yuh

chel / 26 / side account for le cringe fandom posting.

[effiee27]

TADC 9 SPOILERS !!

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More canon human gangle redraws bc shes so precious 🥹🥹 also unrelated but after watching old human interpretations is funny how many ppl interpreted gangle as how canon human ragatha looks like lol + lil human bar abstragedy, someday ill make more polished drawings of them sepa la bola

[kaiju-dayo]

[n3rdv10l3nc3]

𝑲𝒏𝒊𝒈𝒉𝒕 𝒊𝒏 𝒔𝒉𝒊𝒏𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒔𝒖𝒓𝒈𝒊𝒄𝒂𝒍 𝒔𝒕𝒂𝒑𝒍𝒆𝒔.

[alkaloidunderstander]

last night we let the black mold talk

+ me learning to draw janet

[ivyandfriends]

[librarygoth]

poison ivy (2022)

[ohdorotheabrooke]

‘she slipped another finger into myr’ is such an erotic yet repulsive line. it beautifully expresses the ambivalence of what cersei is feeling. her choice of words give you a full picture of her issues with sex : how she’s unable to see it as anything more than submission to masculine domination and how she longs to occupy the role of the aggressor. sex, to her, is a form of conquest enacted by men on women. she calls taena’s body ‘myr’ and by doing so, she’s comparing the assault she’s enacting to the sack of a city. her gesture is consequently reminiscent of her husband (claiming her rights as he did) as well as reminiscent of her father (raping cities as well as women). weirdly, her thoughts are almost serene : she thinks on what sex means to her and she recalls what she did to feel strong after robert’s assaults. we rarely see cersei being this contemplative and the fact that it can only happen when she’s hurting someone tells us everything we need to know about cersei’s hectic and paranoid way of inhabiting her body. this scene is the moment grrm makes it clear how lost cersei truly is. we see the anger, the bitterness and the violence of tyrion in adwd and we should see for how it is : a mirror to the psychological anguish cersei lives in. cersei using taena - as she did lancel - to self soothe is legit one of the best scenes grrm ever wrote. dworkin in the text rendered in fiction. I will never not be a fan

[salialenart]

“I know that we shall be great friends.”

Taena of Myr & Cersei Lannister

[rrrrrrrmmmm]

“Would it amuse Your Grace to be a man one night?”

“Only if you remained a woman.”

“It was a pity Taena could not serve as Hand. She was thrice the man her husband was, and far more amusing.”

[adrastas]

At least I will not be expected to don mourning for Tyrion. I shall dress in crimson silk and cloth-of-gold for that, and wear rubies in my hair. 

Queen Regent Cersei Lannister.

[smallcouncilnotes]

Lena Headey said justice for Taena Merryweather!

[aliteralchicken]

“I want toxic yuri” you can’t handle Janet from hr

[librarygoth]

i love harley and ivy together, but regarding their separation i think it’s so important to consider how much of poison ivy (2022) is about pam being a selfish, power-hungry narcissist who also chronically pushes those who love her most away because she’s afraid of what it means to be close to people and to care about them. one of her key conflicts is this tension between her intense need to be seen and known and loved and her own hunger for control, which is so wrapped up in her self-aggrandizing.

sometimes i see people write or talk about ivy as if she’s this uwu precious baby angel who just likes plants and kissing girls, and while it’s true that the moment she kneels down in the dirt to look at a plant and say “Hello, little friend” she transforms into something child-like and untouched by nihilism, she is absolutely not this idealized object of soft tumblr sapphic cottagecore fantasy, but rather an incredibly complex villain (or anti-hero or anti-villain, perspective depending). in her contemporary incarnation she is, to simplify some very intricate character work, a bad person trying to do a good thing. part of what makes her so compelling is the fact that her most villainous qualities are her most human and mundane ones. she often thinks of herself as a monster because of how her body transformed after it survived woodrue’s experiment, and while her connection to the green did change her sense of morality and her sense of purpose by bringing her in line with the cycles of nature and its indifference to humanity, it is her pain, her fear of vulnerability, her volatility, her hubris, her arrogance, that drive her to perform villainous acts. what does her characterization say about what it means to be human? to be human is to be imperfect, to be hurt, to channel your pain into hurting others, to make choices (good and bad) about how you move through the world.

