#vernalloy

YES okay here's a bunch I've watched and liked in the last few months:

nosferatu 1922; german, silent, black and white. every time I go to watch a silent movie I think "ugghhh this is gonna be boring" and then it rules. if you are a dracula enjoyer, this is actually a fairly faithful adaptation up until It's Not, and there are some interesting visuals and story choices to ponder.

let the right one in 2008; swedish. surprisingly tender romance between two lonely tweens intercut with lots and lots of violent murders in austere snowy winter settings.

a girl walks home alone at night 2014; iranian, black and white. less driven by plot, more by visuals and style. very slow, thoughtful, and emotionally evocative film occasionally broken up with scenes like "guy takes ecstasy at a costume party while dressed as dracula and can't get himself home so a vampire takes him back to her place by pushing him on her skateboard that she recently stole from a child." also there's a cat.

bit 2019; american. kind of falls apart in the third act but it's fun enough that I'd say it's worth a watch anyway. trans girl graduates high school, moves to LA, and falls in with a lesbian vampire girl gang, ft. an extremely good sequence set to "rasputin."

thirst 2009; korean. haven't actually finished watching this one, but it is absolutely balls to the walls. so much sex and blood and bloody sex and sexy blood and catholicism. catholic priest volunteers to participate in medical trials and gets infected with a rare blood disease, and, whoops, now he's a really horny but tortured vampire. tense as all hell, based on the french novel therese raquin.

renfield 2023; american. is this a good movie? no. is it extremely fun? yes. very much a popcorn movie with gore so excessive that it crosses beyond the pale and becomes slapstick. this renfield is a bit of a renfield / jonathan harker hybrid character, suffering under the same old vampiric abusive boss over 100 years, and he's starting to want to try and break free of dracula's thrall.

byzantium 2012; british. gorgeous visuals, lovely performances, imo the script could have used another draft but it's very watchable. two vampire women bounce around england trying to avoid capture by the vampire authorities, but the younger of the two is getting fed up with having to lie about herself to everyone and move constantly. interesting one to compare to bit, they're doing a lot of similar thing wrt gender dynamics and vampirism as power.

JUSTIFICATION:

"Everyone thought she was a girl when we first saw her. She’s in a surprisingly tender situation with a lesbian. Her arc will likely revolve around becoming her own person, which was stolen from her due to her girlfriend who is implied to have lobotomized her." - @vernalloy

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ok so heres the thing. voirreys husband/gingers dad, joseph (name intentional) (voirrey IS a variation of mary but specifically its from the 13 year old girl involved in this) is like. Absent. Hes for all legal and technical purposes still involved with the family but fundamentally he was not raising those kids. Hes in the pictures but he does not know half their names. Hes got problems but idgaf about him this is voirrey time. SO: voirrey rosa, basically from the start of it all, was raising seven fucking children more or less on her own while also having a Job and Mental Illness and Loathing This Whole Motherhood Thing. this also means she is the primary influence on her childrens life, not that joe would really help but its still worth noting

[ID: Marker drawings of a moth-bunny in the style of My Melody. There are drawings of her waving, resting, and playing guitar. End ID.]

My Melodru

HI HELLO so i typed out most of an answer to this like a month or two ago then it got deletd and this languished in my askbox since so let me try again and emphasize the stuff that i think is the most important when i'm making my furry aus

biological interest and diversity

i think the biggest thing that gets my goat when i look at other furry aus is the lack of animal diversity. and, i need to be clear here, this is ENTIRELY a personal gripe/preference- it just kind of annoys me when i see furry aus that are entirely familiar, domestic mammals, yknow? where at least half the characters are dogs and cats. like, no shade to people who do or like those, i cannot emphasize enough how this is a meaningless Me pet peeve, i just really really think furries in general should broaden their horizons and try out more out-there species. and i'm not perfect in this way either: there's an OBVIOUS bird bias in my choices, and a MASSIVE tetrapod bias: almost none of my furries are fish or inverts, despite fish species outnumbering tetrapod species, and invertebrate species outnumbering vertebrate species by massive orders of magnitude.

i think my point is: try getting more unconventional with it. i also really like including extinct species because that's just my jam. pterosaurs, man, consider them

i often will do wikipedia trawls for animals when choosing species for furry aus- i'll have a general idea of the animal i want (ie, horsefly, wallaby) and i'll get to peruse the various families/genera/species under those more general umbrellas til i find something that works either visually or symbolically better than the others.

i'll also say that there will often be a very obvious choice for characters- like, spider for annabelle cane, or something. i encourage, in cases like this, don't go with the obvious choice, see if you can find something more subtly meaningful and interesting. (see: a hummingbird for annabelle cane. they steal spiderwebs in order to weave their nests, but can become trapped in the webs instead and get eaten by the spider.) it can also help to actively try and choose animals- like inverts and fish- that don't usually immediately jump to mind for you.

i also highly recommend getting Specific with it. always do your best to choose a Species of animal, rather than a genus, family, or more general group. it's always more interesting.

