And she felt your pain in Wonderland, and she seethed in that black curtained place, and we can see her there now. She’s just anxiously pacing, tearing at the walls, trying to find some way to break out, to save you from this torment. But still, she can’t find any relief. And then she hears a fight outside, and moments later, she has company. The lich Edward drops into the chamber and scrambles to his knees. And he says:
Edward: Who— who are you? What is this place?
And Lup says
Lup: Are you the one who’s been hurting my brother out there?
Edward: Am I—where are we?
And Lup grits her teeth and says
Lup: I’m gonna fucking kill you now.
(The Adventure Zone, Ep.67: Story and Song- Part 1)
She appeared in our shop maybe…two/three-ish?? years ago.
She’s pretty young, maybe now 16 or 17. Her mom appears to work in the hospital down the street, so we think she comes here to wait out MamaArtist’s shift. She’s a small, shy type, with long brown hair and a bright yellow cardigan that she kinda tries to hide in.
She has a sort of “routine” when she shows up. She’ll show up in the far end of the store, peek around the orchids, and if you don’t glance over at her, come to stare longingly at the roses. She’ll then realize there are people around and scatter to the café tables. After building a fort of books, she will carefully sneak a sketchbook out and start drawing. Few hours later, MamaArtist shows up and they leave.
SO one day, she’s staring at the roses, and I happen to have one that breaks off and is too short to sell, so I smile and hand it to her. “Take it, it’s free.”
She just STARES at me, and points at it and says, “Free?”
I nod, “Yup!” and she’s SO HAPPY!! She starts talking to me really fast, and I realize why she’s so quiet– She doesn’t speak a lot of English!
And….ugh….now I’m embarrassed to admit this, but while I recognize that what she’s speaking is Spanish, I can’t speak Spanish beyond like… drunk kindergartener. In present tense. On alternate tuesdays with mild improvements if I’ve been attempting to read the Spanish sides of the warning labels on chemical bottles.
She realizes quickly that I am a deer-in-the-headlights and starts to run off, but I manage to scrape together enough itty-bitty BROKEN ASS Spanish to make her laugh and diffuse things, kinda. I get from her that she loves roses, but they’re too expensive for her art.
(btw my boss is behind her with the waterboy, ABSOLUTELY THRILLED that she’s talking to me, because The Mystery Of The Yellow Cardigan Customer is one that has haunted us for a few months now.)
ANYWAY, I love art, so I try to ask about her art, but, : ( She can’t find the words for it, and I can’t understand her explanation in Spanish, and IT WAS TOTALLY NOT HER FAULT but she got embarrassed and thanked me profusely for the flower and broke the sound barrier to escape.
Boss swoops in for the down low, and….I haven’t really detailed the conversation I had with this girl here, because it is LONG and kiiiiiinda embarrassing and I tried to type it out but i fell like it came off waaaay too one-sided in my favor because I couldn’t accurately recall the Spanish she was speaking. I just felt like it wasn’t fair, you know? She was shy, but when speaking about her art, her voice was confident and she clearly knew what she was talking about, so yeah.
I’m also speaking with some hindsight right now, because I know where this goes, and what she must have been trying to say, but at the time I was beyond confused and embarrassed. Boss hears me out and then sort of hums. She grabs one of the bouquets I’ve set aside for an arrangement and snaps off two of the buds. Then she marches over to the girl’s table and sits down across from her.
She probably gave the girl the roses, and used the power of being a sweet, gentle older lady to coax out the girl’s story, but there’s a wall in between us and the café and I didn’t want the girl to feel….more….cornered, ha ha. So I kept doing my job.
GUYS. I may have hinted at it with “The Artist” but this teenage girl is AN ARTIST.
Boss comes back, this time armed with photos and GUYS. This girl is using the petals of flowers to VERY DELICATELY create watercolor and petal collages of high fashion dress concepts! I’m not going to post the photos, and i hope it’s obvious why, but THEY’RE BEAUTIFUL and WAYYY beyond what you’d expect from a high schooler.
(Okay, so I paused and tried to google for something similar, and I can’t really find anything, but google “petal dress watercolor” and look at the fourth result which is like…a simple outline of a woman with a dress made of rose petals and its KINDA similar? But this girl is making pieces way more detailed and large scale and conceptual. The watercolor she’s painting is also more realistic.)
So The Artist has been using flowers she cant find, or cheaper ones she can afford. One of the paintings (probably about a 9×12) is clearly crafted out of GOD KNOWS HOW MANY little yellow DANDELION petals, and seems to be of Belle from Beauty and the Beast? Another one is a flow-y dancer in Portulaca petals she has totally been snagging from our store displays and tbh ROCK ON girl. I could go on and on, but THIS is what she’s been up to in our café behind those books!!!! ART.
