The TARDIS Is Sick Of The Doctor Forming Toxic Relationships With Companions And She Is Not Relinquishing

Amazing analysis.

I think the voice of the cold intrests me as a character so much because he's such a real and visceral response to their circumstances. Which is true for all the voices and each is intriguing to dig into in a different way, but this post is about cold the others will get their turn (probably)

Imagine with me, for a second, you've only just learned what it means to exist and you've already been discarded.

You've done everything you were told without question. This is your purposes and you were promised Good at the end of it and you do it and you do it well. Your guide, and authority figure you should be able to trust who is seemingly so much more experienced in this world than you even seems happy with you. You must be doing it right

Then you're abandoned. The only Good for you is an eternity of nothing. The only way you can be Good is to hurt others and to not exist at all.

Wouldn't that leave you empty? Hurt, clawing for something, anything to fill that void. You had Purpose and it turned out to mean nothing, you had a vague promise of Good and it turned out to be nothing.

You can't be Good, can't fulfil that Purpose when all of it means nothing, when you've been lied to and led to be locked in a box for the rest of time. And rather than feel that hurt, you claw it out of yourself with your own two hands, and the same implement you'd used to fulfil your Purpose.

All he wants is that Good he was promised, and to him that's the opposite of that box. It's the opposite of Nothing. It doesn't matter if it hurts him, if it hurts somebody else, if it feels good or feels bad, he just craves something that will make him feel. That will make everything worth it in the end, that will free him from the monotony and inherent stagnation of the situation he's in. What use does he have for morality in pursuit of this? What use is morality in this situation anyway? Where everything is being presented with such grand consequences, where everything is both right and wrong, where these consequences never seem to quite stick for him regardless? So he simply encourages action, in whatever form that may take.

Because it's so much more intresting if it's an active choice. Something is always better than that empty cabin surrounded by nothingness all around he's subconsciously running from. Because cold is most aware of their godly nature, and so is most aware of whats always missing no matter what they do. Who tries to fill that emptiness, first with Purpose then with Action.

For a voice that claims to feel nothing at all a lot of his drive is purely emotional. He wants to be intrested, he wants to be engaged, he wants to feel something even if it hurts. He wants to feel connection to this body the same way the other voices do, and yet criticises them for feeling in that way.

At the core of it all, he wants back what he's lost. And by his very nature he cannot have it.

I'm very much enjoying the recent pages and just how much character is pouring out especially through body language and facial expressions. My favorite being how Tess is just so nonchalant like this is a normal Tuesday and Tynan's mix of confused and pissed. So I wonder how do you draw facial expressions? I do pencil and paper art as a hobby and for me they're one of the harder things to get down right.

Ahh, facial expressions, the backbone of a character-driven story. I can't remember ever sitting down and perfecting How To Draw Faces, but while I struggled with it a lot early on, I don't remember having much trouble with it in recent years, so evidence suggests that the faces I draw were in large part refined naturally during my chibi-drawing video-making process, which makes me think that the skillset can be refined even if the faces in question are incredibly stylized. Eyes, eyebrows and mouths are apparently all you need for the basics.

Cartoon facial expressions have a benefit of modularity - you can get away with swapping out or tweaking individual parts of the expression without having to do any redrawing of the underlying head shape (a difficulty faced by more realistic or more squash-and-stretch-heavy styles, as faces can be VERY flexible and a mouth shape or eyebrow arrangement can reshape the entire profile of the head). This can help us see how extremely complex our ability to read facial emotions really is. Tiny changes can communicate entirely different vibes.

It doesn't take much repositioning or tweaking to get across a potentially very complex emotion.

Every time I try to think of a hard list of do's and don'ts for this, I fail. Facial expressions can be arbitrarily complicated. Rules like "make sure each part of the expression is communicating the same emotion" might sound good on paper, but in practice you can get a lot of mileage out of an expression where every part is saying something different - a big smile with sad eyes, a small smirk with a calm open gaze, etc. We parse facial expressions as a whole, not as a sum of parts. Like a lot of art, getting an expression to say what you want it to is mostly a matter of tweaking it until it looks right. Suppose we want to make our example elf dude look devastated.

Pretty good, but maybe a little too subdued. This gives me "you just told me something horrible that I haven't fully processed yet" vibes. Let's tweak the mouth to pull the corners out more, putting more tension in their face.

That makes them seem a little less frozen. It looks like they're breathing in, getting ready to say or yell something. But maybe instead of SAD devastated, we want FURIOUS devastated. So let's tweak the eyebrows, where anger is stored.

The other expressions give a feeling of open devastation, perhaps witnessing some incomprehensible tragedy - this new expression looks more focused. Maybe they're currently staring down the person who got them so upset, waiting for them to stop monologuing. Maybe once they're done processing, they'll look a little more like this.

That's a powerful face, but we've strayed pretty far from "devastated" by the end there. Maybe they've started their "you can never win" speech against whoever got them so upset. There's determination in that expression - whatever they were feeling before, they've sharpened it down to a knife's edge.

I wish I could give better advice than "just draw about a million little chibi faces and eventually you'll work it out through sheer numbers" but I really can't think of a better way to get good at pulling together specific emotions to match what's happening in the character's head.

sidenote this ask reminded me how much otherwise solid superhero comic art absolutely blows at facial expressions and how much that annoys me, it cannot be that hard to draw nightwing pretty

Hermaeus Mora has found his way in.

He is secret, and needs not tags.

Offer him comments, spread him with reblogs and praise him with likes.

I felt like drawing tentacles, and he just appeared on the paper.

I’m just going to leave this here

Oh yeah, Crowley was very proud of this one. Probably would get him some commendation downstairs. 🎄🎉🎊🩷

No copypasta has ever ruined my life as comprehensively as Hell Fuck Castle. I write tabletop RPGs, and now every time I read a lore blurb about an ancient ruined kingdom where everything was cool until the last ruler fucked it up, my brain whispers "King Big Sad Guy, who did the Flame Thing".

To be fair, Largo goes through that anyway.

I've written Largo into enough of a genuinely mentally harmful situation over the past day that I think it's only fair I draw him all snuggled up and comfy at some point too. Give him a break.

ok so hear me out

It is that funny.

this was funnier in my head.