2. The Process

so very first thing when i'm choosing a species for a characetr is ENTIRELY vibes-based. like what does this character Feel like. sometimes this step is skipped, if there's like, an obvious symbolic or mentioned-in-canon choice that would make more sense (see: condor callum crown). but most of the time for me: Vibes. i'm just gonna list a few of my dialtown furries and my thought process (as i remember it, may be inaccurate) for how i chose them? hopefully that helps a bit.

oliver, to me, feels like a soft and fluffy mammal. he's outgoing, friendly, kind of an in-your-face personality. just feels like a mammal to me! but he's also a complete freak, so i was like, oh, he has to be a marsupial or a monotreme. the Strange mammals! i decided that, from there, he feels most like one of the megapodes (kangaroos, wallabys, those sorts) to me. kangaroos look too scary and imposing, with a frightening Buff Man kind of vibe, so those were out. went to wallabies, because they get that cute fluffy mammal vibe that i wanted for him. i eventually settled on the yellow-footed rock wallaby: they have bold, stripey patterning that i think fits his vibe, and rufous coloration on their limbs that meshes well with his red color palette.

or let's take randy. vibes here were some sort of Trash Animal, those sorts like pigeons and raccoons that adapt well to living in human garbage and most people regard as a nuisance. randy also feels very Birdy to me. from there, i think it was fig who suggested an animal that preys upon swans, and that's really funny. i eventually landed on gulls: some larger gulls will hunt swan chicks, and gulls are a perfect epitome of Trash Animal. i went with the great black-backed gull in particular- randy jade being the biggest, most imposing, apex-predator ass gull is really funny to me. also: i like great black-backed gulls.

karen! she was pretty straightforward for me: karen very much felt like a bug. some sort of insect or arachnid was my starting point: i felt that the Bug Vibes fit her well and that the segmented leg look would work well for her visually. flies are a group i like a lot and felt fit well here- overlooked, often seen as generic or boring (but are actually really cool), and also i like them. and, like, i couldn't resist the pull of Oh She Should Be A Horsefly. She Needs To Be A Horsefly. much like for oliver, the species was chosen for visual reasons: needed to be brown or tan to complement her color scheme, and i didn't want it to be one of the like, larger/scarier horseflies. band-eyed brown horseflies fit her color scheme and are pretty to look at.

3. uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Yay, thank you so much!! :D

Mouthwashing!Vi:

23. What emotion is the hardest for your OC to process? How about to express?

Great question for Vi, because they have a very hard time expressing any feeling at all. They do feel a lot all the time... But they barely show it and fear they might be seen as someone too cold. Or they have the exact opposite problem, when they express their feelings way too much and others don't know how to react.

But about "to process"? I would say boredom. Because this makes them overthink, so they mistake it as sadness.

25. What is your favorite thing about your OC?

Oh Vi is very personal to me. In fact, the answer for both Vis would be the same: they were not easy to love to me. Because they were so... Similar to me (duh) and it felt weird. But funny enough, I started liking myself more now because I'm similar to Vi.

And to answer more about MW!Vi: I really like some details of their design, like their pink hair, dog shirt and tattoos :>

Scott Pilgrim!Vi:

1. What memory would your OC rather just to forget?

Their memories are already pretty confusing because of the Glow, to start - it's lowkey a joke but also true. After knowing about this Gideon's power, they start doubting everything that ever happened to them.

But the good part is that there are many memories they would like to forget. A more recent one would be the big fight she had with Ramona (I'm being vague because I think I never talked about this part of the plot before).

11. What is your OC's weapon of choice? Have they actually used it?

A) Realistic Headcanon:

Hollis' gambling addition that Raz sparked was not something that had just manifested completely out of the blue. Hollis struggled with an organically formed gambling addition during her med school years, though instead of a glitz and glam casino she was just spending too much money on lottery tickets because she was struggling financially.

B) Funny Headcanon:

Hollis' vacation is going to go super well and she's going to be so relaxed and when she gets back to work there will immedaitely be an explosion she has to deal with right now immediately.

C) Angsty Headcanon:

Despite Truman bringing Hollis into the Psychonauts as a genuine way to connect with her and bring her to a place she could hone her psychic skills, there were a fair share of lower ranked employees who had heard what happened and stayed away from Hollis for a while because of it, which was not great for the ol self esteem.

D) Disregarding Canon Headcanon: