#that comic had some of the best things i've drawn and also some stuff i hate

[hollow-head]

Hello! My friend is new to the fandom and i've been showing her my collection of favourite works and found out that your beautiful comic Two Halves is gone from tha ao3. May I ask if you posted it somewhere alse instead or are planning to? Thank you very much, I love your work.

I deleted it off ao3 because there were parts of it I didn't like any more and I was embarrassed about having a poorly drawn sex comic on the internet. I don't know what I'll do with it. Sorry for the inconvenience.

#asks #that comic had some of the best things i've drawn and also some stuff i hate

[factual-fantasy]

27 asks! Thank you for all the kind words! :}}}💙💙💙

@network-warrior-01

Funnily enough I have been thinking a lot recently about making my own web comic, right here on Tumblr! I have a lot of concepts, although I don't know if I'd make a separate comic just for the Factual Fam. I feel like they kind'a already have a web comic..? In a way.?

And I feel like if I made a story driven comic about us, separate from the ones I'm already making.. It would feel.. idk, off? My lil guys are meant to be with me, going with the flow of whatever's going on with my blog/my life. This is their story. Their lives with me are their story. If that makes sense?? I'm not sure if I have any other ideas in mind for them.. what would their world even look like if I wasn't in it or if it was different from what they have now..??

But on the other note, could you imagine? Me? Making a 100% original comic? With my own original characters, story, and world? Its a daunting thought. The sheer amount of stuff I would have to plan and the amount of angst I could inflict on ya'll would be insane <XDD

And yeahh,, the fanart thing would be a problem... <:/

The four of them sit together at the base of my stuffed animal pile. Nice and cozy! :}}

@cudlycorncornsworthcoberson

Actually the quilts are rather deceiving, they're just for show! <XD Bibi was conscious and could talk when he was still a picture. And he became a drawing without the use of a quilt. Jangles had a quilt but was still a picture. He was later "brought to life" with my pen!

The thing about all that life stuff, quilts, pens.. its honestly just for show. Those things don't bring them to life, I do. The flashy ways I do it are just for fun <XD

And about Cici! She was talking! And I think kind'a the idea as to why Jangles could hear them both was not only for the spooks. But becuase Cici and Gerald's concepts were so strongly developed at that point they were basically fully fleshed out characters. Their bodies just didn't exist yet. Hence the "I cant see" I hadn't stitched her button eyes on yet!

So basically their personalities and designs had been thought out. They just weren't there yet. But their presence was still so strong.. And Jangles being a picture kind'a bridged the gap between the concept world and the drawn one. If that makes sense??

He could still hear them after he was drawn though, I guess its an ability that he kept even after being art-ified..? <XD My lore's a little whack- its best not to look too far into it!

Also thank you! I'm glad you liked it all! :DD

Like I've said before, the best way to show you care is with comments. That's what would make me the happiest. :)

And sure I will! Some comics and random cameos here and there.. I already have some comics in mind.. 👀👀

I haven't seen the Puss in boots movie, but something tells me you're right XD

Hmm.. I don't actually know.. That's a good question :0

I guess they would react the same if us humans found a group of people like that. And what would humans do? Probably report it to someone?? <XD

@minophlia

XDD Thank you! I'm so glad you like me and what I make!! :DDD

Giant scary abstracted monsters that attack anything in the vicinity?? Nope nope nope!! Jevil would FREAK OUT and Immediately warp them out of there with a mirror. Cant risk anyone getting hurt!

That's not a half bad idea! :0 I'll see if I can remember to get around to it <XD

Also thank you so much!! :DD

All I know of punch out is from smash bros. And I got beef with Little Mac. Anytime anyone plays as him they always kick my butt XDD

I imagine Jevil wouldn't tolerate it much. If Jax was being a butt towards Jevil that's one thing. But as soon as he starts to direct that to anyone else in the group- especially Seam.. Then there's gonna be a problem. :x

Seam would be annoyed. But its likely the same as Jevil. He doesn't really care about his antics, but as soon as its directed at Jevil or someone else.. well then there's a problem-

@abaroo

Thank you so much!! :DD And of course I held his widdle hand! He needed the emotional support! He was making the biggest decision he's ever made in his life- <XD

And you're welcome! <XD I'm so glad you liked it! :}}

No no no no that is the wrong habitat for me!

I need to be put in a cardboard box with all the flaps open except for 1. There needs to be a grassy/muddy floor and a bowl of water.

Then put this box out in your backyard in the pouring rain. Don't give me anything to warm myself, and only feed me refrigerated watermelon. Now THAT'S what I call a comfy habitat!

@multiverse-city

Thank you so much! :DD I appreciate the compliments!! :}}

Although I'm sorry to say that I don't want me and my critters to show up as background characters.. <:( Sorry!

He probably has a couple of times yeah. Maybe right after big events or shows he got pushed over the edge and crashed.. :(

He might..? But I think Freddy would want to give Bonnie space.. Becuase when Bonnie is overwhelmed, that's what he wants. Is silence and space. And when Freddy is around Bonnie he would try to be really quiet and not move around too much..

So many siblings...

My only thought is that my version of the Daycare Attendant would better fit the role of Kaufmo. :0 The idea that he suddenly disappears, only to reemerge as a monster..

That, and I would shoe horn a bunch of unnecessary angst in there XDD

:DD Thank you so much!! :}}}

WAAAAA THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!! Its so nice to hear that even though you knew nothing about the characters, you still loved my comic!! :DD And thinking my critters have depth?? And feel human?? WAAA THANK YOUUU!!! I try to give them all separate personality's and really put some emotion into them, I'm so glad you've noticed! It seems to be working! :DD

And again a thousand thank you's for the compliments to my sona! :DD The bloodied hands and dripping face getting worse and worse as the comic progresses to show my exhaustion,, even the comically placed hands! I put a lot of heart into all of it and I'm so happy that you've noticed!!

Thank you for all the kind words! Sending platonic love right back at ya!! :DDD 💙💙💙

@anartistwhowrites

THANK YOU!! :DDD

<XD Noooo don't cry! Thank you though, I'm glad you liked it! :))

@beryl-shade

One word; Horrified.

Aww, I'm sorry it made you cry! <:(( But I'm glad you liked it none the less! <:}}}

@badlyblurry

Darn <XD I had it match my Tumblr's theme.

@crimson-thinker

My main thing is it just feels like they "stole" what I made and drew it without asking me. And then turned around and gave it to me as a gift. Which obviously isn't what fanart actually is. But that's just how it feels.

But hey, your ask has many more reasons for me to not like fanart <XDD

The idea I had was they can use Power-Ups purely becuase they're human. Like, something about just being human gives you access to the power the Power-Ups have. .

Do you have a different idea though? I'd love to hear it! :)

#my response #fnaf security breach #undertale #deltarune #jevil and seam #octonauts #factual fam #the amazing digital circus #super mario bros

[sen-ya]

@heart-pirates-week || Day 3 || Penguin

Peng gets a third thing I had a lot of thoughts abt him while I made Heart Pirates Week stuff. Puttin it here for now so I can add it to the queue, I'll put it on Ao3 when I'm not on vacation lol. Previous Peng comics I've done (which I will also link once I am not on vacation lol) recommended before this, but not necessary.

take care

Summary:

“Where’re Beps and Cap?” “Dunno, think they went a few villages over looking for some nerd shit.”

or

teen peng & shachi start unpacking a few things

Warnings: implied child abuse/neglect

Word Count: 1669

“Where’re Beps and Cap?”

Penguin glanced around the open room the four teens had been calling home. It was run down, the wood floor scuffed and littered with what debris Law hadn’t already cleared. He was the only one who seemed invested in tidying the place so the process had become long and drawn out, with periodic full days dedicated to cleaning where Law would use what he could of his powers to move heavy things and direct the other three on how to best scrub the floor or mend the roof. What was left now was one large room that was half-tidy, loosely segmented into a corner for sleeping, a corner for eating, a corner for lounging, and a corner full of books and papers for Law and Bepo’s research. 

“Dunno, think they went a few villages over looking for some nerd shit,” Shachi shrugged from his spot in the lounging area. He took a long drag of the joint he was holding before holding it up as an offer. Wordlessly, Penguin made his way to sit beside him and easily took the smoke. Shachi sniffed and pushed his sunglasses up on his head, using them to hold back his bangs which he’d been meaning to cut for months at this point. He was crouched over some papers, clearly stolen from the research corner and flipped to their blank sides. He was scribbling flowing patterns, his hand turned black from the charcoal he sketched with. 

Penguin tilted his head, leaning in to get a better look. Shachi cast him a sideways glance. “Thinkin’ about our Jolly Roger,” he explained, turning the page so his friend could see better. “Cap gave me some ideas he had, hearts and shit like that. Real creative.” He huffed a laugh. Strewn across the page were decorative hearts, their lines swirling in where the curves met. Penguin smiled warmly at the drawings, his finger hovering over a few while he ghosted the outlines, careful not to touch the charcoal. Shachi held his head a little higher with pride at the approval.

“But this ain’t it,” he proclaimed with excitement, turning to grab a few papers he’d tossed to the side. He spread them out in front of them messily, showing off five or six pages of simplified, wide smiles. “Cap said hearts and you know what he was thinkin’.” Penguin gave a knowing nod. “So I was thinkin’ about that story he told us, the way that guy smiled at him and whatever. He was even smilin’ a little thinking about it. Anyway. Think he’ll like ‘em?”

“Yeah. Thoughtful,” Penguin beamed. Shachi scoffed and rolled his eyes, shoving his shoulder into his friend a little harder than he needed to. Penguin shoved him right back, and before long they were pushing each other back and forth, snickering as they play fought. 

“Don’t say dumb shit like that,” Shachi huffed, though it was clear he was pleased that the other boy could tell he’d spent time on his little project. He gave Penguin a final shove on his head, leaving a nearly solid black handprint on his hat. That only made Shachi’s grin widen and he snatched the hat away.

“What—!” Penguin lunged for it, Shachi quickly scrambling to his feet and running across the room.

“Calm down, you don’t need it right now!” Shachi laughed, turning on the faucet of the sink in their ‘eating’ corner. The delay in the water actually coming out was such that Penguin was able to cross the room and very nearly reclaim the hat before the other boy shoved it under the icy stream, rinsing the charcoal off his hands and the hat in the same go.

“Yes I do,” Penguin pouted, arms tight across his body with his chin pressed firmly into his chest. 

Shachi rolled his eyes, turning the water off and slinging the hat over the faucet. He flicked his wet hands at his friend’s face, causing him to startle backwards and look up. Their eyes met and Shachi frowned at the shame making a home on Penguin’s face. “Seriously?” he asked, a little hurt. “It’s just me.” 

