naoya.
See I just love the idea of Yuuji being jealous over Megumi but exclusively when it comes to Okkotsu Yuuta. He’s legitimately not a jealous person. He’s never been jealous of anyone before in his life. He’s deeply secure in what he has with Megumi and knows that Megumi likes him back and that there’s no need to be worried or upset about Megumi having close relationships with other people. He wants Megumi to have close relationships outside of him.
But the universe fucking bends to give that perfect beautiful bastard everything Yuuji has ever dreamed of.
It’s a new experience for yuuji. He’s not used to experiencing jealousy. He’s literally never done it before. But there’s this impossibly gorgeous and perfect man swanning around out there getting his death sentence overturned and having his curse royalty unattach from his body in sparkling globes of light and having Nanamin legally adopt him as his actual child and having Megumi be His Boy and apparently it’s universally acknowledged* that Megumi is still Yuuta’s Boy despite Yuuji going to Herculean efforts to lock that shit down. He has assassins trying to kill him because it’s universally agreed** that his boyfriend is out of his league, apparently, and his boyfriend is still someone else’s Boy.
It does not help that when the Assassin Problem first appears yuuji wants to go to Gojo and Megumi decides he cannot take that level of humiliation and suggests going to Yuuta first. Which makes Yuuji insist that no no, he can handle a few assassins. No need to bother any impossibly beautiful upperclassman about it who are apparently better than Yuuji in every way. He’s got this on his own. Nooo problem.
Megumi stares at him for three unbroken seconds and goes to ask Yuuta for advice about it, which results in the second years going off to unilaterally threaten the Zenin clan, which none of the first years ever find out about.
Sukuna absolutely does hate the Zenin clan and it’s specifically because they did not consider him when putting a bounty on yuujis head. He’s a firm believer in knowing your worth and he knows his fucking worth. Sorcerers used to have style. They used to have respect. What the fuck is this. The Zenin are not worth dog shit on his heel. He’ll kill them all.
*universally acknowledged by everyone except Megumi, who still does not know that people call him that
** universally agreed by everyone except Todo, who thinks his brother is a beautiful beautiful man that anyone would be lucky to court and that Fushiguro is a boring child with a nonexistent ass who has inexplicably bewitched a gorgeous specimen of manhood.
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