I Thought It Would Be An Hour Of Listening To Screaming And Looking At Pictures Of Draculas, But It Was

Want to learn something new in 2022??

Absolute beginner adult ballet series (fabulous beginning teacher)

40 piano lessons for beginners (some of the best explanations for piano I’ve ever seen)

Excellent basic crochet video series

Basic knitting (probably the best how to knit video out there)

Pre-Free Figure Skate Levels A-D guides and practice activities (each video builds up with exercises to the actual moves!)

How to draw character faces video (very funny, surprisingly instructive?)

Another drawing character faces video

Literally my favorite art pose hack

Tutorial of how to make a whole ass Stardew Valley esque farming game in Gamemaker Studios 2??

Introduction to flying small aircrafts

French/Dutch/Fishtail braiding

Playing the guitar for beginners (well paced and excellent instructor)

Playing the violin for beginners (really good practical tips mixed in)

Color theory in digital art (not of the children’s hospital variety)

Retake classes you hated but now there’s zero stakes:

Calculus 1 (full semester class)

Learn basic statistics (free textbook)

Introduction to college physics (free textbook)

Introduction to accounting (free textbook)

Learn a language:

Ancient Greek

Latin

Spanish

German

Japanese (grammar guide) (for dummies)

French

Russian (pretty good cyrillic guide!)

I simply adore her!

smol plant witch at the supermarket with her mandrake familiar… finally finished! phew… @@

if people like the character I might do some character sketches…

Ahh, it’s back

I was having writers block and so I took a break and soon enough it was 3 in the morning and I had impulsively sewn together a tiny mouse you’re welcome

Reblog the 500,000 dollar written check from Seto Kaiba and money will come your way.

Princess Tutu and Grand Narrative

Once upon a time, there was a clumsy school girl granted the power to transform into the magical ballerina Princess Tutu.

“Once upon a time” is a familiar phrase used to connect stories that take place in lands distant and times different from one another into the same fairytale world. Each episode of the anime Princess Tutu begins with this familiar phrase and then proceeds to tell a story both known and new, where Hans Christian Anderson’s Ugly Ducking becomes Odette, the Swan Queen, from Swan Lake, thanks to the magic of the mysterious Drosselmeyer, who bares a striking resemblance to the character of the same name from The Nutcracker. Princess Tutu is not just a retelling of a handful of fairy tales, it’s an adaptation of stories across literature, ballet, opera, and of course, anime. Each piece of Princess Tutu’s narrative belongs to worlds larger than its own. The series challenges paradigms about typical narrative creation by weaving together multiple “grand narratives”.

While working as an editor for Kadokawa Shoten in the late 80s, Otsuka Eiji wrote a paper called “World and Variation: The Reproduction and Consumption of Narrative” in which he explains the idea of the grand narrative. An individual story only gives the audience a small glimpse into that wider world that the story is set in. This wider world is full of countless narratives told from countless perspectives that make up the grand narrative. Eiji uses the Gundam franchise to illustrate this concept where any given episode of the anime is a small snapshot of narrative within the larger universe(s) Gundam takes place in. Eiji explains, “Countless other [stories] could exist if someone else were the main character.”

Everyone is the main character of their own story. But most of these stories that make up the grand narrative of a world are hidden from view. It’s impossible to tell every story at once and have it be comprehensible. Instead we can only consume small bite-sized narratives that give us a snapshot of the (hopefully) interesting parts of a protagonist’s life. But who, exactly, is controlling these smaller narratives? This is a question faced by the characters of Princess Tutu.

The concept of shifting protagonists and expanding the audience’s view into the grand narrative heavily ties into Princess Tutu’s premise. The anime’s story is catalyzed by Drosselmeyer, the author of a fictitious book called The Prince and The Raven. The book’s ending is a stalemate between the titular characters so Drosselmeyer decides to promote the minor character of Princess Tutu to the role of main character to help the story move forward.

As you can probably tell by the name, Princess Tutu is heavily influenced by ballet. One of the show’s more significant influences is Swan Lake. Through the anime’s re-purposing of Swan Lake’s Odette as a magical girl, Princess Tutu continues to uphold ballet’s tradition of adapting the story for its own purposes.

