Character Misses Their Shot And The Villain Goes "ha! You Missed." And The Main Character Goes "did I?"

Have you read/watched Nimona? If so, thoughts?

The kind of emotional gutpunch I can't bear to watch without ample preparation. The first ten minutes are the hard part for me - it's always a wrench for me to get through a "good-hearted character is cruelly framed" plotline, so I really appreciate how quickly they get that out of the way and how Nimona immediately brightens the mood when she shows up.

Overall, truly one of the best examples of how a creator can use their personal grief and rage at injustice as a medium to sculpt a story. The narrative manages to feel deeply authentic to a real emotional journey while still feeling completely contained within the story. I'm not entirely sure how to put this, but sometimes when a writer gets allegorical with their experiences, it can feel like the story gets put on pause so the characters can turn out to the audience and speak in the author's voice about their thoughts on the subject - a pretty clumsy way to communicate a message. Nimona does not do that. Instead, the many real-world parallels to bigotry, propaganda, queerphobia, church corruption, xenophobia, and regressive policies driven by terror of change feel like they arise naturally from the setting within the story rather than being imposed on it from the outside, which is extremely quality writing and characterization. Nimona's story is so clearly informed by ND Stevenson's life and gender journey, but Nimona herself feels like her own person who is messy and grieving and putting up walls and self-destructing and still - still - a fundamentally joyful, gleeful person who absolutely loves being alive when she isn't being brutally beaten down for the crime of existing inconveniently.

Also, it's a comparatively minor thing, but I really like how, like with She-Ra, Nimona creates a world that is passively non-homophobic, with gay relationships front and center and evidently regarded as completely fine and not worth commenting on - which, to me at least, made both stories remarkably relaxing and comfortable to immerse myself in, because I wasn't being randomly jumpscared by reminders of real-world hate - but it still uses allegory to address the real-world roots of homophobia in the form of xenophobia, correlated injustices like classism, and the monster-ification of The Other. So it can clearly state "hating people for how they exist is Always Fucked And Wrong" without having to dunk the queer audience in the icebath of "hey remember how people in the real world think you personally should be dead?" Again, not sure I'm phrasing this super clearly, but it's a balance ND Stevenson consistently strikes with his work, and I really love how he does it.

Animation's gorgeous, voicework is consistently top-shelf, love the aesthetic of Cyberpunk Arthuriana. Wins across the board.

So during a PlayOn Tabletop live stream, someone asked if nids had toe beans. This lead to the cursed creation of Beans the Hormacat. And who else to own him, by everyone's favorite necron.

There will be more hijinks coming.

captain general kitten and magnus my beloveds

Artwork by Nataliya Mashinskaya

do you ever think about how chemos got blown up. fulgrim's home planet got blown up. the planet he grew up on, that he loved, that he brought back from the brink of collapse, that he had such high hopes for. his adoptive parents, who probably died before he ever saw the fruits of his labour, were buried there. every spouse and friend he'd ever had was buried there. the oceans couldn't support life. he wanted to fix that.

it doesn't exist anymore. it got blown up.

His father's last gift

F-femgrim..... Femgrim my beloved.......

not sure about skin color but try my best……

if it sucks hit da bricks <- litany against sunk cost

take it easy but take it <- litany against burnout/apathy cycle

fuck it we ball <- litany against perfectionism

now say something beautiful and true <- litany against irony poisoning

bi people i love you so fucking much