Post Atom Eve Special And Season 2 Thoughts

post atom eve special and season 2 thoughts

INVINCIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD!!! if you don't wanna be spoiled, don't read!!

okay.

okay okay okay OKAY.

oh my god this show is insane. debbie is everything to me. i was so genuinely upset when she and oliver were in danger that i felt sick. she is such an incredible character and the writers have done her immense justice. she's a wife and a mother and that doesn't stop her from being strong, it actually makes her stronger. her relationship with mark is so incredible and the symbolism of their matching black eyes was impeccable. they've both been hurt in similar ways, by nolan and by angstrom. they're marked by their trauma, but they share the weight together.

oliver is a delight and mark's instant desire to care for him and protect him was so wholesome and wonderful! he was willing to drop everything to care for his little brother and that, more than anything, makes him human and so very, very loving. at least nolan was willing to acknowledge that oliver is blameless in everything.

and nolan..... jesus. probably some of the most insane character development i've ever witnessed. he is so nature versus nurture, and he's become human through his twenty years on earth. maybe debbie feels like those years were for nothing, but there's proof that they had a profound impact on nolan and how he views life. he is, by all accounts and purposes, no longer a viltrumite. he's human. it's a pretty classic trope (the evil alien finds humanity redeemable and discovers that their "inferior" lives are just as valuable as the alien's), but invincible doesn't make this trope feel tired. it feels compelling and powerful, because we have a clear picture of the stakes. anissa and the other viltrumites make that very clear.

anissa herself serves her purpose: she's there to be a reminder of why mark and the coalition are fighting back against the viltrumite empire. she's fast, she's strong, and she completely lacks any form of compassion or empathy. mark barely holds his own against her, which is incredibly powerful after watching mark face off against the sequids and all the other big bads of this season. i really, really hope the show finds a way to avoid her assault of mark because i see no positive gains from that storyline. mark has already been through the wringer too many times over. there's no point in making him suffer further.

speaking of, mark in this season brought me to tears more than once. he is trying so damn hard to be nothing like his father. he's trying to be a good boyfriend to amber. he's trying to be a good friend, a good student, a good son, a good brother. the odds are continually stacked against him and yet he never gives up. he is so very human and his story is so, so heartbreaking. all three of the graysons have their fair share of trauma after this season, but i feel like mark's is somehow the worst. you have to remember that he's only eighteen when all of this happens. he's just barely not a kid, and he's pretty far from being an adult. his brain's not even fully developed yet, and he has to defend an entire planet from the psychotic race of aliens that he shares DNA with. he suffers so much. just give the kid a damn break, cecil. he needs a hug. and therapy.

the parallels between nolan and debbie were incredible. the song choices, the montage of them traveling aimlessly, both of them coming so close to killing themselves... my jaw was on the floor. even mark had a moment of suicidal ideation in the eighth episode, and that through line for all three of the graysons was so well done.

eve. eve is my perfect darling love and she has never, ever done anything wrong in her life. the special was so tragic and while the animation was stunning (those fight scenes alone were jaw-dropping), the true high point of it, for me, was the way it handled the found family trope. this trope is a personal favorite of mine, and it was a real treat to see it given the weight and power it deserves, with a terribly tragic twist. "you killed people i didn't even know i loved" is insane. eve changing her broken family portrait to instead depict all of her deceased family members so clearly was SO powerful. that girl has been through so much, and her special supplemented her character development in a way that she so deserves.

all in all, i am destroyed. i am in shambles. the writing in this show is next-level. there's things i didn't mention in the post that were utterly spectacular (the multiverse references, angstrom levy, rex's development, rick and donald's stories about bodily autonomy, kate and immortal) and of course are deserving of praise, but i am just so impressed with the way the graysons have been handled. it's rare that a family feels so strong and fleshed out not just as a unit but as individuals as well, and all three of them carry so much narrative weight in a way that makes it clear they're forever connected.

