multi-fandom blog. content changes depending on my current hyperfixations. fanart, shitposts, and occasional oc content
names & pronouns: naydra or usabi (pronounced oo-sah-bee). he/they/it/xe, basically any pronouns except she/her. more info on my pronouns page
side blog: where i talk about neurodivergent & disability things — @naydraq
basic dni: terfs, homophobes, racists, sexists, ableists, proshippers, anything like that. no fandom-specific dni
incomplete fandom list: zelda, don’t starve (together), adventure time, atla (avatar: the last airbender), tawog (the amazing world of gumball), stranger things, the owl house, life is strange, hamilton, in the heights, spiderverse, heartstopper & Alice Oseman’s books, heartbreak high, arcane
my ao3
things to know about me:
~•~ I have a tendency to not post for long periods of time (bcuz of artblock, a break from social media, or hyperfixation change)
~•~ auDHD + probably dyslexic (among other things)
~•~ permanently anxious about every social interaction, and just. people in general
~•~ I use tone indicators/tags, please try to use them when interacting with me. more info + a list of common tone tags here
~•~ I also try to spell out lesser known acronyms because I always have a hard time figuring them out
~•~ I don’t like getting into unnecessary shipping wars (key word being “unnecessary”). example: the zukka/zutara discourse in the atla fandom. I ship zukka and not zutara, but I’m not gonna fight with zutara shippers because there’s nothing inherently “wrong” about that ship, it’s just a matter of opinion and I’m tired of this being treated like it’s way more serious than it actually is
~•~ I don’t like people that aggressively correct others’ grammar. it’s ableist and stupid
~•~ I try to make tumblr more accessible for everyone by adding image descriptions/alt text to all my posts, and necessary trigger/content warnings both before the content and in the tags. I also add id’s and warnings to reblogs that don’t already have them (I might forget sometimes, I apologize)
thinking about how when you experience a lot of shame in your formative years (indirectly, directly, as abuse or just as an extant part of your environment) it becomes really difficult to be perceived by other people in general. the mere concept of someone watching me do anything, whether it's a totally normal activity or something unfamiliar of embarrassing, whether I'm working in an excel spreadsheet or being horny on main, it just makes my skin crawl and my brain turn to static because I cannot convince myself that it's okay to be seen and experienced. because to exist is to be ashamed and embarrassed of myself, whether I'm failing at something or not, because my instinctive reaction to anyone commenting on ANYTHING I'm doing is to crawl into a hole and die. it's such a bizarre and dehumanizing feeling to just not be able to exist without constantly thinking about how you are being Perceived. ceaseless watcher give me a god damn break.
Y'all if you're American please email your politicians and senators against the parents decide act. I'm fucking begging because we're reaching a tipping point.
Quick and easy link to both find your congressmen/women and giving you a quick and easy way to copy / paste the message into it. You want to oppose. It's an act that will demand that all major OS makers integrate a direct forced age verification control into all OS.
I received a comment on this that I figured would be very helpful- it's a template for communicating with your representatives. Be sure to use it for reference
Dear Representative [Name],
I am writing to express my strong opposition to H.R. 8250 (The "Parents Decide Act"). As your constituent and a concerned citizen, I believe this bill introduces unprecedented risks to digital privacy and security.
Specifically, I am alarmed by:
SEC. 2(a)(1)(B): Requiring age verification to even use an operating system creates a mandatory "hardware lockout" that ends anonymous computing and forces users to hand over sensitive identification data to major corporations just to power on their devices.
SEC. 2(a)(3): Mandating that OS providers create a system for all app developers to access verification data is a massive security vulnerability. This effectively creates a centralized API of user identities accessible to thousands of third-party developers, many of whom may lack adequate data protection.
This bill does not protect children; it creates a centralized surveillance infrastructure at the OS level. I urge you to protect the privacy of your constituents and vote NO on H.R. 8250.