Penguin’s gaze dropped, his hand shooting up to cover his right eye. The burn and accompanying scar that was there was long healed, leaving a distinct gap in his eyebrow and redness around his ever swollen eye. The iris was clouded, he hadn’t seen out of it in a few years at this point. All he offered as a response was a small shrug before beginning to step away. 

He didn’t make it far. Shachi’s hands, still icy from the tap, wormed their way to Penguin’s cheeks. His grip was firm as he forced eye contact. 

“You don’t gotta cover your face all the time,” he said sternly. Penguin tried to look around, desperately wanting to be anywhere but here. “I’m right! Don’t act like I’m not. Why are you ashamed of this stupid thing?” He jutted his chin towards the scar. Penguin only clawed at Shachi’s hands, trying his best to squirm away. 

The subject had come up a handful of times since it’d happened, but each time his apparent discomfort had gotten the other boy to drop the subject. Maybe it was because they were a little older now, or maybe it was because they were a little intoxicated, but this time Shachi didn’t back down. “It’s ‘cause you got it for me, isn’t it?”

Penguin’s good eye blew wide. “No,” the word was choked. “No, no.” His hands shot up, mirroring the gesture Shachi was holding firm. He shook his head as much as he could in the other’s grasp, his eye squeezing shut. An image sprung to his mind, one of a much younger ginger haired boy, stomach growling. He was a ball of well deserved anger, tightly wound and never afraid to spring. He understood when Penguin was quiet, knew that well fed and well cared for had different meanings. So of course Penguin had to squirrel some of that food away to the only person he felt understood him. Alone and in need — of care, of warmth, of companionship. 

There was one thing he would never regret, and that was the reason behind his injury.

But that didn’t make him proud of it. Didn’t make the waves of powerlessness the scar brought on any easier to weather. Didn’t make him feel less that he should have left sooner, didn’t make him feel less weak for not being able to fight back. There were so many things tied up in what he saw when he looked in a mirror. It was easier to pretend it wasn’t there. Hide it away to avoid people staring in a way that reminded him they could see it. 

Shachi had a tear in the corner of his eye, and if it weren’t for that anyone would have thought he was absolutely livid. But Penguin knew better, and he felt his heart fracturing as he recognized guilt in his friend’s stare. “I’d do it again,” he muttered. Then, confidently, “I’d do it a million times if it meant you’re taken care of.”

Shachi’s eyesbrows knit together even tighter as the tear fell free, and after that they kept coming. “I told you he’d kick your ass,” he squeaked.

“Didn’t care.”

“You fucking should have.”

Another rigid shake of the head. 

“You’re only a year older than me,” Shachi tried. “I don’t need taking care of.”

At that Penguin blinked, considered it for a moment. “I know,” he said carefully. “…But I want to take care of you.”

Shachi studied his face, confused. Penguin knew he was doing it again, giving his friend that look. The one he knew gave him away, the one he was certain Shachi had yet to find a name for. “Actually,” Penguin muttered, swallowing nervously. “I think…?” He looked around, confidence wavering. He screwed his eyes shut to make it easier and blurted, “I think I wanna kiss you. Can I?”

Silence.

Too long of a silence.

After what felt like ages he cracked his eye open and he could see Shachi’s gears turning. There wasn’t hesitance, per se, but questions he seemed to be working through in his mind rapid fire. Finally, he tilted his head, gave a shrug.

“Sure.”

It was quick, awkward, new. 

When it was over both of them dropped their hands back to their sides, studying the person in front of them. Penguin’s heart thrummed, and he smiled listlessly. As Shachi pressed his lips together in a tight line, evaluating the situation, he realized he couldn’t recall ever seeing such a grin on his friend’s face. After a few more moments of consideration he offered, “I think I liked that.”

Before either could think on it more their front door slammed open, Law and Bepo strolling in. “Yeah, just put them on my desk,” Law was saying, nodding to the appropriate corner over the stack of books he had in his hands. Behind him, Bepo carried twice as many.

Shachi leaned to the side to look around Penguin. “Sup nerds?” he called. Law flipped him off in response.

“The woman at the library was so nice!” Bepo cooed, easily sliding his book stack where Law had asked. “She saw how much we got through while we were there, so she let us borrow twice as many books.”

“I’m more surprised that they had this much worth reading,” Law mused. He sounded calm, but it was clear to the other boys that he was just as giddy about the development as Bepo. 

“What are they?” Shachi made his way to their corner, carelessly picking up a book to flip through. Law snapped at him to be careful, and quickly the three of them started to stir up a commotion.

Penguin sighed a chuckle, hanging back to watch the show as he gave himself a moment to consider the afternoon. 

Yeah, he decided. He thought he liked it too.

#my art #one piece #heart pirates #heart pirates week #one piece penguin #one piece shachi #one piece bepo #one piece law #trafalgar law #trafalgardwaterlaw #my fics

[where-does-the-heart-lie]

aha,,, I had this really in-depth thing I wrote about how much I like your art,,, and the first half, maybe even first 2/3 got deleted,,, I was so excited writing it, I have no idea what it all even contained anymore,,,

So... the first paragraph after this here is rewritten from what I could remember writing the first time. I know it's not as in-depth as it originally was. Hopefully it still gets the depth of what I want to say across... The second paragraph is what DIDN'T get deleted. Aaaa

I only just recently found you and started following you, but I have to say, your art and comics and writing for the ASL brothers is just. So unbelievably good. You're up there in my favorites. Top three. Top two even. The way you write them is like watching a group of close friends interacting in real life, down to the silliness and shenanigans and inside jokes and abrupt changes in topic or mood in a conversation, including superficial changes (one that comes to mind is when Ace goes something like "I'll bet ONE MILLION DOLLARS" or some incredibly large number, really intensely suddenly, in response to Luffy's saying he'd be $20 or something, and then there's a beat, and then Luffy is like "$20 is fine :)" and Ace is just like "Alright :)". That kind of thing is something Ive had happen, something I've seen happen to others... but I've never seen it written/drawn so well.) Everything about their interactions is so incredibly natural, so full of life. Every time I read one of your comics I'm in constantly in awe and taking mental notes. Well. Okay, no, that's a lie. I WISH I were taking mental notes, but I get so caught up reading because it flows SO smoothly that I forget to.

And that's another thing!! How the way you do paneling and story beats in your comics makes reading while also visualizing movement and transitions so seamless. It's like, the visual-narrative equivalent of a hot knife through butter. I've read plenty of comics-- from novice to professional-- that have really clunky paneling and/or pacing. And similarly, I've read as many that let you read everything easily, but it's like, TOO easy, and there's no weight drawing your eyes to the actual art or keeping them there. And I've seen comics that are somewhere between these two, but still don't feel like they have a good flow. (All this as passive observation, I'm not one to actively look to critique something.) Anyway, what I'm saying is, the way you set up your comics-- the art, the paneling, the pacing, the speech bubbles, the shots, EVERYTHING-- makes them just. MM!! An absolute frickin delight to read. And it's combined with some of the best, most natural-feeling writing I've ever had the pleasure of reading. You balance everything so well. In this age of being desensitized to humor online, I must say, the silliness in parts of the Water Is Thicker Than Blood comic make me genuinely grin and even laugh to myself alone in my room. It feels so real, so genuine, so... I'm running out of words. I'm sorry. I just... REALLY love how you make stuff. I want you to know that I'm a big fan, and, even though I'm older than you I'm learning a lot, and your stuff is so well-done. I hope this isn't too strange, aha... if it is, I apologize. I got a little intense

Oh woweewowee!!!!!!

Thank you for enjoying how i depict them! I really enjoy drawing them as realistic as i can. I really want people to understand them how i do in my head, and im glad it comes off perfectly because i love these little gremlins! And it really is surprisingly easy to think up situations of them being little dumbasses together :) just put them in situations, think about the ways any normal person could possibly react to the information thats given, scrap all that, use the outlier, and bam! That’s a bonafide ASL dynamic right there!

Thats really nice of you to say how you like how i panel my comics because thats one of the things im a bit self conscious of, truthfully. My formatting isnt as neat or polished as other comics are, and i really dont care to change that, but its nice to know that there is still charm and interest in my style of comics.

I get what you mean with the being desensitized to humor online nowadays. Idk what about it but its kinda hard to get me to full on laugh at memes like i used to. But i really enjoy putting in gags that i think and I chuckle to myself about for a while after i thought of it. The “that doesnt taste anything like ass” gag got me chuckling for so long to myself while i was at work. Just like,,, the shock and awe that Sabo is in from having witnessed that is so funny to me, i dont think that gag will ever get old in my head.

That’s really cool that me just goofing around can be a learning opportunity to people :0 ive never even considered that could be the case

Not at all! Thanks so much for your thoughts and opinions! This is very heartwarming and im very happy i could produce something thats so meaningful to others :)

Thanks for the ask, too :D

#ask reply #@findmeabowloftrash-blog #long post

[kachimera]

1, 4, 13, 24 (choose your fave <3)

*sigh* i've been meaning to be more varied with my fandom posts but. Yea castlevania again sorry not sorry

1) OTP?:

Maleon and Saraleon. Idk what can i say that i haven't said already? The pure love and affection, the devotion, the betrayal. My mans Leon got the best gf and the worst bf of all time and the repercussions of their fallout lasted almost a thousand years, iconic. Runner up is Celiakado bc love my toxic manipulative bastards duo. Daddy issues x cringefail girl <3

4) Is there a popular pairing you dont necessarily dislike but aren't too invested in?:

Again, Richtercard. Neat ship, can get it, but not my thing. Idk what other popular ships i could talk abt bc small fandom. Im pretty 👍 abt most of them i guess

13) What's a character or ship you haven't written/drawn yet but would like to someday?:

Ohhh so many. I have a dumped Leonx Isaac wip fic that i'd like to pic back up, and also some Sara x Julia ideas. And well, if i started listing all the ships i'd like to draw i'd never finish, but you kno stuff like belshine, shalaura, hevor, etc. In terms of characters, i wanna do some doodles with the wygol villagers living their lives, and draw the Lecarde twins or Yoko bc oh man the underrated witches of all time. And this is not going into my cv64/LoD comic n fic ideas (help).