i can't wait to see what insanity season three brings. stay invincible everyone.

swervefire save me swervefire

grimmons edit to the song “So Alright, Cool, Whatever” by The Happy Fits

(spoilers for the final season!)

rambling about art "Perfectionism" (+ my experience)

Lately I've been looking for advice about curbing perfectionism but couldn't find anything that worked for me. I feel that so much of the advice out there is just too surface level. It wants to target what I consider the symptoms (perfectionism itself / fear of messing up) and not the real source of the problem, or the "why", which is something that will look a little different for everybody. If you really want to curb perfectionism, the serious answer, in my opinion, is to start by looking inward. If you've done that and found that you're anything like me, with problems that feel like compulsive fixing, uncontrollable hyperfocus, and/or paranoid thoughts that your art career is doomed and everyone is secretly making fun of you because the angle of your oc's mouth is off by 2 degrees, hearing the advice that looks like "Here's a fun little drawing exercise to do every day!" over and over again is probably starting to feel more demoralizing than anything. So instead, here are some tricks/reframing devices that I use in place of some of the really general ones.

The first piece of advice I see everywhere is to "make bad art on purpose" to get over the fear of making mistakes. As a literal exercise, this just doesn't work great for my specific problem. Sure, I can draw some crappy sketch in 5 seconds if I want or waste all my spoons on making something I hate, but it offers no real support in terms of my "compulsive fixing" issue, which is where everything really goes wrong in my process. If it was as easy as saying "I'm just going to Not Have Compulsions!" I wouldn't be here writing this. But I have learned to relieve a small amount of the paranoia and anxiety that my compulsions stem from with the following exercise!

Essentially, I look through some of my favorite artists' work and find some stuff I really enjoy. While I do that, I look for mistakes, confusing choices, and inconsistencies in the work. I then ask myself: Why do I think this art piece still works so well despite all these errors? Does seeing these errors change my feelings about the piece or about the person who made them for the worse? (Spoiler alert, the answer to the second question is always no.)

I will then literally repeat the answers to those questions over and over and over again to myself while I draw. Does this completely or even mostly fix the problem? Definitely not. But if you're like me and at the point of desperation, this is something that's had a small yet significant impact on my workflow and my mindset as I approach making art in general. If my favorite artist can make a weird mistake on something and I love the piece anyways, then maybe it's okay for me to also make and leave in a weird mistake or two. The other good news is that I've noticed the effect of this has increased over time! In the past few months, and for the first couple of times in my life, I've been able to actually ignore a small handful of my compulsions to fix things while drawing. Which is actually so insane and probably my proudest moment of "invisible" progress I've ever made.

It's definitely worth noting, however, that this exercise is not going to work if you don't or can't approach it in good faith. You cannot give up immediately with "I'll never be this good, this artist's work is perfect." Nobody's work is perfect. If you look for ages and genuinely can't see any mistakes, that probably means you're looking at an artist way outside your skill level, and believe me, I've been there, it's super demoralizing. That's why most of the artists I look up to now are those whose work is just a few levels above or next to mine, because being able to spot errors not only makes their work feel more authentic and easily relatable, but functionally speaking, it keeps me inspired without getting locked into self-pity mode.

I'm obviously not going to put any artists I love on the spot here, but I'm going to list a few errors that I myself see very frequently in my specific corner of the art world: Inconsistent or straight up weird limb lengths, floating facial features, broken lines, color spill, and awkward tangents. Often times, the "errors" I notice aren't even true errors, just results of stylization that I get paranoid about in my own work. And this is super important too -- seeing those kinds of "errors" in art that I unabashedly love helps to soothe the paranoia that I'm doing something "wrong" or that everybody secretly hates me because I drew the eye 2 pixels too far to the right.

Other times, what you notice doesn't have to be an "error" at all. Maybe you just see untapped potential or find something that you would have done differently. For example, maybe you think a different light source or perspective could have improved the atmosphere of a piece. I often feel that many of my favorite artists' work suffers from a lack of contrast.

