Internet Tourist

Griffin McElroy fucking loves his family to death. He knows who they are and he loves them. And so much of TAZ was him setting up a home run that he knew he could trust his people would nail every single time. He knew that Magnus would make friends with the voidfish. He knew it was going to be Magnus, because he knows his brother Travis. There wasn’t any planning or scripting or secret communication needed because he already knew how Travis was going to treat things, because he loves his brother.

He kept setting Merle up for situations where humility and kindness were put in juxtaposition with prideful, know-it-alls, snobs, and people who believe themselves above it all. It was present in Petals to the Metal, and it was present in the star blaster arc.

He knew that Justin is a grumpy fellow who at the end of the day cannot help but be gregarious and root for everybody, cannot help but want to cheer people on and wants them to be BETTER.

All of the most heartfelt moments in TAZ happened with such ease because they didn’t need to be scripted or coordinated, because to quote Griffin as Istus, he already knew they were “going to be amazing.”

"Found anyone?" said Vimes.

"Oh, sarge..."

"Yes?"

"Oh, sarge...sarge..." Tears were running down the lance-constable's face.

Vimes reached out and steadied himself. Sam felt as though there were no bones left in his body. He was trembling.

"There's a woman in the last cell, and she...sarge...oh, sarge..."

"Try taking deep breaths," said Vimes. "Not that this air is fit to breathe."

"And there's a room right at the end, sarge...oh, sarge...Nancyball fainted again, sarge..."

"You didn't," said Vimes, patting him gently on the back.

"But there's –"

"Let's rescue what we can, shall we, lad?"

"But we were on the hurry-up wagon, sarge!"

"What?" said Vimes, and then it dawned. Oh yes...

"But we didn't hand anyone over, lad," he said. "Remember?"

"But I've been on it before, sarge! All the lads have! We just handed people over and went back to the Watch House for cocoa, sarge!"

"Well, you'd had orders..." said Vimes, for what good that did.

"We didn't know!"

Not exactly, thought Vimes. We didn't ask. We just shut out minds to it. People went in through the front door and some of the poor devils came out through the secret door, not always in one box.

They hadn't measured up.

Nor did we.

vetinari who, after spending the entire book concealing himself in the scenery by forgoing the traditional but impractical black and camouflaging himself in greys and greens, who definitely used that unorthodox stealth to get INTO the palace, enters that ballroom in the very black assassin garb he kept on saying he wouldn't want to be caught dead in, literally. who enters that room with intent to kill a tyrant in the bright light, where everyone can see it. who, when asked who sent him, says "i come from the city".

after he did the deed, lady meserole and her allies covered it up, and the common people never get to know how winder died. getting him into that room required the whole of ankh-morpork's upper class to strategically look away at the right moment. in particular it is ankh-morpork's rising bourgeoisie, not the old nobility, who does all the backroom dealing to make the assassination possible. enterprising minds, merchants and guild leaders, proto-capitalists even, got rid of an inconvenient ruler to enthrone (what they thought was) their pet candidate, someone who would help businesspeople do business.

They would build a new machine standing next to HEX and HEX would be... not jealous, of course, why would you think a machine would be jealous? But still HEX would randomly start responding to someone who would spend more time with that new machine.

I'm 100% positive that Dibbler would be mass-printing generated bad romance novels and selling them for profit. All of them would have titles like "A Necklace of Pearls and Flowers" or "A Menace of Dragons and Swords", depending on the audience.

People would buy dis-organisers with new features and the imps would give VASTLY inaccurate answers ("No, dragons don't breathe fire, this is a myth, you are safe!") that would put them in danger - and yet would still refuse to get rid of them. (Maybe Dibbler would sell those advanced dis-organisers, too, sounds like something for him.)

The Watch would have their hands full saving people from said danger. Vimes would never trust this new invention and would get extremely angry at anyone suggesting he bought one, too.

Dwarves would be very anxious because, as our dear Blackboard Monitor already knows, Words Are Important. And if those words come from gods know where, that's really bad. I can actually see the plot where they can actually team up with Blackboard Monitor to destroy those "machine" words at the end.