24) What's your favourite thing abt [character]?:

You know let's go with Isaac this time. I like... the tragedy his choices lead him to. He keeps getting rejected and hated and losing and the ways he reacts are both understandable (as in, yea i get why he'd do that) and also the absolute worst you could do (both for himself and everyone around him, he's one awful bastard). And, since he is so intrinsically tied to Hector, i like how he is his dark reflection, how he shows what Hector could have been if instead of prioritizing his right to live as a human, he had grabbed all that willpower and instead used it to reduce and dehumanize himself for the sake of love and acceptance. It's like, Isaac is strong, smart, stubborn and determined yet he can't use those qualities for his own good or to help others but to spread misery and make himself worse in the process. He really became Dracula's weapon, at the cost of his own life. I am feeling normal abt him (gonna run him over with a bulldozer <3)

#me answers #i was tempted to answer w metroid stuff but most of the questions revolve around shipping and im not much of a shipper there lmao #or golden sun but like only a couple other fellas here know abt it #idk ignore my tag ramblings im just trying to break out of [everything] burnout #castlevania #akumajou dracula #self nullification for a greater good? check out self nullification for a greater evil- Isaac. probably

[bellhopping]

merry christmas fellas, here's my little summary of art

Generally I'd say I've improved a lot throughout this year. Got a proper drawing tablet, switched drawing programs, finally begun working on using more then one type of brush... it's certainly been journey! A journey with many ups and downs, but one I am glad I went on anyhow.

Under the cut is individual uploads of every piece of art in this image, alongside a writeups about their creation. Cheers!

[1/25/23, Medibang Paint]

Starting off with a pretty alright one, drew this to commerate the release of a game I'd been interested in for the past 4 or 5 years. I think it could use some tweaks, but for something drawn in mobile medibang I'm still pretty proud of it.

[N/A, N/A]

This is where my february drawing would go... IF I HAD ONE !!!

I did not draw much digitally in February, on account of my tablet randomly breaking right at the start of the month. I did draw some stuff traditionally, but I don't feel like fishing it out at this moment lol

[3/31/23, Krita]

One of my first proper drawings in krita, and of a character I should really draw more of. This was made for trans day of visibility & comes with a trans pride palette to boot, though I ended up choosing the normal palette since the other one kind of sucks. Also could've done better on the posing, but I was still getting used to the ins & outs of drawing tablet usage so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[4/22/23]

Drawing I made for earth day, honestly a solid contender for best thing I've drawn all year. I did pretty good on the pose, still dig the background a fair bit, & overall think the piece came out damn cool!

[5/12/23, Krita]

An expirement with line thickness, featuring one of my favorite ocs. Despite it's roughness you can tell I had gotten a hang of Krita's core functions by now.

[6/17/23, Krita]

Cover art for the prolouge of CAT-Astrophe Comic, the webcomic my brother & I have been working on. Overall been really happy with my work on the comic so far, I've slowly but surely been getting better at each part of the process and am still making good progress on pages n such ^^

[7/9/23, Krita]

Fanart of a character from a game, drawn for my pal Rinbin after they bought me Rain World. This single handedly inspired me to draw more robots, definitely one thing I 100% intend to follow up on next year.

[8/1/23, MS Paint]

Drawn based off of someone elses post, I don't remember what it was really. Honestly still really damn proud of everything in this!!!

[9/7/23, Krita]

Drew some snakes/snake adjacent pokemon for snektember. I'd say this is around the point where I "mastered" krita, by this point I actively knew how to use a majority of featues & had even begun downloading outside brushes.

[10/20/23, Krita]

Overhaul of a character I made & barely used in 2022, her name is now Olive. I based the whole squidog thing off of something in a dream.

[11/26/23, MS Paint]

Fanart of a webcomic I really fucking like !!!!! Not much more to say I just really dig this one, fucking love drawing in MS Paint.

[12/20/23, Krita]

And, as if to repeat last year, I end this one with a DreamSide main cast image!

Really proud of how much all of my designs have improved throughout the year, from the small tweaks to gigantic overhauls! I finally feel ready to take the next step forward, so to speak.

And that's everything! Thank you all for your time, and accompanying me on this journey. It was certainly a rough one in many aspects, but every year is rough for me so I've gotten used to it. See you all later :>

#bellspeaks #my art #long post

[ichorblossoms]

i only remember the day i made grimm and yarrow bc it was 4/20 and i thought it was funny anyways happy one year to these two fuckers eating away at my brain and here's to them continuing to do that for...the foreseeable future

since i have created So much about them in this year, i wanna recap what the fuck i've done bc i have never had this happen before. it's definitely new to hyperfixate on some ocs so intensely but i'm having a good time with everything so! i can't say i'm upset that these two kicked my ass into gear with drawing so much !!

starting off with the first sketches of them i scribbled down before i had to get back to work on other stuff bc i don't think i posted these

they've evolved a bit but....not by much really. esp in regards to yarrow i had what is more or less his current design nailed down within a day. not to mention that these two both had names within 24 hours? that usually does NOT happen for me

in terms of all the other art, th galleries aren't the absolute best metric to measure how much i've drawn my ocs bc it doesn't account for all the sketches and wips i have lying around and i upload gift art so it's not all mine in there NONETHELESS it's wild comparing their th gallery stats to the main trio of ttw bc those three literally have a decade of existence on them

(also grimm has five more standalone pieces of fanart than yarrow, so the gap between how much i've drawn the two of them is even smaller)

within a year, these two have, give or take, half the amount of stuff as i've managed to make for my other mains that have been around over a decade. ofc with ttw being around so long there are a lot of unfinished things, paper drawings i have stashed away, things that're retconned, and so many more sketchbook doodles of them that just never got posted so it's not as comparable to honeybee bc it's a more constant slowburn in my brain. but still. still

that's also not to mention the 16 or so full comic pages i've drawn for them?? (most of those are under toyhouse's literature bc it's easier to post them that way) which doesn't sound like a lot, but bc i've never done that before with any of my ocs it's. wild to me. i'm still figuring out a method that makes making comics as painless as possible bc i have ideas! but it still feels like i'm like pulling teeth sometimes! i can say it feels a bit easier to make comics now but i still have a lot to figure out :,,D

also i've been writing. i don't consider myself a writer. i said "fuck it we ball" and started writing. i guess i am on technicality, and it's not as if i haven't written anything at all (hi ttw and the old peartree draft), but definitely haven't written extensive prose before this. anyways i've got a 10k-word outline and am approximately 35k words into the first draft so it's not nothing! in fact that's a lot for me, esp bc i'm constantly battling the urge to edit things over and over and also the awareness of the skill gap between me and all of the writers i am constantly reading so it's overall just a...really slow process OTL

because i'm deranged and refuse to make things easy on myself, i envision honeybee as an illustrated novel, but not necessarily illustrated like fantasy novels are i'm talking like....a novel with comic panels in it. i have a vision. (also i had a dream where i read a book like this i can See it in my mind). it's fine. i'm normal. <if this comes to be for realsies i will have to learn how to do so much typesetting bullshit

i don't have any special art to commemorate my Year of Brainrot, but i guess i'll post some writing below the cut. heads up this is First Draft Shit, even though these are the parts i'm currently more fond of i am...not confident in my skills as a writer yet so please offer me some lenience hgfklhgld

anything in [these brackets] is going to be drawn either as a standalone illustration or a small series of comic panels so just hold my hand and imagine with me.

ordered chronologically but missing a Lot of context partially bc i'm not writing any of this in order. i try to keep grimm (they/it) and yarrow's (he/they) pronouns consistent, but excuse any flips bc again, this hasn't been through any external editing, in fact y'all are the first to see any of these words.

part 1 (years 0 to ~1)- least written-for part atm but i re-outlined it semi-recently so i know where to take it

*grimm is misgendered here intentionally, yarrow doesn't know The Pronouns yet

part 2 (years ~6 to ~8)- currently the most-written

part 3 (years ~9 to ~10)

does a little dance and makes jazz hands before faceplanting. thank you if you read any of that hkgdslfhlfk

#rambles #honeybee #writing #i'll probably have more to add later but i have to be at work at seven and will be dealing with toddlers until noon #<king of getting out of bed and out the door in like seven minutes. not always by choice #reading through my writing makes me realize how fucking much i Haven't written and. it's a bit daunting tbh #also like. some of these parts i've written have already been mentally rewritten but i'm Forcing Myself to not do that until i have a more #substantial first draft #i'm so much better at editing and analyzing once i have something on the page it's just. getting it on the page. pain and agony #i am having fun though. like i complain but i'm enjoying this #grimm #yarrow #grimmyarrow

[genericpuff]

…Here is something a bit more serious I wanted to ask…

How do feel when it comes the fact that plenty of sexual themes inside LO are being told incorrectly to a young audience (I keep hearing on how most of Webtoon readers are still around 12-16 year old girls)?

Specially with the fact that Rachel keeps on sexualizing Persephone after some scenes showcasing her trauma….

I hope I’m not overstepping my boundaries here…thanks again for listening.

You're not overstepping at all ! This is actually a topic I've gone off about in the past at length on reddit and in chatrooms like Discord so I'm always happy to divulge about it and talk about it. It's a problem that goes way bigger than LO but I'll try my best to keep it focused on LO for the sake of getting to the point.

Before I get into it, obligatory TRIGGER WARNING for discussion surrounding sexual trauma/abuse/etc. and how it's romanticized and marketed in Webtoons media.

There are so many comics in Webtoons library that are just skeevy beyond belief for the stories they're trying to tell. Whether it's gratuitous oversexualization of its characters to the point of being absurd, to the implications of the romances in these stories that often border on non-consensual/toxic, Webtoons seems to be using these types of things as its main draw in a lot of their "big money" series - or at least, the ones they tend to market the most.

Now don't get me wrong, I've got a strong stomach for weird/creepy/dark shit and I'm capable of having suspension of disbelief when reading stories like this. I'm an SA survivor myself but despite this, I'm no stranger to dark romance or stories that 'toe the line' or even overstep it completely between morally acceptable and morally apprehensible, a lot of these kinds of stories have actually helped me overcome and heal from what I've been through. Suspension of disbelief is important and this is, after all, fiction, where we as creators are able to explore taboo or 'forbidden' topics in ways that either interest us or empower us or just feel like fun to write.

But there's still a line to be drawn because I'm an adult person who has literary analysis skills and is capable of picking apart these stories and what they might be consciously - or subconsciously - teaching us or portraying. Kids and teens? They basically are what they eat. This isn't to say teenagers are stupid or anything of the sort, but I was a kid too once and I know I internalized a lot of media that I straight up shouldn't have been consuming at the time. And I do think a lot of webtoons on the WT platform specifically dangerously veer into that territory all for the purpose of money and clout.

