I just remembered that I still haven’t posted these guys here!
I made them to go see The Guy who didn’t like musicals in London! (Wiggly is missing bc someone at the entrance gave me a keychain and I let them take one of the pins in exchange, that’s what’s usually done, right?? Never been to an event like this. I will remake Wiggly soon)
Imagine being the gays at a pride event in 2004 living their lives when someone grabs the microphone and announces to the room that Ronald Reagan was pronounced dead. Can you even imagine the hype, the celebration, the pure elation
Jesus Tapdancing Christ... THIS is a good welt pocket and the people who designed Simplicity 2895 ought to be blasted well ASHAMED of themselves for the crap way THEY wanted a welt pocket made. *SNARLS*
This is how I learned to do it and a good example of what you want to see in a short form tutorial: pinning, pressing, seam finishing, good fabric handling.
I would mention that you can make the pocket facing with a small panel of your matching fabric that is visible and the rest in a lighter fabric to reduce bulk. That's a lot of denim layers for comfort.
Seeing a lot of people in the tags looking at my account and thinking this was meant for wangxian but it's important to me that everyone understands the nuances of lan wangji my favorite boy so I must correct the narrative: lwj fully believed his love was unrequited and was fine with it, and had moved on post-wwx death keeping his memory alive. He would not have planned a wedding for when wwx came back, nor would he have specifically revived wwx to marry him, because he would always respect wwx's decision to be free and would never try to chain him to a world that hates him only to fulfill his own desires; it's important that he's eternally accepting of wwx and overjoyed at his return, but that he was not the decision maker in this case.
I am so utterly fascinated by “Saki”, the 18-year-running mahjong manga in which you, the reader, become gradually, frog-boilingly aware (over the course of nearly two decades’ worth of mahjong tournaments) that none of these girls are wearing underwear and most of their boobs are slowly expanding.
I need you to understand that I have, like, an anthropological level fascination with this comic. From the perspective of someone who is also a comic artist and writer, two things delight me about it:
the fact that I understand completely how an artist gets from “the fans can have a little hint of skirted asscheek” to “the pussy is completely out on center page” over the course of 18 years; and
the way in which the pussy being out is treated by the characters and diegesis as being utterly unremarkable.
Okay. Point 1. The frog-boiling.
Let me put this in perspective for you. There was already a meme about how the characters in “Saki” don’t wear underwear when I was in middle school. I am thirty now. Okay? And it’s still going.
In the time since, this has stopped being a joke. It is now indisputable canon. This is not because anyone outright says it at any point. It’s because the underwear ran out of places to hide. I’m obsessed with this thought: somewhere in the over 20 volumes of “Saki”, there is a panel in which underwear was objectively deconfirmed. And it would be so hard to figure out where that panel actually is. Maybe the artist didn’t even realize it when she drew it! The frog? Boiling!!
And of course there is also the breast expansion. I don’t know how to put a spin on this. They are just expanding. Like, this happens a lot with artists: you define a character as being, in your mind, “the one with the big boobs”, and over the years you emphasize that trait further and further so that the signal doesn’t get lost in the noise. It’s just that normally—in like a wildly popular manga series about mahjong published by literally Square Enix, for example—normally there would be a point at which the boobs stopped getting bigger. Like, an editor would step in or something. Or you would get to the point where you cannot draw the character in the same panel as her mahjong tiles without her breasts spilling over the tiles, and you’d go, “Well, this is now untenable.”
That did not happen. There is no ceiling. The frog is soup.
Point 2. The complete and utter mundanity of all of this.
It’s like this, okay: there’s no shortage of trashy ecchi manga out there. There’s a million other comics doing wildly bawdier things with wildly more improbable bishoujos.
The vibe with “Saki” is different.
It’s hard to explain this, but it feels like the world of the comic is fundamentally uninterested in the fanservice happening on the page. I cannot describe it as “leering”, because I cannot conceive of a person in the story from whose point of view one would leer. I think the artist is probably into it—I can’t imagine anyone is making her do this—but “Saki” the comic has no opinion on the matter.
There are essentially no male characters in “Saki”. Like, there was one guy? Kind of? At the very beginning? But he is gone now. They put him back in the toybox. He does not exist. It appears to be some level of canonical that in the world of “Saki”, almost all humans are women. Those women are sometimes romantically into each other. According to comments the artist has made on Twitter (which I cannot source), they have lesbian baby technology, so it’s no problem. It’s so much not a problem that the story is about mahjong, instead of any of that.
