#tcba

[tcba]

From The River To The Sea, Palestine WILL Be Free.

Esims donation guide

Raindove Donation Guide

Funds For Displaced Families in Gaza

Menstrual kits to people in Gaza

Daily Clicks To Help Gaza

Masterlist of where to donate and what to sign

Palestinian Books And Poetry

Artists Against Apartheid [Google Drive]

BDS

Educate Yourself

Donate To Gaza Direct Aid

Prints For Palestine

Donate To Medical Aid For Palestine

Donate To The World Food Program

Donate To Doctor's Without Borders

Donate To UNRWA [USA link]

Donate To The PCRF

Operation Olive Branch

Tobefree-in-palestine

Fundraiser For Palestine

Don't Look Away. Ceasefire NOW.

If any of these links are fake and/or outdated please let me know. If anyone has any to add please do so.

#from the river to the sea palestine will be free #palestine #free palestine #gaza #free gaza #gaza strip #ceasefire #tcba #this could be anything #main 5 #tcbart #lillian

[rozaceous]

mariko, violence, and the meta of violence in fanfiction

ok so it’s apparently not enough that i write the most indulgent kind of fic, but now i’m writing an essay about my fic. this got so long, abt 2k total. if i said sorry, it’d be insincere, but at least no one is making you read it?

i want to piggy-back off the post i made earlier this week where i was talking about how mariko was not well-adjusted, and was, in fact, doing extremely poorly. what this post turns into, however, is an analysis not only of mariko’s relationship to violence and her subsequent trauma, but a meta-analysis of how violence is treated in canon more broadly, and how that ends up translating into fic. because, and i mean this in a way that is distinctly not about tooting my own horn, i’m approaching violence with a different lens than what i've found in a majority of fic, but also in a way that is unique to SI fic.

‘to continue being alive is also an art’ starts in medias res ch 1 with mariko haring off to the confrontation at the bridge in wave. we find out later, she’s fresh from just having killed people for the first time. kakashi and mariko have their little chat abt it in ch 2, but it’s treated as done and resolved afterwards. it was self-defense, she was protecting others, she was justified and shouldn’t lose sleep over it.

mariko also kills during the chuunin exams itself (members of the sound team) and during the finals (she on-screen beheads a foreign ninja). there’s a sort-of killing w the itachi puppet in ch 15, and a mention of sasori, but otherwise we don’t get any particular details of her killing people until the events of ch 17, where she kills danzo and the rest of the elder council, as well as whoever was caught in the bombings. (i’m going to word-of-god this for everyone right now and tell you that there were people caught in the bombings, just like i will confirm that she’s killed other people in the interim of the time skip.)

from a writing-level, i approached violence in a very specific way. most of the violence is off-screen and mentioned as a retrospective; what occurs on-screen i tried to keep brief and matter-of-fact. graphic, maybe, but not gory. i also try not to play violence as something that’s done for laughs, like how sakura will beat naruto up in canon when he annoys her. (we’ll come back to this.) and a lot of this has to do with how mariko herself deals with violence.

i mentioned in that previous post, that mariko grows up in a militaristic culture where violence is a norm and acceptable, as someone who is not actually a kid who can be acculturated into that thinking in the same way. mariko comes from a culture and personal history where interpersonal violence is abhorrent. she tries to duck out of canon events and any requirement of violence on her own part by being a medic, but the team assignments (the narrative/me, if we’re wanting to get meta abt it lol) prevent her from achieving this relatively more peaceful role.

when mariko gets assigned to team seven, she has to get real comfortable with violence real fast. she’s already befriended naruto (and hahahaha you may remember that she does so by punching a guy 🙂) and she cares about kakashi and sasuke. she’s come to the realization that this is her lot, these are her people, they are her responsibility. as she notes in ch 2, she’s not good enough to solve her problems without killing. this is also to say, she’s not good enough to problem-solve without violence. it’s beyond her capacity and skill when the stakes are as high as they are. let’s also consider that caring about everyone is a luxury that mariko cannot afford, widespread mercy is potentially a death sentence, and so she narrows that care down to a handful of people. and so if she’s taking the well-being of her teammates as her ultimate good, she will absolutely let the ends justify the means.

added onto any personal sentiment is that, as far as mariko knows, if anyone on team seven dies, the entire world is fucked.

