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Tell me about Obeka? Are you planning a deck around her or more interested in her lore and art?

using this as a poorly veiled excuse to post my shitty meme i spent a little too long on

big rant below the cut lol

her card itself, however, is so fucking convoluted that reading the card does the opposite of explaining the card and any time you build an obeka brute chronologist deck its like proof reading court documents but i mean that in the most enjoyable way like i fucking love how janky and insane she is

so! i already have an obeka deck and it is one of my favorites she was a one-off character in the first commander legends print. she wasnt an important or returning character, or anyone with much lore, she just had a singular excerpt amongst the hundred or so other one-offs added to that set.

anyway heres that excerpt;

Obeka, Brute Chronologist

Obeka will punch you into next week—literally. An ogre mage who breaks the flow of time through brute force, Obeka isn't concerned with piddling details like causality. A right cross from her will knock the baby teeth right into your mouth, and her uppercut is so powerful, your mother will feel it twenty years ago.

Obeka wants nothing more than to live an enjoyable life full of earthly pleasures and knock-down, drag-out fights. Good and bad are of little interest to her, as her only concern is if something sounds fun. She lives exclusively in the moment, and if that moment goes south, she'll beat it out of existence. If you get in her way, consider your wish that you were never born granted.

like--can i be or marry this character holy shit????

Once again it's Regal appreciation hour by which I mean day by which I mean year by which I mean lifetime.

I was very much prepared to not write any fanfiction this year, but I cannot divorce myself from how awesome my favorite Symphonia blorbos are and so I am writing yet another stupid fanfic. I feel feral about these characters in general but Raine gets quite a lot of attention (because she's wonderful, obviously) so I don't want to focus on her too much. Regal, on the other hand, has been underappreciated in the ToS fandom since the game's release day, so I must advocate for him.

I've been RPing as him for the last year or so, and together my RP partner and I have written about 320,000 words of a story. I'm having a blast, and a big part of that is because Regal is, despite the flaws in the storytelling of ToS as a whole surrounding him (and how all of the Tethe'alla characters kind of fall flat), a rather well-conceived and implemented character. Yeah, his clothes are dumb (I'm happy to retcon that outfit with zero regrets) and the game blows through his story at such a breakneck pace he doesn't get the space or the arc he deserves (he should have taken his shackles off as part of his 'sacrifice' to fight the angels), but he is a genuinely fascinating character who feels, just like many of the others do, as if he belongs very specifically in the world he was created for.

I know a lot of people like to write him as this sad sack of shit just absolutely lost in the grief sauce (see the part about how he didn't get the arc he deserved), but I think that's a mistake. See, the biggest bump in the road for Regal was his lack of understanding of what was happening and why. When you think about it, he was faced with having to kill Alicia seemingly out of nowhere. Like one day he's just minding his business and the next Alicia is gone and very quickly after that she's a monster trying to kill him AND HE HAS NO FUCKING IDEA WHAT IS GOING ON. He has no answers. All he knows is that he killed her, and his autistic* brain latches onto that detail because it's all he has.

You have to think, too, about the fact that the game gives him nobody. His parents are dead. George, the only person even remotely close to Regal--someone he's known his *whole life*--betrayed him. (George didn't mean for things to go Like That and he's sorry he did it, but HE STILL DID IT.) Regal doesn't have friends and the extra material makes it clear that he was literally raised, specifically by his father, to be a workaholic. Do you think anyone came to see him in prison? He fought in a coliseum for his life for YEARS. He was on friendly terms with some of the other inmates but the guy had eight years to just sit there and get stuck in the loop of knowing he killed the one person he'd let himself get even remotely close to.

Which is something else people always downplay for some reason. The shit with Alicia isn't just "guy is sad because he killed his girlfriend." It's very much, "guy was born and bred to take on the family legacy" except in this case the family legacy is a company, an island, a noble bloodline, and also the absolutely insane idea that work and profit is all that matters. Everyone else is out to get you. Keep the workers dissatisfied but keep them hooked just enough that they'll never leave. Take no time for fun or friends or merriment. Everything in your life is a business transaction. Don't ever forget it. It's us vs. them. You're alone and you have to make this your entire life or it'll all fall to pieces and it will be your fault.

The drama cd in particular really honed in on that way of being raised and it makes his entire character make complete sense. At a relatively young age his father died and he ended up on top (though it's stated he had to work as a CEO before he was elected via a board to the position of President). Having no other guidelines other than what he was taught--and what George himself adhered to--Regal followed that path...until he ended up miserable, because, despite the way he was raised, he's a goddamn empath**.

