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hello vonnie
Cosimo Galluzzi
DEAR READER
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TVSTRANGERTHINGS
RMH
Jules of Nature
Sade Olutola
almost home
JVL
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
Kiana Khansmith
trying on a metaphor
pixel skylines
Mike Driver
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
izzy's playlists!
occasionally subtle
seen from United States
seen from Chile
seen from Germany
seen from Türkiye
seen from United States
seen from T1
seen from Netherlands
seen from Italy
seen from United States
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seen from Malaysia
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@lego-bug
.+ Meet the Artist +.
HEyo~! Im MAy! I am an amateur animator, multimedia artist and a lover of horror elements and goofy cartoons! Some of the content you can expect for this account is.... NINJAGO.... Yep that's about it I post a lot of Lego ninjas here ... ironically it's mostly Zane and ice emperor content... What can I say he's like brain rot to me~!❄️✨ Enjoy the blog! :3
Ninja doodles that Twitter REALLY liked lmfao
I actually do genuinely love when people make sincere angst art of children's shows. The depth people create in the things they carry close to their heart always inspires me. Like yknow what? What if it WAS that deep. And even deeper. Take my hand. Let me explore this topic with you
Pony ninjago things.... some are unfinished and all are old
New blog!
Hey guys! I'm happy to announce that I've made a second Tumblr account!
While I will still post my Ninjago related art here, you can check out my original content over at @cast-ir0n-bug !
See ya there!
Guess what zine I was a part offff???? ✨🌱
Viridian vitality was a JOY to work on I had a blast! Here's to participating in more zones to come!
Both my fic highlight and main piece are posted below + keep an 👁️ out for some news coming soon!
my main piece for the zine! Wanted to do the final battle against the over lord- one of my favorite scenes from the show!
Probably my favorite piece- got a bit carried away with the environments ✌️✨
Had a blast tho!!
one thing about the post-ice-emperor-zane fics out there, is that many of them focus on zane avoiding everything that reminds him of the never-realm once he gets home. never using his powers, changing his favorite season from winter to summer, etc.
now — don’t get me wrong — this trope is great, and i always eat it up like i’m starved. however, i choose to read into the possible aftermath differently.
what many people brush over way too often, is that zane spent 60 years in the never-realm. 6 fucking decades. that’s longer than he’d been a ninja by far, and if i’m getting the timeline right, longer than he’d even been alive. over the span of his reign as the emperor, the never-realm became more of a home than ninjago. maybe not mentally, a golden cage is still a cage after all, but physically? absolutely.
so my interpretation is that he doesn’t avoid what reminds him of the cold realm. he seeks it.
after his return, zane no longer feels comfortable in warm weather. it’s as if he cannot breathe if the air isn’t piercing cold, leading him to — unintentionally — dropping the temperature in his room by several degrees. another member of the team may walk into his room to inform him of dinner being served, and end up walking straight into what feels like the north pole. zane has no idea why his body does it, it simply automatically happens the second he properly lets his guard down.
he also struggles sleeping when laying down. there had been lots and lots of bedrooms in his huge palace back in the never-realm, but he’d still spent nearly all of the time on his throne. this includes sleeping there. after 60 years, zane is so accustomed to sleeping while sitting that anything else is impossible. the other ninja will find him fast asleep in the chair in front of his desk, the comfy chair in the living room, in a chair by the dinner table, etc. (if he sleeps without bolting upright from a horrid nightmare, that is.) his bed is still made from the first — and failed — attempt to sleep after his return, collecting dust as its owner never lays down in it anymore.
a very serious problem following zane’s stay as the emperor is that he can no longer come up with his own ideas or plans in a moment. he spent so long being a mindless puppet that his mind is nearly programmed to obey orders, not construct his own. on the battlefield, a part of his subconscious is awaiting lloyd’s, wu’s, anyone’s instructs on which area to cover, which criminal to target, which teammate to support. perhaps there’s even a part of him waiting for the voice of someone in particular — vex’s.
