All Fear Of An End

My stepmother did NOT like the way her Libertarian Viking Neighbor framed pregnancy as the fetus "attacking the woman". She incredulously told him this was extremely disrespectful to expectant mothers to portray pregnancy as so violent and negative.

Libertarian Viking Neighbor's response was that people consensually hurt each other all the time, and "there's like a whole community about that, with the acronym the one that starts with a B" And his reasoning was that if the mother was consenting to bring attacked by the baby, it in fact wasn't violent and negative because there was consent.

I need you to understand that I have, like, an anthropological level fascination with this comic. From the perspective of someone who is also a comic artist and writer, two things delight me about it:

the fact that I understand completely how an artist gets from “the fans can have a little hint of skirted asscheek” to “the pussy is completely out on center page” over the course of 18 years; and

the way in which the pussy being out is treated by the characters and diegesis as being utterly unremarkable.

In chapter 299, the main character unleashes a special attack (???), and immediately after, her boobs DEFLATE BACK DOWN TO A REASONABLE SIZE

And then later in the match, she has to use another special move

And now she's completely flat-chested

steve rogers, natalia romanoff, james barnes, tony stark, pepper potts, and bruce banner are people from radically different walks of life, and should therefore have extremely different styles of communication, despite all off them nominally speaking the same language (english). they should have different senses of humor, different senses of where the boundary lies between irreverence and insult, different boundaries, different sore spots, different goals as well as different methods of communication.

the fact that all these characters banter the exact same way, i.e how joss whedon thinks is funny, is incredibly shallow and grating.

steve grew up as a challenging little shit, who was also very small and poor, and he did it in 1920′s-30′s brooklyn new york. he regularly got his ass kicked. tony stark is also challenging and provocative, he’s a shit stirrer, but he grew up rich as all fuck. no one was beating the piss out of him in a dirty alley. tony has grown up surrounded by sycophants, rich enough to get away with whatever amount of bad behavior he wants to pull; steve grew up poor and disabled in a society that openly advocated for the death and degradation of the weak and unfit. why the fuck would they enter a conversation the same way? why would they deliver a snappy retort the same way? natasha romanoff is a spy, she’s manipulative, she’s always watching to see how a joke lands, she’s always conscientiously tuning herself this way and that to get results. she doesn’t have the luxury of casual defiance, or unthinking obnoxiousness, or even standing by her principles and pissing off someone she hates. again, why would she be tossing off little asides the same as tony, or even the same as steve?

the princess bride is sincere, and the characters still banter in their own voices. fezzik is cautious and methodical, inigo is weary and incredulous, vizzini is desperate to impress everyone with his own intelligence and in so doing often sounds like a complete twerp, buttercup is so incredibly pissed off she doesn’t have any brain cells to spare for joking around, and westley is here to ruin everyone’s day. and it works! the characters have great banter because they’re striking sparks off each other, not meshing like identical cogs in a machine.

Why would a character who has never seen the sea describe someone's eyes as "ocean blue"? Would the first thought of a desert-dwelling character be that a sudden event is "like a lightning strike"? How does someone in an nation that doesn't HAVE vanilla or cinnamon know what they smell like to describe a person as smelling that way? Why is your remote-village yokel able to describe with industry-accurate terminology everything from architecture to clothing, plant life, warfighting technology? (This is the inverse of your mega-competent military hero calling their rifle 'the gun' inside their own head.)

In part this stems from lack of awareness of clichés, but I think it's also a lack of care for who the characters are and where they come from. Character voice can be really hard to pin down in any sense, not just humour. An effective way to differentiate them is to have them think and view the world differently not just in broad themes and personality traits by in the details they notice, prioritise, and connect with.

Rough Indonesian Fossil Coral – Indonesia

STOP IT’S BEEN MONTHS. MONTHS!

The Two of Cups

Upright: unity, partnership, attraction, connection, close bonds, mutual respect, love