I’m sorry
I can’t believe it’s the first stormlight thing I did
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izzy's playlists!
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
Jules of Nature
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"

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Cosimo Galluzzi
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祝日 / Permanent Vacation
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Not today Justin
Claire Keane
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titsay

Origami Around
Sade Olutola
hello vonnie

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@chasmkata
I’m sorry
I can’t believe it’s the first stormlight thing I did
Prime Aqasix
A grown-up Yanagawn in Azish robes. I drew him for a size chart a while back but thought it would be fun to color him too! :D
little knife
the three
it’s just so crazy that there’s two main metaphors for racism in the stormlight archive, lighteyes/darkeyes and humans/singers, and brandon fumbled both of them like. dude you could have just decided not to talk about racism at all if you didn’t have anything to say about it.
stormlight is so fundamentally about being a white american man that you can read into brandon's metatextual arc into the politics of the series.
kaladin and shallan have two ends of the 'pull yourself up by your bootstraps' story within a corrupt system while dalinar realizes from his position as an embodiment of the system that corruption exists. there are good moments here and good themes, hope and perseverance and don't kill yourself etc. (neoliberal slop)
then we get moash and the parshmen are people reveal. the ambiguity of the moash storyline is what makes it compelling. if there wasn't a case to be made from both sides then it doesn't work. the audience needs to be with kaladin all the way through even as he helps and then ultimately betrays moash. parshmen slaves being full sentient beings is a slight subversion of a sort of house elf trope, but not unexpected. we have had rlain the whole time as a tease that things are not what they seem.
oathbringer is where it all comes together to get to the point where reality and fantasy are almost merging. humans conquered the continent and subjugated and exterminated the natives and their culture. your way of life, even if you can't abandon it was built on genocide and slave labor. can you still participate in that and consider yourself a good person?
and then RoW shows that Brandon isn't ready to write these books. he regresses back into fantasy, dropping the ball on the moral rolling stone that has been building momentum since minute one. all nuance is written out and it becomes a straightforward fight between good and evil.
the way odium and the fused were written means that any doylist critique can be given a watsonian answer.
q: should the land of the continent that was violently conquered be given back to its original inhabitants?
a: no because they worship an evil god.
q: when, if ever, is revolutionary violence justified?
a: never, he told his best friend to kill himself.
this is the frustration. brandon sanderson is not ready to reckon with the answers to the questions that made the first books so compelling. he is not ready to admit some systems might need to be overthrown. he set up for a grand slam and then bunted.
toddler dips one toe into the hottub of post colonial thought and then has a tantrum because it's warmer than the air
ok so
brandon just confirmed that the cosmere is actually just a dwarf galaxy with hundreds of stars instead of thousands.
that concept is really tripping me right now because i've always imagined it as a whole universe around the size of our observable universe (around 46.5 billion light years) with the planets all spread out in different galaxies so the only way to travel between them is through the spiritual realm or shadesmar or whatever...
i guess that's still true because stars in dwarf galaxies are still several light years away from each other, BUT brandon also said that some books written in the future of the cosmere have more advanced technology, so technically travelling between the planets in the physical realm isn't not possible
in case the embedded link isn't working:
I'm a transfem Adolin truther and just imagine the two siblings sitting down for a conversation when Adolin asks Renarin to look into his future. Renarin does it and sees Adolin wearing a havah and has 0 idea of how to handle this uniquely stressful social situation as Adolin looks at him expectantly. Do you see my vision
Analyzing the listeners from an asexual perspective
This is something that's been interesting to me for a while, because on one hand "asexual aliens" doesn't feel like a great form of representation. On the other hand though, examining a fictional species with different understandings of sex and attraction can be a great way of analyzing how we ourselves relate to those things. In the end, I've spent a lot of time thinking about this so I figured I may as well try to organize my thoughts on the matter.
Anyway, the first thing that sticks out to me about the listeners specifically is the term "once-mate". It's a pretty simple descriptive term for a relationship, but more significantly, it is the only term for romantic relationships that the listeners have. It sounds similar to how humans might call someone an "ex-partner", but when Venli meets Mazish and Dul, singers who have chosen to be married and refer to each other as spouses, she contrasts this to the term "once-mate", implying that it is a much broader term for relationships in the listener culture than it initially sounds. Of course, there is also the term "warpair" which may have romantic associations, as the only warpair we know is Thude and Bila, who are also once-mates, (Venli and Demid are also called a "researchpair" with similar romantic implications) but we don't know this for certain and there is nothing inherently romantic about it in the same way as once-mate. What I find most interesting, however, is that even if a warpair is romantic in nature, there is still no word for a romantic listener couple that does not fight together and does not "mate" together.
This suggests to me that the listeners, despite being from a primarily asexual species, are actually an extremely amatonormative and allonormative culture. Not only are listeners expected to eventually want to find partners and "mate", as we see in how Venli's resistance to trying mateform is regarded by the adults in her life, but they literally don't have the language to describe a couple that doesn't want to have sex. When I think about what it would be like for a listener who wants to actually have asexual relationships, I think they would end up experiencing alienation similar to what asexual humans in the real world would experience. Not wanting to try mateform is seen as immature or naive, something you'll "grow out of" eventually like we see with Venli. Romantic relationships would probably be taken less seriously or seen as not valid if they don't consummate it, or a listener might be accused of wasting time for pursuing a relationship without wanting to mate.
For a while I wasn't sure if I was thinking too much about this, or if Brandon Sanderson hadn't fully considered the implications of a species with limited sexual desire, however Wind and Truth gave some revelations to the listeners that helped make everything click into place. Rlain explains that despite how the forms work, listeners are fully capable of experiencing a full range of emotions in any form, even if some are muted or enhanced. Most significantly, listeners can experience desire and attraction in any form. We've seen this across the series up until this point, with singers like Mazish and Dul, or Thude expressing attraction and a desire to try out mateform with Bila while still in workform. This scene explains the descrapancy of what we've seen and what we've been told by explaining that the listeners not only sacrificed their forms, but avoid acknowledging intense emotions like love due to a desire to not want to associate with Odium and his associated emotions. The listeners do not acknowledge romantic relationships outsight of pragmatic purposes like mating or battling together because they don't want to acknowledge love for its own sake.
At this point I'd argue that listeners, and singers as a whole, aren't actually asexual outside of mateform. The definition of asexuality can be complexed and nuanced, but it seems as though it's more accurate to say that mateform activates libido, while a singer's sexuality is the same regardless of the form they take. I think Brandon Sanderson may not have fully understood the nuances of what asexuality was when he first described singers as being primarily asexual, and ended up saying something that wasn't totally accurate. Moreover, I think the way singers expereince asexuality would resemble human sexuality quite closely. A lack of desire or outright repulsion to mateform, and lack of sexual desire even while taking mateform, though they'd probably still act silly.
Ultimately, this is a lot of my own thoughts and musings, and I may be projecting a bit. In the end, it's just something I have a lot of thoughts on (perhaps too many thoughts) and I wanted to share them. I think there's a lot to be gained through exploring how singers experience love and relationships (preferably singer/singer couples) and an asexual singer in particular (Venli, I'm talking about Venli) could be a particularly powerful viewpoint to explore. Rather than asexual aliens, I think Brandon may have just created an exaggerated version of our amatonormative/allonormative culture, and it could be interesting to use that to examine those things.
The concept of Adolin fancams set to cunty pop music being within our reach…
It's an unprecedented deal for the author, whose 'Mistborn' series and 'The Stormlight Archive' are being eyed for film and television adapt
The deal is rare one, coming after a competitive situation which saw Sanderson meet with most of the studio heads in town. It gives the author rarefied control over the screen translations, according to sources. Sanderson will be the architect of the universe, will write, produce and consult, and have approvals. That’s a level of involvement that not even J.K. Rowling or George R.R. Martin enjoy.
Ongoing comic. Please read it in order, you'll enjoy it more that way. First. Previous. Archive.
Oh look, Szeth's getting in touch with his feelings even without Tien there to push him. Yay? Not his fault Roshone is confused though, he did try to tell him that Lirin wasn't his master.
Thanks for reading! This is a bit of a long one. There's a very obvious split here, where this could have been divided into two comics, but I wanted these two scenes placed together for. Uh. Reasons. Little note, those two people who Szeth passes in the hallway are Rillir and Laral, who probably will not be speaking in this comic, but who I thought deserved a cameo.
This was my first ever stormlight au, "Tien Finds a Very Special Rock," or what I also affectionately call "Literally the Most Obvious AU for Szeth Stans Reading WoK." Originally I figured he'd take the oathstone from the belongings of a terminal patient, but I think it's important to me for the vibes of this au that Tien acquires it in the most innocent and innocuous way possible. It's currently an ongoing comic. Next. Archive.
Thank you @to-shards-you-say for the image ID's (seriously tysm, I really didn't feel like doing it), and @highly-invested for writing the death rattle, and @taravangians-storming-balls for spren reference materials. And thank you all for reading along, as I slowly figure out how to draw comics. <3
EDIT: There is a continuity error here. Kaladin implies interest in being a soldier, and yet his parents address him by his full name rather than as "Kal." This is intended to take place shortly before he commits to a life as a surgeon.
inconsequential headcanon that small alethi and veden children have fuckass bowl cuts up to a certain age, as symmetry is a holy visual quality in vorinism
at risk of sounding immensely petty. i think the tone of the prologues re: gavilar reflects a broader shift in the writing style in the stormlight archive, away from implication and towards a much blunter style. in both words of radiance and rhythm of war, the prologues demonstrate gavilar kholin's verbal and emotional abuse of his family members, but the way in which it's done in words of radiance feels rather more subtle than in rhythm of war. which is not to say that that's not real abuse - but words of radiance, in which gavilar unsettles jasnah by twisting her own words against her to dig at her insecurities, gets across gavilar's emotional abuse in a far more interesting way than rhythm of war, where he basically just insults navani and everyone she knows until she snaps. gavilar goes from a cruel, power-hungry warlord to an egomaniac who thinks he's a god, and ends up feeling less like a selfish, arrogant conqueror to basically just a cartoon villain.
Stormblessed. Happy first anniversary to me for falling head over heels in love with these books!
Detail shots: an assortment of shirts and no shirts. 😅
Etsy Procreate brushes Patreon Tip jar Prints
Finally drew Kaladin from the Stormlight Archive!