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megashadowdragon · 2 years

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sanji will take down multiple admirals

sanji beating multiple members of their greatest power would fit that

first there is kizaru

twitter . com/dengekivinsmoke/status/1497908252041957380

🐆"Only those who are very good with observation haki are capable of spotting him"

🐆"His devil fruit is about speed"

Sanji vs kizaru one of the most anticipated fight in ONE PIECE

Kizaru’s lazy and easy-going demeanor is something of a reference to the main characters’ approach to crime from the 1970s French film Borsalino. ; and oda stated that if sanji was in real world he would be french

and second there is green bull

sanjis epithet is black leg

and there is a highly fatal disease of cattle (which includes bulls etc) etc called blackleg. which is the name of sanjis epithet so Its possible sanji will cause green bulls death

and in one piece there are multiple references/allusions to journey of the west for luffy is inspired by sun wukong

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sanji besides his reference to satan/lucifer alludes to two characters in journey of the west sun wukongs companion pigsy/zhu baije

(sanjis references to zhu bajie

Zhu Bajie is a complex and developed character in the novel. He looks like a terrible monster, part human and part pig, who often gets himself and his companions into trouble through his laziness, gluttony, and propensity for lusting after pretty women. He is jealous of Sun Wukong and always tries to bring him down.

Pigsy’s Buddhist name “Zhu Wuneng”, given by Bodhisattva Guanyin, means “pig (reincarnated) who is aware of ability,” or “pig who rises to power”, a reference to the fact that he values himself so much as to forget his own grisly appearance*. Xuanzang gave him the nickname Bājiè which means “eight restraints, or eight commandments” to* remind him of his Buddhist diet*.*

In the original Chinese novel, he is often called dāizi (呆子), meaning “idiot”. Sun Wukong, Xuanzang and even the author consistently refers to him as “the idiot” over the course of the story. Bodhisattvas and other heavenly beings usually refer to him as “Heavenly Tumbleweed”, his former name when he was a heavenly marshal.

sanji is called an idiot by ussop and zoro multiple times.

Sanji is a cook, while Pigsy got insane appetite (sometimes Pigsy is also portrayed as a chef in some versions)

and zhu bajie lusts after every woman he meets

plus pigysy/ zhu baji

Bajie joins The Team because his mortal in-laws end up hiring Monkey and Xuanzang to exorcise him from their farm and chase him away from their daughter, Blue Orchid. However, Bajie legitimately married Blue Orchid and did so with their permission, and while he is quite a glutton (as he himself admits), he’s also a very hard and diligent worker who more than earns his keep by his labors. As he notes to Monkey-in-disguise, he cleans the ground, drains ditches, carries bricks and tiles, builds walls, plows fields (pulling the plough singlehandedly at that), plants grain and generally improves the farm, with even his in-laws admitting that he does his labors, which is why they were happy to take him in as their son-in-law in the first place. So why do they want him gone? Because it’s undignified to have a monster as a son-in-law. This makes perfect sense to Chinese and Japanese cultures, even today, but modern Westerners tend to see them as Ungrateful Bastards engaging in Fantastic Racism: he’s being cast out, despite being everything a farmer could want in a son-in-law, simply because of his race. noteIncidentally, this may be why this aspect of Bajie’s story is almost never adapted straight. For example, in Monkey, Bajie is to be exorcised because he’s given up being a dutiful son-in-law to instead become a wastrel who spends his days eating, drinking and picking fights. In Dragon Ball, the Bajie-expy Oolong is an enemy because he keeps kidnapping girls (all of whom end up pushing him around and bullying him, to the point he’s happy to give them back) and the whole “in-laws call for exorcism” angle is dropped entirely. Admittedly Bajie isn’t entirely innocent — by the time Monkey and Xuanzang come along, he’s keeping Blue Orchid locked up in his private room and not letting her parents see her. But it’s never clarified whether he’s doing that because he’s just an asshole or if he’s only doing so because he’s angry at how, after having welcomed him into the family, his in-laws have turned on him for his supernatural nature. “

basically zhu bajies inlaws had him kicked out by son wukong and this could be referenced in a way with how zeff had luffy take sanji away with him by the baratie despite sanji being a good chef though he is perverted due to the fact that he wanted sanji to follow his dreams since he was kept here by his debt so while zhu bajies in laws were assholes sanjis father zeff had him taken away because he cared about sanji

but the part about zhu bajies in laws are applied to sanjis biological father how while zhu bajies in laws didnt like him because he was supernatural sanjis biological father hated him for being born normal)

who fought against the bull demon king along with sun wukong and more importantly sanji references prince nezha who captures bull demon king

“ In the ensuing fight against Sun Wukong and Zhu Bajie, Bull Demon King reveals his true form, a giant white bull, and attempts to charge towards his opponents. Nezha shows up, captures Bull Demon King and brings him to Heaven to let the Jade Emperor decide his fate“

the bull demon king after being defeated is taken to heaven to let the jade emperor decide his fate could also reference green bull doing something that would get him arrested by the marines like either he left the marines to join bb genuinely or was a spy for blackbeard and ending up being arrested by the marines after sanji defeats him given how often the tenryuubito and im are called gods etc

since nezha was known for his temper and conflict with his father and fire based weapons and sanji uses fire abilitys powered by anger and hada conflict with his biological father and nezha was called the third lotus prince and sanji is a prince not only does sanji mean third son but he is the biological third son to his biological parents and while sanji had a loving relationship with his mother his father was angry at him

nezha was known for going on aa fit of anger before a certain event and sanji has shown that she had a temper and nezha “His mother then secretly built a temple for Nezha and this temple later flourished. This temple became very well known and grew vastly because Nezha granted miracle cures to the sick and the crippled. However, Li Jing soon found out about this temple and burnt it down because he was still angry at Nezha and felt that he had already caused too much trouble for their family.Li Jing burning the temple caused Nezha to desire his father’s death. Thus, enmity between father and son grew. Nezha was later brought back to life by his teacher, Taiyi Zhenren, who used lotus roots to construct a human body for his soul and gave him two new weapons: the Wind Fire Wheels (風火輪) and the Fire-tipped Spear (火尖槍). With the reincarnation of Nezha by his master, Li Jing and Nezha fought many battles. However, Li Jing soon realized that his mortal body was no match for Nezha and so he ran for his life. On the run, he met his second son, Muzha, who fought and was defeated by Nezha. , Randeng Daoren.Nezha is often depicted as a youth, instead of an adult. He is often shown flying in the sky riding on the Wind Fire Wheels (風火輪), has the Universe Ring (乾坤圈) around his body (sometimes in his left hand), the Red Armillary Sash (浑天绫) around his shoulders and a Fire-tipped Spear (火尖槍) in his right hand. Sometimes, he is shown in his “three heads and six arms” form (三頭六臂). “and nezha ended up going on a fit of rage against his father so he hd been known for his anger

green bull = bull demon king

¨In the ensuing fight against Sun Wukong and Zhu Bajie, Bull Demon King reveals his true form, a giant white bull, and attempts to charge towards his opponents. Nezha shows up, captures Bull Demon King, and brings him to Heaven to let the Jade Emperor decide his fate¨

so sanji alludes to 2 characters who participated in the fight against bull demon king and typically its portrayed as sun wukong vs bull demon king but how about have the character based on zhu bajie and nezha go against the character who alludes to the bull demon king. and it fits for green bull to be a spy on the marines given that it means that after he was arrested he would be judged by wg ( ¨the gods¨) given the bdk was taken to heaven for judgement. ( and sanji had pulled off spy like moves like the mr prince stuff and there had been multiple times pre time skip where he disappeared and pulled off something big ( mr prince, damaging the arc, opening the gates etc )

and for more on green bull being sanjis evil counterpart

The only two pieces of information we have about Green Bull have to do with Food and Women. Basically he was introduced during the Reverie solely to let us know that about him.

“Eating is a pain in the ass” and “I haven’t bothered eating” vs Sanji’s appreciation towards food after he experienced starvation

Saying that he would eat even if it’s a nuisance solely if he’d get to flirt with a girl vs Sanji putting himself aside and preparing his best dishes for ladies

And on top of that

- Luffy and Blackbeard’s first dispute was about food, which sets up while they act similar they have different tastes

sanji and luffy are foils to each other and the blackbeard pirates are the evil counterpart to strawhats with

blackbeard being evil luffy

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“ So, I was thinking that Luffy and Sanji are like two sidesfrom the same coin, ‘cause there are some aspects of them that are the same or at least really similar, but some others are just complete opposites (This is going to be pretty long, sorry, so I’m dividing it in blocks, which may be a lil messy, sorry) Appearence: Both, are thin, but, while Sanji is tall, Luffy is short. Sanji has blond and well brushed hair that covers part of his face, but Luffy’s got black messy hair. Both have a “mark” on their face, Luffy’s got his scar, Sanji’s got his eyebrows. Sanji always wears formal clothes that are black, whileLuffy wears informal clothes, which are bright colored. Fighting Style: Both fight without anything else but thier body, but while Luffy’s a Devil Fruit user, Sanji’s not. On the other hand, Sanji’s the best swimmer in the crew. Also, Luffy uses mostly his fists to attack, while Sanji uses only his legs (well he uses knifes in his fight versus Wanze, but just one fight, so let’s ignore it). Personality: Most of the time, Sanji’s composed and mature, but there’s a lot of moments when he’s really childish. Luffy, is most of the time childish, but he can be serious if the moment requires to. While Sanji has shown he has sexual desires, Luffy has shown he has less sexual desires than a snail. Both are hopeless dreamers, with kinda impossible dreams. Sanji want to find a legendary sea that may not exist, and Luffy wants to find a legendary tresaure that’s wanted by a lot of people. Luffy will do whatever he has to do to achieve it, but Sanji has been shown to deny his desire to accomplish his dream, just for the sake of someone else. Luffy’s an excited child that go running towards anything that sounds fun to him without any second thought. Sanji’s careful and thinks his next moves with precison, also Sanji is one of the main strategist of the crew Luffy easily falls for lies,tricks and ilusions, while Sanji doesn’t and even sometimes uses them in his advantage. Both are so damn protective, but Sanji’s a lot more sacrificed. Luffy’s loud and bad at infiltrating, but Sanji’s quiet and awfully good at infiltraitng and finding ways to help the crew. Story/Family: Both are saved by a pirate that looses, an arm on Luffy’s part, a leg on Sanji’s part, Their fathers are both famous criminals, but while Sanji’s father’s more from the underworld, Luffy’s father from the upperworld. Also both have two older siblings, but while Luffy’s aren’t blood related, Sanji’s are. Well, that’s just a list of things that have come to my mind for now. Feel free to expand it. Sanji can’t hit a woman at all, while Luffy could care less about your gender if you’re the enemy. Zoro’s in the middle of the spectrum. I got this from TV Tropes. I’d also like to point out how Oda’s chosen colors for them are red and blue. While you have Zoro and Nami whose colors are their hair color, Sanji could honestly have yellow or even black as a color, but those were assigned to Usopp and Brook instead.

In most literature, red and blue are symbolic opposites. Usually they designate for convenience enemies or rivals at least. While Sanji’s rival is Zoro, sanji unwilling had sort of a heelface turn where in chapter 844 they actually had what they talked about sort of sanji vs. luffy more like sanji hitting luffy in order to strive him down both sanji and luffy had 2 flashbacks first one featuring their mentor and their mentors losing a limb for them and the second featuring a relationship with their brothers for luffy it was in spirit for sanji it was biological for luffy it was positive relationship for sanji negative in the tea party since sanji is trying to save his biological brothers and father who he hates while e how luffy tried to save his brother in spirit ace this serves as an excellent point of contrast while sanji is saved his brothers and father who he hates (along with his sister who he loves) luffy tried to save his brother in spirit and failed where sanjis mentor lost a leg to protect him while luffys mentor shanks lost a arm saving him heck in the manga this was outright referenced when luffy told him

Also, it’s interesting that we don’t really know who put a stop to Judge’s conquest of the North Blue

after the incident where he took down four nations. Something must have happened to make Germa fall back and look for support from a Yonko to achieve their dream. Judge doesn’t look that different in the picture, so maybe that happened during the time skip. Watch Oda make Green Bull be involved in that incident, as the Admiral who was dispatched to prevent the Vinsmokes from attempting to conquest the whole North Blue once again.

So Zoro and Sanji, the two Monsters enforcing the will of Pirate King Monkey D. Luffy will end up fighting the newly recruited Admirals who were called Monsters in the same breath by Doflamingo back in Dressrosa

and all of the admirals powers are references to their color motif akainu (red = magma) aokiji (blue = ice/cold) kizaru yellow = light and in japan the color purple is associated with gravity fujitoras power so its quite likely that green bulls power is associated with the color green and since ice/cold, magma, light, and gravity are the things that make up the world I think that green bulls power is related to nature and he is able to survive without eating through photosynthesis (and normal plants are vulnerable to fire ) and green bull probably has pop greens in his arsenal considering how dangerous they are its fitting if a admiral with plant powers has them

cows/bulls are slaughtered and for their meat like people make beef and used for cooking Beef is the culinary name for meat from cattle. Beef can be harvested from bulls, heifers or steers. Its acceptability as a food source varies in different parts of the world. en . wikipedia . org/wiki/Beef and theres another exotic type of dish called bull testicles / people eat the testicles of the bulls and sanji is a chef and has a tendency to make comments about cooking in his fighting so when he faces ryokugyu he could make a comment saying he will turn green bull into beef or make references to preparing beef in reference to green bull

and 3rd akainu

akainu is also from north blue ( and would know about germa66 comics

he is heat based like sanji and proclaimed his superiority to the fire fruit so sanji beating him with fire hotter than his magma would be interesting plus

ifrit jambe is blue lava

or sanji vs aokiji aokiji has joined the blackbeard pirates and aokiji means blue pheasant and kidnapped pudding

sanji is associated with the color blue

while luffy and akainu both are associated with the color red

while sanji and aokiji both associated with the color blue

( if we were to try to make a theory based on a parallel what if aokiji causes puddings death

plus oda once compared sanji to a duck ( a bird)

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audreydoeskaren · 3 years

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Abridged history of early 20th century Chinese womenswear (part 1: 1890s & 1900s) *improved version

Source here

*I’m fixing and reposting the first two posts of this series because back then I had no idea how Tumblr formatting functioned and they deserve better. I’m keeping the shoddy original versions for archival purposes.

*After some thought I think it makes more sense to group the 1890s and 1900s together.

Other posts in the series:

Part 1: 1890s (original)

Part 2: 1900s & 1910s (original)

Part 3.1: 1920s-silhouette

Part 3.2: 1920s-design details

Part 3.3: 1920s-accessories, hair & makeup

Part 4.1: 1930s-silhouette & design

Part 4.2: 1930s-hair, makeup & accessories

Part 5: 1940s

Part 6.1: 1950s-Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan & friends

Part 6.2: 1950s-mainland China

Intro & context

In order to understand early 20th century Chinese fashion we have to go back a bit into the past to have some clue about the context. When the Manchus conquered China and established the Qing Dynasty in the mid 17th century, Han Chinese men adopted Manchu style clothing but Han Chinese womenswear remained independent and separate from Manchu womenswear. Han Chinese women retained the habit of wearing a two piece ensemble as the outermost layer, unlike Manchu women, who wore a single floor length robe. I will be only discussing Han Chinese women’s fashion in this series.

In the 19th century, Han Chinese women wore 袄裙 aoqun, a two piece ensemble consisting of a robe and a skirt. The robe had a very low 立领, standing collar. In the second half of the 19th century, the robe in aoqun had a very generous and roomy cut and huge sleeves, a look which reached its peak in the 1860s and 70s. The hem of the robe hit the knees, the length in vogue since the 1870s. The collar of the robe is very low, only providing enough space for one button, likewise in fashion since the 1870s. The robe is closed with 盘扣 pankou, which in this era were always plain with either a bead or fabric knot tip. The robe closes at the side, usually at the right side at the 大襟 dajin, the side closure, however examples of robes with closures on the left also existed. Robes with closures on both the right and left were also a thing, a style called 双襟 shuangjin, double closure. Shuangjin robes were derived from a men’s riding vest, the 巴图鲁坎肩 batulu vest (batulu is Manchu for “warrior”), that could be opened from both sides, and would experience a revival in the 1920s.

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1870s/80s photograph of a group of women in aoqun, the two skirts on the left are the elaborate mamian style, the one on the right is plain.

In aoqun, the skirt was usually of a style called 马面 mamian, made of two long horizontal pieces of pleated fabric with two flat sections each sewn to a waistband with one flat section overlapping, creating a wrap skirt that once worn around the wearer’s waist, appears to have two unpleated sections, one at the front and one at the back. This skirt was very decorative in the 19th century, full of embroidery, tassels and elaborate trim, sometimes giving the illusion of a separate apron being attached (I’ve seen this weird stereotype that traditional Chinese womenswear has a separate apron at the front this is complete bogus). The robes were likewise heavily decorated around the seams, ceremonial outfits like wedding gowns could be so full of embroidery that the original fabric is hardly to be seen.

The combination of robe and pants, 袄裤 aoku, was also a common way of dressing since approximately the 1800s or 1810s. This combination would become the norm in the 1890s.

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1870s/80s photograph of a woman in a ginormous ao, roomy pants and with bound feet.

Another noteworthy fad was bound feet. The middle of the 19th century was the pinnacle of foot binding and fashionable women had incredibly small feet, dubbed “lotus feet”. This was achieved by wrapping tight foot binding cloth around the feet since childhood and restricting the growth of the feet, I think also breaking a couple bones in the process. Women wore foot binding cloth and baggy stockings underneath their shoes, tied up with garters below the knees. Foot binding is said to severely restrict mobility and cause intense pain; I don’t doubt the pain part but I’m not sure about mobility since I’ve seen plenty of photographs of women with bound feet roaming about the streets.

Not every woman did foot binding though, it depended heavily on region, class and the individual family. For one, Manchu women all had natural feet. For Han women, an account from the 1850s said that in Beijing, every five or six out of ten women did not have bound feet, and that probability is three or four out of ten in the countryside. In the provinces along the southern coast, most women did not bind their feet (this probably has to do with the influence of indigenous cultures in the south, since foot binding was primarily a Han fashion), whereas in the northwest almost every woman had bound feet. By the way, I really don’t like how articles on foot binding describe it in the most sensational way possible, why is it so hard to approach history with peace of mind? And it pisses me off that all the articles containing 1890s photographs only talk about the foot binding as if there is nothing more of value in portraits of whole ass women.

Anyway, if you are interested in learning more about foot binding, check out Cinderella‘s Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding by Dorothy Ko, recommended by @thefeastandthefast . Or just anything written by Dorothy Ko tbh.

Silhouette

In the 1890s, the cut of the aoqun began to become more slender and form fitting, commonly believed to be a result of westernization. But I think it’s also because the wide sleeve look has also been in fashion for quite a while now (some 80 years or so) and people were getting tired of it. The robe inherited the knee length hem from the 1880s but was less baggy and took on a more straight cut silhouette. The collar remained quite low until the end of the decade. Pants were overwhelmingly more popular than skirts in the 1890s, I speculate this may be due to a rising interest in feminism and women wanting more mobility, but aoku was also very popular in the 1870s and 80s in general so it may have also just carried over. The pants were still ankle length and straight cut but less roomy than earlier 19th century models. Overall the 1890s just looks like a shrunken and simplified version of the 1880s.

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The aoku as of the 1890s.

By the second half of the 1900s, the collar began to rise, becoming medium height. This was kind of reminiscent of late 18th century Han women’s collars I mentioned in this post on Chinese standing collars. The robe and pants shrunk further, becoming quite tight fitting. The robe was still around knee length. The pants were especially tight and could be considered skinny. Foot binding became less common and many women had natural sized feet. However, since foot binding is something that begins in the childhood, the fact that many women without bound feet appeared in the 1900s meant that many parents started to reject food binding in the 1880s and 90s.

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Ca. 1907 photograph of a group of women, possibly students, in tight fitting aoku.

Design details

The 1890s saw the mass disappearing of wide, embroidered trims around the seams, popular throughout the 19th century. The use of multiple rows of binding/trim from the 1870s and 80s was continued, albeit in a much more minimalistic and geometric way. I’ve seen a lot of plain white ao finished with multiple rows of black binding of different widths, it’s mighty avant-garde and elegant. Because clothes of the era were still constructed in the older Chinese method, they had a seam down the middle of the sleeves used to extend the length of the sleeves; this seam could be bound and decorated but it was not compulsory. Actual embroidery on the robe and skirt/pants was rare, if not non-existent; completely plain fabric was the norm. The ao of this era commonly had a 厂字襟 (厂 shaped closure), where the front placket is held up by one or two buttons and then closed by more buttons down the side seam. This style of closure was first popularized for Han women’s clothing in the 1800s and 1810s, before that Han women’s clothing closures were a straight line from the collar to the armpit. The pankou used to close the ao of this period became a lot more elaborate and the main source of decoration; I have a whole ass post on them here. A general air of simplicity, comfort and proportionality dominated the fashion of this era. In the mid 18th century, Han women’s robes started having folded cuffs (possibly borrowed from Manchu court dress), called 挽袖 wanxiu, and these became fake and represented by a piece of trimming in the 1850s. By the 1890s this design feature largely disappeared, leaving the sleeve edges either plain or simply bound.