After literal YEARS of occasionally running into Alicia and talking to her, he starts forming a connection to her--which is important because he's never allowed himself to do this before. And at one point he realizes he doesn't even know her name...which comes as a surprise to him...and brings with it shame. After this, he starts living for himself. He listens to his employees--something his father never did. He starts enacting rules to protect his employees, particularly from things that would hurt them in the field, because part of what was making him so miserable was wrestling with the empathy of their terrible working conditions on top of just hearing his father's manta repeating itself in his head all the time.

I cannot stress enough how important this is. Alicia, despite being a love interest and someone he was interested in seriously dating and perhaps someday marrying (the details of their relationship are never known but it's almost more tragic if they were just starting to be serious), WAS STILL HIS EMPLOYEE.

He was supposed to protect his employees. He was doing so much to ensure his employees would be safe. And then he killed Alicia.

Alicia, the one person he allowed himself to get close to.

Now, consider the fact that he was raised as a tool and not a beloved son; he was not allowed to have friends and not allowed to make merry. He was under his father's thumb until his father's untimely death--a death, by the way, that only surprised him with its suddenness; he did not grieve that man!! Regal, as a 25-year-old man, had ZERO coping mechanisms. All he had was the truth he was raised under and the fact that he went against that truth AND WAS NOW BEING PUNISHED FOR IT. How can someone like this think of anything except that they are the reason George was put in a position where he had to get rid of Alicia? That the only reason Alicia was experimented on and turned into a monster was because of her connection to Regal?

IT MAKES ME FEEL SO FERAL!!!

The events of the game open his eyes to the ACTUAL truth, to what actually happened AND WHY IT HAPPENED TO ALICIA. In the end he learns he had NOTHING TO DO WITH IT. If he had not befriended and started falling for Alicia, she still would have died--it's just, if she hadn't had a more direct connection to Regal, who knows where she might have met her end. Alone, forgotten? At least someone knew her as she was; at least someone can tell Presea the kind of person her sister was.

The ToS fandom has always loved joking about how Regal's just into punishment as a kink or whatever (and I'll never forgive the shitty non-canon-in-my-heart sequel for leaning so hard into that angle, fuck you fuck you fuck you) but let's be serious about it for a hot second. Yes, I think learning this information puts him on a better path, but you can't erase 8 years of self-loathing and fear instantly. Did you guys really think this man would just forget about the darkest years of his life and start frolicking in fields of flowers?

The trauma he's endured goes so much deeper than "I killed the person I loved," and boiling it down to that really does the character a disservice. The "born for a specific purpose, not allowed to exist outside of that purpose" bit is also given to Colette and Zelos, but while their role is being a sacrifice whose only use is dying or procreating to continue the line to have more sacrifices (absolutely also traumatizing btw), Regal's situation feels a lot more like indoctrinated religion and, very specifically (and no I am not kidding), religious trauma. Again, he endured that very controlled lifestyle complete with a mantra from birth into his early 20s, and the MOMENT he broke away from it too far, his life came crashing down around him in a very painful and traumatizing way.

Now, you might think the religious trauma parallel is unfounded, if not also the indoctrinated religion aspect of it, it could just as easily be a parallel for an abusive and controlling relationship, right down to the betrayal from someone who is supposed to have your best interests at heart the moment you step outside of that control to the feelings of shame and self-loathing and "you did this to yourself."

So whenever I see people joking about what a sad sack of shit he is or whatever, I'm just astounded, especially if it's coming from someone who loves literally any other character in the game. Like, you'll definitely have your blorbos, and I totally understand if Regal just ain't it for you, but I find it really disconcerting that someone might find (for example) Yuan's trauma deeply meaningful but see Regal's as stupid or silly.

I'm pretty sure I started this post to talk about how easy it is for me to RP as Regal because he's just such a great character to sink into and write about, particularly because I like to imagine that, starting in the post-game, he deeply regrets some of the choices he's made in his life, and, rather than lean into the things that have already transpired, he seeks to do what he can to better the world around him with the resources and power that he has.

It's like the ultimate fuck-you to the way his father raised him. He's not wasting the skills he's developed, but he's also not using them to hurt people or for personal or Lezareno profit.