Again, don't get me wrong, I love morally questionable or otherwise abrasive characters, I think they're fun to write and fiction is a great way to explore those kinds of dynamics (and I've had pals weirdly thank me for how much suffering I put my characters through LMAO). But I'm also not gonna sit here and bullshit people into thinking my main projects are meant for teens. They're not. My main protagonists are in a shitty toxic relationship that should not be romanticized. My main character is a hyperbolic self-insert reflection of how awful I used to be as a person and how I was at the center of all my own problems for years. You should be 18 at minimum if you want to read my work because the stuff I write about isn't appropriate for or wouldn't be able to be observed and accepted as just fiction the way most mature adults can.

Now I'm not saying my work is "deep" or anything like that, it's stupid fun weeb shit. But it's the kind of stupid fun weeb shit I wouldn't want a teenager internalizing or taking to heart. It's why I'll include plenty of disclaimers to remind people that my stuff is a work of fiction and I simply enjoy exploring these kinds of tropes and dynamics through my characters, but I do not condone their behavior or the things I represent in my work. I fully respect other creators and writers who do the same.

Rachel is not one of those people. Rachel doesn't do this. She tries to claim to be progressive while completely misrepresenting the things she writes. She doesn't actually care about these topics, she just wants you to think she cares about them. Don't get me wrong, there are other series on the platform that are absolutely problematic when it comes to this sort of thing (Webtoons looooves marketing them, blech) but Lore Olympus is the absolute pinnacle of irresponsible, the sum of everything that's wrong with Webtoons.

It gets constant special treatment - often times being put in the banner reel every time it updates and in the prime spots no less that are rarely ever given to other - far more thought-provoking and well-written - series that could really use the ad space.

It markets itself to kids and teens despite having subject matter that either isn't handled responsibly OR should be taken with a level of suspension of disbelief that a lot of teens/kids aren't capable of having.

And the subject matter that it does try to handle responsibly is flubbed entirely because they're leaving it up to the writing 'skills' of a privileged white woman from New Zealand who's either never lived these experiences or, those that she has, couldn't even write them into a narrative when she tries because she still exists with internalized biases that completely miss the mark because she's never tried to look at things with a viewpoint outside of her own.

She's just not a writer, full stop. But because it's Webtoon's golden goose, they market the shit out of it anyways and give it preferential treatment. And of course, they market it to kids and teens because it's cute and colorful, and kids and teens will be more likely to overlook its blatant problems because they don't have the literary analysis skills yet to identify them.

The other side of the coin they market to? The adults who don't think these problems are problems to begin with. These are the same adults who celebrated 50 Shades of Grey and After as if they're masterworks of fiction. Overall very shitty, problematic people. At least the teenagers have the potential to "grow out of it". The adults who defend Rachel like their life depends on it are grown up but not mature or empathetic in the slightest towards those who have found their own stories and experiences trivialized or otherwise misrepresented completely through LO.

I know, that's undoubtedly a lot of hot takes, but this is such a massive problem in romance stories today. I get it, it's "drama", and it's been around since the harlequin novels of old, but the way it's pushed and romanticized and presented as if it's somehow "couple goals" by the people - often women - who write them is getting to be exhausting.

At this point I put Rachel Smythe right up there with Anna Todd and EL James - ego-driven female "writers" who wrote shitty fanfiction that got a lot of views and happened to fail upwards in their success, but when you dig past the subscriber count numbers and the clout, they themselves are not that profound or well-read in any meaning of the word. They're just people with huge deeply-rooted issues who write problematic romances instead of going to therapy.

And that's all I'm gonna say on that.

#lore olympus critical #anti lore olympus #antiloreolympus #lo critical #ama #ask me anything #sorry btw if that doesn't answer your question #i kinda just went off there because it's def a hill i'm willing to die on #webtoons advertising their creepy romance shit to teens and kids fucking sucks and it's everything that i hate about the webtoon industry r

[opbackgrounds]

Since you are reading the older arcs, I feel like you have a better vantage point to talk about this: how do you feel Oda's pacing has changed over the years? I keep getting the sense that he's going through stuff faster than before but when I check the number of chapters for each arc, the later arcs are so much longer. I don't know if it's nostalgia but I feel like the older arcs might have been shorter but they felt really detailed and well paced.

I've actually thought about this quite a bit, and I'm convinced that the answer is in the edit.

There's a lot of factors to consider when considering this question. Firstly, the cast is much bigger now. A bigger crew requires more enemies for fights, and grander world-spanning stakes requires an equally grand second- and tertiary characters. This is an inherent problem with creating a world and story that's as big as One Piece's and Oda's hardly the only person who's ever struggled with it--Just ask fans of GRR Martin how they're holding up waiting for The Winds of Winter.

However, while some of the growth is necessary and expected, Oda's done himself no favors. The recent Road to Laugh Tale sketches show that the Red Scabbards started out with only four samurai. Personally I think five or seven would have been a better number, but just imagine how much shorter Wano would be with the samurai plot threads essentially cut in half. And, really, as cool as it was that Oda was able to sit down and come up with the Eleven Supernovas in an afternoon, once they're introduced into the story Oda has to do something with them. In one fell swoop Oda introduced nine plot lines that simply did not exist before the Sabaody Archipelago. He did the exact same thing when introducing the Seven Warlords, and while that's a cool group that definitely has a place within the world of One Piece, I understand Oda's grief when he says he wished he'd made it a smaller group.

But, what's done is done and having introduced all these characters Oda doesn't really have much choice but to use them. I think for the most part his handling of the Supernovas has been really good, weaving them within existing arcs, but not every group has been that successful. The absolutely best thing Oda could have done for his pacing is cut out a lot of the fluff and streamline the story as much as possible. That's not to say that there's not a place for character interaction and jokes, but its like finding steak with the right amount of fat. You want enough for some flavor, but not enough to ruin the cut.

And that just hasn't happened. I brought it up at the beginning of Water 7 about how tight the plotting is. Even a lot of the jokes and character interaction end up tying back into the themes and plot of the story itself. I distinctly remember a chapter early in Wano where a ton of pages were spent on a joke about Franky going from

place to place looking for blueprints to Orochi's mansion, and while it's a good joke in and of itself, it didn't do anything for the overarching story of Wano. Had Oda cut it, the story would have lost nothing and he could have used those pages on something more important. The same can be said about the cute fox story the tied into the weapon stores. It was cute and heartwarming, but the benefit to the overall story of Wano did not justify the page count Oda spent on it. And it's not just Wano, because there's no reason why everyone and their dog deserved flashbacks during Dressrosa, and Doflamingo definitely didn't need three.

That's the power of the edit. Working on a serialized schedule means editing works differently than someone making a second pass on a novel. You have to be ruthless when deciding what to cut and what to keep before anything's been drawn. Because as I've said before, making a comic is one of the least efficient ways to tell a story out there, and stupidly labor intensive even when working in black and white and using assistants.

Oda's also made several comments, more lately, about being ready for One Piece to be finished. He has a different mindset now 25 years later than a young man just starting out on his journey. I don't think the fandom appreciates just how much of his life he's given up to see this story through, the years he wasn't able to spend with his wife and children, days of little sleep cooped up in a room drawing on a grueling schedule known to kill people. That has an effect on the story itself. A person only has so much endurance, and while I'm sure Oda still loves One Piece you can definitely tell how the simple passing of time has affected how he's gone about writing it.

#sarc talks #long post

[arecomicsevengood]

TRIP REPORT: SPX 2023

I went down to the Small Press Expo in Bethesda, Maryland this past Sunday. While I lived in Baltimore for a number of years, and it was essentially a local show, this is the first time I've been since moving to Philly in 2019. It took a year (or two?) off on account of COVID. I don't have much to say about the show itself, I enjoyed walking around talking to people, I probably didn't see all the stuff I would've liked, I'm not really in a good place to judge trends. I missed some people I would've liked to have met, like Drew Lerman, who left before I got there. He won an Ignatz though, and good for him. I do believe that the thing about SPX and the Ignatzes is that everyone essentially occupies very different spheres of interest and sets of influences. As I walked around, seeing little cards on people's comics saying they were nominated for an Ignatz, I would ask them if they had heard of or were familiar with the thing that won, they almost never were.

At the one panel discussion I attended, about drawing detailed backgrounds as a way of of establishing worldbuilding, Rosemary Valero-O'Connell cited Taiyo Matsumoto's approach as an influence, and as I sat in the audience thinking "Yes! Let's talk more about that!" everyone else on stage, quite reasonably, talked about their own influences instead - which for Daria Tessler, who I came to see, included Mark Beyer and Jim Woodring. The panel was generally good and interesting, and it's not meant as a slight to the moderator Rob Clough to point out that the best questions came during the Q+A from the audience. One member asked the question, how do you handle tonal shifts when you are using detailed visuals for plot purposes, and everyone agreed that that at emotional climaxes or at moments of more interiority they reduce the level of background detail.

Daria Tessler was the artist I was most excited to meet of anyone at the fest. Since my local shop, Partners And Son, is on top of it, I had already read her newest comic, volume 2 of Cagelessness, which absolutely rules, and so I had to shell out the big bucks for a copy of her fully-silkscreened book Dust, that uses multi-color collages as a backdrop for the cowboy characters who, in Cagelessness, move through ornately designed drawn worlds. Her work is beautiful, another high point of the panel discussion was her talking about how Marc Bell calls the tiny details cluttering up the backgrounds of his comics "chicken fat," and while Clough cited the term as originating from Will Elder, Tessler described chicken fat as "what you put in the soup to make it taste better, if you're not vegan," perfectly capturing what makes these artists work such a delicious meal for the eyes.

A similar "I already have all of these" experience was behind my purchase of Tales Of Old Snake Creek, by Drew Lerman, which collects his anthology contributions from recent years and adds watercolor to them. I love these comics in their original formats but I'm not going to say no to the convenience of this, which is also printed at a size larger than the digests in which some things ran.

Shout-out to Bread Tarleton, who pointed out to me the Paradise Systems table, where everything looked good and lavish, but what I picked up was Cry by Yan Cong. I believe Paradise Systems to be a reprinter of self-published comics from China. Cry features cartoony figures in a charcoal textured world, and follows a man having a sexual experience with a prostitute with a weird visual punchline.

Adam Szym directed me to the Strangers Fanzine table, where I picked up Shony Glassware 2 by Manning Coe, which is in some ways probably the sort of zine a lot of people go to SPX to get. Pretty funny stuff, maybe Ben Jones influenced, by a 26-year-old who lives in Osaka. Drawing himself in a Beat Happening shirt but with a bio where he talks about listening to 100 Gecs, there is a definite vibe at work here and while I don't remember the price point of this one I feel like it had to be cheap because it's that kind of comic. If you're ordering the new printing of Bhanu Pratap's Dear Mother from Strangers and want something else that's not too genre-y make sure you throw this in there.

