fandoms & randoms

req'd by @warriorofthegods

this does encompass much of life

but she’s already dressed again, after peeling off the skin that would previously have been under that armor

the only logical conclusion here is that she wanted a picture of herself at her SHINIEST and PRETTIEST and hurried to get dressed once enough of her fresh and shiny new skin was uncovered

I bet her bestie took the picture and has been eagerly waiting with the magical fantasy camera for like, hours

okok I've posted about this before but I'm watching animation content on youtube again while getting work done and by GOD I WANNA TALK ABOUT THIS AGAIN

There's a specific concept I want to consume as content/art so badly but it came to me in a stupid dream. BUT. Sometimes, a dream means I DID see a hint of it somewhere and my brain accidentally plagiarized it which provides me with the teensiest sliver of hope that exists already and I don't have to work on it

It's a kind of a reverse isekai, right? But instead of an instant portal, it's time passing. And what I mean by that is that it's a Sun Wukong story, but the branch off is that after the main events of Journey to the West he gets either water temple'd or trapped in magic sleep again, not for a few hundred years but a few THOUSAND.

He wakes up to an incredibly far-flung China that remembers his myth and only his myth.

The art style that operated in this dream was sort of. Textured but 3D? Think nimona's buttery lighting but instead of emphasis on light and shapes to operate with the stained glass and solarpunk-medieval style the models are textured in a way that just invokes traditional brushwork and colour bleed even in a more cyberpunkish setting. Think like. Whenever there's a night scene the astigmatism glow of lamplight bleeds a little, like ink feathering on paper.

It's a little bit of a Steve Rogers treatment in a way, the world has moved past him, but also completely mythologized and capitalized on that mythology. Rather than treat that man out of time narrative as an aspect of backstory, it's the MAIN character narrative, because this ISN'T a world that needs him. This world is doing pretty okay, actually.

This a story about him.

Not about his feats or how cool his powers are or the 8 gajillion things the magic staff can do but just.

How ya doing, bud?

From the vaguely coherent notes that I could garner from my sleepily typed googledoc, it seems that I wanted this to be a love letter of sorts to the Asian diaspora experience? A specific sort of loneliness? Where the world you experience has a sort of disconnect in that it makes plain you belong there but you also don't, you never have, and there's no way to go "back" but going forward feels like groping blind through the muck. How much right to the past does he feel like he has? When it's been built into something he can't recognize and is clearly important to other people.

I want the pickup of the plot to gain him friends, family, maybe even a conflict or two but the stakes should never elevate vis a vis physical enemies to battle.

It'd be about 2/3 of this sort of narrative drawn story and the other 1/3 just hogwild worldbuilding and design

I've looked at a few other journey to the west adaptations but they mainly just use him as a funky lil action figure hero that's there to be cool as hell and save the day

I've definitely read american born chinese and, looking into my notes, it seems I want to hit that energy but from the reverse

If I remember correctly, Gene Luen Yang's Sun Wukong narrative operates in tandem with the erasure of identity in order to achieve things, whether that be acceptance or greatness or just to be taken seriously , the parts of yourself you're willing to hack off of yourself in order to 'fit'.

As far as I can tell from my fucked up sleep deprived notes, the timeskip narrative is meant to serve as how quickly culture shifts when you're away from it, that if you lived your life in the dragon's palace, the world you try to return to is now alien. Reaching for the limbs you hacked off of yourself only to find they were propagules and you don't recognize what's bloomed in your absence.

Interacting with people outside of my ethnic culture can be awkward but interacting with my cousins, people my age who just came from China is utterly baffling. The connection was severed when I immigrated as a child and it never quite grows back right.

A lot of us lose our ability to communicate using a Chinese language, if we ever had it at all. We learned language from our parents so our vocabulary ossifies and stagnates, we don't speak like people our age. A lot of us never learned to read and write and any effort to do so is magnified tenfold by the difficulties in language acquisition age brings.

I think the emphasis in the story would be the can't-go-backness of it all. The recognition-but-not-quite-sameness.

I think the over sanitation of the internet is doing similar things to people's psyche.