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Three women in aoku, late 1890s. I looooove the look on the far left, I will probably make it some day.

Going into the 1900s, the geometric trims became more simplified and austere, while the pankou became increasingly ornamental.

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Late 1900s photograph. The robe is trimmed with fur and thin, geometric binding, and closed by very ornamental pankou.

Hair & Makeup

There were no significant changes in hairstyling in the 1890s, fashionable women would wear existing 1880s hairstyles but style them with bangs. A common style I’ve seen in photographs was long hair pulled back into either one big bun at the back or two smaller ones at the sides. The short bangs were usually very neat, precisely cut and sat closely to the forehead. Elastics did not exist, so Chinese women used strings and hairpins to tie their hair together. Hairpins of this era were usually very thick and sturdy, a single one was enough to hold all your hair into a bun. It was popular to use flowers and/or pearls to form a ring of decorations around a bun.

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Common 1890s hairstyle, for most people the decorations weren’t so elaborate.

A popular headpiece was this thin headband adorned with pearls worn at the place where bangs should be, although that has been around since the 1870s as well.

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Ca. late 1890s. Some women wearing the pearl headband.

Around 1905 the bangs began to grow in length but still weren’t long enough to cover the eyebrows. They were longer at the sides and shorter in the middle, creating this volume and curve at the forehead.

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Photograph ca. 1905. Long bangs.

By the end of the decade these evolved into a being with a will of its own. Long hair tied into braids or low buns became fashionable instead of tight, high buns.

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Calendar painting from 1911.

Fashionable women in the 1890s wore little to no makeup, because of the influence of female university students who were usually without makeup. In the 1870s and 80s, thick makeup was more common and was a trend popularized by sex workers in Shanghai, thus becoming increasingly considered indecent in the 1890s. I find this quite problematic cause respectability politics suck and there’s nothing wrong with wearing fashion trends invented by sex workers. All the straight male writers of the 1890s and 1900s praising female students for being “pure” and ”hygienic” in contrast to the supposedly nasty sex workers make me cringe to my core, it’s just pitting women against each other and setting us up for “I’m not like other girls” in my opinion.

The common makeup look includes white power, lipstick and blush. The lipstick shape was usually a tad smaller to the actual lips and blush was applied in large areas toward the outside of the face.

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Standard 1890s and 1900s hair and makeup look. This drawing is probably from around 1902, it’s a bit more festive folk art than fashion plate so take the patterns with a dash of salt.

Undergarments

Unfortunately I don’t have many pictures for undergarments of the era but I can describe them to you. Since women commonly wore pants, they would usually wear another layer of pants (could be considered drawers) underneath that was of a similar construction but plain and easy to launder. Panties and such didn’t exist so drawers were the innermost layer, enough to protect women’s private parts. Likewise for the robe, another plainer, sturdier version would be worn underneath. In the mid 1900s, as the sleeves of the outer robe began to shorten, the undershirt became more form fitting at the wrists and could serve a decorative function.

Chinese women in the 19th century bound their breasts with long strips of fabric to achieve the flat look. I’m not exactly sure how this is done but basically you wrap fabric tightly around your chest until the boobies are concealed. A famous undergarment of the Qing Dynasty was the 肚兜 dudou, which was actually unisex. The female only version was called 抹胸 moxiong, 袜肚 wadu or 袜腹 wafu, the latter two are etymologically similar to earlier words for “corset” or “a pair of bodies”. However, unlike what many later 20th century artists would like you to believe, wearing only dudou on the upper body was not legit underwear for grown up women, as it was usually worn in conjunction with breast binders as an extra layer of warmth. It was also worn very tightly around the breasts and waist, not tied loosely like in paintings or period dramas nowadays.

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Dudou diagram.

Shoes

Women began campaigning against bound feet in this period and many drawings depicted women with natural feet. However, if a woman had her feet bound since childhood it’s difficult for them to return to their natural size, so some women who were born in previous decades would still have very small feet, even if they began to reject it at this time. Women’s shoes of Western construction weren’t yet so common so most women wore Chinese style shoes, which were commonly made of fabric and had a slightly upward pointing toe. Women with bound feet would use a long piece of ribbon/cloth to wrap their feet (to maintain the shape) and wear small fabric pumps with a white sole. These could be flat or have a teeny tiny bit of wedge heel, called 弓鞋 gong xie, bow shoes. Women without bound feet would wear normal sized pumps, likewise of fabric, with slightly upward pointing toes and a thick white sole. Embroidery on shoes was a huge thing in the 19th century and before but by the 1890s it started to disappear as well, and shoes in the 1890s were commonly plain. In the 1900s, Western leather shoes were increasingly popularized, but it wasn’t until the early 1910s that this popularity reached its height.

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Foot binding cloth.

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Shoes for bound feet.

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Woman with natural feet wearing Chinese style pumps. Western style knit stockings were becoming popularized in the 1880s for women with natural feet as well.

Some editing afterthoughts

I’ve been looking more into 18th and 19th century Chinese fashion lately and I realized I held some deep rooted misconceptions about the Qing Dynasty. For some reason I always considered the 1870s and 80s look with the elaborate, big robes conservative or backwards, which is really not fair. Chinese women’s fashion was revolutionized in the beginning of the 19th century, going from the flowy, slender robes of the 18th century to stiffer, more structured robes with flared sleeves. Styles also differed dramatically from decade to decade, it’s just not very well studied and there’s a stigma around Qing Dynasty fashion so people don’t get into it as much. Because Han women were allowed to continue wearing Han style clothing into the Qing Dynasty, a lot of 18th century reproduction ensembles nowadays get mistakenly labelled as Ming style hanfu, which really isn’t helping... I was definitely not alone in this though, the perception of Qing Dynasty Han women’s fashion most people nowadays have is: in the first couple years Han women were allowed to wear Ming style hanfu, but then bam the late 19th century look was forced upon everyone. This view is super not nuanced and false on almost every level, but it is extremely widespread and I don’t blame you at all if you also think like this, this was me just two months ago too... A wise woman (I mean Karolina Zebrowska) once said that everything in fashion history happens gradually, which is also extremely true for Chinese fashion history.

I’ve really started to question what modernity in fashion means because the elaborate 19th century Chinese look that white people back then considered the epitome of conservative Chinese clothing was actually new and exciting in the beginning of the 19th century. I can’t help but wonder if this view that Chinese clothing as of the 1870s and 80s was symbolic of Chinese culture’s “backwardness” and “stagnation” was a product of colonization and white imperialists’ efforts to demonize Chinese society and take things out of context. I would prefer to say that Chinese fashion westernized a lot during the 1890s and 1900s but not necessarily modernized because what is modernity. Fashions change and that is the most normal thing on the planet.

If you read what white historians or politicians wrote in the late 19th/early 20th century about Chinese fashion or culture (which I highly recommend you don’t, that shit is detrimental to your mental health), it becomes obvious that the majority of them have no clue what Chinese fashion looked like before the 19th century and how we got to what we had in the 19th century in the first place, so they just assumed that Chinese fashion always looked like that and that we haven’t progressed as a culture in hundreds of years lmao. Bullshit pseudo-Darwinism at its finest. Oh or if you look up 18th century European Orientalist paintings depicting imaginary Chinese characters, the clothes they wore and the hairstyles they had were so far off from what actual 18th century Chinese fashion looked like to the point they felt racist and were uncomfortable to look at. I stumbled across so many of them when looking for 18th century Chinese painting and every time I see one it almost gives me a stroke. So I think it’s really important to acknowledge that Han Chinese fashion of the 18th century is a valid field of study.

In my original 1890s post I said that the elaborate embroidery and trimmings started to appear on Han women’s fashion around this time because of Manchu influence, I take that back because I’ve realized it’s a whack claim. I’ll explain it more when I make some posts on the 19th century later.

Reworked part 2 is coming soon as well :)))

#1890s #1900s #19th century #historic fashion #qing dynasty #vintage fashion #vintage hair #vintage shoes #chinese fashion #chinese history #abridged history of early 20th century chinese womenswear #清汉女装 #edwardian fashion

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lwt28brave · 3 years

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LT2 masterpost

If it was up to me, we would get an autumn or winter EP. Since it’s not up to me at all, here, enjoy this post with everything we know so far of LT2, which is to say, not much at all. Everything here is hypothetical. I’ll be updating every time I see something relevant. A little disclaimer that while this is a masterpost (kinda), it could be read as discourse (duh, it’s also a theory), AND it’s also by me, and you shouldn’t expect me to be serious at this point.

Due to me restraining myself, there’s no reference to any of the times he’s mentioned his guitar skills and him improving but I hope you know I cried every single time.

I’m also linking my old pinned here. It was written before AFHF and around the free merch thing that didn’t lead to much, but I still think I made some good points.

Possible tracks:

Copy of a Copy of a Copy

Change

Faith in the future??

369??

Possible names:

369

Faith in the future

When is the album coming out?

Your guess is as good as mine

Friday 28th of January 2022. Almost two years after Walls. It’s a Friday. It’s a 28th. What else can I say?

Here you can find @want-to-be-loved timelines for every month.

Here you can find @berlinini’s timeline of what Louis has been up to this year (2021).

The rest is under the cut. And here you can find a PDF version where Tumblr can't tell me how many pictures I can add.

2020

He said back on May 2th 2020 he wasn’t writing anything new yet.

(x)(x)(x)

Interestingly enough, he’s said many times after that that the album’s not ready cause he has no new experiences to drawn from. I won’t call him out because he does it himself.

May 4th. He liked a tweet from DMA’s Johnny Took saying they had to go write together again. Louis has been credited as an influence for them and (kind of) participated in their previous record, so I’m assuming he meant for their music and not his, but you never know.

Nothing(literally nothing??? how did we survive) until 11th of July. We all know what happened that day. We all celebrated it. Nonetheless, that’s not what I’m talking about here.

(x) So, by the beginning of July 2020 he was working on concepts and ideas for the new album. That was fifteen months ago. I know perfection takes time but…

Brief summary of important things that happened from then until the next mention of new music:

Louis left Syco!!!! 10 days later he rescheduled the tour for the first time. He followed Matt Vines on Twitter, probably so we could publicly shame him into doing something. Also, the 10thanniversary. He followed more people I wish he hadn’t.

Then more nothing until September. Not even a single tweet. The first merch drop was on the 28th of August but he just RT’ed the tweet. He first mentioned Free my Meal on the 25th of September. Then on October 1st Walls hit #1 on a lot of countries and Louis was incredibly happy and excited about it ^^

And then, that same day, October 1st, 2020, he dropped this bomb:

(x)

He also said it was too soon to be sharing new lyrics with us (x)

And, obviously, this tweet which is actually what made me start this whole post. I would hope you know mate.

(x)

He also told us he was cooking "banger after banger" and that he was incorporating more social themes into his music (x)(x) (I believe any social issue is a political issue but that’s not the point rn).

COPY OF A COPY OF A COPY?!?!

These next paragraphs are brought to you by my mind not remembering things and me not having any links. I’m assuming COACOAC came from those writing sessions that supposedly happened in October. Or in LA but I have no idea if he actually was in LA at any point other than a Daily Mail article putting him there on December which would have been too late, but I do remember that someone said he was in the studio in LA last autumn???? A rumor. Maybe. IDK. Did I mention already all of this is very hypothetical?? Well, this is it. I can’t even remember if this was October or November or what. So, take this with a grain of salt.

I’m also… taking the liberty to assume, if you must, that Copy wasn’t meant to be a Walls reject because it sounds more mature and darker and it has a vastly different tone that Walls songs. I know he’s said that song probably isn’t getting into the album, but I want to have faith (in the future) that I’m getting a studio version. (But also, Louis, if you’re reading this, first of all GET OUT OF MY BLOG second of all, please don’t ever feel pressured again to add a song to the album because we have already heard it before. It’s your art and it should always be under your own terms).

So yeah, I believe that Copy is either one of those four songs (then imagine the other three??!!) or was written around the 1st of October date.

---End of the Intermission---

Then not much important (other than sharing more about Marcus Rashford fight against food poverty and the 2nd merch drop) until he announced the livestream on the 24th of November. (x)

It wasn’t until a few days before the livestream date we even thought again about new music (jk, I know we’re always thinking about new Louis’ music). So, December 9th/10th, 2020. Nine months ago. We got our first taste of new music!

He made sure we knew Copy of a Copy of a Copy isn't a cover! (x) (x)

(x)

Ok, so that’s it for 2020. (I feel like I’m missing something from September 17th because tweet was deleted but maybe he was still talking about cucumbers. We might never know. Unless I understand how Tumblr tags work). Expected, cause Walls was released in 2020. We needed to let it sit for a while.

2021

Another Summary: Louis third tweet of the year was telling the UK government off. So was the fifth. What a good beginning. On the 26th of January, he said he prefers pancakes over waffles. I hope he meant pancakes other than his own. More importantly, he tweeted the infamous “you lot read into things too much”. Don’t get me started, Tomlinson. Don’t. Then the 31st came around and Walls was one. He tweeted this. How wise. And Project Defenceless happened!!

15th of February!! Who cares about Valentine Day when the next day we got this? ♥

(x)

So…AN EP?? AN EP?? PLEASE RELEASE AN EP.

“I’m sure I will have something out this year but unlikely that will be the album”. Unlikely but not impossible. Also. A single would be good. This is the second time he mentions releasing something in 2021 and he sounds surer about it than the first time around.

He also said that he isn’t sure we will get a studio version of Copy. And that the best bridges from Walls to LT2 are Walls, OTB, KMM and Copy. Can’t wait!

Then we jump to March 6th when he announced he was going to create his own management company. “Sometimes action is needed first to encourage the motivation and belief”. As we can tell he was already manifesting some stuff which will lead us to the numerology stuff/Tesla… kidding. Or not. We might never know.

On the 22nd of March he answered some questions:

He told us music was still his main focus ♥ mwha. (x) I included this tweet to guilt-trip him into giving us music in case he’s reading this even after I told him to leave. ILY.

(x) I’d love to get a visual EP this autumn. Just saying. It sounds like a lovely concept.

(x)

…next (I will get into it, I promise. I’m just mad).

On the 25th he left for Mexico until April 10th. You could assume it was just for the documentary where we got ten seconds of footage or admit the obvious: LT2 its a Mexican baby!!

On the 26th (so, not so far apart from that first 369) we got the first Faith in the Future mention: (x)

Back then we were innocent people who had no idea what was coming upon us. We still have no idea because what the fuck does he mean with these. Please explain. I have one braincell and I don’t use it enough for this. I’m linking some theories.

On the 30th of March he confirmed he was already working on the documentary. So AFHF was already on the works. Will it take this long for us to get the Veeps numbers? We also got this tweet: "Got a decent chorus idea down" (x).

Same person that got the “something out this year” exclusive. If you know something share with the class. Also. Is this Change? I feel like this could be Change but I also assume he wrote Change after hanging out with his friends or being in Doncaster. But who knows.

(x) And the second mention to 369.

(x) 15th of April. The second "Faith in the future".

On the 19th of April he announced that he had something BIG for us later on the year which turned out to be the Away From Home Festival ♥♥ (x) I love him so much.

Then on the 28th he announced the 369 merch drop (which it’s probably the Walls drop? Except that the TOU and KMM ones were “drop 1 and drop 2” and this was drop 369 which, again, makes no sense) but we still don’t know what 369 means.

Into May’ 21 we go.

He rescheduled tour again. And dropped another bomb (x).

He announced he has signed with BMG as an independent artist by RTing this tweet on May 10th. The article also says that he’s already working on writing and recording LT2. The timing… we don’t know. What this deal involves… we don’t know either. Bear with me here because I have a lot to say about this.

I think the deal is only a distribution one, but that BMG are interested in Louis and what he (us) could bring to the table. They were either present at the festival or watching it, but officially they had no involvement at all with it (everything is credited either to Louis own company, 78 Productions, or Charlie Lightening’s company). That’s the case for both giveaways too; the vinyl one and the tickets for the festival.

I think it would be an unbelievably bad move not to test the waters with BMG now or soon-ish. At least a single, to see how it performs. Due to the circumstances, it’s obvious there’re certain limitations on place but I want to see how they push it, whether the radio play exist this time around and if the song is playlisted and promoted and all that… I would also love to know, since it says he signed with BMG UK, but it also states it’s a global deal, how things are going to go on the US and other countries.

Yes, yes. I know those are all questions and no answers. But I know the same as you, sadly. If any of you know more than you’re letting on… again, share with the class.

Where was I? Yes, on the 25th of May Louis had a great day writing (x). Since the first time he had mentioned he was officially writing to this date there’s almost eight months. And I believe he was writing before October’ 20.

He followed Robert Harvey that day and, on the 28th of May (why is it always the 28th???) he was spotted at the studio for the first time.

June was an interesting month for the fandom ♥. Lots of LHL content which I will love and cherish for the rest of times. On June 4th, June 9th, and June 10th he was spotted at the studio, but I believe he was there more days.

(x)

This was posted on June 6th and captioned Studio. Charlie also shared it with “Mega tunes being put down, can’t wait for this @louist91 #louistomlinson #LT2” as the caption. This gives me 2019 (Elton-Joint) vibes. I like it. Feels like we’re getting closer to something.

He added the Milano date on the 9th too which I’m mentioning because I’m going alone. Anyone wanna go with me please? I’m nice and I never eat anything before a concert so you can have my food. On other news. It didn’t come home.

During July he was at the studio at least three days too. Probably more. Feels like more with all the fan pictures we got. Or was that June? Anyway, July 1st and 9th we got some videos from Robert Harvey and wearesuperhi, which is who Louis has been working with the most, that we know of. I don’t know for sure they’re from that day. And on July 5th we got an article and lots of pictures of Louis looking really good outside the studio.

On the 12th of July the first fans started getting the free, 369 bucket hat and print. We still don’t know what the purpose was other than to thanks fans. Maybe that was it. I want answers and I still think it relates to a future project (see theories above), but it could also just be a bridge with the Walls breaking.

He didn’t tweet about anything interesting for a while, mostly because he lost his phone (he either throwed it in the air or smashed it who knows). Then on the 29th of July he announced the festival!

I’m glossing over it because there’s already been a lot of talk about it (rightfully) and while it was a wonderful thing, it doesn’t have much to do with LT2.

Let’s talk Change!

On August 3rd he tweeted this about the setlist.

(x)

And this (x) on the 28th! I can’t stand him.

We didn’t get it, obviously. Because who was going to get that. But we read too much into things. Alright.

On the 16thof August Dave Gibson shared this post tagged #LT2 with the eyes emojis 👀👀👀. I believe this has to do both with Change but also with whatever else came out of that Mexico trip.

(x) Last relevant tweet related to LT2 is this one.

So, on the 30th of August we got Change and we cried, and we know that Change is going in the new album. He said it. With those exact words. He also said he was “getting a feeling for it”. This has to meant he already has a general idea of the vibe of the new album and what’s going in it!!!!!! (Right? RIGHT?).

Anyway, let’s go back a few weeks because some other things happened on August. He was at the studio a few more times. Or it was suggested that he was there. On the 17th and the 18th. (Why was it so time-pressing to be at the studio instead of rehearsing for the festival? There was no studio at all on the documentary. Which makes sense, but again, then why?).

On the day of the festival we got another mention of Faith in The Future that made me feel part of a cult ngl. The words were flashing on the screen for less than a second. Okay.

And then he tweeted those words again after watching the livestream/documentary on the 4th of September (x). This is what makes me suspect it's either the name of the album or of the single.

On the same day, we got some interesting quotes about LT2 on the documentary.

“Soon I’ll have to think about me second album, which in my head I’ll get the tour out of the way and then I’ll address that. So, I hadn’t really given it much thought, to be honest”.

“When every day is the same is hard to feel creative and it’s hard to have any kind of proper inspiration”.

“As season started to come back, I started writing again and it was great and some of these songs turned out alright”.

And I think this is it. I might be overlooking some important details but that’s what we know and what we don’t know.

So. Conclusions. That’s what you missed on Glee. I do believe the album is, if not mostly done, partially there. And yes, this post is pointless and never-ending but it’s all in here if you need to tell Louis “Hey, you said this, mate”.

#LT2 #Louis Tomlinson #Faith in The future #369 #Louis #LT #new music #idk what this is #but it's long #pinned

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obviouslygenuinely · 3 years

Text

Free Resources For Writers & Creators

This is a quick post of free resources that may help fandom creators (or creators in general). I’m sure many of these have been shared before. However, it doesn’t hurt to spread the word. A few quick points:

As a professional writer, I think this post will cater mostly towards writers.

I’m also a freelance photographer, so digital photography/editing/art sources are included, too.

