I'm like 75% certain I had the original 'red/maroon Battlewinner with a frozen throat' design but I'm kicking myself bc I deleted the og blog (frigid-lizards) I posted it on.

Anyways I love to see it, just a little "ehehe I did that" moment

Here's a screen shot of the corrupted file for shits and giggles

This is mainly my observation as a non black person watching the reactions of other non black people and especially white people to the show Interview With The Vampire, they are a result of a fundamental misunderstanding regarding the idea of horror.

in a world of white dominated hollywood horror movies that mostly contain gore and white familial tragedy and abuse, none of which ever ever include the concept of race, misogyny and homophobia, racialised misogyny, and racialised homophobia- people cannot digest a horror tv show wherein the main character is a black man who is always and forever a victim of systematic, social, and microaggressive racism. people, specifically white people, have always been uncomfortable with being shown the extent of anti black racism in a way that isnt heavily sanitised or sympathetic to the white cause. to white people, the genre of horror simply does not include race cause they have not experienced the horrors of colonialist genocidal white supremacist anti black racism. and i highlight anti black racism because it is the subject of the show, as well as being a topic that is discussed vaguely by non black people while still being the most perpetuated form of racism from a global standpoint.

to white people especially, as the people who are responsible for the worst crimes committed against black people, anti blackness is just one of life's constants that should not be addressed directly or in detail, so to depict anti black racism so openly as a part of the genre of horror is incomprehensible to them. they dont want to be shown even a smidgen of exactly the kind of shit their ancestors and peers are responsible for, cause horror to them must just be things that they relate to and nothing regarding race at all cause it causes them to confront their comfortable positions. this is the same reason why you see white people saying jordan peele's movies are 'too hard to understand' despite being very easy to understand.

horror to people of colour is a concept that intrinsically includes racialised violence, its a constant presence like a rusted nail hovering near an open wound. and white people reject this. which is why they decided to degrade and miscontrue the purpose of iwtv and call it 'just another self important show thats racist and not worth watching'. cause to them horror is meant to be enjoyable, they want limbs chopped off not the actions of their white ancestors coming back to remind and haunt them. even though horror is a genre that is meant to fill you with... horror. horror to white people does not include the politics of racism, cause they see horror as an apolitical genre (obviously incorrect when everything and the kitchen sink is political naturally).

to the people of color, it is a moment of feeling seen, to see a main character ( a flawed man a pained man) experience the horror of all round racial discrimination, to see the horror of him being dismissed and exploited by the white people around him, the moment of witnessing yourself in the other when you see Louis and Claudia being so utterly sabotaged by so many forces, the way they are pushed to making irreversible devastating decisions cause they think they have no other choice to achieve an escape from a multitude of things they suffer through, the manipulation and abuse they had to become accustomed to. this is the horror, the horror of being immortalised against your will and lack of choices you were given, the horror of being forced to be subjected to racialised misogynistic and homophobic violence for eternity. being forced to live with all these memories and no means of forgetting. all this while enduring the way a white man belittles them for even suggesting that he might be racist while he expresses racist micro agressions (both lestat and daniel). this is real horror that hits home, horror you want to devour as a person of colour cause you want to see more of this story continue, to see what becomes of this living limbo that Louis, Claudia, and eventually Armand have to go through.

and as most white people cannot fathom this, cannot relate, they dismiss this version of horror that focuses on racism as a core element from the perspective of a black man and forever young black girl. they dismiss the show as just being tone deaf colour blind casting cause they didnt even see the trailer or try to understand this show. the white guilt is a shield they use to defend themselves against the frank and honest depiction of anti black racism from the perspective of a black man. they do not want to understand. they want sanitised, digestible depictions of racism so the horror remains fun for them.

even though this show is literally categorised as horror, and has all the hallmarks of classic horror including the camp styling, the blood, the gore, the supernatural, and the violence - the single fact that the show's core theme is based around racism from the perspective of a gay black vampire man is enough for them to declassify as horror in their minds. cause people of colour and especially black gay men must always be shown as having a good time to dissuade the guilt of white people and their responsibility is establishing the systems that oppress gay black men. speak no evil, see no evil, hear no evil, and the evil is not there anymore.

i may have more thoughts on this that i'll express later but thats all i have for now.

Asking because I’m extremely curious about this, how did MonProm’s writing get different over time? I remember you saying that the lore and characters feel different, and that it's missing sincere character interactions, too. I know almost nothing about the lore and I’ve only seen a few people mention the characters, so I’d be interested in a rundown of what aspects you think got worse in the series

I wouldn’t mind a very long response since I’m not that active in the fandom, I need to catch up on what happened

sorry for taking so long to answer this! i kinda waffled on it for a long bit, mainly because i started doubting myself again, and whether or not this was me simply overreacting or being tinted by nostalgia or simply being extremely picky and choosy in what i like (the last of which is true, i seldom get into fandoms at all for this reason and stay away from most popular media, but i wasn't sure if it applied here). i've posted about it already, but i'm in the middle of a psychotic episode where i can't feel a lot of pleasure to begin with + most things i do experience ending up solidly in the "very bad" category, so as you can imagine, i really didn't want to mislead and check that i was actually in objective reality.

as it is, this is also when a lot more screenshots started to be posted in the monster prom tag, and that helped me bridge the gap back into returning to the games themselves and feel like i was making a more accurate judgement. if you're one of those people who have been posting screenshots, i sincerely thank you, and i appreciated seeing you in the tag greatly.

