. @bowdowntoheda - Tumblr Blog

i love listening to my fiancée drawing

“no stop” “oh no i didn’t mean to do that” “wRONG LAYER” “wait go back” “what line is that?!” “cAN YOU– [irritated noises]” “oh you…bastard” “what..layer is that on??”

she’s so cute djksfh

hst3000

A gift for your fiancee

hawkeyedflame

oh my god dkfjdhgksdjk

falseinnocencereturns

gaycism

op's redemption arc was nice though

papapuffv2-deactivated20220628

This was a nice progression of character development

prokopetz

Things fanfic is reputed for inserting into the source material:

Sex

Things fanfic actually inserts into the source material:

Sex

Holding hands

Bizarre misunderstandings

Meticulous descriptions of food and clothing

The author’s unaddressed traumas

Found family

Plausible explanations for existing plot holes

Additional plot holes

Exciting new frontiers in speculative physics, economics, chemistry, biology, zoology, psychology, theology, and/or ontology

Tax evasion

Gender

Very bad puns

seawitchkaraoke

The characters actually talking about their feelings/their trauma

backstory of the third guy from the left at 15:23 in the second episode of the third season

why-bless-your-heart

One of the things that sucks about being an animation nerd is having to live with the fact that, from a technical standpoint, the Hotel Transylvania movies are absolutely ground-breakingly staggeringly incredible.

avidamysterii-deactivated202311

As completely ignorant on animation, why is that? How is Hotel Transylvania any good??

why-bless-your-heart

The short version is that they’ve been figuring out how to plug the strengths of traditional animation into cg animation.

Longer version: cg animation is essentially puppet animation. You build a model, paint it and dress it up, and then move it around. That’s why Pixar’s first animated film was about toys, and their second one was about bugs: it’s much harder to make something look convincingly soft and fleshy than it is to work with something that’s supposed to be rigid.

Working inside this paradigm, the progression that makes sense is to work on developing more and more articulated puppets. Figure out how to add fur (Monsters, Inc.), move fish (Finding Nemo), get to the point where you can actually make human puppets who look appealing (The Incredibles.) In 2012 the big animated feature films showed off huge strides in particle physics (The Guardians), and hair (Tangled, Brave). Character effects and lighting were really hitting their stride, and the general movement was towards more detailed models, increased realism, richer and more intricate environments. The models only had so much range before they started to break, so squash & stretch was never going to be as pronounced as something from drawn animation could be. Hotel Transylvania challenged that.

As a show creator and director, Genndy Tartakovsky’s always shown a preference for stylization. He’s also got a reputation for incredible and deliberate timing, spectacular silhouettes, dramatic movement and clear staging, and just overall really good at directing animation. He wanted Tex Avery-type animation in CG and by golly, he did it.

Look at how exaggerated those shapes are, and how snappy, smooth, and fast the transitions between each one: that’s not something that was really being done. The motion-blurring alone was so defining that apparently Sony calls it a “Genndy blur.”

Animation is essentially the art of movement: the better the movement, the better the animation, and the Hotel Transylvania franchise has spectacular movement.

The model is actually being resculpted for maximum exaggeration, and the smears and blurs make the transitions between each pose fast, energetic, and snappy.

Like. Look at that movement. Look at how tightly he’s rooted while the follow through of his clothing sells the hard stop of each hip bump. Look at how sharp and deep his knees are bending, the way his weight shifts onto his heels and that tiny little side step at the very end, where he keeps his weight on his right foot for a split second before popping over to his new position. And he’s dancing the Macarena because he had to find the most brain-dominating, toe-tappingist song in the universe to win a DJ battle where a Kraken was being driven into a murderous rage by a mystical melody and it had to be counteracted by another song.

Yeah.

Somebody once described the Hotel Transylvania franchise as “like seeing Lamborghini making a clown car,” and honestly, that’s kind of what it’s like.

keyblack-hl

The above analysis of the spectacular animation in Hotel Transylvania is completely and 100% accurate, but I can't help but feel gobsmacked by the claim that admiring these films as an animation nerd "sucks." I'm no story specialist, but the themes and morals in these films (at least the first 3, don't know much about the 4th) are fantastically wholesome and positive, the execution is the finest that animation has to offer, and the films themselves are delightfully fun to watch with goofy and self-aware humor that Tartakovsky uses in literally all of his work. I defy you to find any difference between the jokes in this film and the ones in the well-beloved Samurai Jack.