Princess Tutu and Odette

The basic story of Swan Lake is about a prince falling in love with a girl cursed to be a swan from sunrise to sunset by an evil sorcerer. The sorcerer tricks the prince into confessing his love for his daughter, Odile, instead of the swan girl thus dooming the swan girl’s chance at true love and breaking the curse.

Amanda Kennell, an American scholar, outlines in her paper “Origin and Ownership from Ballet to Anime” Swan Lake’s production history and the evolution of the ballet’s narrative. The original staging in 1877 had the story end with the villain going unpunished and the two lovers drowning in a flood. In a revival staging from 1895 the villain was defeated and the two lovers reunited in heaven after throwing themselves into a lake. In a single scene production called The Magic Swan from the 1940s, the iconic “black swan” was introduced setting the precedent for the same ballerina to play the role of Odette and Odile in striking white and black costumes. And finally, another staging in 2006, not only adopted the White and Black Swan motif, but also changed the ending once again so that the prince kills the villain and he and Odette live happily ever after.

Despite each staging of the classic having significant differences, none of the variations are cast away as counterfeits. The value of the production isn’t in how close it is to the original Swan Lake but instead in the relative merit of each variation. In fact, it doesn’t really matter which you consider “the original” where the additions made by each carry their own merit and add to Swan Lake’s grand narrative. In this same regard, it would be acceptable to consider Princess Tutu another variation on the world of Swan Lake’s grand narrative.

There is terminology for this phenomenon in Kabuki theater. Eiji points out in his paper the similarities between the concepts of Sekai (world) and Shukou (plot) from Kabuki theater and his ideas of the grand narrative and the smaller narratives.

In Kabuki, Sekai represents the world a story takes place in and Shukou represents the story that is a product of that world. Each staging of a Kabuki play is its own Shukou derived from either a single Sekai or the mixing of Sekai. What matters in creating a good performance is not necessarily conveying the Sekai but instead the relative merit of the Shukou’s take on things. No performance is exactly the same and different actors bring different strengths to a performance and in turn provide a different experience for the audience’s entertainment. This of course carries over to more art forms than just Kabuki, classic ballet is in a similar position where entire songs are sometimes re-choreographed just to match the strengths of an individual ballerina. Ballet in particular has a long tradition of making minor and major changes to suit an individual performance. Whether it be tweaking choreography or straight up giving the story a different ending. The evolution of Swan Lake’s production is an excellent example of how productions of what are considered to be the same story can dramatically vary.

But Princess Tutu borrows from more stories than just Swan Lake. This brings us back to Kabuki and the idea of mixing Sekai in order to create another Shukou.

Princess Tutu takes pieces of classic stories and rearranges them to create something simultaneously familiar and completely new. Princess Tutu is not forging a new Shukou from only Swan Lake’s Sekai, but instead is connecting the canon of European literature and performing arts together into an even more extensive grand narrative.

Just look at the series’ opening for example, where Swan Lake and The Nutcracker are intertwined with one another as the anime’s titular character is dressed in the ballet costume of Odette and dances to The Nutcracker’s Flower Waltz to simultaneously combine the worlds of two ballets while producing an entirely new moment unique to the Princess Tutu anime.

The anime ends on the implication that if one person tries to control a story and the grand narrative it’s connected to, that person will fail. Princess Tutu is an excellent reminder of how stories are dynamic. Stories end up taking on a life of their own evolving, expanding and being reworked by both creators and consumers.

Eiji explains that once the consumers feel they have a grasp on the grand narrative they are free to produce their own small narratives from it. This is exactly how its creators forged Princess Tutu from the grand narrative of classic literature and performing arts. Just as mangaka can’t help it if a doujinshi adds to the narrative of their original story, Travosky can’t control the new life his ballets have taken on in Princess Tutu. Stories will take on a life of their own, abandon the need for an original and become a part to a larger grand narrative to be consumed and reworked over and over.

I. Need. This.

What I Can’t Say To My Brother

You are fundamentally a bad person. You are furious. You are selfish. You are a liar. You are a gaslighter. You are a thief. You are misogynistic. You are queerphobic. You are racist. You are intolerant. You are abusive.