The CMC is wrong but I can’t be arsed to fix that at 2am. It’s supposed to be 7cmc.

Anyways…

They rise heads up, heads up high!

I wanted the birds to look like they were actually in the space so first thing after doing the draft was to do a lighting study

after that I covered the walls in letters in lieu of a projector/vr headset bc i have neither of those :) Then i take a picture of the section of wall and superimpose the lineart over top of it so I can pencil in the lines

et voila

The full saga of Margie and the Nuns (so far). Realised I never compiled these in one place.! Also, bonus Margies!

I've been looking for a fun/quick little animation sideproject to flex my frame-by-frame muscles, so introducing Margie! A cat-goose dragon based on this little fella from this medieval manuscript

Then about a week into their journey like

Legolas: *in Elvish, for approximately the 20th time* ugh fucking hobbits, so annoying

Frodo: *also in Elvish, deadpan* yeah we’re the worst

Legolas:

Legolas: ugh fucking hobbits

Merry: Frodo what’d he say

Frodo: I’m not sure he speaks a weird dialect but I think he’s insulting us. I should tell him I can understand Elvish

Merry: I mean you could do that but consider

Merry: you can only tell him ONCE

Legolas: umm well your accent is horrible

Aragorn: *hollering from a distance* HIS ACCENT IS BETTER THAN YOURS LEGOLAS YOU SILVAN HICK

Legolas: y’alld’ve’ff’ve

Frodo: Good morrow to thee, frend. I hope we twain shalle bee moste excellente companions.

Legolas: Wots that mate? ‘Ere, you avin’ a giggle? Fookin’ ‘obbits, I sware.

english would probably have changed less since Chaucer’s time, if a lot of our cultural leaders from the thirteenth century were still alive and running things.

they’ve had like. seven generations since the sun happened, max. frodo’s books are old to him, but outside any very old poetry copied down exactly, the dialect represented in them isn’t likely to be older than the Second Age, wherein Aragorn’s foster-father Elrond started out as a very young adult and grew into himself, and Legolas’ father was born.

so like, three to six thousand years old, maybe, which is probably a drop in the bucket of Elvish history judging by all the ethnic differentiation that had time to develop before Ungoliant came along, even if we can’t really tell because there weren’t years to count, before the Trees were destroyed.

plus a lot of Bilbo’s materials were probably directly from Elrond, whose library dates largely from the Third Age, probably, because he didn’t establish Imladris until after the Last Alliance. and Elrond isn’t the type to intentionally help Bilbo learn the wrong dialect and sound sillier than can be helped, even if everyone was humoring him more than a little.

so depending on how much of a role Thranduil took in his upbringing (and Oropher in his), Legolas may have some weird stilted old-fashioned speaking tics in his Sindarin that reflect a more purely Doriathrin dialect rather than the Doriathrin-influenced Western Sindarin that became the most widely spoken Sindarin long before he was born, or he might have a School Voice from having been taught how to Speak Proper and then lapse into really obscure colloquial Avari dialect when he’s being casual. or both!

considering legolas’ moderately complicated political position, i expect he can code-switch.

…it’s also fairly likely considering the linguistic politics involved that Legolas is reasonably articulate in Sindarin, though with some level of accent, but knows approximately zero Quenya outside of loanwords into Sindarin, and even those he mostly didn’t learn as a kid.

which would be extra hilarious when he and gimli fetch up in Valinor in his little homemade skiff, if the first elves he meets have never been to Middle Earth and they’re just standing there on the beach reduced to miming about what is the short beard person, and who are you, and why.

Pippin, confused: Is he not speaking Elvish?

Frodo, sarcastically: I dunno, are you speaking Hobbit?

Boromir, who has been lowkey pissed-off at the Hobbits’ weird dialect this whole time: That’s what it sounds like to me.

Merry, who actually knows some shit about Hobbit background: We are actually speaking multiple variants of the Shire dialect of Westron, you ignorant fuck.

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