When you struggle asking your crush out, so your literal wingman offers some emotional support.

(cue Yoruga falling backwards into the bush as soon as Kouya turns around, not because he's hiding, but because the sign is too heavy to hold for long lol)

Finished this despite having my doubts, and decided to give them an actual setting rather than floating in the void lol. This is their dynamic in a nutshell, or a part of it anyway.

i know it’s like years old at this point but i love that one collab mumbo and grian did with tommyinnit bc it’s like the single most concentrated example i’ve seen of mumbo’s Chaos Nullification Powers

you get to see a bit of it on hermitcraft, mostly via his interactions with grian, but until seeing that collab it didn’t really hit me just how completely mumbo can no-sell other people’s attempts to control a situation. tommyinnit is possibly the single shoutiest, most chaotic minecraft youtuber out there, and in most videos i’ve seen he pretty much overwhelms everyone else and sets the tone for interactions because of this. but mumbo just. doesn’t let him. no matter how much tommy escalates in intensity, mumbo reacts with *exactly* the same energy he always does. grian largely comes across in the whole video as annoyed and reluctant to engage with the whole thing, but mumbo’s not even affected. he just rolls with anything he finds funny and basically ignores anything he disapproves of, only seeming more and more unflappable the harder anyone tries to get a rise out of him.

AND imo, this is the key to my favorite interpretation of him as a character

see, when the people around him are being more reasonable/calm, i think mumbo often comes across as anxious and a bit easily overwhelmed. the thing is, his nervous wet cat vibes do not scale. he has one setting. his responses to the last life ‘ah-ha!’ jokes and to hermitcraft 8 starting to crumble to pieces under a falling moon are almost identical.

mumbo jumbo is inexorably and eternally Just Some Guy, but that gets stranger and stranger the weirder his surroundings become. the giggly incredulousness that makes him an easy target for goofy puns looks Very different when it’s also his reaction to the impending end of the world.

learned something about myself lately

[ID in ALT] I've made posts before about Talia/Dick co-parenting Damian moments (will never happen but let me dream) and this came to me in a vision. Took me ages to finish for some reason 😭 and then even longer to post

saving you from yourself 🫧

my ACEN tip gimmick has been fulfilled, aaand i got a little carried away with it. I haven't had time to draw for myself (or at all, really??) in like two weeks, i needed to Doodle and Have Fun. ... also, i did not think he would get so many donuts. people understand the value of giving treats to fictional characters :) its what he deserves

also shoutout to snazzyskeletons who had the same Tip Theme i did. we took pictures with our tip jars together. they are adorable v

i'm glad their vash got some donut money too :) 🍩 please check them out if you want some cute trigun stuff

- "Fergus! You're gonna miss your cocoa, you know!" - "It's a long way down from this window. But I'm so high I'll bet I could fly." - "Fergus!"

more alien revamp progress trying to make the anatomy more believable and less.. whatever the hell I was doing before

also toying around with what body parts might have been before they became what they are currently (the "ancestor" in the upper right is very heavily mantid-based) and then working off of that. still a ways to go, but it's more fleshed out now.

sometimes it's moments like this that make me look back and go 'hm, maybe I have improved artistically over time' and feel less stagnant

I sort of rambled about this in the tags of a post, but I wanted to make a proper one myself since I find it very fascinating (law backstory flashback you will always be famous). so one of my favorite scenes is this one:

it is a very meaningful moment for these two, a very clear turning point to their dynamic at that time, and it's made even clearer by how law starts referring to rocinante as cora-san afterwards.

now, there are several instances throughout dressrosa arc where the similarities between doflamingo and law are mentioned, with the former going as far as to call them both birds of a feather. and as it's shown in the flashbacks, reading about flevance was enough to trigger doflamingo's traumatizing memories of his and rocinante's childhood, which seems to motivate him to bring law into the family. the way law seeks to lash out at everything then is reminiscent of doflamingo's own worldview and experiences, at least from his pov:

rocinante noticed those similarities as well and though he tried to (questionably) discourage all kids from joining the DQ pirates by scaring them away, law's case in particular prompted him to bring up the topic with sengoku at some point, as seen during sengoku's conversation with law.

