serpentinemalign: two hands belonging to people offscreen cup the head and face of my self insert, mat finish. (Default)

i'm working on a new version of my neocities site! so, a call for anyone following this journal who has a personal website: would you like to be added to my links section? no obligation to add my site back, but it would be nice! (if we are mutually subscribed and you have a personal site, i may add you even if you don't respond to this call, but you can always drop me a dm if you'd like to be removed!)

serpentinemalign: two hands belonging to people offscreen cup the head and face of my self insert, mat finish. (Default)

Snowflake Challenge promotional banner featuring  an image of a coffee cup and saucer on a sheet with a blanket and baby’s breath and a layer of snowflakes. Text: Snowflake Challenge January 1-31.

hello we have made it to the end of the month and we are gonna do a big speedrun tech. here's some background music for that.

we're gonna go in a slightly altered order. (also some of this was written on my phone so is in proper caps, some is on my laptop and is in lower case. i'm so sorry, there is no rationale behind this.)

please treat this whole post as nsfw and vulgar and click links with caution. i mostly made nsfw art this year lol

past. fandom wrapped for 2022. )

part 2: the present: goals! )

future! the future of fandom... )

serpentinemalign: hugo strange in conversation (blah blah blah)
Snowflake Challenge promotional banner with image of three snowmen and two robins with snowflakes. Text: Snowflake Challenge January 1-31.

and here is my second snowflake challenge entry for today. just a quickie to have a hope of finishing by the end of the month lol. i think i'll have 3 to do in 2 days? so, as a courtesy, i am trying to cut my posts sooner into the post so that you don't have to scroll for too long through my entries.

In your own space, rec three fanworks that you did not create. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

most of the links are nsfw and kinky so be careful! )
serpentinemalign: hugo strange offers a glass of something. (try the wine!)
this is also a snowflake challenge fill for #10: make a fanwork!

some simple (i just edited out speech bubbles/text/frames, cleaned up the background and prettied up the colours a little), some more complex. most are from batman: prey.

preview:


feel free to use anywhere. i would love a comment if you use any, especially just to commiserate on loving this terrible terrible man

get to the icons! )

bonus reminiscing on making graphics in the 2010s :') )
serpentinemalign: Hugo Strange holds a pocket watch. (pocket watch)

[nsfw text ahead! read with caution!]

In your own space, Talk about your favorite trope, cliché, kink, motif, or theme. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

In college, my creative writing professor warned me off my love affair with the second person. He said, it's tough to pull off. You have to have a good reason to use it.

What's a better reason than to be a fucking slut?

Read more... )

serpentinemalign: Art of Hugo Strange commissioned from Winterdusted. (hugo strange but make it fashion)
so i was planning on making some hugo strange icons because... i miss making icons and i had a shit mental health day and thats usually a sign to like, stop doing 'serious' stuff for a bit. making icons from comic scans is still creative labour but it is less intensive than like... drawing or writing. youre making a miniscule collage and playing around with stuff you already have in front of you.

so i was looking at some new comics to gather as many images as i could! and can we talk about the fact that hugo was IN the batman '66 series... and he has a FUCKING. COMBOVER.

Read more... )
serpentinemalign: two hands belonging to people offscreen cup the head and face of my self insert, mat finish. (Default)
Snowflake Challenge promotional banner with image of snow-covered trees and an old barn in the background. Text: Snowflake Challenge January 1-31.

In your own space, interact with a community or a fic. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

i do try to comment on all the fics i read, which are actually quite few and far between because i'm quite picky and have to be in the right mood to read fic. so instead i settled on interacting with a community! admittedly it's not strictly 'interacting' until i start commenting on people's posts, but i figure adding it to my reading page and committing to doing the challenge myself will help motivate me to check out other people's fills!

so, i decided to join [community profile] allbingo and create my own bingo card to try and fill out! i basically tweaked a bunch of the hurt/comfort prompts in the card generator to create an extremely on-brand card that would be just the right amount of challenge to fill.

