I Woke Up With The Strangest Feeling Of Loss, Grief And Regret This Afternoon And It's Lingered Still.

I think often how we overuse words. And how because of that, words that had potency and weight, sometimes now feel trite or even almost empty, half spoken without conviction. "Beautiful" it's almost as trite and vague as it comes now, it's lost it's meaning. There is no singular word that I can give to you to describe her radiance adequately. There is no word to define the way my heart rushed when her skin touched mine. I thought my heart would never be still again. It may have settled but my feelings sure haven't. It's still racing trying to find some sort of definition. It is like a gnat trying to quantify and calculate the breadth width and height of a mountain or some sort of decimal trying to comprehend all of creation.

Life was like an ocean and she was a wave I was just getting tossed in.

I don't know always the directions I'm meant to move in. But I do know the distance is either damned or darned by your dictation.

Incase you really wanted it! This is the dragons den in the game. She isn't a gym leader anymore. But she does run the city. They haven't gotten to the elite four yet but I plan on making her a member. She is the mentor to a rival of the character players. She gave the rival an egg that hatched into a dratini and the player character one that will hatch into a bagon. The dragons den has ice type pokemon and dragon type encounters too. Every trainer there isn't a dragon Trainer but a dragon hunter or a dragon buster so they use dragon, fairy and ice type pokemon.

this really isn't an ask, but, a while ago I saw your concept of Claire as an ice type trainer, and I sorta ran with it. I gamemaster for a pokemon ttrpg, and in the game Claire founded her own Dragon's Den, but in an ice cave. My players thought it was cool spin on the concept, and you gave the springboard for some really cool environments so thank you for that!

aaaaaa that's so cool! so glad something i drew had such an impact! :D

feel free to keep me posted on how your sessions go!

“For some time, Hollywood has marketed family entertainment according to a two-pronged strategy, with cute stuff and kinetic motion for the kids and sly pop-cultural references and tame double entendres for mom and dad. Miyazaki has no interest in such trickery, or in the alternative method, most successfully deployed in Pixar features like Finding Nemo, Toy Story 3 and Inside/Out, of blending silliness with sentimentality.”

“Most films made for children are flashy adventure-comedies. Structurally and tonally, they feel almost exactly like blockbusters made for adults, scrubbed of any potentially offensive material. They aren’t so much made for children as they’re made to be not not for children. It’s perhaps telling that the genre is generally called “Family,” rather than “Children’s.” The films are designed to be pleasing to a broad, age-diverse audience, but they’re not necessarily specially made for young minds.”

“My Neighbor Totoro, on the other hand, is a genuine children’s film, attuned to child psychology. Satsuki and Mei move and speak like children: they run and romp, giggle and yell. The sibling dynamic is sensitively rendered: Satsuki is eager to impress her parents but sometimes succumbs to silliness, while Mei is Satsuki’s shadow and echo (with an independent streak). But perhaps most uniquely, My Neighbor Totoro follows children’s goals and concerns. Its protagonists aren’t given a mission or a call to adventure - in the absence of a larger drama, they create their own, as children in stable environments do. They play.”

“Consider the sequence just before Mei first encounters Totoro. Satsuki has left for school, and Dad is working from home, so Mei dons a hat and a shoulder bag and tells her father that she’s “off to run some errands” - The film is hers for the next ten minutes, with very little dialogue. She’s seized by ideas, and then abandons them; her goals switch from moment to moment. First she wants to play “flower shop” with her dad, but then she becomes distracted by a pool full of tadpoles. Then, of course, she needs a bucket to catch tadpoles in - but the bucket has a hole in it. And on it goes, but we’re never bored, because Mei is never bored.”

“[…] You can only ride a ride so many times before the thrill wears off. But a child can never exhaust the possibilities of a park or a neighborhood or a forest, and Totoro exists in this mode. The film is made up of travel and transit and exploration, set against lush, evocative landscapes that seem to extend far beyond the frame. We enter the film driving along a dirt road past houses and rice paddies; we follow Mei as she clambers through a thicket and into the forest; we walk home from school with the girls, ducking into a shrine to take shelter from the rain; we run past endless green fields with Satsuki as she searches for Mei. The psychic center of Totoro’s world is an impossibly giant camphor tree covered in moss. The girls climb over it, bow to it as a forest-guardian, and at one point fly high above it, with the help of Totoro. Much like Totoro himself, the tree is enormous and initially intimidating, but ultimately a source of shelter and inspiration.”

“My Neighbor Totoro has a story, but it’s the kind of story that a child might make up, or that a parent might tell as a bedtime story, prodded along by the refrain, “And then what happened?” This kind of whimsicality is actually baked into Miyazaki’s process: he begins animating his films before they’re fully written. Totoro has chase scenes and fantastical creatures, but these are flights of fancy rooted in a familiar world. A big part of being a kid is watching and waiting, and Miyazaki understands this. When Mei catches a glimpse of a small Totoro running under her house, she crouches down and stares into the gap, waiting. Miyazaki holds on this image: we wait with her. Magical things happen, but most of life happens in between those things—and there is a kind of gentle magic, for a child, in seeing those in-betweens brought to life truthfully on screen.”

A.O. Scott and Lauren Wilford on “My Neighbor Totoro”, 2017.  

I had a pretty terrible day yesterday. I woke up in the middle of the night, and my brain was like "Why don't you make a self portrait but make it plum?" So I did. And this is what I landed on. I made this after a terrible day in a terrible year, where I have felt lost and confused. What I've learned while making this is that Identity and Narrative are things you have to give to yourself.

Double puff, just to be safe.

We are on the couch Your sleeping head in my lap You begin to drool

I will remember flowers in glass vases.

And shoeless feet in grassy places.

I will remember caramelized skin. And a smile even sweater.

And movie nights, cuddled on the couches Sitting next to the heaters.

I will remember golden-brown hair. And the the way it felt.

I will remember dark brown eyes, and the way they'd make me melt.