Adam Szym's Their Use Continues is a horror short about the current trend towards reviving dead actors as CGI phantoms in movies currently in the news. Feels nice and relevant, I think I would've liked this to be a little bit bigger (it's printed digest size) and hi-res. Adam uses some digital collage elements for backgrounds and borders that I mostly felt was making the book smaller and fuzzier still.

I nonetheless liked it better than another horror comic I picked up, issue 1 ofJenna Cha and Lonnie Nadler's The Sickness, published by Uncivilized. Both people are more mainstream-comics, which I think is fine, but this does something I really associate with the dumbest kind of attitude that can be present in horror stuff, the kind of tonal miscalculation the comics I like avoid: Presenting a mid-century American setting where characters nonetheless are using a high degree of vulgar language, of a sort that would be stylized and off-putting if it were depicting the modern era but really just completely pulls me out of something set in the past. The second printing changes the color palette on the cover in a way that makes the drawing better, but this is not the sort of thing I would recommend anyone track down, which is sad, because it's likely far more readily available than anything I liked.

Tim Lane's Happy Hour In America 1, from a few years ago, was available at the Fantagraphics table. Presumably because Tim was signing, but I never saw him. I haven't read the big books collecting his short stories, but I like his contributions to anthologies. He's a guy who can really draw, in a way that you don't often see at small press shows, or that feels more appreciated by a mainstream-comics crowd. If his stories aren't as psychotically involved on a plot level as Mack White, he's nonetheless interesting as like a Gen X'er talking about American masculinity and what animates it. I would gladly read it in single issue comics format, though I missed these the first time because it wasn't what I felt I was in the mood for.

Another thing I picked up as a half-off copy of David B's Incidents In The Night, volume 2, from Uncivilized. I think volume 1 did pretty well, and is now sold out, but now that that's unavailable, volume 2 is a harder sell. David B is one of those dudes, like Joann Sfar or Christophe Blain, that got the big bookstore push like fifteen years ago but now no one wants to put out their books in the U.S. David B is also a guy, like GIpi, who had a comic put out by the Ignatz line Fantagraphics had. I bought issue 1 of Babel at the time and didn't care for it, and would've told you I didn't iike David B's work. But lately I've been tracking down books in the Ignatz line I skipped the first time (along with the First Second books of Gipi and Sfar from roughly the same time) and enjoying them, and this fits into that trend as well. A pretty involving plot, involving booksellers, the occult, criminal organizations. I both want to track down a copy of volume 1 and am frustrated that the volume 3 advertised at the end of this book was never translated into English.

Yasmeen Abediford's Death Bloom won an Ignatz, for best minicomic. All of the Ignatz awards are really ill-defined categories, and this is one is a $25 risograph thing, which to me seems like it should exist in a different category than cheapo xerox stuff, but whatever. Anyway, I believe Abediford will also be in the new issue of Freak, which I have seen Instagram posts indicating contributors got an advance copy of but have yet to be for sale online. Abediford is from the Bay Area, but this book was printed by Lucky Pocket Press, based in Baltimore, but from people who either moved there or didn't have the press going until after I left there. They sold me the comic in a little printed bag, which included a family tree for their little mascot guy, citing the "onion peow guy" as "(father, deceased)" and "(comics legend)," which is interesting to me insofar as I don't think of any of the Peow stuff as being interesting to me, though I'm happy it found its audience and made a mark. I don't really get this one either but whatever, I'll reread it tos ee if my opinion changes.

I would also put the output of publisher Silver Sprocket in a similar category to Peow - Not for me, seems like it's for younger people, in a way that dominates SPX as it's currently constituted. I have the deepest sympathies for them not being able to dominate SPX this year though, due to a misplaced/inaccessible pallet of books that they didn't get until halfway through Sunday. They had flown out Leo Fox from England, to debut his new book Prokaryote Season. I had seen Fox's stuff on Twitter last year and thought it looked good/interesting, but was also frustrated by the fact that he had apparently released a comic that was only for sale for 24 hours - maybe a way to create demand so that people actually order a thing, but in an artificial scarcity kind of way I resent. Anyway, I bought one of his self-published things, My Body Unspooling, and yeah I think it looks really cool and interesting, though the approach taken, a sort of simple narrative about the notion of the self rather than something that seems interested in having characters interact is again the kind of trend I blanch at in work made by people younger than me. I nonetheless liked the comic, and thought it was cool, and am going to read his book soon.

I bought issue 9 of Mike Centeno's Futile from the Radiator Comics distro booth. It is explicitly labeled as No Previous Readin' Necessary, so while there were two older issues of Futile at the table, printed at smaller dimensions, I didn't pick them up. This was cool, a mostly black and white (but with pages in the middle in color) comic about a musician taking mushrooms . It looks great on a flipthrough, though Audra Stang, working the table, tried to close the center-spread of my flipthrough so that the burst into full-color I was admiring didn't spoil the story's progression and surprises. Format and cartooning kinda reminded me of Nate Doyle's series Crooked Teeth. (Nate had a larger-formatted barbarian fantasy comic available from Strangers Fanzine, which I passed on.)

I also bought Beth Heinly's Girls Named Meghan from her, though Heinly is Philly-based and I've had plenty of chances to pick it up before. It's a memoir of her teenage years, growing up in Delaware County, which is where I went to high school, and the friendships she had that veered into rebellion and her apprehensions about being around people more "troubled" than she was. It is basically black and white but there's little red-pencil edits throughout, like maybe the wrong PDF was sent to the printer or something, sourced from a file where she was noting what she wanted to fix. I don't think of the other copies I have seen were like this though. Again, I think this is the sort of self-published autobio thing that many people go to SPX to find. I can see the places there this could be stronger or more impactful but there is still a fine sense for who all the characters were, and what the era was like.

I got a few other things but this is all I have read so far, at this moment when I felt like writing. Andrew White gave me a copy of the new Yearly, and a name I recognized from his writing for The Comics Journal, Henry Chamberlain, gave me a copy of his book George's Run, a biography of a Twilight Zone writer published by Rutgers University Press. I also got issue 3 of a comic called Cat Scratch Fever by a woman named Emily Zullo, and Soumya Dhulekar's Flash Valley. Both of these are in the classic digest sized minicomic format with black and white throughout, though Dhulekar opted for a a cardstock cover. This is the sort of thing I am most happy to buy from a stranger at a show and basically not even care about the quality as long as the price is right, though of course the price for both of these is higher than it used to be. I also bought and haven't yet read Leo Fox's Prokaryote Season, the theoretical "book of the show," although another contender for that title, the collection of Liam Cobb comics, What Awaits Them, looked great but I will pick it up when it comes into my local shop.

[nuttyrabbit]

I’d like to hear what you have to say about IDW.

Alright, let's do this then! I'm not gonna make a big mega review, because frankly I don't think I need to, but I'm just gonna run down some things I like and don't like about the comic just to get it out there, and I'm gonna do it in a "Like-Dislike-Like-Dislike" format just to make things interesting.

With that being said, let's rock and roll

LIKE- The Art

For whatever problems IDW may have, one the most consistently good things about the comic has been its art. Whether it be Archie vets like ABT, Yardley, and Skelly or newcomers like Mauro, Thomas, and Foundraine, IDW has looked consistently fantastic! Some of the action scenes in this comic are some of the best action scenes I've ever seen in any Sonic media (especially anything drawn by ABT. Y'all accuse me of having Ian as my husbando, but the closest thing would be ABT because that man physically CANNOT FUCKING MISS)

Many of the covers especially are some of the best Sonic has ever seen, PERIOD

This cover in particular is something I'd love to have framed

IDW is just a consistently gorgeous comic, even moreso than Archie at its peak with a few exceptions. Also helps that IDW has multiple good inkers and colorists to help the lines pop out, which was an issue I had with Archie

DISLIKE- The Setting

The thing is, I don't inherently dislike the setting of IDW. Setting it past Forces was a good move and setting it in something similar to the games was also a really good call. While I greatly prefer the mix and match setting of the reboot, there is a charm to a more simple, gamelike setting

The problem is that the setting, at least to me, is too simple. At any point it feels like there's maybe 4 locations on the planet: Resistance Base, Eggman Base, Sunset City, and Forest. There are a couple other named locations like White Park, Angel Island and Spiral Hill and that one camping site, but for the most part it feels like the comic ping pongs between these fairly generic locations. As a result, the comic world feels shockingly small in terms of scope and wonder, which is something weird to say about Sonic of all things, a game franchise which has done wonders in taking the hedgehog to various weird, wacky, and cool locales.

It also doesn't help that unlike the games or other comics or even stuff like the OVA and Prime, a lot of the locations don't really have a tangible history or interesting visual motifs, so they just kinda fall flat

I'm not expecting the comic to go full Archie reboot and have a MASSIVE world full of named locations established with DEEPEST LORE from day 1, since that was an extraordinary situation that kinda hurt the comic long term, but having a bit more variety would help the comic loads.

As is, most of the comic's settings just kinda blur together for me to the point where something like Eggperial City just seems like another Eggman base to me. Unfortunately, given what Ian's said about developing the setting (I.e he won't for asinine reasons), I doubt this'll change any time soon, which is a crying shame

LIKE- MOST of the New Characters

While I'm known as an Archie diehard, I'll fully admit that I do like quite a bit of the IDW newcomers. Tangle, Whisper, Starline, Surge, and Kit are characters I've all found to be enjoyable or compelling to some degree. Other characters like Clutch, Rough, and Tumble are also quite enjoyable, though severely underutilized.

IDW has done a pretty solid job (FOR THE MOST PART) of introducing and establishing new characters that add something interesting to the comic at large, and I'm glad to see that some of them have begun making the leap to the games

DISLIKE- Belle

Yeah, I'm not gonna sugarcoat it, I think Belle sucks hard. The concept is fine, but the problem is that A: you know where this shit is going the moment she shows up and B: it takes fucking FOREVER to get there.

Like by the time Belle has her big confrontation with Eggman in issue 50, I'm just rolling my eyes because we knew this was coming and it's just kind of a lame part in an otherwise really cool issue.

Also she just feels like a lesser version of at least 3-4 different characters, including IDW Mecha Sonic. Scrapnik Island is just Belle's arc but actually interesting

Yeah, I just don't think Belle works and is probably the only major dud of the new roster, but man she is a BAD dud. Like the kind that drags down every arc she's in.

Like- Some of the Canon Portrayals

When it comes to portrayals of the canon cast, IDW is a fairly mixed bag, and I think a fair deal of them are abjectly weaker than both game and Archie portrayals (Team Dark being THE most egregious example of this, but Eggman also kinda falls into this)

With that being said, I still do like some of the canon cast in IDW.

