A Simple Blog

you've seen the jokes. india is "dirty", indians are "everywhere", why don't they fix their own country. ok. let me tell you why, and what's happening right now while nobody's watching.

first, the history you skipped: britain ruled india for two centuries and drained it. economist utsa patnaik's research estimates around $45 trillion in today's money was taken. the india that got independence in 1947 was one of the poorest countries on earth. every "why is india like this" question starts there. you don't get to profit off a robbery and then mock the crime scene.

now, what's happening RIGHT NOW:

in may the question paper for NEET leaked. that's the national medical entrance exam. over 2.2 million students took it. cancelled. years of studying, families' savings poured into coaching, gone overnight because someone sold the paper. students died by suicide after. these were kids who wanted to be doctors.

and out of that came a protest movement. a gen z group called the cockroach janta party, started by a 30 year old named abhijeet dipke, got 22 million instagram followers within DAYS. they've been doing a sit-in at jantar mantar in delhi demanding education minister dharmendra pradhan resign.

and then there's sonam wangchuk. if you've watched 3 idiots, he's the real engineer the character was based on. built solar schools in ladakh. invented ice stupas so himalayan villages have water. spent his whole life on education. he's 59 and he's been on hunger strike for 17+ days now. reporters went to see him this week and he was too weak to talk. and the troll armies are calling him "anti national" and "foreign funded". a man starving himself for other people's children. that's the thing here, anyone who asks a question is suddenly a traitor.

it's not one incident, it's everywhere you look:

• infrastructure worth thousands of crores failing within months of the ribbon cutting. tunnels collapsing in regions where heavy rain is a guarantee, not a surprise.

• youth unemployment near 10% for ages 15 to 29, 13.6% in cities. in a country of 1.42 billion where more than half the population is young.

• only about the top 3% of indians earn above 10 lakh a year. meanwhile billionaire wealth keeps ballooning and the headlines celebrate it.

• manipur burned for over two years. an ethnic conflict, tens of thousands displaced, and the prime minister barely said the word manipur while it happened.

• journalists raided. critics' houses bulldozed. activists sitting in jail for years without trial under laws like UAPA. our press freedom ranking has cratered.

• even the petrol is a fight now, ethanol blending pushed through while drivers complain about their engines and get no straight answers.

and through all of it, the PM, who came to power on religious polarisation (americans, sound familiar?), travels abroad for photo ops and has not held one single open press conference in over a decade. not one.

what i'm asking:

if you're not indian: share this. our media mostly won't cover any of it because the big outlets are owned by the same billionaires the government serves. the only reason wangchuk's fast is getting any coverage is people refusing to look away.

if you ARE indian: speak up even if you're comfortable. especially if you're comfortable. join the protests. add to this, correct me, translate it. staying quiet is a choice when nothing in this post touches your life.

india is not "dirty". india was robbed, and it's being robbed again, from the inside this time. but it's also the country where a 59 year old will starve for strangers' kids and 22 million young people will rally behind a party literally named after cockroaches, because cockroaches survive everything.

we can still save her. but only loudly.

Might as well post her ref sheet here too, here's my magical girl OC/former sona! For context she originated when me and my irl best friend came up with a parody of magical girl animes but with characters inspired by ourselves and our friend group (which is why she has such an unserious name she's literally just called Cake lmao). Eventually I grew so attached to Keki, and to the other characters' designs, that I decided to treat them more like OCs and started taking their lore more seriously.

Her story isn't very fleshed out, especially because she has technically two stories and I can't decide which I like best. The first is a story about a magical girl academy, the second is about Keki (and other girls) being university students who are recruited to be magical girls by basically a magical fairy godmother woman in an otherwise mundane and normal world.

The lore about the magical girls themselves is more or less the same in the two stories though, especially when it comes to Keki so I'll explain some stuff here. First the charms, they're the items magical girls use to transform. I called them that because, when they're not being used, the magical girls carry them around as charms lol. Keki carries hers as a keychain charm, for example. The designs vary slightly from girl to girl but they're all different shaped and coloured bows with the same golden box thing in the centre (I've actually designed so many charms now, and a lot of them don't even have magical girls to own them, but they're just so fun to come up with lmao)

In the lore, each magical girl has a signature power known as their magical gift. Keki's is Catharsis, meaning basically the strength and power of her attacks are directly proportional to the intensity of her emotions. She's a very emotional person by nature, so she's a relatively powerful magical girl, although her power level fluctuates because of this. She also has the side effect of being able to sense and read other people's emotions. It's not mind reading, but no one can bullshit her into thinking they're fine if they're in a bad mood lmao

Her weapon is pretty straightforward, it's a bow and arrow to go with her cupid theme. The design is not final, I may get rid of the red ribbon but whatever.