So, like, the fiction here appears to be this: this is the, like, meta-narrative of the fanservice of “Saki”, right: it’s just normal that they don’t wear underwear and their boobs are arbitrarily big. It’s been normal. It was normal before the story of the manga began. It’s just how things are. Nobody bats an eye about it, and if they do, it’s in sort of a lesbian kind of way so like what’s the problem, we love lesbians here. This is literally normal for girls.
The fanservice simply diffuses into this all-encompassing aura of disembodied, ambient sluttiness. The framing of the panels demands you acknowledge it, and the story demands you already be over it, because it’s mahjong time now, and we’re playing mahjong.
Do you get??? why I’m so fascinated??? Are you not a little enraptured???
Anyway, I have no idea how to end this weird post. I guess the conclusion is that women stay winning????
I have so many questions... How does one SUSPECT a manga character isn't wearing underwear? Like, sure, boobs are front and center amd you can see them get bigger panel by panel but how does this work for panties? Are there just that many upskirt shots?
Also how do you keep a manga about Mahjong going for 18 years, what??
I love that opera sits in this limbo where it's extremely well-known but not really beyond a surface level recognition, so you get commercials for makeup or whatever to the tune of the I Hate Women So Much It's Unreal aria
#in the first bridgerton book daphne describes her crush feelings as if her heart is playing the queen of the night aria from the magic flute#which i can totally see if you have never found out what the words mean. very high and fluttery.#but the lyrics are along the lines of THE VENGEANCE OF HELL BOILS IN MY HEART. IF YOU DON'T MURDER THAT MAN I WILL DISOWN YOU.#and i laughed so hard i had to put the book down
#lmaooooo #my fave is that episode of white collar where neil is doing a theft #and the music they play over it is leporello's 'here's the list of all the hundreds of women my boss has fucked' aria from don giovanni #it's supposed to just sound grand and sophisticated but the guy is singing about how DG fucks tall women short women #fat women skinny women princesses and peasants he fucks them all! #and here's the numbers broken down by nationality! #he's fucked over 1000 women in spain you know!
#oh and he's singing all this to a former conquest who tracked DG down because he promised to marry her then ditched her #anyway it's a lot
Or when someone uses “Oh mio babino caro” as the saddest song ever, and is about a girl faking a tantrum so her father will help her boyfriend scam the authorities to get his grandpa’s inheritance
I think it would be so funny if there was a show about King Arthur and the knight of the Round Table where a different knight(s) joins the Round Table every episode and it gets to the point where the cast is like 500 people and absolutely no one is acknowledging that there are like 400 people in this court. Like a gratuitous amount of knights. The plot randomly pivots to knight or knights of the week and then back but it’s not an anthology exactly. Some of them die the same day they join, some randomly disappear from the story and others are technically there for the rest of the series but doing fuckall. Occasionally Arthur will be like “Where has Sir Whatever gone?” and everyone will shrug. Very important quest surrounding the major knights you’re expecting and a minor knight no one has seen for 5 seasons randomly joins in. You need a knightly spreadsheet to join in.
This is all handled very dryly by all the other characters, except for Arthur who occasionally breaks the 3rd wall, addresses the camera and says something like “This is all very confusing.” when the plot hits maximum ridiculousness.
There are several knights who do not speak Welsh and this is depicted by them speaking various dialects of old French and Gaulish and Brittonic splinter languages with a bar at the bottom that just says ‘I do not know what he is saying.’
Sometimes Arthur will be like “Where has Sir Whatever gone?” and someone is like “He has become a saint.” or “I believe he has become king of Dumnonia.” and there’s a random quick montage of this random knight getting up from the Round Table, riding out of Camelot and having religious visions or conquering an entire kingdom or drunkenly wandering all the way to Constantinople for no particular reason with the implication that this was all occurring while the other knights were debating a riddle or something asinine.
I think it would be so funny if the first shot of the series was Arthur sitting alone at a comedically large actually round table. Court utterly empty except for him and Sir Kay and like 2 guys from his father’s reign. And in the closing scene of the series he’s sitting in the same spot but there are hundreds of knights crammed into the room around him, sitting on each other’s laps, on the table, pressed flat against the walls to fit. They outgrew and surpassed this ridiculously large table several seasons ago and have been lowkey sitting on top of each other without addressing it.
periodically Percival will say something and Galahad will elbow him really hard and repeat it and Percival will be like “OW. Lancelot, are you seeing this?”
gummygunk
stormborns
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