I think most of us love writing about characters who have to work through their trauma, but there's an extra layer here that I particularly enjoy with Regal. With Raine I'm all about her inability to trust easily and her struggle to feel truly comfortable around other people, but with Regal I think it's maybe specifically related to the fact that he has had a lot handed to him that he didn't necessarily want, and his self-sacrificing nature lends itself to him feeling obligated to take it. I fully believe Regal would be happier and better off stepping away from Lezareno and from his family's toxic ass legacy*** (or at least not working it full-time as the acting President) but I can't ignore the fact that...these things are all he has and all he knows. So writing about him attempting to get back into the swing of things, maybe struggling to find time for himself, falling into workaholic patterns by mistake, learning to set boundaries between his private life and his job...all while not being fully satisfied and finding more fulfillment in charity work and other pursuits, just makes him feel like a very well-rounded character. Like...it's believable that he would continue to work a job he didn't particularly love specifically because not only does he not know anything else, but he knows with this position of power he can make a lot of things happen that would be impossible if he just twiddled his thumbs on the sidelines--like financial assistance going to Palmacosta, or his duties as a nobleman to try to get better laws passed in Tethe'alla, etc.

This was a pretty clumsily-written post and for that I am truly sorry. I've just been absolutely insane lately thinking about Regal and I had to get some of why I think he's such a wonderful character out into the world.

:)

*this is just my headcanon but a lot about Regal screams autism to me.

**this is canon as far as I'm concerned. I wrote him this way far before I ever heard the drama cd, and the drama cd just solidified it for me tenfold.

***there's a scene in the hotel with Lloyd I think where Regal says his family's legacy on Altamira started when Tethe'alla flipped over to being a flourishing world last, which means they were in a position of power great enough to build an empire on Altamira already at that time (800+ years ago). I don't want to get into how awful this probably was or how evil the family was because I think you can all imagine that for yourselves. Also, nobody ever mentions the fact that Regal is the last of his family line, but it's a very convenient built-in control tactic to guilt someone into doing as they're told or risk bringing shame to a family that's been going strong and unbroken for over 1,000 years.

bug girl

do not repost

Jhonen Vasquez makes a show designed around his own unique artsyle, which was notoriously difficult for animators to learn, and everyone praises it for the effort and creative ambition Jhonen and his team put toward realizing his artistic vision.

A woman makes two shows designed around her own unique artsyle, heavily inspired by Jhonen, and people constantly screech about how horrible she is for “making” people draw her wretched, “animator unfriendly” designs. Or even better, unironically proclaim it “cringe” for her to be clearly influenced by Invader Zim, not because they think Invader Zim itself is bad or cringe, but because liking it apparently is.

It's insane to me that this entire "debate" (if it can even be called that) is literally just

trans people, jewish people, black people literally everyone who has been hurt by bigotry: hey please don't spend $70 on a game about pro-slavery and fascism when a lot of that money will go to its creator who is publically bigoted and uses her massive amounts of wealth to fund the eradication of marginalized groups

and the response to that was: fuck you why can't you just let people enjoy things, harry potter personally saved my life

like. it's extremely telling that so many people value their own entertainment and nostalgia over the lives of others. jkr is such a horrible, despicable person and literally all people are saying is that yeah you shouldn't be giving a modern day nazi that much money when they constantly bring people to the alt right and donate that money to every anti-human rights organization you could think of.

and no i don't think sending people death threats is okay but at the same time, you don't get to act surprised, defensive, or victimized when people call you out for giving money to a fucking nazi.

I'm in love with Aamira ❤️❤️🙏 can you give us more info about her? Some fun and maybe not so fun facts about her?

Hi Anon ! Thank you for your kind words and for your interest \o/ Aamira's side of the family is the one that Qalaa got her "Beast Curse" from. It's a bloodline hereditary curse that boosts the strength of those in good health (like Qalaari) and eats away at those that have a weak constitution... like Aamira. "Weak" members of the family are usually cast aside or cast out. Aamira ; while still quite young, 16 or so ; ran away from all of this to try to live her life following only her will and enjoy as much of it as possible. Even without the curse Aamira would have had a weak health, but think of it as her Beast basically making her immunodeficient and weaker and weaker as the years go by.