apocalypse incubi/succubi kidnapping archaic medical treatment forced to hurt somebody
sensory deprivation theft deals with demons brainwashing / deprogramming stalking
unwanted transformation electrocution FREE SPACE tongue trauma coulrophobia
unrequited pining nightmares cages interrogation restrained
tentacles telepathic trauma asphyxiation fall from grace therapy
serpentinemalign: two hands belonging to people offscreen cup the head and face of my self insert, mat finish. (Default)

Snowflake Challenge promotional banner featuring an image of a chubby brown and red bird surrounded by falling snow. Text: Snowflake Challenge January 1-31.

hello! ❤️

we are creeping closer to the end of january but i am determined to actually make it to the end! so today we are doing a digital scavenger hunt. i would do pictures, but I'm a little leery of my privacy and I'm at work technically so composing this from my phone and image hosting from a phone is a little awkward.

In your own space, post the results of your fandom scavenger hunt.

Search in your current space, whether brick-and-mortar or digital. Post a picture or description of something that is or represents:

Read more... )

serpentinemalign: two hands belonging to people offscreen cup the head and face of my self insert, mat finish. (Default)
This is just a really quick post to whine about twitter crashing and burning which perhaps isn't the Best use of this platform but it's been weighing on me. My feed is so much more depressing and discoursey since they rolled out For You/Following. The dark patterns even down to the level of making it hard to swap to the functional feed and access other options if you're using your phone one handed, with your right hand. or the complete nonfunctionality of the desktop versions account switching.

Even on the Following page, now the takes seem vastly more negative because people are dropped into the new For You page by default! It's exhausting! I have no idea if they changed the algorithms for this, or if they're just the same algorithms but now I have to see them and it's really easy to forget to change to Following because it's now the default, and you're locked into starting there. no thank you. it is so manipulative and gross and it should come as no surprise.

also I'm 100% seeing more side accounts of people whose mains I've blocked which. lol. I think this is just a coincidence, but it's unfortunate! :')
serpentinemalign: two hands belonging to people offscreen cup the head and face of my self insert, mat finish. (Default)

so this is a combo deal today!

In your own space, tell us about 3 creative/fannish resources, spaces, or communities you use or enjoy. (One or two is fine, especially if you're in a smaller fandom or like many people at the moment, fannishly adrift right now) Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

In your own space, create a quiz or a poll (or tell us your thoughts about answering quizzes/polls). Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

so first off, here is my quiz! i assign you one of my fictional crushes based on vibes.

i will probably tweak depending on whether people are getting the same result over and over again, which would mean the questions aren't even enough. most of them are very simple 'pick x' uquiz fare with a few slightly weird ones, so i don't anticipate this being an issue.

i took my own quiz and got charles offdensen :') he is certainly the one i need.

now, to answer challenge #5, i will talk about the resources i used to make the quiz!

Read more... )

serpentinemalign: my self-insert smoking a cigarette. (mat finish)

Snowflake Challenge promotional banner with image of three snowmen and two robins with snowflakes. Text: Snowflake Challenge January 1-31.

we are doing two today! because i was so excited to do this one :D

In your own space, add something to your fandom’s canon. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

if you followed me on twitter you might know that i am a little bit obsessed with otto mentallis because characters with mind control powers are literally kryptonite to me and my single-track mind. i love the bastard. i love that he's a lot more of a complex character than just the game's red herring, because in many ways he is a villain despite not being the villain and i am just obsessed with that.

i'm writing some stuff right now for gross otto/self-insert comic and as a result of it, i have a single concept to bestow upon the world:

the grulovian mob is bankrolling the psychonauts.

they're not the organisation's only benefactor. of course, governments the world over fund them to deal with their problems. but the mob contributes a lot more than you'd expect!

i don't have much beyond that currently, beyond the mere existence of the grulovian mob and its entanglement with the psychonauts. now honestly i don't know a lot of organised crime history, i really need to know more and i like to incorporate little glimmers of reality into my work because i think that adds nuance, so none of this is set in stone. i think the crisis and the attempts to rebuild the country post-maligula's tyranny would probably lend well to organised crime. some members, especially those higher up in the ranks, will be veterans who fought for grulovia in the civil war against maligula. everyone is traumatised as fuck and wants to keep a grip on stability with all they've got. so i can see organised crime kind of making its way in as a means of 'protecting the people' after all this. and, then they would go international because they also have such a high proportion of psychics.