for those not in the know — i've been in the monster prom fandom since it first released, prior to even the first additional ending to be added (the "Punch the sun" ending, and i recall the minor fandom drama that happened at that time due to it). my impression of monster prom is very much influenced by this, as what got me into the first game was the fact that the characters genuinely seemed to care for each other and were friends with each other (not merely tolerating each other's presences nor dressing it up, they sincerely thought of each other as friends and were open about that fact), on top of the wide variety of small details and statements that, if taken at face value, could create compounding complexity in the lives of each and every character and had wider implications for their lives.

no, they were not necessarily explored nor even necessarily "real", with so many conflicting events and statements, but i liked this too, because it meant a wider flexibility in what you could imagine, helping to create a more tailored experience for everyone who thought about these characters. this was what i liked about the early fandom too. what was baseline "canon" was so vague and minimal that you could have wildly different interpretations of the same characters' histories and relationships with each other. you would have radically different perspectives on what the world itself looked like, what it was like, that there wasn't really any wrong answers so long as their personalities remained the same. this is where you got the old headcanon of polly and liam being childhood friends who knew each other as humans, or that the world of monster prom was post-apocalypse where humanity itself had gone extinct or only existed in tiny pockets, or my personal headcanon that both monster and human society existed right next to each other and had minimal crossover for petty cultural reasons. this was also prior zoe-as-ro, and there were wildly different interpretations of zoe's personality, with most going for a far more disquieting creepy-cute than the deep nerd we got.

this is why you get stuff like the timeloop theory, where everyone is repeating the same weeks leading up to prom over and over, and are perhaps vaguely aware of it but broadly unconcerned. this is also why it felt like the joke that, the characters were still in high school but were all fully legal adults with most in their 20's, best landed, because it was absurd and strange and didn't quite make sense, but the world itself was inherently absurd and semi-malleable to begin with. realistically, i felt like everyone understood it was making fun of the trope of having adults play teenagers in american sitcoms and wildly casting outside the age range, but for more in-universe explanations it wasn't any different from the way that you would have a large, dramatic ending in which everything changed, but then you'd restart and everyone would be right back at the beginning with nothing different, or even having conflicting events in the same run. it was a dream-logic that fit with the tropes and, thus, diagetically made sense.

to be clear, i don't mind canon having a set, well, canon on which it refers back to itself. i don't mind expanding that or including more things which are set in stone. but there was a perceivable shift in how the games handled this over time, becoming a lot more... bitter, it felt, towards all of these different branching ideas and concepts that, yeah, the people making them knew wouldn't necessarily be "canon" because "canon" already liked to contradict itself so much. most people weren't even sold on any one idea, and there was a much greater sense of enjoying and appreciating all the varying ideas people would come up with even if you personally didn't share them. making the characters be out of character was the real crime, because then it didn't diagetically make sense in the same way, didn't wholly fit.

(again, this is not to say fanon didn't happen and characters weren't smoothed down into a simplified personality that fit these varying fan-interpretations instead of the game itself. certainly damien love/lust was just as bad as it had ever been, and everyone loved to mangle his character into a more stereotypical "bad boy with a heart of hold" all the time. but it certainly felt less set-in-stone about it than it does now, with any deviation from the norm being considered strange and odd and even broadly shunned from the wider fandom.)

all of this is setup for establishing what the writing, lore, and characters felt like in the earlier days. the characters were the strongest part, with their relationships to each other being equally as important. the lore played it fast and loose and was far less interested in setting anything in concrete because that wasn't the important part. the lore wasn't the important part, which was what made it all the more intoxicating to think about, all the more fun to play with.

montrip is easily the biggest offender when it comes to setting everything in all-or-nothing terms and demanding absolutism from the world. broadly i blame the hitchhiker conversations for the worst of it, but i think ultimately the way they handled the entire premise of the game is where this problem stems from. it's not really an exploration in the same sense that you might explore the first game, discovering different perspectives and different people with different relationships to each other. it's an exploration in the sense of a sequel that over-explains the monster, that takes the most boring option out of all those that were possible and floating around and settles on something that was blatant, obvious, typically rejected not because of how novel it is but how trite and par for the course it is in the rest of the genre.

yeah, okay. humans know nothing about monsters and there's a "monster dimension" that exists separately from the human dimension. there's no crossover between the two of them. of course there's a big grand-scale fight between the eldritch powers that zoe used to be a part of, from which not only are slayers the main organization against them, but also the merkingdom has some horse in this race too. it's an urge to make things so universal in explaining them, in revealing connecting threads which unite everything that's ever happened in here, that makes the worldbuilding and lore immediately much more boring than it ever was before.

and it didn't have to be this way! nothing in the first game contradicts any of this too explicitly (see the above, the first game loves to contradict itself), and i would even be happy if this was basically canon but never stated or confirmed to be the big overarching everything going on underneath it all. i believe you should probably know these things about any world that you create and have them in the back of your mind. the difference is that you can know these things and keep them in mind, even focusing on things where its very relevant, and still not reveal them. this is why you have lore bibles, after all. every horror writer knows exactly how their monster works and the full underlying reason for everything that happens, but that doesn't mean the audience will see it or possess this same information too, and leaving it intentionally obscure will make far better stories.

which, this is bad enough, but it wouldn't be the breaking point for me if this was all there was.

but the worst thing of all has to be the slow decay of the very same characters that sold me on this world, this lore, this game in the first place. monster prom is nothing without the characters in it. it's a dating sim, it has nothing but characters to get you to play, and liking these characters are the entire reason anyone would pick up monster prom in the first place.