She managed to make a little life for herself in a small unremarkable place close to one of the older forest of the region. There she developed close ties with two siblings, Temhos & Olgha. Both of them members of a tribe that lives deep deep withing the old woods who come to visit the village semi frequently to trade goods and buy things to carry back where they live. Both siblings tried to court Aamira (after months of good relationship), and, eventually, Aamira chose Temhos. For two or three years things were pretty idyllic fro all of them. But then Aamira started talking about wanting a child... Temhos tried to reason with her that with her health it was really fucking dangerous for her to try and that her chances of not making it through were too high for his tastes... Aamira pretended to listen but actually didn't and things got really bad when Temhos found out she was pregnant. They argued, Aamira's health took a downside, Temhos took care of her until she got better again (and Aamira, with her rose-tinted delusional glasses, thought it meant he'd stay). When Aamira was around 7 month pregnant Temhos ran away (very very far away). It broke her heart but not her (by now frantic) determination to see her pregnancy though. She (somehow) found her away again to Temhos' village where she was taken in by Olgha (who was very confused, then very angry (at both Aamira & Temhos), then very panicked). Qalaari was born in this village. Olgha became her surrogate parent to help Aamira raise her (she was still in love with Aamira, but knew that her heart, broken as it was, would still never be hers... I think Aamira knew Olgha's feelings too and could only just be very thankful she still helped her raise Qalaari, despite how painful it must have been for her.) Aamira was very loving with her daughter, but her (now very bad) health and broken heart left her with long dissociative episodes, on top of moments where she wouldn't even managed to get out of bed. That's when Olgha would take care of Qalaari most (frustrated and heartbroken as she was over the whole situation, Olgha genuinely loves Qalaari like her own daughter.) 12 years after, the Beast finally eroded all of what Aamira was (she was still young... probably around 32 or 34 years old ??) and she passed away. Also, how Aamira survived giving birth is nothing short of a miracle. Most likely due to her will of titanium to meet and raise her daughter... Eventually the Beast got the best of her, but she managed to hold on for 12 more years !!

Please don't send discourse/callouts to my askbox out of the blue, especially if I don't know you. I don't have the energy for this kinda thing and it also just feels like... Kinda a breach of boundaries if we don't even know each other y'know?

i have a kind-of version of my own Ulixes backstory that is wedged halfway between middle class and working class. this is mostly just abt his family’s economic status and im still workshopping it but here is a summary anyway:

Ulixes' family, in the economic boon of Revachol a few decades prior, became comfortably middle class. They afforded the purchase of a pretty big house in the less-wealthy areas of East Revachol. This was entirely leveraged on the faith that industries the family's working men were established in did not fail. I imagine those business were stuff like architectural planning, plumbing - shit like that. The family had a bunch of kids, the house mortgage was paid off, the Bücher family Own that house now, blah blah blah. Of course, profitable revacholian industries eventually failed spectacularly and everyone went out of business and could barely find work. Their finances slipped from the Middlest of Middle class down to lower middle class at best, then right on the line of working class. No longer able to afford maintenance, parts of the family home slowly fell into a state of disrepair as the older generations aged out of the workforce and the new members just couldn't manage the upkeep of the place on top of struggling with job hunting, etc... I'm thinking Streetcar Named Desire-type backstory here. The family still hasn't sold the house, because it's basically the only thing they properly Own still. As for family dynamics... It's a lot of 'legacy' type bullshit that gets thrown around. Attempting to outdo each other with slightly higher-paying jobs, skipping meals to siphon away little piles of wealth that would barely pay rent in Jamrock for a month. Realistically, no one will ever rekindle the wealth of their families' yesteryear - all they have is an decaying husk of opulence, and a few pieces of jewelry to sell when there's another famine. Ulixes probably works part-time somewhere to afford to bunk outside the family home. Perhaps his father also regretted selling something whose funds he used to put Ulixes into further education. Something like parental expectation, 'sacrifice', and - in their minds - a last-ditch attempt at scrounging a 'respectable' middle class wage for the family, as they age. Something like sacrificing material heirlooms; sacrificing Ulixes to the free market in order to get put into a decent carehome. It's nothing but tragic.

It's funny cause for the most part of the game, I didn't really care about people's criticisms of Engage's writing and thought they were just mad the story was straightforward and didn't try to be overly complex... But now that I'm (finally) reaching the endgame, there's a loooot of weird plotholes that 3H would be jealous of lol.

Okay I don't do this normally but out of curiosity, I looked at that guys' posts and yeah they're going around sealioning anyone who likes Dimitri being all like "how can you say Dimitri/AM is your favorite when you didn't play all the routes". Buddy it's called having preferences, subjectivity and opinion. I'm sure if we twist their behavior around back at them, they'll be like stop bothering us for liking Edel cause double standards is their bread and butter.