I chose not to use any affiliate links in my post. I don’t want to profit from this, and I’m not sure that’s allowed on Tumblr anyways.

If I’ve listed a resource I haven’t used myself, I’ve made sure to state it.

Masterlists and/or huge resource compilations are marked with asterisks.

Alright, here we go! I hope you all find this post helpful. Happy writing/creating!

Research

All of these are free resources for research. I use most of them for my writing jobs because they are extremely credible. These are great for making accurate references in your fics/creations.

1. ***Research Resources For Writers***

Writer’s Write has an enormous database of research resources for writers. They are divided into 20+ categories such as:

careers

historical research

crimes and forensics

religion

Each category contains 10+ resources like websites, articles, tips, databases, and so much more. It’s the most comprehensive and organized free research tool I use.

2. PubMed

My go-to source for citing medical studies. You’ll find 30 million citations related to numerous physical and mental health issues.

3. BioMed Central

I don’t use this website as often, but I keep it in my bookmarks. It’s similar to PubMed - great for discovering current and former medical research.

4. Drugs.com

If you need to name a medication and/or refer to medication side effects, Drugs.com is a straightforward resource. It’s easy to navigate and understand.

It also has a tool that lists potential medication interactions. This is really useful for accurate descriptions of med combinations.

5. Merck Manuals Consumer Version

Merck Manuals started out in 1899 as a medical reference guide for professionals. This consumer version is really comprehensive and updated regularly. It includes definitions, studies, and more.

6. FindLaw

If you’re writing about legal topics, FindLaw is useful for learning about laws/procedures in reader-friendly language. Categories include:

accidents/injuries

criminal law

family law (divorce, custody, etc.)

Keep in mind that laws vary based on location! You’ll often find additional links to state-related laws within articles. I do recommend double-checking state/location-based legal resources for accuracy.

7. APA Dictionary of Psychology

This psychology dictionary is provided by the American Psychological Association. It covers 90+ areas of psychology and 25,000+ terms/definitions.

You’ll also find links to additional psychology databases, resources, and so on. The website is updated frequently to provide updated information.

8. U.S. Bureau Of Labor Statistics

If you’re writing about a character’s job/career in the United States, this is a great source for accuracy. For any job sector, you’ll find details about

education requirements

positions in the sector

average salary for positions

what the positions entail

I imagine there are alternatives for other countries, too!

9. Investopedia Financial Term Dictionary

My area of expertise is personal finance; all of my writing published under my name is in this niche. I still refer to Investopedia’s dictionary for help. It’s excellent for understanding/explaining financial terms in a way that your reader can understand.

10. MedTerms Medical Dictionary

This is the medical version of Investopedia’s dictionary. I use this source less frequently, but I find that it’s accurate and helpful. There are many similar references online if you search for “medical glossaries” or “medical dictionaries”.

11. Domain Authority Checker

I’m not sure if this one is too helpful for fic writers, but it’s one of my most used tools. Domain authority “a search engine ranking score developed by Moz that predicts how likely a website is to rank on search engine result pages (SERPs)”.

The Wikipedia page for domain authority (DA) explains it clearly and simply. To sum it up, websites with good DA scores are considered reliable and accurate. If I cite sources in my work. I always link to sources with good DA scores.

Writing/Editing

This section is the most thorough one. All of these are completely free tools for writing and editing any type of content. I currently use or have used all of these at some point in my career.

1. ***List Of Free And Open-Source Software Packages***

This Wikipedia page applies to multiple categories in my post. It’s a masterpost of free and open-source software for anything and everything. Software is divided up into categories and sub-categories. Some relevant examples include:

media

networking/Internet

image editing

file management

There are hundreds of free software links on the page, so you’ll need to do a bit of browsing. Start with the categories above to find software geared towards writers/creators.

2. OpenOffice

This is a free alternative to Microsoft Office. I’ve used it for nine years and love it. OpenOffice software includes free applications for:

text documents

spreadsheets

presentations

drawing

templates

There are many more tools with OpenOffice that I haven’t used. If you write offline, I cannot recommend it enough. Tutorials are readily available online, and the software is pretty user-friendly.

3. Evernote

I briefly used Evernote and found that it’s very user-friendly and helpful. Most of my colleagues use Evernote and recommend it for taking notes/staying organized.

(I’m personally not a fan of note-taking software or apps. My method is messy text documents with bullet point lists.)

4. Google Drive

This might seem like an obvious one, but Google Drive/Docs is my writing haven. It has the tools included with Microsoft Office and OpenOffice and then some. It’s great for collaborative writing/sharing documents, too.

5. Grammarly

I use the Premium (paid) version of Grammarly, but I also used the free version for years. It’s helpful for detecting simple spelling, style, and grammatical errors.

There are numerous ways to use it - desktop, copy/paste documents, and so on. I’m not a huge fan of how well it works with Google Docs, but they’re improving it/it’s moved out of beta mode.

If you’re interested in the paid version - which I highly recommend - wait to buy until a holiday pops up. They offer a major discount on the software for almost every holiday/special occasion.

6. Plagiarism Detector

This website is handy for scanning for plagiarism. You can scan your own work to ensure uniqueness, too. My clients are big fans of this tool.

(I no longer use this resource; I use a paid tool called Copyscape Premium. The low cost has a big return on investment for me.)

7. TitleCase

The name says it all. It’s free and simple! I’ll be honest - I’m terrible with proper title case. You’d think after a decade of writing I’d nail it. However, I use this tool pretty often.

8. Hemingway Editor

Hemingway Editor is an online and desktop editor. It’s excellent for scanning your writing to check for:

readability (a grade-level score is listed)

adverb usage

passive voice usage

complex phrase usage

estimated reading time

This tool is color-coded to make editing easy. For example, adverbs are highlighted in blue. I don’t use this as often as I used to, but it was essential for my early writing career.

9. Polish My Writing

This tool is very straightforward. You paste your writing into the text box. Spelling errors, grammar suggestions, and style suggestions are highlighted in red, blue, and green.

It’s great for double-checking your work alongside Grammarly or Hemingway. When using free editors, I recommend using at least two for higher accuracy.

10. OneLook Reverse Dictionary And Thesaurus

I’m going to use the definition directly from the website:

“This tool lets you describe a concept and get back a list of words and phrases related to that concept. Your description can be anything at all: a single word, a few words, or even a whole sentence. Type in your description and hit Enter (or select a word that shows up in the autocomplete preview) to see the related words.”

To put it simply, you can use the reverse dictionary/thesaurus to find those words/thoughts that are on the tip of your tongue. Use the tool to:

find a word based on the word’s definition (i.e. search for “inability to feel pain”)

find synonyms and related concepts

generate a list of category-specific words (i.e. search for “cat breeds”)

answer basic questions (i.e. search for “what is the capital of France?”)

The results can be hit or miss, but I usually find the information I’m looking for. It’s a solid resource any writer regardless of genre.

11. Word Frequency Counter + Phrase Frequency Counter

I cannot emphasize how much I love these tools. Repetition is the bane of a writer’s existence; it’s simply inevitable at times.

These two tools count the number of times you use a single word or phrase in a text document. Just copy/paste your document, hit submit, and you’re all set!

For the phrase frequency counter, you can scan for two-word to ten-word phrases.

12. Thesaurus.com

This is another tool that might seem painfully obvious. Combined with the word frequency counter, it’s such an essential resource for me.

It’s especially useful if you’re writing about the same topic multiple times (i.e. love, getting drunk, sex, etc.). I always use this combo of tools to ensure uniqueness.

13. Lists Of Colors

Are you stumped when trying to come up with unique shades of blue? Is describing your character’s hair or skin color difficult? This Wikipedia page has you covered. It contains:

lists of colors (alphabetically)

lists of colors by shade

lists of Crayola crayon colors

lists of color palettes

I typically use this resource for product descriptions, but I also used it for creative writing many times. It’s a lifesaver for all things color-related.

Free Photos/Images

Tons of creators need free photos/images for numerous reasons. All of these sources provide 100% free photos, illustrations, etc. that have a Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license. This means there’s no copyright whatsoever on them.

You can edit the images however you’d like, too. All of the images in my post are from the first source listed below. I made them black and white and added text.

(A lot of these sites have donate buttons for contributors. Donating a dollar here and there goes a long way!)

1. Unsplash

Unsplash is my personal favorite for high-resolution photos. It’s easy to navigate and has over 2,000,000 free images. Downloading an image is a one-click process, and you don’t need to create an account.

2. Pixabay

Pixabay is my go-to site for illustrations and vector graphics (they have photos, too). There are 1.9 million free images to choose from. You don’t need an account to download images, but I recommend creating one. It’s free and with an account:

you don’t have to complete a CAPTCHA every time you download an image

you can access higher-quality/larger/etc. versions of images

I often use graphics from Pixabay to create overlays and masks for mixed media art pieces.

3. PxHere

I’ve never used PxHere, but one of my writing clients recommends it. It seems very similar to Pixabay, and the interface is user-friendly.

4. Pexels

In my limited experience, Pexels seems to focus on “artsy” stock images/content. I found great high-quality images the few times I’ve used it.

5. Burst by Shopify

I haven’t used Burst, but it’s another free image site that a writing client recommended to me. It seems a little limited compared to the other sites, but it never hurts to add it to your toolbox!

Digital Art/Photo Editing/Etc.

This section seems brief, but the tools listed are pretty comprehensive and diverse. They are geared towards many creative needs/projects like:

Creating manips of people/etc.

Adding text to images.

Creating collages.

Digital illustration.

Advanced photo editing.

There’s something for everyone. In my experience, finding your favorites among these will take some trial and error.

1. Pixlr X and Pixlr E (app available)

Pixlr X and Pixlr E are both versatile free editing tools. Pixlr X is ideal for less experienced creators. Pixlr E is comparable to Adobe PhotoShop.

I’ve used both software formats for personal and professional art projects.

The Pixlr app is handy for making collages, adding filters/overlays, adding text, and so on. I’ve used it for creating fanfiction collages and similar projects. It’s super easy to use.

2. Remove Background by Pixlr

This is one of the easiest/fastest tools I’ve found for removing backgrounds from images. It’s perfect for creators who make manips using photos of people.

It takes literal seconds to use. The tool automatically removes the background. If you spot any mistakes, you can refine the results with brush/erase tools. Then you download the cutout and you’re all set!

Unfortunately, this feature isn’t available on the Pixlr app. There are a lot of smartphone apps for removing photo backgrounds.

3. GIMP

If you need a full-fledged Photoshop alternative, GIMP is excellent software. It’s not an online tool like most I’ve suggested; you’ll need to download it to your computer.

There’s quite a learning curve for it, unless you’re familiar with Photoshop already. Fortunately, the free video/text GIMP tutorials online are endless. I no longer use/need GIMP, but it’s a personal favorite of mine.

4. Paint.NET

Admittedly, I haven’t used Paint.NET, but my art/photography colleagues commonly mention it. It’s comparable to Photoshop and GIMP. It’s a web-based tool, and a quick Google search returns several tutorials for it.

5. Photopea

This is more or less a Photoshop clone, but it’s free and web-based. If you watch Photoshop tutorials, you can usually follow the same steps in PhotoPea.

I’ve only used it a few times; I have Photoshop so I don’t need it. Still, it’s very impressive - especially for a free tool.

6. PicsArt (app available)

PicsArt is a photo editing website and app; the app is much easier to use in my opinion. It’s a “fun” editing tool for photo manips, collages, and fan art in general. A lot of users post their art in the app, and I’ve noticed tons of cool fandom edits.

Some of the features are Premium (AKA cost money), but I don’t think they’re worth the extra cost. PicsArt also has a digital drawing app. I haven’t personally used it but it may be worth checking out!

7. Adobe Photoshop Express (app available)

(I’ll preface this by saying I have an Adobe subscription, so I have access to the “locked” features. I’ve used the free versions, but my memory of it is a bit hazy.)

Photoshop Express is a free web-based tool and smartphone app. The app is very user-friendly and can be used for detailed editing, adding filters, adding text, and so on.

I’m less familiar with the browser version; I only use it for the cutout tool when I’m feeling lazy. It seems to be a good fit for quick edits - filters, cropping, and so on.

8. Make PNG Transparent by Online PNG Tools

This tool is awesome for removing solid colored backgrounds. I use it to create graphics for mixed media art pieces. Here’s how it works:

upload an image

type the color your want to remove (name or hex code)

type the percentage of similar color tones you want to match (for example, 25% will remove your chosen color plus similar warm/cool tones)

the removed color is replaced with transparent pixels

If you want to make a JPG transparent, start with the website’s JPG to PNG Converter. There are a ton of useful free tools offered, but I haven’t tried out most of the others.

Wrap Up

That’s all I’ve got for now! If I think of additional free tools, I’ll add them to this post. Feel free to reblog with your own recommendations or message me if you’d like me to add anything.

I hope my fellow creatives find these too

#writer resources #writing #writblr #fanfiction #fanfic #creative writing #writing reference #writing resources #writer reference #obviouslygenuinely #creators #artists on tumblr #fandom #fan art

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sabugabr · 3 years

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Why the Clone problem in Star Wars animated media is also a Mandalorian problem, and why we have to talk about it (PART 2)

Hi! I finally finished wrapping this up, so here’s part 2 of what has already become a mini article (you can find Part 1 here, if you like!)

And for this part, it won’t be as much as a critic as part 1 was, but instead I’d like to focus more on what I consider to be a wasted potential regarding the representation of the Clones in the Star Wars animated media, from the first season of The Clone Wars till now, and why I believe it to be an extension of the Mandalorian problem I discussed in part 1 — the good old colonialism.

Sources used, as always, will be linked at the end of this post!

PART 2: THE CLONES

Cody will never know peace

So I’d like to state that I won’t focus as much on the blatantly whitewashing aspect, for I believe it to be very clear by now. If you aren’t familiar with it, I highly recommend you search around tumblr and the internet, there are a lot of interesting articles and posts about it that explain things very didactically and in detail. The only thing you need to know to get this started is that even at the first seasons of Clone Wars (when the troopers still had this somewhat darker skin complexion and all) they were still a whitewashed version of Temuera Morrison (Jango’s actor). And from then, as we all know, they only got whiter and whiter till we get where we are now, in rage.

Look at this very ambiguously non-white but still westernized men fiercely guarding their pin-up space poster

Now look at this still westernized but slightly (sarcasm) whiter men who for some reason now have different tanning levels among them (See how Rex now has a lighter skin tone? WHEN THE HELL DID THAT HAPPEN KKKKKKK) Anyway you got the idea. So without further ado...

2.1 THE FANTASY METAPHOR

As I mentioned before in Part 1, one thing that has to be very clear if you want to follow my train of thought is that it’s impossible to consume something without attributing cultural meanings to it, or without making cultural associations. This things will naturally happen and it often can improve our connection to certain narratives, especially fantastic ones. Even if a story takes place in a fantastic/sci fi universe, with all fictional species and people and worlds and cultures, they never come from nowhere, and almost always they have some or a lot of basing in real people and cultures. And when done properly, this can help making these stories resonate in a very beautifull, meaningfull way. I actually believe this intrisic cultural associations are the things that make these stories work at all. As the brilliant american speculative/science fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin says in the introduction (added in 1976) of her novel The Left Hand of Darkness, and that I was not able to chopp much because it’s absolutely genious and i’ll be leaving the link to the full text right here,

“The purpose of a thought-experiment, as the term was used by Schrodinger and other physicists, is not to predict the future — indeed Schrodinger's most famous thought-experiment goes to show that the ‘future,’ on the quantum level, cannot be predicted — but to describe reality, the present world.

Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.”

[...] “Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it. But they go about it in a peculiar and devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places, and events which never did and never will exist or occur, and telling about these fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion, and then when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say, There! That's the truth!

They may use all kinds of facts to support their tissue of lies. They may describe the Marshalsea Prison, which was a real place, or the battle of Borodino, which really was fought, or the process of cloning, which really takes place in laboratories, or the deterioration of a personality, which is described in real textbooks of psychology; and so on. This weight of verifiable place-event-phenomenon-behavior makes the reader forget that he is reading a pure invention, a history that never took place anywhere but in that unlocalisable region, the author's mind. In fact, while we read a novel, we are insane —bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren't there, we hear their voices, we watch the battle of Borodino with them, we may even become Napoleon. Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.”

[...] “ In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we're done with it, we may find — if it's a good novel — that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street we never crossed before. But it's very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed.

The artist deals with what cannot be said in words.

The artist whose medium is fiction does this within words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words. Words can be used thus paradoxically because they have, along with a semiotic usage, a symbolic or metaphoric usage. [...] All fiction is metaphor. Science fiction is metaphor. What sets it apart from older forms of fiction seems to be its use of new metaphors, drawn from certain great dominants of our contemporary life — science, all the sciences, and technology, and the relativistic and the historical outlook, among them. Space travel is one of these metaphors; so is an alternative society, an alternative biology; the future is another. The future, in fiction, is a metaphor.

A metaphor for what?” [1]

A metaphor for what indeed. I won’t be going into what Star Wars as a whole is a metaphor for, because I am certain that it varies from person to person, and everyone can and has the total right to take whatever they want from this story, and understand it as they see fit. That’s why it’s called the modern myth. And therefore, all I’ll be saying here is playinly my take not only on what I understand the Clones to be, but what I believe they could have meant.

2.2 SO, BOBA IS A CLONE

I don’t want to get too repetitive, but I wanted to adress it because even though I by no means intend to put Boba and the Clones in the same bag, there is one aspect about them that I find very similar and interesting, that is the persue of individuality. While the Clones have this very intrinsically connected to their narratives, in Boba’s case this appears more in his concept design. As I mentioned in Part 1, one of the things the CW staff had in mind while designing the mandalorians is that they wanted to make Boba seem unique and distinguishable from them, and honestly even in the original trilogy he stands out a lot. He is unique and memorable and that’s one of the things that draws us to him.

And as we all know, both Boba and Jango and the Clones are played by Temuera Morrison — and occasionally by the wonderful Bodie Taylor and Daniel Logan. And Temuera Morrison comes from the Maori people. And differently from the mandalorian case, where we were talking about a whole planet, in this situation we’re talking about portraying one single person, so there’s nowhere to go around his appearance and phenotypes, right? I mean, you are literally representing an actual individual, so there’s no way you could alter their looks, right?

(hahahaha wrong)

And besides that, I think that is in situations like that (when we are talking about individuals) that the actor’s perspective could really have a place to shine (just the same as how Lea was mostly written by Carrie Fisher). In this very heart-warming interview for The New York Times (which you can read full signing up for their 5-free-articles-per-month policy), Temuera Morrison talks a little bit about how he incorporated his cultural background to Boba Fett in The Mandalorian:

“I come from the Maori nation of New Zealand, the Indigenous people — we’re the Down Under Polynesians — and I wanted to bring that kind of spirit and energy, which we call wairua. I’ve been trained in my cultural dance, which we call the haka. I’ve also been trained in some of our weapons, so that’s how I was able to manipulate some of the weapons in my fight scenes and work with the gaffi stick, which my character has.” [2]

The Gaffi stick (or Gaderffii), btw, is the weapon used by the Tusken Raiders on Tatooine, and according to oceanic art expert Bruno Claessens it’s design was inspired by wooden Fijian war clubs called totokia. [3]

And I think is very clear how this background can influence one’s performance and approach to a character, and majorly how much more alive this character will feel like. Beyond that, having an actor from your culture to play and add elements to a character will higly improve your sense of connection with them (besides all the impact of seeying yourself on screen, and seeying yourself portrayed with respect). It would only make sense if the cultural elements that the actor brought when giving life to a fictional individual would’ve been kept and even deepened while expanding this role. And if you’re familiar with Star Wars Legends you’ll probably rememeber that in Legends Jango would train and raise all Clone troopers in the Mandalorian culture, so that the Clones would sing traditional war chants before battles, be fluent in Mando’a (Mandalore’s language) and some would proudly take mandalorian names for themselves. So why didn’t Filoni Inc. take that into account when they went to delve into the clones in The Clone Wars?

2.3 THE WHITE MINORITY

First of all I’d like to state that all this is 100% me conjecturing, and by no means at all I’m saying that this is what really happened. But while I was re-watching CW before The Bad Batch premiere, something came to my mind regarding the whitewashing of the Clones, and I’d like to leave that on the table.

So, you know this kind of recent movies and series that depicted like, fairies in this fictional world where fairies were very opressed, but there would be a lot of fairies played by white actors? Just like Bright and Carnival Row. If you’ve watched some of these and have some racial conscience, you’ll probably know where I’m going here. And the issue with it is that often this medias will portray real situations of racism and opression and prejudice, but all applied to white people. Like in Carnival Row, when going to work as a maid in a rich human house, our girl Cara Delevingne had to fight not to have her braids (which held a lot of significance in her culture) cut by her intolerant human mistress, because the braids were not “appropriate”. Got it? hahahaha what a joy

Look at her ethnic braids!!!

