When It Comes To Artistic Personification Of The Deadly Sins, Lust Is Usually The ONLY ONE Ever Designed

A major POV character having parallels with every other member of an ensemble cast, providing extensive opportunities for the author to explore the intricacies of their character from different viewpoints?

Well, I never! What next, other major characters also have parallels with one another that allow for even more dynamic interactions, so much so that the story might wrap up before we fully explore all of what they could do and say to one another?

Why, that would leave us with a sense that the characters are 3 dimensional and could exist in their world outside the story. Fanfiction could even sprout off the possible futures that an ending providing satisfying character and story arcs would allow, simply for the sheer volume of available dynamics.

is this something idk

Ya know what? Even before JK Rowling outed herself as a substandard primate, I wasn't a big fan. Harry Potter is the least bingeable fantasy series I've read.

Lord of the Rings? Perfect for binge reading.

Discworld? Streaming services envy the variety.

Harry Potter? Tonal whiplash like there's no tomorrow. Went from kids books to being for edgy teens that don't want to be embarrassed yet.

At least How to Train Your Dragon doesn't try to change demographic that quickly. It actually matures over the series and takes time to transition, instead of just switching to a different style out of nowhere.

Soz for the ramble in tags.

As someone from a more average family, I’ve always been fascinated by your anecdotes about your upbringing. What’s it like to have parents so deeply immersed in fandom, and when did you realize that most kids’ parents have zero familiarity with fandom stuff?

as soon as I brought up renfaires and D&D and filk songs and cthulhu carols at school and got bullied about it :/ made it pretty obvious nobody knew or cared what I was talking about

But it was nice! Being raised in fandom, a thing built entirely from open enthusiasm for things you love, taught me to pursue things not because they were popular or What Was Expected Of Me, but because I loved them. I think it laid some major foundations in my worldview that helped me avoid a lot of normative expectations that wouldn't have worked for me, just by teaching me from minute one that things that are weird and unpopular can be perfect for you, and things that seem to work for everyone else can not work for you, and that's okay.

Once you've internalized "this seems to be something everyone does/likes/wants, but the thing I want seems to be almost unheard of - and yet I still want it" it may be easier to apply this to things like recognizing one's orientation (in my case "this all seems boring and weird and extremely limiting, but everyone acts like it's normal and great, so I think I'm just gonna… not do it"), pursuing unorthodox careers, and just… trying the weird things and seeing what works.

Identifying the things you love doing is already a difficult exercise, and it's made much more difficult by artificial filters like "these things are Cool And Sexy while these other things are Cringe And Weird and Should Not Be Liked." Being able to decouple your brain from the high school popularity contest makes the search for your passions that much easier, and I think I started with a serious leg up thanks to the guidance and unconditional support of two absolute nerds.

Oh yeah, Crowley was very proud of this one. Probably would get him some commendation downstairs. 🎄🎉🎊🩷

something's wrong with my copy of Slay the Princess

Credit to Jurassic Park as a fictional work, they at least added the DNA from an unrelated species to the existing DNA, regardless of how unrelated it was.

I mean, it's stupid to use frog DNA but at least they STARTED with the original creature.

I've thought since the late 2010s, start with what you have, see how it can be combined to create the most complete sample and extrapolate the rest to try and create a decent approximation of enough genetic data to grow the sex cells.

People who have a better grasp of biology could certainly improve on this rough idea, I don't know how to create the conditions to grow the egg and I'm not convinced doing so in a live surrogate as with cloning is entirely possible for a long-extinct mammal.

To anyone who follows me, I don't care about nor trust Colossal Biosciences anymore (The people behind the "Wooly Mice"). They have proven themselves to be headline-chasing grifters after this latest stunt. They are claiming to have de-extincted *Aenocyon dirus*, aka the Dire Wolf, by editing just 20 genes from the the DNA of a Grey Wolf (*Canis lupus*) to make this thing:

If it wasn't clear from their scientific names, Grey Wolves and Dire Wolves aren't remotely related to one another aside from being Canids, despite what pop culture like Game of Thrones would have you believe. If they did look like each other, it would have had to be via convergent evolution, as they only shared a common ancestor over 5 million years ago.

This distinction, however, isn't found in the publicized articles about this so-called resurrected Dire Wolf and makes their claim that they brought the Dire Wolf back by simply editing *20* genes from the genome of a Grey Wolf laughable. A Dire Wolf would have shared more in common genetically with a Maned Wolf (*Chrysocyon brachyurus*) or Bush Dog (*Speothos venaticus*) than it would with a Grey Wolf.

