Netherlands - Elderly millennial - History graduate. Once in a while I might flood your dash with unsollicited ancient Rome factoids. Lotta D&D up in here, fellow kids. My art tag (gosh it feels pretentious saying that) is My Doodles.
As a little celebration for having finished the first 10 sketches for our D&D campaign, and due to the fact they’ll currently all still fit into 1 image post, here’s all the sketches so far in one post, starting with one from our most recent session (the 55th, time sure does fly) at the top, down through 54-48, and an errant one from way way early in the campaign, in session 4.
The last 8 sessions have sure been a rollercoaster. Slaying a fallen angel and foiling his plans to tear open an elemental rift, and witnessing the disbandment of a druidic tribe, and then hopping across the world and get invited to a fancy gala in order to outwit a beguiling enemy to release a dearly beloved NPC whom she held hostage, and to lobby for a ship at the same time.
All the drawings I’ve done since the initial batch. I took a pretty big break in between the first 5 and the last 2 (they’re from sessions 56-58, 61-62, and 84-85 respectively, top to bottom) but perhaps some day I can fill the gaps.
Wait another minor third point following on my previous post on Dreams of Drowning, Avantika's gender also plays a role in brief instances - not as someone who's really actively seeking out sex, though she does become Vandran's lover. It's mentioned she's attracted leery men's eyes from a pretty young age that she needed to learn to handle, avoid or ignore. When Vandran first talks to her on the ship, one of the thoughts flashing through her mind is he knows why she's fled town and wants to blackmail her for a quick fuck. Near the end of the story Vandran is visibly disappointed she put her shirt back on rather than commit to an 'exuberant reconciliation' he's said or done absolutely nothing to earn yet after giving away her ship.
I think you can't quite see her ambitious urges, her need not to trodden upon on and for 'her worth not to be exploited' entirely separate from the travails of her gender.
On the subject of Dreams of Drowning from Mighty Nein Stories Untold, what gets me about this short story is, first off, it's genuinely well-written and does a very graceful job weaving its themes, story threads and foreshadowing into a single tapestry, feeding into the ending at all timeperiods within the story, simultaneously. It's well worth a read, I think it's one the best ones in the anthology.
Beware of some spoilers below:
Secondly, it does a good job of making Avantika, whose interiority we haven't really been allowed to glimpse in any media before, come across as a reasonable actor - sympathetic, even - without really breaking with the way she's portrayed in C2. You can understand what she does and why she does it. I know she got jokingly marked as the crazy slutty ex-girlfriend often on stream and fanspaces (which bothered me for the misogyny of it, at minimum; I'm sorry, really really don't wanna start discourse or get hate over it, but it's pretty hard to ignore) but her reasoning always seemed perfectly rational rather than crazy to me and is reinforced in Dreams of Drowning. Someone struggling through a harsh existence, seeking to do more than just keep her head above the water and become a self-made woman. A life of surviving has made her guarded, both in campaign and in the short story (for example she muses about maybe allowing herself to love Vandran some day, as if it's a risk she can't take). She's someone who wants to fulfill her own ambitions and be treated as an equal rather than be denigrated, sidelined, or "dismissed as a simpering tavern wench", as it's put at one point.
Throughout the short story she's kept in men's shadows; Vandran 'treats information like an indulgence' and constantly keeps her in the dark, other characters always direct their attention to Vandran and don't note her presence in the scene, she's not even acknowledged as captain coming off her own ship while docking, a ship which Vandran almost immediately gives away to the Plank King without bothering to explain or apologize to his lover. Vandran screws her over to mollify a dangerous man, which in its own right makes good sense, but this breach of trust is the event that locks in the course of the future; having had enough, she finds out what Vandran's been hiding, and demands her share. For him to hold to his promise, and do this together. But by then it's too late, she "has far more faith in the monster than the man."
Why should she be content with the shadow, and not be allowed to rise above them, to sate her hunger? And that might have worked in another life, as the protagonist of an aspirational tale about overcoming adversity. But even her own story isn't her own, her life is a highway to her tragic end, littered with off-ramps she alone cannot take. The only warlock who can't. There's a bit of meta I once mused about writing, how her role and treatment in the narrative is as an object, objectified in many senses of the word. Any attempt to either escape it or become the subject, is doomed to failure. And Dreams of Drowning is littered with inescapable foreshadowing from front to back. But at least this time we get to see things from her perspective, not as an antagonist, and that flips the dynamic with the reader to tragedy instead of victory.
Anyway, buy it. Dreams of Drowning is a good read.
I don't really wanna gloss over the fact that it's pretty remarkable to get images like this in a tv show; I haven't really seen anything like this even in major blockbusters since like... Kingdom of Heaven (2005) or so.
And back in my day, before the later seasons of GoT, visuals in fantasy and sci-fi tv shows were on the "Papier-mâché, DIY and painted canvas" variety. Something like Sharpe had to do the battle of Waterloo with like 20 extras, tight camera angles and a dream. Between all the endless social media complaining about everything I don't want to forget it this show looks sick as fuck on my screen (and unlike the Long Night, it's in bright daylight). I can pause it on basically any random shot and take a minute or two to drink in all the detail and the armour designs.
My feeds everywhere are all back to Korra discourse and I am just getting flashbacks to the trenches in 2012-2014 I want everyone to shut up we’ve been over all of this a thousand times before
I'd like to make everyone aware that after literally nearly 2 decades, there's finally been releases of the Avatar the Last Airbender books 1, 2 and 3 soundtracks. Hoping they'll continue that and release the missing Korra soundtracks too (book 1 exists, but the others don't, except for several individual tracks Jeremy published).
You can find the releases on Jeremy Zuckerman's youtube, under the Releases tab!
There's a certain cosmic poetry about Lindsey Graham demanding they bomb Iran for decades, finally getting it, and then promptly dying. Holden Bloodfeast indeed.
There’s something delightfully hectic about episode S3E3 of HotD, even if the big setpieces happened in the preceding two episodes and this one’s supposed to be more of a small scale one.
Been seeing what might be one of the most awful, hardhitting photos I've seen since Bucha out of Kyiv after last night's missile attack - and accompanying this human tragedy, lots of gloating pro-Russian commentators. I genuinely don't know how to describe the image except sickening; a human sacrifice to terror-bombing via ballistic missile.
