No Idea Who My Favorite Infinity Train Character Is, But Grace Is Definitely The Coolest.

One of my favorite things to explore is the way Adrien has been affected by growing up in an arguably abusive household. Normally I think about behaviors he's learned as a defense mechanism (timidity, selflessness, submission, being endlessly good-natured), but this is a good example of learned behaviors that involve imitating something harmful, instead of reacting to something harmful.

So I was watching the English dub of Sentibubbler, and there was a scene that I remember made me feel uncomfortable when I saw it the first time:

I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was.  Then, later in the episode:

And that punched me in the gut.  It scared me.

I don’t think I can write out a whole essay on this rn, but I needed to throw it into the void.  What I can say is that Chat Noir demolished something because he was angry.  I’m not saying that he was angry at Ladybug necessarily, but the situation didn’t go his way, he felt like he wasn’t being heard, and he hit something so hard that it shattered.  And I’m saying he learned that from somewhere.

Visiting family over the summer be like

I had like twenty scenes from the first three Stormlight books I wanted to illustrate before the fourth book came out, but . . . *Glances at countdown to RoW I definitely don't have on my bedside table* Yeah, that's not gonna happen. So here are some doodles of Syl.

Nobody told me it was Marichat May!

You can't call someone family until you go stargazing with them.

One of my favorite side effects of my Year of Overthinking my Sexuality is what I learned about the differences between aesthetic and romantic attraction.

Did you know you can think someone is pretty, or cute, or handsome, without liking them romantically? Yeah! Maybe that's common knowledge, but I sure didn't know until I went down the rabbit hole of researching asexuality. The result of that extensive research and the discovery of separate terms for separate kinds of attraction is that I now feel much more comfortable finding people attractive.

The curly-haired boy on my cross country team? Cute. The woman with the braid carrying her child? Very pretty. The short kid I keep passing in the halls? Gorgeous. The big lady I ran into at the grocery store? Breathtaking. It's made me realize that the vast majority of people in real life actually look really good. Very few of them perfectly fit what I've been taught to see as conventionally attractive, but so many of them have faces I long to just . . . look at. I swear, ninety percent of the girls I know from church are prettier than any model I've ever seen. Most people, maybe even all people, are attractive in a very genuine, very mundane, and very beautiful way.

I like feeling like I can say someone looks good without implying that I like them. And I like admitting that if I'm honest, everyone looks good.

I've been drafting a Plance animatic for . . . months . . . and my drawing style has gone through at least three iterations, plus the sketchy first draft:

I think I've finally found the one I'll stick with, though:

Now I just have to redraw all the frames in this style

Yayyyyy

Look me in the eyes and tell me that Plance and "Princess and the Frog" don't have almost exactly the same character dynamic

Why is this how it always goes

Do you ever start writing something that you’re excited about and that seems like it’s turning out well and that you’re getting eager to share, and then you start typing it up or doing an edit pass and it’s just awful it’s awful its premise is fundamentally flawed and it’s out of character and the prose is clunky and the plot is badly paced and ludicrous and the whole thing is embarrassing, how could you have done this, how could you have sunk so much time into this, you can’t even look at it, how is this that shining thing you were so excited about, how could you even have considered finishing it let alone sharing it with anyone, you’re crying, your mother is crying, nuns are spontaneously exploding in the streets,

Steris, my queen