the question of pamela isley’s humanity has also been one of her central conflicts over the last 30ish years of comics publishing. she's loved harley for so long, in spite of herself, and while she has always protected harley and taken care of her, she has not always been kind to her, and Harley has not always been kind to Pam. so many people hate janet from hr, some because they simply don’t like the character, but others because they don’t like that janet isn’t harley. it took janet some time to grow on me, but i never hated her because the nature of their relationship makes sense to me. pam cares about janet, but takes advantage of janet’s love for her to suit her own agenda. janet loves pam, and understands that she’s being manipulated, but ultimately desires a dynamic in which she is essentially pam's submissive pet, as long as she isn’t being taken for granted, as long as at least a part of pam loves her back. i don’t like every individual story beat that deals with the escalation of pam and janet’s relationship, but the overarching idea works and even honors certain historical aspects of pam's characterization in a way similar to how wonder woman: the hiketeia (2002) honors the bdsm aspects of diana's origins without being weird about it. I think pam and janet's relationship only becomes more cohesive as the series continues, and janet's characterization became much more concrete between issue #26 and now. that said, i didn’t fully like janet until issue #38 when she confronts pam over her cruelty and emotional isolation, telling her:

“You can be so nice when you’re happy. But when you’re mad it’s like the sun goes behind a cloud. Like you don’t even remember the happy parts. Like they never happened. It’s really hard to love you. I don’t think you like being loved. I think it annoys you.”

this is the thing janet understands that actually makes her so vital to pam's story. pam is going to hurt harley. she is going to hurt janet. she is going to hurt herself. one of the questions of poison ivy (2022) is whether or not pam will learn from the consequences of her actions, or if she'll continue to succumb to her most evil (and most human) tendencies.

i appreciate this book so much for the nuanced way in which it handles pam (even if i don't love every plot point or wish some of it was executed more elegantly), and for the way in which it explores what i think are very relevant questions in our post-capitalist techno-fascist hellscape of a world: how do we balance hopelessness and hope? how do we balance nihilism and idealism? at what point do we become the things we hate?

pam has always been a villain. often a likable one, depending on the era in publishing. a villain we can empathize with. but still a villain a the end of the day. and humans, all of us, even the most well-intentioned ones, are capable of villainy. this is one of the reasons i love pam. she's a mirror. it's scary how much of myself i see in her, how much of other people. she's messy and sometimes repulsive, a narrator rendered unreliable because of how she lies to herself.

also, if you wait five or ten issues, i'm certain about one thing: pam and harley will get back together. again, i love harley and ivy. but i also think if you're reading this book to focus primarily on the ship, you're missing out on so much good, interesting shit! i literally haven't scratched the surface of all my thoughts about it here!!! questions about who's actions are framed as villainous versus heroic, questions about what it means when what you are at your very core is villainized because you don't fit correctly into society, about what it means to be understood, about how, as pam puts it, "it's the monsters that teach us how to be good."

there's nothing wrong with reading for a ship, but at the same time this is literally such a rich text, and it makes me so sad to see people reduce it to "it's the worst thing I've ever read because i don't like what's happening with my ship."

[librarygoth]

to add to my ivy post from a couple days ago:

"ivy's more cruel and egotistic after she was resurrected and I don't like it" yes that's the whole point? she got her full power back and once again it's been going to her head? part of the character's whole thing is that her love of power corrupts her noble intentions???

i keep seeing people say they don't like that g. willow wilson's ivy can be vain and cruel, which is a wild thing to say about that character specifically because historically that's been like. her whole thing. literally her first appearance in batman (1940) #181 is essentially because she can't stand that people aren't paying attention to her. for years she was directly depicted as a villainous sadist who loved tying people up and playing with them and who specifically got off on humiliating and dominating men. there's definitely a conversation to be had around the degree of misogyny and homophobia that went into her characterization immediately post-crisis, but regardless not a single writer or artist who has worked on the character has ever been subtle about her capacity for cruelty, including in her most sympathetic depictions.

