Hi! I'm Es. I draw sometimes (as you presumably can tell).
This account is primarily an art archive. Everything is tagged with #my art, and I'll go back and tag #fanart according eventually
#oc art is currently tagged under #oc, but will be separated out eventually
Right now I draw whatever strikes my interests, with no fixed fandom. Mainly I'm trying to develop my art skills and work on my original story/ocs when I have the time, but I do fanart when I am inspired.
Find me on bluesky & twitter! I'm very very inactive on instagram.
I'll always find it a little silly when people who defend Agott like their life depends on it treat Tartah like the spawn of Satan for his actions in chapter 87, then defend it by saying the difference is that "Agott apologized"
Agott did apologize. In chapter 58. That's 55 chapters AFTER she sent Coco to the Dadah Range. This doesn't make her apology any less valid, and it was definitely something she needed to do before she and Coco could grow closer, but it took time. It's been 10 chapters since Tartah betrayed Coco and he hasn't had a single appearance since. Comparing the two on the basis of who has and hasn't apologized is just silly when the circumstances are so different.
I think it's also pretty clear that Tartah didn't even realize how badly he hurt Coco until this moment. We don't know exactly what was going through his head when he chose to force the truth spell onto her, but judging from his prior characterization across the series, I highly doubt he was being purposefully malicious.
With all that being said, while I don't think Agott and Tartah are a fair comparison in general, trying to justify one while demonizing the other is hypocritical at best. At the end of the day, while they've both hurt Coco, they're still just children doing what they think is right in the moment. They're not evil, they're not the villains of this story, their choices and actions are shaped by the lives they've lived and how they've been failed by the adults in their lives.
My main issue with this argument is that it always manages to diminish the complexity of both Agott and Tartah for the sake of which ship is better based on how they treat Coco.
Yes, Agott and Tartah are parallels, but their character arcs are distinct to the point that comparing their actions and scaling them on who was worse seems illogical to me.
Tartah and Agott are two societal rejects. They were both deemed unfit to become witches of the calibre that was expected of them. Agott was rejected by her family and her mother for her "childish magic" and "lack of talent." Tartah was rejected by witches and masters because of his silverwash. These rejections make them adopt rigid societal views that are altered by Coco and Custas. Their interactions with outsiders, slowly becoming friends with Coco and custas, alter their worldview. Coco's unique ideas deviod of the rigidness installed in them by witch society spur them on to deviate and stay true to themselves. Tartah is able to find a way to accommodate himself in an abelist society due to Coco's help, and Agott is able to dismantle the toxic views from her household by interacting with Coco.
Ultimately, Agott's journey to fully dismantling her prejudice is a gradual and well written one. We see with every interaction how she manages to break away at old beliefs, beginning to see Coco as a witch on par with her and slowly develop her own criticisms of the witches code. Her prejudice fully breaks away in the silver Eve arc, where her and Coco's relationship is at its strongest, and we end up getting the most iconic Arcko moments. During this arc, Agott is able to access a safe space created by Qifrey and the other Qiflings. Even though she is an incredibly hyper independent character, she luckily has a support group present and is able to express herself freely. On the other hand, Tartah (another hyper independent character) further withdraws himself and slowly goes on a spiral, losing trust in adults to the point that he joins the brimhats because of how sick he has gotten of witch society.
Both Agott and Tartah are radicalised by their own experiences. Agott goes on to dismantle the views of witch society while Tartah arguably goes a step further and dismantles his views surrounding the whole system itself: how witch society even functions in the first place. Agott is implied to hold such criticisms, yet she doesn't voice them while Tartah is someone incredibly loud about the beliefs he holds.
In the end, Agott and Tartah both hurt Coco as a result of the beliefs they held and acted upon. While it was neither characters intentions to hurt Coco the way they did, they still very much did hurt her as both were acting out of pure impulse. They end up recognising this later on. To me, they're both children, and in a society that focuses on how children are an oppressed group, it makes sense that hurt children will hurt others even if that's not what they mean to do. I can't particularly bring myself to hate either of them. Look at how much pressure Agott was under to the point that her individuality was at stake due to her desire to prove everyone wrong and conform. Look at Tartah's own exclusion from society over and over again for something that he couldn't control but could easily be accommodated for. Look at Agott's hardworking nature and the way she needs to wrestle with the fact the fact that she isn't some prodigy but has had to work tirelessly to reach the point of profiency she is at just for it to be discredited by those around her because it isn't the right type of magic or it isn't what they expected. Look at Tartah and the horror of having to see your friend and his father struggle economically and medically speaking while you have no way to help them because you know whichever adult you turn to will wipe their memories and on top of that your friend turned into a tree: the same tree at the shop you work at with your grandfather and its the witches hiding all this information. Look at how society has failed both of them and led them to the point of acting in such extreme ways while we have been shown that they're good-natured kids at heart.
I feel like... this cover art has Implications....but I don't know what they are.
ohoooohohohohhoho Custas backstory?
............I know the tone has always been present from the beginning (given Coco's mother being petrified and all) but I DO feel like this manga starts off being very..... Cheerful and 'Woaw magic is cool! :)))' and we are now strictly in the "magic is a metaphor. we are now examining class struggle and ableism in a society inherently divided into castes by Forbidden Knowledge".
Which is. Cool. But also. Waow.
oh shit they made him a sylph....jacket?
.........what if he crashes?
........................is there a reason why most commoners don't have access to sylph shoes? Because that might be worth examining.
./......he is about to be MUGGED for those wings. Or something else. Because the comic is focusing WAY too much on how well this is working way too early into the chapter.
..........or maybe I'm being too pessimistic. Maybe it'll be fine.
Damn, that is COOL though. These kids thought of everything!
.....what was that little pause there, Custas?
Also, if he gets tragically mugged while out and about........
...didn't Qifrey chew out Tartah for flying at night like..... three chapters ago?
I'm sure that won't be relevant at all.
I don't know why I'm such a pain in the ass, but I really don't like how long the narrative is focusing on their overall success with this spell.
ohohohoho this is cute. Coco's name is only two identical characters. Which means, presumably, the author made this language a syllabic one, just like Japanese.
.....oof.
................OOF.
Sorry, I keep on not having much to say, because the entire time I read, my only reactions are just that one nervous monkey glancing to the side meme.
This story really took "Coco struggles with knowing something she wasn't supposed to" and cranked it up to Coco STRUGGLES with KNOWING something she wasn't SUPPOSED TO.
The pointed hat is off. I repeat. The pointed hat is OFF.
okay, new theory.
5) Iguin is Tartah from the future
SEE I FUCKIN' KNEW IT
NOTHING GOOD LASTS THIS LONG NARRATIVELY
Okay holy fuck I didn't think they'd KILL HIM!! FUCKING--
ahhh, damn. Dagda is also flying too close to the sun, I see. Why did I think it was gonna be the Knights Moralis with magical arrows? I thought it was gonna be some 'get hit erase memory' type of shit. :T
This is. This is just....fate.
I could say "how come witches haven't fixed slavery yet" but. I suppose there's no magic in the world that could stop bad people from doing bad things for the first time. There's always gonna be someone starting new type of fucked up shit. :/
I don't like. The pattern of beloved-parent-figures being uh. Brutally taken to an end here.
Qifrey, you in danger girl.
.........okay so this girl isn't giving off Helpful Witch vibes, despite not being a Brimmed Cap. So I'm thinking the staff... which she keeps talking to...? IS her master?
And maybe THEY'RE a brimcap?
And what, the apprentice to the brimcaps gets their... brim....? When they graduate?
Or when they cast their first Forbidden Spell?
I don't like this..........
Okay, so she's definitely a Brimmed Cap in training?
.........okay so that's not uh. Horrifying imagery at all.
Reading Gollum as Boromir's replacement (both driven mad by the Ring even) tinges his near-execution by the hand of Faramir with a shadow of fratricide? Into it
hmmm ok I started answering and went off the rails here so need to break this up.
My comment about Gollum as Boromir's Shit Replacement was kind of a joke but. Now that you mention it, it's interesting that Faramir is the only other main character aside from F&S to interact with Gollum over the course of LOTR (leaving aside Gandalf/Aragorn's prior interrogation of him pre-FOTR). From everyone else's perspective, they will only ever know of Gollum's critical role in Sam & Frodo's quest as hearsay - the invisible final piece in the puzzle, the phantom at the heart of the story, the ghost in the machine. Gollum's a ghost, intrinsically: a walking manifestation of the story's central trauma, a lost echo who can never reclaim his personhood; his function is to haunt, to linger, to repeat himself, to fail to move on.
TBC
As a ghost, he's hard to see (even without the ring) and he doesn't appear to that many people; it's interesting that Faramir's the only other guy in LOTR who talks to him. Kind of random on the surface; why would that be? Gollum is real to Frodo and Bilbo because ringbearers = he's their shadow self, and Sam's a package deal with Frodo (though there are some aspects of Gollum that remain invisible to him, or which he can bear witness to but not understand). But why Faramir? He doesn't have any particularly resonant parallels with Gollum! No but unfortunately, Gollum does have some parallels with Boromir and has slotted into the story right when Boromir dies (and he dies immediately after succumbing to the ring - such that we know that if he had not died, he'd have been running around all ring-crazed like Gollum).
