I Love Them Your Honor

i love them your honor

one of the best gideon moments hands down is when, post battle with new lyctor ianthe, she finds out that dulcinea and palamedes are sort of exes and she LIES DOWN ON THE GROUND ABOUT IT AND GROANS FOR FIVE WHOLE MINUTES. everyone is like “gideon get up” “gideon it’s not a big deal” and she is like literally i’m going to end it all. this is so embarrassing for me and palamedes must hate me (cam has told her four times this is Not True) i must go make things right with him immediately. babygirl there’s a feral infant proto-god who just consumed the soul of her 1950s greaser chewtoy sprinting around canaan house you HAVE to change your priorities. and yet she won’t and she doesn’t. i love her so bad

It is my pleasure to finally be able to share with you the project that I've been working on for the past 2 years!

For my final project for my masters degree, I decided to create a visual development artbook for an animated movie adaptation of the Leviathan trilogy by Scott Westerfeld. This 100+ page long book contains all the research that I put into this project, from sketches and concept art to final designs and illustrations, as well as explanations of my creative process.

I am aware that the timing is not ideal, but I promise that this has absolutely nothing to do with the upcoming Netflix adaptation! That adaptation wasn't announced until after I'd completed my project, and I had absolutely no idea that it was happening. This is a fully fan-made project, and has no affiliation with Scott Westerfeld whatsoever.

All that being said: I hope you enjoy! This was a very long labour of love, and I am so so happy to finally share it with you all. These books hold a very special place in my heart, and it is my sincerest hope that my work manages to do them justice.

LINK TO THE COMPLETE PDF

🗣️ (also sorry this got long, turns out i have thoughts) so like riko is one of the weirdest fandom cases i've ever seen. i've been in fandoms where characters who commit actual war crimes and genocide are badass babes or uwu soft bois, and even spoiled mafia brats who commit terrible crimes against the heroes for daddy's attention that get love and redemption. it's so weird to see just how isolated from all that riko is to me.

i do think it's partly how aftg is written, and that's also partly because niel's pov is not at all forgiving of riko, while is entirely forgiving of people like andrew. but i also think it's because of how riko himself is written. he's one of these characters that's better on paper than he is in the book to me. because he's never presented as smart enough to fall into the magnificent bastard trope where everyone applauds how devious his plans are, but he's not outright hammy enough to just be a fun read, he doesn't even get the same stupidly dramatic flare as andrew. and while we're told he's powerful and doing dangerous stuff, he's presented on page, more often than not, as a petulant child that neil is just done with or a guy who likes to torture people who neil is also done with. neil is never actually scared of riko, or even particularly threatened by him, and i think that hurts him and makes his position in the narrative weaker. especially when nora is trying to play him as a villain and a threat in a mafia story rather than a good old fashioned rival in a sports drama. for example, his first impression on the kathy show should live up to the hype of this imposing charismatic villain who broke kevin's hand, but instead loses him temper, forgets all of his media training and lets a nobody like neil goad him into losing control of the interview, and then his payback, things like shoving neil around and seth's death, are basically brushed off because neil doesn't really care that much. it's not given the weight to be a seriously omg this guys a threat first impression. and this isn't uncommon, lots of media hamstrings their villains at the start by making sure we know the main character is too sassy for them and can humiliate them, without thinking about how weak that can make the villain seem. it feels sometimes like nora wanted riko to be this chess master villain or tragic child who's lashing out at the world, without committing to it fully to either, or was just not an experienced enough writer to have known how to write either of those things in the pov of someone who hates riko's guts, which is understandable, writing is hard and that sort of nuance takes practice, especially if you just go by the books and not the extra content, and i do wonder how differently nora would have portrayed riko if she rewrote the main trilogy now with presumably a lot more practice under her belt. in the end riko ends up in this weird grey area to me where i understand why he's not popular, given he has none of the usual obvious traits that fans like to latch onto when redeeming a villainous character, and even the ones that are there are glossed over pretty quickly because of neil's pov, and a lot of his more interesting pieces are on paper not actively presented in the book, and not everyone reads super deep, but i also don't understand the amount of hate. i have literally never seen a character in any other fandom i've been in have this much fandom wide hatred.

See I have nothing to add here because you single handedly dropped the best analysis of Riko's character in the series I had pleasure to read so far and summed up all my feelings about why and what of the fandom. If the goal was to write a character that is impactful yet easy to hate then that goal was achieved but for me it real takes away form the magnitude of feelings Riko could evoke in reader and questions he could provoke in narrative if he was given bit different presentation that woudl still align with the lore we already have.

...you know, jean has the means to take over in absence of riko and kevin too.

he's the number three in the court, he's a property of moriyamas, sure, but so is kevin. he plays excellently when beaten everyday. remove riko as an active threat to his wellbeing that he can't remove and what does that leave? tetsuji would beat the hell out of him, sure, but he did that to riko when he overstepped too. tetsuji does not give a shit about dynamics as long as the team provides the results.

the obstacle for jean's takeover is the grayson and rape that keeps circulating among the rumors. if jean eliminates grayson as the only one rapist left on the team and somehow extinguishes the rumors, he has a free run.

I don't think he would want to be the captain though. too much exy bullshit. but being the captain would mean there's no one higher than him on hierarchy=no one to hold power over his head aside from tetsuji.

I feel like fox AU's where Kevin and riko leave to Palmetto together are Jeans villain origin.

Those two fuckers who shaped his life into what it is now dare to just say actually bye and fuck off???? Just like that ?????

He will hunt them for sport if you thought Riko was bad wait for Jean as he takes over nest. Fucking holiday break but it's Jean dragging them back to evermore

the idea of katelyn’s family not liking aaron is really interesting. aaron views katelyn as a way to get that normal life he so desperately wants, a way to even momentarily escape his family’s insanity. but even though he views katelyn as a solace, her family doesn’t like him. for good reason, i mean he was an ex drug addict who killed a guy, but still, it stings him. now he has to face the idea that maybe even though he wants a normal life more than anything, maybe that life doesn’t want him. it also adds depth to katelyn, making her have to choose between two different kinds of people.