I was challenged by one of my friends to draw my interpretation of Amaterasu Okami as a person!

I thought I'd try doing something a little closer to the original game's style (mostly just for fun), but I also did one that's more of my usual style.

Petra Parker doodles

awesome morning in awesome nation-state:

-- tried to get insulin; had to pay out of pocket because former employer fucked up paperwork and never told me. and health insurance is tied to employment in the US. and diabetes meds aren't subsidized

-- bike by city center, cops doing their morning scolding/intimidation of the two dozen homeless people that sleep near the steps/entrance of federal courthouse since city outlawed them from laying/sitting elsewhere

-- guy on bus watching insta clips of based-fascist vtubers

-- had to fill-out annual department hire paperwork at HR at school, there's a printed-out sign that says something about "the US Department of Homeland Security now REQUIRES that blah blah blah" with a big scary emblem

-- returning paperwork to counter, HR is like "you didn't fill out a SELECTIVE MILITARY SERVICE sheet?" and i was like "but i'm legally 'female' at state/fed level?" in half-jest because may as well fill it out to avoid government scrutiny, and she's like "but you weren't always?" (ouch. how sure are you?) and i'm like "well i'm over 26 years of age" and she's like "well just to be safe" and then i was like "is there anything else the US Department of Homeland Security and/or armed forces would like from me?" but i was too deadpan for joke to land and she just went "i don't know?"

-- sit down to fill out some docs and a new foreign student is being guided through paperwork by an HR person. student is from Vietnam. he asks if he can claim a dependent for taxes. HR person is like "why, aren't you alone?" and he's like "i have nine-month-old daughter and a wife?" and she's like "oh well as a migrant here for under [x amount] of years, your wife and child don't technically count as dependents, so no"

-- biking to campus through super-sanitized "progressive" neighborhood. home with fancy landscaping obviously calculated to superficially appear somewhat in synch with local region landscape yet all shrubs/flowers actually from Europe and team of four guys just unloading pesticides all over the manicured yard (right next to "natural area" hiking trailhead)

-- frown and turn head other direction, directly across street a cop is parked at the curb, he's just sitting in driver's seat giggling and watching shit on his phone in like a giant military-esque black SUV

What i want most in my estinien and wol dynamic is for them to be wholly devoted ride or die will help you hide any number of bodies, but in a way that looks totally unremarkable from the outside. They are both ‘no point talking about a problem i can simply fix’ people, so it never gets articulated. What looks like silent disinterested team work is in fact trust and understanding of the other so complete they don’t even bother to look. He doesn’t check on them after stopping the canon in stb, what for? He’s removed the artillery fire, of course wol’s got it from here. Wol isn’t in a panic over his disappearance at the end of HW, if he needed help he wouldn’t have left.

And if he HAD needed help wol would have fought every ascians simultaneously to make sure he got it. No different from Estinien leaping into a battle he was noticeably not participating in just to rescue a passed out wol then immediately dip. No he doesn’t talk about it, he just does it, which is the same thing to them.

He hands them Nidhogg’s eye without a moments hesitation. Wol hears he’s travelling with gaius and has no doubts. There are exactly two azure dragoons. There may be only one wol but when they’re not around, it’s estinien who gets the call.

Both are so alone in their massive invisible struggles, even in the wars they share with thousands of others, and i think they see that in each other. They can’t carry each other’s burdens, so they’ll do a mutual sam gamgee and carry each other.

The depths of depravity we encounter in this world are fucking nauseating. How did we mutilate ourselves and our relationships to the point that this could even be considered, let alone adopted? But I guess if we already tolerate armed police in schools it's really only the new technology that makes this shocking. Forget school to prison pipeline, some US schools are functionally already part-time prisons.

No one is perfect, Petra Parker. Not even you, but we should always try to be better ❤️💙. I love transfem Spidey so much, but I think it's important that we capture the messy, imperfect person she would be to keep her as relatable as her canon counterpart.

just finished dawntrail and i thought wuk lamat was really niceys actually

As I'm going back to write some stuff about ARR, I am finding that Alphinaud's weird behavior is not my only outstanding question about the events surrounding the Garlean attack. Another big one is why Y'shtola and Yda, who have managed to find one another after the attack, don't try to contact the Warrior of Light or Alphinaud by linkpearl. Or, for that matter, why the WoL doesn't try calling anyone else by linkpearl after they discover the attack.

Unfortunately I do not remember off the top of my head whether anyone other than Minfilia talks to the WoL over linkpearl prior to that canon point and I would have a lot of ground to cover to check that. So this might not be a viable theory, but I wonder whether it's possible that only Minfilia had the WoL's linkpearl prior to the attack. Given that the Scions are operating as a secret organization in early ARR, that might not be as weird as it sounds. We know linkpearls are vulnerabilities that can be exploited (hence why Yda and Papalymo discard theirs as they flee from the banquet later, and it's entirely possible Y'shtola and Yda did the same after the Garlean attack). A single point of linkpearl contact with the organization for newer recruits could protect other members from exposure should one be captured by their enemies (as, in fact, they are).

And the Warrior of Light, even as they make themselves an extremely valuable recruit very quickly, are still a relatively new recruit. Again, given the position from which the Scions are operating in ARR, it is not surprising that they don't expose huge amounts of information about their operations to a new recruit no matter how talented. The WoL doesn't learn what happens to the tempered or that the Echo protects them from tempering until after their first encounter with Ifrit, probably because that mission was something of a cock-up and they were never intended to be directly exposed to a primal so soon. (I think that if you take Minfilia's dialogue beforehand and Thancred's obvious guilt after, this was supposed to be more of a learning mission for the WoL where they shadowed a more experienced member who explained things to them along the way so they could understand what the Scions were facing with primals and gain some firsthand experience, but they were definitely not supposed to be thrown headfirst into a primal battle. Thancred fully acknowledges that this was a fuck-up, and he's very hard on himself for it despite the fact that it all worked out in the end.)

But especially noteworthy--whether it was intentional, or just narrative expediency, I'm going to treat it as meaningful canon--is the fact that the Warrior of Light does not know that the Church of St. Adama Landama is a sanctuary for the Scions. Minfilia has to leave a message for Noraxia to deliver to them with her dying breath. This is plainly higher-level information than the Warrior of Light was privy to prior to the attack.

In the bigger picture, then, while the game doesn't necessarily do a great job of making all this clear, I think it does add up in the context of what the Scions are in ARR.

XIV HEATWAVE FESTIVAL- WEEK 9 : Stargazing

"Not a cloud in sight, Shtola. Stars are shining in full force. There's that line of them there. Each point bright and blue. Didn't seem to matter whether we were sailing in the South Sea or the Bounty it never failed to trail us around in the sky. Now I always figured, were I to connect those stars like so..."
"... Arsay!"
"You can see it, yeah? Got the idea from one of Krile's new spells. Not a perfect match and limited in range. But still close, I'd say, to how you might remember them to be... I hope."
"A controlled dispersion of aether... 'Tis brilliant, dear. Thank you."