and the first game pulls this off extremely well. it's all in the tagline: be your worst self. they are, indeed, all terrible people. yes, even that character that you just thought of right now. they all have points in the game where they commit atrocities, where they kill or hurt people, where they do inexcusable things that could not be ignored in a more serious setting.

but that's the point. i think there's something very powerful in creating a character who not only do you love and love their personality and the way they interact with the world, but who also are inapologetically terrible, and to have the humor and the charisma be so good that you don't get bogged down in the "this is awful". likewise, it never feels the urge to really go out of its way to justify what's going on. this is not to say theres no discussion of if someone "deserved it", but usually there's still the sense that the joke is on them, that this is still an extreme reaction specifically for comedy and not necessarily something that can be justified. you can have damien set leonard on fire and have it feel earned, without prompting the needed reaction of what it's actually like to watch someone burn to death.

this is what sets the prank masterz ending apart from the rest of the game, and really establishes it as the first real "bad ending". because nothing that you do or happens in the prank masterz ending is any different from anything else that happens in any other run. you summon evil beings from other dimensions as a throwaway gag on how visiting one location raises your stats. you kill other people and damn them to terrible fates. you watch as body horror happens. the only difference is that, in the prank masterz ending, the laugh track doesn't play.

the rest of the game and the writing echoes this philosophy, this careful interplay of tropes that keeps everything tongue in cheek and yet sincere enough to make sure emotional beats still land when they're needed. the characters feel true to themselves and their own emotions, even when the world is extreme and excessive, when everything else runs on comedy logic.

this is also what i noticed failing first as time went on.

like i said, fanon has always existed and there's always been very specific ideas as to what characters are like in the same way fanon always flattens down characters into the same tropes over and over. scott is stupid and innocent and doesn't know what sex is. damien is violent and hot and too cool for anyone else. miranda is the idiot girl character. repeat over and over and over until you get sick of it.

but it's been an issue as time has crept on that canon has started to approach fanon and began to merge with it. now, scott is so innocent that he can't even curse. polly starts being mean to her friends and saying things that would be very hurtful to hear. the merkingdom isn't really super evil and fucked up, it's just miranda that's like that. they become simpler, easier to digest, streamlined for social media posts and mass-sharing. they become less and less subversions of existing tropes and moreso just another example of them, something else to add to the collection, not their own individual stories.

even further from this, what more complex traits they had are now stated and not shown. polly is stated to be smart and clever in a way that her party girl persona doesn't imply and to be sincerely rather down to earth with the people she cares about, but we seldom ever see this anymore unless its the game specifically trying to make a point about it, in which case it won't let her do anything that implies cleverness and moreso will just outline it in the narration. vera is stated to care for people in a very genuine and heartfelt way, but seldom will get a chance to do so, and every opportunity for her to do so to their faces is missed while she will just outright state it later. it does not feel consistent, it does not feel like any of these are intended reads of their actions. it feels like the devs have something they want to do but no idea on how to actually do so. and forget it if you want these traits to manifest in small ways that show up in unrelated moments and scenes.

the dialogue becomes harder and harder to tell between each speaker, if you are just looking at what's said and not at the pictures attached to it. the characters' distinct voices have been eroded away, so that they speak more and more like each other, relaying the same terms and ideas in the same words. perspective becomes a suggestion, instead of a must.

this is something that started back in monster camp too, as all of the endings in that game felt ultimately the same as every other ending. it's very hard to place or define the full reason why, why there feels like there's no emotional stakes nor investment, why everything feels moreso like selecting different coats of paint and trying to find all the different ending pictures rather than being interested in exploring the characters as characters.

stranger yet, the series that started with the tagline of "be your worst self" has experienced a kind of... softening, for lack of a better word? what i mentioned about being able to handle the balance between terrible people who do terrible things and the light tone of the game starts to change, as abruptly the same characters who were down with violent murder in the first game start to lose their nerve, acting more and more on more typical morality. it's one of those things that feels like it's starting to damage the tone, as abruptly it's not as absurd as it used to be, demands less suspension of disbelief which could buffer and support the rest of the setting on it. there's even a part in one of the endings in montrip which involves current-polly and current-scott looking back on their monprom selves and reacting in horror at how violent and careless their pranks are, in a way that fundamentally felt like it was undercutting and disparaging all the things that felt fun and made monprom what it was.

which is odd, really, because more and more i feel like the characters in these games like each other less and less. the friendships and genuine enjoyment of each others company that brought me to this game in the first place has gone. now they don't mention each other as much, don't care for each other's feelings and reactions as much, aren't as willing to support each other. they are more and more found on their own, relied on their own, seem to seek out contact and interaction with their own friends less and less. it feels like they're all separating out into their own worlds, but also feels like they wouldn't willingly want to interact with each other if they weren't already forced together by some other outside contrivance.

if anything, i'd compare it to every other dating sim out there, where you, the player, are the most important person in these characters' lives, and they only feel ambivalent or antagonistic towards every other character. which, again, is not why i picked up monster prom or why i liked it so much in the first place.

and it's because of this that it feels like the current state of the series has to focus on its increasingly weak worldbuilding and lore, trying to form a more serious foundation without character relationships being so tightly bound together, without the characters themselves being more developed and rich, without an aspect of absurd humor to rely on.

more and more i've noticed monprom has to rely on referencing other series to make itself funny and create humor, which, again, it's always done. it was just easier to ignore back then, if you didn't know what was being referenced, because there was always more going on in the exact same scene to bolster it and give context clues as to the setup and punchline at play. it feels like the current games are much more dependent on you knowing pop culture references in order to have any fun with it, and i'm someone who, again, is very picky in what i like or what i'll seek out. i'm not interested in a stream of references about other things that i would much rather be doing than playing through a game that feels like it hates that i like it at all, when i could, again, just be engaging with the thing that takes itself seriously and knows what it wants.

hi (:

I'm not very involved in fandom and I also dont really watch 4sided dive, so maybe this has been talked through already but-

I noticed how the bells hells dont have any kind of place to call their own. Vox machina had their own keep, and whitestone, and scanlans mansion on the road. The mighty 9 had the xhorhaus and calebs tower, (and the dome/tiny hut).