powers the world over are obsessed with obtaining psitanium and psilirium because with those minerals, you can make anything happen. i think maybe the drug trades around the world would be very interested in synthesising these minerals into a drug you can take. maybe different strains will give you different psychic abilities, temporarily.

so... consequently i can very quickly see a scenario in which the psychonauts donates small amounts of psitanium to the grulovian mob, the kind no one would miss, and in return, they share in the profits. it gets laundered, goes unnoticed.

this is the point that we get spoilery so i'll put the cut here )

serpentinemalign: mat finish looking distressed. (distress)

Snowflake Challenge promotional banner with image of three snowmen and two robins with snowflakes. Text: Snowflake Challenge January 1-31.

i remembered the image this time! be proud of me!

In your own space, Scream Into the Void. Get it all out. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

okay let's talk about my fandom hot take that only people in private have been exposed to... until now. the core of modern-day fandom cruelty and nastiness is personal, internalised shame externalised out onto the world.

i feel this in my heart, not my head. it's not something i can quantify. i see it in the quote retweeted posts floating around on my twitter... but i could really just be seeing myself reflected, because i am a very self-absorbed person.

i'm not here to talk about other people's bad takes, because that will be anything but cathartic, honestly; that's just giving people free board in my head (and your mind is the only place it's okay to be a ruthless landlord).

i'm here to talk about my own shame, and how it led me to this conclusion.

i said this is cntw but i will be talking about noncon fantasies so please only read if you feel fine to do that!

some of you will know that this is not my first account. i've been in fandom for almost 15 years, and 'serpentine malign' as a handle is only 4 years old. i'm thrilled by the friends and mutuals i've made since. the freedom it's been to just be horny on main, talk openly about ALL my kinks, refuse to censor myself, and quietly but firmly align myself with other fans advocating for creative expression. but let's be real! what motivated me to create this new presence was something between fear and paranoia. i wanted to start from scratch, vet my followers and curate my space from the start, because it's easier to build a fortress on a fresh foundation than try to patch up a house rotting from the inside.

i moved to this handle because fandom had become an uncomfortable and unwelcoming place, and because my tastes were only getting more fucked up. it started in my mid-teens and only got worse from there. i started getting nasty and passive aggressive and judgmental people on extremely innocuous posts, and in response i too became nasty and passive aggressive and judgmental. it's a cycle. it makes you tremendously paranoid because you just don't know what's going to inspire hatred and snide comments so you adjust your behaviour to anticipate an impossible amount of vitriol.

my tumblr dash was a hostile place full of horrible takes that kept me up at night. i just freefell into it being that way one day. i was addicted to the discourse. and just trying to fill a void i hadn't acknowledged inside myself, a hole created by repression and shame.

Read more... )

serpentinemalign: A greyscale picture of BD Wong as Hugo Strange in Gotham. The red tint of his glasses is visible. (hugo strange)

hello again!

so i am annoyed and feeling creatively edged, you might say, because i was about to finish an art piece and then my tablet ran out of juice and it runs super hot when i try to charge it and draw. so we are going to tackle the snowflake challenge.

i already did challenge #1 sort of because i made a sticky post during the month with my fandom and dw information! so we are actually going to start at challenge #2, which is:

In your own space, write a promo, manifesto or primer for your fave character, ship or fandom. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

Canon illustration of Hugo Strange holding a pocket watch.

this is actually fantastic because i have been hoping to make a hugo strange shrine for my neocities and we are going to talk about him now okay okay. this is just going to be more or less freewriting/stream of consciousness that eventually gets organised into something that can go on my website permanently, accompanied with cute pictures.

if you know anything about my work at all you may know me as the person who is extremely horny for hugo strange and expresses it in many different forms. like here is my ao3. it's just fetish shit. i hate it. i hate that he was tailored for me.

i think the core of my obsession with this character is he is the perfect vessel to project the vast majority of my fantasies, because most of my fantasies centre on power and control. i like medical kink, i like characters who could feasibly be in a position of authority over me or even in charge of my life or death. thats a lot of wide open vulnerability and gaping wounds that look a lot like...

