Hello, and welcome to my personal World!
Here's where I'll share some personal notes, fun/random stuff, and my original writing. Enjoy!!
Featured Fiction:
Dreamer | Eternal Rain | Pet Projects | Search for the Sky | So Distant | Unraveled
Role Plays:
dis-colour | Prismatic Haven
Original Character Profiles & References:
OC Library | Character Refs
Just for Fun
Ask Us! | 30 Days of Art Event | DA 30-Day Drawing Challenge
You can also find me on DeviantArt and Unvale.
Simplified list to be edited as I see deadlines coming up. Might not get to all of these, but I hope to be able to do them!
Challenges
Other projects
Challenge prize -- toyotami kun - seahorse family
Challenge prize -- Calicoe - Jinks
Eternal Rain world/web banner update
Hey, everybody!
Summer's knocking, even if the weather says otherwise (like here in the Midwest US, where it's cool and rainy). XD So, first off, I want to say congrats to all the grads!! For those of you who aren't out early for graduation, hang in there, you're almost done! I hope you enjoy your summer breaks. ^-^
As for me, I know I haven't been posting a lot of art lately. I'm drawing, but mostly sketches since I'm working on anatomy and facial variation. I've been watching a lot of YouTube tutorials that have been helpful. The finished work I've done recently has been for DeviantArt art trades, so they're not on here. I'm planning to draw a nice pic of the Eternal Rain core cast for -- and I can't believe I'm saying this -- their 20th anniversary. (MY WORD, I feel old. STOP IT, TIME!!)
I'm planning to slowly pull out from DA, or at least severely cut back on using it. I initially joined it because my IRL comic club buddies had introduced me to it, and I wanted to try commissions while I was still looking for a job. I had a bad experience with a commissioner who never paid and then other stuff happened; so I stopped offering those. Ever since DA was bought out by Wix, it's been going downhill, and a lot of the people I knew there are gone (including my comic club buddies). They made their own "AI art" tool, and it's being overrun with the stuff. Since I'm busier now, DA's notifications are also way too much to keep up with, and I keep getting weird, scammy spam messages there, too. I've already started pulling out of the groups I'm in there, soon to only leave the ones I'm adminning (like theOtaku on DA). I haven't decided how much of my current gallery I'm going to leave and how much I'm going to clean out (though I have started taking stuff down). The only ones I know for sure I'm going to keep are my pieces for RP groups.
On the writing side, I've kind of paused to work on development stuff for characters and world-building. That new Unvale site I've been testing out for the past few months has an interesting feature that gives me some inspiration on that end. I'll probably make a separate post with my thoughts on that, so that's it from me for now.
Hope you're all doing okay, enjoy the long weekend, and be safe!
I want to make a fan art challenge for May! What theme would you guys want to do?
A. Spring has sprung!
B. Mer-May
C. Mental Health Month
Your Lie in April could have been an A+, five-star anime. I’ve highly rated and recommended it in the past. But when I re-watched the series, I found myself skipping over several segments. Your Lie is uneven, with one excellent thread and one that fell short because of definite, glaring issues.
The excellent thread is the main plot: Kousei, a musical prodigy who leaves the concert scene after his mother’s death, returns to the stage to face the piano and all the baggage that it carries, through which he comes to terms with his mixed feelings toward his mom and finds closure and connection. The psychology of it and the portrayal of his trauma was very raw and immersive, and the emotional payoff of this thread endears the series to me despite its flaws.
The secondary plot thread is a love triangle between Kousei, his childhood friend, Tsubaki, and a violinist named Kaori who pushes him back into the music world. This thread falls flat for several reasons, which boil down to one key problem: the series’ poor sense of humor.
To be honest, Your Lie’s slapstick comedy almost stopped me from watching the series when I first picked it up. “But Kita,” you might say, “you’re absolutely fine with the slapstick humor in other series.” True, slapstick can be absolutely hilarious when it’s used correctly. But it can also hurt a series when it’s overdone and/or doesn’t suit the context. (Looking at you, original Rurouni Kenshin anime.)
The reason it doesn’t work in this particular series is that Kousei was abused. When you’re dealing with a sensitive topic like this, it’s in bad taste to choose slapstick as your mode of comic relief, especially when the one being smacked and hit in the head with softballs (to the point of bleeding that oddly-realistically doesn’t go away the instant after the comedy moment is over) is the abuse victim. This DOUBLY fails when the potential love interests are the most frequent offenders. How can I get invested in the romance plot when I don’t believe that either of the girls treats him right? In this case, my disinterest in the romance aspect worked for me since it softened the blow of the tragic ending. But I don’t think that’s what the author was going for.
What do you think? Have you seen other series that were sabotaged by their humor? Feel free to share in the comments.