Yeah, I had taken a brief scroll through their blog the first time I saw them argue with Random about Claude because I had a pretty strong feeling that they were just another stan running around around against Rhea and Dimitri fans because I knew that person didn't follow Random when they started pulling the bad faith Claude takes.

I scrolled through a few posts before I was like yeah I'm not even gonna bother looking further because I could see all they were doing was arguing with people whose names I recognized, and the only people who ever do that are the stans. They also have absolutely nothing else but discourse on their blog.

It's crazy to me too, because I've seen those same Dimitri fans try to talk about anything else FE related and yet they still get pulled back into discourse. Like, I'm at the point where I believe everyone in that immediate group is just actively being stalked by the stans (and I recall one of them mentioning they are being stalked by them, but my guess is if one of them is, all of them are).

Also, the stans tend to pull the "you didn't play xyz route" when I'm quite certain most if not all of the Dimitri fans on Tumblr have at the very bare minimum watched the full route on YouTube of anything they didn't play. All these people have the information they need to know where they stand opinion-wise, and like you said, it's just... having an opinion. The stans have their opinions, we don't agree with them, and we don't engage with them unless they engage with us first.

Something I've noticed about the group of Dimitri fans that gets stans going after them is that it's always the stans who start it. They always respond to asks sent to those people. In other words they go onto those people's blogs, look at their posts/their replies to their anons, and start arguing at them over literally anything they say in thsoe ask responses.

Every single time I see a post reach my dashboard from any of those people (you might know the Faerghus/Dimitri group I'm talking about), it's always a stan going after them when they were just answering one of their own anons and posting something on their own blog. I'm sure there are people who think they engage in discourse too much, but they don't even start it. They get harassed and can't just blog in peace.

Unfortunately those same stans have been targeting Random as of late (and I've noticed it's more and more different ones so they're probably going after someone as soon as they notice their buddies are doing so) so it's not that surprising that they've taken notice of me since she and I interact regularly. They basically go through the chain of who interacts with who and try to start shit.

Oh nonnie honey, you better believe if even a single Dimitri fan did to them what they do to us, they'd be all over that and whining about it and posting callouts and shit.

I just want to be able to post whatever my feelings are about Dimitri without worrying that people will try to tear it down because "it's not about Edel-chan and it portrays Dimitri in a good light".

I've blocked every Edelstan I've come across but more of them keep popping up, so... I guess the blocking never ends. My block list is basically just Edelstans and bots at this point with few exceptions.

Funny how the stans don't block Dimitri fans who hate Edelgard to avoid seeing them (it's because they don't actually want to, because they want to argue), even though we're all over here trying to block them, but some of them block evade to keep going. Literally like Dimitri fans have tried to block them and move on, but they persistently find ways to keep harassing. And like I said, they go down the line, so eventually they'll just find every active Dimitri lover who posts about him and whine at them.

Unpopular fandom opinion but: "If it's not in the movie/book/show itself then it isn't canon, idc what the creator says!" is such a stupid af bullshit take lmfao.

well apparently angst is in the air today and it bit me too so

i've always examined vince vs jay from his own perspective but what do pule and verica even think.

edit post-writing this: oh this is a hot pile of half-formatted brain vomit. click the read more at your own risk. my goal was to get my thoughts straight, and i did, and now this is a mess and i'm not fucking fixing it

pule did his grieving while he was still human, i think. he never did expect to see jay again, but once he remembers the worst period of his fucking life while sitting next to the two (well, 1.9) people who notable weren't there for it, it's... well, a shock is putting it lightly, i imagine. they know his name, they have the right vibes that, despite the fact he'd never felt them as human like he could now as a warframe with transference, just fit - mostly. not all of it is correct, but enough is, and the second he manages to ask if it's jay, he gets swiftly but gently corrected, that, well, yes, but also it's vince now.

once he finds out Why it's vince now, pule struggles hard with being confronted with the walking, breathing truth of accidentally getting his best friend actually killed for a while still. part of the grieving process gets reset entirely, and as friend fashion show has pointed out so excellently, it does do pule a lot of good to hang out a lot with others (bruiser, notably) that he doesn't have a painful shared past with. the threads he dropped with jay are easy to pick back up with vince, though: sharing old jokes and making new ones referencing stuff only they know, ways of thinking that are still almost identical after years of close friendship, etc. they grew together for a significant formative period of their lives, and that still affects just how suited to be each other's friend they are.