This is a hell that us down under in Australia are already living in, and it’s not even effective at what it claims to do in protecting children.
Given that, in the wake of this mandatory identification policy, my country seems to be moving to hand over its citizens biometric data, like fingerprints, Face ID files, and identification documents, over to the USA and to ICE to maintain the visa free travel (ESTA) we have, I strongly urge any US resident to send these emails, or make calls.
But if you can’t do that, the most powerful thing you can do is spread the word. Tell your friends, family, coworkers, anyone who can help.
My reach will likely be small, and so I don’t know if this will mean very much in the grand scheme of things, but I cannot stand to see this tracking happen to another population as it did to mine.
And if you think it won’t affect you, it will. All anonymity goes out the window when your accounts can be linked via your personal ID
I wish you all luck in preventing this act from going through.
“The Militarization of the Police Department – Deadly Farce,” an original painting by Richard Williams from “The 20 Dumbest People, Events, and Things of 2014″ in Mad magazine #531, published by DC Comics, February 2015.
“For most people, he was the painter of ‘America,’” he added. “But even he said his vision was what he wanted ‘America’ to be. It was a mythical ‘America,’ a place where all people were decent, honest and full of good will. His work was full of gentle humor that made you feel a little better; even if you knew it wasn’t really true… you just wished it was. My parody of Rockwell’s painting simply says, ‘That myth is dead.’”
I think it’s relevant to add that even Norman Rockwell chose to leave his cushy job at the Saturday Evening Post because he wanted to make artwork that was more radical. The Post had rules that wouldn’t allow him to do artwork depicting black people as anything other than servants. The job paid really well and that was a huge reason he continued on. But he wanted change that and so he moved to Look magazine.
A lot of people know about the very first piece he did when he left the post which was the The Problem We All Live With which depicts Ruby Bridges walking to school under federal protection.
But I don’t think enough people know about Murder in Mississippi which depicts three real civil rights activists who were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan and sherriffs. The magazine ran the sketch instead of the finished piece because they felt it had a more striking statement to accompany the article. Norman Rockwell would finish that version after publication which is here
Rockwell’s legacy is sanitized because he decided to maintain his job at the Post for so long despite his frustrations with not being able to express himself. The civil rights movement was just his final straw to change what he could with the little time he had left. Look magazine received a lot of hate for Rockwell painting these as well.
Another favorite piece of mine is The Right to Know which depicts an integrated populace questioning their government. In 1968, the year of Vietnam and the year the Fair Housing Act only just got signed in months prior:
But I think it’s important to include the caption Rockwell originally wrote for the piece as well. I think it represents how a 74 year old Rockwell felt about the America he believed in and the people in it:
We are the governed, but we govern too. Assume our love of country, for it is only the simplest of self-love. Worry little about our strength, for we have our history to show for it. And because we are strong, there are others who have hope.
But watch us more closely from now on, for those of us who stand here mean to watch those we put in the seats of power. And listen to us, you who lead, for we are listening harder for the truth that you have not always offered us.
Your voice must be ours, and ours speaks of cities that are not safe, and of wars we do not want, of poor in a land of plenty, and of a world that will not take the shape our arms would give it.
We are not fierce, and the truth will not frighten us. Trust us, for we have given you our trust. We are the governed, remember, but we govern too.
I’d just like to briefly say even Rockwell’s seemingly feel good Americana pieces are often more political than people today realize for example
likely the most famous picture of a Thanksgiving dinner ever painted and you see it all the time.
What you may not know is its actual title
“Freedom From Want” it’s a part of a series of 4, including this now famous meme
“Freedom of Speech” These paintings were illustrations of FDR’s “Four Freedoms” speech where The President laid out a vision that would become what the Allies were fighting for in WWII universal human rights that became a part of the UN charter.
