Nyxoholic666 - Chaos & Ink

rf kuang always has two characters who are like orbiting each other, twin planets, can’t live without each other can’t live with each other, she loves tragic death of complicated friendships. ramy and robin, rin and kitay, even june and athena. everyone dies. but what i like about her tragedies is there’s always a third. always another component, important and surviving. nezha and victoire. not a happy ending, but one that leaves you with an ache in your chest and a hope for the future, that the sacrifice and death did in the end have a point.

the lines “this has always been a family story” and “this is the kind of family they are” are SICKENING in the context of a series that starts with “the campers here, they're mostly good people. after all, we're extended family, right? we take care of each other” and ends with “family, luke. you promised”

I'm not sure I can actually fully express how much I love libraries. No matter how long I might go without being in one, they are always there when I need them. Nothing is safer to me than rows of books in a community building. I don't remember lots of my childhood, but I remember what it felt like to stand in my school's library and feel like it was so much larger than it actually was. I remember almost every day after high school I wouldn't be picked up for a while, so I would walk to the public library right next door. I'd sit there for hours, on the floor, picking through whatever was nearby. I volunteered there. I used it to read books my family wouldn't allow me to touch. Even now, as an adult, when I feel unsafe I go to the library. I'll spend all day there, reading, drawing, just sitting. No one wants anything from you for being there. You can just sit and be and it's warm and safe and fun.

hell is other people

hell is a physics lab where you get a migraine squinting at tiny images on mirrors, stab yourself in the eye with a travelling microscope and have a one in ten chance of getting a working galvanometer or voltmeter

I think the Hunger Games series sits in a similar literary position to The Lord of the Rings, as a piece of literature (by a Catholic author) that sparked a whole new subgenre and then gets blamed for flaws that exist in the copycat books and aren’t actually part of the original.

Like, despite what parodies might say, Katniss is nowhere near the stereotypical “unqualified teenager chosen to lead a rebellion for no good reason”.  The entire point is that she’s not leading the rebellion. She’s a traumatized teenager who has emotional reactions to the horrors in her society, and is constantly being reined in by more experienced adults who have to tell her, “No, this is not how you fight the government, you are going to get people killed.” She’s not the upstart teenager showing the brainless adults what to do–she’s a teenager being manipulated by smarter and more experienced adults. She has no power in the rebellion except as a useful piece of propaganda, and the entire trilogy is her straining against that role. It’s much more realistic and far more nuanced than anyone who dismisses it as “stereotypical YA dystopian” gives it credit for.

And the misconceptions don’t end there. The Hunger Games has no “stereotypical YA love triangle”–yes, there are two potential love interests, but the romance is so not the point. There’s a war going on! Katniss has more important things to worry about than boys! The romance was never about her choosing between two hot boys–it’s about choosing between two diametrically opposed worldviews. Will she choose anger and war, or compassion and peace? Of course a trilogy filled with the horrors of war ends with her marriage to the peace-loving Peeta. Unlike some of the YA dystopian copycats, the romance here is part of the message, not just something to pacify readers who expect “hot love triangles” in their YA. 

The worldbuilding in the Hunger Games trilogy is simplistic and not realistic, but unlike some of her imitators, Collins does this because she has something to say, not because she’s cobbling together a grim and gritty dystopia that’s “similar to the Hunger Games”. The worldbuilding has an allegorical function, kept simple so we can see beyond it to what Collins is really saying–and it’s nothing so comforting as “we need to fight the evil people who are ruining society”. The Capitol’s not just the powerful, greedy bad guys–the Capitol is us, First World America, living in luxury while we ignore the problems of the rest of the world, and thinking of other nations largely in terms of what resources we can get from them. This simplistic world is a sparsely set stage that lets us explore the larger themes about exploitation and war and the horrors people will commit for the sake of their bread and circuses, meant to make us think deeper about what separates a hero from a villain.

There’s a reason these books became a literary phenomenon. There’s a reason that dozens upon dozens of authors attempted to imitate them. But these imitators can’t capture that same genius, largely because they’re trying to imitate the trappings of another book, and failing to capture the larger and more meaningful message underneath. Make a copy of a copy of a copy, and you’ll wind up with something far removed from the original masterpiece. But we shouldn’t make the mistake of blaming those flaws on the original work.

I love that Tumblr is actually a community. Your blog will be quite poor and boring if you only post your own stuff. Most of our blogs contain countless reblogs and discussions with other people on the website. This is communication and appreciation of each other’s creativity, thoughts, sketches and etc. It’s one thing to mindlessly like tons of photos a day like TikTok and Instagram offer you, and another to reblog and add hashtags and some comments about how the post made you feel or what you think you could add to a joke, a headcanon, an au, a story, an art… It makes this hellsite feel genuine.

*I drew this picture for a fan convention to celebrate the 3rd anniversary of FGO Nemo's implementation.

Work process & Idea sketch

oh and that gap in my resume is when i was digging my own grave

A moment of peace and quiet before everything went looney tunes

did you know they say calculus is the language of God. did you know they tried to hold math up to infinity like a candle to the void. did you know statisticians plunged into the vastness of random chance and picked out patterns and equations and eight hundred ways to tell you how big your inevitable errors are and how far off those guesses at errors might be. math haters I can't sit with you anymore. human innovation is cradled in these ancient, methodical, desperate attempts at understanding what we are not designed to understand