krad

i saw a cute tellius shipping meme recently but realized pretty quickly after filling out a few tiers that i would receive the stank eye from most of the fandom for highly unorthodox tastes. :P parking this here instead of other SNS sites since i trust y'all quite a bit more; tellius peeps feel free to gank ~

( anyway, here's the list. beware for dead dove. )

drawing zihark has always been interesting because on one hand he is absolutely a pretty boy bishie, right, lol.

but on the other hand i've always thought he'd have this unsettling... intensity? most of the time you'd assume he's in airhead land when he's intentionally being ~quirky silly~ or not even really see him because he knows how to melt into the background, but he'd look at you and it's simultaneously right through you and too much. i could see some characters being spooked. the scales of judgement are not in your favor, etc, and the times he'd be weirdly confrontational (rare) do not at all line up when you'd expect it too - he'd be placidly smiling when he's truly annoyed, and he'd love to annoy you when he's actually pleased (all the times he teases characters in supports - it can be surprisingly sharp at times).

(imo the best zihark fanfic writers like neotula & queenlua & a few others of you here) understand that implicitly. <3 bless u)

so i've been leaning into that askew-ness, the off-kilter like quality a little more recently in this feh strip. remember this mini essay on sleaze and trying to dial more into it with art? leaning deliberately on a lot of that since this flavor/themes the strip touches on selfshipping cough, but also the coercion factor with gacha summoning contracts is very much all in the territory. this is home, in some ways.

and idk it's fun experimenting how to pull off that intensity stylistically. exaggerating and pulling certian expressions. pushing back against the omnipresent habit of making people "pretty" first and instead bringing the subtext of expression to the forefront.

shit's the crunchy side of drawing i love. :D

zihark's such an interesting take on the nabarl archetype since most of them are about bettering their blade skills, bettering themselves in some fashion or another. bettering themselves by getting revenge.

and at first blush zihark's whole character arc (like tellius deconstructing everything else) is him dedicated to bettering the world/bettering his country. not himself. (it's funny. i hate idealists as characters. so many things about his character i should have bounced off on.) except....

this is also tellius, and that's not quite the entire story, is it?

he's an idealist at his heart but he's a sellsword like every other nabarl. he fights for a better world for laguz but he's more daein than he wants to admit, and can and does stick with them until ideals are warped beyond recognition. on the flip side he fights for a better world but makes jokes about cutting down humans in port toha. he also has a tendency to waffle/stall enough that he can pretend that blood is out of his hands (the quote unquote quasi-bad ending of him staying with micaiah's army in p3 of radiant dawn is, quite illuminating. my heart aches for him there but it's also a very very needful view of one angle of his character).

honestly it's zihark's constant hypocrisy (tension, inherent contradiction) that's the most fascinating part of his character - he's deft and light (distant?) enough that it never quite rings as the blatant hypocrisy that it is, or hint of the real dark side that i do think he contains but more or less steers himself away from. (he's very libra like that. judge, jury, smiling executioner all in one). i think he has a deliberate, cultivated tendency to skitter away (from himself, from others) before seeing emotional consequences - a necessary defense, learned the hard way. none of us wants to feel hurt, but there's almost a certain empty, restless extreme quality to it that only catches up to him in the P3 bit mentioned above.

paints quite a bit different of a picture than the selfless idealist, doesn't it.

in this essay i shall -

i was lazily googling around for zihark's kanji and this old radiant dawn gameplay essay absolutely sends me:

- "zihark, the overlooked god" as the TITLE. you are CORRECT gamer bro sir, the only valid gamer bro

- 'how to train your zihark' LMAO

- 'he's good if you give him two robes, a dracoshield, an energy drop, and all the best skills-' i mean. yes. this is also how i treat mine but also gamer bro i think the dawn brigade might need those more than him :D;;;;;

(it's funny because it straddles the line of a troll post i was surprised it didn't have the "humor" tag but also like.... it's just sincere enough in that '15 years post release microanalysis cope' i can truly see somebody writing it.)

.... now this is making me want to do the zihark&ike RD solo again ..... (it's doable and it is so, so funny)

I finally reached 2,100 orbs in the FE gacha.

mentioning here since a) it's been fun, i've been playing since 2020 and sunk an ungodly amount of hours in it, certinally more than most mainline games especially with looking up FEH news, but i'm. tired. i'm done. and b) i've been wanting to "audit/clean" where i spend my time (will do a dreamwidth spring clean too), and that was a big negative time-sink/activity on the cutting block. 

it's bittersweet as that was my specific goal of putting it on ice/indefinite hiatus. ( Read more... )

not a rant per se but an observation (ok it's totally a rant) :P

( fe fates stuff, minor fandom harasser mentions )

it's really wild finding prolific fates/gunter posters who have been inactive for years now

cuz on one hand i really, really miss not being able to chat/shitpost with the best of them (we would have gotten along so well lol)

on the other hand that was uhhh, 2014-16?

and i don't know how to say this politely, but even as horny as fates is as a whole, gunter fans (and the everything with the S support) are .... next level pervy/kinky lol. like, you gotta be comfortable with several kinds of dead dove at minimum - you gotta walk in cracking up at viagra jokes.

and i only barely got comfortable drawing kink art in 2018-19, not even in the least bit the same amount of years.

so it's just wild going 'mm, man i would have not been mature enough to even remotely approach this, even probably 3 years ago.'

duality of fen?
i suppose it's the new generations of folks picking up the games that keep the flame alive.

Hit 7,200 on the gunter slowburn fic in the last 48 hours, and will probably get another 5k this weekend through this initial spurt. May have been seriously slacking off on work and personal life stuff for that to happen (but I don't feel too guilty considering I put in more work hours than normal last week.) The final fic will likely be in the 60k-80k range. Close to twenty percent on a single weekend ain't too shabby.

Been very pleased with trying out manuskript as a free open-sourced version of scrivner, since I needed a program that could quickly and efficiently outline small scenes as I'm writing this somewhat out of order. Manuskript has its open source quirks (don't let typos on its site scare you off), but dang if its auto-word count tracker isn't useful. Here's what it looks like: 



Realistically, I have always (since the college days) written my best work in textedit as a quasi stream of consciousness that blends notes into actual short dialogue exchanges and actual scenes, once when I "talk myself into" character's heads. Here, i copypaste those bits into Manuskript. Once when the individual chapters are reasonably complete, I start archiving them into a .doc file to prep for eventual Ao3 upload (and because I don't quite trust Manuskript yet not to delete things. paranoid to a fault ok).

( other woo writer shit stuff )

title: rose bloom and sword
rating: M
pairings: gunter x f!corrin (fates)

"It'll make an exquisite view for me, riding behind you. Excellent morale raiser, milady."
It wasn't the first time Gunter had appreciated her surprisingly curvaceous and revealing armor; he had never been blind. A beautiful pert ass held appeal no matter the years.

***

some real one-handed sad romantic porn and pillow talk afterwards to break the cherry on writing this (redacted). Conquest route, post S-support.

(Ao3 link, mirror on the website coming later.

after me whinging about it for a week on the gunter tumblr and calling him a wrinkled nutsack, he started letting me in his head with fanfics; here's the first one. to be honest it is definitely not my best work! i fully intended this as a crash course, and it is absolutely more of a crash than a flight. :P 

( author's notes as always )

... that said, crossposting this post about reading the fates manga and how excellent it's been for getting a real sense of the worldbuilding.
( heads up for the usual gunter ship squicks )