The hells dont have anything like that do they?? Or if not just their own, do they have a place they could just show up at and stay for a bit?

That feels rather inconvenient, but also like it says something about them/the campaign- about being settled, belonging to somewhere (or to each other?), their financial&political situation, etc .....

I dont really know whether that's a question. Maybe - do you have thoughts on that? Do you know if other people here or in the cast have talked about that?

thanks (:

Hi anon,

Honestly? My thoughts are that the Nein and Vox Machina situations re: permanent, nonmagical housing aren't actually standard and they left them behind so much (well, Greyskull Keep and the Xhorhaus anyway) that I don't blame Matt for not going back to that specific well. It's fairly typical in my personal experience and in other actual plays I've listened to for even a higher level party to not have a specific home base. For what it's worth I assume Bells Hells could show up at Zephrah or Whitestone and at least be taken in given all their service to Accord and to Keyleth particularly. I agree it probably says something about the political situation that rather than service to an existing government, they are serving a vast political alliance who themselves are staying in a war encampment. I don't think it says much about them financially or being settled though - the Mighty Nein rarely if ever had the amount of money Bells Hells has had throughout, and they didn't rely much on the Xhorhaus other than in the arc they spent in Xhorhas. If anything I think it perhaps says more about how globe-trotting this campaign is, and perhaps how much Vox Machina returned to Whitestone.

As for lack of magical accommodations, the really simple and boring answer is no bard (for most of the campaign, anyway) nor wizard. Tiny Hut and Magnificent Mansion (which is the basis of Caleb's tower) are both available only to bards and wizards. Caleb had specific reason to prioritize these (half the party being kidnapped resulting in the death of another party member early on) but Bells Hells couldn't have cast these even if they wanted to. They also don't have anyone who can cast teleportation spells more than once a day; Fearne multiclassed and won't have Transport Via Plants for another level, and I don't think that's the 7th level Imogen took (and we know it's not what Dorian took). So it's harder for them to return to a static home base, and no one can cast the magical home base because of the spellcaster choices (though I will also note they would have only just gotten to the point of having it now - Magnificent Mansion is 7th level which you get at L13.) I'm interested to see what Sam does if he rolls up with another cleric, because technically clerics have Temple of the Gods, which is basically like if Magnificent Mansion were a lock-in. That's also L7, so also wouldn't have come into play until now.

They did, I should note, have the Silver Sun, which they received at roughly the same level as the other parties received Greyskull/The Xhorhaus, and could have served in many ways as both transport and home base had they not decided to crash it into the key. I support this choice, and yes, their base being an airship does say things about the campaign's focus, but they did indeed have it for a time.

Hi! So, seeing you in my notes reminded me that I meant to ask you about that Instrumentality poll. Being as I am tumblr user 人類補完計画, I have, asyoumightimagine, a lot of interest in the topic, and I'd be very curious to hear *your* thoughts on Shinji's choice - in part because you mentioned in the tags that you were wondering whether your take aligned with the consensus view, but also because I feel like you're among the most distinctive & intellectually honest philosophical voices I've encountered on here, and I do wonder how your faith, along with your overall view on things, influences your take(s) re:EoE.

I was going to wait until the poll finally closed but i think its been plateauing for a couple of days now anyway so i might as well. This is all going to be pretty vague and mysticism-y ofc, especially given the vagueness and mysticism of the source material itself, and im going off of memory on top of that (i am not putting myself thru the emotional hurdle of rewatching EoE just for a post, sorry)

So, first off, my interpretation of shinjis ultimate choice is to reject instrumentality for all of humanity, to retain our ATFs and our individuality. And i lean towards thinking this was a mistake, on his part. I sometimes see ppl suggest that he offered everyone a choice to either join or refuse instrumentality, but i tend to think this is just projection; idr anything in the text to clearly support this

Im not really sure how to go about arguing for this position directly, beyond rebutting objections. To the extent we are given a clear explanation of what an ATF is, it is smth like the secrecy of our own thoughts and desires and personality; ie, others ignorance of those things. Ignorance is a terrible thing, just generally, in itself! Like impotence. Its terrible in proportion to the importance/value of the things one is ignorant of, and ppl are about the most valuable things there are. Thats much of whats so bad about death, which is why it makes perfect sense the dead get to join in HI as well. So, putting it all together, the presence of ATFs is a terrible imposition, and their removal thru HI is a great blessing, maybe even the greatest possible blessing. And this shows itself in the end of strife and discord and the beginning of real unity of spirit and will, but its already present in the mere dissolution of interpersonal ignorance