Bottom line, don't fall for whatever this company is trying to tell you. If the Dire Wolf were to be brought back, it wouldn't be via something like this, and certainly wouldn't *look* like this. If you want an idea as to how a real Dire Wolf would look like in life, here is some fantastic paleoart by artist Mauricio Antón:

Addendum: I seem to have partially miscalculated Dire Wolf genetics. They were not closer to Maned Wolves or Bush Dogs, but they were still not closely related to Grey Wolves. They were basal members of Canini, related to canids like Jackals (genus Lupulella) but distinct from them. I am sorry for this misinformation in my attempt to correct other misinformation. My main point, however, is still correct.

First family dinner back in Ithaca

Penelope: Want some pork for dinner, Darling?

Odysseus (gagging): No, Beloved. I don't think I'll ever look at a pig the same way.

Telemachus: Ooh! Dad, how about some bee-

Odysseus (terrified): No! Don't even finish that suggestion! (Whispering) He'll hear you.

(Penelope and Telemachus look at one another with concern)

Penelope: Well, we also have some fish.

Odysseus: Perfect!

(Odysseus proceeds to stab it as violently as possible)

Telemachus:...Mom, was he like this before or...?

Penelope (swooning): No, but I'm into it.

I hate it when people say hear me out about an objectively hot woman.

I’m writing scenes which are good, and I don’t know where they are going to fit in the book. But it’s what I call ‘The Valley Filled With Clouds’ technique. You’re at the edge of the valley, and there is a church steeple, and there is a tree, and there is a rocky outcrop, but the rest of it is mist. But you know that because they exist, there must be ways of getting from one to the other that you cannot see. And so you start the journey. And when I write, I write a draft entirely for myself, just to walk the valley and find out what the book is going to be all about.

-- Terry Pratchett - A Slip Of The Keyboard: Collected Non-fiction

I'm very much enjoying the recent pages and just how much character is pouring out especially through body language and facial expressions. My favorite being how Tess is just so nonchalant like this is a normal Tuesday and Tynan's mix of confused and pissed. So I wonder how do you draw facial expressions? I do pencil and paper art as a hobby and for me they're one of the harder things to get down right.

Ahh, facial expressions, the backbone of a character-driven story. I can't remember ever sitting down and perfecting How To Draw Faces, but while I struggled with it a lot early on, I don't remember having much trouble with it in recent years, so evidence suggests that the faces I draw were in large part refined naturally during my chibi-drawing video-making process, which makes me think that the skillset can be refined even if the faces in question are incredibly stylized. Eyes, eyebrows and mouths are apparently all you need for the basics.

Cartoon facial expressions have a benefit of modularity - you can get away with swapping out or tweaking individual parts of the expression without having to do any redrawing of the underlying head shape (a difficulty faced by more realistic or more squash-and-stretch-heavy styles, as faces can be VERY flexible and a mouth shape or eyebrow arrangement can reshape the entire profile of the head). This can help us see how extremely complex our ability to read facial emotions really is. Tiny changes can communicate entirely different vibes.

It doesn't take much repositioning or tweaking to get across a potentially very complex emotion.

Every time I try to think of a hard list of do's and don'ts for this, I fail. Facial expressions can be arbitrarily complicated. Rules like "make sure each part of the expression is communicating the same emotion" might sound good on paper, but in practice you can get a lot of mileage out of an expression where every part is saying something different - a big smile with sad eyes, a small smirk with a calm open gaze, etc. We parse facial expressions as a whole, not as a sum of parts. Like a lot of art, getting an expression to say what you want it to is mostly a matter of tweaking it until it looks right. Suppose we want to make our example elf dude look devastated.

Pretty good, but maybe a little too subdued. This gives me "you just told me something horrible that I haven't fully processed yet" vibes. Let's tweak the mouth to pull the corners out more, putting more tension in their face.

That makes them seem a little less frozen. It looks like they're breathing in, getting ready to say or yell something. But maybe instead of SAD devastated, we want FURIOUS devastated. So let's tweak the eyebrows, where anger is stored.

The other expressions give a feeling of open devastation, perhaps witnessing some incomprehensible tragedy - this new expression looks more focused. Maybe they're currently staring down the person who got them so upset, waiting for them to stop monologuing. Maybe once they're done processing, they'll look a little more like this.

That's a powerful face, but we've strayed pretty far from "devastated" by the end there. Maybe they've started their "you can never win" speech against whoever got them so upset. There's determination in that expression - whatever they were feeling before, they've sharpened it down to a knife's edge.

I wish I could give better advice than "just draw about a million little chibi faces and eventually you'll work it out through sheer numbers" but I really can't think of a better way to get good at pulling together specific emotions to match what's happening in the character's head.

sidenote this ask reminded me how much otherwise solid superhero comic art absolutely blows at facial expressions and how much that annoys me, it cannot be that hard to draw nightwing pretty