They Probably Need To Talk

Friendly reminder that Héctor has been dead much longer than he was alive, he was only 21 thats literally around one 5th of his existence since then he has been a skeleton. What if he doesn’t really remember being alive, sure he has his memories of events, he remembers the people in his life but specifically what a living body felt like? Not so much. 

One of the twins mentions missing his nose, Héctor shrugs as he touches his fingers to his nasual bone, it’s been so long it feels like he just always never had one.

Rosita watches as he helps her cook one day, accidently spliling a boiling pot of water down himself, she smiles and points out a least he hasn’t got skin that can burn. He can’t really remember what it felt like to be burnt. 

Imelda holds his hands in hers, stroking his fingers and comments on how smooth the bones feel compared to his calloused fingertips from years of playing the guitar, he comments on how good her memory is because he had forgotten that before distracting her with kisses. 

Commission for my friend @nikodavisartwork !

Hector : Imelda is definitely out of my league

Hector : Actually, we’re not even playing the same sport.

Hector : It’s kinda like she’s in the NBA

Hector : And I work in the muffin store next to the stadium.

Revolution in Coco

I was actually surprised by the years the characters were born, 1900, because they pretty much lived throught the Mexican Revolution (1910-1917/1920), even the actual movie stars were born during or after, Pedro Infante 1917, so really it was just their baby or child years while Coco characters were in their pre-teens and early adulthood.

What does this mean? You can read the wikipedia article, but pretty much there were many militant groups running around, many small towns didn’t know what was going on, no one from the higher ups cared if you knew anything so these revolutionary groups would just arrive and tell you, recruit you.

It wasn’t always that nice, when I went to my granny’s hometown they told me their grandfathers hid underground with a sack of corn whenever they heard horses (military groups) approach, they asked for you to give them stuff, (horses, food, a place to sleep) if you refused you were not supporting the rev movement or the president, thus you were the enemy so neither fraction was any good, (of course the revolutionaries often liberated the towns from the landlord but remember most were just farmers so getting so much power could get to their heads) All in all the people in the town didn’t knew the social movement that was happening. I remember saying, “great my family just hid during the revolution” and my mom turned to me and said, “they survived”.

We don’t now how Santa Cecilia fared during the Revolution but maybe cheking out the history of small towns may help, either way I’m not an expert on the Rev so take it easy with me if there’s anything wrong

(Also, Princess Leia’s hair came from this time!)

Wow so smooth

It's our favourite greasy old bat's birthday!! 🥰🎉 Wish him a happy birthday everyone, he will hate us all (he's so grumpy I love him so much)

I pick one of his famous quotes to make this small animation (using Tvpaint this time), sound source from yt, rough animation and ugly animatic on my ig

what some players think the occultist is like: -evil -religious extremist -time for my 4:00 human sacrifice brb -praise cthulhu!! -ending the world is cool and good and your confusion about why someone who thinks ending the world is cool and good is even on the team is definitely not a sign of being mistaken what the occultist’s barks and campfire dialogues are actually like: -i’m a university professor with tenure and still haven’t paid off my student loans -who wants to sing some super cool CAMPFIRE SONGS?! - /stupid teacher quips -god is evil, humans rule and monsters drool, come at me you eldritch FUCK i will yeet your malformed ass back to the VOID YOU SPAWNED FROM you little BITCH -oh fuck oh fuck why did i have the hubris to think i could play games with star-satan and win, curse my lack of genre awareness -HELP I’M SEALED WITHIN THIS MORTAL FLESH PRISON AND I HATE IT HERE. STOP SINGING HIS STUPID SONGS! YOU’RE JUST ENCOURAGING HIM! -whoops it got weird for a minute but it’s all out of my system now, brb making dramatic speeches about the united human intellect -i’m too old for this shit :| what the occultist’s hero shrine story is actually like: -yes hello my hubris led me to make only the worst life choices and i’m not allowed to host book club anymore

another book covers

let's talk about the way we talk about sigma

and i’m not just saying this because i’m a hater or because i find the woobification of characters annoying (although i am, and i do, but that’s neither here nor there) but i AM saying it cuz it’s no longer mildly annoying so much as it is just hurtful and exhausting due to the casual ableism it perpetuates. whether it’s consciously or not, it’s there and i’m pointing it out cuz a lot of people probably don’t even realize what they’re saying (i hope) so i wanna spell it out crystal clear.

