I'm Your Huckle Berry

For this Witch Hat Monday I drew Coco in a Starry Night Dress! It's a continuation of the Starry Night Hat I painted a while back :)

Time lapse below, the full hours long art videos, PSD file and HD image will be DMed on Patreon the 5th of each month :)

but halfway through he reveals that while researching he stumbled upon evidence that Light might be behind the Kira murders, and then spends like fourty minutes explaining the concept of a shinigami, an hour explaining how he thinks Light used one to commit murders, and then another hour explaining Light's ideology and why the concept of criminals being inherently evil is flawed

If watching this whole video hasn't changed your mind - made you *think* about the humanity of the people you are just callously sentencing to death - then I'm at a bit of a loss. But I do know one thing you don't:

My legal name.

That's right. Before I uploaded this video, I changed my legal name, and have encouraged those in my life to do so as well. Frankly, trying to decide what my new name would be probably pushed back this video's release like, a month.

(Aside: Actually it didn't but we can all just pretend it did, it's way more interesting than the minutiae of real issues that cropped up)

So. Is Light Yagami Kira? I can't say for sure. It turns out, accusing a public figure of serial murder comes with a lot of legal ramifications! You would think I'd have learned by now that talking about people has "potential consequences" like "being sued by extremely litigious individuals. "

I spent a long time thinking how to end this video. The only thing I came up with is that there's no way to judge a person by just a list of actions alone. And yes that includes Light, the wanker. Courts spend weeks and weeks trying to litigate criminal cases and they still get it wrong! So even though I think he may be the actual scum of the earth, I hope I'm wrong. I want to believe that, given the opportunity, he wouldn't take the ten seconds to write down my name and take my life with just a flick of his wrist.

*long beat*

But I still changed my name so don't even think about it you little sh-

It’s a parody - and I use that word very loosely, because there’s really nothing funny about it - of Les Miserables. It’s about a failed revolution, and a barricade, and the people who fought and died there for nothing. Nothing changes. Politics with a capital P goes on, and even the most pure and noble of intentions only becomes food for the pit of snakes who pull the strings. The powerful remain powerful, the powerless, despite their solidarity, their desperation, their violence, their hope, remain powerless. Their little lives don’t count at all. Things continue exactly as they always have, minus a few faces in the crowd.

It is also, I think, where we see Sam Vimes at his lowest. Sure, Thud! does similar things in stripping him down, but that is under an outside influence, and he has his family to think of. He has something to fight for.

In Night Watch, though, all of that is taken away. Sam Vimes, eternal cynic, for once has Cassandraic knowledge that his cynicism is absolutely founded. He knows how this will end, and there’s no Corporal Carrot to make the world magically better around him, no Sybil and Young Sam to push through for, no city to protect. The absolute best that he can expect is to succeed, and lose that family, that future, forever. The absolute worst? He dies. Everyone he cares about here dies. And it’s all in vain.

Sam Vimes is an alcoholic. It’s something that we tend to bring up when we’re talking about how amazing he is, how much he’s overcome, but gloss over otherwise. Which is a little sad, because it’s fundamental.

Sam Vimes faced this exact dragon, years ago. Sam Vimes saw there was no way to slay it. He saw the ants eating at the heart of every hope, every effort. He saw the first man he really knew as a good and kind and just - but never passive, never weak - man die, horribly, slain for no reason but petty grudge and Politics. He saw John Keel’s garden wither and die in its bed. He saw the hope of a better, brighter Ankh-Morpork squelched, and the sacrifice of a good man wasted. He saw the world, in all of its rotting, miserable, pestilent despair, spoiling every good thing that dared show its face, its only ordering principle the slow decay of entropy.

Young Sam Vimes had no anchor. Young Sam Vimes had nothing left to turn to but the bottom of a bottle and the smelliest part of an Ankh-Morpork gutter.

Sam Vimes, as of the events of Night Watch, is back there. Not only physically temporally displaced. He has nothing. There is no reason for him to stand up, to take on the role of John Keel, to take responsibility for the barricade, to try to bring Carcer back to justice. To fight the doomed fight. There is nothing between him and finding a quiet seat at the Broken Drum, ordering himself a pint, and giving up. There is nothing between him and despair.

But he gets up anyway. He intervenes anyway. He tries to help anyway, even when he can’t believe it will make any difference. And it doesn’t, in the end.

Except that people lived who, save for the actions of John Keel, would have died. Except it quite literally meant the world to them.

And that’s where the hope is hiding, in this hopeless, bleak, despair of a book. There is no glory. There is no revolution. There is no good thing that cannot be corrupted. There is no point. Except.

That’s why there are no monuments to the Glorious Heroes of Treacle Mine Road. In the grand scheme of things, nothing they did mattered. But they are remembered, because they need to be remembered. Because sometimes what we do does not matter.

Zaeth:

Me when I have tea to spill:

Me when a new fic hits:

Me defending my favs:

so they do things like making windshields that shatter into tiny dull fragments rather than huge sharp shards of glass. they keep its positive features (transparent, for example), but avoid characteristics which would be bad in the situations where a failure would occur (sharp edges).

some of this you can do by talking things through with your partner, getting a fair, looked-at-by-separate-lawyers-in-each-of-your-employ, thoughtful prenup, and considering your partner's handling of frustrations and disagreements.

other things you need to do by keeping up your own financial independence, arranging your life for resilience including preparing to handle the sudden absence of your partner (people not only betray and divorce but also die, get into car accidents, and get called away to help family or friends across the country), and being familiar with your locality's divorce laws.