Sonic: For all the flak Sonic gets and despite how annoying some of his long-winded speeches can get, I do for the most part like his portrayal. I think having him wrestle with morality, while a bit tedious at times, is interesting, and he still has quite a few moments that make me go "That's my Sonic!" Still inferior to post-SGW Sonic and ESPECIALLY Adventure-era Sonic (who is my eternal GOAT)

Amy: Despite people accusing Amy of being a Sally clone (an accusation which I always find hilarious because it's thrown at ANY female character in a leadership position), she also gets a few pretty solid moments throughout the comic (mainly before and after the Zombot arc). Not as good as Archie Amy but still aight

Silver and Blaze: It's nice to see Silver and Blaze have consistent characterizations and for the latter to not job horrifically. They have good chemistry with each other and the rest of the cast and are a pretty welcome presence, especially since they show up more than once every 600 issues.

The Chaotix: I also like the Chaotix and think they get a lot of really strong moments. Probably one of the few abjectly great parts of the Zombot arc was how they were done

Zavok: Turns out the moment you take Zavok away from the D6 and put him with real characters he actually becomes mildly interesting

The Others: Characters like Cream, Tails, Vanilla, Orbot/Cubot, etc aren't amazing but they're perfectly fine so I'll put them in the good side.

But yeah, I think a few characters get pretty decent characterization with some really strong moments here and there. Though the issue is that none of these portrayals are really the peak of these characters. The most I can say for some of them is that they're good, but there's rarely a moment from most of these examples where I'd point to them and go "This is the perfect way to write this character

DISLIKE- Other Canon Portrayals

Here's what you were probably here for, so let me do this bulletpoint style

Eggman- Isn't as menacing as Archie nor as goofy as his best showings in the games. He has some pretty great moments here and there, with him mulching Starline being a highlight, but he's kinda disappointing overall, especially compared to what's been done before

Knuckles: It's cool they remembered his duty to the Master Emerald and got rid of that dumbass "military leader shit" (which they still kept in Frontiers for some weird fuckin reason. Dunno why they're pushing that). Shame that means he basically sits in the background for most of the comic because there's no Sonic Universe equivalent (which I'll get to). His characterization is okay but MAN compared to all the cool stuff he got to do in the reboot it's very disappointing

Omega- He's still funny, but god it just ain't the same. This is a case where I think the Archie version was just flat out better. He, Amy, and Shadow are the biggest cases of "Archie just did you better"

Shadow: Do I even need to explain this? It's discount Vegeta/Sasuke/Vergil. He's an arrogant prick without anything that made him interesting. Comparing him to Archie is comical since the latter clears so hard it isn't even funny. But fuck, I'd even take Prime Shadow or hell, Boom Shadow over IDW, because at least the former has a reason to be pissy and the latter is at least funny. IDW Shadow is just miserable every fucking time he shows up and I can't tell if it's because the restrictions are that bad or it's because he's just not fun to write, but it sucks. I love Shadow, he's a great character, but every time he shows up I groan. It seems like Sega's gonna be a bit more lax with him, so hopefully that changes things but yeesh

The Deadly Six: It's a shame that Ian couldn't make the Deadly Six outside of Zavok worth a shit, especially since he decided to show them into two separate fucking arcs. I'm not gonna pin my dislike of their portrayal entirely on the comic because I just don't like them, but I am gonna give it shit for using them twice, once in an arc where they didn't belong

The Babylon Rogues: I'm not a fan of the Babylon Rogues, but even I can tell that outside of Jet's sacrifice in the Zombot arc, they've been done exceedingly dirty. That one annual story with Jet and Whisper may be one of the worst stories in IDW Sonic that shit was BAD

Metal Sonic: He's portrayed okay in these comics but my issue is more the shit around him. Sonic trying to redeem him and getting rebuked the first time was interesting stuff. The 2nd time made sense. Beyond that it's gotten obnoxious

LIKE: The Minis

While I dearly miss Sonic Universe and think the comic could use an equivalent (more on that next section), I think the minis we get each year are pretty damn good!

Tangle and Whisper, Bad Guys, Imposter Syndrome, and Scrapnik Island have ranged from good (T&W) to some of the best stuff IDW has put out ever (Scrapnik Island). They're paced well, drawn well, and have really cool shit happen in them. Scrapnik Island in particular was really, really cool and I found Barnes' pacing and character work to be even better than Ian and Evan in places and think he should get a shot at writing some mainline stories.

Also the specials have been pretty good, with the 30th Anniversary Special being extremely pleasant

DISLIKE: Plotting (Or lackthereof)

Now we're getting into some of the nitty gritty.

The big issues with IDW's plots are threefold, so I'll tackle each one individually

Pacing. Evan and Barnes are generally fine with this, but my god Ian Flynn still doesn't know how to pace a story that's more than a couple issues. The Zombot Arc is the absolute worst fucking caes of this (You could cram that entire story into 6 issues and it'd be significantly more effective), but stuff like Eggperial City and even Surge's storyline are also examples of this. So many of the things he plots just drag on and on and repeat themselves ad nauseam in terms of plot beats and even what the characters talk about.

It's an issue that's more readily apparent when reading on a monthly basis as opposed to on a trade basis (where the pacing is less noticeably bad because it's written FOR trades like many modern comics are, much to their detriment), but it's still really bad nevertheless. The only times it hasn't been with Ian are during the minis where, surprise surprise, having to do your story in 4 issues means you gotta actually tighten things up and cut filler.

Again, Evan and Barnes don't seem to have this issue, so a lot of this is on Ian. I like the dude's writing but holy fuck he is still SO bad about this

2. Repetition. I talked about this in a sense in the pacing section by talking about how repetitive Ian's plotting and dialogue can get because of the poor pacing, but I wanna talk about it in a different sense. A lot of IDW's plots are uh, very repetitive, especially as of late. It boils down to "Eggman is doing a thing, go look into it/stop it" a LOT. I know Eggman's the main villain and all but I swear the schtick of "We gotta go check out the Eggman base and fight badniks" has gotten very, very old. Even the Surge and Kit arc ended in "Go to the Eggman base" Arcs like Chao Races and Camping are welcome breaks because they involve the characters doing other shit.

It also ties into my complaints about the setting being small because it often feels like characters just have nothing better to do than go raid Eggman bases and fight Badniks. I know it's an action comic and all but maybe actually utilize some of your smaller villains? Maybe make some new ones? Or maybe even invent some weird new locations for your characters to check out and switch things up? Just an idea.

I keep bringing up that this comic needs a Sonic Universe equivalent and I really believe this because it'd not only give characters like Knuckles, Shadow, and the Chaotix more time to shine, but it'd also give some fantastic diversity in terms of plots. Like while Sonic is fighting Eggman for the billionth time, maybe the Chaotix are doing actual detective work or Knuckles is exploring some ancient ruins and finds a weird new thing he's gotta deal with or an ancient secret he's gotta unlock.

Post reboot Archie benefitted greatly from this since while the main comic was mostly Sonic and co doing shit with Unleashed, Universe was exploring and expanding the world and giving the side characters way cooler shit to bounce off of, making the setting not only feel larger, but also making it feel more varied.

3. Long Term Plans (Or lackthereof)

This one ties a lot into my complaints about setting, but it's strange seeing a Sonic comic do so little in terms of setting up mysteries or future plot threads (that aren't solved IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE CURRENT ARC ENDS), and it also results in a comic that feels more constrained. It gives so little to really talk or speculate about. Maybe it's more a fandom thing for me but I enjoy it when media drops cool background stuff for the viewer to speculate about and make the world like a puzzle the viewer has to piece together. It adds so much to a story and narrative when a viewer can pick up on little plot threads and watch them come together over time.

LIKE Action

This one's simple. IDW has a lot of really well drawn, really interestingly written action bits. Any time there's an action scene, no matter how mundane or banal, it's always gonna look fantastic

Like DAMN. And that's not even an ABT action scene.

DISLIKE: Too Self-Contained

Okay this is a weird complaint but I really don't like that the comic can't explicitly draw on locations and plot elements from not just the games but other side stuff. I get why, but it's also lame because one of the coolest parts of reboot Archie was seeing what insane stuff the comic would pull from and reinvent.

Also it's absolute bullshit they can't bring back the Hooligans and Battle Bird Armada. Like come the fuck on, those are good villains

RAPIDFIRE TIME

Okay so I've been typing this up for way longer than I anticipated so I'm just gonna rapidfire a bunch of other shit I like and dislike

Like: Neo Metal Sonic being the first villains rules and that arc is really fun

Dislike: The Zombot Arc. It's got cool ideas but it goes on for fucking ever and devolves into misery porn pretty hard. Also I don't care if the Zeti were always planned, them being there sucks **IAN**

Like: The fact that Ian isn't the only person writing. I've been saying since Archie that a revolving team of writers would be cool and lo and behold, we've gotten that. Very cool stuff

Dislike: No Off-panels. It's a crime we don't have those because they're funny

Like: The cool outfits the cast wear in Chao Races. I love alt outfits

Dislike: "No alt outfits outside of very special exceptions". See above

Like: IDW actually puts out trades on time.

Dislike: Wispons are overused as FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK. I get randos having them and Whisper specializing in them but I don't think Lanolin needed to have one. It's creative yeah but just give her sound powers

FINAL THOUGHTS

Okay so clearer I had a lot to say about IDW Sonic, and I was deliberately being as general as possible to try and write this up fairly quickly. It's a comic that I find to be decently enjoyable, but also very noticeable flawed and ultimately kinda lacking in some key aspects. I like the comic well enough but it's never clicked with me in the same way other Sonic media like Archie did. I'm hopin in the future that some of these issues I've listed are remedied and that the comic continues to find success.

But yeah, this was fun, albeit exhausting, to write up. So to close this out, I'm gonna give it a numerical ranking

As of now, March 21, 2023, I give IDW Sonic a 6/10 (For context I'd give the reboot a 7.5 overall and the pre-reboot a 6 as well)

#IDW Sonic #THE IDW SONIC MASTERPOST #asks

[lonelywretchjervistetch]

My DCCU Interlude: The Legion of Super-Heroes (Part 1)

Prologue: Long Live the Legion

This year, I've decided to give into my unending nerd urges (...nerdges?), and have been writing essays on how I would create a DC cinematic universe, similar to how James Gunn and Peter Safran have been given to reins to do the same. Except, y'know, they're talented nerds with extensive filmmaking and writing careers, and I'm...a nerd. BUT nevertheless, I've been jumping in headfirst, and honestly, I've enjoyed it.