*granted, these are sentiments i’ve seen far more often on twitter or tiktok than on here (and i know complaining about stupid takes on either site is like going to the beach and getting mad about all the sand, but bear with me) but it’s ABSOLUTELY something that i see a lot on here too and i'm starting to get incredibly fed up with it all. someone's gotta fuckin say it.

im going to put the majority of this under a readmore because i've got a lot to say on the topic but here's the long and short of it:

you guys have GOT to stop acting like sigma is a poor little helpless confused manipulated innocent little uwu baby. like, for real. stop saying that shit. stop lamenting about “waahhh poor science granpa doesn’t know where he is or what’s happening around himmm 🥺🥺🥺”. stop acting like he’s being held captive or abused by talon despite evidence to the contrary so you can make your little “uwu i can’t wait for overwatch to save him and Fix Him uwuwuw” posts. and for the love of all that’s holy, if i see one more person say or imply that he was better off when he was being forcibly institutionalized than he is now working for talon, i’m going to start fucking attacking people with my teeth like a chimpanzee.

it's incredibly fucking weird and alienating for literally anyone who experiences even a fraction of the things yall are pointing out as proof of his incompetence. and before any of you hit me with the "oh it's not that deep 🙄" im gonna tell you right now that i dont care and im going to be mad about it anyway cuz its my party and i can post whatever i want.

ANYWAY!!

to continue my point, not only is it weird and infantilizing and demeaning and belittling to those of us who deal with literally any of the myriad of things going on with him that i’ve seen people point to as proof that he ‘needs to be fixed’ — memory lapses, time loss, dissociation, auditory hallucinations, disordered thought, just straight up being autistic, hyperfocus and/or complete lack of focus, panic attacks or meltdowns, i cannot overstate how many of the ‘weird’ things he does are just autistic traits so i’m gonna say it a second time for good measure — and those are all just things that i personally have in common with him (which is part of the reason i’m as mad about this as i am to make this post, but i digress).

to single out these things, all of which are completely reasonable for someone who is autistic, who is traumatized, who suffered through a prolonged period of forced confinement, and/or who has literal brain damage, and NONE of which are nearly as tragic and doomed as people are making them out to be, that’s all bad enough on its own!

but to point out these traits and then turn around and use them to color every single interaction he has with another character, every single thing he says, and tie it back to his traaaagic broken mind and how he’s clearly losing his grip on reality just feels… insanely othering in a way that’s really exhausting.

like, for fucks sake, a solid 80% of his character interactions could be lifted near verbatim from conversations i’ve had in real life with my friends, family, coworkers, you name it, all of which were friendly and usually in jest — hell, 9/10 times when i let out a random non sequitur or lose my train of thought or forget what i’m doing, nobody even bats a fucking eye! they sure as hell don't accuse whoever i’m talking to of abusing me because they expressed mild annoyance at my bad joke.

i’ve genuinely seen someone get all worked up and construe his one interaction with sombra where he comments on her tendency to disappear and reappear in odd places as evidence that he’s got dementia and is slipping away from reality altogether… and not, yknow, a nod to her fucking cloaking ability and translocator and the fact that she uses both very frequently just for the hell of it. that one still fucking baffles me i'm sorry. if i hadn't seen it with my own eyes i'd honestly think it was a joke. like. cmon now

another thing that makes it even worse is that most of this is also just…. not even grounded in canon. if this was the way blizz was writing him, it’d be one thing. it would still be shitty and ableist, but blizzard handling their oooh spooky scary mentally ill character badly is about as surprising as the sun rising every morning. i can't say i wouldn't still be upset to see people continuing to perpetuate it, but i wouldn't be AS mad, i guess.

but SO. MANY. of the popular takes on his character are either never concretely stated or outright contradicted by his ingame dialogue and interactions and it drives me insane!!! idk WHERE y’all are getting this shit but so many people are reaching so hard to make him a tragic sad uwuwuw glass bones and paper skin pathetic little meow meow that they’re going out of their way to misinterpret source material so they can shout from the rooftops about how sad and pathetic and unaware they think people like me must be.

i keep seeing people talk about how he probably has no idea that talon is a terrorist group, that he doesn’t know what talon IS, or that he doesn’t even know that he WORKS for talon, and it’s starting to go from mildly annoying to infuriating. this shit has literally no basis in canon aside from conjecture based on the fact that he’s Known to be mentally ill!! i don't see even half as many people getting this all up in arms about widow, who we KNOW FOR A FACT was literally kidnapped and experimented on and brainwashed by talon. like. that's her WHOLE THING. meanwhile sig literally just works there and people are clamoring for ovw to come """""rescue"""""" him as if hes like, a lab animal or something instead of a grown man who happens to not be particularly bothered by the fact that he works for talon.