I can't post examples rn, but if anyone can reply with some, I'd be grateful. The one with Jack and Aku talking about where to meet for their showdown is a great one.

heathyr

i’m just. very frustrated as an adult on a 17+ app being treated like i’m a little baby who can’t handle adult content or curate my own experience. it’s fucking stupid

heathyr

earlgreytea68

“there are lots of kids online now” ...as opposed to when????

bookhobbit

this is sort of vague because I'm not sure if I can make it make sense but I wish more 101 nonbinary activist materials focused less on just "gender isn't binary" and more on "the fact that gender is a social construct means it is constructed differently in different cultures and is in a constant state of change like everything else about a culture"

like...it's not just about updating the gender system to recognize non-binary genders but also about recognizing that the social construction of gender is extremely responsive to time/place and this is true even for "man" and "woman" which means that there's no reason to invalidate anyone's expression or feelings about their gender, no matter what gender it is or how familiar it is to you

bookhobbit

a further thought: this is also why I don't think gender abolition is a useful goal, because, as Rikki Anne Wilchins put it, gender is primarily a system for creating meanings, and if you actually tried to totally erase the concept of any gender at all from the world, that would involve erasing a huge amount of cultural meaning, probably without actually fixing inequality tbh

on the other hand, if you acknowledge that there are as many gender systems as there are cultures, and that there are probably as many variations on even the normative genders as there are people in that culture who belong to them, then gender essentialism loses the vast majority of its power because if the meaning of gender changes across cultures (even across relatively small cultural shifts), then that means they're not inherent moral truths of the universe, they're ways of performing particular cultural meanings

and this makes non-binary genders, and nonnormative gender expressions, no less concrete than binary genders with normative expressions, not by saying "actually a non-binary gender is a concrete object with xyz characteristics" but by saying "all genders are arbitrary", which creates room for essentially infinite space and self-determination

I have no idea if any of this makes sense, I just visualize, like, a garden

elodieunderglass

I think your garden metaphor works well for something else I feel deeply is missing from how we talk about about gender: the idea of time, both personal and historical. You mentioned it in the OP but I think it’s worth pulling out further. Gender has changed over recent generations, but it has also changed in the same places across historical periods. A garden is a great way to think about that. Some plants mature and are kept for many seasons; others are annuals, subject to rapid changes of fashion. The overall vision for the landscape may be cultivated with a long-term plan, or it may be shaped by random environmental events. New gardeners may destroy and replant it, or it may be a public garden.

birdonawire

bbc merlin’s political agenda of “i’ll wait for the king to die and fuck his son so good, he’ll have to adopt my politics” was actually so ahead of its time

pretentiousfilmperson27

#no period piece no teenage show no political drama ever came close again#‘we have a dragon and he instructs the most powerful wizard of all time to become a sugar baby to save the world’#now that’s a fucking plot!!!

tiffanyachings

éowyn is your favourite lotr character when you’re ten because she’s a young woman who gets to FIGHT with a cool sword! and then éowyn is your favourite lotr character again when you’re in your twenties because she’s a young woman who is bitter and angry and deeply depressed but who learns to HEAL and find hope. and also she gets to fight with a cool sword.

queenklu

Hey so listen. I’ve only played Witcher 3 and watched the Witcher show, I know the canon is that Geralt just keeps getting brown horses and calling them all Roach BUT

it would be REALLY, REALLY FUNNY….if Roach has been the same horse for like…..fifty years…..and Geralt doesn’t notice his horse is magic, because how long do horses live? 100? This is Fine. Horses, he’s found, are surprisingly sturdy. One time a catastrophic storm sank Geralt’s ship and drowned literally everyone on board but Roach was found chilling on shore, a-okay.

Jaskier: So I didn’t want to bring this up at first, because I didn’t want you to think I wasn’t cool with your magic horse–

Geralt: My What.

queenklu

Jaskier: –like how did you tame it? Did you raise it from an egg or something? It seems like most magic horses eat people–or, sorry, do you taste bad as a Witcher? Roach has never tried to take a nibble out of me–

Geralt: Jaskier. This is a normal horse.

