Nothin' Special

you have this mysterious fish that  no one really cared about, because everyone assumed they’d gone extinct with the dinosaurs. an interesting footnote, but one of many, many fossil species. 

and later the coelacanth gets some fame as a so-called “missing link” species, a theory which is now outdated (and not accurate for coelacanths) but was really influential at the time. because they have some weird biological quirks – bones in fins! – people were like “oh, they must be a missing link.” so the coelacanth was launched into some fame with the theory of evolution. it got brought up a lot. drawn in old textbooks as proof.

and then a fisherman finds a weird fish off the coast of south africa and calls a local fish expert who had let it be known she was interested in weird finds, and he brings her the (unfortunately badly rotted) corpse and she’s like “well, this is sure weird,” and sends off the bones to other experts, who start to quietly freak out, and rush to south africa, and rewards are offered for another one, any other one, and a few years later one is caught and frozen before rotting.

and it’s this incredible discovery, this extinct creature come to life (the prehistoric coelacanth lived in swamps and marshes in south america; these now are deep ocean fish in and around the indian ocean, but it’s still recognizably the same species)!

but it’s also blue.

not like, muddy blue, or tumblr-default-background blue.

Paper cutout animation test! Featuring my wip Moho rig.

I made a quick animation in Moho and then exported the individual frames and used a cricut to cut them out. Then, I did a "quick stop-motion test" on a makeshift light table because I am apparently insane.

(Adding a few sheets of vellum helped sell the look.)

The Moho animation took about 30 mins...filming the stop-motion shot also only took about 30 mins. (because it was only 2 seconds.)

But the printing, cutting, gluing, and other fabrication.....took days.

Armand was Andrei. Marius renamed him Amadeo, "beloved by God." Not because Marius saw himself as Amadeo's God, but to return to him the very little Marius knew of him, that Andrei (at the time) had a relationship with his God and to communicate that God's love for him was not to be proven through starvation & monkhood but through experience and love of life and what existence has to offer.

That's what Marius gifts to Amadeo.

To say otherwise is backwards thinking all over that stupid fucking painting donorship slander Rolin threw out there.

Marimand is not sunshine and rainbows but it's not where everything bad that has ever happened to Armand comes from, either. I encourage you to separate the show from the novels and think for yourself without the influence of others' perspectives.

If you want a dynamic where Armand is renamed for ownership, where his individuality, selfhood, and dignity are stripped from him, look no further than literally everything Santino inflicts. Allesandra, too, if you want some flavor.

The name Amadeo is beloved, a gift. "Armand" is given to him to force him into the identity of being God's warrior, God's executioner.

Marius does not do that.

Marius tried to set him free.