The narrative itself frames this as an erasure of individuality, but im not sure how to understand this. Is the idea supposed to be that we would not survive the loss of our ATFs? Im not sure thats even intelligible: the loss of our ATFs is just the lifting of certain kinds of ignorance or, in other words, the instilling of certain kinds of knowledge. Knowledge in whom? In those undergoing human instrumentality. So clearly we survive HI, if it involves us coming into knowledge, and thus being around to know these things. Is this supposed to mean our distinctive contributions to the diversity of human experience etc would all be destroyed in favour of some uniform replacement? I dont see why that would be necessary; we can certainly imagine ways ppls varying idiosyncratic quirks can all "make it into" some sufficiently rich collaborative work. Why should HI not be the same? I suppose the fact it involves everyones bodies into a homogeneous sea of yellow goop speaks against this, but my inclination is to read this as a sort of pupal stage from which a mature instrumentalised humanity can emerge. Tho thats admittedly a bit of a reach

Theres yet another negative interpretation of the "destruction of individuality" i sometimes hear: that it would somehow rob us each of our agency and ability to shape the world in accord with our desires and beliefs. This goes along with a worry that the inauguration of HI would necessarily be a violation of consent and mental autonomy, which strikes me as misguided for much the same reason. Our ignorance of one another is not an individual condition of oneself in particular one can opt in or out of irrespective of the choices of others; if my not being able to retsin my ATF is a violation of my "autonomy", why is my retaining my ATF not in turn a violation of the autonomy of the others being thereby kept ignorant of my deepest self? Mutual ignorance of one anothers mental states (including that very ignorance) is in no interesting way reducible to the ignorant subjects each having certain "individual" or "intrinsic" or "internal" states that can individually and unilaterally be shifted without affecting those of the others; it is an "external" relation. So thinking about HI in terms of individual, unilaterally revocable consent is confused; the fact it is changing is irreducibly collective, and thus consent to it and only be given or refused collectively if at all. Hopefully thats not too opaque

This reply feeds into my answer to the worry about the dilution of ones agency and control over the world. This objection makes sense against a background view on which, for an agent A to control the answer to a question Q and a distinct agent A* to control the answer to a question Q*, Q and Q* must be modally independent: any answer to the latter must be compossible with any answer to the former. Or that, if this isnt true, this is bc As control over Q or A*s over Q* must be only "limited" or "partial" or w/e. My rejection of this assumption (which is i think what lies behind the last objection about autonomy) is probably my deepest, most abstract anti-liberal commitment. Its a conception of control or freedom that i think ultimately requires a debilitatingly narrow view of what full freedom could look like, or of what facts can amount to states of a person. (For example, i think it prolly requires you to say that knowing that the sun rises, a property entailing the "external" fact that the sun rises, is not actually a state of a person, in some important sense, rather than smth like a conjunction of a state of a person and a state of the horizon/sun.) But going all the way into this would probably take a lengthy book; mb i will try to work it out slightly more precisely at some point tho

You asked how my feeling about EoE connect with my faith, and broader view of the world. This illiberal assumption is close to the heart of it. I am always tempted in this context to quote marxs comments in the 1848 manuscripts about the whole of nature being the "inorganic body of man", and i dont think im alone in seeing connections between those passages and remarks like pauls about the mystical body of the church ("So we, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another." Now there is smth for mereologists to chew on!!) And this is a trend you see elsewhere in the Christian tradition, like dantes description of the celestial eagle in paradiso xviii-xx. I was surprised, when talking to an atheist friend about my tentative support for HI, that they said my christianity made sense of my disagreement with them about this point; not bc i dont think theres a connection but bc idt of these emphases on the unity of the mystical body as particularly prominent in outsiders impressions of Christian belief

Anyway, hopefully that was at least somewhat illuminating. Thx for the kind words ^^

Darry and Pony bond over bitching about their husband/boyfriends.

"Tim needs to get his head out of his ass. He's not gonna live to see 21 if he keeps stealing cars."

"I wish Curly would shut up in school. I don't care if he falls asleep but he thinks it's funny to poke me in the ribs during reading time."

and Tim and Curly "bond" over "gushing" about their boyfriend/husband

"Ponyboy looked at me today for a solid hour during study time, did u know he's got these tiny freckles by his eyes? And his dimple dot deeper, i don't know how that's possible. His math teacher gave him a C on our last test, I'm gonna spread roofing tar on that bitch's car. Also his eyes get green when he's really mad and he I found he's ticklish the most by his navel-"

". . . . I hope Darry makes tater tot casserole. "

SO real, pony and darry dont even mean to do it either, it literally always starts off as a “man why the hell did he even do that” convo between the two over some coffee, theyre like middle aged women discussing their husbands in a cubicle

and then when it comes to curly and tim talking about their unfortunate significant others, curly is always just going off on like 13 different tangents and not getting to the point, he NEEDS to be very specific so everyone knows how hes feelin!!

also its canon that tim shows love through his VERY colorful vocabulary, im not putting it above him to call darry some interesting choice of words and use words curly wouldnt even think of but BY GOD is he never forgetting them and putting them to use later

and god for id tims talking to pony over it cause ponys just standing there like “oh����”

PLEASE HELP: SIGNAL B*OST, D*NATE, OR C*MMISSION ME!!

Listed below are the TL;DR, How to Help, and Full story/Context. I’m sorry I had to resort to this but i have no other choice.