So in Gollum, Faramir is confronted with what Boromir would have been reduced to if he'd lived. On the one hand then, Gollum serves a very practical warning to Faramir not to make the same mistake (can't be bothered to reread the scene but pretty sure Frodo frames it this way explicitly, they play this up even more in the film). But on the other hand it also provides Faramir with some much needed closure. By being shown the terrible counterfactual, Faramir is granted the definitive knowledge that Boromir's heroic death was the best option left to him. But also the whole sequence functions as a ritual enactment of the grieving process, where Faramir gets to capture his brother's ghost-fragment, punish him, forgive him, and let him go. All while setting himself apart from his brother's legacy by consciously making different choices.
(What does Faramir have to punish Boromir for, and how does Gollum's transgression in the forbidden pool represent this? Spitballing but 1. Boromir's failure in succumbing to the ring, obviously. 2. Much more tenuous but... I think there's a certain deeply buried rage that Faramir has wrt Boromir that goes something like, "why do YOU get to break the rules but I can't??" And the spectacle of Gollum's casual entitlement to the pool, his blithe disregard for certain laws or rules, might trigger something of the same feeling. Faramir is the overlooked conscientious younger brother who has always been stuck grinding away, dutiful and unpraised, at the thankless task of trying to maintain domestic law and order - that's what he's doing right now in this scene - while his charismatic favoured elder brother, who daddy will not shut up about, goes off galavanting on mysterious important quests, where he has one job which he fails at and then gets himself killed. Gollum is neither favoured nor charismatic nor galavanting but in this scene he IS acting with total disregard to the rules. And you could imagine Faramir having to deal with a lifetime of Boromir acting like the rules don't quite apply to him because they both know daddy's never going to punish him, he'll always get away with it. So I think Faramir's role as law-enforcer, how he deals with people breaking the rules/getting away with stuff, is a part of his identity that is deeply intertwined with Boromir and perhaps relevant to how he deals with Gollum here.)
This scene is also a ritual of closure in the other direction, for Frodo and Sam: the trauma of Boromir's attempted attack on Frodo was never resolved for them, they never got to see Boromir's final redemptive act of self-sacrifice. But now the scene is restaged with Faramir holding them in his power, and he rights that wrong on his brother's behalf. By analogy it also functions as closure for the failures of men more generally - Aragorn has his whole epic arc of redeeming Isildur's failure, but at a lesser level Faramir is atoning here for Boromir, Denethor, the whole line of the Stewards.
Moral of the story is Gollum has to stop whoring himself out as a shadow self for every tom dick and harry. or maybe that's just me
note to self, idea for a three-shot on the theme of brothers/jealousy/theft/getting away with it/letting go once I finish up with my current Gollum story:
1. Smeagol & Deagol (Semagol's POV) - trying to steal trinkets/secrets from the matriarch. They get caught but Deagol gets away with it by blaming Smeagol, who is generally disliked. Smeagol looks Deagol in the eyes as the matriarch publicly shames him. Deagol does not defend him. Smeagol is gripped by a seething jealousy - why is Deagol loved and Smeagol hated, even if they do the same thing?
2. Boromir & Faramir (Faramir's POV) - they are children. Boromir has the grand idea to steal apples from the garden of some key senior figure in Denethor's court. Faramir is anxious and tries to talk him out of it but eventually his desire to bask in Boromir's confidence overcomes his caution and he comes along (though does not steal any apples himself). They are caught and brought before Denethor, who punishes only Faramir despite Boromir stepping up to take the blame.
3. Henneth Annûn
- Faramir's POV as he finds Gollum in the pool stealing fish, hears about Boromir from F&S. The situation (heightened by proximity to the ring) ignites a strong urge to punish Gollum for his careless transgression and hold all three of them captive so he can assert his value to/dominance over Denethor. Despite this he consciously chooses to let them go (and by analogy he lets it all go: his unresolved envy of his brother, his desperation to win his father's regard, and the Ring itself).
- Final coda: Gollum's interior monologue at Frodo's perceived betrayal when he stands by and allows him to be captured. The Smeagol personality breaks, and the monologue becomes interspersed with memories of Deagol's betrayal and the incoherent pain Smeagol felt as a child: Why do they punish us, always us, no one else? Why does nobody speak for us? If they hate us and wants us gone, why won't they leave us alone? Ends with the Gollum personality urging him to grip tight on his hatred of the world and desire for vengeance: it's the only thing he has, after all.
