i'm glad to have shared in your perils

This piece has been rotting in my art folder for months now and I finally figured out how I Wanted to color/render Dinraal.

When you post art on Tumblr, you tend to get the level of interaction you would expect from your follower count and the popularity/activity of a fandom. Things tend to level out and remain the same. My Les Mis art posts, for example, always tend to get abooout the same amount of notes every time — because it’s always a combination of my followers and people in the Les Mis fandom.

Posting on Tiktok or Instagram feels more like pulling a slot machine lever. 🤣Sometimes your post will get picked up by the algorithm and shown to everyone, including people who aren’t actively following you or actively engaged in your fandom. Other times the sites will arbitrarily decide your followers don’t want to see anything you post, and refuse to put it up in their feeds, so that you get basically nothing.

I have over 1000 followers on Instagram and regularly struggle to get more than 10 likes. On Tumblr, the amount of notes I get on a post actually IS correlated to my follower count, for better and for worse 😂. I rarely get more than I’d expect, but I also rarely get less.

Art getting popular on tumblr is also slightly more of a “meritocracy?” If something gets popular on Tumblr, it’s because a lot of people shared it; if something gets popular on tiktok/Instagram, it’s because something about the SEO tag combination arbitrarily made the algorithm favor it.

While they chose humanity, especially Crowley, never should we doubt how much he loves and cares for Aziraphale. As our favorite angel said, this is bigger than them, it's about humanity, free will, choices. Crowley wanted to give humans free will doesn't mean he doesn't care for Aziraphale or that he just didn't chose him.

They both chose humanity because it is something they have cared for and protected their entire lives. They love humanity, they think humans, small and silly and predictable humans, deserve a real chance to be happy, without anyone interfering. And that's beautiful. And sad. It's one of the thing that bring thel together and while both of them show at differnet times how much they love and want each other, they both decided that we were worth the sacrifice. Because it's a decision bigger that them, their only chance of making things right, and help the ones they've always protected.

companion piece to my earlier Crowley portrait 🥲