this is something that's addressed in game MULTIPLE TIMES - he’d far prefer to watch an ant crawl on the ceiling than listen to s76 trying to ‘talk sense into him’, not because he can’t hear him or anything either, it’s pretty clear from his tone and cadence that he’s actively choosing to ignore him. when baptiste points out the fact that he’s fully capable of leaving talon if he wanted to, he doesn’t deny it or act confused or like that’s a strange thing to say, he just seems a little bemused that someone would think he WANTS to leave. yeah, he sure could— but why would he bother?

he's not "totally unaware of what he's doing" in the fucking slightest - hell, i'd argue that his new map-exclusive lines and interactions prove that he's MORE grounded now than he was in ovw1. yes, he gets a little confused on occasion when he can't quite remember the last time he's been somewhere. (memory lapses are just kind of like that. i had several while writing this post, in fact! it just fucking happens sometimes. it's really not the end of the world. frustrating, yeah, but i promise you we can manage just fine).

i guess the question i'm asking is: is it really all that difficult for to fathom that he might just... WANT to be there? that he might just straight up not care what talon is up to, so long as he's able to keep doing his research as he sees fit??

and for the record, before anyone takes this and runs with it and we lose the plot of this post, i am NOT SAYING that the very idea of wanting him to leave talon is #problematic or anything. i dont care, really. do whatever you want. what i do care about is just like.... being mindful about what we're saying and WHY we're saying it. it's reaching a point where people are somehow managing to look at the ass backwards already ableist as hell decisions blizz has already made with him and decided "hey, i bet i can find a way to make that even worse!"

Blaze Road / Frank Prigent Available in art print, 60x90cm, limited edition of five.

Yeah, about that plate...

I think everybody has felt the punch of feels because of Bruno’s plate drawn on his little table, but there’s something that caught my attention since the first time I watched the movie and I wanted to talk about it: where he drew that plate.

Bruno’s table is a direct extension of the family table, it’s in perfect alignment with the one his family uses every day. And he didn’t draw the plate beside that crack in the wall to actually see his family while he’s pretending to be sat with them. He didn’t draw it at the head of his table to face the wall either, which would be like sitting right behind Alma. He drew it on the right side.

Except Alma, who always occupies the head of the table (obviously), there’s no way to know if they always sit in the same order or not. We only see them eat two times: breakfast in the morning of the fateful day and dinner with the Guzmán for Isabela’s proposal, and both times the table has a different arrangement. But I think each Madrigal has indeed a specific seat assigned, and their usual order is this:

Antonio, Dolores, Isabela, Camilo and Agustín at Alma’s right, and Félix, Pepa, Mirabel, Luisa and Julieta at Alma’s left (let’s remember that in this moment abuela had moved Mirabel to her side, but she was originally sat between Pepa and Luisa).

During the dinner, there’re guests there occupying two extra seats and altering the order, but each movement can be easily tracked.

Mariano and his mother have to sit next to Alma, and Isa has to sit beside Mariano, so Pepa and Félix move to the opposite side of the table. Julieta, as the bride’s mother, sits in front of Mariano’s mother too. Luisa could’ve kept her seat, but Mirabel has to sit in front of Dolores to keep an eye (or both eyes) on her, and Agustín sits beside Mirabel for the same reason. But everything else is more or less the same. Camilo, Dolores and Antonio remain in their side of the table, as well as Mirabel; in fact, Camilo is occupying his seat, he hasn’t moved at all.

During the breakfast outside (and during dinner), they’re not using their plates, but we can see Mirabel setting the table with them at the beginning of the movie, right before the Family Madrigal song. And she’s arranging the plates in the same order. More important: in this moment, after the disastrous dinner, we can see the plates arranged in that same order again.

Those plates are there for no reason, the Guzmán just left, everything’s a chaos, it has no sense that the family has removed the dinner to set those plates and leave them there. This is just a narrative device, because Mirabel is peeking through the crack from Bruno’s hideout, she’s seeing what he sees, and she’s seeing a table in which every member of the family has a specific seat with their name.

And what’s Bruno’s seat?

At Alma’s right. He has always sat at his mother’s right, and he has kept doing it even from inside the walls, because that’s his seat (probably the one Antonio occupies now).

To be honest, it’s not just about Bruno’s plate. What I love the most about this thing is all those combos with the rest of the family: if that was Bruno’s seat, that would mean Dolores used to sit right beside his tío; Dolores and Isa always sit together; Antonio always sit beside his big sis; Pepa and Félix always sit side by side, and Julieta and Agustín always sit face to face; Mirabel always sit beside Luisa. Agustín was the one who took care of Camilo when they were eating, and Pepa was the one who took care of Mirabel. And I think every single one of these combinations, as a reflection of their family life, is just wonderful.