art prompt: draw a creature/animal that fits the name Scrimpering Whimperlet

this thing

the curse of adhd:

this is something that I think a lot of people don't understand abt adhd. and like. this shit can get scary, especially if it happens often. I hate that I can't remember what I'm doing for the entire time it takes me to do it. I hate having to pause in the middle of conversations to desperately attempt to re-trace my train of thought because I don't remember what we're talking about. like. if you don't have adhd. just try to imagine what it's like to be unable to carry out a full conversation. try to imagine your memory resetting at random intervals. what are you doing right now? do you know? because often times, I fucking Forget. in the middle of doing things. and then I'm just standing there like an idiot desperately trying to wave away the thick fog that exists in my brain 24/7. and sometimes that shit just doesn't work. and I forget for good. it's terrifying. to me, at least.

Tried to figure out how I've been running these things and I came up with this

SO MUCH THIS. it drives me up a fucking WALL when people call male witches wizards

my take on this

The tragedy of my life is that I keep acquiring and displaying fetish art and having to be corrected by my friends.

Most recently, a friend came over my house and saw my computer background and went, "Wow, um, I didn't know you were into that." To which I look at the picture of the well drawn muscular female minotaur in historically accurate Greek clothing and I start geeking out about how I love the detail the artist did with the clothing and I point out the period appropriate folds and pins, how the artist even inserted the native plant that was used to dye the clothing this particular shade in the background, and even how the belt has technology AND historically accurate weaving patterns on it.

Then I start explaining how I love the muscular choices of the minotaur, that I was so impressed with the artist's anatomically correct depiction of the muscles converging into the neck. That many people get an upright cow's neck wrong because cow's don't have collarbones, so it can be very difficult to merge the upper arms and a chest of a human with a cow's body. I draw her attention to the beautiful way they've merged the pectoralis major so smoothly while also staying true to how muscular they've depicted the rest of the body.

I finish up with my thoughts on the artist's bold choice to depict the minotaur as a female, and despite the underlying themes of a minotaur being violence, child murder, strength, and muscles. I segue into how unlike bulls, cow are perceived as mothers. That they are the major source of milk in human culture, and that idyllic depictions of them in a field usually depict calves frolicking nearby, yet the minotaur kills and eats children.

I finish and there is a long pause.

"Urban, this is fetish art." and she takes me to the artist's twitter and god dammit it's fetish art, not a bold statement on cultural perceptions of women and violence throughout history. I have been tricked again.

tbh if they put that much thought and research into it and an unaware observer couldn't tell, is it actually fetish art? If it were actually fetish art, does that somehow preclude it from also being a commentary on women and violence?

Some of the boldest political and emotional messages I've ever seen came from straight up no nonsense porn. It's a setting that allows people to approach a major facet of the human experience without shame or obfuscation.

Keep in mind this is coming from an asexual person-- I don't think physical desire is some foundational keystone of life without which one isn't fully human. I think it's as morally neutral as hunger and thirst, and almost as impactful on all of human culture.

So why does the fetish cancel out the art?

Our tendency to dismiss anything associated with sex or the expression of sexual desire as frivelous and meaningless leads a lot of people to forget that pornographic art is still art.

The artist didn't just jerk off on the canvas and a beautiful minotaur appeared. They didn't spend hours researching greek dyemaking and bovine anatomy just because they were horny for muscular women. And their admiration for muscular women doesn't cease to be inherently transgressive of traditional and mainstream views of femininity just because they expressed that admiration in a sexual way.

Francisco Goya's The Nude Maja is a classical masterpiece that took three years to paint and is considered one of the greatest works of art ever made. [^] It's also porn. It was commissioned by a man-- the Prime Minister in fact-- to hang in a private room specifically for his nudes where he "often retired after dinner." It's believed the model depicted may have been his mistress.

In the political climate in which it was made, depicting a fully nude woman was extremely controversial (in fact it's considered one of the earliest western works to depict a woman's pubic hair without obvious negative connotations) especially because Goya painted her looking directly at the viewer, making her an active participant in an exchange of desire, rather than a passive object.

Eight years after it was finished, the Spanish Inquisition raided the Prime Minister's home, stole The Nude Maja and all his other paintings, and put Goya on trial for "moral depravity."

Goya, who had by then been rendered deaf by an unknown illness that may have been cumulative lead poisoning and was already sinking into the deep depression that marked his later years, escaped prosecution only by arguing that The Nude Maja followed in the "respectable" tradition of the classical nude [^^] , despite the fact that the full frontal nudity, pubic hair, direct stare, and the details that established the subject as a modern, living, literal woman, not a mythological figure or allegory-- the very features for which it was considered problematic-- were substantial departures from that tradition.