Jaskier, who has seen this horse appear on rooftops, in the middle of lava fields, refusing to swim but two seconds later showing up on the other side of a lake, and one time doing this for half an hour:

Jaskier: What Do You Mean

cipheramnesia

Jaskier, a completely ordinary human person who has managed to not age a single year throughout Geralt’s multi-century life and Roach, a completely ordinary brown horse who has managed to not age a single year throughout Geralt’s multi-century life just look back and forth at each other like “bitch, I won’t bring it up if you don’t” and that’s the end of it.

doctorguilty

Not to sound like an old fart here but my philosophy about video games is like. A kid living out in the middle of bumfuck nowhere with no internet access for miles should be able to purchase a game from walmart, take that game home, put it in their console, and play the whole game with all of its features and the only thing lack of internet affects is the inability to play online with others. Nothing else. They shouldn't be missing entire chunks of the game becuase they can't download a patch. The game shouldn't be borderline empty or unplayable without a patch.

lilacandladybugs

*whispering to myself as i try to email my academic advisor* fear is the mind killer. fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. i will permit it to pass through me and over me. when it is gone i will turn the inner eye to see it's path. where the fear is gone there will be nothing. only i will remain.

arguablysomaya

motherfuckers out here saying "i hate driving 😞 lets get self driving cars 😄” like shut the fuck up shut the fuck up shut the fuck up you want free public transportation. you want a train

#yeah no #not with hoq public transport is in germany #trains are so freaking unreliable here

c3rvida3

I think people need to understand that part of living a healthy life is having different people who understand different parts of you, so that you don't overwhelm your friends and expect too much of them, or ignore valuable relationships because they feel "incomplete".

We all want to be fully seen and understood, but it's not shallow or meaningless to just have a pal you talk about TV shows with who isn't also, like, your platonic soulmate. That's still your friend! You still enhance each other's lives with your company. Not everything that matters is profound.

I think a lot of you are lonely because you're waiting around for someone who sees into your soul instead of just plain old lookin' at the people in your life, finding common ground, and planting a little garden there. Even if that garden only grows Star Trek fan theories and memes, it's still good.

It just... makes me real sad that you guys can't imagine a friendship where you don't talk about sex and trauma constantly, or that you think these are prerequisites for "real" friendship. Like, it legitimately breaks my heart.

fictionadventurer

I think the Hunger Games series sits in a similar literary position to The Lord of the Rings, as a piece of literature (by a Catholic author) that sparked a whole new subgenre and then gets blamed for flaws that exist in the copycat books and aren’t actually part of the original.

Like, despite what parodies might say, Katniss is nowhere near the stereotypical “unqualified teenager chosen to lead a rebellion for no good reason”. The entire point is that she’s not leading the rebellion. She’s a traumatized teenager who has emotional reactions to the horrors in her society, and is constantly being reined in by more experienced adults who have to tell her, “No, this is not how you fight the government, you are going to get people killed.” She’s not the upstart teenager showing the brainless adults what to do–she’s a teenager being manipulated by smarter and more experienced adults. She has no power in the rebellion except as a useful piece of propaganda, and the entire trilogy is her straining against that role. It’s much more realistic and far more nuanced than anyone who dismisses it as “stereotypical YA dystopian” gives it credit for.

And the misconceptions don’t end there. The Hunger Games has no “stereotypical YA love triangle”–yes, there are two potential love interests, but the romance is so not the point. There’s a war going on! Katniss has more important things to worry about than boys! The romance was never about her choosing between two hot boys–it’s about choosing between two diametrically opposed worldviews. Will she choose anger and war, or compassion and peace? Of course a trilogy filled with the horrors of war ends with her marriage to the peace-loving Peeta. Unlike some of the YA dystopian copycats, the romance here is part of the message, not just something to pacify readers who expect “hot love triangles” in their YA.

The worldbuilding in the Hunger Games trilogy is simplistic and not realistic, but unlike some of her imitators, Collins does this because she has something to say, not because she’s cobbling together a grim and gritty dystopia that’s “similar to the Hunger Games”. The worldbuilding has an allegorical function, kept simple so we can see beyond it to what Collins is really saying–and it’s nothing so comforting as “we need to fight the evil people who are ruining society”. The Capitol’s not just the powerful, greedy bad guys–the Capitol is us, First World America, living in luxury while we ignore the problems of the rest of the world, and thinking of other nations largely in terms of what resources we can get from them. This simplistic world is a sparsely set stage that lets us explore the larger themes about exploitation and war and the horrors people will commit for the sake of their bread and circuses, meant to make us think deeper about what separates a hero from a villain.

There’s a reason these books became a literary phenomenon. There’s a reason that dozens upon dozens of authors attempted to imitate them. But these imitators can’t capture that same genius, largely because they’re trying to imitate the trappings of another book, and failing to capture the larger and more meaningful message underneath. Make a copy of a copy of a copy, and you’ll wind up with something far removed from the original masterpiece. But we shouldn’t make the mistake of blaming those flaws on the original work.