One of the reasons this happens might be to relieve a white audience of the burden of watching these stories and feeling what I like to call “white guilt”. Because, as we all know, white people were never very oppressed. Historically speaking, white people have always been in privileged social positions, and in an exploitative relationship between two ethnic groups, white people very usually would be the exploiters — the opressors. So while watching situations (that every minority would know to be very real) of opression in fiction, if these situations were lived by a white actor, there would be no real-life associations, because we have no historical parameter to associate this situation with anything in real life — if you are white. Thus, there is less chance that, when consuming one of these narratives, whoever is watching will question the "truthfulness" of these situations (because it's not "real racism", see, "they're just fairies"). It's easier for a person to watch without having to step out of their comfort zone, or confront the reality of real people who actually go through things like that. There's even a chance that this might diminish empathy for these people.

Once again, not saying this is specifically the case of the Clones, majorly because one of the main feelings you have when watching CW is exactly empathy for the troopers (at least for me, honestly, the galaxy could explode, I just wanted those poor men to be happy for God’s sake). But I’ll talk more about it later.

The thing is, the whole thing with the Clones, if you think about it, it’s not pretty. If you step on little tiny bit outside the bubble of “fictional fantasy”, the concept is very outrageous. They are kept in conditions analogous to slavery, to say the least. To say the more, they were literally made in an on-demand lab to serve a purpose they are personally not a part of, for which they will neither receive any reward nor share any part of the gains. On the contrary, as we saw in The Bad Batch, as soon as the war was over and the clones were no longer useful as cannonballs, they were discarded. In the (wonderful) episode 6 of the third season of (the almost flawless) Rebels, “The Last Battle”, we're even personally introduced to the analogy that there really wasn't much difference in value between clones and droids, something that was pretty clear in Clone Wars but hadn't been said explicitly yet.

In fact, technically the Separatists can be considered to be more human than the Republic. But that's just my opinion.

So, you had this whole army of pretty much slaves. I know this is a heavy term, but these were people who were originally stripped of any sense of humanity or individuality, made literally to go to war and die in it, doing so purely in exchange for food and lodging, under the false pretense that they belonged to a glorious purpose (yes, Loki me taught that term, that was the only thing I absorbed from this series). Doing all this under extremely precarious conditions from which they had no chance of getting out, actually, getting out was tantamount to the death penalty. They were slaves. In milder terms, an oppressed minority. And again, I don't know if that was the case, but I can understand why Filoni Inc would be apprehensive about representing phenotically indigenous people in this situation. Especially since we in theory should see Anakin and Obi-Wan as the good guys.

(and here I’d like to leave a little disclaimer that I believe the whole Anakin-was-a-slave-once plot was HUGELY misused (and honestly just badly done) both in the prequels and in the animeted series — maybe for the best, since he was, you know, white and all that, and I don’t know how the writers would have handled it, but ANYWAY — I believe this could have been further explored, particularly regarding his relationship with the Clones, and how it could have influenced his revolt against the Jedi, and manipulated to add to his anger and all that. I mean, we already HAD the fact that Anakin shared a deeper conection with his troopers than usual)

Yes, Rex, you have common trauma experiences to share. But anyway, backing to my track

As I was saying, we are to see them as good guys, and maybe that could’ve been tricky if we saw them hooping up on slavery practices. Like, idk, a “nice” sugar plantation owner? (I don’t know the correct word for it in english, but in portuguese they were called senhores de engenho) Like this guy from 12 Years a Slave?

You know, the slave owner who was “nice”. IDK, anyway

No one will ever watch Clone Wars and make this association (I believe not, at least), of course not. But if we were to see how CW deepened the clone arcs, and see them as phenotypically indigenous, subjected to certain situations that occur in CW (yes, like Umbara), maybe some kind of association would’ve been easier to make.

I mean, come onnnn I can’t be the only one seeing it

You see, maybe not the whole 12 Years a Slave association one, but I don’t think it’s hard to see there was something there. And maybe this could’ve been even more evident if they looked non-white. Because historically, both black peoples and indigenous peoples went through processes of slavery, from which we as a society are still impacted today. And to slave a people, the first thing you have to do is strip them from their humanity. So it might be easier to see this situation and apply it to real life. And maybe that could lead to a whole lot of other questions regarding the Clones, the Republic, the Jedi, and even how chill Obi-Wan was about all this. We might come out of it, as lady Ursula Le Guin stated in the fragment above, a bit different from what we were before we watch it.

Maybe even unconsciously, Filoni Inc thought we would be more confortable watching if they just looked white (and because of colonialism and all that, but I’m adding thoughts here).

And of course I don’t like the idea of, idk, looking at Obi-Wan and thinking about Benedict Cumberbatch in 12 Years a Slave or something like that. Of course that, if the Clones were to play the same role as they did in the prequels, to obediently serve the Jedi and quietly die for them, that would have been bad, and hurtfull, and pejorative if added to all that I said here. But the thing is that Clone Wars, consciously or not, already solved that. At least to my point of view, they already managed to approach this situation in an incredible competent way, that is giving them agency.

2.4 AGENCY AND INDIVIDUALITY

So, one of the things I love most in Clone Wars is how it really feels like it’s about the Clones. Like, we have the bigger scene of Palpatine taking over, Ahsoka’s growth arc, Anakin’s turn to The Dark Side, the dawn of the Jedi and rise of the Empire and all that, but it also has this idk, vibe, of there’s actually something going on that no one in scene is talking about? And this something is the Clones. We have these episodes spread throughout the seasons, even out of chronological order, which when watched together tell a parallel story to the war, to everything I mentioned. Which is a story about individuals. Clone Wars manages to, in a (at least to me) very touching way, make the Clones be the heros.

Can you really look me in the eye and say that Five’s story didn’t CRASH you like a full-speed train???? He may not have the same amount of screen-time as the protagonists, but his story is just as important as theirs (and to me, it might be the most meaningful one). Because he is the first to break free from the opression cicle all the Clones were trapped into.

His story can be divided into 6 phases.

1 - First, the construction of his individuality, in other words, the reclaiming of his humanity.

2 - Then the assimilation of understanding yourself as an individual of value, and then extending this to all his brothers, not as a unit, but as a set of individuals collectively having this same newly discovered value.

3 - This makes him realize that in the situation they find themselves in, they are not being recognized as such. This makes him question the reality of their situation.

4 - Freed from the illusion of his state, he seeks the truth about it.

5 - This then leads him to seek liberation not just for himself, but for all the Clones (it's basically Plato's Cave, and I'm not exaggerating here).

6 - And finally, precisely because he has assimilated his individuality and sought freedom for himself and his brothers, he is punished for it.

His story is all about agency. Agency, according to the Wikipedia page that is the first to appear if you type “agency” on Google, is that agency is “the abstract principle that autonomous beings, agents, are capable of acting by themselves” [4], and this abstract principle can be dissected in 7 segments:

Law - a person acting on behalf of another person

Religious - "the privilege of choice... introduced by God"

Moral - capacity for making moral judgments

Philosophical - the capacity of an autonomous agent to act, relating to action theory in philosophy

Psychological - the ability to recognize or attribute agency in humans and non-human animals

Sociological - the ability of social actors to make independent choices, relating to action theory in sociology

Structural - ability of an individual to organize future situations and resource distribution

All of them apply here. And this is just the story of one Clone. We know there are many others throughout the series.

Agency is what can make the world of a difference when you are telling a story about an opressed minority. Because opressed minorities do exist, and opression exists, and if you are insecure about consuming a fictional media about opressed minorities, see if they have agency might be a good place to start. So that’s why I think that everything I said before in 2.3 falls short. Because the solution already existed, and was indeed done. Honestly, making the non-agency representation of the Clones (the one we see in the prequels) to be the one played by Temuera Morrison, and then giving them agency in the version where they appear to be white, just leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.

And honestly, if they were to make the Clones look like Temuera Morrison, and by that mean, take more inspiration in the Māori culture, maybe they wouldn’t even have to change much of their representation besides their facial features. As I said in part 1, I am not by any means an expert in polynesian cultures, but there was something that really got me while I was researching about it. And is the facial tattoos. More precisely, the tā moko.

2.5 TĀ MOKO

Once again I’ll be using the Te Ara: The Encyclopedia of New Zealand as source, and you can find the articles used linked at the end of this post.

Etymologically speaking,

“The term moko traditionally applied to male facial tattooing, while kauae referred to moko on the chins of women. There were other specific terms for tattooing on other parts of the body. Eventually ‘moko’ came to be used for Māori tattooing in general.” [5]

So moko is the correct name for the characteristic tattoos we often see when we look for Māori culture.

These ones ^. Please also look this book up, it’s beautiful. It’s written by Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, a New Zealand academic specialising in Māori cultural issues and a lesbian activist. She’s wonderful.

According to the Tourism NewZealand website,

“In Māori culture, it [moko] reflects the individual's whakapapa (ancestry) and personal history. In earlier times it was an important signifier of social rank, knowledge, skill and eligibility to marry.”

“Traditionally men received moko on their faces, buttocks and thighs. Māori face tattoos are the ultimate expression of Māori identity. Māori believe the head is the most sacred part of the body, so facial tattoos have special significance.”

[...] “The main lines in a Māori tattoo are called manawa, which is the Māori word for heart.” [6]

Therefore, in the Māori culture, there’s this incredibly deep meaning attributed to the (specific of their culture) tattooing of the face. The act of tattooing the body, any part of the body, is incredibly powerful in many cultures around the globe. The adornment of the body can have different meanings for these different cultures, but all of which I've come into contact with do mean a lot. It’s one of the oldest and most beautiful human expressions of individuality and identity.

And in the Star Wars universe, the Clones are the group that has the deeper connection to, and the best narrative regarding, tattoos. In fact, besides Hera’s father, Cham Syndulla, the Clones are the only individuals to have tattooed skin, at least that I can recall of. And they do share a deep connection to it.

For the Clones, the tattoos (added to hairstyles) are the most meaningful way in which they can express themselves. Is what makes them distinguishable from each other to other people. Tattoos are one of the things that represent them as individuals.

And I’m not BY ANY MEANS sayin that the Clones facial tattoos = Moko. That’s not my point. But that’s one of the things I meant when I said earlier about the wasted potential of the representation of the Clones (in my point of view). Because maybe if it were their intention to base the culture of the clones after the polynesian culture, maybe if it were their intention to make the Clones actually look like Temuera Morrison, this could have meant a whole deal. More than it’d appear looking to it from outside this culture. Maybe if there were actual polynesian people in the team that designed the Clones and wrote them (or at least indigenous people, something), who knows what we could’ve had.

Even in Hunter’s design, I noticed that if you take for example this frame of Temuera from the movie River Queen (2005), where we can have a closer look at the design of his tā moko

Speaking purely plastically (because I don’t want to get into the movie itself, just using it as example because then I can use Temuera himself as a comparison), see the lines around the contours of his mouth? Now look at Hunter’s.

I find it interesting that they choose to design this lines coming from around his nose like that. But at this point I am stretching A LOT into plastic and semiotics, so this comparison is just a little thing that got my attention. I know that his tattoo is a skull and etc etc, I’m just poiting this out. And it even makes me a little frustrated, because they could have taken so many interesting paths in the Bad Batch designs. But instead they choose to pay homage to Rambo. And I mean, I like Rambo, I think he’s cool and all that.

Look at him doing Filipino martial arts

But then, as we say in Brasil, they had the knife and the cheese in their hands (all they had to do was cut the cheese, but they didn’t). Istead, it seems like in order to make Hunter look like Rambo, they made him even whiter???

2.6 SO...

Look, I love The Clone Wars. I’m crazy about it. I love the Clones, I love their stories and plots. They are great characters and one of the greatest addings ever made in the Star Wars universe. They even have, in my opinion, the best soundtrack piece to feature in a Star Wars media since John Williams’ wonderful score. It just feels to me as if their narrative core is full of bagage, and meanings, and associations that were just wiped under the carpet when they suddenly became white. It just feels to me as if, once again, they were trying to erase the person behing the trooper mask, and the people they were to represent, and the history they should evoke.

I don’t know why they were whitewashed. Maybe it was just the old due racism and colonialism. Maybe it was meant for us to not question the Jedi, or our good guys, or the real morality of this fictional universe where we were immersed. But then, was it meant for what?

The Clones were a metaphor for what?

(spoiler: the answer still contains colonialism)

Thank you so much for reading !!!! (and congratulations for getting this far, you are a true hero)

SOURCES USED IN THIS:

[1] Ursulla K. Le Guin, 'The Left Hand of Darkness', 14th ACE print run of June, 1977

[2] Dave Itzkoff, 'Being Boba Fett: Temuera Morrison Discusses ‘The Mandalorian’', The New York Times, published Dec. 7, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/07/arts/television/the-mandalorian-boba-fett-temuera-morrison.html (accessed 15 September 2021)

[3] Bruno Claessens, 'George Lucas' "Star Wars" and Oceanic art' , Archived from the original on December 5, 2020, https://web.archive.org/web/20201205114353/http://brunoclaessens.com/2015/07/george-lucas-star-wars-and-oceanic-art/#.YEiJ-p37RhF (accessed 15 September 2021)

[4] Wikipedia contributors, "Agency," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Agency&oldid=1037924611 (accessed September 17, 2021)

[5] Rawinia Higgins, 'Tā moko – Māori tattooing - Origins of tā moko', Te Ara - the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, http://www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/ta-moko-maori-tattooing/page-1 (accessed 17 September 2021)

[6] Tourism New Zealand, ‘The meaning of tā moko, traditional Māori tattoos’, The Tourism New Zealand website, https://www.newzealand.com/us/feature/ta-moko-maori-tattoo/ (accessed 17 September 2021)

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hacked-by-jake · 3 years

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Hey Ho! :D

You will always find this post in my blog description.🥰

(Well, since there’s not really much information about me, here’s a post of things you’ve been interested in and some facts about me.)

(Thanks to the Anon for the motivation to do this here! <3)

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So, Hi! You can call me HBJ! I don’t want to mention my real name and age here. 😁

I started publishing my fanfictions here on Tumblr a little over a year ago and haven’t left since. xD

My mother tongue is not English, I am from Germany. So if you find some mistakes, please excuse it, I’m doing my best and still learning. <3

I honestly have no idea what to write here so, have fun, if anyone reads through this here. 😂 At least that’s a little bit of me. :D

>The Ask Box is always open. So feel free to ask a question if you are interested (but I want to warn you, I am not answering everything, but I will let you know in this case) < <3

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Let's start! ❤️🌹🎭

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First of all 10 Random Facts about me. This was asked by an anon. Here is the original post.

I’m a giant nerd, there’s no place in my room that’s not full of merchandise.

I prefer to read stories that are self-published, for example here on Tumblr or on other sites, rather than real books.

I have a problem with jackets, I have tons of them.

I usually dye my hair according to the colors of characters I like.It all started with green/purple - because of the Joker. And the last color I have at the moment is all green because of Joker / Loki from Marvel (Oups)

Almost all tattoos I have are about fictional characters (also Oups)

No one, really nobody knows what books/stories I read because that’s something very private to me.

I listen to music 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Also, it’s hard for me / I don’t like to talk about the music I listen to because this is very intimate for me for some reason.

When I watch a series, it’s at least 2 times behind each other, sometimes more often. But never just once.

Films that I watch for the first time and that excite me, I watch every second that I have time. When the movie is over, I start again unless there are several parts. But then I always watch my favorite one 500 times.

-----

Random questions from you.

(Asked by @procrastinatingrobin) -One place that you'd like to travel at least once in your life?

---- One of my biggest wishes is (what a cliché xD) New York. For example the “Joker Stairs”, which is one of my biggest dreams. *-*

I would love to travel to a lot of locations from my favorite movies/series.🤭

America in general is a dream for me (a German potato 😂😅).

But there are so many beautiful places to which I want to go. For example, I would love to travel to Tenerife. I know someone who lives there and every time I see pictures I get very jealous. xD

Unfortunately, I’m incredibly afraid of flying, so if that doesn’t improve, I’ll never get anywhere near these places.😫😂😂

---

(Asked by Anon) How many tattoos do you have?😄

I love tattoo questions. 😂🤭At the moment I have eleven tattoos🥰

---

(Asked by Anon) -What's your favorite animal?

Hmmm I don’t really know, I think they are dogs because I have a dog now. *-* But to be honest, turtles are so cool.🤔 My brother has a turtle named: Schiggy (based on Pokémon)🤭

---

(Asked by Anon) -The stupidest thing that ever happened to you?

Ohhh hahaha there I have something good!😅Story Time with Hbj xD

Okay: As some might know, I’m a big fan of The Joker by DC.🃏Well, in 2019, the Joker movie with Joaquin Phoenix came to the cinemas and I was at the cinema premiere with my best friend. And the movie was absolutely amazing. I really wanted to watch the movie again..Aaaaand I was lucky because my best friend’s boyfriend also wanted to see the movie in the cinema so I went back to the cinema 5 days later to watch the movie again. I was so excited and so extremely happy that I trembled and could not stand still. xD And for these two reasons, I accidentally dropped my not really old phone. It just fell straight down on the stones in front of the cinema and the display was completely broken..Well, what can I say? I needed a new one.. 😂😅But the movie was still fantastic!😍🤭This is actually one of the stupidest things that ever happened to me. xD

---

(Asked by @kyras-things) What are the little things that make your day happiest?

Oh that’s a really nice question! *-*Well, I have really little things that can make me happy. :)-It is enough for me when I wake up tomorrow and see my merchandise shelf😅 (This is right in front of my bed)This is for most something really small but for me really great and makes me happy. <3Other things are music, stroking my dog, messages on my phone, my hair color, my tattoos, when the sun is shining in the morning, coffee, riding longboard and of course (yes this is my absolute serious and not only so therefore said) tumblr and thus at the same time Duskwood. 💕I think these are the most important things. 🤭All I need is to see something that matters to me.😅🥰

---

(Asked by @leetjep) Seriously....Do you ever sleep?

Very rarely😂 Last time I slept was in fall.😂

---

(Asked by Anon) Ios or android?

Only related to the phone: Android.Yes, I stand by it!😂

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(Asked by @booklover-01040) Hello!I was wondering have you got any paranormal or creepy experiences? If no, then a nightmare that you will never forget.

Hey Ho! In fact, I haven’t experienced any paranormal things. Which is probably also because I don’t believe in that and I’ve found a rational cause for everything so far. (Important: I don’t believe in it, but I don’t say it doesn’t exist, I don’t want anyone to feel attacked)

And a nightmare I’ll never forget? In fact, I can’t think of any one. There’s a dream I’ve have since I was a kid: It’s about two little wolves trying to eat me. xD And I can even tell where that came from.

The movie to blame for this is: Twilight xD

Yep… When I first watched this movie, I was way too young, and as a child I was always very anxious. Just such things and horror movies in general were terrible for me (today it is actually no longer so) (Even the dream is no longer bad today and yet it has a bitter aftertaste of childhood.)

In any case, I was much too young and that did not let me go back then. xD But a really unsettling dream I had was: Well.. Do you know the Pink Panther? 😂

I once dreamed that the Panther “chased” me through an endless long corridor. It was an endless corridor in pink with countless doors. He sang the theme song and threw clocks at me…😅 And that went on all night until I woke up.

(This, by the way, had a trigger too. A German song (the rapper only took the melody of the title music and wrote his own lyrics. The text isn’t really cool though and that’s the reason)

----

(Asked by @dreamer-writer-fangirl) What color is your hair?

Well, at the moment my hair is green🤭

Check HERE and HERE for pictures.

----

(Asked by Anon) Is your brother younger or older than you?🤗

My brother is older than me.🥰

----

(Asked by Anon) Do you have a nickname?

Yes, actually I have one. I can even say it because it has nothing to do with my real name. :D But please don’t laugh at me. 😂Well, I have the loving nickname: Little Onion. yep…My mom gave me that name for some reasons. 😂

----

(Asked by Anon) some information about your dancing?😄 you mentioned it a few days ago💃

Yeah, well, I danced for 13 years, in different groups, also several groups at the same time. :D It was the hip hop/breakdance direction. But at some point I stopped because I didn’t enjoy it in the groups anymore and time was getting tighter. :/ Unfortunately, there was and is no real other groups here, which is why I stopped completely and now only dance for myself and just for fun.🤭

(Asked by Anon) What's your favourite food ?

Uhhhm, I think everything with pasta is my favorite food.😂 I can eat noodles all day. 🤭🍝🍜Well, and of course, Pizza!🍕Pizza is adorable. 😂

----

(Asked by Anon) What type of video games do you like to play?

I don’t really have a favorite type / genre, I don’t play video games that often. I’m actually playing what looks exciting to me without any particular genre or type. 😁🤭

But if I do, I guess I’m the most Nintendo type. So most of the games I play are related to Nintendo. <3

(Asked by @mirajane01040-duskwoodmemes) Do you play... Minecraft?

I used to play a lot of Minecraft, but nowadays not so much, and if so, then only the mobile version. This is fun for in between and dispels the boredom. I even started building Duskwood several times, but never finished it. xD Well, yes, sometimes I play Minecraft.