mariko one hundred percent and sincerely believes that violence is wrong. even when it’s justified, self-defense, etc., mariko views it as ugly. there may be situations where she assigns herself less blame, but she is always blaming herself for being too weak to find another way, because her (somewhat unrealistic) view is that violence is the sign that you’ve run out of other options to get your way.

however, with the stakes being as they are, and with the world she’s in treating violence as a form of currency, mariko sees violence as a necessity.

so we can see the dissonance, right? she has to use violence to protect not only herself, but the people she loves, and the entire world. and mariko’s fundamental optimism is that people are worth helping and that the world is worth saving, because if she doesn’t believe in that with her whole heart, she’d literally just curl up and die. she wants to be kind and to help and nurture and build, but her most effective tools—once again, she views using violence as a failure—are the ones she hates the most. but she has to use them. more, she has to be very, very good with them.

this isn’t a small-level dissonance, it’s a diametric opposition. so in terms of narration, mariko can’t think too much about the violence she’s enacted because it would destroy her. she knows this about herself. she hates it. but it’s necessary. and so she doesn’t think about it. and if she does think about it, she’s very clinical and writes it off as unfortunate and necessary and—well, it’s done, no use crying over it now. she’s disassociated herself from it. and i wanted that perspective reflected in the way i wrote about violence.

the other aspect of how i wanted to handle violence is from how i approach the canon. we’ve all read the fics where konoha is a grimdark dictatorship, with death and torture around every corner. and, uh, it is? it’s a fascist war machine, plainly. it’s child soldiers and state-sanctioned assassination baked into the world economy? there’re multiple instances of genocide? it’s a fucking nightmare.

i, personally, am not able to brush aside those things. i like the meta and the reading-into-things and the what-if’s that happen when you don’t take things at face value. so for me, the writer, i can’t glorify violence. there’s a reason i wrote mariko walking through the uchiha compound in the way that i did. so i’m not going to write like killing a thousand people in one go is anything but horrifying (staring at you, minato), even if i’m not interested in directly interrogating every particular instance of violence within the narrative.

but canon doesn’t approach it from this angle. for canon, this is all the quirky backdrop, and violence and killing are bad, but very few people tend to die in a meaningful sense. violence doesn’t often have lasting consequences. (this is, also, the evolution that Naruto goes through as a series, where it starts off as a critique of the state and then turns into bootlicking, but that’s another meta that plenty of others have written better than i can.) in canon, the ability to do high-damage moves is considered a cool power-up. in fact, your power level is directly correlated with your physical danger level—ie, your ability to do violence.

moreover, casual violence is funny in canon. (we’re back to sakura beating up naruto and it being treated as a joke.) these things are entirely the conceit of reading/watching canon, and it’s what we do with every piece of media. this isn’t a judgment! we are suspending our disbelief and buying into the premise of the story that gets told. and i would hardly have written over 50k of naruto fanfic if i didn’t find it innately compelling and, yes, fun.

so this is where the presentation of violence in fanfiction can get dicey, because not every author is approaching canon with the same spirit that canon itself has. i also want to make the blanket statement that i don’t think any one interpretation is right or wrong, it’s that they’re all interpretations. i’ve read and liked fics of all varieties; i’m not morality policing, i’m trying to place myself and my own fic within a broader phenomenon of how fics present the morality of violence. i don’t personally care what one fic thinks is morally good, nor do i think that a particular presentation necessarily corresponds with what the author thinks in real life, or even that a presentation has to be consistent from fic to fic. these are all lenses/perspectives, and fanfic is inherently about playing with the little details of canon and going, “And?”

so on one end, you’ll have some fics that 100% correspond with the attitude towards violence that canon has and aren’t too interested into getting into the grittier moral quandaries of the canon past what canon presents as good or bad. on the other, you’ll have other fics that will rip the morals of canon to shreds. again, i like both! it always depends what the focus of your story is!

i feel like i’m somewhere in the middle. i feel like a lot of naruto fics commit hard to either of the above scenarios from the start and i...don't (as one commenter pointed out). there's a level of progression I'm trying to portray. and, i have to say, part of the comment that @vermillioncrown left on ch 17 really resonated: “She's sunk as low as them, she's just as fucked up in this second life despite knowing another moral framework and society. And she's mud-wrestling them down at ground level lol.”

