Latest Posts by vivacias - Page 8
"In the space of a sundown, you show me the wide world from a horse’s back, and the soul of the world within my own walls" - Fool's Errand
🍊- prints available here!
lil artfight ref for joyce
Cassian's relationship with Herald is so fucking weird.
He hates Herald for replacing him. He took the Sidestep name to spite him, to spit in the face of his bright eyed hero worship. He envies Herald his gender. He covets all Herald has and is. Herald is his nemesis. Sidestep is Herald's.
He loves Daniel. He basks in the warmth of his thoughts. He revels in the easy way Daniel excepts him. He wears Daniel's clothes to smell like him. He would kill for Daniel. He would burn the world for Daniel.
He's never been more honest with nor told more lies to anyone like he has with Daniel. He can't lose to Herald, but also wouldn't accept being taken in by anyone but Daniel. There's no good ending for them. Cassian wants it anyway.
2, 16 and 19 from books asks, please 🙂
2. top 5 books of all time
answered here but my runners up:
the left hand of darkness (ursula leguin)
the hunger games (suzanne collins)
invisible cities (italo calvino)
the great gatsby (f scott fitzgerald)
gifts (ursula leguin)
16. how many books have you read this year?
only 7 i got off to a slow start but then recently started commuting with audiobooks and we are SO BACK (•̀ᴗ•́)و
19. most disliked popular book
sorry…………. gideon the ninth. it’s awful
🧍book ask. 2 + 6 + 20 :^)
2. top 5 books of all time
ok i’m going with non-childrens lit novels 🤨 so
the tombs of atuan (ursula leguin)
annihilation (jeff vandermeer)
east of eden (john steinbeck)
royal assassin (robin hobb)
parable of the sower (octavia butler)
6. read this month
the golden compass (philip pullman)
powers (ursula leguin)
20. what i look for in a book
for getting into a book, i want “disappearing” prose that doesn’t distract me from the scene with unnatural rhythm or silly word choice, dialogue that’s either naturalist or theatrical but NOT forced to set up stupid lil quips, place descriptions that take me away, a feeling of promise that smth will happen.
for remembering & loving it after i’m done reading—a striking turn & sudden illumination towards the end of the book about what it all meant (even if the answer is “nothing” or “we don’t get to know”), a main character who got to be selfish, magnetic, and cunning, a world that felt wider & deeper than what was seen in this story, an ending that satisfied. doesn’t have to be uplifting or unpredictable as long as i hear the door click shut behind me on my way out yk.
book asks:
book you’ve reread the most times?
top 5 books of all time?
what is your favourite genre?
what sections of a bookstore do you browse?
where do you buy books?
what books have you read in the last month?
is there a series/book that got you into reading?
what is the first book you remember reading yourself?
when do you tend to read most?
do you have a guilty fav?
what non-fiction books do you like if any?
did you enjoy any compulsory high school readings?
do you have a goodreads?
do you ever mark/dog ear books you own?
recommend and review a book.
how many books have you read this year?
top 5 children’s books?
do you like historical books? which time period?
most disliked popular books?
what are things you look for in a book?
I’ve been thinking a lot about fandom recently, both as someone who has engaged with it regularly for over a decade on various platforms and also as someone who has increasingly become disenchanted with those spaces. Not only because of pervasive issues of (especially anti-Black) racism, misogyny, transphobia/homophobia, and the like, but the particular way those things take shape within fandom.
At the most basic level I think fandom has a fundamental methodological problem with the way it approaches texts, be they shows, books, movies, etc. What I mean is that people almost invariably approach fandom at the level of character, often at the level of ship - your primary way of viewing a text is filtered through favourite characters and favourite relationships, as opposed to, say, favourite scenes, favourite themes, favourite conflicts.