Read more... )

serpentinemalign: two hands belonging to people offscreen cup the head and face of my self insert, mat finish. (Default)

hey there!

i'm a fan creator in my late twenties who enjoys transgressive art and psychological horror in, like, the sicko's way.

this journal, like most of my profiles, is 18+ and should be presumed to be a nsfw and choose-not-to-warn environment by default. there is selfship, kinkposting, and venting.

i grant access pretty liberally. please don't feel the need to do the same, and feel free to revoke access at any time.

check out my site!

serpentinemalign: two hands belonging to people offscreen cup the head and face of my self insert, mat finish. (Default)

hey! we're back. this is just a quick post to let you know i'm following a bunch of people from discord servers and twitter and just surfing blog links here, so you may have received a follow notification from me. i feel a strange need to announce this, as though it's odd to follow people on a blog site. i don't know. i guess i feel the tentativeness of slow online mediums a lot because i associate them with being, like, a preteen on the internet who didn't know what they were doing and didn't know what the etiquette was when going on forums and livejournal and all that. all that shyness aside, i'd like to move towards slow mediums before twitter inevitably implodes. i hate the desperation and loneliness and commodification i feel with fast social media. (it's oh so easy to blame it on that and not, like, my emotional problems. lol.)

but i have some fun stuff in the pipelines here so let's talk about that instead 😎

hypnosis journals and big content overhauls and challenges, oh my! )

serpentinemalign: two hands belonging to people offscreen cup the head and face of my self insert, mat finish. (Default)
WARNINGS:
  • Venture Bros. spoilers.


NAVIGATION


Welcome back! This time we’re covering the short, sweet, and possibly best season of the show, although my opinion on this is likely to change, because from here it's almost nothing but bangers. We will be counting All This and Gargantua-2 as part of season 5 because it’s pre-the big status quo change in Season 6, and most of this season feels like it’s building up to the special. This is impressive because the whole season has the feeling of looking forward and back all at once — tying up loose ends as though this season was going to be the last. Almost every episode is dense with callbacks to previous lore and plots. It’s not completely inaccessible to anyone coming to the show fresh, but I guess this is the point that being rerun-friendly isn’t the goal. This approach massively benefits the show, because then the writers can focus on developing the continuity they’ve already established. Probably the episode with the least callbacks is Spanakopita!, which as we all know is a fucking classic and one my partner and I have often pulled out to get friends interested in the show.

Hammer and Publick are finally reaping all that they’ve sown over the 55 (I think?) episodes prior to this season. I think season 4 was already tending towards this, but here is where shit gets intricate and fleshed out and incredibly polished. In fact I’d say it’s telling that the weakest episode of the bunch — still a pretty good episode; it introduced anthro furries into the canon after all — draws on a plot element from the only episode neither of them wrote, ¡Viva los Muertos!. Everything feels neat and wrapped up well, and while it’s not as much of an emotional gut-punch as season 4, I never come out of any of Season 5’s episodes unsatiated.

Read more... )
serpentinemalign: two hands belonging to people offscreen cup the head and face of my self insert, mat finish. (Default)
WARNINGS:
  • Venture Bros. spoilers, discussions of abuse as per what's in the show.


NAVIGATION


Hey folks! It’s been a while. I'm currently swamped with work and my partner and I just got into Metalocalypse, so my rewatch of The Venture Bros. slowed down. Plus, this is the longest season of the show, so it was gonna take a little longer anyway.

This season had some troubled development, hence (at least partly) why it was broken into two halves. Intentionally or not, the season's tone does reflect this. It feels bleaker than the rest of the show, somehow. It digs into the tragedy and trauma, watching the characters make horrible decision after horrible decision. I don't think the season is always successful, but it's bold, and its tonal shifts lead to some of the most outstanding storytelling in the series. When I first watched the show this was my favourite season, and it might still be! We’ll see when we get to the end of this retrospective.