So this homey American Thanksgiving scene was also a bold statement that no one in the world should go hungry
Rockwell’s work was very political, he used that Americana small town America vibe of his work to make what he was saying feel very close to the viewers he was trying to reach and also his optimism of the human spirt but for sure not blind to the need to build a better world.
Embossed braille should be standard on computer keyboards.
It would raise braille literacy more than anything else I could imagine - among both the blind and the sighted. Currently braille is actually vanishing due to an increasing reliance on audiobooks and screen readers.
I think that braille has a lot of potential use among non-blind groups. As an alternative to traditional writing for dyslexics. As a way to help photosensitive people type with their eyes closed. Or simply as a means to help sighted people find things without needing the lights on all the time!
Accessibility note: It’s important that braille doesn’t vanish because it’s one of the only written language that works for blind and sight-impaired people. It is necessary for them to interact with the real world where screen readers and audio devices are not available to them, such as elevators, most major metro systems, stairwells, doorways, the bumps in the sidewalk at corners are actually developed in conjunction with audio signals so blind people don’t step off the curb into traffic before the correct time.
Digital technology has made accessibility so much easier for all of us disabled people, but we still *need* the real-world accommodations that we fought and died for
Braille is also better than audiobooks for in depth learning & comprehension of academic texts since it allows for spatial navigation, re reading, and direct engagement w the text and its syntax in a way that helps you with information coding (in a similar process to visual saccades for sighted people). Braille literacy is vital to blind and sight impaired people because it allows them better access to education and employment, with folks with Braille literacy being up to 60% more likely to be employed than those without.
See for additional information: https://bera-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/rev3.70083
Every time I see this quote I realize how poor even very smart people are at looking at the long game and at assessing these things in context.
One of my favourite illustrations of this was in a First Aid class. The instructor was a working paramedic. He asked, “Who here knows the stats on CPR? What percentage of people are saved by CPR outside a hospital?”
I happen to know but I’m trying not to be a TOTAL know it all in this class so I wait. And people guess 50% and he says, “Lower,” and 20% and so forth and eventually I sort of half put up my hand and I guess I had The Face because he eventually looked at me and said, “You know, don’t you.”
“My mom’s a doc,” I said. He gave me a “so say it” gesture and I said, “Four to ten percent depending on your sources.”
Everyone else looked surprised and horrified.
And the paramedic said, “We’re gonna talk a bit about some details of those figures* but first I want to talk about just this: when do you do CPR?”
The class dutifully replies: when someone is unconscious, not breathing, and has no pulse.
“What do we call someone who is unconscious, not breathing, and has no pulse?”
The class tries to figure out what the trick question is so I jump over the long pause and say, “A corpse.”
“Right,” says the paramedic. “Someone who isn’t breathing and has no heartbeat is dead. So what I’m telling you is that with this technique you have a 4-10% chance of raising the dead.”
So no, artists did not stop the Vietnam War from happening with the sheer Power of Art. The forces driving that military intervention were huge, had generations of momentum and are actually pretty damn complicated.
But if you think the mass rejection of the war was as meaningless as a soufflé - well.
Try sitting here for ten seconds and imagining where we’d be if the entire intellectual and artistic drive of the culture had been FOR the war. If everyone thought it was a GREAT IDEA.
What the whole world would look like.
Four-to-ten percent means that ninety to ninety-six percent of the time - more than nine times out of ten - CPR will do nothing, but that one time you’ll be in the company of someone worshipped as an incarnate god.
If you think the artists and performers attacking and showing up people like Donald Trump is meaningless try imagining a version of the world wherein they weren’t there.
(*if you’re curious: those stats count EVERY reported case of CPR, while the effectiveness of it is extremely time-related. With those who have had continuous CPR from the SECOND they went down, the number is actually above 80%. It drops hugely every 30 seconds from then on. When you count ALL cases you count cases where the person has already been down several minutes but a bystander still starts CPR, which affects the stats)
That Vonnegut quote brings this particular moment to mind:
Yes, it’s just a pie. Yes, the pie itself doesn’t do much direct damage in the grand scheme of things. But the pie is resistance, and resistance inspires resistance. Resistance inspires survival. Throwing pies sometimes starts a movement. Throwing pies sometimes saves lives.