Everything has been handed to you. You do not have to try to succeed in anything. You’re athletic, charismatic, talented, pretty enough to look like every leading man in an action flick , and every body wants you to succeed. I grew up hearing and watching everyone fawn over you. Kids at school would make friends with me just so they could come over to the house to hangout with you.

“Deven’s so smart, you know when he was little he spoke Russian and Spainish?”

“Deven’s so handsome he should be a model!”

“Deven’s so good at fixing computers!”

Your life could’ve been astronomically better than mine. But you couldn’t even do the bare minimum of effort or pretense of it to even coats on by. You’ve pissed every opportunity away. Every ounce of goodwill people have given you, you’ve sucked it dry.

The money you stole to party with your rich kid friends (who you also mooched off of to the point they stopped talking to you) almost made our family homeless. Every girlfriend you’ve ever had would sheepishly admit that you bragged about stealing money from me to pay for the date and would slip me a twenty from their purse as an apology.

Every girlfriend you’ve had you also drove to have an emotional breakdown. You purposely went after women with emotional problems and no support structure so you could bully them. These were women who wouldn’t know what a real healthy normal relationship is supposed to be. You did that on purpose.

You claim our mother is the person you love the most in the world (after yourself). You take money from her (you steal from her on occasion).The few times she tried making boundaries you guilted her and blamed. Our mother, the one parent we share in our blood, the one parent who actually stuck around for you.

My poor mother had to give up her dreams of travel and further education, of making beautiful art, all so she could give birth to a pitiful man like you. She was sixteen and scared out of her mind. She was hurting from a father that abondomded her as well, and you fucking play on that with your POS dad’s behavior. You use your fear of abondomenr as a fucking excuse.

You dare try to lecture me. You dare try and take some sort of moral authority and intellectual stance. I only speak to you at family functions out of the bare necessity to not hurt our poor grandmother’s feelings.

How fucking dare you try to explain the origins of storytelling and myth. I’m a fucking English Major with a concentration in creative writing my thesis is based around archetypes. I’m not taking intellectual or academic sources from a man who got a full ride to college but flunked our his first semester because he didn’t show up to class and didn’t do homework.

You only showed up to take tests. (College students who do this have the brains to check the professor’s attendance policy and grading system to see if they can pass and get away with it.) You also didn’t have the spine to tell our parents what you were actually doing, you would drive up to college and sleep in your car, like the jellyfish you are.

It took everything I had in me not to tear you down with a few sentences. You have to feel like the smartest person around. You dared to say you were, “The Muhammad Ali of Knowledge.”

Every memory of you cornering me and screaming at me to agree with you and your shitty pints. You would t let me leave til I said you were right in between choking back sobs burned in me. You and your need to control every body around you.

I could’ve destroyed you. Just a few flippant words, because let’s be real, what we say causally is usually what devastates others the most.

“Relax, you’re only my half-brother.”

“So, how smart do you have to be for your dad to finally give a shit about you?”

“What’s it like to have a dad that doesn’t love you?”

But I didn’t, you know why? Because I’m not you. That would’ve been a Deven move.

Your fave magic babe is now available on my redbubble store as prints and other items ✨

Sigh so here’s the other story – my condition right now is chronic and crippling severe, and so far medical help has failed and other options aren’t covered by my insurance. I live in a very difficult home environment too, so being in bed all day is causing problems and I don’t think I can get better on my own. In short, everything is a catastrophe. 

I’m working on commissions from May but I am very slow, can barely function, so I need to see a doctor soon or I’m not sure I’m gonna be able to do art at all. No patreon, no game, no giveaway, no nothing. I am scared to death and have been holding it in inside and trying not to panic but I am.

In short, I…need help. 

I would be extremely grateful to anyone who buys my prints and merch, since I don’t have the luxury of taking on any more commissioned art, but I seriously do need to help my father afford my medical expenses. He’s trying his best and I’m scared he’s going to lose everything because of me.

I’m putting my ko-fi up here as well.  Donations are extremely appreciated!

I apologize, and thank you so much for hearing me out. You all have been so kind to me.

if I was matt murdock and I found out the same chemical spill that blinded me and lit the world on “fire” turned a bunch of turtles into pizza loving ninjas I would lose it actually