Anelim101 - Novocaine/Reca

Have some calories, tiny waist man 😳

WOWW, HHUH, HMM...

Pov: you're the prisoners guard

Don't let him talk, he will manipulate you

(there will be a yandere pov part two, stay tuned!)

Honkai: Star rail | Luofu Storytelling: Cosmic Fables

the sheet hes holding is called “pickup lines the ladies will love”

celebrating spooky month with a fun little werewolf x vampire au

they're dating in secret because why not

yeah i just wanted to draw ratio as that feral fella meme

@/doctorforks CTIYS!

Version without effect under cut

This was very fun to do! Thank you.

you hit friendship 4 and he just gossips about his ex job

The idea just hit me: Ratio’s students are called his ducklings 

He’s fully aware of it and makes no move to stop it from spreading around campus. 

Being considered one of Ratio’s ducklings is kinda a big deal because those are the students who are willing to put in the effort and work to keep up with Ratio’s teaching style. 

They are both terrified of him and respect him so much that all the other students are in turn terrified of them. And while the ducklings don’t get any special treatment from Ratio, there’s something special and comforting about being part of the group of students who are willing to stick with Dr. Ratio’s coursework. 

This is how I see it happening: 

It started during Ratio’s first few years of teaching. Not his first year because I fully believe his first few classes were really controversial and had a lot of dropouts once his personality and harsh teaching style were made known. 

It took a while but after a few years, there’s finally a class with no drop outs, even if it’s super small. However, this class are also the students who are dedicated and truly want to learn and refuse to quit even with Ratio’s standards. 

(They still complain and cry of course, the student life is all about pain- no this is not me projecting as a uni student, I’m perfectly sane I promise-)

And of course, like any other student who needs to understand wtf is going on in class, his students do everything in their power to create study groups and attend his office hours, which are 100x scarier in the beginning since that’s prime one-on-one time with Dr. Ratio. 

At least in lecture the man is a hundred seats away from you. Here, he’s speaking directly to your face as he explains just how wrong you are and giving advice on how to fix that. 

At first, due to how unused to Ratio is from having a class of students who are truly trying to keep up with him (whether they’re succeeding is up to interpretation), he only spends time with them during lecture and office hours for the first few weeks. 

And then it spirals.

Around campus, you begin to see the esteemed Dr. Ratio being followed by a gaggle of students tripping  over each other, constantly asking question after question and him answering each one. Even as he’s being blunt, he never looks like he’s trying to outrun them, and even stops occasionally to write in one of the student’s notes.  

The ducklings nickname started out as a joke when someone made the connection of his students following him like baby ducks after lectures, and spiraled a bit more when one of the students found one of his rubber ducks in his office.

And so after finals, that first class of students got together for a nice drinking party to celebrate their freedom. A few drinks in of reminiscing about the class and how they’ll actually kinda miss Dr. Ratio, someone made a joke of buying some rubber ducks for the good doctor. Continuing on the high, an entire gaggle of drunk uni students just pull up to a craft store at 3am and start hunting for ducks. Another brilliant student laughs at the idea of personalizing each duck, and the rest of the class find the idea so funny that they buy out an entire aisle of craft supplies and get to work.

The next day, hungover but still committed to the bit, the entire class show up to Ratio’s office and each hand him a personalized rubber duck along with a terrified thank you for the class. 

Ratio would give his usual denying spiel of how “it is unnecessary” and “your education is all the reward a professor could want” but this is his first ever class with no dropouts and who all managed to pass their finals. 

The man is a failure at not caring, he is crying on the inside.

So he keeps the ducks on a shelf in his office. 

Somehow, the duckling nickname just cements itself after that day, and each class afterwards, despite all the pain and grumbling of the students, are always referred to as Ratio’s ducklings because only the truly insane (dedicated) stick it out and follow after him. 

And after each final, his little ducklings always give him their own personalized rubber duck that he continues to add to his shelf that he always had within eyesight of his desk. 

(the first class of ducklings are his personal favorite, though he’ll never claim to have any)

I’m incapable of not adding Aventurine whenever I talk about Ratio nowadays, I just have to accept that I love them both too much now. 

But yea, I like to imagine Aventurine finding out about the ducklings nickname first and teasing Ratio about actually having a heart and caring, which Ratio just denies and tries to justify as him being an attentive professor. But then Aventurine finds the rubber duck shelf and it’s just too sentimental for him to even think about joking. 

Adding to my headcanon of Aventurine being really curious about different subjects, I imagine that when he gets comfortable, he constantly asks Ratio questions about anything and everything. Ratio happily replies and teaches him. 

I like to think that one day, Aventurine would make his own personalized rubber duck to gift to Ratio as a 'thank you' for always indulging him with his questions and that rubber duck just becomes Ratio’s favorite. He gives it a little podium in his house and office and he constantly carries it around with him. He has photos of the damn thing. His first class find out about the duck and needle him about having ‘no favorites’ which he denies. Aventurine finds it both embarrassing and really cute. 