But the point of this entire exercise is that even when I apply a mock version of my compulsive behavior with art that I love and pick it apart as much as I possibly can, I realize that I STILL LOVE the artwork I'm looking at just as much if not more despite all the "mistakes". Rarely do the errors take anything away from the piece that they don't replace with a sense of life and authenticity. And as a bonus, now I'm ten times as excited to go draw and try out some new things!

And for the record -- this isn't the sort of thing I dedicate "15 minutes a day!" to doing, but something that comes pretty naturally to me whenever I come across art I really love. And speaking of TIME, one other piece of advice I see everywhere is to set a timer and give yourself just a few minutes to draw such and such. This is a piece of advice that logically I know SHOULD work, and despite the fact that it DOESN'T for me I would STILL recommend it heartily. My only problem with this piece of advice is that my brain just does not work this way. Time is just way too arbitrary and setting a "fake deadline" doesn't do anything to fix the issues that are making me take forever in the first place. So instead, in order to try and improve my speed in my digital art, I've started to stay more zoomed out of my canvas as I draw. This better mimics the experience of sketching on paper, something that's always been easier for me since fixing mistakes is so much less convenient than it is on a digital program.

Don't get me wrong though, if you're like me and used to drawing while so zoomed in you can count the pixels, this is going to be even harder than it sounds. I avoided this piece of advice for years because it was so viscerally uncomfortable to let go of the feeling of "control" I had over my pen strokes while zoomed in. But I gave in a few weeks ago when I was having such a hard time getting a pose down after days of attempts that I was willing to try anything. And honestly, the results were a MUCH needed morale boost. I saw improved speed, dynamism, and stylization pretty much instantly. I've been pushing myself to do this with all my subsequent art pieces and while I forget to do it every 15 minutes it's still made a surprisingly large and positive impact on my workflow.

Yes, I still feel the compulsion to "fix everything" in the refinement stage. But if I pair this with the advice above, the amount of compulsive fixes I makes goes way, way down. Especially if I remain relatively zoomed out during the refinement stage!

In conclusion, I'm not saying that the og art advice was dumb or bad or never works. This post is extremely specific to my situation. As far as I know I might be the only person in the world who spends extra nightmarish hours on every piece adding and deleting and readding unnoticeable layer effects, color adjustments, and details and "fixing" and unfixing and "fixing" every conceivable possible detail whilst sitting there begging myself to just stop so I can go eat or move on with my life or do literally anything else. And the fact that on top of that I go into hyperfocus every time I so much as LOOK at my Ipad makes any "take a break" solution near impossible if I don't have a seriously involved outside support system to take my mind off of art, which I don't.

Thanks to all of this plus typical life stuff, I've been drawing less and less in the past few years. It's hard to start anything knowing that once I do, I'm pretty much not going to have a life again until it's finished.

And drawing less also means that when I do draw, I'm drawing much slower, which draws out the length of time I have to deal with these problems and therefore makes them unignorable. I used to be able to finish up a full piece in 5-8 hours, basically a school night, and because it was finished I could focus on my responsibilities the next day until I started to draw again. But now I'm spending anywhere from 8-16 hours on simple bust up character drawings. That's crazy! Honestly reading all this back, I guess it's no wonder I'm so burnt out and exhausted all the time!

I'm never going to completely stop drawing. Even if I wanted to, I don't think I physically could. But I would really love to get to a point where art feels fun and freeing again, and where sitting down to sketch on paper for 10 minutes doesn't mean throwing the entire day away.

So if anyone else out there has got advice for me I would absolutely love to hear it. And I'd also love to hear from anyone who can relate to any of this, because as much as I was joking earlier about being the only one in the world, I haven't actually been able to meet anyone else who gets what I'm going through. And wow it is so difficult to put into words, too. I rewrote this post a million times. But that's all for now! Thanks for reading.