Answer a few days later: Yes, I do!

---

(Asked by Anon) If you could be a fictional character, who would it be and why?

Oh, there are a few. xDBut the three main characters for me: Evey Hammond because of V for Vendetta. Harley Quinn because of The Joker. And, of course, my MC because of Jake. 🤭I know, very superficial reasons but I hope they are enough for you, because these are the main reasons xD 😅🤭

---

(Asked by Anon) Hey hbj i'm curiousFamily or a career? 😋

I choose the career.🤭 After that, there is still enough time, and who says that not both work?😉

---

(Asked by Anon) do you like alcohol?🍷

No, absolutely no. Not a little bit.

---

(Asked by Anon) What is your favorite drink?

If I don’t drink coffee, I only drink sparkling water, my entire life. I very rarely drink something different. Water for life! 🧊

---------------------

Either/or questions from you.

(Asked by @duskwood-legacies) -What would you rather see, Northern Lights or sky lanterns?

That’s easy for me🤭 Northern Lights! If you ask me.. that is magical! *-* (Well, unless it’s like “Tangled” and I get a Flynn Rider.. then sky lanterns xD)

---

(Asked by @duskwood-legacies) -Strawberries or raspberries?

Definitely: Strawberries🍓 *-*

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(Asked by@duskwood-legacies) Do you prefer angst or fluff?

I think it depends on the general mood I’m in.🤔 I think the best is angst with happy ending.😁

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(Asked by@duskwood-legacies) Milk or cereal first?

Obviously: Cereal first! 😂🥣

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(Asked by @justubi) Would you rather have a nosy neighbor pr noisy neighbor?

Unfortunately, I have both. xD But if I could choose, I would opt for the noisy neighbor as I wear headphones all day anyway.😂

---

(Asked by @justubi) Would you rather be poor but love your job or rich but absolutely hate your job?

One hundred percent and without having to think about: poor and love my job!I could never have a job I don’t like. This is a real horror imagination for me😂

---

(Asked by @kyras-things ) Prefer to write fanfics or read them?

Oh that’s a really hard question for me! 🤔 I can’t really make up my mind, but I think I’d rather read than write myself. With stories of others I can better dive into another world and relax. 🤭Because when I write, five hundred other thoughts always fly around in my head and I have to decide how to write something etc.I love writing but sometimes I wish I only had to think about a story and it would be written on a sheet right away. xD <3

---

(Asked by @leetjep) Would you rather have one eye in the middle of your head or two noses?

I take the eye in the middle of my head. 😂Then I would make the Jake eye as a tattoo around it, which would be really cool.🤭

---

(Continues on new asks)

#It's me :)#personal #hbj talks #about me #have fun lol

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nightwingmyboi · 4 years

Note

Hey so I was wondering about Dick's Romanian heritage. Is it mentioned a lot in comics or media? Is he dark skinned in any adaptations? Is it true he originally went to Juvie after his parents died? Where would I go to find this stuff out? Thanks!

Sure! So, Dick’s heritage is a pretty complex topic. I think it’s best to leave the explanation to [this post]. Since I know not everyone will click the link, just to briefly clarify something: Dick is Romani, not Romanian. Being Romanian means being from the country of Romania. Romani people are scattered across the world. Also, Dick is typically depicted with light skin in canon...him being Romani would not conflict with this, because the Romani people have a large range of skin tones. Not at all opposed to him being depicted with darker skin, but just so that you know. Very, very strongly recommend checking out the post for the whole story (edit: and checking the reblogs for the counterpoint to said post!!)

Robin (1993) Annual #4

As for your other question...in one version of Dick’s origin story, following his parents’ deaths, Dick was sent to Gotham’s Youth Center. This center was essentially a juvenile detention center; most of the kids were sent there for committing what are described in comic as “adult crimes.” It was a very rough environment for Dick, especially in the aftermath of his parents’ deaths.

Dick going to the center after his parents died is technically a retcon of his origin (ie it was something added later). I know for some reason certain people hear the word retcon and immediately are like “then it doesn’t count!!!” but I think that is very much the wrong approach. True enough, some retcons are bad--that is, those that completely ignore previously established characterizations or plot points, and in doing so often radically change the story for the worse. It’s fine if people want to ignore those bad retcons, I do so myself. But, that’s not true for every retcon lmao. I’d say the juvie origin retcon is a great example of a good retcon. It really helps to clarify and enhance the original story, and I don’t think it should be dismissed. Hear me out here:

1.) The juvie origin doesn’t replace any previous origin story--it really only adds to and improves upon the timeline of Dick’s original origin.

For the most part, in previous tellings of the story, Dick’s origin went pretty much straight from his parents dying to him and Bruce in Wayne Manor. It’s a pretty sudden, jarring jump; the in-between was largely left to the reader’s imaginations or implied to not exist at all. And I’ll be real...the pacing and immediacy of events is pretty wonky and unreasonable. In one of the most extreme speed runs through Dick’s origin I’ve seen, Dick’s parents die and Batman immediately swings down from the rafters and tells Dick that he’ll solve the case...while Dick’s parents’ bodies are still cooling a couple feet away (Batman #436). Yeah, that is absolutely ridiculous lmao, as is the idea that Bruce just immediately adopted Dick the day his parents died. I think that the juvie origin very nicely slows things down and helps to organically fill in the gap of time that would and should exist between Dick losing his parents and being taken in by Bruce.

2.) The juvie origin helps to rationalize Bruce’s reasoning for taking Dick in.

In previous origin stories, Bruce’s main motivation for taking Dick in is that he saw his own suffering reflected in Dick and wanted to help him. I dig the parallels between Bruce and Dick...but this is very flimsy reasoning to adopt someone lmao. With all the tragedy that occurs in Gotham, you cannot tell me that Bruce had not run across some orphans before. Bruce sympathizing with Dick certainly should be part of what motivates him, but there needed to be something more. If there is not some immediate, urgent reason to adopt Dick, then it makes zero sense that Bruce would try to raise him honestly. Why would Bruce tear Dick away from his remaining family and friends at the circus? Why would Dick want to leave? And even if Dick could no longer remain at the circus, why wouldn’t Bruce allow Dick to go to a good foster home, especially since Bruce is so laser focused on his solo crusade against Gotham’s crime that he doesn’t even allow himself to have a steady girlfriend half the time? Lots of plot holes here!

The juvie origin fixes a lot of these issues! Staying at the circus is not an option for Dick, not because Bruce just snatches him away, but because legally Gotham Juvenile Services says that the circus is an inadequate environment for raising a child. Dick is sent to juvie, and the comic makes a point of showing Dick nearly being beaten to death almost immediately upon arriving.

Dick is in danger and he’s lost in the system, so there is no longer a possibility for him to land in a good home. Initially, when Bruce goes to find Dick, he’s still tracking him down only with the intention of getting justice for Dick by solving his parent’s murder. But Bruce is a good person at heart. When Batman finds Dick trying to escape from the juvenile hall, beaten to hell, he intervenes. The next morning Dick is taken in by Bruce Wayne.

So now, taking in Dick isn’t Bruce tearing Dick away from the chance of having a loving family and throwing him into the dangerous life of a crime fighter; taking Dick in is Bruce saving Dick from a horrible situation, possibly even saving his life. The only way to get Dick out of the potentially deadly situation he was in quickly was for Bruce to take him in as a foster parent. Bruce’s actions actually make a lot of sense! And Bruce is forced by necessity to take on a fatherly role that he does not feel suited or prepared for, rather than him adopting Dick on a whim. The juvie origin gives this scenario the urgency and necessity that it desperately needed.

3.) The juvie origin has been around for a long time, and pretty successfully adds nuance to Dick’s character without completely altering or changing who he is.

The juvie origin is a retcon that has been established for about 25 years, fyi. Robin Annual #4, which is where this idea first came into play, was released in 1995. There are also references to this origin story in Nightwing Vol. 2, and that comic series ran from 1996 to 2009, so it’s not like the juvie origin is completely baseless or totally removed from the narrative.

Nightwing (1996) #11

Also...Dick Grayson has been around for 80 years. In DC comics, I’m pretty sure he is predated only by Superman and Batman. You are inevitably going to have to add nuance to his character as time goes on. The juvie origin adds a very interesting complexity to the character and his fight against crime, considering he himself has been in the system...there’s so much untapped potential there!! So yeah, I feel like the juvie retcon is a very valid addition to Dick Grayson’s origin story. Plus, Robin Annual #4 is just a very well written and well thought out comic book that really fleshes out Bruce, Dick, and Alfred’s initial relationships to one another in a realistic way, and more people should check it out.

What I’m saying...is that more people need to get on board and accept the juvie origin guys!! It’s my favorite origin for Dick, hands down. Thanks for giving me an excuse to talk about it anon.

As for where to go for more info…well, you can always check out Dick’s DC wiki, or anyone else’s, for basic summary info. For me, I always like going straight to the source. You could find a comic rec list that focuses on what you’re interested in and just dive in and build your knowledge that way. Sometimes if you google around, you can find neat creator interviews that address questions like the ones you asked. If nothing else, I’m sure there are people on tumblr (like me :D) or elsewhere online who are willing to help you out and point you in the right direction if you’re curious about something in particular. Idk if other people know of a good resource for things like this?

#thanks for the ask anon!#ask #dick grayson #robin #bruce wayne #batman #alfred pennyworth #juvie hall #meta #romani #romani dick grayson

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philosopherking1887 · 3 years

Text

Writer tag game

Thanks for tagging me, @ectogeo-rebubbles... 4, days ago, sorry; my parents are visiting and I haven’t had much time to myself.

How many works do you have on AO3?

(Why is the number so big when I post? @sapphosewrites said the same thing, so I know it’s not just me...)

What's your total AO3 word count?

515,575

What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

Mostly Zuko-centric ATLA fics because a couple were inspired by a BNA whom I tagged in the Tumblr post, then she reblogged and lots of people saw them.

Between the Salt Water and the Sea Strand

To Give Birth to a Dancing Star (didn’t get very far on that one, oops)

The Last Argument

Zeno’s Paradox (the only non-ATLA fic on this list; I posted it very shortly after Thor: Ragnarok came out, before I realized how terrible it was)

Shame and Necessity

Do you respond to comments, why or why not?

Yes, almost always (unless someone said something weird, or one person left a bunch of identical short comments on different chapters of the same fic; it seems a bit silly to respond to every “<3″ with “Thanks!”). I respond to encourage people to keep commenting, by assuring them that I’m reading comments, I pay attention to their content, and I appreciate them. I especially like it when people comment on specific themes in the fic or how it relates to some aspect of canon, so that it starts an analytical conversation about the story and the characters -- which is what a lot of us are here for.

What's the fic you've written with the angstiest ending?

I’m gonna say The Third Time, because Loki actually permanently dies.

What's the fic you've written with the happiest ending?

Starting Over, I guess? That’s the hopeful ending of my Thorki series, taking place before some hypothetical version of the Infinity War storyline in which neither of our principal characters dies (because fuck the actual movies, and fuck Ragnarok too, while we’re at it). But there are other fics, sometimes intermediate in one of my series, that have hopeful rather than downbeat endings, even if more complications arise later. The Ninth Deadly Sin is a rare standalone fic with a happy ending (which I’d forgotten about until I went looking through my Works page for happy endings). Prince of Darkness also has a fairly happy ending that involves solving climate change with Frost Giants...

Do you write crossovers? If so, what is the craziest one you’ve ever written?

No, at least not yet. I have nothing against them in principle, and sometimes enjoy reading them, but since the target audience is the intersection of two (or more) fandoms, it’s necessarily going to be smaller than either fandom on its own.

Have you ever received hate on a fic?

Not really related to the fic. I did get a random nasty comment on a Garashir fic about a fan letter I wrote to Tom Hiddleston (and handed to his manager-person after seeing Betrayal in London) and then posted on Tumblr. Just someone being an asshole.

Do you write smut? If so what kind?

I do indeed! I write very chatty smut, with a lot of feelings, often angsty, and sometimes awkward, because sex can be awkward, especially if one or more of the participants is inexperienced (at least with bodies like their partner’s).

Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Not that I know of.

Have you ever had a fic translated?

Yes -- someone translated No Exit into French as Aucune sortie (though actually, the French title of the Sartre play that I named the fic after is Huis clos).

Have you ever co-written a fic before?

Nope.

What’s your all-time favorite ship?

I’m inevitably going to answer that kind of question with my current favorite ship, which is Garashir... but that might actually be my all-time favorite ship because the fandom is a lot more welcoming and chill than others I’ve been in before.

What’s a WIP that you want to finish but don’t think you ever will?

Hoo boy. All the people I’ve seen doing this tag game previously have said they don’t have any; I have 5 partially posted WIPs in old fandoms that I doubt I’ll pick up again. I think I’ve tagged most of them as “on hiatus” and warned readers in author’s notes that I probably won’t finish... Do I want to finish them? In theory, yes; in practice, no.

What are your writing strengths?

I’ve most often received compliments on my dialogue, which I also find the easiest thing to write; my favorite version of this compliment is when people say that they can hear the dialogue in the actors’/characters’ voices. Some people enjoy the philosophical discussions that I can’t help inserting into my fics...

What are your writing weaknesses?

Plots. Thing happening. I cannot come up with plots. All of my fics are just people talking and having thoughts and feelings about things.

What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?

Ask yourself: what does it add to have the dialogue in the language it’s supposed to be in rather than translated? If the POV character speaks the language, would it be sufficient to note that they’ve switched to a different language, or put it in italics or something to indicate that? If the POV character doesn’t speak the language, would it make more sense to just say that other characters have spoken an unintelligible string in another language, or that they just caught a few words, or whatever? That’s not to say that there’s never a good reason to include the actual language; if the actual words are important, or if it matters that the POV character doesn’t switch effortlessly between languages, or if it just adds some richness of texture that you’re going for, it can make sense.

If it’s a real language that you’re not fluent in, do ask someone who is to check your grammar.

What was the first fandom you wrote for?

Harry Potter, of course; I am that age, after all. I wrote fics about Tom Riddle and/or Voldemort when I was in middle school in 2001-2. I’ve always been interested in the villain’s perspective.

What’s your favorite fic you’ve written?

At the moment, Had we but world enough, and time. It stayed reasonably self-contained while also covering the issues I wanted it to cover, with some smut thrown in. Maybe my best fic is actually an older one, but my favorite is always in my current fandom, because that’s what I’m excited about... and I’d like to think my writing has been improving with practice.

Tagging: @delicatetrashstranger, @vermin-disciple, @hex-o, @judiops, @the-last-dillpickle... and @illwynd and @incredifishface (since I actually ended up talking about my Loki and Thorki fics in this one).

#fic writer tag game #my fanfiction

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natsubeatsrock · 4 years

Text

So, I’ve been watching Sword Art Online: Abridged Parody, and...

I don’t think it’s terribly controversial to say that SAO Abridged has become the gold standard for what a good abridged series can do. While Team Four Star took 3 legendary IPs, Final Fantasy VII, Hellsing Ultimate, Dragon Ball Z are all generally considered to be fairly decent as stories. As much as people complain about DBZ’s random power ups, it’s not as if it was incoherent. Things make a decent amount of sense and that was the worst of the bunch.

Sword Art Online is notoriously problematic. No doubt I’m not the first person to say that. Plenty of people have said as much all over Tumblr and Youtube. In abridging SAO, Something Witty Entertainment managed to improve on what happened originally.

Now, I want to do something incredibly nerdy. (As if I haven’t done nerdy things on this blog before.) One of my favorite things about SAO Abridged is its insane sense of connections between episodes. Things are referenced that don’t matter until much later and jokes are often built on previous events long before the present episode. Two of the big plot points of the current arc are built on information we learned in a few previous episodes. I want to argue that episode 2 is the most important episode of the first arc because of its connections to every other episode in the arc.

To start, the narrator in the cold open connects this episode to the one before it by saying that a number of players died after being idiots. Notably some jumped into fire. If you remember, Klein struggled to kill a pig and named his avatar Ballsdeep69. In episode 2, this is shown in this episode in that players haven’t read the manual compiled by beta testers.

Though, it’s not as if that;s the only reason they’d fail. In episode 3, the leader of the Black Cats took some of the tutorial NPCs from missions. Kayaba blames this as a factor in people failing miserably in the season finale. But we’ll get to him soon enough.

The intro plays and we’re in a meeting of players who are trying to beat a boss. The idea is that people will strategize to beat a boss by working together. This doesn’t pan out well throughout the series. Kirito is able to tank hits from seven lower level players in episode 4. In episode 5, the meeting to beat Sheeptar happens after 7 people. When they go after the meeting, 5 more died.

Now Kibaou makes his only appearance in the series. I don’t want to make too many “this character makes their debut here” connections. Asuna and Tiffany make their debut and are important characters in this series, but I’m not talking about them in this way. Kibaou is minor enough that I can mention him here. His stupid entrance makes his takeover of the Aincrad Liberation Front in episode 10 seem like a negative statement about them more than a positive one for him.

Though, episode 8 shows a bit of their incompetence on their own. While Corbax thinks his strategy of “group up and hit it till it dies” is revolutionary, it’s about as revolutionary as he is Hispanic. The strategy’s true origin is episode 2, as an alternative to Kirito’s “final solution”. That doesn’t work well and Kibaou starts to take power as a result of Corvax dying.

We then get Asuna’s troubles with menus. She’s not the only one with these issues, considering we learn Yoko has issues with the menu in episode 6. However, this is one of many clever ways to hint at Asuna’s ineptitude with the game early on. While she’s shown to have a lot of innate skill in this episode, that’s despite her inexperience. For all the changes made from the original, this was best shown in both versions by Asuna using her real name as her avatar name in the final episode of the arc.

Something I didn’t pick up on right away was that the setup for Laughing Coffin comes from episode 2. One player receives messages he believed to be from Jesus. At the end of the fight, he gets the command to kill them all and the end card is preluded with a creepy version of “Jesus Loves Me”. They come up in episodes 6 and 9. In episode 4, it comes up that other groups like Titan’s Hand have come up.

But the big thing that you see from this episode is a theme that runs through the first arc of this show. Kirito sees this game as an alternative to the real world. It would be easiest to make this the only real connection to this episode, but that would be lazy. (Clearly, this was written before I realized how crazy this “one post a day” idea was.)

Kirito mentions that he has power he didn’t in the real world in episode 1. While that may have felt like a throwaway line at the time. In episode 2, he uses that power to tell off the idiots around him, just like he wishes he could have done in real life. And to be honest, he might not be right about being able to solo the boss, but he’s definitely better than most everyone else in the boss room. Asuna might be on par with him skillwise, but he has more experience than her.

I almost called this section of connections “Kirito is better than those around him.” While he’s not the strongest player in SAO, as we end up learning, he’s certainly better than most of the people he’s playing alongside. This ego serves as fuel for tagging with Silica in episode 4 under the supposed threat of Laughing Coffin. It’s why we get the formation of “The Kirito is Always Right Foundation” in episodes 5 and 6. It’s why he challenges Heathcliff in episodes 9 and 11.

But something happens.

In episode 3, he unwittingly joins a guild because he’s such an amazing player. However, that wasn’t enough to save his guild mates from dying. Sadly, he had just decided to open up to people and the ordeal closed him off to people and even emotions according to episode 4. In episodes 4, 5, 7, and 8 we get the sense that this event had a serious emotional impact on him.

However, through these events he learns to open up to people more. Going on missions and teaming up with othes, he starts to open up to people. This obviously leads to a relationship with Asuna and Yui original. As stupid as he still feels the people around him are, he still has respect for him.

In episode 2, he tells the people, “Shoot for the stars. It will make it more fun when I kick you back into the dirt.” In episode 8, we see a change in his epic rant, which happens to be my favorite moment in the series. On humans he says, “They are without question a complete write-off as a species. And how dare you make me care about them!” And when Kayaba goes on a similar rant to Kirito’s after his identity is revealed, Kirito plays defense for them, lukewarm as it is.

And wouldn’t you know? Kirito is told that he could have served as a leader and inspiration to the people in SAO because he is better than so many of them. Sure, Kayaba bring the idea up that same episode and a few episodes earlier in trying to recruit him for the Knights of the Blood Oath. However, the idea first came up in episode 2.

#not fairy tail month: crisis on infinite fandoms #swort art online abridged #sao abridged #something witty entertainment #sword art online abridged parody #this was a fun one to do #i'm glad i picked these topics well in advance #or who knows #i'd talk about more recent stuff #like hamilton #or avatar #or who knows what else is unpopular nowadays #anyways sao abridged is awesome #go watch it now

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misszura · 3 years

Note

Where, besides Tumblr, can people find you doing fannish things? (Obviously only mention sites and usernames you actually want to be found at. Don’t expose your secret identities on my account.)

What other names have you gone by on these platforms, including Tumblr, if any?

When did you join the IT fandom? And what got you into fandom, to begin with?

What are your favorite ships, or characters, if any, and why? What do they mean to you?