And of course, we haven’t spoken about the inherent morality of throwing pies at oppressors in a world where oppressors have outlawed pie throwing. At the very least, pie throwing is a reminder to the oppressors that no matter how much money they have, no matter how much power they have, there are still some people, some moments they can’t control.
I’d rather go out throwing pies than just rolling over and accepting that pie throwing isn’t going to solve anything. Yeah, the pie throwing doesn’t immediately solve the problem, but it doesn’t have to because it’s just a starting point. So throw the damn pie.
Speaking of the effects of pie throwing and art in opposition of oppression, and “resistance inspires resistance”:
Imagine sitting in a packed auditorium and some asshole is up front is spouting bullshit about minorites. Like saying they’re filthy and deserve a violent death etc. And there are lots of people nodding along and even cheering and applauding
But no one is saying or doing anything to disagree, so you think that you’re the only one who opposes the speaker. And you don’t want to say anything because you don’t want their ire or violence to be aimed at you
So you go through the entire speech, and possibly your entire life, thinking you’re alone
BUT if just one person has the courage to speak up, to throw a pie, to project art on the screen behind the speaker, then that single act of resistance will inspire others to do the same. It could even inspire you to stand up. Or if you’re the first, then you can inspire others
The No Kings protests absolutely did do something. Just tune into your local city council meeting the next week and see public forum. Chances are there’s a public official advocating resistance of all and any federal orders, or a local housing/immigration activist saying it helped them and then pointing that energy in the direction of more.
3.75% of the entire country was in the streets on Saturday. Might not sound like a lot, but those are the kind of numbers that signal a toppling government or a revolution.
If nothing else it proves to wannabe authoritarians that they can sure fucking try, but they can’t kill us all.
every single outspoken anti-war protestor did do something. Muhammad Ali famously refused to join the war, which in turn inspired people to draft dodge, or help others draft dodge. Every person dodging the draft is one less person shooting at someone during a war, and one less person likely to die.
also, that pie in Anita Bryant’s face? did literally destroy her career as a raving bigot, she lost so much face nobody really took her seriously after that - and she’s not the only one
this is why we still want to see an entire stadium of people show up for a trump rally and then just point at him and laugh derisively
It’s very important to me that wx is nonbinary. I don’t think this was intended at all but to me, becoming a robot can be seen as a form of gender affirming care. It’s like, nothing I could do to change my body would be enough, because this or that treatment would bring me closer to being a man or a woman, not to who I want to be. There’s only so much about the human body that’s customizable. Might as well leave it behind for a body that’s entirely removed from humanity and its concept of the gender binary. That’s how nonbinary they are to me. I’m kind of jealous.
So it actually INITIALLY wasn't. There's a forum somewhere where Klei actually endorses it and is like "you know what. Yeah." It was a response to a lot of people seeing WX as nonbinary and autistic coded. Klei responded something along the lines of "we didn't initially write them that way, but we're really glad those people can have that understanding and connection to a character, so we support that interpretation of them."
Also in the coding, theres like. Gender. For how other characters refer to each other. WX is specifically they/them and is refered to as "Mx." They're the only survivor that uses that, which means it was made specifically for them.
We also literally see them go from "the very concept of my body is flawed and I hate it" to "IM THE BEST AND COOLEST ONE HERE AND PERFECT IN EVERY WAY." Lmao
Compiled some basic information I know about drawing fat characters for beginners since I've been seeing more talk about absence of really basic traits in a lot of art lately.
Morpho Fat and Skin Folds on Archive.org (for free!)
