If you make goth clothing, decor, accessories, etc
please
please please please
please stop putting crosses on literally everything.
I know that they're a staple of goth fashion. I know. But not everyone is Christian. Not everyone wants to wear or surround themselves with Christian symbols. There are a lot of goths who would die happy if we they never had to see a cross again. Please.
#they really said “you can’t use wiki as an academic source-use our garbage AI that’s even less reliable”#and you can’t even opt out of it
no but you can FORCE it away. use ublock origin and copy paste the blacklist i made into the filters to be able to remove the bullshit AI overview that google forces. it also removes youtube's forced ads (at least until they fix it)
you can also use the ublacklist extension and use this blacklist of AI image generation websites to curate your google image results
there are ALWAYS ways around stuff. it's just a matter of looking into it and asking around
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??
Another kind of diversity we need in writing is protagonists without love interests. Give me adults with full-fledged stories that don't include falling in love.
Fantastic article!! The guys looking for it were fish researchers who saw it one time, knew instantly it was an undescribed species, and then tried for nearly 20 years to find and document it!
It's a type of ghost pipefish, related to seahorses, and it floats around coral reefs looking like a piece of algae and hunting unsuspecting prey
They are, of course, named after Snuffleufagus from Sesame Street!
Later on it the project, they got citizen science involved, and people across the Pacific started reporting sightings of snuffy fish from all over!
Hooray for science and hooray for S. snuffleufagus !
If you accidentally hurt someone or cross their boundaries and they make you aware of this, literally all you have to do is apologize and stop. You don't have to beat yourself up internally for months. You don't have to hate yourself for fucking up. You don't have to feel like a horrible person. No one benefits from any of that - and at worst, such an extreme reaction will make the person in question less likely to speak up around you in the future, cause even if your negative reaction is directed at yourself and not at them, it's still unpleasant for everyone involved.
every time someone realizes they dont have to pick between being a boy or a girl an angel gets its wings btw. and also extremely loud cheering can be heard in the distance from me specifically
kaledo-art
blakekathryn
jacobvanloon
dededos
ellievsbear
pixelskylines
areudirty
gummygunk