In what ways do you participate in fandom? (ex. Posting memes, reblogging/commenting on content, writing fanfic, making fanart, creating fanmixes, etc.)

Do you have any in-fandom inspirations? Other members of the community that drive you? (And if you have the time/energy, in what ways do they inspire you?)

Name and link some of your favorite works, please!

Do you have any works of your own that you feel particularly proud of, or wish more people would’ve consumed? Please provide links if possible.

Have you ever participated in a fannish event (ie. IT Week, a fic Big Bang) or applied to be a part of a fanzine? If so, which ones, and can you please link them?

Without any form of bashing or lashing out, what is something you feel this fandom is missing?

(lmao sorry I accidentally unfollowed trying to get to the ask button)

OMG, it's 2am here, and I just received this notification, so instead of watching the celling, trying to find sleep, I'll answer your questions !

(I love asking ! Thank you so much ! )

Others social medias that's it ? I have plenty of them. You can find me on twitter (@ CrazyZura) but it's mostly in french (speaking English in front of a buch of french people is hard y'know ?) I have Instagram, but it's not really interesting (except if watching me make paper boats and leave them at my university is interesting) I think it's resophinement (I'll check before posting) I also have wattpad, but as before it's in french (feel free to have a look on my unfinished works (no It there)) still CrazyZura, but I have a second account where I project to post the fanfiction I'm currently writing ! (I'm almost done ! ) Oh and I have a tik tok account ! I draw a lot, and there is some IT content there certainly CrazyZura (as @ but I think my username us wawawa, because I used to cosplay a gebderbend Wario) (don't ask he is underrated XD)

I never changed my username on those platforms, because I'm kinda a newbe on Internet, i mean, I'm here from 2015 for most of them, before I was on... YouTube i think, and Facebook. I used to have a blog, and my username was something like sosodu44 (my name + from my department) (and I'm on Tumblr for 2/3 months, I still don't know how it works)

(please tell me i understood well the question, sorry if not, I still learning foreign languages)

I'm also a newbe on the IT fandom since I watched them (2017 and 2019 version) during the lockdown, and the 1990 miniseries not long after. I'm still looking for the book, but I can't find any book shop open (and I won't buy it with Amazon.) You laugh at me if I say that I saw those movies while watching the whole Finn Wolfhard filmography ? Because it's thanks to that I'm in the fandom

My favourite characters are Stan, Richie and Patrick, and my favourite ships are probably Stozier (don't hit me please) patrick X Richie, henpat and obviously Reddie (I mean, I think everyone in the fandom like Reddie, right ?) Why ? I kin (it's the term ? Let's say it's the term) Richie and Stan (more Richie, he is my Confort character ) and Patrick, because I have a thing with unsaine bad Guys, my family always make jokes about it. (I can't help, plus the fact that he is pictured by Owen teague improve my love for him) (funfact : patrick is my Confort drawing, when I don't know what draw, it end up by Patrick) (sometimes Vic comes, because i like his character a lot too)

I love this question, because it makes me feel like I'm really a part of something even if I don't do a lot. As said before I draw Patrick a lot, not only, I draw it characters a lot (I need to find where I put my last Bill drawing ) I also have a fanfiction, but I won't post it until it's finished, because I fear to not end it, and I don't want the pressure of people asking "when is the next chapter" (if people ask that) and I'm kinda anxious that if I start post it before I finish it, I'll never finish it... (But soon ! Like before July if I work hard !). And obviously I reblog memes, I share fanarts, cosplays, tik tok, videos, and fanfiction.

Ok so this is the "sophie is going to simp over everyone" time ! Fanfictions writers who inspires me are @ fuji09 (I didn't notify them on purpose, I have to stop bothering them) they're fanfictions are really cool, and there for every tastes, I wish I could have a writing skill as good as them. There is also my friend shayla_mitchel (on Wattpad) she writes a lot about Patrick and she Helps me a lot with my work (plus she is the one who correct the English version, since my translations aren't always the best) (by that I mean : it's sometimes, when the moon is in good therms with Neptune, good enough) (in my language it's fun. I swear) there are those Cosplayers on tik tok, mostly fezilius and Synthestron, moonshine4snails, tarondactyl and aphelion (they're cosplaying with their friends, if you have time watch they're works, even if they don't do only It contents, they're really good Cosplayers that I love) (i just noticed I've mentioned only male/nb Cosplayers, so I add cospla.natro (on Instagram and tik tok) and Ligeia.cosplay (on Instagram and tik tok too) and there is also the reddie videos of kmcarras (on Instagram)

I still don't know how to put links in her (I'll try to figure out while answering) the leach series of Fuji09 (mentioned above) on AO3. A fic called When you say my name by YoungDumbandFullofHeadcanons on AO3 (really a jewelry, but a lot of tw, mostly of transphobia, be careful and take care) and a hard one called "a lot of marshmallow" by MeganRosenberg on AO3 (apparently) kinda hard because it's a violent one. There was others like Above and bellows (I think) i can't find it back to mention, I think the author deleted it.

I'm really proud of the fonction I'm currently writing, even if it's a fiction with an OC and I'm a little ashamed of that(because people judge that a lot). (As said before not posted yet) and my tik toks about Richie and patrick (the two last I've posted.

It's now 3am, and I haven't finished, my phone Will probably get out of power before the end XD (like this I'll see if Tumblr have some automatics saves)

I wish I would, but no... One day, may be if the occasion comes to me :)

I don't really know, I wish we had more content (in french for exemple ! ) But I think the fandom is kinda cool (when we forget all the ship wars and all dramas like this)

I hope I've answered well enough, I'll probably regret doing this that late tomorrow, because I probably forget a lot of things (did i mentioned that i made some It incorrects ? I don't think so) keep asking me things I'm totally open for this (idk if annon are on)

On this, I wish you a good night, or day, or whenever you are and I'm going to keep watching my celling !

Good night 🍈🍈🍈

#zurask #it 2017 #idk what put on ashtags #I'm not even sure that the right orthography?#I'm sure that's not the right one

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everygame · 4 years

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Blaseball (Web)

Developed/Published by: The Game Band Released: 20/07/2020 Completed: n/a Completion: Maxed everything in the shop. Trophies / Achievements: n/a

Alright, if you’re here there are two options:

You already love Blaseball and just like reading about it.

You have no idea why people are obsessed with Blaseball.

Now, in the grand tradition of my article on Cinco Paus, because it turns out this tumblr shouldn’t just be about me finishing games and then complaining about how they failed me, I present:

Blaseball or: How You Learn To Stop Hating The Fact The Canadian Team Is Called The “Moist Talkers” And Love A Game That’s Usually Sold As A Communal Storytelling Experience (As Wank As That Sounds)

There’s a challenge here. Blaseball, once you’re in, makes you want to immediately gush about the cool things that are happening in the game, to tell the story of it, but unless you’re definitely tuned in to it, I think it can be somewhat alienating. Like here’s what I want to say, right?

That after the Raptors went out of the NBA playoffs I stopped caring (this is not entirely true; I stopped after the Nuggets put the Clippers out because spite/the lols) and was kind of looking for something else to obsess over in a not-too-active fashion. You see, what kind of got me into sports, as much as learning to enjoy the actual games, is the… theorycrafting? I might be using the term wrong. But it’s looking at the schedules and thinking, “ok, if they beat them, then they’re here, but if they get beat, then they might struggle there” or “trading X player for Y would be the best move… will we do it? Can we do it?”

It’s part of the reason why this year’s NBA bubble was such a success--they created a play-in situation for a group of teams on the edge of the playoffs, and then even though I don’t really care about any of the teams involved, there was so much drama, and so many ways for things to go, that you could spend ages just thinking about how X thing had to happen for Y thing to occur and then get excited if it happened or have to recalculate.

So: Blaseball. It is, ostensibly, a game in which you gamble on baseball blaseball games. I mean for the most part, I will be clear with you, that is it. It’s a game where you make bets and use your winnings to increase your ability to make bigger bets. It’s not even a particularly effortful example of this. There’s no clicker mechanics outside of one involving peanuts that turned out not to do anything, and all games are pretty clearly given odds so you can mostly fire and forget.

However. The thing you have to do with blaseball is actually the thing I have to do with a sport: pick a team and care. It’s not a baseball blaseball betting sim. It’s a sport fan experience. I say experience, not sim, because you will not be pretending to be a fan. You will be a fan, and if it’s for a made up team, who cares?

I think for a lot of people (the kind of nerds who play this kind of game) that’s a novel experience and I think that for people like me (who like sports) there’s an immediate sense that people are being ironic. You know; “blaseball” doesn’t feel that far from saying “sportsball” and I can’t guarantee that a lot of folk aren’t enjoying it… wrong. But then I also feel like people enjoy actual sports wrong so fuck it (I’d just warn you that if you go hard and join the discord--which is kind of necessary--you might find some people… annoying).

So you might think I’ve just described a few things at cross purposes there: I said you’ve got to be a fan for this to work, but then I also said that the NBA bubble succeeded because it made me care about teams I didn’t care about because of theorycrafting. Well, not exactly: what I’m saying is that in this game you’re going to need one (the ability to be a fan) to make the other pop.

I’m lucky here, because I’m Canadian (among other things) immediately and violently defending the one Canadian team in the thing is instant. I don’t need to put any effort in. I’ve never been the kind of guy who could just pick any team because I like the look of them, maybe you are or maybe you’re actually going to have to live in Charleston to want to support the Shoe Thieves, but let me say: if you are not American, the only correct decision is to support the Moist Talkers despite their terrible name (that I have come to terms with.)

Anyway, now I’ve given you the background, let me explain what happened last season to my team.

During a game, an legendary undead pitcher swapped places with our worst pitcher before, in another game, swapping places with a dog who used to be owned by one of our previous players. Then our fans started a campaign to make sure our best pitcher, who was trapped inside a peanut, would be idolised enough that they’d meet the “Monitor” a huge squid god, which most people assumed would kill them. At the end of the season, the squid cracked open our pitcher’s peanut shell, chose not to eat them and as a result saved them from the end of the post-season, where a vengeful peanut god turned all the players trapped in peanut shells (or, uh, who had Peanut in their name) into an evil team who then played the season champions in a RPG battle-style blaseball game (with hit points and everything) and cursed them. Then, at the end of the season blessings were handed out and thanks to having our best pitcher and receiving and absurd four blessings (including one which increased the size of one of our batters and one that gave a player a fishing net) we were suddenly one of the best teams in the league… with the danger that we might actually win the next season and be forced to fight the peanut god.

Now, as I said above, there’s a fair chance that seemed like absolute drivel to you. And even if it is exciting, I think the most important thing to do is to scroll back up and look at the screenshots and remember that the game doesn’t really have any graphics. Blaseball games occur in a tiny window with a diamond graphic, and so it’s a bit like watching just the corner of the screen in a baseball game. It is not particularly entertaining to watch games (although you can learn how to be captivated by it anyway). The game also, despite not being anything, can take up a massive amount of mental real-estate because you’re going to be checking in on it every hour of almost every day even though all you’re doing each time is clicking ten things and checking scores. It’s probably much too much, and it gets worse when you start to engage with the discord, because as a fan you really have to co-ordinate how to vote for blessings to make sure your team is always improving and you’re raising money for a good reason.

Alright, by this point it’s almost sounding like I’m trying to talk you out of getting into it, and I *do* recommend you don’t sicken yourself of it too quickly by checking it all the time. But most importantly I sort of glossed over what the genius aspect of Blaseball is: that being a fan has a weird, roundabout effect on how well your team does, and that reflects the fact that being a sports fan is not passive. When you watch a game you’re somehow putting everything into it even though you can’t affect anything. It’s why you spend all that time theorycrafting. Here, you, as a group, pool the votes you’ve spent all week raising money for and try and make your team what you want it to be. You don’t get to change what’s going on in a game like it’s Twitch Plays Baseball, or something. That wouldn’t be a fan. In Blaseball, instead, what you do is you try and make your dreams real via collective wishing. It’s only the slightest step up from just being a fan of a real team, and it gets to the heart of the communal experience of being a fan.

If I was the NBA, the NFL or very specifically the MLB I would 100% be looking at Blaseball and how to learn from it. I think there’s a crass version of it--imagine fans of teams in the NBA bubble could have voted to like… make sure their team got the nicest hotel rooms, or nicer meals or something--but giving fans a way to boost their team (outside of the brute force of their psychic power in a home game) by, I don’t know, checking into an app or otherwise engaging is a truly interesting (and honestly kind of disturbing, for people who hate the implications for tracking) concept.

Anyway. Try Blaseball! Pick a team, bet based on the odds, invest in snake oil, idol the best pitcher every game you check, but don’t check too much (and invest in the pitcher pendants, once you’re maxed buy votes and join the discord to find out what your team is voting for/get involved in the conversation. That’s it. But it’s pretty cool.

Will I ever play it again? I mean, it still feels a bit rich to say I’m playing this but I’m invested at least until the Moist Talkers win a season. Which could be this season. I’m really interested to see how much The Game Band expand this, too--I can think of a lot of ways that fans/players can be ever more empowered, but I’m interested in how carefully they could destroy the balance, and so many ways this could simply be more entertaining to look at and engage with (I mean the fact that you have to go to external sites for things like future schedules is kind of wack imho.)

Final Thought: There’s a ton of other stuff people like about this game--making up stories about the players, who they are, drawing them--and the nice thing is I don’t give a flying fuck about any of that and I don’t really have to. You can completely ignore the wiki’s fanfiction if you like and just deal with the reality of the game and how you personally react to it. Or you can really get into it and care about it way more than what’s actually happening on the field. I don’t care, I’m not your dad.

Even if I did just spend a long time shouting at you about sports.

#video games #web #webgames #blaseball #the game band #review #games #gaming #text #txt

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irrealisms · 4 years

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very glad you're in favor of lying to therapists-- there's a lot i wish i could tell my therapist but i don't have the words, and saying a lot of it would get me hospitalized as it mainly relates to me deriving immense pleasure from causing myself pain. i feel it's almost hypocritical to be okay with someone else consensually hurting me but when i hurt myself (for the purpose of seeking pleasure) it is suddenly a huge concern.

ohhhh i have a lot of things to say to this but honestly the first thing is that this is #relatable. a Huge Mood.

okay now time for my ramblings. this is such a thing that can honestly be really frustrating and can make things hard? like, i self harm /and also/ i’m a masochist, and some of these experiences are super different, but then other times they’re... not. for the most part i have the policy of telling my therapist when i self-harm out of emotional pain reasons and not just Ooh Stimmy reasons, but sometimes it is genuinely hard to tell those apart, from both directions! and also that policy has.... mostly fallen by the wayside since I’ve had therapists who would report to my parents every time I self-harmed. (spoiler: it didn’t make me stop self-harming, it just made me stop telling them when I did.) honestly, I highly recommend asking your therapist outright (ideally on the first day! this is always the first question I ask when considering therapists) when they consider it justified to break confidentiality and/or suggest hospitalization and/or hospitalize a client involuntarily. some therapists won’t take any action about self-harm; if you can find one who fits your other criteria and is helpful, this might be a question to ask them, as long as you’re willing to lie if the answer is that they will.

the other thing is safety. (this is not actually a reason to tell your therapist, btw, people in general tend to be super bad at judging which things are safe and which things aren’t.) if you’re doing something for pleasure, you probably don’t want to die! a lot of “coping mechanisms for self-harm” are just maximally safe ways to self-harm, like snapping a rubber band against yourself or putting your hand in ice water. other things you might like that are basically zero-risk: spicy food, waxing, getting your flu shot, (nsfw) figging. when cutting yourself, avoid veins and arteries; when hitting yourself, avoid organs and bones. one of the most famous “people are really bad at judging what’s safe and what isn’t” examples is that fireplay and waxplay are less dangerous than slapping someone’s face hard. in general, anywhere that’s covered in fat (breasts, butt, thighs) is gonna be safer to hurt than places that aren’t (face, neck). there are some things where having a partner does improve safety a LOT— especially if you’re doing anything where you might go unconscious before you’re able to respond (don’t do solo breathplay, kids). if you’re doing anything with infection risk, keep a fully stocked first-aid kit, use it, and be mentally prepared to suck up your pride and go to the doctor if you have to. i’m not an expert on this, but in general, you’re going to want to be looking for BDSM safety guides and self-harm harm-reduction. don’t 100% trust advixe from anyone who isn’t an expert (including me!), because, again, it can be REALLY unintuitive which things are dangerous and which are low-risk. (note that i DIDN’T include exercise on my zero-risk list; IME, it can range from “healthier than not exercising” to “significantly less safe than cutting”, depending how good you are at noticing the difference between good pain and bad pain while exercising and whether you consistently stop when you experience the latter.) if you’re doing high-risk things and don’t want to compromise on them (for example, if you’re me age 15 and are super into solo breathplay) please please PLEASE look up safety/harm reduction/risk minimization guides. (if you’re unwilling to do this, consider that you might, in fact, be self-harming; putting yourself in risky situations is a form of self-harm, even if the situation is one you enjoy.)

there’s also a thing where.... okay this is gonna be controversial but. safely practiced self harm is not actually an inherently bad thing! for me, self harm is often a bad sign because it signals that my normal strategies for distress tolerance have failed, that i am in so much emotional pain that i’m relying on this for endorphins. other times it’s bad because it signals my belief that i deserve to be hurt. these are bad things! my pain is bad! but the badness isn’t located in the self-harm, they’re located in my motivations, and (sometimes) in the fact that i’m inflicting a negative experience on myself without a reason. the self-harm is more measurable, so it makes a good metric of how well I’m doing, but it isn’t actually the goal, except insofar as I want to avoid scaring other people. (my friend wrote a post about this; I’ll link it in a reply to this ask, because I’m on an ancient version of tumblr mobile and don’t trust it with links. I’ll also drop a link to the Icarus Project’s short workbook on self-harm.)

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maxparkhurst · 4 years

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How did you create your characters? What was your process?

TMI Tuesday: How did you create your characters? What was your process?

// <offers out a chair> You’re going to want to sit for this. It’s going to be a LONG story. For those who’re looking for a short answer: I’m actually in the middle of creating these two. Edits and tweaks are always being made to make them appear real and true. And it’s thanks to everyone on here and in-game that they’ve progressed so much.

Now for the long version.

Evolving as an Author:

Maxinora and Augustine Parkhurst are a culmination of ideas inspired by a myriad of things. The process of creating them isn’t linear. It has a lot of pit falls, unexpected twists and turns, and a ton of hills. To understand how we got the current versions of these two, we need to go back a couple years ago.

It’s the summer of 2012. In efforts to get me off of his account, my Dad gifted me my own. This was when I made my first ever serious roleplay character- a hunter named Evelon Holmwood. Well, at the time I spelled it like Evavllyn but...Yeah. We’re going to gloss over that fact. Now, Eve was my pride and joy for the last several years. I played this character nonstop, refusing to play or write about anyone else. In retrospect, I used this character more as therapy than anything of creative merit.

Eve’s story was basic at best. But I got better with story-telling the older I got. Unfortunately, her story got so convoluted that I had hard time salvaging anything from it. Now, you’re probably asking: How does this relate to Max? Fear not. I’m getting there. It was around this existential crisis that a mutual friend of my boyfriend and I convinced us to leave WoW and hop on SWTOR. My boyfriend was more than eager to make the switch but I was skeptical. Leaving WoW meant leaving Eve. And was I ready for that?

He assured me I was and helped me make a character on SWTOR. This was the first iteration of Max. A bounty hunter from Nar’Shadda named Maxinora Fenrik. My intentions was to make her a lowkey copy of Eve. At this time, I wasn’t very confident in my writing abilities and liked to stay in my lane. But, the more I roleplayed this character the more she took on a life of her own. She evolved past Eve and exceeded my expectations. Playing a new character bolstered my confidence and while I no longer play SWTOR -due to OOC reasons- I still have fond memories with this character. I enjoyed this character so much that I reused several components of her design when making Max. Some which include her name and being blind in one eye.

I flipped between the MMOs when Legion dropped. Expenses started to pile up and between the two subscriptions I didn’t have the time to play both. In the end, WoW won my affection and I made a Blood Elf because I had friends on Horde Side. Rorien Hawkthorne was her name. A drunk artist and master assassin. She’d be the second iteration of Max. She had an older sister complex, an affinity for being melancholy, and it was my first experience with playing a character who could kept secrets- or tried to at least. Another new character under the belt and I was feeling a little more confident in my story telling abilities. I’d probably would’ve kept playing that character if not for OOC drama happening in a guild I was in. The fallout had me jump back to the Alliance where I indulged in creature comforts. It was back to Eve.

Tumblr made an entrance in my life around then as I ventured forth with a refreshed look on my hunter. I salvaged what I could and made a half-decent story. A lot of her misadventures are still posted up on her blog @evelonholmwood On the side I made the third iteration of Max. A fire mage and blacksmith combo by the name of Rowan Celwick with her younger brother Thomas Celwick. They were just two orphaned kids trying to make a life in Stormwind. Rowan was an arcane drop-out and blacksmith wannabe and Thomas...Was...Well? Thomas? A glorified side-piece? A way to garner pity for Rowan. I didn’t place a lot of emphasis on them or their characters. My main focus was Eve. But these two would be the underlying foundation of Max and Auggie’s characters.