So there’s some common Zelda fanon I wanna talk about, relating to civilization tropes I think some of y’all haven’t really thought about in detail before, and that’s Hyrule (Zelda 1 &2 Link), Wild (BOTW mostly), and Ravio (LbW).
I’m using the Linked Universe names, because that’s where most of it comes up, because these things happen most often where you can contrast the boys with each other. This is often done, quick and dirty, by people assigning “roles” to each without much thought. Ravio’s unfortunately tends to be extremely pervasive outside LU spaces, too.
But, in brief, there is a trend for people to craft these characters in a framework of innocent vs savagery vs trickery that can have some really unfortunate implications I’m not sure many are even aware of. Hopefully I can explain better where these ideas come from, why they’re so easy and appealing, and why we should try to avoid repeating them for more than just the sake of “easy” but also to stop repeating some really nasty historical tropes.
I would start from what’s probably the simplest one to address: the tendency towards a “feral” personification of Wild. This tends to come from two places: Wild’s amnesia, and the collapse of society around him and his lost place in it.
Now, brain damage is complicated. You can lose a range of things to any given injury because of the way information is encoded differently and in different places. You can lose memory and/or skills and/or coordination and/or balance, etc, because it all depends on what got damaged. But in-game a lot of stuff suggests that Link retains things like speech, reading/writing, coordination, and martial skills. None of the people who knew Link prior to his injury suggest he seems changed in any way not attributed to stress and anxiety...
And, more importantly, real people suffer memory loss just like that in the real world. Treating him like he’s become “feral” due to memory loss is cruel to actual people living with brain damage today, and if you go there you should have a good reason for it.
Social collapse is a wide-spread theme in basically every Zelda game. The threat that the Big Bad poses is almost always the destruction of society as it exists: Malladus literally vanishes the infrastructure of New Hyrule in Spirit Tracks; the Twilight turns people into spirits living lives they don’t realize are questionably real in Twilight Princess; Veran freezes the passage of time to force people to work forever in Oracle of Ages. King Daphnes and Ganondorf under the sea vie over the fate of the world above in Wind Waker: keep what’s been made, or start all over again?
In modern culture, people tell a lot of stories about the fragility of civilization and what happens in its absence. You get the range from Lord of the Flies, in which children wrecked on an island attempt (and fail) to recreate civilization on their own, Kipling’s “The Jungle Book” in which Mowgli is treated as reckless and innocent, and a much more obscure piece from the 18th century “Paul et Virginie” (and likely many more I don’t know offhand.) Essentially all of them play with the question of how do people become civilized, and what happens when they do? In Lord of the Flies, the children were civilized and failed to maintain it; in the Jungle Book, the boy wasn’t civilized and innocently interacts with it. In Paul et Virginie, the children were (relatively) uncivilized on the (French colonized) Mauritius, raised by their mothers but when the girl was sent away, she becomes civilized and dies tragically to preserve it.
The two Links most removed from civilization are Hyrule and Wild. Wild “lost” civilization, losing both his memories of it and the structure of it. Making him feral, without manners, and without a place to belong is that kind of Lord of the Flies savagery mixed with Mowgli’s innocent playfulness: there isn’t a structure to adhere to, so he’s a savage. Whereas Hyrule is more like the Paul eg Virginie side: innocent of civilization, he remains pure and sweet and kind, unable to conceive of big concepts like evil or money or so on. Neither position permits them to interact with the civilization that is right there in front of them! Wild can buy a house; he has people who know and care for him. He has social connections and social rights. The world exists, but the fandom does not seem to want him to interact with it in favour of remaining “wild.” In Zelda 2 – a game explicitly set within a decade of Zelda 1 – there are whole towns with trade and a castle and massive structures with on-going life in them... but very few fans seem to ever reach into that story or relate it back to the first. Hyrule, the character, does not exist within Hyrule, the country.