Season 4 is, first and foremost, a low-key season. The laughs are darker, more bitter. This is not a season of action-packed multi-parters. For most of it, we’re living in the breathing space between the action. It’s almost like an entire ‘Doc Hammer’ season, in the sense that Hammer is generally the writer of the more dialogue- and pathos-heavy plots. Many Season 4 episodes aren’t individually fantastic or stand-out, but they have a lingering sadness to them that resonates. The subsequent seasons keep a better balance between sadness and silliness, but I’d say that this season laid the groundwork for the show's biggest emotional punches. And this season absolutely delivers on the heartwrenching moments, especially between Rusty and his sons.

Read more... )
serpentinemalign: two hands belonging to people offscreen cup the head and face of my self insert, mat finish. (Default)
WARNINGS:
  • Venture Bros. spoilers, of course.


NAVIGATION


Welcome back to my Venture Bros. retrospective! Between the last part and this one, we found out A FUCKING VENTURE BROS MOVIE IS COMING. So it's never been a better time for me to continue this series. Today we’re taking a look at Season 3. It took me a little longer to get through the season, partly because I’m in the midst of finals and partly because there’s a lot more to digest. This is the point of the show where it gets really good. The show adds more depth to the characters so they can respond organically to bigger plot events. It also experiments more with episode format, meaning that episodes can vary massively in scale and scope. We have some ‘traditional’ (ad)Venture capers, but we also have two whole flashback episodes to fill us in on character backstory. It works so well in fleshing out the world and making us care about the cast, who felt a little bit threadbare in places. This season is the moment I understood why Pete and Billy were, like, there.

It’s difficult to figure out how to rank the season’s episodes, or to choose a ‘star of the season’. I think it's because we have an actual plot now. The episodes never stop being silly or funny, but the plots have actual substance to them. At this point we know the basics of all the characters and them being their usual selves risks being boring. So to expand our understanding of them, Doc and Jackson put them in situations that test their comfort zones. They parade Rusty around a supervillain house party. They (seemingly!) send the force of the OSI after Brock. The Monarch is forced to arch other people than Dr. Venture, and consequently JJ is forced to deal with an arching relationship. Plot is mostly prioritised over cramming in as many jokes as possible, but I don’t think this is a bad thing for the show. However, it does mean that characters who normally steal scenes, like the Monarch, now have more meat to contend with.

Read more... )
serpentinemalign: two hands belonging to people offscreen cup the head and face of my self insert, mat finish. (Default)
What do you do as a fiction writer when most of your conceptual library is built up on media that’s referencing other media?

By which I mean, you think of the shining examples of stories that grabbed you start to finish, and it's almost all media that is a creative 'adaptation' or parody of an existing work, or it's a pastiche or deconstruction of an existing genre, or a combination of different genres. It's also often media with a specific aesthetic that is intended to draw on a past 'retro' aesthetic. For me personally I am thinking specifically of Venture Bros., Team Fortress 2 (which isn't a linear story, besides in the comics, but it sure got my attention), The Incredibles (okay, we get it, you like 60s/70s aesthetics), almost every genre that functions as a revival of a 'classic' genre (neo-noir is one example). In some regards, sure, I could be talking about most media because nothing is original, but here I specifically mean media where the basic premise is inherently referential. 

What do you do when you don't really like the works being referenced as much as the referential work? As in, you don't have much motivation to seek out more of the 'original sources' that influenced whatever you liked, because the examples you have seen/read give you a decent sense of the vibe but, for you, they don't pack the same punch or provide the same enjoyment? Because it's something about the dialogue between the two parts, between the past and the contemporary, rather than necessarily the original work in isolation. A lot of my music tastes reflect this idea of ‘dialogue’ too — I love sample-based music, like plunderphonics and mashups. I love it when people put together songs and genres I never thought could be combined. But in a lot of those cases, the sum of its parts is the appeal for me, and not necessarily the original.

I love artists who wear their influences on their sleeves and poach as much as they can get away with. I'm not so concerned about having an in-depth knowledge of the sources they're referencing, because obviously the references aren't all of why I like the media in question, but the parts which reference and adapt clearly must have some value to me because this keeps showing up in all my favourite works and genres. And I'm not really sure why, and I’m not sure how to use that in my own work.

Read more... )
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