earlier this week Twitter user ppuccin0 tweeted about a fashion article that advised against tops with large floral patterns, saying the wearer was in danger of looking like a "ććć³ćć£ććÆćć°ćć," or a "romantic auntie." the tweet went viral with many agreeing that a "romantic auntie" sounded like a very nice thing to aspire to be, and some even posted illustrations or photos tagged with the trend
illustration by Toyota Yuu (author of Cherry Magic)
illustration by 141shkw/Sora Midori (author of Beautiful Curse)
photos by Takinami Yukari (author of Motokare Mania and Watashi-tachi wa Mutsuu Ren'ai ga Shitai or "We Want A Painless Romance")
illustration by m:m (mangaka of Matataki no End Roll)
illustration by ooinuai (mangaka of Onikui Kitan)
illustration by ma2 (mangaka of The Reason We Fall In Love)
THE FRENCH DOGS!!!!! Belfort and LUPIIIIN! I should still continue watching the series, but the first episode is so CUTE!
BTW sorry for the big watermark :3
Huge thanks to my friend who attended the Alice Oseman Pop Up Shop this weekend for their photo of Aliceās reasons for each recommendation
THE CATCHER IN THE RYE BY JD SALINGER
This was one of the books that made me want to write SOLITAIRE. Essential reading for any fans of snarky narrators.
SUMMER BIRD BLUE BY AKEMI DAWN BOWMAN
It's hard to find aromantic/asexual representation infiction, but this is one of my favourites.
CONVENIENCE STORE WOMAN BY SAYAKA MURATA, TRANSLATED BY GINNY TAPLEY TAKEMORI
One of my favourite novels of the past few years, perfect for SOLITAIRE and LOVELESS fans. A story about one woman's alienation with modern society.
THE BLACK FLAMINGO BY DEAN ATTA
A beautiful and hopeful story about a teenage drag queen, written in verse.
HERE THE WHOLE TIME BY VITOR MARTINS
An adorable queer teen romance. HEARTSTOPPER fans will love this.
HOMEBODY BY THEO PARISH
This trans coming out story is so uplifting and affirming.
LAURA DEAN KEEPS BREAKING UP WITH ME BY MARIKO TAMAKI
I loved the complexity of the toxic relationship at the heart of this stunningly illustrated graphic novel.
IT'S LONELY AT THE CENTRE OF THE EARTH BY ZOE THOROGOOD
This graphic novel features a hard-hitting and honest portrayal of depression. A great choice for those who are drawn to the mental health themes in my works.
The writer's strike and franchise fatigue: two heads of the same coin?
Context: I'm shamelessly reposting a comment on a popular webforum where someone posed the question "What's next for Star Wars?" that prompted a lot of discussion about the whats and whys of what's working, what isn't, and of course everyone's favorite hobby: performing yet another autopsy on the Sequel Trilogy. I declined to go there in favor of speculating on the production side.
Ultimately I think the future of Star Wars requires Disney to do what a lot of franchise owners have been resistant to doing for various reasons: allow their creative teams a wide latitude to fully develop their ideas without unnecessarily harsh deadlines tied to quarterly earnings reports. Now that isn't to say that projects can fail on their own merits.
I don't know for a fact that Book of Boba Fett was timid, awkward, and boring because the showrunners couldn't make a cut that worked with the time and resources allotted, but we were mostly all impressed with Rodrigues' work on Mando so we were cautiously optimistic that a Cool Gangster Drama with Boba Fett could be a thing. So what the hell happened? Solve that mystery and I think you ensure that Star Wars has a future.
Looking at another popular "Star" franchise, we see a lot of similar problems with uneven writing and what seems to be differing opinions both inside and outside the franchise as to what exactly it means for something to carry that name. What sort of stories can you tell? How do you tell them? Can you have a point of view character or does it always have to be ensemble? Can you deconstruct the setting only to reconstruct and reaffirm it in the finale without losing the fans?
What explains "bad" writing? Coercion by the studio? Writer inexperience? Showrunner inexperience? A failure to find the right balance between modernizing the storytelling of a franchise without it becoming illegible as part of that franchise or to cling so hard to fan service that it is afraid to experiment and becomes a less interesting and murkier Xerox of itself?
Something that I found fascinating in the discourse around the writer's strike is that the format of streaming TV with its short seasons has turned everyone involved in these productions into gig workers. Unless you're one of a half dozen showrunners who have helmed widely acclaimed franchises, modern tv has become severely siloed on the production side: writers have limited opportunities to learn directing, editing, and show running. They also have limited opportunities to see how their work translates to the screen when it lands in the hands of directors, actors, set decorators, and FX artists.