The Charm Mark is basically just a mark that appears somewhere on a magical girl's body once she becomes one and "unlocks" her magical abilities. It's just a sign that she has magic now. The location and appearance varies from person to person, in Keki's case it's in the centre of her chest. Oh and people without magic can't see the marks. Here are the ones I've designed already, like I said they all look different but the marks all have swirls incorporated in their designs

My take on what Aika's teammates might be like!

Based on their silhouettes!🪐🌃💫✨

Names, Sketches, rambling, and process stuff under the cut ✄---------

kinger, the old white man who did all this in the first place, is of course the one the women need to talk to in order to have agency and value. obviously. his black wife? reduced to the fridge for his man pain and then reduced to a babymaker in the irl backstory. no mentions of destiny's achievements or power. why would we? the only positive mention of black women comes from stevie wonders song that was wrongfully used for a white (idrgaf about who his actor is tbh bc lets all be honest and admit jax was written as a white man) closeted abusers death. goose hates women and black people im so serious

I’m not “media illiterate” for wanting the lore that was introduced to be actually developed, regardless of the fact that the show is “character-based.”

I’m not “media illiterate” for wanting more than ONE character of the cast to be focused on.

I'm not "media illiterate" for not wanting to see gender-based violence.

I'm not "media illiterate" for wanting to see non-stereotypical and good representation of transwomen.

People who can't connect the artist with the art they CLEARLY and OPENLY made for themselves, with their own fantasies and morals.

People who see a white person, who hired a lolicon, racists and openly said they enjoy racist humor, take a black man's song and instead of saying "she clearly ignored the importance of the song and it's meaning" they say "it's not that deep. *racist slur*"

Media literacy isn't "writer wanted this to be like that, i know that so i am media literate and you're not"

It's knowing how to connect the dots and say, for example "Hey! This person lived at this specific time, in this specific region, had these specific life events, these types of people around them.... This is their work and these events/people/cultural phenomenons are present in it."

It's knowing that Kafka's work reflects life of a Jew when Jews were concidered subhuman. It's not about capitalism, sure it can look like that, but that's not the very specific experience HE had.

It's knowing Vladimir Nabokov wrote Lolita because he wanted to present the evil, as he himlswf was victim of CSA. He did NOT write it as erotica and he did NOT want it to be romanticised, the reason it was is because no one respected his work because at that time it was still normalized for old men to abuse young girls.

It's knowing that classic male writters in 1600-1900s lived in time where women had no rights, had to serve men and were married off as children to men twice or even thrice their age and it was basicaly a-okey to view them as property.

It's knowing that most classic American writers supported or benefited from slavery if they didn't fight against it. So ofc they would ignore that black people are human beings.

I love how this post came full circle

Literacy isn’t just about seeing the creator intent. I think we can all see now what Goose that trying to accomplish .

It’s about analyzing biases and seeing new perspectives!

Me personally, I’ve learned a lot just from people in the comments of this post, even from people who disagreed with me.

Policing people’s opinions and trying to shut down conversations is how a fandom goes sour.

THAT is why this fandom has become so toxic. Same with MHA, STH, and so many others.

(p.s white people don’t get to decide what is racist towards POC’s + Me calling out weird writing choices isn’t transphobia)

That's Tammy! She's the black magical girl witch of the midwest. ( Chicago West suburbs to be exact) She's leading her story and not "along for the ride" to someone elses. She's a shy, anxious bi girl who dated her bestie for about a week til they decided they were okay being friends. Sia and Tammy are still very affectionate towards each other and Tammy views Sia like a knight who protects her. She's a latch key kid who lives with her single parent mom , and has two vampire boys that are after her heart who are also queer.. and are also dealing with their affection/rivalry towards each other. The Disposable black girlfriend trope is so frusrating. Bi erasure is frustrating and the validation of one's queer idenity is so important to me. Seeing a young queer black girl on screen like this growing up who's leading her story and telling a story that's full of whimsy and melodrama like the YA stories I grew up with ... but were so white ... seeing a Black girl leading in that type of story is important. I've said it before but too often we as black folks are disposed on the side, or our stories are only deemed worthy if it's so focused on our pain I'm 32 years old... I'm very tired of black pain. I want to see a black girl in those types of stories who are queer like myself , loved on and magical. I rambled. There's a fan of the pilot who said this and it encompasses how i feel. "Black kids deserve to go to Narnia" We deserve our whimsical fantasy and supernatural stories .