This is reinforced through the architecture of dominant platforms that host fan content, particularly AO3 - there are separate categories for fandom, character and ship, and everything else is lumped together in “Additional Tags.” You cannot, for example, filter for fics on AO3 by the category of “critical perspective” or “thematic exploration”. There is no dedicated space for fan authors to declare their analytical perspective on the text they are writing about. If an author declares these things, they do so individually, they must go out of their way to do so, because there are no dedicated or universally agreed-upon tags to indicate those things, and if your fanfiction has a lot of tags, that announcement of criticality gets mushed together in a sea of other tags, sharing the same space with tags like “fluff and angst” or “porn without plot.” Perhaps one of the few tags closest to approaching this is the tag “Dead Dove: Do Not Eat,” which doesn’t indicate perspective or theme but rather that there is, broadly, some kind of “problematic content” contained therein - often of a sexual nature, frequently as a warning about “bad” ships.
Now this is not an inherent problem, as in, it is not inherently incorrect to approach a text and primarily derive pleasure from it by focusing on a given character or relationship. And I think a lot of mainstream media encourages (even requires) audiences to engage with their stories at these character- and ship-levels. The political economy of the production of art (one which is capitalistic, one that seeks to generate comfort, titillation, controversy, nostalgia, or shock for the purposes of drawing in viewership, one that increasingly pursues social media metrics of “engagement” and “impressions”, one that allows for the Netflix model of making two-season shows before cancelling them, as well as a whole host of other things) enforces a particular narrative orthodoxy, one that heavily focuses on the individual interiority of specific characters, one that is deeply concerned with the maintenance of white bourgeois middle class values of property ownership, the nuclear family, normative heterosexual sexuality and gender, settler-colonial ideas about community and environment, etc. If you do not care about the familial drama surrounding Shauna cheating on her husband in Yellowjackets, for example, because you think the institution of monogamous marriage and the nuclear family is stupid and violent and heternormative, then you will have a difficult time engaging with the show in general. We exist within a deeply normative (and frequently reactionary) media environment that encourages us to approach art in a particular way, one that privileges the individual over other narrative components (settings, themes, conflicts, ideas, political and moral perspectives, structure, tone, etc).
All of which culminates in priming fans to engage with art at these levels and these levels alone, even when that scope is deeply inappropriate. A standout example I recently encountered was browsing the fandom tags on tumblr for the movie Prey - a movie that recontextualises the original Predator film by setting it in colonial America to make the argument that the horrific violence of white colonists and imperial soldiers is identical to the violence we see the Predator do to human beings. It is a movie that makes the argument that, despite this alien monster running around killing people, the villains of the franchise are these occupying soldiers and settlers, an alien force who themselves have just as little regard for (indigenous) human life.
And when browsing the tags on tumblr, what I found was dozens upon dozens of horny posts about how hot the predator monster was. Certainly there were discussion of the film’s narrative, and these posts got a good amount of notes, but the tags were heavily dominated with a focus on the Predator itself. People were engaging with this film not as a solid action movie with interesting and compelling anti-colonial themes, but as a way to be horny about a creature that is, ironically, a stand-in for white settler indifference to (and perpetuation of) indigenous suffering. And if this is your takeaway from an extremely straightforward film with a very clear message, this is not merely a failure to comprehend the content of a text, this is something beyond it - a problem that I think is due in part to the methodological problem of approaching all texts as vessels for bourgeois interiority, individual but ultimately interchangeable expressions of sexuality, perhaps best-expressed by the term “roving slash fandom,” a phenomenon wherein fans will move from one fandom to the next in search of two (usually white, usually skinny) guys to draw and write porn of, uncaring of any of the surrounding context of the stories they are embedded in, and consequently dominating a large sector of fandom discussion.
