Latest Posts by vivacias - Page 4
The Fallen Angel of Babel šāļøšŖ½
LOVE BABEL BY RF KUANG!! I drew Robin Swift as the fallen angel painting!!
"The Undergrad Cohort"
I finished Babel in about 2 weeks and it's left a gaping hole in my heart I need to patch with fanart.
Uncleaned scanned sketch below.
INSTAGRAMĀ | TIKTOK
a friend was talking about a book we hate and was like "itās a book thatās very popular with queer people who havenāt yet realized thereās a thriving ecosystem of queer books that had editors" many such cases unfortunately
my somewhat unpopular opinion is that "famous story retold from female character's pov" is a good concept, actually. it's just that it became gimmicky very fast and spawned a storm of lazy works that refuse to engage with the source material in any meaningful way and flanderize everything into generic YA tropes. but at its core taking a known story and exploring it through the perspective of a female character even, and perhaps especially, when said character is not a particularly active agent on said story, is a way to remind people that women are still people with rich inner lives and that the real life women that we learned to think as pawns in the lives of men were/are still humans whose complex interiority deserve exploration on principle that everyone, but especially the people who live on the margins, deserve exploration. but that's a concept that gets defeated when most people writing those lazy retellings can't write complex interiority to save their lives.
Still Alive!
Well, haven't been on tumblr in a blue moon, but I thought I might drop by and let everyone know that today is the release day for a RuneQuest ttrpg product that I have co-written!
I am talking a bit about "Lands and Traditions under the Sune Dome" in a Patreon post open for everyone to read. Come have a look if you are curious:
Or you can check it out directly on DriveThruRPG:
Now that editing/proofreading/layout/adjustment/writing hell is over for that one, I can refocus full time on the next Fallen Hero: Revelations demo, which by the way able to be wishlisted on Steam!
I think there's a part of Ortega that is vindicated when Step reveals themselves as a villain. Like, they knew they weren't retired, they knew they didn't give up, knew they would never stop fighting. They just happen to be on the other side now. It's a tiny victory inside a greater loss. That fire that Ortega admired didn't go out, it changed.
This is a dangerous sentiment for me to express, as an editor who spends most of my working life telling writers to knock it off with the 45-word sentences and the adverbs and tortured metaphors, but I do think we're living through a period of weird pragmatic puritanism in mainstream literary taste.
e.g. I keep seeing people talk about 'purple prose' when they actually mean 'the writer uses vivid and/or metaphorical descriptive language'. I've seen people who present themselves as educators offer some of the best genre writing in western canon as examples of 'purple prose' because it engages strategically in prose-poetry to evoke mood and I guess that's sheer decadence when you could instead say "it was dark and scary outside". But that's not what purple prose means. Purple means the construction of the prose itself gets in the way of conveying meaning. mid-00s horse RPers know what I'm talking about. Cerulean orbs flash'd fire as they turn'd 'pon rollforth land, yonder horizonways. <= if I had to read this when I was 12, you don't get to call Ray Bradbury's prose 'purple'.
I griped on here recently about the prepossession with fictional characters in fictional narratives behaving 'rationally' and 'realistically' as if the sole purpose of a made-up story is to convince you it could have happened. No wonder the epistolary form is having a tumblr renaissance. One million billion arguments and thought experiments about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas that almost all evade the point of the story: that you can't wriggle out of it. The narrator is telling you how it was, is and will be, and you must confront the dissonances it evokes and digest your discomfort. 'Realistic' begins on the author's terms, that's what gives them the power to reach into your brain and fiddle about until sparks happen. You kind of have to trust the process a little bit.
This ultra-orthodox attitude to writing shares a lot of common ground with the tight, tight commodification of art in online spaces. And I mean commodification in the truest sense - the reconstruction of the thing to maximise its capacity to interface with markets. Form and function are overwhelmingly privileged over cloudy ideas like meaning, intent and possibility, because you can apply a sliding value scale to the material aspects of a work. But you can't charge extra for 'more challenging conceptual response to the milieu' in a commission drive. So that shit becomes vestigial. It isn't valued, it isn't taught, so eventually it isn't sought out. At best it's mystified as part of a given writer/artist's 'talent', but either way it grows incumbent on the individual to care enough about that kind of skill to cultivate it.
And it's risky, because unmeasurables come with the possibility of rejection or failure. Drop in too many allegorical descriptions of the rose garden and someone will decide your prose is 'purple' and unserious. A lot of online audiences seem to be terrified of being considered pretentious in their tastes. That creates a real unwillingness to step out into discursive spaces where you š«µ are expected to develop and explore a personal relationship with each element of a work. No guard rails, no right answers. Word of god is shit to us out here. But fear of getting that kind of analysis wrong makes people hove to work that slavishly explains itself on every page. And I'm left wondering, what's the point of art that leads every single participant to the same conclusion? See Spot run. Run, Spot, run. Down the rollforth land, yonder horizonways. I just want to read more weird stuff.
I have been listening to the Hobbit audiobook while working. Bad idea. I didn't work, I drew Bilbo and his fancy home ā„
tlt fans will be like read my books. jakey the ninth is about [long list of tumblr post motifs that were popular 2 years ago, 1 plot point from the adventure zone balance, & no indication of the premise or genre]
The Nine ššæš¹ With this, I'd like to thank everyone who purchased someone from my Tolkien-characters-series! The earnings reached about 2 000USD and were donated to these three organizations (to help nature, animals, and humans) - Czech Union for Nature Conservation Caritas Bez mĆ”my THANK YOU SO MUCH! š
deeply unlikeable and unpleasant female characters are actually so important for the ecosystem and also as a good litmus test over if a person is Weird about women or not
mind over matter principle.
hai :3 back with more faceless drawings of dina's tattoos and this time i actually share my thoughts on them woohoo!!
When designing them I wanted to go for a much more industrial, black-out look for them as opposed to something more detailed and intricate. Theyāre hard and heavy and in your face. They serve a purpose and are not meant to look pleasing or inspire anything but wariness. Imo the same way you donāt stop to marvel at the way a road sign is designed, regene tattoos have one purpose and thatās to inform you what youāre looking at is something to be wary of... Didn't stop me from making them look cool, but I imagine since they're standardized depending on the kind of regene that they are pretty to-the-point and featureless beyond bits necessary for identification.
(walks out of the chargestep mines covered in coal dust and shaking like a small dog) i think i hauve black lung
filled up my reading notebook so until i get another one. microblogging
god. i know children are more unflappable about some types of horror elements and white american kids arenāt expected to have much familiarity with the topic, but i canāt believe some of the descriptions of collective punishment of indigenous ppl that i read in gullstruck island at eleven years old. no wonder the specter of this book has hung over me since grade school. this is a cautionary remark but also something positive i am saying about the book.
hi I'm from your pseudo-medieval fantasy city. yeah. you forgot to put farms around us. we have very impressive walls and stuff but everyone here is starving. the hero showed up here as part of his quest and we killed and ate him
Titania & Oberon
I want to write a book called āyour character dies in the woodsā that details all the pitfalls and dangers of being out on the road & in the wild for people without outdoors/wilderness experience bc I cannot keep reading narratives brush over life threatening conditions like nothing is happening.
I just read a book by one of my favorite authors whose plots are essentially airtight, but the MC was walking on a country road on a cold winter night and she was knocked down and fell into a drainage ditch covered in ice, broke through and got covered in icy mud and water.
Then she had a āmiserableā 3 more miles to walk to the inn.
Babes she would not MAKE it to that inn.