verica has a more complex headspace around this. she actively searched for him, knowing that he hadn't died but instead had become a warframe, even though he stopped pinging on the orokin radars even before she got apprehended and warframe'd herself. there's such a huge chance that he's dead, but dammit, if anyone can do the impossible, it should be the mathematician who'd managed to put a pencil into a pocket dimension between solid reality & the poisonous void. and she's... partially right.

when she wakes up on kelth's orbiter, she's going to think the idiot before her is jay. he'd done it, he'd managed to come back from the dead, and found her scattered clues. and, well, we know it isn't really jay anymore. he doesn't even confess the whole thing, at first - he just says, well, i go by vince now. and she rolls with it completely because why wouldn't she. it's only when the cracks start to show, both in his behaviour and in one certain scene between the three of them that i'm sure i'll die two and a half times while writing before i'll get it just right, that she actually realises that Nope, Not Jay. Not Like That Anymore.

she struggles with even just accepting it in her head, at first - he's so much like jay, pinging Correct in so many little ways, but he's Not, calling him by that name hurts him, and thinking of him as jay is wrong for the person vince is now. she goes through the period of grief she hadn't allowed herself even before everything.

and now, all three of them are in the same space, grieving the shit that happened to them, that one of them had to die, but at least they now have each other again. for reasons mentioned before, bonds with vince are built up extremely fast, and they quickly get to the same level of friendship they were at with jay. they go beyond, even - vince needs them more than jay did, even if he might not want to phrase it like that to not force them into anything, but they respond to it in kind. one of the consequences of the way warframes are fundamentally changed, made more rigid and less flexible, from humans in my lore makes it so that they will seek out familiarity at ridiculous costs. removing the memories from fresh frames was a fix for that by the orokin, but you can't just make something Rigid/Inflexible, apply a Change, and expect it to not eventually pop back into its original shape like memory foam.

pule & verica is also an interesting initial dynamic, i think. pule feels guilty for, well, everything - he's still under the impression that he'd gotten ghosted for life, and the fact that the warframe he'd been glaring at from the corner of his eyes, the one that had looked way too much like the recently-vanished artist octavia to be anything like a respectful tribute, had actually been her all along and he hadn't even bothered to look into it- he does struggle with it. of her own part, verica's shocked to see him at all, didn't realise that he'd whole ass up and volunteer for the program if she also disappeared, didn't realise that sitting down and letting herself grieve with him had also been an option. i imagine she does also initially carry some guilt over this, though she gets over hers significantly faster than pule does, both because it's just Less Significant Levels of Guilt & because she's just way more prone to Alright Oops Let's Move On than he is (hi. musician who's been in public about it here. making mistakes & moving on like nothing happened is a Necessary & Learned Skill. show must go on & all that)

i think pule would initially expect her to be hostile towards him, after he gets over the shock of "holy shit you're a warframe too? holy shit you're That Warframe? i was never ghosted on purpose??". but 1. even if she did have the right to get hostile, which she knows she doesn't, it wouldn't do anything, and 2. buddy friend we're still here after everything why would i be mad about getting this second chance at life. i've already lost my other friends and family and everything from that life, just let me hang on to you and this other idiot with all the strength left in me.

anyway, that's how the three of them become inseparable on an almost-physical level. a true triad. they get a shared bedroom and sleep together in a pile and everything. you'll find out

Me through clenched teeth with a white-knuckled grip on my pen: My Art has Value, the Only One who has to Like it is Me, My Art has Value---

       Meanwhile, she is still waiting for some dashing knight to come by, her true love, to sweep her off her feet and take her away and save her!! To go someplace far, far away where she can live happily forevermore! Someone has to still be holding out for a hero, and Miranda is all too happy to fit that bill.

Junji Ito makeup test #1

OR

Figuring out what I need in order to create a music video parody of the song "Gloria" by Laura Branigan, but make it about Tomie. I will be playing the part of a 1980s pop disco singer in the style of Junji Ito. This is high art in progress, people! 😘😂😅

photos of first test:

additional digital notes made using Clip Studio:

main takeaways:

So first off, where the fuck did my stage makeup go??? I had no idea it was missing until today!! I ended up using the makeup from when I used to perform as a mime. (Not a joke, but in a larger, cosmic sense, kind of a joke. 😆 I'll probably do it again sometime. I was adorable as a little soft butch gay mime!)

