✩ milky resonances ✿

different visual textures sort of…the idea of sticking to a specific line weight for a character all the time isn't something i would ever do instinctively i feel like

that's wild honestly…i've never thought about making visual art that way. i always just try to match the thickness of the line to like, how homogeneous i want the color to be in that area or w/e…or to create an underlayer or overlayer…like i think of different line thicknesses just as ways to create

demanding…you have to keep so many different things sort of unstably balanced, like spinning plates

maintain the higher levels of complexity…like at every moment you have the possibility of undercutting whatever it is that makes your characters interesting and turning the story into something more trite, and even like one misstep at the end can kind of mess it all up. storytelling is pretty

you have plenty of room to go in totally other directions from either of the above

in general i think needles like this are kind of challenging to thread—like in general i guess i feel like narrative has something of a tendency to "degenerate" into something more simplistic if you don't carefully

have a lot of questions ultimately…like there's a lot of ambiguity and other possibilities. i had forgotten about those pits also so like, i guess that kind of does suggest that maybe the traders have ulterior motives they're not being forthcoming about. still like…many open possibilities, i think

yeah i guess like, the kind of impression i've gotten overall is that gathy isn't going to write off the possibility that she might possibly try to eat one of them if she feels the need but she thinks they ought to just be capable of handling that if they're going to hang out around her, but i still

"chase" and find the activity/challenge pleasurable in a way that we can honestly relate to pretty easily.

point that rabbits will chase each other around for fun, i can easily imagine that they could make the abstract leap to thinking it's fun to chase around something else, as long as it's moving in an appropriately chaseable fashion. like, i would guess that they could understand the abstract rules of

that moment.

i haven't spent as much time around rabbits but from what time i have spent around them, i get the impression that although they have different sorts of impulses from cats in many ways, they also have that kind of self-control and awareness and do many things "deliberately." at the

also like, even if he's really absorbed in play in the moment, if his ear starts itching or something he'll back away for a few seconds, scratch his ear, then walk back over and get into pounce mode again…like you can tell he has like larger-scale awareness and is deliberately choosing to play in

from the pointer, like if our cat loses track of where the dot is he'll turn and look at how the person is holding the pointer to figure out its likely location, and if he wants you to play with him using it he'll start batting the pointer around and looking at you, maybe meow a bit etc.

we could get the ideas across to them. if you watch them play alone, they'll make up games with this kind of quality, even with rules and structure that enhance the thrill and challenge. they understand that laser pointers are "not real" for example, too—they can even recognize that the light comes

acting "on instinct," more that they understand abstractly that they're playing and just think the activity is fun, very similarly to how we feel when we play. cats are connoisseurs of dexterity-based play that requires quick reactions; i think they would enjoy things like racquetball or shmups if

sounds fun"

one thing i have noticed about cats (which i'm extremely confident in actually) is that they're very aware that what they're doing is play when they play with a toy, and even that they're very in control of themselves and acting deliberately—like it's not that they're "in a frenzy" and

naturally more curious? like if they see a glittery shiny thing moving around they want to check it out? rabbits do chase each other for play too, right? so they could easily kind of put two-and-two together there and be like "oh this shiny chiming thing is interesting, oh i could chase it, hee hee

they'll do it with any ol' object that fits the bill in the moment.

this is just my hypothesis of course and i wouldn't say i have hard proof of this or anything—it's just what i've come to suspect after spending ~30 years around cats.

in the case of rabbits, maybe it's just that some are

following those impulses leads to them getting to eat, that becomes the basis for them developing their hunting abilities. still, i don't think they ever lose the general attraction to that sort of behavior, so to entertain themselves, especially when very awake or kind of peckish or the like,

hungry brings this out more, and this ends up leading them to hunt as kittens learning the ways of the world; once their mom takes them out and starts teaching them hunting skills, their natural tendencies in the above direction will take care of half the battle, and then when they realize that

in the case of cats, i don't know if they really have a specific "prey drive" so to speak, but rather i've long suspected it's more like they just find it entertaining to chase/stalk/pounce on/bite/etc. anything that's kind of small and moves eratically, and being more alert and especially more

commonly tread

approach, because it makes gathy out to be a more complex and unusual sort of character. "big scary monster" vs. "harmless victim of prejudice" are common tropes in existing media; "selectively dangerous" vs. "generally dangerous but bluntly honest about it" is richer characterization and not as

to everyone.

i don't know if either of these approaches is necessarily better than the other in any kind of general sense; it depends so much on your overall goals and what you have in mind plotwise and so on. i will say though i guess that, knowing only what i know now, i kind of like the existing

a threat at all to anyone or just a victim of prejudice. the possibilities are maybe a little less ambiguous—like either she's a big and maybe imminent threat to the party or maybe she's not a threat to anyone. as it is, you get the picture that she's definitely dangerous /in general/, but maybe not

nomads say something, i think in some ways it raises more alarm at that time, because then it suggests that maybe she /was/ trying to conceal these facts from the party. on the other hand, when all of the stuff against her is just biased-seeming hearsay from other parties, you wonder if she's even

party). there's a lot we still don't know about her in general oc. atm i'm curious to see what the comic is going to make of all this uncertainty (could be many things over a variety of different time scales oc).

if instead the party hears nothing of her more dangerous tendencies up until the

considering the social implications of telling people things like that. a lot of people seem afraid of her as if she is a real threat, which suggests maybe she is, but in ways that also seem kind of biased and maybe not that much based on hard facts, which suggests maybe she isn't (at least to the

them, like in the sense that if someone wants to kill and eat you specifically, it's kind of counterproductive if they tell you that well beforehand since it will put you on guard. then again we also know that she's generally just very straightforward and plain-spoken so she might just not be

depends on your goals i would say…like, as is, i have big questions about how much gathy is actually a threat to the party vs. people are just unreasonably afraid of her. the fact that she's forthcoming about her behavior to the party is interesting, because it makes her seem less threatening to

is there even such a thing as "too many different lineweights" or "changes lineweights too often"?? change 'em every panel for all i care…arguably makes it more interesting