Up until now, I've finished a series on Superman. And that was a lot, but it's nowhere near the end. In fact, Superman is a lynchpin for a particular corner of my DCCU, focusing upon space and the cosmic (unsurprisingly). The other two lynchpins are Batman (for street crime and down-to-Earth stuff) and Wonder Woman (for magic and mysticism), which shouldn't be too surprising. But while they would each launch segments of my DCCU that would involve multiple other films and projects, television series would also be involved with each hero, ideally. James Gunn is, of course, doing the same, and Marvel's been doing this for years now. So, when I had to think about a series associated with the Man of Steel that I would want to see...well, there's only one choice, really.

I am a huge fan of the Legion of Super-Heroes. They've had a shit-ton of incarnations over the years, in comics and in other media, for good and for bad. But the Legion is one of the first DC hero groups I faithfully followed, starting with the 2005Waid/Kitson Reboot run, which I still remember fondly. And the Legion is, of course, inexorably linked with Superman, as their first appearance involved them recruiting a teenaged Superboy into the group from the 31st Century. So, naturally, this was the FIRST group I thought of when I thought about a TV series. After the animated series is one of the best adaptations of its time period, especially in the second season.

But why talk about this now? I mean, I'm in the middle of my Batman series, so why interrupt that? Well, it's Legion of Super-Heroes Appreciation Week here on the ol' hellsite, so for those people who are fellow fans of the Legion, and also want to read the desperate rambles of a midly-obsessive and frustrated nerd, why not take advantage? I would contribute art to this, but my time is weirdly limited. I have drawn my version of Saturn Girl, though, so feel free to check that out if you want to. Anyway, lemme get into the mini-series here. Starting with one question...why not a movie?

Chapter One: Soap and Space

Let me preface this by saying...I don't like the 2023 movie. At all. Don't get me wrong here. It looks great, voice acting is quite good, and some of the character designs are stellar. But goddamn it, for a Legion of Super-Heroes project, they dropped the ball SO goddamn hard, in a lot of ways. Also, Mon-El...what the fuck have you done to Mon-El? God, that movie pissed me off SO hard the entire time...but I digress. Jest because I didn't like that movie, that doesn't mean a film based on the Legion is impossible. But I also think that it...doesn't really work as well as a TV series would.

The reason for this, in my opinion, is because of what the Legion is at its best: a soap opera and a space opera combined. One of the best things about the Legion is its setting and its members. During its height, the Legion was a massive team brimming both with interpersonal conflict (because, after all, we're mostly dealing with teenagers at first), as well as set amongst a wider sociopolitical interplanetary conflict that these guys are supposed to navigate amongst. It's Teen Titans...IN SPACE. That rules. It rules so hard.

One of the things that makes the Legion so very compelling is simply the fact that you get to know the characters, and their personal struggles. And given that most of these guys are aliens, despite how human they often look, those interpersonal conflicts are made even more complicated, and even more interesting as a result. A movie honestly can't balance all of that in a way that feels authentic to the Legion. The animated series technically did this, but still steered away from a lot of the soap opera aspect in lieu of making it more of an action series. And obviously, it's gotta be an action series...but it could and should be much more than that.

OK, what about multiple movies? Again, for a group as large as the Legion is, even making a franchise isn't exactly guaranteed to work for all of these diverse characters. And, uh, that's assuming you'd be able to MAKE a franchise. How many times have we been comic book films made with a franchise in mind, only to perform so badly that the entire idea is scrapped? So, no, we're not relying on a possible set of sequels. Instead, let's plan a story over the course of seasons, with each season of this series acting as a discrete story (just in case it gets cancelled prematurely).

OK, what about medium? Should it be animated or live-action? Well...I actually vote for the latter, IF the budget it high enough. Let's not skimp on the budget for a wide-sweeping space opera, if we can help it. But the, if that's a problem, then animated is a viable option. After all, it's worked before, and it can work again. The only caveat here, for both, is that we're aiming for a platform like HBO, or at the very least not the CW or a more public network. Reasons for this are because more money is available from HBO and such, and also because...well, frankly, we want a mature show of actual good quality. CW quality ain't gonna cut it, sorry.

OK, so we have a mature-leaning series of good quality, packed full of drama in multiple facets, with a large cast that the audience can follow and latch onto. Lastly, because each season is meant to be insular to a certain degree, there's an overarching plot for each season, which concludes with the season finale. Commonplace, obviously, but important nonetheless. With all of that out of the way, we should now talk about a few things here, right? Those things are:

Setting: Where is our series set, and what are the day-to-day struggles associated with the setting? Where is the Legion within this setting, and how do they interact with it? What notable people or forces can be found here and drive everyday existence?

Cast: This is a huge potential cast, so who are we primarily following when the series starts? For that matter, how large is the Legion when the series begins, and will that number change over the course of the first season? Who are the major characters, and can the Legion be put into groups that can be followed? And finally, what are the backstories and interpersonal relationships amongst the primary cast of characters?

Story: What is the main conflict over the course of the season, and who are the major players? What are the stakes as we lead up to the season finale, and how will our characters resolve it? How will this conflict change our characters or the setting, whether or not the characters actually solve the problem? And what other problems or consequences will result from this resolution?

And all of those things, frankly, are super goddamn basic in terms of storytelling, but still important to keep in mind as we go through the planned season. For each season, we'll assume 12 episodes, which is a reasonable number of episodes to assume per season. And before I start plotting this whole thing out, I'm gonna put together a brief synopsis to sum up the season 1 plans. Once that's done, I'll be going through the above three points one at a time, then looking at a potential future for the series. And if people are interested in more, I may just oblige that request! So...what's this theoretical season one about?

The 31st Century is a peaceful utopia on a knife's edge. Building tensions are bringing the United Planets close to dissolution, if not to outright war. This strife has led to conflict, and a lack of faith in authority across the cosmos, especially on the famously rebellious planet Earth. And amongst all of this, forces are trying to widen the gulf between civilizations that much farther apart. A group of young heroes, inspired by legends a millennium past, have stepped up to the plate, calling themselves the Legion of Super-Heroes. Learning to work together under difficult circumstances, the young heroes must navigate many threats.

Leader of the group Rokk Krinn struggles both with his compatriots, and also the difficult role of leader thrust upon him, while struggling to balance a life amongst all of the stress placed upon him. The silent Imra Ardeen works against culture shock, while also feeling a deep and profound duty to her home world of Titan, and a palpable distance from her responsibilities to that moon of Saturn. Garth Ranzz comes from a planet in economic strife, on the brink of leaving the United Planets. With his older brother and twin sister on different sides of the conflict, he must navigate both family and political strife, while finding his own path amidst conflict with Rokk and burgeoning feelings for Imra.

Newcomers to the organization are now navigating this new environment. Chief amongst them is Lyle Norg, a superhero enthusiast and brilliant teenage scientist who has given himself powers of invisibility. Tinya Wazzo is a highly connected young woman with her own responsibilities, a mysterious demeanor, and an agenda of her own to pursue. Luornu Durgo is an exile from her home, which she talks about very little, but still seeks to return to with her good deeds. And Elgar Degep, who comes to the Legion on recommendation from a secretive benefactor, claims to be a descendant of ancient Earth heroes, but hides a much more insidious secret.

This small and young group of heroes has many opponents to their success. The Science Police of Metropolis are wary of their presence, and their extremely ambitious leaders are in constant conflict with the heroes they see as vigilantes. Behind the scenes, a cult named the Dark Circle seeks to take advantage of the strife, driving criminals across the United Planets to strike against the police and the Legion alike. And beneath it all, corruption within the United Planets itself seeks to set the Legion up for a fall, influenced by a greater power beyond their understanding.

A rough synopsis, but believe me...I have ideas. So very many ideas. But I'll go into that further in future essays. So, if you're interested, stay tuned for more of that! And if you actually read this mess...honestly, thank you, I appreciate it. Long like the Legion.

See you in Part Two!

#loshweek #loshweek23 #legion of superheroes #legion of super heroes #legion of super-heroes #losh #dc #dc comics #dc cinematic universe #dccu #my dccu #my dcu #film ideas #tv show ideas

[camp-campverse]

Hello, I am interested in your Camp Camp au! I assume that it’s a future au where at least some of the og campers come back as counselors, but I’m curious about the exact details. Especially Harrison, he’s my favorite so I’m always curious on how people think his life turns out :]

Im excited to see how this au will turn out, it already looks amazing!

(Ps I suggest tagging each individual character in your posts like #cc max #camp camp max and also #camp camp fanart. It helps people find your work easier because they often search for one specific character or just fanart.)

Hi! Thank you so much for your interest! I'll gladly share the nitty gritty with you! :D

This will be a role reversal AU; Adults are now the campers and Campers are now the Counselors (As to how this is possible will come about way WAY later in a certain "episode" I have in mind and miiight get a funny little quip by Max at the beginning.)

My original plan for this was to make it a comic, but, my plan is to recreate most episodes from all the seasons (and more after), so that's gonna take forever. I also hate doing backgrounds. SO, we go next best thing!

Writing with some bits I had in mind drawn up so that certain scenes fit with dramatic and or comedic effects. I WILL be posting this on AO3 when I get the chance to actually write it out, it's just a matter of not procrastinating.

I've had this idea rattling in my brain ever since The Quarter-Moon Convergence (Yes, Harrison did inspire this li'l thing I have uwu), now that RT is shutting down, I figured it was time to get it out of my head.

Now's just a matter of making this blog look great, as I wanna post future art and what the designs of everyone looks in my head, and, y'know. Writing. Going between each episode to get certain references is a little. Lol!

Thank you so much for your interest in this li'l thing I'm doing, hope I've caught you for the ride!

(I definitely will tag them all in future stuff, I just didn't for that one bc it's a WIP and not the full image, so I wanted to wait for the full image before I tag everyone properly <3)

...Also Quartermaster isn't with them. They don't know what happened to him! Shrugs!!!

#Camp Campverse #Asking Counselors

[mdzsartreblogs]

hey! i'm so glad i found your blog, its like a blessing to me! not exaggerating! i wanted to ask, do you have all official art from mdzs in your collection in your blog? like from the donghua, novel, game, and novel and all? i'm looking to make my own private mdzs art collection, so a reply would help!

also what would you suggest as the best sources for collecting mdzs official art? any twitter acc or zerochan?

Hi! Thanks for getting in touch!

I don't have all the official art, because there's just so darn MUCH of it, and because it's actually much more complicated to curate than most other art.

See, I try not to post duplicates, and usually I can easily ensure that by just searching for the artist and checking what of theirs I've posted, and/or by looking at the notes and just seeing if mdzsartreblogs is already in the "reblogged with tags" part of the notes.