mariko ‘knows better’ but isn’t better. she doesn’t feel like she’s a good person. arguably, she isn’t a good person. she has enough of an outsider perspective to see the system for what it is, but she is still inherently within the system. she is absolutely playing the game, and doesn’t have any moral high ground. she kills, she lies, she deceives, she betrays. she harms people. her intentions might be noble, but as tumblr loves to say abt causing others harm: intention isn’t magic. mariko wants better and is trying to achieve it, but she’s in the system and can’t get out of it because we all inherently live in a society, and removing yourself from society isn’t exactly as feasible as our ideals might like.

and because tcba is, mostly, from mariko’s perspective, her understanding of violence colors the narrative. because mariko is an SI/OC, her perspective is one that is ALWAYS going to be a negotiation of ‘canon at face value’ and ‘me personally doing an analysis.’ and i think that’s really cool and interesting, which is why i’m doing it!

but—and this is not me throwing shade or getting mad or singling anyone out—this is also a take that is a little counter to broader fandom habit that aligns with ‘omg she was so badass when she killed that guy!’ or ‘yes! fuck it up!’

reiterating that i’m not trying to scold or slight anyone, bc this is the ‘canon at face value’ take, where we are supposed to see these things as badass and praise-worthy, and often these are climactic scenes where mariko is ostensibly cast as the righteous victor! and if people don’t see what i’m trying to do as different to that take, that’s also on me as the writer, especially bc, as i already said, this is a story that is trying to negotiate those different perspectives on violence. but i also want to point out that there’s more than just ‘violence as badassery’ happening. this is also ‘violence as tragedy.’

and since the meaning and role of violence isn’t a theme that’s going to go anywhere any time soon, i thought it was worth discussing.

#this is not to say that i think the narrative doesn't reward mariko for mercy or generosity. zabuza and haku as the prime examples ofc #and i hope i made this clear? it got so long. #kudos also must go to verm bc it's our discussions that always filter through to everything and some of this was probably their words #but i so would love to talk more abt this if anyone is so inclined #tcba #tcba meta #rozisms

[arc-haism]

"The stalks of gladioli in full bloom, fully visible when he shoves down his arm warmer, fill him with shock, yes, but mostly with relief.

For her part, Mariko looks at the black tulips lining her upper arm and is so obviously flabbergasted that Sasuke would probably sneer if he didn't feel the same way on a deeply spiritual level."

—the universe outside us chapter 1, by @rozaceous

#my art #gift art #tcba #when i saw there was new tcba content i screamed #i love so much that the soulmate marks only bloom at a relationship's turning point #“a decision that binds you and another person irrevocably” #the poetry of it all #finally drew mariko with another character! #...just realizing that i probably drew the gladioli upside down #i pretend i do not see it

[chalk-drawings-on-the-sidewalk]

my favorite mentally ill ramboy (with bigger horns cause i like ram horns) @tcba

SUPPORT THE TCBA COMIC RIGHT FUCKING NOW

#my chalk drawings ✍️ #lorenzo tcba #tcba #lorenzo minch #is that how you spell his fucking name??? #this could be anything

[djgirlslove]

n-e-wayz i just wanted 2 say: if u eva see a webcomic called "this could be anything" or "TCBA" then STAY TEH FUCK AWAY!!!!!!! the creator is a babyfur, 4lung fan, bi gay, and general creepo, nd it haz a laaaaaawt of slurs nd a ton of liek. generally weird shit

^^^ Creatorz website btdubz

also dis is TEH FURST THING U C ON TEH WEBSITE i feel liek dats already a red flag omegalul

DJ Yuri OUT!!!!!!!

Edit: teh creator is also common in teh moshi monsters and sparklecare fandom!!!! Examplez below so u can watch out 4 him

ALSO!!!! ONE OF HIS FRIENDZ MADE A COMIC @/cody-kicks-the-bucket WHICH UH. TEH FIRST THING ON TEH BLAHG IS. DIS.

#tcba #this could be anything #blocklist #in case any of u were wundering wut my DNI meant.... well there u go XD #EDIT: adding teh tagz this guy is popular in #sparklecare #moshi monsters

[cartoongore]

#ART #FURRY #TCBA

[nyanyasong]

happy pooltoy ....

#happy burfdae #tcba #this could be anything #my art

[the-chaos-goose]

I saw one of my plushies and did a thing

#t slur #reclaimed slur #confuzzlementation #oc: String Cheese #tcba #tcba fanart #tcba oc #flashing #flash warning #ask to tag

[goodburger1997]

JIMMY'S ART SUMMARY OF 2023

2023 absolutely was the year of the Jimmy. We had an art renaissance, start of TCBA, freakification, and i think i found inner peace! Wowie! Anyways you dont care about that you're here for the ART SUMMARY!!!!!!