I’m kinda stunned, because DAMN, she’s like 15 (at the time this happened) and I wish I’d had that skill at 15 holy shit. Boss flips through the photos, and shows me the sketch this girl has JUST STARTED for the rose petals I gave her, and its a series of tiny little ballerinas and AAAHHH GUYS SHE’S SO GOOD. Swear to god the second I discover her online I’m promoting the shit out of her.
So here we are, ooooohhing and aaaaahhhing over these photos when Boss gets this super serious look on her face. She stares at me, grabs one of the BRAND NEW rose bouquets– a really big, really pretty set of fire roses (uh, yellow roses that fade into orange and then red at the tips) then looks around the store for our managers and shrugs.
She proceeds to slam the guillotine down just underneath the heads with the most deadass “oops” I have ever heard. She grabs one of our paper bags, and we quickly shove all of the rose heads into the bag. She runs off.
I peek around the corner just in time to see Boss hand the bag over like a sack of cocaine, shoving them behind the girl’s books, patting her on the shoulder, and running off. I’m laughing really quietly but really hard, because The Artist looks SO CONFUSED and baffled. Boss is giggling and grinning, and we don’t even try to hide when The Artist opens the bag and sees what’s inside.
guys, I felt super bad for a second because she started to cry. Like, actually cry. She rushes over and tries to give it back, but we just insisted it was hers. My Boss’ only price? She had to come and show us the finished pieces. Which she did. And has, since we’ve been sneaking her bags of broken flowers to play with while her mom works. We’ve seen her less as she’s gotten older, but she texts Boss pictures every once in a while of her art, and I HOPE TO GOD she’s entering contests because she has some serious talent.
imagine if the oceans were replaced by forests and if you went into the forest the trees would get taller the deeper you went and there’d be thousands of undiscovered species and you could effectively walk across the ocean but the deeper you went, the darker it would be and the animals would get progressively scarier and more dangerous and instead of whales there’d be giant deer and just wow
The thing about how women in comics used to be drawn and sometimes are still drawn, you can only really understand the difference between an action girl being forced into unrealistic sexual, sensual positions, and an actual strong and well posed, empowering but still sexy female character, when you see what it looks like to have male characters depicted in overtly sensual poses
And I’m not talking about the Hawkeye Initiative or any given parody
I actually want to draw a comparison using art by Kevin Wada
Kevin Wada is a proud part of the LGBTQ+ community and he has this unique ability to sexualize mainstream male heroes without it looking like a parody. He draws covers for multiple big comic companies and his style reminiscent of old fashion magazines, drawn largely in traditional watercolor, has made him a stalwart of the industry.
He also draws a lot of naked Bucky Barnes.
Anyway, I want to talk about how interesting his art is, the difference between his power poses and his sexy poses for male and female characters.
A typical power pose for a male comics character would look like this
Whereas every so often with female heroes you get something like this
Not all the time, of course, but it happens and it happens in the wrong places. You wouldn’t be posing like a cover model in the middle of a battle, you really wouldn’t.
But when it comes to Wada and male and female characters, the difference is pretty clear.
When he draws male characters, they more often look like this
Sensual, in a pose you wouldn’t usually see a big, muscular hero doing. If not that, then playful, sexy, for looking at, but nothing about their anatomy overly exaggerated
How he draws women is also very clearly different from many other artists, from sexy pose to power pose.
Still posing for the camera, still to be looked at, but very, very different from how we’ve seen female characters portrayed in mainstream comics in the past.
And I guess it’s really just a matter of variety? Objectification in art is a long time debate and appears everywhere always, but for all that we can argue about its impact on popular media, there are a few things I know for sure:
1) having a female character pose like a playboy cover girl in the middle of a battle scene is just Bad Art and y’all need to find better references
2) female power poses will never look quite as right as when they’re drawn by people who know the value of expressing personality through pose (it’s basic animation principles and some artists still need to learn it) and who actually know what a female character’s personality beyond “sexy”
3) Iron Man or Batman posing like they’re about to beat somebody up is 100% not the same as a fashion drawing by Kevin Wada where a Typical Beefy Action Guy gets to pose like a flirty pretty boy
4) the MCU films have figured out the value of pandering to female audiences by sexually objectifying all their male action heroes while simultaneously appealing to the male demographic’s action movie power fantasy. Quoting Chris Hemsworth and Taika Waititi: “I’m not a piece of meat” “Uh, yes you are.”
They definitely struck some kind of balance there.
Also, more important than this entire post: y’all should follow @kevinwada on Tumblr and give him love because his art is divine and his talent beyond words
blackash26 