I Love It When A Piece Of Media Is Like: Is There Anything More Painful Than Knowing Your Sibling? Is

Me whenever I post anything anywhere (unless I forget then I remember it after five billion business years)

me: I write for myself, not validation

also me after posting a fic *refreshes ao3 every five minutes*

(two things can be true)

pray

Prompt

On a mysterious quest, two friends are cursed by a witch that if they ever fall in love, they’ll lose themselves. Still, the friends continue the quest together, risking their lives for each other multiple times, sharing secrets, and growing closer as they both deny anything will change. They think they’ve beat the witch’s curse as they complete the quest, only to realize that the final task requires them to give up either their memories of their lives or their bond with each other.

- Lynn

Request for “romance doomed to fail” by megsdellenbaugh

The 9th Vault’s premier companions.  The Lady Fate, Eclipse, Rose and Royal

And some casual clothes and expressions for my bard, Rose. 

My Tiefling bard has lived many lives and had many names.  For a while, he was Rose, the courtesan in the vault, now, he is Quinn, the actor in the traveling troupe, tomorrow, he may be someone else entirely.  He never holds to tight to the lives he has lived so that he won’t miss them when they are gone.

Some info about these guys under the cut

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13th Hour

This one truly took so long to paint ;_; I've always loved paintings with lots of tiny hidden details but couldn't work on those very often because of my hand injury. But I decided to really indulge this time. Most of my paintings take 1-3 recording sessions but this one took 10 ahahaha

The character is Dante, a painter from my work in progress novel about artists titled 1000 Words Unframed. He's an eccentric one and likes to paint trompe l'oeil, aka illusions. Here he's painting a bunch of clocks onto his wall, but none of the clocks are accurate, some having 13 hours, one clock is a spiral, another is made of eyeballs lol. He is also a lover of cats, hence all the cat portraits and kitties hanging out. Here are some close ups of all the details!

Here's a timelapse of how I painted it. The bottles and table in the foreground started as 3D models in SketchUp. The rest is painted in Paint Tool SAI. The full HD image, 10 art videos, and PSD file will be DMed on Patreon.com/Yuumei on April 5th.

Recently, and partly for personal reasons, I've been thinking of Jo's grieving process after Beth's death in Little Women.

Namely the fact that just before Beth dies, Jo seems to have beautifully come to terms with the pending loss, but afterwards, she regresses into despair.

In Jo's poem My Beth, and in her conversation with Beth after the latter reads it, she says she realizes that she's not really losing Beth, because Beth's memory and influence will always be with her, making her a better person, and because she has faith that Beth will be watching over her in heaven. The last paragraphs of "The Valley of the Shadow" seem to set up Beth's death as sad, but not a soul-crushing tragedy, because the family has already done so much preliminary mourning, because they're relieved that her suffering is over, and because they have their precious memories of her and their religious faith to comfort them.

But then after Beth actually dies, Jo does fall into deep, soul-crushing grief and depression, which includes struggling with her religious faith, and it takes her a lot of work – through talks her parents, through her writing, and eventually by finding love with Friedrich – to finally emerge from the abyss.

I guess it shows that you're never really prepared for a loved one's death, even if you think you are.

But I suppose it's not just about Beth. It's that with Beth's death, all of the same-age companions Jo grew up with are gone. That's why the chapter of her depression is called "All Alone." Meg is married, Amy and Laurie are in Europe, and Jo may have lost Laurie's friendship (she hasn't, but she doesn't know that yet) since she rejected his marriage proposal. If they were still with her, then Beth's death might not have been so shattering. I suppose that's the book's essential, bittersweet message about growing up: siblings and friends drift apart as they all build their own separate lives (and as some die young, which was more common in the 1800s), but new relationships, i.e. spouses and children, fill the void.

(A slightly depressing message for those of us who genuinely don't want to get married or have children. As much as I like Friedrich, I almost would have liked to see an ending where Jo stays a "literary spinster," not because I think it would have been more feminist, but just because it would have shown her finding happiness with her surviving family and friends. It would emphasize that she doesn't "lose" them after all, and show that you don't need to "replace" those relationships with romance or else be lonely forever.)

But I don't think it's just about that either. Beth's death also leaves Jo without a fulfilling purpose in life. Since her writing career failed in New York after she gave up sensation stories, she made caring for Beth her life's purpose, so with Beth gone, she's aimless. She thinks she has no choice left but to "take Beth's place," as Beth urged her to do, and live a quiet, domestic life of keeping house for her parents. But while Jo does those household duties well for a while, and learns their value, she isn't content with them. It was a lovely life for Beth, but it isn't who Jo is. So beyond Jo's grief and loneliness, another cause of her depression is that she's unfulfilled. This explains why writing again, and finding literary success, is such an important part of her healing process, and why she finds her ultimate joy in the very active, un-quiet life of running a boarding school for boys.

For personal reasons, I've been feeling uneasy lately about Jo's backward swing from acceptance to depression between "The Valley of the Shadow" and "All Alone." It does feel slightly as if Alcott was saying "You may think you're ready to accept a loved one's passing, but when it actually happens it will break you." But it does help to remember that the situation is more complex than that.

@littlewomenpodcast, @thatscarletflycatcher, @fandomsarefamily1966

Caleb 100% does the silliest things to cheer up MC and has absolutely no shame about any of them

Even as a teenager, when other boys were too proud and insecure, he danced about the kitchen singing a song out of tune at the top of his lungs because his pipsqueak had a bad day at school

When MC was teased because she couldn't do makeup as a young teen, he practiced with her until she was good at it, letting himself be the guinea pig

He writes her notes and leave them around the house to cheer her up, usually with really bad little doodles that she doesn't have the heart to tell him are terrible (he knows, it's deliberate)

She fell in a puddle at the park just before her hs graduation and she was mortified because she put in such an effort to look good and now had to walk home covered in mud. Caleb doesn't hesitate and deliberately falls in afterwards so they're equally muddy together

He has a running joke, where he'd make more and more weird faces at her until she laughed - now, he only has to make one before she bursts out laughing no matter how down she is

Caleb's priority is always MC's wellbeing - he loves her so much, too much to bother about things like what people think of him when her opinion is all that matters 😭

I'm already dying, let's not risk it

Rewatching Arcane

Me whenever I post anything anywhere (unless I forget then I remember it after five billion business years)

me: I write for myself, not validation

also me after posting a fic *refreshes ao3 every five minutes*

(two things can be true)