If you add up all of the live action Star Trek shows produced to date, you end up with 8 seasons of streaming that equal roughly 4 seasons of broadcast era TV. Which means that under the old paradigm, a traditional TV show would only now just be airing its second "good" season. Which, shockingly enough, maps very neatly to attitudes about Strange New Worlds and Picard Season 3, and to a lesser extent Discovery season 4.*
*To the extent it will ever be allowed to make a second impression, which is another seeming "problem" of the streaming era that needs addressing since any "failed" first season is very likely to result in a sub-franchise that is going to get cauterized and forgotten about given the era of a permissive financial environment for funding additional seasons and permitting a production to recover and learn from their mistakes is pretty much dead and gone.
Were I Disney, given these realities, I would probably fund 2 or 3 "stables" of Star Wars writers and production teams. One for light hearted action comedy, one for "serious drama," and a third for something more esoteric. Maybe a fourth for big budget tentpole films. Keep them employed and give them opportunities to develop their tradecraft.
Don't be so quick to slash and burn a dud, use failure as permission to experiment. If nobody cares about Book of Boba Fett anyway, why not take some risks and see if some writers who are claiming they can turn in a second season that can "fix" the first season by turning the stories that go nowhere or are halfhearted into the first chapters in more meaningful stories? People already tend to avoid series that have only one season anyway and become ever more likely to do so the more time passes without more seasons so you're just throwing away your investment by not trying to salvage it.
This is incidentally why I'm not antagonistic towards the prospect of trying to rehabilitate the Sequel Trilogy. The Prequels are poorly made but were rich in potential. That potential was not left on the table, it was exploited until we can no longer separate the Prequels as they originally stood from all of the tie in media that added depth and nuance to the setting and storybeats.
So were I Disney and I have all of these props and set pieces in storage doing me absolutely no good, then of course it will eventually be time to try to make the Sequel Trilogy good. Maybe do some Director's Cuts and then build out the universe to make it feel less claustrophobic and less overtly a bigger, louder, dumber rehash of the Original Trilogy.
ID: āThis Pride remember to respect all trans people : Trans women who donāt shave with a drawing of a woman whit a yellow and pink beard, trans men who donāt bind, masculine trans women and feminine trans men with a drawing of a trans woman with short pink hair wearing a yellow baseball T-shirt holding hands with a trans man with a yellow crop top and short curly blue hair, fat trans people with the drawing of a fat trans woman with short white hair, dark skin and a pink cropped top, disabled trans people with a drawing of a wheelchair and a walking cane in the color of the trans flag, neurodivergent trans people with the symbol of the autistic community, trans people who are sex worker with a drawing of blue bra and pink underwear, poor trans people who canāt afford transition, trans people who arenāt out yet with a drawing of a closed door, trans people who donāt plan on transitioning, black trans people with a black fist holding a trans flag, and any trans people who isnāt white with multiple hands of different skin tones, muslim trans people with a drawing of someone wearing a hijab in the color of the trans flag, jewish trans people with a drawing of someone wearing a white shirt and a kippah in the color of the trans flag, non binary people even those who donāt identify as trans with the non binary flag, those whose identity you might not understand with the genderfluid flag, the agender flag, the demi gender flag and the genderqueer flag, trans people who donāt pass and donāt want to with a drawing of a trans woman with a beard and dark skin raising her fist, every pronouns with dialog box in which are different sets of pronouns, trans people of every identity with the gay flag, the lesbian flag, the ace flag, the bi flag, the pan flag and the aro flag, every trans person is beautiful and deserving of so much love so donāt forget the T.ā End ID
P.S. : can someone tell me if I did the image description right cuz I have no idea
if you loved episode 3 of tlou you really should listen to the official podcast with troy baker, craig mazin and neil druckmann because thereās SO much! hereās some of my favorite things said on the podcast:
- joel stacking rocks was to show that he missed and mourned tess. in that moment he was saying āiām sorry, i blew it, i lost you.ā
- in the beginning of the episode ellie told joel tessā death wasnāt her fault but deep down she does feel like it was her fault.
- ellie admires joel because he protected her multiple times and as a child she has a desire for a parental figure to protect her.
- frank realized bill was gay pretty much as soon as he got out of the hole and saw how bill was looking at him. billās taking in how handsome frank is andĀ āfrankās brain is incredibly attuned to that.ā thatās why frank was smiling.
