Grocery props I did for TMNT Mutant Mayhem. I used to not love getting assigned props, I felt like I should be doing the “important” stuff or whatever, ego shit. But doing props is cruelly s joy and be be super readily in between bigger assignments. It can be nice giving 100% of your attention to a banana or some bok choy.
yamato
Be gay. Do crime.
the analogy of between a crab and falling in love: what’s hidding in between all the sand that shima hides himself in?
this chapter kinda encapsulates a lot of unresolved plots and bring back things that were discussed before, as a way to, little by little, start to close shima’s arc on understanding his feelings. and, for my happiness (and for a lot of you guys reading me, i supposed), we finally had a confirmation that shima doesn’t quite understand or can’t even separate his feelings inside him, all because of his history with rejection, broken family, and the coldness of the ones around him. the boy, who tries to grasp his sandy feelings, who stubbornly kept slipping between his fingers, is finally dipping his toes in the ocean.
what mukai and shima discussed at the sauna is very important for a lot of things. not only for the present narrative, but for a context in general about how skip to loafer deals with feelings and love. instead of approaching a safe solution and going for the “she was the one who could save him”, takamatsu-senpai chose to go through the more complicated and bumpier road: she started to make her own characters question the idea of romantic love that was shoved down their (and ours) throat since they were born.
is not that shima doesn’t love mitsumi — he just doesn’t understand the concept of romantic feelings or how everything “ends” with it (it was interesting to me how he said “ends”, the never-ending idea that romantic love is the final goal. it never “starts anything; it’s always “the end” of things). for him, everything falls in the same blurry and messed up category and end as easily as it started. however now, after years and years of being shutten down and used for people’s own selfish desires, shima is finally free to think and act for himself. but we don’t learn to swim at the bottom of the ocean: we need to start at the beach.
mukai telling shima that he’s often shutting people down and pushing people away without noticing was there for two main reasons, in my opinion: one, show a little more about mukai himself and his own feelings in relation to shima, a friend that he holds dear and wants to see opening up a little more, warming himself towards others; and two, to make shima start to question “what am i doing to the people that care about me?”. this is a trigger that sensei used to bring back a lot of important moments between shima and mitsumi and connect the dots inside his head. what i didn’t expect was that she would such beautiful analogy: a crab.
by swimming around their past, shima starts to ask himself: how does mitsumi feels about me. it’s funny how, even after all that conversation with mukai, he didn’t start with the obvious and questioned himself. he was thinking about her — about the other. what brough him back to his own heart was the girl herself, without both even realizing it.
grabbing the crab in the middle of it is the safest option. you’re protecting yourself of a possibility of being hurt and are able to maintain a safe distance from all the dangerous attributes of the crab. by always staying in the middle of his own feelings and never really going for the claws of his own mind, shima maintained his safety and “never got hurt” (and here i strictly mean hurt by his own ghosts, who he tried to deny instead of facing it). i mean, if he doesn’t move, they won’t be able to attack him. if he stays protected, there won’t be a necessity of changing what you know so well.
but…there’s always a first time, right? and i don’t mean this only for the act of holding a crab: this might be shima’s not only first time doing so, but also the first time he ever felt something different for someone — something more. something he never met before.
and mitsumi, on the other hand, appear serene on his eyes. she did have her first time already — and was bitten by the crab. she was the one who put herself out there and risked being hurt. and, unfortunately, he was the one who made this happen.
by shima’s reaction (the full-on blush), it’s easy to interpretate that he had some kind of realization and that…well...yeah it involves the crab. and mukai. and mitsumi. and the beach. and the ocean. and the sand, that he could never grasp before. what did he realize? he himself isn’t sure, as he tells mukai (“how was the crab?” “i don’t know). and, well, how can someone who has never seen a crab be so sure that what they are seeing is, in fact, a crab?
sensei made it clear, with all the words, with mukai being a sensei for a day: shima is, for the first time in his life, having to deal with a feeling that’s completely new and scary for him. romantic love isn’t easy. for a kid who grew watching his own understanding of romantic love (his parents) be so broken and twisted, romantic love is something that can only cause harm. so no, it’s not that he doesn’t understand love per se: he just doesn’t know how to approach it within himself. it’s up to him, now, if he's going to sing his hands in the sand and find the answer for all the questions he’s dealing with.