This even gets expressed in the primary ideological battleground of fandom itself, the ridiculous partitioning of all fan conflict into “pro-“ and “anti-“ shipping compartments. Your stance on engagement with fandom itself historically was (and still is) always first filtered through one of these two labels, describing your fundamental perspective on all texts you engage with. And both of these two labels are only concerned with shipping, as if all disagreements about art can only be interpreted through the lens of what characters you think are acceptable to draw or write having sex. Nowhere in this binary is space to describe any other perspective you might take, what approaches you think are valuable when interacting with art, what themes or stories you think are worth exploring. It’s not just that the pro/anti divide is juvenile and overly-simplistic, it is a declaration that all fan conflict must be read through the lens of shipping and shipping only - the implication being that any objections raised, and criticisms offered, is ultimately just bitching about ships you don’t like.
Which, again, I think is a fundamental error of methodology. It leaves no space for people to discuss the political and moral content of a work, the themes of a piece of art, the thorny issues of representation not just as expressed through individual characters but entire worlds, narratives, settings, and themes. You are always hopelessly stuck in the quagmire of “shipping discourse,” and even rejecting that framework will inevitably get you labelled as either pro- or anti-ship anyway - and you will almost invariably be labelled an “anti” if you express any kind of distaste for the bigoted behaviour of fans or the content of the text itself, again reinforcing the idea that this is all just pointless whining online about icky ships you personally hate.
And this issue is best perhaps epitomised by reader insert fanfiction, circumventing any need for you to project onto a character by literally inserting yourself into fiction, primarily in order to write/read about a character you want to fuck. This then intersects in particularly disgusting ways with real world politics, such as reader insert fics about Pedro Pascal going with you to BLM protests. Even if this is (incredibly over-generously) interpreted as a very poor attempt at being “progressive,” it still demonstrates that many (white) fans are often incapable of thinking about anything outside of a character-centric perspective, quite literally centring themselves in the process, and consequently they think it’s totally appropriate to do things like that. The fact that this is also frequently a racist lens is not coincidental, because again, a chronic focus on (fictional) individuality prohibits any structural perspective from entering the discussion, which necessarily excludes a coherent or useful perspective on systemic issues, where people come to the conclusion that the topic of police brutality is little more than a fun stage to enact whatever romantic shenanigans you want to get up to with a hot guy.
I will stress, again, that it is not a moral sin to have a favourite character, nor is it bad to enjoy reading about two guys having sex in fanfiction. I enjoy and do those things, I engage with fandom often through a character-centric lens (see my url) - because it’s fun! But I think that this being the dominant mode of engagement inherently excludes and marginalises all other approaches, and creates a fandom space where the most valuable way to talk about media is to discuss which two characters you most enjoy imagining fucking each other
I drew that when Fool’s Assassin came out and proceeded to completely forget about it until now! Touched it up a liiiittle bit.
f!UB i sketched as warmups over the week
I love how you draw Herald! He actually looks like a young man and not a lost 12 year old
That's very kind of you, especially considering I don't think I've drawn ever him the same way twice 😎
💞 and 🚲 for JOYCE !!
🚲 : Does your OC enjoy playing the field? Or are they more monogamy-minded?
joyce doesn’t necessarily want monogamy, but her ortega derangement syndrome doesn’t leave much room for noticing or returning anyone else’s interest. like i think it’s pretty damning that she’s a dating sim MC and in three playthroughs i’ve never felt compelled to even try another route with her.
her puppet, josie, cursorily flirts with mortum to make their working relationship easier, but it doesn’t excite her. mortum wants to be wanted by josie, so where’s the sport?
i do think she has chemistry with chen, that he has chemistry with ricardo, and that they’d be good for each other in a trio, but i can’t see her wanting someone who’s good for her. she’s busy acting up about ortega !
💞 : Do they treat sex casually or do they view it as something with a lot of emotional weight?
definitely something with like planetary weight, although that might not be true if it wasn’t for the re-gene tattoos, because she’s a sensual person & totally horny enough.