TL;DR version

Please help a mentally disabled fan artist’s family to pay for medical debts for c*ncer, insulin, maintenance meds (for depression, anxiety, etc), and cat food

How to Help

D*nations!!! - I only have P*yPal (also thru K*-fi) and GC*sh! Please dm me for the link or QR code

C*mmission me!!! - I really hate asking for help with nothing to give in return, so preferably please c*mmission me. I havent updated my new set of c*mmission sheet samples BUT heres a short, quick version attached on my post as a pic.

B*y my let-go collection of merchandise!!! (PH-based only please and sorry) - In order to try and make up for the em*tional ab*se me and my mom have to go thru on a daily basis just by living with dad, I ended up in a downward spiral and tried to buy things impulsively since 2020. So, now, we’re paying the price and I have been deeply regretting it ever since. So, plsase please please help buy my palugi (selling for a loss) let-go merchandise, theyre mostly official and am selling for a loss, we badly need the space and especially the funds. Weve only sold less than a half of my stock and it doesnt help that my dad keeps mocking me about it.

Share and S*gnal boost!!! - Tumblr is the only site where i have somewhat of an audience. Please please please help reblog, share, and signal boost.

Full Story/Context

Hi, I’m Theresivy (Teh-reese-ivy), I have been depressed and mentally impaired (among other things) who draws art as a multifandom self-taught fan artist, As of 2020 my mom’s tumor has turned into cancer that has only been given medical attention to in 2022 onwards. And as of then, i have indefinitely become a N,E.E.T for my mom and our finance’s sake while being there by her side. As of now she has gone through FOUR surgeries because more and more unexpected complications keep popping up. She doesnt deserve this, why couldnt it have been me,

We live with my emotionally abusive and manipulative dad (her husband) and our two fur daughters Pancake and Waffles (of which my cats and mom mean more than the world to me) while being forced to live in one of the countless apartment complexes my equally abuse maternal uncle (and his wife, my maternal A-I-L) as we have no other choice. And as such, my dad has been kissing their asses since we were forced to move here more than five years ago.

Both my uncle and my A-I-L took it upon themselves to become the defacto head of my maternal family ever since my maternal grandmother passed just because he became rich thru the means of evil entrepreneur practices. We cant do anything lest we want to get kicked and live on the streets. He is a real-life mastermind as he is always a few steps ahead of us, even making it so that his eldest daughter became his perfect pawn of being his personal lawyer. He always has connections and to them we are merely insects.

My parents and the rest of our family dont really see “artist” as anything that could get money rolling in (and day by day my failed attemptes have been proving them right), and on top of that, they see me being depressed and such as being the “freeloading couch potato”. So they keep bringing up how much of a failure I am. Weve been living in such toxic conditions that my mom has developed this sort of stockholm syndrome type relationship with my dad, and her younger brother (my uncle), and his wife (my A-I-L, her S-I-L). At first i thought i could try and save mom but shes too far gone that she strictly forbids me from fending for myself whenever either of the three try to berate me and drive me to tears and breaking down for the fifth time every week.

All i wish now is to be able to pay back at least some of the debt, for my mom and my fur daughters’ sake, and hopefully my own. I have been in a downwards spiral ever since i have been tolerating being the “odd one out” kid from school. in general, and even in the family, its been literal years and my entire life, im tired of being used and tossed to the side, im tired of being the punching bag of a cosmic joke, and im tired of my disabilities. im tired of being useless to the people i care for the most. so please. help us.

My wish now is to be able to help mom and our fur daughters move away from our domestic ab*sers. everything is an endless spiral of dead ends and im sick of it. ive been self sabotaging for years but a small part of me still has hope, please. i dont want to believe that this is where it ends for us. in this world of darkness and cruelty that spits on our faces, only my mom and our fur daughters have shown me the smallest glimpse of happiness. and even then ive failed them by becoming a barely functioning patient of depression. so, please, dont take my sunshines away.

hi!! i love your hh stuff.if you dont mind,would you mind doing alastor,charlie and adam (all seperate,lol) comforting child (9-12ish) reader? like they see reader as a younger sibling,or a their child! thank you sm,if u do this! hopefully,its not too much-

Don't Cry!

summary: Charlie, Alastor, & Adam comforting you (child reader)!

warnings: mentions of crying, mentions of depression, swearing, mentions of cannibalism (Alastor)

tags: (as always, just tagging a few people i think would be interested in this, please let me know if you would like to be on the taglist!) @o-kye@lil-stormcloud @zuuriell @strangleetomz @xxtalulahlovesyouxx@zoexia@ax-y10 @stars-around-scars-collective@blu3-lemonad3@myheartticks@joviepog@mochamuff1n@unbeleevable@danvstheworld @radio-to-trenchcoat-demons

Alastor (child reader [father figure Alastor]):

Alastor had heard sniffling coming from your room in the hotel, but he had just assumed that you had a stuffy nose.

That was until he heard little sobs from your room 20 minutes later.

"What did I say about a smile, de-"

^^ You were curled up in your bed, hugging your tear-stained pillow, buried under at least 5 blankets.

Alastor was never the best at comforting others, but he tried his hardest to make out what you were saying through your cries. You said something about how others in Hell mocked you for being an imp.

What a foolish reason to bully a child! You can't control being an imp, so why would they act like you made that choice?

They were all dead by the next morning.

Alastor, having no idea what else he should do, took you on a trip to Cannibal Town for tea with Rosie (which you giddily accepted!) & flesh-eating (which you politely declined)!

Charlie (sibling reader):

She knew something was up before you were even upset. You were sluggish, you rarely came out of your room, & you weren't smiling as much!

Expect loads of unexplained boxes of candies & cookies outside of your door, random stuffed animals in your room, etc. She just wants to make sure you feel okay!