He could draw enough connections between it and a "respectable" painting in that genre by another lauded Spanish artist, appeasing nationalist egos and satisfying people that he was suitably reverent of the idealized past. Therefore, it wasn't porn. It was valuable, it was a classical nude.

To a modern viewer, it is in fact, more or less indistinguishable from any classical nude, despite the fact that when it was painted, anyone who saw it could have told you it was porn.

Today, The Clothed Maja, an almost identical but less risque painting which he created directly after The Nude Maja [^^^] is one of the paintings included in Animal Crossing: New Leaf.

Another painting included in New Leaf is Beauty Looking Back by Hishikawa Moronobu. It's an arch-typical example of the ukiyo-e genre. While far from all ukiyo-e art was erotic, it's not an exaggeration to say the overwhelming majority of it was, at the very least, intended to titillate.

The very name ukiyo-e associates the genre with hedonism, courtesans, brothels and pleasure districts. Beautiful courtesans were the most common subject. Nearly every ukiyo-e master produced explicitly pornographic work at some point in their careers. [^^^^] Beauty Looking Back is a pin up. It would have been recognized in the time it was created as something inherently sensual and referential towards sex, despite not being explicit.

And yet, it's "artistic value" (I do not like this term. The value of art is not and should not be quantifiable) is so unquestionable that Nintendo included it in arguably one of the most family friendly games in their notoriously, stringently family friendly catalog.

What is a fetish, if not a non-sexual element that inspires sexual desire?

What is fetish art, if not a depiction of these non-sexual elements intended, whether explicit or not, to arouse that same desire in the viewer?

What defines something as being outside the boundaries of "normal" sexual desire? Breasts aren't a reproductive organ, they're not inherently sexual. Neither is the ass. But they do inspire sexual desire, at least in those whose cultural back ground has taught them to associate those body parts with sex.

If feeling sexual desire because of anything that isn't genitalia is a fetish, then all erotic art-- from the most explicit adult films to those Levi's billboard ads where the models are doing their best not to wear the jeans they are advertising-- is fetish art.

So when did The Nude Maja and Beauty Looking Back stop being fetish art, and become art?

When does it stop being shameful to admire the beauty and technical skill of a creative work just because it's sexual in nature?

Is it just time? Or have we let ourselves be led into imagining the past was a land of chastity and virtue, its art inherently more valuable and firmly divorced from physical desire-- where men could paint tits all day and other men pay small fortunes to commission and purchase those tit paintings all without a single impure thought-- compared to which our modern age is debauched, immoral, deviant, degenerate?

If that Minotaur was hanging in a museum with a placard that said it was painted in the 1700's, would you, or your friend, still assume it was fetish art?

If you'd come across it in a context where you knew it was sexual, would you still have stopped to notice and appreciate the skill and the research put into the details?

This was a hell of a tangent, and if OP is the kind of person who notices period accurate historical details at a glance and the particulars of bovine anatomy to the degree of being able to make an educated statement about how well someone has accounted for the musculature whilst attaching a cow head to a human body-- probably none of this art history trivia is news to you.

The point is just this. Maybe you weren't "tricked" into seeing the art before the porn.

Maybe your friend was tricked by our deeply sex negative culture into only seeing the porn and missing the art entirely.

[^]: Though he's better known on tumblr for Saturn Devouring His Son, which I'm always delighted to remind people is not a name he gave it. It wasn't discovered until after his death, so we can't know for certain what he intended to depict. The greek myth of Zeus's father eating his children was a best guess and, imo, a way of sanitizing the disturbing nature of the image by framing it as part of the classical tradition of mythological art, rendering it allegorical and academic instead of horrifying and unexplained. It was not the first time Goya's work would rendered more palatable to conservative audiences by claiming it was part of classical tradition, which brings me back to Maja.

[^^]: Physically fighting the urge to add a rant here about fascism and "degenerate" art. Just go watch Jacob Gellar's "Who's Afraid Of Modern Art." He does a better job of it than I would anyway.

[^^^]: presumably also at the Prime Minister's request, with the intention they be displayed together and not, as urban legend likes to say, because the Inquisition forced him to. The concept of creating a clothed and a naked version of the subject so that the viewer can imagine undressing them is a tradition well preserved in commissioned pornographic art today.