The Vampire Jogailla ( left) Tammy ( center) The Vampire Darius ( right)

Shirley the witch ( on the left. Tammy's witch mentor) , Sia ( right. Tammy's best friend.)

Character bios here:

Cure Spike/Sui Ogawa concept sketch⚡️🎸

(my script is in the alt text if ever the font is hard to read)

I’ve been getting a lot of asks wondering how I go about picking my colors for character designs, pages, backgrounds, etc, pretty much anything about color in general, and I figured in some attempt to try to answer them all at once, here’s my attempt at a color-centric art tutorial! I’m far from an expert on the subject, and I haven’t received any formal training on the matter, so this is entirely constructed of ideas I’ve gleaned from a bunch of snippets of different people’s advice over the years, studying other people’s art, and experimenting on my own to create something that works for me. Nonetheless, I feel passionate about the subject, and I hope this is able to help make color “click!” like a key in a hole for anyone who reads it. I had to discover my key-click moment on my own through trial and error, but i don’t believe in gatekeeping advice, so hopefully I can help you skip the trouble I went through lmfao.

None of this is meant to be like… a shaming or judgmental authoritative truth of “this is how it must always be done! anything outside of my vision is wrong and morally bad! Harrumph!!!” Especially since this is random shit I’ve figured out on my own with no formal training. It’s more just “if you are looking for something to ease your strain, perhaps this might help you give you what you need to have an easier time!” But most of the time I don’t even color my illustrations the way I do in this tutorial. Usually I try to balance & combine these principles with the “standard colors” that a scene is “supposed to be,” like if the ground is a concrete gray and the trees are green, I’ll keep them looking gray and green (depending on the lighting), but with the knowledge of “I want this to be a sad scene, so I’ll make the grays and greens lean heavily closer to blue, so the audience knows that it’s time to be sad.” Stuff like that. They’re cheat codes for strategic intent, not strict rules.

Now hopefully when it comes to covering more specific things, like how I design my characters, you guys now know the baseline foundation I’m running off of so I don’t have to explain all of this first before I get into the nitty-gritty hairs of “why I made this character purple and green vs why this character is blue and yellow” lmao.

Color is a hard subject to explain! Most of the color theory explanations I’ve heard primarily cover stuff like the science of reflecting light, then name drops all the famous kinds of color palettes, tells me what a cool vs warm color is, explains nothing else, and dips. Which, personally, has literally never been helpful for me when it comes to understanding why the fuck my painting should include the color blue in the shadows. Heaven forbid applying any of that shit to character design. Ough. No I had to figure that out on my own lmfao. So therefore this tutorial is more skewed towards that kind of perspective, someone who doesn’t really benefit (at least at this skill level) from the scientific cerebral shit. I want to know the why behind your creative choices!!! Tell me why the curtains must be blue!! That’s what’s important to me on a practical level. Dont get me wrong, I’m sure one day I’ll learn the purpose behind the scientific stuff, I’m sure there’s a reason behind it, but you’ve gotta figure out how to take the first steps at all to begin with before I can get to the master level stuff of like………scientifically understanding how bounce light works. And if we don’t understand why the curtains are blue, I don’t think we’re gonna get why the bounce light should be blue, too. So I wanted to explain it!!! I wanted to cover it!! Because I’ve never seen it explained before!!! And it’s important to know the why!!!

The Grand Councilwoman is literally just responding to what she sees as a threat to the galaxy and is extremely reasonable.

Gantu is much the same. He’s a bit overzealous, yes, but he thinks he’s saving the galaxy from stitch.

Cobra Bubbles is literally just doing his job, he’s obviously not happy about it but he is doing what he feels is best for Lilo. And much like the Councilwoman, he is extremely reasonable.

Myrtle is, again, just a little shit. She’s a schoolyard bully and is truly small potatoes.

Jumba calls himself an “evil scientist,” but literally nothing supports that. His only onscreen crime is creating a bunch of Pokémon that have powers that will mildly inconvenience people and can be persuaded to be nice over the course of 22 - 90 minutes, to say nothing of himself seeing as he decides to change his ways at the softest bit of persuasion.