- frank realized bill was gay fast, but he realized he wanted bill when bill was playing the piano and singing linda ronstadt.
- it took them a while to find long long time by linda ronstadt but they always intended the song for bill to sing to be about a long love that was forever unrequited. āit was very important that the lyrics were someone saying āeveryone tells me that itās okay, that love will find me [ā¦],ā no it doesnāt, no itās not, and the person that i long for from afar - iām gonna love them basically forever in the most unrequited manner.ā
- it was important that frank immediately knew billās sexuality because frank SAW bill, because bill had completely buried his sexuality but frank saw through him.
- frank originally was trying to see what he could get out of bill (like a free lunch) but the more time they spent together, the more he went āoh, this is a beautiful person.ā
- āthere is two ways of loving things. frank wants to love outwards - he is sun, he is light. he wants to make things beautiful around him, he wants to care for bill, he wants to revitalize the streets so itās not just this mausoleum bill lives in, and he wants to have friends. he wants to share what they have. and bill wants to put an electrified fence around them that is guarded by an additional layer of flame-throwing gas pipes and no one can show up ever because he must protect frank from the worldā¦ and as it turns out, both of those loved are required but one of those loves is likely to give you in trouble more than the other.ā
- when frank put his finger on the furniture piece and saw how dusty it was, he realized what his purpose could be in billās life. bill can protect them, but frank can nurture their home.
- when bill apologizes to frank for growing old fast, itās because heās afraid of frank being left alone. ālook at this beautiful man and the beautiful things that he does, and what is billās contribution? bill doesnāt grow strawberries. billās contribution is to keep frank alive. but bill is already afraid that heās going to fail and that is a fear that joel has because he has that fear through experience [of losing his daughter.]ā
- bill and joel understand each other and that theyāre purpose is to protect others. they donāt care about their own lives.
- on their last day together, bill decided very early that he was going to die as well.
- the gun that ellie takes belonged to frank.
- that letter bill wrote reminded joel that he failed to protect both sarah and tess. the letter underscores for him that no matter how hard he tries, he canāt protect the people that he cares about. but now he has ellie to protect.
Ok, so far we've seen multiple Shattered Spaces and multiple variants of the main characters. There have been many speculations that each variant represents a part of the main crew. I agree with this. I can see each part of the main crew's personality split taken to the EXTREME. But there's one that confused me, and we'll get to him later. First, let's go over what each shattered version of the main crew represents.
Amy:
Rusty Rose: Amy's sense of loyalty.
Thorn Rose: Amy's love for nature.
Black Rose: Amy's love for adventure.
Rouge:
Rebel Rouge: Rouge's sense of leadership.
Prim Rouge: Rouge's sense of deceit and trickery.
Pirate Rouge: Rouge's sense of teamwork.
Knuckles:
Renegade Knucks: Knuckles rebellious and defiant against another control.
Gnarly Knuckles: Knuckles naivety and assuming to believe everything.
Dread Knuckles: Knuckles' sense of impulsiveness.
Tails:
Mangey Tails: Tail's sense of primal instincts.
Sails: Tail's dependence on others for guidance.
I know all of you noticed that a certain variant of Tails is missing: Nine. Nine was hard to place. He is Tail's sense of reliance on machines however due to how much we've seen of him that wouldn't be the main trait he represents. Re-watching the show I realized what he represents.
Nine: Tail's love and emotional need for Sonic.
This is mentioned originally by @animatedjunkfood in messaging, but they pointed out that while traveling through the ShatteredVerse for the first time, we hear each main character's statements that reflect their ideals. Amy's is her love for nature, Knuckles is his hot-headedness, but Tails is the only one that has two separate lines. One mentions that he doesn't need an army because he has Sonic and the other mentioning on how his and Sonic's bond can NEVER be broken, that they are INSEPARABLE.
The writers did that for a REASON, and I think that it shows how important Nine is going to be in the future. Tail's lines reflect his LOVE and BOND with Sonic, and Nine so far reflects that perfectly. He didn't show care towards anyone besides Sonic, he only takes Sonic to the Grim, and he shows an emotional need for Sonic despite how cold he tries to be, Sonic being the original Tail's emotional rock doesn't change for Nine; and in Nine's case becoming that EVEN MORE SO.
Remember I mentioned that each variant of the main characters is their traits taken to the EXTREME. Keep that in mind in the future, cause it might become VERY important in future episodes. But anyway, this is just what I think, let me know what you guys think about this.