[^^^^]: and I do not mean ~artistic nudes~ here. I mean fully explicit art created with the specific intention of being porn. Like I could not post them on tumblr without them being immediately taken down for violating community guidelines, regardless of their "artistic value" as historical works by globally recognized masters of the genre whose non explicit works are so well known and well loved they ended up in ANIMAL CROSSING.

I must see the Minotsaur art

Beyblade heavyweight division

There are so much going in in this image

Spent like all day drawing every single version of the Kieran in Hisui au i could find lmao. Isekeiran au is mine, Warden Kieran au belongs to @laststation2hisui, Don't Weep, Insects belongs to @applesjuice, and Kieran Legends Arceus au belongs to @noiverns-den

So chapter 23 happened, and I just had to make this reference.

(Also. Akari. Girl. You cannot just strip down like that in front of your crush. I don't care if you're fighting Lord Arcanine in an active volcano, Volo's right there with you and his repressed demisexual ass is not ready for this, AKARI YOU ARE GIVING THIS MAN EMOTIONS HE IS NOT USED TO-)

“ships should at least make sense.” no. ships can make sense, sure. but they’re just fictional characters we play with for fun. they’re fantasies, not a fucking thesis paper. so no, they don’t always have to make sense. they just have to make you happy (or horny).

let people enjoy (fictional) things however they want to enjoy.

If you're on discord for too long you get the fun experience of gaslighting yourself about what emojis are real. like what do you mean fingerguns is not an actual emoji.

*does this to you*

Frankly beautiful way of phrasing it

Silverwing opens as sort of Watership Down xenofiction where it’s the modern world as seen from the perspective of bats, but then it establishes that the supernatural is emphatically real but very specifically only for bats.

Bats intrinsically have magic based around echolocation, and can use sounds to sing images and maps into other creatures’ minds. Bat magic can create echoes that last for generations. A bat oracle listens to echoes from the future. A bat uses bat magic to turn himself into a human. The bat afterlife is a real physical location you can go to, it’s ruled by Bat Satan and you can bring a bat back from the dead by pulling their bat soul out of bat hell like Bat Orpheus.

And honestly more xenofiction should do “Magic is real but humans haven’t noticed because the universe isn’t about them”

The way necromancy works is this: Everything in your body — meat, bones, skin, blood — has something like a memory. They remember, in their own way, what it’s like to be alive. Skin remembers the sun. Bones remember what shape they’re suppose to be in. Muscle memory is more than just an idiom.

The way necromancy works is that the caster puts a little bit of their willpower into a corpse to order it to remember how it functioned in life and obey. This is easiest to do with bones, which are easy to trick, and becomes increasingly difficult the more of the original body remains.

To reanimate a full body to your command, you have to have a lot of willpower.

The necromancer checked the map. She checked the map again. She squinted up at the stars, lips moving silently. Then, taking the lantern off its hook, she peered over the side of the little sailboat.

There wasn't much to see. The sea was dark and still as glass, except where the lanternlight turned a patch of seawater a yellowish-green. A tiny fish flitted into the gleam, attracted to the light, and then vanished into the murk again.

The necromancer chewed the inside of her cheek. She sat down again, the boat bobbing gently with the movement, and checked the map one more time. Then she opened the little wooden case on the floor of the boat, which unfolded into a neat arrangement of drawers.

There were. Things. In the drawers. Some wriggled. Others twitched little beetly legs into the night air. A few of them made noises, which ran together into a squeaky, wheezy squeal of horror.

The necromancer twiddled her fingers over the display as she considered her options. Then she grabbed a few of the twitching, wriggling things, held them in her palm and squeezed her hand into a fist as tightly as she could with a squelching noise.

She opened her hand to inspect her work. She breathed the spell into it, and then, holding her hand over the edge of the boat, dropped the spell into the sea.

And that seemed to be it. She sat back in the boat and closed the little wooden case. After a moment she started looking over the map again.

There were a lot of handwritten notes on the map. Each one was connected to a mark and some coordinates; some of them said, "Storm 1457," or "Struck a rock 1483." Others said "Total failure," or “Completely dissolved.”

The note the necromancer seemed most interested in was the one that read, “Battle of Salzstein, 1501.”

The necromancer checked the map. She checked the map again. She squinted up at the stars, lips moving silently, and then she was suddenly thrown down to the floor of the boat as though a giant, invisible hand had crushed her.

Her mouth opened in a noiseless scream.

FRICK ‘IM UP, ODYSSEUS! FRICK ‘IM UP

"I want to be a dragon."