sengoku repeats what everyone says about the amber lead disease, that it's incurable, and warns rocinante not to favor law much for it could jeopardize his mission. whether rocinante's agreement here was reluctant or not ig is up to each reader but learning of law's real/full name (his relation to the D clan) reignites his initial worries and some more, considering the historic opposition/threat the D represents wrt celestial dragons and how this could endanger him if doflamingo were to find out.

so there's even bigger reasons for rocinante to not want law to become doflamingo 2.0. though as he later admits amidst his drunken speech, the will of D no longer matters to him when it comes to saving law, as rocinante's journey to cure his disease ends up making him feel genuine sympathy for law beyond that. he's forced to witness first hand how much discrimination and dehumanization law's subjected to time and time again, because of his disease and ties to flevance. before all this, law's mentioned his imminent death more than a few times and does it after too. and during the first disastrous hospital visit, he tells rocinante: see? I'm not even human anymore!

which brings me to this bit of dialogue:

for all of law's similarities and/or parallels to doflamingo, it's worth noting that rocinante experienced the same things his brother did and due to his younger age probably understood even less of what was happening or why they were being targeted in the first place. compared to doflamingo, rocinante also has way less dialogue in their backstory but one he does have is this:

this happens in the part where rocinante, doflamingo and their father are strung up on a wall and shot at with arrows. the villagers all express their anger, grief, the violence and suffering they've gone through because of celestial dragons like the donquixotes. albeit different in nature, along with doflamingo, rocinante experienced a kind of dehumanization as well.

so, again: for all that law might resemble doflamingo the most, I do wonder... how much of himself did rocinante see in law, though subconsciously? a kid who lost his family, subjected to the kind of violence that led him to resign himself to death (seek it, even) and was treated by others as inhuman because of circumstances out of his control? it might've not been what rocinante believed to be his own motivations to help law, likely never actually saw or realized the similarities they shared, but imo it adds some more depth to his kindness and sympathy towards law.

this also marks a stark difference between the donquixote brothers. whereas doflamingo got caught up in a very vicious cycle (which traces back to the existence of celestial dragons as a whole and was further enabled by others like trebol) that he planned to continue with law, rocinante was able to see past law's rage and acknowledge the pain beneath. after all, rocinante knows too what it's like to be hurt by others who've been terribly hurt first and became someone who wasn't exactly keen on returning the sentiment, unlike doflamingo, regardless of whether it was in his nature to be so or if it's something that was nurtured as he grew up. that's not to say rocinante was an endlessly kind saint (he had his own biased views) or that he wasn't capable of violence (he did beat up all those medical staff and burn down hospitals for example), but those incidents weren't caused by a sense of entitlement on his part or such. he didn't blame law for stabbing him or in general for seeking revenge against the world, ultimately chose to protect and save him instead - which, indeed, changed law's life. as law presently insists, he owes cora not just that very life but his heart as well.

lastly - law himself might not disagree with doflamingo insisting they're of the same sort, but law is also the kid who couldn't fathom leaving his dying little sister behind. who softened and lowered his guard after receiving genuine kindness/love/sympathy for the first time in years. who saved a little mink and risked his own neck later on to save a boy who'd just lost his brother in the worst way possible. who didn't even consider putting his crew in danger when he knew (and expected) he might die and his whole revenge plan against doflamingo was rooted in love and grief to begin with, the same upon which the foundation of his crew was built and is a tribute to. last we saw of him, law orders bepo to go back in winner island because can't leave the crew behind, etc etc, so there's that too. how much of it is law's own nature and personality? how much is due to the impact cora had on him? both? would've doflamingo turned out differently or made different choices if his parents had tried harder to school him out of those CD views or if he'd had more positive influences aside from them, instead of the people he ended up surrounded by? would he have become the same kind of person he is rn no matter what? interesting stuff to think about.