(I’m kinda pulling from my own experience with one of my old professors. She was terrifying but by god did I actually learn during her class. Every one of us would complain for hours about her exams, and boy were the averages terrible, but we were all also deeply committed to attending every office hour and defending her against the other students. It was like ‘She’s a harsh and insane professor, but she’s our harsh and insane professor.’ Everyone knew you were serious if you chose to take her class instead of other professors for the same course, she was that infamous. If I take 5 seconds to psychoanalyze myself without getting depressed, maybe that’s why I really like Ratio - outside of the burnt-out gifted child thing with emotional expression issues that also hit way too close to home. He just really reminds me of one of my own professors that I still really respect to this day) 

someone help him 😭

I am so in fucking love with the stairway to heaven animation and the only ways I can express that is to either say I am bricked the FUCK up, or I give in to the uber instincts of my uber autism and write an essay on what I THINK are some of the references/inspirations used in the animation. I chose the essay because I need people to know why I am "bricked up."

I am fully willing to accept if I am wrong/reaching for some of these but even then, I think it's cool that I can still connect certain moments with things I enjoy. With that out of the way, behold my analysis/breakdown of Stairway to Heaven!

Spoilers below the cut not just for the animation, but also minor spoilers for Kane Pixel's backrooms series, Liminal Land, Skinamarink, and Mandela Catalogue. Also just a warning for the incoherent ramblings of a guy who's abnormal about analog/indie horror. Please please please please PLEASE go watch the animation if you haven't.

First, "subject 087" is in reference to SCP-087, the never ending staircase SCP. I actually didn't even catch that the first time until I scrolled down to the comments lmao. In my defense, when SCP was blowing up in the mid 2010s I wasn't really old enough to appreciate it or find the format interesting (and honestly it is still hard for me to really get into it, but that's more of a me thing. Conceptually a clinical approach to horror like with SCPs or in All Tomorrows is fascinating, but it can be a bit of a slog for me), so I only knew the main three's numbers. (173, 096, and 682).

"Motion detected" has been used in just about every analog horror series now, but Mandela Catalogue is probably the main series that popularized the trope when analog horror first started getting popular.

The backrooms is, obviously, the backrooms. You can probably assume it's Kane Pixels' backrooms because his version really blew up but it feels more like early days backrooms before we got all those monsters and almond water stuff. (Which btw it's so funny we got "almond water" from whoever the first person to say the air smells like almonds was. For reference, almonds smell like cyanide. OP was trying to say the air smells toxic, not that almonds are the safest thing to consume in the backrooms.)

This shot just reminded me of The Oldest View, ALSO from Kane Pixels. Tbh that's probably just me but I thought it was neat.

Next up, the door. Aside from the obvious 333 angel numbers which also appear very prominently in Mandela Catalogue (this series is going to pop up a lot, I'm sorry), but for some reason it reminded me of the Silent Hill 4 door. Again, that's just the tism probably.

Skinamarink ahh shot, was honestly expecting the door to just poof, disappear.

Next, the shot with all the houses. While KP's Backrooms do have that creepy neighbourhood, this exact shot and set up feels closer to H.O.M.E. from Liminal Land.

And then our most darling biblically accurate horror icon Columbina would make False Gabriel proud, and just... she is so fucking cool and creepy in this and I love her so much.

This whole sequence was for one absolutely horrifying and beautiful, but what caught MY attention were the settings and locations shown. These are standard creepy liminal spaces and analog horror gore censorship, yes, but they also reminded me of the locations Trevor Henderson uses in his art pieces, so suffice to say I think Columbina looks RIGHT AT HOME regardless of how you wanna look at these shots. And the animation on her face opening up into wings and eyes is just an absolute chef's kiss moment. Props to the animators, man.

This trope, the whole main character monologue overlaying the screen moment, very common in analog horror but for me, again popularized by its use in the Mandela Catalogue.

The smudged picture is a reference to one of the ending shots in Skinamarink, where it pans over the childhood photos only for their heads and faces to now be missing, which most agree is the movie's way of saying these kids were trapped her for so long they eventually just stopped existing/faded into nothingness.

And finally, the classic ending scene of KP's first Backrooms video.

I know for a fact there are probably other references to liminal spaces/analog horror that I either missed or they're like general concepts/tropes used in analog horror. I did almost mention the mill in petscop because of Columbina's "two in the mill, one taken, one left" because that phrasing felt really specific, but it doesn't quite fit the vibes of all the other references. Also her only being seen in the camera is a trope used in all manner of horror media. My first thought was the forest scene in VHS (2012) where the murderer could only be seen in the film static.

I just wanted to get the especially cool/unique moments out there. I didn't even touch on the storyline but that's because it seems pretty straightforward. I'm also aware not many people are gonna read my red string corkboard ramblings, which I'm fine with. I just needed to get this out of my system, but I do appreciate those who did take the time to indulge my ramblings!

That's all for now, back to whatever the hell I had planned for today.