her cruelty was so well established that in detective comics (1937) #751-752, published in 2000 in the aftermath of no man's land, batman and robin are shocked to realize that ivy's rescuing and caring for children instead of kidnapping and killing them. there are some earlier sympathetic depictions of her; in black orchid (1988), ivy's a tragic figure who feels more deeply than anyone gives her credit for. in batman: legends of the dark knight (1989) #42-23, she initially seems sympathetic, but turns out as a classic femme fatale out to deceive. detective comics #693-694 is the first issue of the mainline comics to reveal that she can feel the pain of the earth and to introduce a desire to protect plant life as part of her motivation. this story was published in 1995, only a few years after batman: the animated series first depicted ivy as an ecoterrorist. batman: poison ivy (1997) is not only one of the first stories in which she's depicted as subject instead of object, but it's a story about her seeking revenge against unethical weapons manufacturers for genuine wrongdoing. fruit of the earth, which spans across issues of batman, detective comics, and shadow of the bat in 1999, begins the story that concludes in detective comics #751-752, showing us ivy as a nuanced figure. we already know that ivy has a connection to the green, thanks to black orchid and secret origins (1986) #36, but it's rarely referenced until the no man's land arc; when robin asks the kids in ivy's care why she lets them live, they answer simply: "because we respect the green." in batman: gotham knights (2000) #61-65, ivy sacrifices literally everything to save her park orphans when they begin turning up dead. yet it's not until detective comics #817 and batman #651, both published in 2006, when ivy's motives shift from protecting plant life to straight up ecoterrorism.

the whole time this is happening, she's still cruel and sadistic and conceited and haughty. it's almost a cliche at this point for batman to tell her she's doing the right thing the wrong way, or for someone to comment that ivy could be the one to save the world if she just got over herself. the fact that she's cruel and vain is actually so important because it contributes to her complexity, just like her relationship with harley does. a woman known for her cold heart who notoriously hates humans suddenly cares about a human, and this raises questions: why does she care? what does caring about someone bring out in her? what does it look like when she cares about someone? so many of ivy's most interesting layers became visible through the process of answering these questions and weaving those layers with her more unscrupulous ones in harley quinn (2000), harley and ivy: love on the lam (2001), and gotham city sirens (2009).

even post flashpoint she's still vain and cruel. birds of prey (2011) is (in my opinion) such an awful take on an iconic title, but it and the new 52 era complicate poison ivy further while still maintaining her cruelty and her ego by giving us a version of pam who grew up in a violent and unstable home, whose research was effectively stolen by wayne enterprises, who transformed due to a freak lab accident and got revenge on the father who murdered her mother. this is a pamela who is dying (of what, we never learn), and has no problem betraying her teammates to save herself, all while assuring them that her friendship is genuine. batgirl annual (2012) #2 also adds incredible nuance to pam, exploring the ways in which she experiences emotion and humanity, further compounded by the contents of her first solo series, poison ivy: cycle of life and death (2016), appearances in harley quinn (2013), harley quinn (2016), and batgirl and the birds of prey (2016) (though i don't like her depiction in this book, personally), all of which eventually leads into another odd era for the character, one in which DC for a moment appears poised to rehabilitate her as a hero.

this is how we lead into the events of batman (2016) #41-43, then heroes in crisis (2018), then harley quinn and poison ivy (2019), and her absence during the joker war, all eventually deciding that pam is not, in fact, a hero. instead she remerges in fear state as two halves of a whole, for the second time in five years. this of course leads into poison ivy (2022), which in my opinion feels like a return to form for the character. it alchemizes the best parts of her from all these different depictions, pre- and post- crisis, and balances them so delicately and well. i've been reading comics for so long and i genuinely think she's one of the most difficult characters to write because there are so many moving parts to consider with her. i think anyone who can write her as cohesively as g. willow wilson in poison ivy (2022) or amy chu in cycle of life and death or john francis moore in batman: poison ivy, is doing something that requires so much skill, even if these takes aren't perfect.

literally the key to getting this character right is making her cruel and vain and selfish. that is who pamela isley is. she is also fiercely protective of the few people she allows behind her walls, a ray of pure joy when she gets to work with plants, a genuine warrior of the earth, a hater of abusers, a woman who tries to hide her feelings, even though every emotion hits her with more intensity than she can bare. she's literally all of these things because she's complicated as fuck! she's the messiest person in gotham! this is literally what makes her so fun to read about.

it just feels so weird to see people say they don't like it when she's vicious and selfish because it sounds to me like you actually just don't like the character.

[pompom-facha]

Some Oona from (Dis)Enchantment fanart cuz I remembered that I love her so very much

Close-ups

Doodles below the cut!

She's so fun to draw I love her

[sheepskull2]

They're all I can think about 🥺

[vanillapervert]

moral support

[vanillapervert]

a gift

[vanillapervert]

i liked this comment, wasnt actually intending to make it look food-like, not on a conscious level at least lol, then i remembered those bracelettes made out of candy for kids, so yeah why not make this edible too