,,, sun-dappled sheets...

[[WIP; CONCEPT ART]]

.

.

Hm, better than the few couple attempts I made. I'll admit.

people who don't think at least a little bit of obsession is a little bit hot weird me out to be honest

empanada with her ace bee plushie, watercolor and pen

I regret to inform everyone I'm watching Wakfu again and that, now in 2024, I still haven't grasped how to draw hats.

i like "confused innocent wittle android" connor but only when he's doing it on purpose. male manipulator.

same 😚

Although! I also enjoy him learning to navigate the world beyond what he can access via internet/social protocols and stumbling a little along the way. He’s aware of how the world works on an intellectual level, but actually having to experience life — going through the motions of surviving, of feeling emotions, of actually connecting with others on a deeper level beyond “pick an option from this algorithmically optimized list”, requires more nuance and forces him to show more vulnerability in order to learn and grow and connect. So I can imagine him being caught off guard, or having his intentions misread, or picking the wrong course of action, and feeling (at best) a little abashed and (at worst) mortified/guilty sometimes as a result. He’s confident and smart and adaptable, but nobody’s perfect, and I think he’s generally pretty hard on himself if his reactions to his failures in-game are any indication.

I still like to imagine him as more of an “ends justify the means” type of person, though. Imo he wouldn’t be above using deceit and manipulation to get what he wants even after deviating, but he’s also developing his own code of ethics separate from CyberLife’s that dictate when and how and to what extent he should use those tactics, and whether the consequences to his interpersonal relationships will be worth it.

Machine Connor on the other hand? He knows exactly what he’s doing and he’s here to wreck your shit 😌✨

OH YEAH and yeah idk maybe the big skull fungus very well could be like, a god. that it could be like, the one god shroom. i remember people before sotf were wondering if the mushroomos infected sozo(nious) on purpose because of the implication that its a god was in the file name even before the lore tablets mentioned it.. i think. i havent seen them for myself either besides small glances IT ALSO HAS A WHITE STEM?? INSTEAD OF A BLACK ONE LIKE SOZO HAS?? like?? is it a different type? what if its from an ancient ancestor? whats going on, whats the relation of the mushroomos to these similar but different fungi? im honestly just as confused as you are. i think about these things about the game, especially with sozo, so often and im glad someone else also does just as much LMAO. at this rate ive posted 3 fucking anon asks in a row im so sorry

COTL DEVS ANSWER ME WHAT IS THE SKULL SUPPSOED TO BE

If it is a god shroom then everything explodes because It's A God Shroom it could do whatever it wants for any reason . In which Sozo has a god in his body/brain(???) and that's why it can drag him with it when it's revived. and that is a Theory I've proposed before but then it's like. WHY would a god shroom NOT infect more than just Sozo. Surely it wants to propagate right??? Otherwise why infect at all?? Unless it just wanted a vessel??

I mean fuck if we really want to go insane about it, the fungi that kills Sozo doesn't even look like the same fungi

and it split the one on his head in HALF so like. I assume it's the same fungi and it just spores in a strange way, because otherwise we're going into complicated ass hyperparasitism territory (parasites that infect other parasites) which we COULD do but like WHY, but i mean.

like. maybe this is a neverending spiral of endless fungi. who knows Throws my hands into the air.

AND DIFFERENT STEM COLORS YOU'RE RIGHT I DIDN'T EVEN NOTICE?? COULD THEY BE DIFFERENT SPECIES THEN? BUT WHY ... Or is a maturity thing and maybe the one on Sozo is younger and will lose its darker colors as it ages????? I mean. And bear with me here, but. The shroom on the skull has fuckin age lines. So like. Old shroom? Old shroom gone white with age? Old? Shroom? Aged? Elderly shroom?

and don't even get me STARTED on the mushroomos who are themselves seemingly menticide (given they drop it when killed and sozo will eat them). like. the worldbuilding here is so fucked and I can only barely try to contain it into digestible boxes that make a vague amount of sense in my brain