I eventually took a hiatus from WoW and focused on more personal writing. The details are boring so I’ll gloss over it by saying that creating a character completely from scratch was the final push in the right direction for me. Fast forward several months to a year aaaaaand BOOM! Pandemic.

Writing is an escape for me. It’s one of my best coping mechanisms during trying times. And when nothing else works, I over indulge in some Warcraft. So, I resubbed. There was hesitance when re-entering the RP scene. I didn’t leave Eve’s story off on an convenient note. For lack of better phrasing, I wrote myself into a hole I couldn’t get out of. So, with the help of my boyfriend, I decided it was time to give Eve her happy ending and shelf her for good.

Which put me in a dilemma! Who was I going to RP? Well, you remember the Celwicks? They became my newest project.

The Creative Process:

I knew the Celwick story was weak and read much like a middle-school fanfiction. Revising was a must. But there were integral pieces to their story which I enjoyed:

Familial Sacrifice

Juxtaposing concepts

Intertwined Fates

These were themes I could work with and evolve. Keeping these in mind, I started to deconstruct the Celwick story line. They were no longer Gilnean but Kul’tiran. This prompted a name change from Celwick to Parkhurst. And I won’t lie, I like the sound of Parkhurst better than Celwick. Thomas became Augustine and Rowan became Maxinora (Mainly because I actually HAD the name Maxinora and not Rowan). The little changes got me hyped for the characters.

Next, I started to trim away the unnecessary details that bogged down the narrative. Things that either didn’t fit or made the timeline too convoluted were replaced. Pyromancy was a great example. The age I wanted Max to be wouldn’t yield to her understanding of Pyromancy. At least, not to the level I WANTED it to be. SO, I turned it into lament’s magic. Alchemy. (I also always wanted to play an alchemist since watching FMA)

A girl with two professions seemed excessive as well. I had to look at why I wanted her to be both an Alchemist and a Blacksmith. The answer was simple. I just liked the juxtaposition of an intelligent woman being rough and tumble. Which made me ask: Was Blacksmithing necessary to achieve that imagine? The answer was no. To pay respect to her previous iteration, I made their parents blacksmiths. It also let me keep themes of fire in her concept. The change in profession brought on a change in her appearance. I made her a little more slender to fit with the alchemist appeal.

Max’s aesthetic was brought on by my previous characters. Rorien inspired more internal facets of Max while Fenrik inspired outward appearances. Max’s auburn was strictly a decision made on the fact that I had one too many character’s with black hair. There wasn’t any other reason for it.

Designing Max was easy. The real challenge was with Augustine. Up until that point, all I had to go on for his character was Tommy Celwick and...Well. There wasn’t a lot there. He wasn’t much more than a poorly used trope and I considered doing away with him all together. But I realized that I REALLY liked the trope and I liked what he did for Max’s character. So, I buckled down and made myself think through all the reasons why Thomas Celwick -AKA Augustine Parkhust- needed to exist.

I decided that I needed him in order to present themes in Max’s story. He was the foil to her character. Cynic older sister? Meet optimistic brother. He also appealed to not only the three themes listed above, but also the newest one I wanted to explore: two sides of the same coin. Max and Augustine are simultaneously the same, having similar traumas, and yet different. If for nothing else, Augustine could help propel Max in the right direction. Be her moral compass, you know? With a bit of half-assing here and there, I managed to get a decent character out of Augustine. Took the cliche nerdy brother idea, physical design and all, and ran with it. Shortly after I made their Tumblr account. In no way did I expect this BOY to take on a life of his own. Like, Auggie knocked on my brain’s door and was like, “Yeah. No. I’m not a side character. Give me my own story...”

Which will bring me into my final point!

The Characters Write Their Own Story:

I’ve never been able to sit down and plan a story. My mind doesn’t work in such a structured fashion. It wanders and explores. When I’m creating, I’m watching. Watching the scenes play out before my eyes as these characters take what I’ve given them and grow into something almost independent of me. The basic pieces of Max and Auggie’s back story, along with character design, were purposeful. Yes. But everything that came after was THEM.

It’s cliche, I know, but I can’t describe this experience any other way. These two grew outside of my influence and now dominate a space in my brain. They talk, work, and interact without me. I mean...Not REALLY. But...It feels like that. It feels I’m watching through a keyhole and just recording what I see as their story plays out.

I guess a better analogy is me being the director. I’m watching the movie in the stands as two actors improv. On good days, I’m in control and rework scenes until I’m satisfied with the results. Try this. Move here. Say this. On bad days, I don’t see anything. My actors went home. The lights are off. Show’s cancelled for the day. These days make me sad...But they’re worth it because on the BEST days...The best days Max and Auggie run the whole show, and I am watching through the keyhole as their story unfolds little by little.

It’s truly magical.

The last part of their creation was the voice. Character voice, for me, is like building muscle. You need to work out. Start small and work your way up in weight. Every little piece I wrote made their voices stronger; and that’s including asks and threads. Interacting with other characters helped to flesh them out as people. And while it was hard and intimidating at first, it’s started to become easier.

Wrap-Up

My method is messy and untrained. I don’t claim to have any secrets. My knowledge of writing is mediocre at best. But I’m having fun. And that’s were the real magic of any character comes in. Fun. Because if you aren’t writing about something that sparks your soul- either with love, happiness, hatred, etc- then it’s nothing more than a forced, hollow husk. Writing is meant to evoke emotion. At least in mind. And want to express complex emotions and share them. In a perfect world? My characters -any of my characters- resonates with someone. They become the escape someone needed. That’s the ultimate goal.

It’s thanks to all of you that Max and Auggie have come this far. It’s from their interactions with others that they’ve managed to evolve into something incredible- especially Augustine. He just kept shining brighter and brighter until I felt obligated to make him an in-game character. So, you all are just as much a part in the creative process as me. Thank you!

And a special thanks to my boyfriend for always being a sound board for my rambling ass <3

THANK YOU FOR THE ASK, ANON! Sorry I posted an essay...<3

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gatheringbones · 4 years

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writing ask! you've said that you've been writing in a notebook lately... the thought definitely appeals to me, but don't you feel that it slows down your writing at all?

Yes, it does slow your writing down.

It slows your thinking down as well; which is why I was so glad that I was devoting so much time to writing by hand during my most anxious days in the spring of this year; everything slowed down. Every thought that I had had to conform to a very specific rhythm and a very specific speed because it was dictated by the pace of my own body. I also got so much better at writing by hand the more I did it that at some points it felt like I was writing exactly as fast as I thought and as a bodily sensation that’s just, to me, thrilling. I also began to succeed almost entirely in cutting out that obnoxious stage where you think of something to write and then pick it to pieces and silence yourself before you can get it down on paper. No criticism, no judgement, just good old fashioned victorian automatic writing with a story in mind and several concepts that lit my whole brain up with excitement every time I thought about them too hard. Since I wasn't judging what I was writing or worrying too badly about how this piece fit sequentially with all the others, I could write down exactly what I meant to say when I had the words to say it better, knowing that some future, smarter version of me (who was not currently reeling from the deaths of one hundred and twenty thousand dead americans) would look upon them kindly and supportively and know how to say the very important thing I didn't know how to yet. I had to nurture my belief in this very kind and talented future version of me and gosh what a comforting exercise that turned out to be.

it also divorced the sensation of writing almost entirely away from a side effect I've noticed of having been on tumblr for so long which is that every time you hit Post on this hellsite you brace yourself for a raging onslaught of abuse from every broken soul who wants to project all of their pain onto you at once. Writing on tumblr makes you nervous and hesitant in ways that I would love to see spoken more openly about, but it wasn't until I switched to a form of writing that wasn't typing that I could notice what was happening.

see also: transcribing. On a day where I don't feel like writing I can always transcribe what I've written by hand and I'm not allowed to change a word of it. If it's an obvious spelling flub I'll correct it in the moment but every long rambling run-on sentence full of me trying out concept after concept gets its place of honor in the record. I'm not allowed to judge it or compare it or improve it: it just is what it is. The time for reformatting and advanced drafting is later; this is what I'm doing right here and now and absolutely nothing else. I'm deeply anxious and I have a history of behaving very abusively towards my own writing to the point where my shame cauterized any motivation I ever had to write until I just plain couldn't do it anymore. re-teaching myself had to go hand-in-hand with all of my other trauma recovery work; I had to be kind to myself, I had to find ways to stay grounded and acknowledge the sensations happening in my body, and I had to find ways out of those episodes of shame/blocked writing so I could build the neural pathways to allow me to process shame easier on the whole.

being in a writing body, for me, with good paper and a pleasing pen, somewhere nice that smells good, feels good. I have worked so hard to build rituals around my writing that make writing feel good, because that's one of the only things that will convince my traumatized brain that writing is safe. That, and writing consistently using whatever method suits me best, even though it doesn't always feel good, because the other thing I'm trying desperately to learn is that not feeling good does not always equal not being safe.

#writing thoughts #I also don't show it to anybody and I didn't talk about any of the plot details until I was 90k in and felt like most of it was bedrock #I would never subject something I feel uncertain about in my writing to my rejection sensitive dysphoria #that's a TERRIBLE idea for me

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liskantope · 4 years

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Some brief (and sometimes not-so-brief) reactions to major Disney films 1937-1967

Around a month ago I made a temporary switch from Netflix to Disney+ with the goal of watching all major Disney movies in order, roughly paced so that one year of Disney film-making equals one day of real life. I should clarify here that by “major Disney movies” I mean mostly just all the animated ones plus a few hybrid live-action/animated ones, and a few of the most popular live-action ones (at least the ones I remember having a song considered good enough to feature on one of the Disney Sing-Along videos, a staple of my video-watching as a kid growing up in the 90′s). I would have been interested to see Song of the South, which I’ve never seen in its entirety, but it’s not included on Disney+ for fairly obvious reasons. As I get further into modern Disney, I’ll probably skip over most of the sequels and other features I strongly expect not to like (with the exception of Belle’s Magical World, which is said to be so legendarily bad that I just have to see what the fuss is about).

This time range of three decades happens to include more or less exactly those Disney productions that Walt Disney himself took a major role in (he died shortly before the final version of Jungle Book was finished). I’d like to do this again in another month, when I will have gotten up through the late 90′s, but honestly this post wound up way longer than I was imagining and took several more hours than I expected (or could really afford), so I’m not promising myself or anyone else that.

Looking at Wikipedia’s list of Disney productions, I’m a little taken aback at what a low percentage of these are animated features, which to me form the backbone of that company’s legacy; visually scanning the list makes the line of animated films look shorter than I had always imagined, but really what this is showing is that Disney produced far more live-action movies than I ever knew about, including (and perhaps especially!) in its early days. Right now I’m continuing on through the 70′s films, but this set of mini-reviews represents the first month of watching and three decades of Disney magic.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 1937

This is the full-length feature that began them all and which had the burden of defying contemporary skepticism that a full-length animated feature could be taken seriously at all. We are already far beyond the earliest days of animation and have progressed lightyears beyond the quality of “Steamboat Willie”; throughout the film I marveled at the sophistication of the animation with a newfound appreciation of how groundbreaking a lot of the sequences must have been.

I know I watched this at least a couple of times in childhood and I think once when I was a bit older, but even that was long ago.

Snow White is based on one of the simpler classic fairy tales, and the writers had to come up with ways to flesh out this very short story enough to occupy well over an hour. This was done not by exploring the character of Snow White or the Queen or even filling in extra plot details (the fate of the hunter is never addressed) but by spending a lot of time on the dwarfs. The detail spent on individuating them took a lot of work from the animators, but I think their efforts paid off. I can’t say the same about the attention paid to Snow White or the Queen (pretty much the only remaining characters). Snow White has an almost entirely flat personality, with no sense of curiosity or concern whatsoever about the Queen’s designs to have her killed, just having literally only one goal in mind: to marry this Prince who she’d only seen for about two minutes and run away from out of shyness. (This is of course a trend we’ll see with Disney princesses for a long time.) The Queen similarly only has the goal of being “the fairest in the land”. Something about the particular harshness of her voice strikes me as The Quintessential 1930′s Female Villain Voice (“I’ll crush their bones!”), whatever that means -- maybe I got my idea of what this should be from the movie Snow White in the first place.

I still think “Heigh Ho” (which I’ve known well since early childhood) is an excellent song in its utter simplicity, especially when complimented with the “Dig Dig Dig” song (which I did not remember at all until a few years ago when a Tumblr mutual posted the excerpt containing it!). I’m not enormously fond of “One Day My Prince Will Come”, although I did enjoy playing it on the violin at a couple of gigs with one of my musician friends back during grad school -- I was convinced then, and up until watching Snow White just now, that it belonged to Cinderella.

Pinocchio, 1940

This was a favorite movie of mine in earlier childhood; we owned the VHS and I watched it a lot. As a child, I had no sense of one Disney movie coming from a much earlier time than another one; it was only much more recently in life that I understood that Pinocchio really comes from all the way back eight decades ago. Pinocchio taught me the meaning of “conscience” (both in the dictionary sense and in a deeper sense), and it shaped my notion of what fairies may look like -- for instance, my mental picture of the Tooth Fairy, back when I believed in her, was inspired by the Blue Fairy in Pinocchio.

It’s amazing just how much the quality of Disney animated features improved from the first one to this one, the second. It helps that both the story and the characters are far more complex than those of Snow White. The plot from the original book (which I’ve read in Italian and English) was more complex still, of course. There is one gaping hole where it’s never explained how Gepetto somehow found himself in the belly of a whale (I don’t remember whether or how this is explained in the book), but I’ll forgive that.

It’s interesting to see the 1940′s caricature of “bad (early teenage?) boy” shown in the animation and voice of Lampwick. Phantom Strider talks about the turning-into-donkeys scene as a notoriously dark scene for adults who didn’t find it as terrifying when they were children -- count me in as one of those adults! It’s especially terrifying to see the whole mass of boys-turned-donkeys being treated as slaves in the hellhole known as Pleasure Island and realizing that this is never going to be resolved in the movie -- it’s rather unusual in Disney stories for some great evil to be left unresolved with no recompense even for the chief villain. In fact, Pinocchio is pretty much the only Disney story I can think of where the worst villain doesn’t meet some kind of dire fate. Really, the range of Pinocchio’s view is much narrower: it’s just the coming-of-age story of one puppet in his quest for Real Boyhood. (And yes, I still giggle at how intricutely Jordan Peterson analyzes particular scenes from the movie to support his beliefs about neo-Marxism or whatever.)

Disney+ heads many of the descriptions of the older movies with “This program is presented as originally created. It may contain outdated cultural depictions.” I’m a little surprised they don’t do this with Pinocchio, given what appears to me a rather derogatory depiction of Gypsies.

“When You Wish Upon a Star” has become a timeless hit, for good reason. And I still find “Hi Diddle Dee Dee” extremely catchy.

Fantasia, 1940

I saw this one multiple times growing up (for earlier viewings, I was not allowed to see the final number “Night on Bald Mountain”). My mom, for her part, saw this in theaters at the age of around 4 (even though it originally came out long before she was born) and thought for years afterwards that there was no such film in real life and her memory of seeing it had been just a pleasant dream.

I have nothing much more to say about this one except that, representing a very different approach from most animated films, Disney or otherwise, 1940′s or otherwise, it succeeded exquisitely. The “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” number was particularly perfection; it was as though the composer originally had every motion of the story in mind when writing the music. At the same time, having the main character appear in the form of Mickey Mouse in some way seems to cheapen the effect.

The Reluctant Dragon, 1941

I watched this for the first time, not having known it existed. There isn’t really much to say. All that stuck in my mind was one of the shorts, “Baby Weem” (amusing in a disturbing way), and the longer segment which gives the movie its title (also amusing, in a different kind of disturbing way). It was especially interesting to see a 1940′s cartoon portrayal of a very effeminate man, or should I say, male dragon.

Dumbo, 1941

I saw this maybe two or three times growing up, and not in very early childhood. It was never one of my favorites. Later on, I learned that it was done very low-budget to make up for major financial losses in the Disney franchise. This definitely shows in the animation. However, if there’s one thing I can say in praise of Dumbo, it’s that it’s incredibly daring in its simplicity, not only to have such elegantly simple animation but in having a mute title character (instead the main “talker” in the film is the title character’s best friend, who had much more of a New York accent than I’d remembered).

In some ways I find this film incredibly cold and dark by Disney standards, for reasons I can’t entirely explain, and I remember feeling this way even on earlier watchings when I was much younger. The stark cruelty of the humans running the circus, as well as the elephants other than Dumbo and his mother, just really gets to me. (I vividly mis-remembered one of the lines I found most memorable in childhood as “From now on, Dumbo is no longer one of us.” The actual line is, “From now on, [Dumbo] is no longer an elephant”, which in a way, is even more chilling.) In this regard, there was no need to make a modern, woker remake of Dumbo containing an explicit anti-animal-exploitation message -- the 1941 version conveys this message loud and clear. Now that I’m writing this, I suppose it could be argued that this is another instance of what I described under “Pinocchio” of leaving a major evil unresolved in a Disney film. And apart from that, while the ending for Dumbo is meant to be a very happy one, as an adult I find it incredibly naive: Dumbo is now super internationally famous for his extraordinary gift and is entering the life of a child celebrity, and it’s just going to be smooth sailing from now on? I hate to say it, Dumbo, but your troubles are only just beginning. (I was glad to see Dumbo reunited with his mother in the last scene, however, which I hadn’t remembered happening at all.)

“Look Out For Mr. Stork” is a skillfully-written song I’d completely forgotten about for two decades or so but remember knowing well when I was young. I still think “When I See an Elephant Fly” is a fantastic song, especially with all its reprises at the end -- I’d had some bits of it confused in my memory but had kept the main chorus with me over all the years. Now it’s widely decried as racist, or at least the characters who sing it are decried as racist caricatures. For whatever my opinion is worth, I’m inclined to disagree with this, in particular on the grounds that the crows seem to be the most intelligent, witty, and self-possessed characters in the movie. I’m also pretty sure I heard critical things about it over the years which are false. For one thing, not all of the crows are played by white actors -- only the lead crow is, while the rest of the voices are members of a black musical group called the Hall Johnson Choir. Also, I’m not clear that the lead crow was actually named Jim Crow by the time the movie came out (no name is given in the movie itself). Now an earlier, much more forgettable song featuring black men singing about how they like to work all day and they throw their pay away... yeah that seems awfully racist.

Bambi, 1942

I have surprisingly little to say about this one -- it’s just very distinct from other Disney films of the time, in its story’s lack of magical elements, its characters all being animals and animated in to realistically model animals’ movements, its lack of musical numbers, and its plot reaching the same level of simplicity as that of Snow White. Not to mention actually having a benevolent character die, which I don’t think had been done up to that point. I remember watching this a couple of times as a kid; I was never terribly eager to watch it again and I feel the same way now, despite having majestic beauty that I can really appreciate.

The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, 1949

This is the first of Disney’s animated features that I never had seen before. What a strange movie, or should I say, two smaller, unrelated movies rolled into one. I liked Mr. Toad’s half better than Ichabod’s half, or at least I found it more entertaining. I was brought up with the book The Wind in the Willows and recall seeing a non-Disney animated rendition of it (which was better and somewhat more thorough than this half-movie-length rendition). I was kind of excited when the “The Merrily Song” started because it unlocked a song from my early-childhood memory that I’d forgotten about for more than twenty years but knew from one of the Disney Sing-Along videos. I still think it’s a not half bad song, especially with the harmony.

The Ichabod story was not at all what I expected, not being familiar with the original book version (I had always assumed that Ichabod must be the name of a villain). I found it completely boring until the final horror sequence. As a child I would have found the courtship part even more boring (at least now I can muse on how man-woman courtship dynamics were shown in the late 40′s), and I would have found the horror part at the end very scary (in fact, maybe this is the reason my parents never showed the movie to me). It is a little shocking in being the only Disney story I’ve seen so far with a decidedly unhappy ending.

Cinderella, 1950

This one I only ever saw once or twice as a child. This is not counting a very vivid memory I have from around age 6 or 7 when I was watching a part of it over at another family’s house and their child, who was almost my age and nonverbal autistic, rewound and repeated the same 2-minute sequence involving the mice for probably about an hour (I was impressed because I at the time didn’t know how to work the controls of a video player).

I suppose this could be considered the second in the main trifecta of the most conservative fairy tale princess stories that Disney did in the earlier part of its history. I think one can argue that Cinderella has the strongest and most fleshed-out character out of those three princesses. I like the spirited internal strength she reveals in her very first scene. That said, like the other earlier princesses, she seems to have one singular goal in life, and that is to find her true love, not, say, to escape her abusive stepmother and stepsisters.