I now remember why I stopped using the dry cake face paint and switched to wet paint in a tube BUT I CANNOT FIND THE TUBESSS

I'm out of eyeliner in general, but for this, I need some kind of extra thin/fine eyeliner and preferably more than a thimble-full of paint for it.

Maybe I can thin out some matte black face paint and also get like a really nice fine brush? I guess it depends on if the paint is water-soluble.

I should probably check to see if I already have these materials, which would be SO MUCH EASIER IF I COULD FIND MY FUCKING STAGE MAKEUP--

Either way the lines need to be super thin, straight, clean, and parallel to each other. Or I could look at the rougher cross-hatching Ito sometimes uses, but I suspect tidier lines will look best with makeup.

Luckily, I already have an entire burlesque/drag act where I make myself look like a character from a black and white film. Between that and the mime thing, I theoretically have all the white gloves I will ever need lol. I guess I'm going to need white leggings, since the light gray ones won't work for this. Junji Ito is not generally greyscale as much as literally black and white.

Do I own makeup primer? I feel like yes. It definitely sounds like a good idea.

I KNOW FOR A FACT I DIDN'T THROW OUT MY STAGE MAKEUP because I had quality skin-safe glitter in basically every color, and only a FOOL would throw that out!!!!

Gloria is a song from 1983 with disco balls in the music video. Do I want to incorporate more style choices from 1983? Should I buy a wig? Something with shoulder pads maybe?? I guess that means I can keep the thick eyebrows...

Actually upon further research, I do need a sequinned shirt for this. Possibly a sequin leotard with a shiny belt. And leg warmers. OH! And a jacket with just the biggest shoulder pads I can find! Or at least the closest thing I can find to this outfit in one trip to a thrift store

Every 1980s music videos seems to have a person with their hair and clothing flowing in the wind. Now, I could buy a fan. But much funnier and cheaper would be a shot of my hair blowing in the wind that then pans to a friend furiously fanning me with a piece of cardboard or something. (Which means I'd need either two people helping with this shot, or I just have to accept that the shot's going to look kind of blurry by doing the zoom-out in post. Oh gods, I would have to write a proper shot list ahhhhhh--)

Honestly, blurry footage seems fine in some parts. I'm probably going to add some dreamy soft filters anyway to make it look like pre-digital 35mm film from an 80s vid.

I'm going to need some fake blood to splatter at me in the middle of the video. Obviously. So I guess that bit will need to be filmed outside.

The good news is the fact that the nearest easiest filming location for me is a alley full of dumpsters is actually really appropriate for this video. XD

Should I do the distressed eyebrows that a lot of Junji Ito characters have? Note to try that in the next test along with a The Crow-like smile. (My go-to high school Halloween costume. Damn, I have been painting my already pasty-pale face even whiter for a while now! 😅)

Other progress made on this project today:

I recorded myself singing a voice memo along to the rhythm of the karaoke version of Gloria that's on YouTube, but in it, I'm singing in the key that is appropriate to my voice. (A couple half-steps down, I think.)

Next step will be to load that clip onto my computer and adjust the karaoke version to match its pitch. And then like, practice the song with my new personalized backing track.

If i actually finish this, I'll have to re-record the backup vocals to say the right name.

Also the next step will be to see if my interest in this lasts long enough to at least get me to find my frickin' stage makeup.

Additional notes:

The original music video for Holding Out for a Hero is exactly the right energy for this, and now I absolutely need shots of me in front of (badly green-screened) flames, on my knees while singing passionately and directly at the camera and presumably wearing kneepads tbh

Omg what if I included a little "photoshoot" sequence and really fucked with the photos to make them all blurry-body-horror nasty as they flash by real quick?? Get like, a glitch effect in the mix hell yeah 😎😎😎

Edit: Omg i just remembered I have these short-shorts with a reanimator quote on the ass! ("Blasphemy? Before what god?") i know what shorts to wear for this now!!

Oh! Another idea! What if the video starts with me reading Tomie and then closing the book and picking up the nearest microphone-shaped thing and using that to start singing - and every 30 seconds or so of footage, it quietly changes to a different item (one of which is absolute the black wand vibrator that I have XD)

Note: I can easily shorten the song if I only have funny shots planned for like 2/3 of the song length. No need to get too repetitive.

sorry i obsess over mine’s face 24/7 this will continue to happen