as for my last words, what i want to remind everyone: no, it won’t be resolved so fast. not next chapter and, maybe, nor the next. i mean, why should it be? love, be it platonic or not, isn’t something to be forced out of someone. it’s something that requires more than a simple “yes or no”, something that doesn’t grow overnight. none of them are wrong. mitsumi never imposed something on him, she only did what her heart told her to do. shima never wanted to hurt her in some way — in fact, this is one of his biggest fears, up to now. they both are trying to understand themselves, the world, and the universe. they are in the apices of their teenage years, in the apices of committing mistakes for dumb reasons and for sealing peace with simplicity. they all have lot of different crabs with lot of different meanings hiding inside their particular beaches. it’s up to them if they are going to start digging it or not.
and, as always, thank you thank you so much for reading what i have to say and my crazy rambling. i hope that we can now start a great discussion about it 💛 oh and people!! don't be afraid of talking to your crab — sometimes they know more bout us than ourselves 🦀
🌻 this analyze was originally posted on my twitter
Watching across the spiderverse today was a spiritual experience. These two stole my heart
fumi telling mitsumi she was leaving her behind. shima feeling like he's always a few steps behind mitsumi. fumi knowing mitsumi loves her but still being concerned about how their interactions have been decreasing lately. shima agreeing to the break up but still feeling like he was told he wasn't needed. mitsumi telling fumi that frequency doesn't matter because she has a spot in the mitsumi hall of fame. mitsumi telling shima that no matter who he is she'd still want to be friends. do you see my vision
the u-20 team and this field… will fall to the two of us!!
warm ups feat bachira :)c
Fumiii! We thought the same thing! Sousuke never said he didn't love Mitsumi. All he says is that she told him he doesn't love her the way she loves him. But as the great Fumi says, the only one who can understand her feelings is Shima himself!
As I've said before, it's when Shima is shocked that his true feelings come out the most.
I love how Sousuke and Fumi get on so well and so quickly, even though it's the first time they've met. It's probably because Mitsumi talks to Sousuke a lot about Fumi and vice versa, but also because they're both bound by their love for Mitsumi.
I really like the fact that it's Fumi who makes him realize that there's something wrong with the way he thinks. It's not right for him to let someone else decide his own feelings. And even though Chris has already pointed this out to him, it's only when big Fumi bursts out laughing and makes him feel like a weirdo that he questions himself. Then when Mitsumi's best friend Fumi tells him that she's not good at understanding others, it challenges him even more.
Robin finally found freedom, Robin finally won the battle inside him, because he reclaimed his name.
If the first sign that everything was very wrong with the concept of Babel, it's the fact that Robin was coerced to give up his Chinese name and choose an English one. Throughout the story, Robin never refers to himself by his true name, only Robin Swift. The most foundational aspect of his identity, his given name, was stripped away from him to assimilate into British society and white academia.
But upon his death, he reclaims that name. It shows that the only way to be free was in death, because a life serving the Crown erased who he truly was. In dying and releasing himself from that oppression, he became free, I think Robin won.
How many of us have had to give up our names, or their proper spellings, or their proper pronunciations, to mould them into something slightly more acceptable to suit the confines of Standard English? I think that Robin hearing his true name upon his death, and uttered by the woman who named him as such no less, was the final rebellion that reversed the deep-rooted colonization of the mind.
Can we talk about how Robin and Griffin might have other siblings?
“She has the letter from Griffin that Robin never opened. Meanwhile she’s read it so many times she’s memorized it. She knows three names – Martlet, Oriel, and Rook. She can see in her mind’s eye the final sentence, scrawled before the signatures like an afterthought: We’re not the only ones.
“She doesn’t know who these three are. She doesn’t know what this sentence means. She’ll find out, one day, and the truth will dazzle and horrify her.”
They have other siblings who Griffin loved, who Griffin wrote to, who Robin never knew about because he never opened Griffin’s final letter
No it’s ok Dana it’s just the way the you wrote the most beautiful ending to a show I hold incredibly near and dear to my heart caught me off guard a bit.
Luz died and came back to life, and she's also bisexual. What does Jesus have on that? It took him three whole days to come back to life, and he's not even canonically queer
Made a quick lil redesign of the MH girls, tried to mix the original designs with the new ones :^)
taking a knack at teen designs after seeing the crew's :) gonna do the whole fam eventually
twyla
part 2 !!
Cleo
damn,,, these allegations got hands