It took you a few days to figure it out, & then you just had to explain it to her: you & your best friend had a big argument & hadn't been talking.

Charlie immediately tries to fix it! She's trying to set up a meeting with you & your friend to work things out, she's writing apology scripts, etc.

Eventually, you snap & tell her that you don't want any of this & you just need time to grieve.

Expect 10 apology emails next morning!

Adam (sibling reader):

He's pretty dense (no offense [hey that rhymed]), so Adam had no idea you were upset until another angel had told him that you hadn't done any of your extermination work in 2 weeks & that you also hadn't eaten much.

"What's got your panties in a bunch?" is his first question upon entering your messy room & seeing your miserable self.

You tried to explain to him that you were going through a depressive episode, but he didn't understand.

^^ "Being depressed is just being sad, isn't it?"

^^ This led to a 2-hour-long conversation about depression & a 1-hour-long research period.

^^ "EVERYONE LEAVE Y/N ALONE, THEY'RE DECOMPRESSED-" "It's 'depressed', Adam." "That's what I said!"

watching the fallout show and coming away begrudgingly loving it, immediately followed by a playthrough of 1 for the first time since i was a teen...

i think ive cured myself of Classic Fallout Purism.

new vegas still clears 3 and 4 in terms of writing quality, sure, and fallout 2 may be better than 1, but like...

1's writing is kinda dogshit?

like watching the fallout show and seeing consequences for good intentions and shit it felt Right, it felt like the writers understanding the fallout i know and love better than bethesda ever could, with bethesda always watering shit down into Belligerently Evil or Pure Baby Goodboy, which is SOOO TERRIBLE

but in playing 1... it sure is exactly always watering shit down into Belligerently Evil or Pure Baby Goodboy.

your options with Shady Sands? save a girl from slavery or don't.

your options in Junktown? help an evil crime boss take over or don't. (this was planned to have depth, where the good guy was an ironfisted frontier justice executioner postgame while gizmo made it thrive, and while that's still glanced at by the released endings the framings are reversed to still have killian as a hero)

The Hub? help an evil crime boss take over or don't.

Necropolis? leave people to die of dehydration or dont.

Boneyard? this is the ONLY place with nuance, in that you can be easily led astray by the Regulators and can end up siding with those monsters if you don't ask the target they give you some questions first to learn the truth. and even then, the choice boils down to Help The Murderous Corrupt Cops or Help The Oppressed And Unarmed Underdogs.

your options in the main quest? Eugenicist or Not Eugenicist.

we've dunked so much on Fallout 3 for moral choices like "do you bomb a city full of innocents for being ugly to a rich mans balcony or do you Not" or "do you engage in genocide or do you Not" but like. its not that far a cry from fallout 1.

hell, even shit like the brotherhood. fallout 3 has gotten a lot of flak for portraying the brotherhood as largely chill and not as theocratic technofascists, but while fallout 1's brotherhood sends you out on a suicide mission at first... after that they're pretty much chill? that's a one off. and in the good ending they stay safely out of politics and just become a research and development hub.

super mutants? i remember me and many others being pissed that the mutants in 3 were stupid compared to the smarter mutants of 1 and 2 but like... nah the smart mutants were exceptions in 1 and 2, too.

maybe fallout 2 is where a lot of the charm i remember comes in. but largely i think replaying fallout 1 and finding it Deeply Fucking Lacking right after watching the show and loving it, ive come around a lot on the Whole of fallout. i think its less that New Vegas was a grand return to form for the way fallout Ought To Be And Was Before Bethesda's Grubby Mits, and more accurately it was just kindve a one off.

MarvelDC anon x5 sorry im back again I just wanted to say I agree 100% with everything you say and don’t rly have anything to add there that isnt just recycling your points. It’s genuinely fucking crazy how the entire point of the superhero in 90% of cases is that they are vigilantes who operate outside of the legal system and yet so many of them are given plot lines about how the cops or the military are Awesome. Or like will show them buddy buddy with cops or the government. LIKE STOP ITTTT. STOP ITTTTT. And most of the time too it’s for characters where them being hyper connected with the government etc makes their overall story Worse. Ill use flash as an example bc You Know that guy but I LOVE flash I love him as a disabled character struggling w addiction issues for personal reasons BUT HIM LOSING HIS LEGS LIKE SHOOTING PEOPLE IN THE SWANA REGION AND THEN BECOMING A GOVERNMENT GUY IS SO FUCKING ASSSSSSS IT MAKES HIM WORSE AS A CHARACTER AND A PERSON IN A WAY THAT ISNT INTERESTING BECAUSE THEY NEVER SAY ANYTHING INTERESTING ABOUT IT!!!!! Like why the fuck did Flash even become disabled in regard to Going To Commit Imperialism For The U. S. A like NYC gets destroyed on the daily!!!! Have him lose his legs by a building falling on top of him!!!! Im spitballing ideas here but why wasn’t Venom Flash uhhhhhh Him Losing his legs in an event like that, in conjunction with him saving someone else, since this is the era of Symby and Eddie's breakup Symby is slithering along + sees this and helps him out, bc you know they can make their own choices and do what they want and maybe they wanna be a hero too even for a moment, then like maybe a few months later or whatever They Meet again and Symby is like hey….. I felt something when we bonded for that brief time. Im going through something rough too right now (The Divorce) so why don’t we try something new together. AND NOW BOOM. you can have Flash as Venom. Now without the stupid venom as addiction metaphor too! Like if you really fucking want you can include stuff about the government trying to manipulate them or whatever but as a whole this would have been so much better of an angle to start venom flash with but NO that we DIDNT GET Because Of The Military Complex meaning We Cant Ever Have Good Things

i know this is so controversial among the venom fans but like i'm really not that attached to flash lmfao i know nothing about him he's just some guy to me i just know he's so much better than mac gargan cuz by god that was a dark time for venom comics.