But official art mucks that system all up because multiple people post it! I might have reblogged that piece, but not from that OP, and not in that post version. So if something isn't brand new, I'll often toss it in my likes for a later date when I can check if I've reblogged a different version of it, but I've been so busy recently that said later date really hasn't been coming, oops.

I also haven't been super consistent about reblogging art that's only on merchandise - sometimes I do, sometimes I don't, without much rhyme or reason. *sweatdrop*

There's also the complication, from the curation point of view, of where to draw the line on what counts as "art." So like...the donghua is composed of cels of drawn art, so should I count every screen cap I see of it as "official art" and reblog it? Or what about the manhua, the entire manhua is "official art," so should I try to collect every single panel? I've decided to draw the line on "no" for treating donghua screen caps as art for this blog, and I don't (usually) count comic pages from the manhua (though I've definitely made exceptions) but I'll reblog more "arty" stuff, like promo posters for the donghua, or chapter lead-ins for the manhua (or the incredibly sexy stuff that the manhua artist has been posting on Twitter of late, coughcough). But you may choose to draw the line in a different place, so what I have may not include whole categories that you'd want to collect.

That said, I've reblogged approximately 500 posts with official art over the almost three years I've run this account (three years this September!). And I can probably help a little with your question!

Resources from Me:

#official art on mdzsartreblogs: https://mdzsartreblogs.tumblr.com/tagged/official%20art

My (six months out of date) organization spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1nrSuFDL12MZ4O9_LFcbm7Tq47z_aiOl6I-xj8BNHs-c/edit?usp=sharing

This is the sheet I've used to organize these blogs and to keep the tags organized, though during 2023 I've had no time to maintain it. The reason I'm sharing it now is because the last sheet is a list of official artists (now a couple years out of date) with examples of their work and select links for finding them, so that might help.

Other Resources:

I don't really use twitter and have only vaguely heard of Zerochan, so I'm no help with those. Tumblr is my primary social media account, though I did recently make a Lofter account and I'm gonna try to find some official accounts there to follow directly. I can report back on that if people want, my Chinese isn't great tho so it's slow going and, as I've mentioned, I'm stupidly busy rn so it's hard to find the time.

For other Tumblr blogs that have a lot of official art, here's a few I know of that post it often:

@hanguangjunn - especially active recently, has done a lot of compilation posts that I don't always reblog because I often have some or all of the pieces as solo posts already

@t110n - posts a decent amount of MDZS, and posts official art for a huge range of danmei fandoms. One of my favorite blogs for that kind of thing; I super appreciate how much work they've put into sharing manhua art from a huge range of danmei fandoms.

@fluff-crt - also doesn't post everything, but is still active and has been active since before I joined the fandom; they also have posted some scanalations/translations and reposts with permission, though not as much recently.

@shandian-go - this is a Group Order account (the one I use personally, in fact, highly recommend) but from an art standpoint they're also a great resource for finding official merchandise art, as Mel always posts about the new merch with pictures and doesn't delete the posts advertising closed GOs.

@mdzs-equine-archive - posts official art that includes any equine (Apple, Lan Wangji's horse, etc.)

@minmoyu - in general, Minmoyu is one of the most incredible, helpful people I've found running a danmei account, and I've used resources they've written to help me buy print books, to find new danmei to read, and more. They also fairly regularly post official art, and have done so since the early days of danmei fandoms on Tumblr.

@p-h03n1-x - not active anymore, but used to post a lot of official art.

@zam81 - not super active, but basically all their posts are official art and/or photos for MXTX fandoms.

Those are the ones that spring to mind; if you scroll back through the tag on mdzsartreblogs and see who I've reblogged from, you'll spot some more; if you go back to waaaay in the beginning you'd probably be able to spot some folks who were more active once upon a time and are less around now (@aliceindanmeiland springs to mind, they haven't posted official MDZS art in a long time as far as I know, but were very active in the period when MDZS first hit Tumblr as a fandom, around the summer of 2018. Note that I personally joined the fandom in the fall of 2019.)

Hope this helps! Happy collection building!

-unforth

#resources

[donnerpartyofone]

Have you ever read any of Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol comic book stuff? I think it's so weird and overlooked

Is it overlooked? Isn't there a recent TV adaptation of it? I'd agree that it's not as big as Avengers or whatever, but frankly anything that's *smart* tends to be a little more niche and not-for-everybody, and that kind of makes it special, not to be such a snob. But no, I never read it, it's a personal failing. My exposure to the British Invasion is kind of spotty to be honest; I read a lot of Preacher and Transmetropolitan, not very much Hellblazer for some reason, I forget what else. I read From Hell and V and Watchmen, naturally, but I never forgave Alan Moore for Lost Girls, what an obnoxious piece of shit! The major Grant Morrison title I read (setting aside little random things like We3 and some Seven Soldiers stuff) was The Invisibles, which I was really hot and cold on. It's a great repository for Morrison's amateur pop culture scholarship and it is written with a kind of infectious passion, but I felt like if the premise is "the stifling forces of order and conformity vs. the liberating forces of rebellion and anarchy", that gets kind of sabotaged by the fact that the chaos agents still have to be represented as cliches and stereotypes for them to be legible to the reader. Like a true non-conformist wouldn't just look exactly like Johnny Rotten or whoever, a real rebel wouldn't be so straight-from-central-casting. So there's kind of a big flaw in the basic conceit, because in order to have archetypal resonance, you have to default to preordained cookie cutter images (in this case of flappers and mods and harlequins and stuff), which is the opposite of the whole idea of the winds of change and the triumph of individuality and everything.

I'm sorry, this is totally not what you asked, I'm just riffing now. I have every reason to believe Doom Patrol is really great! Maybe I'll get around to it some day, but I haven't read a superhero comic in a long time. The last time I read them really devotedly was in a time before irony, to be frank, and sometimes I find modern titles a little too *knowing*, like a little too smug and proudly self-aware at the expense of having an engrossing narrative with convincing characters. (And if the only alternative is soapy fetishistic bullshit of the Joss Whedon variety then I am REALLY not about it) It's funny because I have this memory of reading Grant Morrison's Marvel Boy miniseries that was drawn by J.G. Jones when it first came out and I was a teenager, and it blew my mind so hard! I thought Jones was everything, I would have done anything to be able to draw like him, and it didn't hurt that I knew somebody who was friends with him and I got to visit his studio once and it was probably pretty obvious that I immediately fell in love with him. But that Marvel Boy series had a bit of a meta, post-modern quality to it, which at the time wasn't so common and I found it really excitingly intelligent--so I raved about it to this friend of mine, one of my best friends in high school who was slightly older and who I looked up to in some ways, and he just sneered and spat something about how it's fucked up that comics aren't this innocent thing for kids anymore, and he refused to do more than glance at the pages of this very slick, adult book that I loved and wanted to share with him. And I mean now that everything feels like its saturated with this juvenile sense of irony, I kind of get where he was coming from! Even though I still think he was being a dick to me at the time, because in hindsight I've realized how our friendship was a total one-way street and he would say this stuff to me about how I was "still a mystery" to him and he'd make it sound like he was anxious to get to know the Real Me, but if I let him in on anything he didn't directly relate to in a personal way then he wouldn't even tolerate a conversation about it. Ahem. This is also not part of your question at all. But now you know! My sincerest apologies.

[aevyk-ing]

2023 review stuff

Here we go again. Gotta keep up with the tradition because it's always interesting to go back and reflect on a whole year. While things have improved ever so slightly, my life isn't good yet. But hey, I'm doing my best to keep on fighting until I get there.

2020, 2021, 2022

Health (mixed)

I started out this year with a surprise: I'm autistic! And while it's not a bad nor good surprise, it has changed completely the way I treat myself. I used to feel useless and an idiot but now there's an explanation for most of my quirks and I can use my newly discovered "superpowers" to make me feel better. But hey, it's still a secret. I'd like to get a formal diagnosis (I mean on paper) before talking to my parents and family.

That being said, I've used this new knowledge to fight the many bumps I've encountered this year. There's still a long way to go, but I feel like I know myself way better now.

2. Writing (freaking good)

I started the year finishing a book, then I wrote another one, translated three, wrote four short stories, a full comic strip and lots of stuff more. I've created a whole new continent for Gingaria and new places for the next books. I had a great presentation for my book Kylkos and lots of people have praised Legends of Gingaria, which makes me so happy! It all gives me the strength to go on the days I feel bad. And I can't wait to show you what's in store! Also, shout-out to all my AO3 readers.

3. Art (quite good)

I'm getting the hang of Clip Studio Paint and I think you can see the leveling up. I'm trying to improve with more character, creatures and places designs. I've drawn more comics and some illustrations I'm really proud of. While I sometimes have bad days when nothing seems to work, I can just go back when I feel better.

4. Cosplay (eh...)

Believe it of not, I've managed to keep on sewing some new stuff. I can't share it for now, but hopefully next year. I've done some clean-up and while I'll use most of my time to fix stuff next year (once I can get it out of the boxes), I'm planning to do more photoshoots.

Now I'm going to talk about the stuff that has helped me go through this year. But first...

I'm sure nobody cares, but this year has been worse because we've had some problems regarding the documents so they can demolish our house and pay us. The thing is some... baddies have been meddling with the process and we were in the middle, so that's why our case is getting longer to resolve. Hopefully, now that we've got the papers we need, things will start going on more smoothly.

Movies & series

I've watched a lot of stuff this year. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-verse was so good, I loved Suzume and The Boy and the Heron and, about series, Over the Garden Wall and The Blue Eyed Samurai.

2. Gingaria

While writing is not always easy, I've had so much fun making this world even bigger. And I made a doll maker! There's a lot to come and I hope it keeps on growing.

3. Webtoons & reading

I still struggle with reading but my mind is calmer this year. I've read some books from a public place where you put one and get one (left one of my Zem copies just because). I'm currently following some Webtoons and my favorites are The Blind Prince and Your Smile is a Trap.

4. Side projects

I was commissioned to make 35 fabric cubes and a replica of Gladys from F.R.I.E.N.D.S. Also made some props for cosplay and fixed other stuff.

5. Therapy

I'm so lucky to have found someone who gets me and understands what I'm going through. Sometimes is hard because she makes me rethink everything but I've improved so much this year thanks to her.

Someone asked me recently about my New Year's resolutions and turns out I don't want to have any, I'm going to rely on my projects. I've had an interesting idea recently and I'm going to search for someone to make it come true, I have more stories to tell (currently writing yet another book) and more surprises along the way.

Thank you so much for being there. I hope you all have a happy New Year. Keep on shining!

#me #personal #2023 #writing #art #cosplay #autism #neurodivergent #media recommendations #happy new year