Le Belle Fool Sans Merci - December 2022
My last piece from 2022, in which I tasked myself for some reason to a redraw of la belle dame sans merci with my favs. Closing off the year with this art piece was a little major for me (backgrounds ugh) but super excited to get into 2023 with renewed creative vigour!!
whenever i see ur levi art i get the inexplicable urge to bark but not in a sexual way, in a “u are so interesting and terrible and fantastic and u suck and i love you but i dont know how to verbalise it” kind of way
GOOD. He's NOT sexy. he's not sexy he's not sexy he is interesting
blackout design notes
What r Joyce’s thoughts on the rangers (also hi love ur poasts and J is sooo fun)
hi ! you’re so kind !! here we go.
herald. dumbass kid. joyce is nice to his face, playing into his dream narrative of a kindly, washed-up-but-still-got-it sidestep who trains him and even teases that she might get back into the hero game … while destroying his self-confidence on purpose. she pities & despises him, seeing him as a poster boy for letting the agencies & corporations that own heroes do whatever they want with you, willingly and happily, til you die or your parts are wearing out too fast to be worth the replacement cost. she’s not interested in seeing more complexity in him.
short term, breaking down herald is just the most efficient way to break down the rangers as a team, embarrass them on tv, make the public question why they’re reliant on such fallible heroes so blackout can give answers. long term, if her “training” takes herald out of the hero game now while he’s young and undamaged, before she unveils the system of abuse & vice behind it, well. she thinks he’ll come to thank her for the favor.
argent. threat, but not too hard to neutralize. joyce successfully plays the harmless therapist to plant false memories & the damocles sword. blackout comes out of their book 1 fights unscathed & not flagged as a telepath, their book 2 fight just dinged up. joyce is curious about argent’s motives, her apparent attraction to blackout, the source of her powers, her dynamic with the other rangers, but not enough to ever chase the rabbit while she’s on a mission, so she knows almost nothing about her.
chen. one of a very few ppl joyce shows some of her real personality to—mainly, the pissy part. they can’t help snipping at each other like a couple of mean old queens whenever they’re in a room. but it leaves them both tired, and sad, because even though they don’t see eye to eye at least they see each other, more than they do with many other people. which is why he’s the only one with any suspicion she might be blackout (25%). he’d be the second person she told about being a re-gene, if she was sure he wouldn’t kill her.
ortega. jesus christ, what doesn’t joyce think about ortega? sidestep loved him. she’s remembered as his sidekick. she resents that, deeply, because it implies that as soon as she got away from her creators she immediately poured herself into someone else’s shape instead of molding her own identity, and she thinks that might be true. joyce still loves him. she hit him with a car. she crashed a car with him in it. she likes how he looks with blood on his face. she hates to see him hurt.
she flirted with him as her puppet, josie, a younger woman who looks like sidestep, or maybe her daughter, while also flirting with him as herself. she turned him down when he asked joyce to the gala, accepted as josie, only to stop in front of the sidestep exhibit and throw a hissy fit about how “she” saw him talking with an older woman, and should she be worried? then as joyce demanded to know if him going out with josie was trading in for the younger model. only when she was confident he liked her real body more did she have josie break things off, pretending to be scared of his powers as a parting kick in the ribs for “making” her doubt. he hadn’t done anything.
she slept with him. she showed him her tattoos. she smacked him. she kissed him again. she cut her hair back to how she wore it when she was sidestep. she misses his mom.
she’s in on his hollow ground investigation, uncertain yet whether to help him or tangle up all his red strings while he’s distracted. she’s testing him, encouraging him to share his conspiracy theories, trying to see if he’s jaded or desperate enough to partner with blackout in exposing the truth. she wants him to be. she wants to be honest with him and she wants his sharp, suspicious mind. but she doesn’t want to see him brought low enough to get on her level, because she fell in love with an idealist. he calls her joy. it’s so. 🤌
well thanks for asking
what is joyce's favorite animal and why?
mice and rats ! mental contact with dogs is nice, but she’s always preferred animals more skittish than herself. it feels good to be what calms & comforts them. part power trip, part compassion. consequently,
talk to me about joyce please. ama
Quick! Funniest reason for someone to become a villain