JANUARY:

Yeah this was all I could find XDDDD January was a slow month, and my Papa Louie hyperfixation was eating me alive XDDD

FEBURARY:

another rpetty slow month, but also during ym PVZ hyperfixation XD who remembers that?

MARCH:

A lot happened in March, namely my 17th birthday, the strat of my freak transformation, and of course I got kicked out of my dad's house and was homeless for a while until i moved to New York on April 2nd. But most importantly, its when I finally decided to get up and make TCBA a real webcomic. Wow!

APRIL:

This is when most of TCBA production started! Unfortunately it means I dont have many drawings from this era except for ref sheets and this! This was also when I developed my Weezer autism :3

MAY:

Ah, May. This was the month that I realized I was a babyfur, and furthermore got my 4Lung spinterest! this was also the release date of the first act of the first chapter of TCBA, May 17th!

JUNE:

A pretty slow month, I forgot what happened in June to be honest XD other than being at my cousins for a while.

JULY:

This was literally all I drew in July that I can find. Huh.

AUGUST:

This is when I REALLY started to experiment with my art! And also when my Andrew WK spinterest began! And also when school started. So. This was when the JUnkies became more of a family, and when Act 2 released and when act 3 started development!

SEPTEMBER:

Oh boy was this a month! I developed spinterests in Sparklecare, Preeny Has To Repeat 6th Grade, AND Molly's Future Mishaps! Hot damn!!!!! This is when i really REALLY started to experitment wiht my art, with pieces taking inspiration from some artists, and some where I just got silly with it!!!

OCTOBER:

Man, what even happened in October? I came out as transage, but unfortunately on Halloween an event happened [that I don't want to talk about] affected how i made my art for the rest of the year. I don't want to talk about it much more

NOVEMBER:

November was the month of general not-fun-stuff. I don't like November.

DECEMBER:

AND FINALLY WE REACHED DECEMBER!!!!!!! GOOOOOODBYE 2023 I WILL NOT MISS YOU ONE SINGLE BIT!!!!!!!!!!!!! ok maybe i'll miss you a little bit, but honestly i have hopes for the new year!!!! I think things will be better then :3 Thank you to all my friends, and my quippies, and especially the junkies who all stuck with me through thick and thin throughout the year, my highs, lows, and even my extreme lows [Weird Al thirst era]. I love you all no matter what. Here's to better days and sweeter nights in the new year!

and remember,

In case anything happens I love you

#my art #2023 #tcba #sparklecare #sparklecare hospital #papa louie #plants vs zombies #i love how 90% of this is tcba #eyestrain #blood #nudity

[ilikewritingandspeedcore]

BREAKING: Local TCBA fan makes art of Lorenzo Minch. The fan in question sucks ass cheeks at making art. Locals are advised to be weary of this fan, as the risk of Lorenzo jumpscares are skyrocketing as of this hour. More at 9, I'm Wanna B. Aheero, and this is Call Out News™

LORENZO JUMPSCARE MATHAFACKA!!!!

Making this was a struggle and a half and it still looks like shit :(

#tagging for visibility #i guess #tcba #lorenzo tcba #this could be anything #tcba fanart

[moved-please-leave-me-alone]

Happy Schizophrenic Boy Saturday

#tcba chapter 1 spoilers #this could be anything #tcba #jimmy.txt

[tcba]

More webkinz style stuff :3

pssst... hey, if you wanna help me out and get some cool webkinz style art of your OC, dm transsexualfreak on discord!! 15$ for a standard pet portrait of your OC, and 20$ for something like this!

#tcba #this could be anything #main 5 #tcbart #happy burfdae #webkinz

[rozaceous]

pushing my way through the next ch of tcba, as effortful as walking into the wind during a snowstorm, but what gives me consistent delight is how much kabuto and sasuke can't stand each other

#mariko is ofc the other sasuke wacko #and this is team taka/hebi+kabuto witnessing sasuke and mariko have a Moment #tcba #if someone wants to prod me pls do so my brain is melting

[swagginess]

HAPPY via @sillyfunny

#my art #3d art #jimmeh #<-new tag just for you jimmy. #tcba #happy burfdae

[demoninc]

@tcba This Guyyyyyyyyy

#Tildeart #TCbA

[cartoongore]

#ART #FURRY #TCBA