My reaction to this movie is overall positive. The mice were fun (I also like how their voices seemed a lot more like how mice “should” talk than in most other Disney cartoons); the dynamic between Cinderella and her evil relatives, and the dynamic between the stepmother and stepsisters themselves, was shown in a rounded way; and the fairy godmother is a great character despite having only one scene. The character of the king is pretty odd (very selfish yet his main dream is of getting to play with his future grandchildren) while not especially memorable or well fleshed out. There are certainly some great classic songs in this one -- not the most stellar that Disney has ever produced, but solid.

Alice in Wonderland, 1951

I was curious about what I would think of this one, since we owned the video of this at my home growing up and I watched it many times during childhood but as I got older I fell in love with the original Lewis Carroll books which, together, I often consider my favorite work of written fiction ever. I had not seen the Disney film Alice in Wonderland for around two decades, although I made the mistake of catching parts of more modern, live-action adaptations of the story more recently. I wondered what I would make of the old animated Disney adaptation after getting to know the books so well.

There is simply no way that any movie can recreate the true flavor of the books, but Disney’s Alice in Wonderland does a fine job of creating the general nonsensical, sometimes bewildering dream atmosphere, and, perhaps more importantly, capturing the essence of Alice’s personality. I give a lot of credit to Katherine Beaumont for this -- she has the major girl’s role in the next movie on this list as well, but she especially shines as Alice. Two other very distinctive voices, Ed Wynn as the Mad Hatter and Sterling Holloway as the Cheshire Cat, also add a lot to the cast of characters.

While mixing around some of the scenes of the original book Alice in Wonderland, with some scenes of Alice Through the Looking Glass inserted, the progression of the plot is a long, dreamlike sequence of strange situations with only a few common threads, true to the original first book (Looking Glass had a little, but only a little, more structure). In the movie, everything breaks down at the end with many of the previous scenes and characters swirling together and Alice frantically trying to wake herself up. One could object that this is not how the dream ends in the book Alice in Wonderland, but there is a similar sort of breakdown at the end of the dream in Looking Glass and it feels very real somehow, as in my experience this is sometimes how vivid dreams disintegrate.

Oh, and did you know that Alice in Wonderland has a greater number of songs in it than any other Disney film? There are nearly 25 that made it into the film, even if lasting just for seconds, with a around 10 more written for the film that didn’t make it.

So, does the Disney film do a good job of conveying one of my favorite books of all time, within the confines of being a children’s animated film? I would say yes. For reasons I described above, and from the fact that it manages to avoid working in a moral lesson for Alice, or depicting Alice as a young adult, or manufacturing an affair between Alice and the Hatter (ugh), like some film adaptations, I would say that this classic Disney version is the best Alice in Wonderland adaptation that I know of.

Peter Pan, 1953

Although I never knew this one super well, this movie has a special place in my heart from the way the flying sequence enchanted me in early childhood. I have to differ with the YouTuber Phantom Strider when he dismisses the 40′s/50′s-style song “You Can Fly” as just not doing it for him, because that song along with the animation of the characters’ journey to Neverland had a major hand in shaping my early-childhood sense of magic and wonder and yearning. I distinctly remembering a time, around age 6, when I just didn’t see much point in watching other Disney movies, or movies at all, which didn’t have flying in them, because what could possibly top the sheer joy and freedom of feeling able to swim through the air? I’ve had hardly any exposure to Superman, and so the kind of bodily flight I imagined in fantasy or performed in dreams was almost entirely shaped by Peter Pan. (At the same time, the crocodile in Peter Pan influenced my nightmares at the same age.)

I only ever saw this one a few times, but I distinctly remember the most recent of them being when I was a teenager, perhaps even an older teenager, and I remember thinking at the time that it was a pretty darn solid Disney movie. I still think the same now, while granting that some aspects of the movie seem a little antiquated and certain sequences with the Native Americans are quite cringe-worthy from the point of view of modern sensibilities. Only a couple years ago, when visiting my parents’ house, I finally took down the book Peter Pan from the shelf and decided to give it a read and found it a beautiful although slightly strange and offbeat story. In particular, I was shocked at how nasty and vengeful Tinker Bell was (particularly in trying to get Wendy killed), when I had remembered her as sweet and naive in the movie. It turns out I was wrong about the movie -- Tinker Bell tries to get Wendy killed there also! -- but somehow the tone is moderated well enough that in this version I never really feel horrified at her behavior, nor do I feel disturbed at the situation of the Lost Boys in the way the book made me view them. The song of the lone pirate who sings about how a pirate’s life is short, right before Captain Hook fires his gun and we hear a dropping sound followed by a splash, is one of the more masterful executions of dark humor that I’ve seen in Disney animation for children.

While most of the songs in Peter Pan, considered as songs on their own, are pretty good, I think the best one is the one whose lyrics didn’t make it into the film: “Never Smile at a Crocodile”.

Lady and the Tramp, 1955

Despite being more obscure than most of the old Disney animated classics, I used to know this one quite well since we had it in our home. I’ve always considered The Great Mouse Detective as the most underrated Disney film of all time, but I think it has serious competition here. Lady and the Tramp is an absolute gem. While not quite as Disney-fantasy-ish with its lack of magic and other fairy tale elements, in my opinion Lady and the Tramp is, in most ways, superior to everything else on this list save Mary Poppins. Beautiful animation which shows Lady and most of the other animals moving realistically in a way we haven’t seen since Bambi*. Everything visually and conceptually framed from the dogs’ points of view. Great voice acting. Consistently solid dialog without a single line too much or missing. A story evoking the dynamic between humans and pets, class inequality, and deep questions about the place of each of us in society and choices between a stable existence among loved ones and striking out to seize life by the horns. Our first female lead who stands on her own two four feet and whose sole goal isn’t to get kissed by her true love (one could argue that Alice was the earlier exception, but she is a little girl whereas Lady is actually a romantic female lead). When Lady is approached by her two best (male) friends in a very awkward (perhaps especially from a modern sensibility) but sweet scene where they offer to be her partner, Lady makes it clear that she doesn’t want or need a husband just for the sake of having a husband to make babies with -- her standing up for her own wants in this way doesn’t in the least turn into a Moral Stand that dominates the movie. Excellent music all the way through.

Oh, and this movie was my very first introduction, in early childhood, to the Italian language (”Bella Notte”), which some 25 years later sort became my second language of sorts.

Criticisms? Well, the baby was animated rather stiffly and unnaturally, but that was like half a minute of the movie at most. And there’s the whole segment with the Siamese cats, which produced a great song purely music-wise (fun fact: Peggy Lee provided the voices of the cats) but nowadays comes across as rather racist. I’m not entirely sure how I feel about it, but I will say that I’m sure in the minds of the creators this was no different than having animals of all other nationalities (Scottish, Russian, Mexican) appearing in the film with voices reflecting the respective accents.

*There may be a few exceptions, like Peggy, who seems to be modeled after the musician Peggy Lee and moves like a sexy human woman. The way that human sex appeal is conveyed through the animals’ movements in this movie is quite impressive: my mom confesses to having somewhat of a crush on Tramp growing up and not quite understanding how that could be possible when, well, he’s a dog.

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, 1954, and Old Yeller, 1957

I don’t want to say about these movies, as they don’t really fall under the category of animated classics. I just want to say that, while I saw each of them once growing up, on seeing them again I recognize each as a great movie in its own adult point of view way that is not necessarily very Disney-ish.

Sleeping Beauty, 1959

I think this was the movie I was watching at the time I decided it would be fun to write a bunch of mini-reviews for Tumblr, as my reactions were changing a lot as I was watching. I went into the movie very curious, because while I only remembered enough of the fairy tale story to know that it was another of the very simple ones, and I remembered the one song as a waltz by Tchaikovsky, and I knew I had seen the movie once (and probably only once) as a kid, I couldn’t remember anywhere near enough to possibly fill a full movie time. What was actually going to happen in this hour-and-a-quarter long film?

I wasn’t watching long before I came up with the description “spectacularly forgettable”, in part to justify why I’d managed to forget practically all of my one previous viewing. The story doesn’t have much substance and feels sillier than even the other fairy tale Disney plots, like even minor twinges of critical thought, even granting the magical rules of the universe, are liable to make the plot topple. There is some filler to flesh out the movie, but (unlike with Snow White’s dwarfs) none of it is as amusing as the creators seemed to think it was. The only characters with actual personality are rather boring -- the capers between the members of royalty and the jester are a bit on the annoying side in my opinion. Maleficent seems to have no motive whatsoever. She actually calls herself something like “the mistress of evil” later in the movie. This is pretty black-and-white even by Disney standards, where the bad guys usually at least want to think that they’re on the right side of things or justified in their aggressive behavior. Aurora (the title character) has the least personality of all the Disney princesses. Literally all I can say to describe her is that she has the Disney Princess Trifecta of characteristics: she has a good singing voice; she is friends with all the “nice” animals; and her only goal in life is to be reunited with her True Love who she met once for all of a few minutes. The reason why I couldn’t remember any songs other than the Tchaikovsky one is that there aren’t any.

The one thing I consciously really enjoyed while watching was the fact that the score throughout was Tchaikovsky; the idea of having one work of classical music as the entire score seems like a bold one for a Disney film. As I was digesting the movie afterwards (and watching the short documentaries supplied on Disney+ helped here!), I came to realize that this classical music backdrop was complimented in quite an interesting way by a fairly unique animation style. I had been disappointed by the animation early in my watching, disliking how a lot of the figures in the beginning castle scene (for instance, various people’s faces), looked very “flat” somehow. But I’ve come to see this as part of a style where everything looks almost like a series of cut-outs superimposed on each other, to incredibly beautiful effect in a lot of the outdoor scenes.

My conclusion? If you watch this the same way you watch most Disney animated movies -- focusing on plot, characterization, action, and meaning of the main story -- it will just be kind of forgettable at best. But if you watch it as more of a purely visual and musical piece of art without trying to make much “sense” out of it (so, more like I would watch a ballet), you may find it uniquely beautiful among Disney classics.

One Hundred and One Dalmations, 1961

Whew -- what a complete and utter contrast from its predecessor! I can hardly imagine a film that’s still distinctively Disney while being more different from Sleeping Beauty in every aspect.

I remember seeing One Hundred and One Dalmatians a handful of times in childhood (when I was around 5 and it had just come out on home video, my mom almost bought it for me but decided to go with Beauty and the Beast instead explaining that it had better music -- I grew up knowing the preview for Dalmatians that showed at the beginning of our Beauty and the Beast VHS than the dalmatians film itself). I remembered a number of scenes very distinctly, including a lot of the Horace and Jasper bickering and Cruella smashing one of their bottles of beer into the fire and knew Lucky’s line after getting stuck behind in the snow almost word for word, while I had entirely forgotten all of the country/farm characters and entire sequences involving them. I had forgotten, but soon remembered, the television scenes including the Kanine Krunchies jingle. (Some years later, I think as an older teenager, I read the original book with some interest.)

Although I wasn’t around in 1961, everything about this movie’s style strikes me as very contemporary -- the animation in particular seems like the current style for 60′s cartoons. Something about the dialog and humor feels that way as well, as though it closely represents a sort of 60′s young-people-in-London culture that I’ve never seen myself (I was struck for instance by Cruella being asked how she’s doing and cheerfully answering, “Miserable dahling as usual, perfectly wretched!”). It was a little strange and offputting to see television so prominently featured in Disney animation from so long ago, and to see such a decrepit bachelor pad (with the accompanying lifestyle and attitudes) as Horace and Jasper’s in a children’s movie. The crazy driving in snow at the end startled my adult sensibilities (as I now have some memorable experiences driving in snow) in a way that didn’t affect me as a child -- scenes like that just didn’t feel like Disney after having just watched all the previous films. All in all, these novel features made the whole movie a wild ride.

I’m bemused by the fact that, despite taking place in London (which I hadn’t remembered -- I thought it took place in America), the only accents which are fully British are those of the villains Cruella de Vil, Horace, and Jasper.

Main criticisms: I found all the stuff with Rolly being characterized by his body shape and only ever thinking about food to be in poor taste (although not surprising for the times). And while “Cruella de Vil” is a great jazz number, the movie has no other music to speak of -- my mom was quite right to choose Beauty and the Beast over it.

(I realized when finishing this review that this is the only one of all the movies in the list that I’d actually enjoy seeing again sometime soon. Not sure what to make of that. Something about it is more interesting than most of the others? Especially the human-centric parts?)

The Sword in the Stone, 1963

I never saw this movie until later childhood or maybe even early teenagerhood, when I quite liked it. On watching it again, I was overall pretty disappointed. This movie has some decent songs and some fun aspects to the story, but a lot of it is kind of weak and forgettable and it’s all just sloppily done.

The story has a clear moral message which is generally pro-education and about reaching one’s full potential, but in my eyes it comes out kind of muddled because the story shows Wart ending up as a legendary king only out of the arbitrary happenstance that that happens to be his divine destiny. Merlin’s motives seem kind of inconsistent as well, with him sometimes seeming to support Wart in his desire to become a squire, then flying off in a rage when Wart chooses squirehood over fulfilling a “greater” destiny, then joyfully returning after Wart pulls the sword from the stone and is now set on the fixed path to being king, even though this involved exactly zero change of attitude on Wart’s part. The message that actually comes across looks more like, “We have to just follow whatever fate has in store for us” than “We must strive to be the best we can be”. And, it arguably even comes across as subtly disrespectful to more mundane lifestyles and career paths.

The animation is not great by the high standard of full-length Disney features (I noted how I especially disliked how tears were shown). Wart’s voice seems to change a lot, sometimes broken and sometimes not yet broken. I found out after watching that this is because the character was played by three different actors, sometimes with more than one of those actors in the same scene! This was purportedly because the voice of the first actor cast for the role started to change, but then why does Wart sometimes sound like his voice has already changed anyway? Sloppiness all around.

Still, some parts of The Sword in the Stone are fun even if none of it is stellar, and it entertained me more when I was younger, so worth watching once, especially if you’re a kid, I guess?

Mary Poppins, 1964

I came into this one far more familiar with it than with most of the other Disney movies, including the ones I watched many times when I was young, so it feels a little strange to try to summarize a similar-length review of it. Mary Poppins is in my book without a doubt one of the top three Disney movies of all time, in some respects the very best, and certainly the masterpiece of Walt Disney himself, the culmination of literally decades of determination on his part to turn Pamela Travers’ children’s works into a movie. (I would feel sorrier for Travers about how strongly Disney twisted her arm to turn her books into a movie whose style was entirely antithetical to hers, if it weren’t for the fact that the Disney version of the story is just way better than her rather weak set of stories. I give Travers ample credit for having created an amazing character in the person of Mary Poppins, but for coming up with good stories, not so much.)

I didn’t see the full movie Mary Poppins until later childhood (although I knew many of the songs) and it quickly became a favorite of mine. I went a gap of a number of years without seeing it before I copied the soundtrack from someone when I was in college, which spurred me to go out and rent it (back when Blockbuster was a thing) and so I managed to reconnect with it at the age of 20. More recently I’ve become somewhat of a Mary Poppins enthusiast -- feeling pretty alone among my generation in this regard, with the possible exception of the theater subculture -- having seen probably most or all of the documentaries there are on its production and learned a ridiculous amount of trivia about it, not to mention knowing the whole soundtrack pretty much in my head.

Mary Poppins seems to be Disney’s longest children’s classic, at 2 hours and 19 minutes. All it lacks, really, is an animal-themed or classic fairy tale atmosphere and a proper villain. But what can you get out this movie? Stellar child acting (especially for that period) and excellent performances all around, apart from some awkward but endearing aspects of Dick Van Dyke’s acting (while his singing and physicality is superb). A complex and multi-layered story combining magic, comedy and a little tragedy, appreciable in equal measure from a child’s level and from an adult’s level. Revolutionary special effects which include the first extended hybrid live-action and animation sequence. Timeless words and phrases which have permanently entered the lexicon. One of my favorite extended musical sequence of all time in any movie (”Step In Time” takes up 8 minutes and change, and I’m glad they didn’t go with the “common sense” measure of cutting this “unnecessarily long” number). The Sherman brothers at their very best, in a musical soundtrack that easily scores in my top two out of all Disney movies (the other one being The Lion King). A beautiful message (among several big messages) about the little things being important (or at least, that’s a very crude summary), exquisitely encapsulated in the most beautiful song of the movie, “Feed the Birds” (this apparently became Walt Disney’s favorite song ever, and I’m pretty close to feeling the same way -- I’m determined that one day when I finally have a piano I’m going to learn to sing it along with the piano). I could go on and on here.

If I try really hard I can come up with the sole nitpick of feeling that maybe the parrot head on the umbrella’s handle shouldn’t only reveal itself as a talking parrot head in only one scene right at the very end -- this should have been shown at least once earlier. Even granting that, this film is still practically perfect in every way.

The Jungle Book, 1967

(Let’s get the Colonel Hath in the room out of the way first: “The Jungle Book” is a terrible title for a movie. You know, when you base a movie on a book you don’t have to give it the same title as the book...)

I saw The Jungle Book several times as a kid and, despite not considering it nearly as good as Mary Poppins, similarly reconnected with it in adulthood (particularly the soundtrack). Only several years ago I found myself thinking of getting hold of a double album of classic Disney songs that I thought I’d heard about but couldn’t seem to find online. It soon occurred to me that mostly what I really wanted was some of the songs of The Jungle Book, so I got that movie’s soundtrack instead. I soon learned for the first time that The Jungle Book’s songs were written by the Sherman Brothers*, precipitating an “Ah, that explains why I remember them as so good!” moment. (“I Wanna Be Like You” seems like the clear winner among the songs.) Of course hearing the soundtrack made me curious about the movie, which I did eventually get hold of several years ago; thus I had seen this film exactly once already since childhood.

It says a lot about the music and the overall technique behind this film that I still look back on it as one of the great classics, considering how weak the story is. In particular, I consider a story arc to be pretty flawed when characters that seem significant and/or memorable come in without really living up to their expected big role: the wolves who raised Mowgli play a crucial role in the beginning before more or less disappearing (and it doesn’t entirely make sense to me why Bagheera, rather than they, is guiding him to the man village), and King Louie (who is a well-formed character that I particularly enjoy watching) really ought to come back into the story later somehow (an alternate, and much more complex, ending had him make a reappearance). The villain Shere Khan is not especially well developed in terms of his character and motives, but I do enjoy his menacingly bass voice. Still, the voice acting, the action, the animation, and the overall setting are all very solid here.

I’ll end with some random observations about the song “That’s What Friends Are For”. I think the likeness of the vultures to the Beatles was mostly lost on me as a kid (along with the recognition that this movie came out in the Beatles’ heyday). More interestingly, even when I was old enough to understand how vultures eat, the fact that every single line of the song is a clever macabre double-entendre went completely over my head. I do think it was a very obvious mistake, by the Obvious Standards of Cinematography, to give Shere Khan the last line of the song and begin that line with the “camera” on him, rather than have his voice come in “off-camera” and Mowgli and the vultures looking thunderstruck before panning to him, but maybe I shouldn’t be pushing for overdone techniques here.

* An exception is “Bare Necessities”, which was written by Terry Gilkyson, the original songwriter Disney received submissions from, who wrote two hauntingly beautiful other numbers which were deemed not Disney-ish enough to be put in the film.

Some general stray observations:

These older Disney films love gags involving alcoholism and drunkenness, a bit of a questionable emphasis given that the audience is children. This trend continues into the 80′s at least, but I don’t think one sees it much in modern Disney movies.

Watching these animated films I often find myself flinching as characters’ heads smash into things or gigantic objects smash over their heads, feeling almost surprised when they come out of it pretty much fine. I guess this a staple element of cartoon action throughout the decades, but I can’t recall a more recent Disney animated film where we see this (guess I’ll soon find out!)

There is a certain style of vocal music, with unified rhythm and lyrics but complex harmony and a capella, which seems to have been immensely popular in the 40′s and 50′s and distinctively appears in practically every single one of the 40′s and 50′s films above (“You Can Fly” is a typical example). I recognize it also from some non-Disney-related old records my parents have that were passed down to them. I’m curious about whether this style has a name.

For years I thought the Sherman Brothers did only the soundtrack for Mary Poppins and Bedknobs and Broomsticks, only discovering they did The Jungle Book songs rather recently as I explained above. It turns out they were involved in most of the major Disney films around that period, including The Sword in the Stone and The Aristocats (although not its best-known number “Everybody Wants to Be a Cat”).

There is a particularly sad instrumental passage, played by the string section starting with a minor-key violin melody going downward and joined by lower string instruments, which I knew well from my Jungle Book soundtrack (partway through “Poor Bear”) but was surprised to hear in desperately sad moments of several of the other movies around that time (including One Hundred and One Dalmatians and Robin Hood, or at least a close variant of this passage with slightly different endings). I have no idea who wrote this or how it came to be reused so many times.

I knew the name Bruce Reitherman as the voice of Mowgli in The Jungle Book, but in watching all of these other features back to back I’ve noticed that there are some other Reithermans in the front credits of quite a few of them.

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