so now i'm the one nodding along with you and not adding anything lol. i trust you to come up with a better backstory for him because i literally don't know anything about him beyond the vaguest outline. i don't even know what war he fought in that he lost his legs to i dont know Anything. eddie some little absolute freak to me but flash is just some guy

Like if you really fucking want you can include stuff about the government trying to manipulate them or whatever but as a whole this would have been so much better of an angle to start venom flash with but NO that we DIDNT GET Because Of The Military Complex meaning We Cant Ever Have Good Things

i do have to say though that this is totally how i thought venom 2011 was going to go. the first like, four-ish issues got my hopes up so much. i really honestly thought it was going to be drawing parallels between symby and flash how they are ultimately just tools of the government, just weapons that can be discarded in pushing the military's agenda.

this whole page drove me insane at the time and it still kinda does. the way flash is lying directly to his superior to stay with symby longer despite how much he's been drilled that being with the symbiote too long is a danger. they aren't friends yet this early but there's still this impulse to stick with it. and it's because they're parallels!!! the symbiote is quite literally being treated as a mindless tool by the government - it's deprived of all rights that a sentient, sapient being requires. it's trapped and it's being forced into serving and fighting on behalf of a government that doesn't even care for it. likewise, flash is being given the illusion of choice, and to some extent he still does have a choice, but he's being so manipulated by the government here that really he is also just a mindless tool for them - or at least, they want him to be mindless about it. the final fucking panel at the bottom of the final page is crazy.

it was such a strong start to a run that i was very apprehensive about due to aforementioned lack of knowledge of flash as a character, and my general fed-up-ness with the way the comics had been handling venom and eddie in general during that irl time period. so i was so so hoping that it would be taking a blatant and staunch anti-military stance, or even at the bare minimum if it was even still done in a liberal way, as long as there was still SOME criticism of the military complex i would be jumping for joy. and the idea of flash and symby then also bonding during all that?!! crazy. but then it just kinda. goes off the fucking rails halfway through that run/??? like demons and hell and satan kinda off the rails. absolute bonkers. i need to reread venom 2011 actually i barely remember it it was like a fever dream to me. could have been because i descended into madness shortly after i read it but i digress

I think my issue is that I get in my own head too much when I should just....do.

Like i think too much about a thing and then I'm paralyzed by my thoughts and feelings and then never end up doing anything

I think the trick is to brain empty and just do.

And then deal with whatever consequences that come afterwards

enough stories about how someone learns to truely be happy through love. i want a story where someone is desperately seeking out love thinking it's the only way to be happy only for them to learn by the end that happiness is what they make of it and they don't need love at all to make it.

this genuinely breaks my heart

Maybe putting a 7ft metal creature on unstable wheels is a bad idea--

extra background-less version:

person not involved in The Discourse: wow both sides on this need to touch grass lol theyre both wackos

side A on The Discourse: i would like to exist in peace

side B on The Discourse: everyone on side A should kill themselves

the rise of AI art isn't surprising to us. for our entire lives, the attitude towards our skills has always been - that's not a real thing. it has been consistently, repeatedly devalued.

people treat art - all forms of it - as if it could exist by accident, by rote. they don't understand how much art is in the world. someone designed your home. someone designed the sign inside of your local grocery store. when you quote a character or line from something in media, that's a line a real person wrote.

"i could do that." sure, but you didn't. there's this joke where a plumber comes over to a house and twists a single knob. charges the guy 10k. the guy, furious, asks how the hell the bill is so high. the plumber says - "turning the knob was a dollar. the knowledge is the rest of the money."

the trouble is that nobody believes artists have knowledge. that we actively study. that we work hard, beyond doing our scales and occasionally writing a poem. the trouble is that unless you are already framed in a museum or have a book on a shelf or some kind of product, you aren't really an artist. hell, because of where i post my work, i'll never be considered a poet.

the thing that makes you an artist is choice. the thing that makes all art is choice. AI art is the fetid belief that art is instead an equation. that it must answer a specific question. Even with machine learning, AI cannot make a choice the way we can - because the choices we make have always been personal, complicated. our skills cannot be confined to "prompt and execution." what we are "solving" isn't just a system of numbers - it is how we process our entire existence. it isn't just "2 and 2 is 4", it's staring hard at the numbers and making the four into an alligator. it's rearranging the letters to say ow and it is the ugly drawing we make in the margin.

at some point, you will be able to write something by feeding my work into a machine. it will be perfectly legible and even might sound like me. but a machine doesn't understand why i do these things. it can be taught preferences, habits, statistical probability. it doesn't know why certain vowels sound good to me. it doesn't know the private rules i keep. it doesn't know how to keep evolving.

"but i want something to exist that doesn't exist yet." great. i'm glad you feel creative. go ahead and pay a fucking artist for it.

this is all saying something we all already knew. the sad fucking truth: we have to die to remind you. only when we're gone do we suddenly finally fucking mean something to you. artists are not replicable. we each genuinely have a skill, talent, and process that makes us unique. and there's actual quiet power in everything we do.