because he misses vex. he knows he shouldn’t, really, he does. vex was an awful human being, a master manipulator, and the one at fault for basically everything that went down in the never-realm. it’s what everyone tells zane anyway. despite all of this, he was zane’s only friend for ages. (he now knows that he was never a friend, but he spent 60 years believing otherwise.) without him, there’s an empty space he can feel whenever, wherever, and it never gets properly filled.
all of this and more follows him into his daily routine. zane repeatedly catches himself longing for what reminds him of his old home.
and he hates himself for it.
we’re talking upper level loathing. he shouldn’t miss it, it was the worst years of his life, his reign as emperor traumatized himself — and others — beyond belief. but with everything he has gone through in his (already too long) life, he longs for familiarity.
the monastery no longer provides that feeling in the way it used to.
and that hurts.
Seeing as ao3 went down right after I posted my last chapter, I’m just, gonna put this here
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
🎄 🎁 MERRY CHRISTMAS!!! ✨❄️
A zelsa to you all and to all a goodnight
The Fortnite BR skins of the original four ninja have been revealed!!
This turned out way better than I thought it would, they all look amazing
.....I may be aggressively resisting the urge to buy fortnite but you better believe nothing's stopping me from DRAWING THEM-
So my Ninjago hyperfixation has been defrosting again (everyone clap and cheer), and something really interesting occurred to me.
Now, it's been a hot minute since I've watched the full series, so correct me if I'm missing the mark on a few details. But I was noticing a really interesting trend when it comes to the utilization and context of the saying "ninja never quit".
9 times out of 10, when someone says "ninja never quit" (or some variation like "the resistance never quits", "the news never sleeps", etc.), it's usually stated as a sort of rallying cry. It's primarily used as a motivational phrase to encourage others not to give up and to keep fighting until the day is saved.
However, off the top of my head, I can think of only two instances in which that context subtly yet meaningfully deviates from the norm (again, feel free to chime in if I'm missing any others). And analyzing it further has led to a fascinating realization about both characters involved.
Zane at the end of s3, during his fight with the Overlord. Zane isn't speaking to anyone except the Overlord directly in this conversation. He isn't motivating anyone except maybe himself, and perhaps saying it as a threat towards the Overlord. Now you might immediately be thinking that him simply motivating himself instead of someone else isn't that meaningful of a deviation from the norm. But it actually gets so much more interesting when you consider the surrounding context. Before confronting the Overlord, Zane stated the iconic line of "support me, friends, for one last time". That last bit in particular leads me to believe he fully planned on dying. He knew the risks of wielding the Golden Weapons/Armor. Survival was nowhere in his strategy. He planned to die, and he did so with a smile on his face - and he planned to take the Overlord down with him by any means necessary.
Lloyd at the end of s8, right after watching the Bounty get crushed. Like Zane, he says the phrase not with the intention of motivating his companions, but as a threat against Harumi/personal affirmation to himself. And in the much more specific emotional context of this scene, it's important to note that right now Lloyd thinks he's one of the only ninja left alive. Then he drops his badass one-liner, and jumps off the train so he can live to fight another day. But more noteably, the full quote goes like this: "This isn't the end, Harumi. This is just the beginning. Without my power, without my friends, I'm gonna fight you. I'm gonna fight on. Because a ninja never quits." Unlike with Zane, these aren't the words of someone planning to die, but rather the opposite. With the phrasing and attitude he has in this scene, it doesn't seem like death is an option. Lloyd is promising, both to Harumi and to himself, that he will not rest until she has faced justice and Ninjago is saved. Death is not an option. Fatality is not an option. He will continue to live and fight and strive no matter what, and will not let himself die until his goals are achieved.
In both of these cases, the phrase "ninja never quit" take on a uniquely different meaning. When Zane says it, he means "I will not stop fighting you until we're both dead. I will fight you with everything I have, and even my dying breath will be spent in your opposition." Whereas with Lloyd, he means "I will not stop fighting you until I've succeeded, and I will not allow myself the peace of dying along the way. So square up motherfucker, because I'm coming for you."
Although Lloyd and Zane are both deeply sacrificial individuals, I think this dichotomy says a lot about how differently their views are on what sacrifice actually means.
For Lloyd, death is not an option, not for himself and not for anyone, even his worst enemies. From his perspective, the ultimate sacrifice is not martyrdom but devotion. He gave up his childhood to be the Green Ninja, permanently aged himself with the Tomorrow's Tea, banished his father to the Cursed Realm, and made so many other personal sacrifices to his health and happiness for the greater good, rarely wavering in his devotion to his cause. Even when the FSM offers him the chance to find peaceful absolution in the afterlife, Lloyd rejects that opportunity to return to fighting alongside his friends. His own martyrdom is rarely, if ever, something he plans for or intends. Unless he's backed into a corner with no other option, his own death is never Plan A. Because for Lloyd, sacrifice means living on and continuing the fight.
For Zane, however, death itself is the end goal. Whether he dies, his opponent dies, or they both take each other down together, he thinks the only way a fight can end is if one or more parties are gone. From this angle, martyrdom is the ultimate form of sacrifice. And although Zane himself doesn't always die by intentional sacrifice as often as the fandom likes to joke, the fact it happens anyway seems to be endemic to his death-as-heroism mindset. Zane fights and he fights hard, but one could interpret his actions throughout the series as being somewhat self-destructive (to put it lightly). He also gets injured that much more after his titanium rebuild, post-sacrifice. I like to imagine that's because coming back from death gave him some bad ideas about his expendability, and now he's a lot more careless with his own physical wellbeing.
Both of these characters are deeply sacrificial, defining themselves and their worth by the sacrifice they offer to others. But for Lloyd, the ultimate sacrifice is living. And for Zane, the ultimate sacrifice is death. And although that on its own is interesting enough, what I find even more fascinating is that both of those opposing perspectives share one commonality: loneliness.
Although both characters have likely held some version of their respective values for a long time, it really seems like these two moments are when those values truly crystallized (ha). For Lloyd, he had just been led to believe that almost all of his friends were dead, yet he chose to get back on his feet and continue the good fight because "ninja never quit". He was alone, and allowing himself to endure that loneliness was his sacrifice to bear.
With Zane, it's a lot subtler but that same situation rings true. In the Decoded miniseries, Zane confesses about his death that he "felt so alone". With the implication being that the loneliness he felt in death was the part that actually traumatized him more so than the physical experience of it. Zane was alone in that moment, hanging hundreds of feet in the air without the help or support of his friends, unable to properly say goodbye, armed with nothing but his own memories of them. For Zane, dying is a lonely process. And during a lot of his other death scenes, sacrifice or otherwise, he often experiences it on his own without any of his friends present (cough cough the Never Realm).
In both cases, subjecting themselves to loneliness is the ultimate sacrifice. For Lloyd, that means living on without his loved ones. For Zane, that means dying with no one around to hold him as he goes.
Anyway. Just some food for thought <3
Welcome back Nice Emperor AU yaaay
trope that makes me crazy.png
yearly update to my ninja designs that i totally didnt rush through...
I was curious about 1, 5, 7, & 8 for the art ask. :)
Yippeee
(Tagline cuz this gets long)
My hot take is that PIXAL would have a horrible time in The Administration. I think they hand her a stack of forms and she, having been a secretary but specifically having been a secretary during the most obnoxiously tech-obsessed era of Ninjago City goes "Erm. Do you have these in digital format?" and the Adminstration says "No." and her eye twitches a little.
Furthermore I think if you handed a huge "stack" of digital forms to PIXAL she would run them through her computer brain flawlessly in less than a second whereas if you gave Zane a bunch of them he would have to fight with like 50 terabytes of media + the actual Overlord to give everything a coherent answer and after way too long he gives you an absolute mess. They have different strengths.