Strangely, Wind Waker does not fall prey to this, I think because the structures are presented as fait accompli: Link wakes up with his grandmother and his sister, he has a defined home, and a society in which you spend the entire game forced to engage with. Zelda 1 & 2 were not sophisticated enough to waste resources on going as in depth in social terms (although such interactions absolutely exist in Zelda 2!) and BOTW leaves such interactions as optional: you can survive the game with minimal social contact... but it’s a choice to play with it that way, not the default. The ways in which this edges onto the noble savage trope, in which “uncivilized” tribes are either innocent or brutish (rather than complex social systems in their own right) is fairly obvious.
There is one other character in Zelda who gets treated to the question of whether he is an innocent, free of civilization and all its rigour... or something else. Ravio, coming from the devastated world of Lorule, can often wind up slotted into the scared, innocent child trope and unfortunately that’s the better position people frequently take. The worse one evokes the Merchant of Venice: the deceitful, Jewish merchant who values money over people’s lives.
Lorule (and Nintedo’s approach towards their humanoid Zelda villains in general) is near-eastern-coded in many ways, down to the fact that Yuga’s outfit is the spitting image of Ottoman dress. Yuga being a depraved bisexual (a common historical trope about Muslim men towards Christian men and boys), and Hilda being deceitful and conspiring against everyone she was once allied to are a backdrop to the ways in which Ravio is a greedy coward. He’s not an evil character in the game; the mechanic of penalizing death without being too severe is interesting and works well! But that doesn’t take away the stereotype, just like it’s not okay Nabooru is pretty explicitly predatory towards child Link in Ocarina of Time, too.
Arab and Jewish stereotypes often converge, because both people's originate from the same region, and both are hostile "Others" to Christian Europe and Nintendo doesn’t have a great track record of their near-Eastern coding in Zelda. It crosses the whole gamut from harem and amazon tropes with the Gerudo to breath-takingly anti-semitic or anti-black (Ganondorf being green, eg. non-human, in various incarnations), all packaged neatly in the ideal of medieval fantasy Europe. The scale would be impressive if it wasn’t so damn awful, but we can at least stop repeating it in our fanworks.
Wild doesn’t have to be feral to be a playful little shit; Hyrule doesn’t have to be pure and innocent to be kind. Ravio doesn’t need to be innocent or scheming, and he shouldn’t place money over Link’s well-being (If you chose to respawn at home, he is consistently only ever concerned for Link! Once you buy the items outright, he promises he'll still be there to take care of you.)
Do better. It’s more interesting that way, and I want to see that variety grow!
[If any of y'all would like me to dig up better sources on any point, I can do so but I didn't want to bog this post down further. I have largely left the anti-arab stuff alone because it's not the biggest issue with Ravio's fanon presence, which is the focus here.]
Wondering if anyone has done a critical analysis of the Sheikah as Asian/Japanese coded in BOTW viz. the Yiga’s betrayal by and hostility to Hyrule royals coded Caucasian.
I agree. The Near Eastern coding of Lorule is very clearly tapping into an orientalist tradition, and the same applies to the Gerudo in BOTW/TOTK. That Nintendo depicts Near Eastern coded Gerudo women as alcoholics and dating-obsessed still troubles me. Aren’t they also mighty warriors?
The design of Agahnim from ALTTP is not spared from this racist representation either. Not to mention that the first two Zelda games make explicit references to Christian symbols and practices.
Currently our pet is sick (mucus and clicky breathing) and we want to make sure we have enough enough for a visit to the vets. SO-
BOOSTING COMMISSIONS AGAIN! Willing to haggle to its a desperate thing rn.
Currently our pet is sick (mucus and clicky breathing) and we want to make sure we have enough enough for a visit to the vets. SO-
BOOSTING COMMISSIONS AGAIN! Willing to haggle to its a desperate thing rn.
hi! I’m doing good! thank you for reaching out lol, I am. not good at that. now that I’m on break I have time to do actual art instead of just being tired hehe
i eat plastic dinosaurs @osseus-naydra - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
