Pidge: Why Did I Never Enjoy Things Like The Rain, Or Sunsets, Before I Met You? I Didn’t Even Notice

map of europa with drawings of my fellow soldiers from back during the ice war

way back when I got promoted to sergeant my captain gave me the company guidebook on europan warfare and all these maps. neither of them were worth anything except as a canvas. thing is, ink and paint freezes in those tunnels, so I drew the other soldiers all in pencil. I've been going through these old sketches from my time on the ice and thinking I might share some of them, so I'll have a few more for you soon, because the ice was hell and this was the only thing that made it gentler

Source for map (Global Geologic Map of Europa by USGS in conjunction with NASA):

https://pubs.usgs.gov/sim/3513/sim3513_sheet.pdf

(I love USGS so much)

Redraw of this old piece because I was in that kind of mood again, even if this part of the story is over

kal doodle

One of my favorite side effects of my Year of Overthinking my Sexuality is what I learned about the differences between aesthetic and romantic attraction.

Did you know you can think someone is pretty, or cute, or handsome, without liking them romantically? Yeah! Maybe that's common knowledge, but I sure didn't know until I went down the rabbit hole of researching asexuality. The result of that extensive research and the discovery of separate terms for separate kinds of attraction is that I now feel much more comfortable finding people attractive.

The curly-haired boy on my cross country team? Cute. The woman with the braid carrying her child? Very pretty. The short kid I keep passing in the halls? Gorgeous. The big lady I ran into at the grocery store? Breathtaking. It's made me realize that the vast majority of people in real life actually look really good. Very few of them perfectly fit what I've been taught to see as conventionally attractive, but so many of them have faces I long to just . . . look at. I swear, ninety percent of the girls I know from church are prettier than any model I've ever seen. Most people, maybe even all people, are attractive in a very genuine, very mundane, and very beautiful way.

I like feeling like I can say someone looks good without implying that I like them. And I like admitting that if I'm honest, everyone looks good.

Here are some Plance kisses I doodled!

(and now the last one, but with glasses:)

Honestly I have an incredible amount of respect for the ML writing team. It takes so much creativity to come up with all those ridiculous akuma ideas, not to mention the lucky charms (holy crap, speaking as an ML fanfic writer, lucky charms are SO hard to come up with, it's insane that they've invented nearly a hundred lucky charms)

Here's the uncolored version, because I tried a different process this time and I think the in-between actually looks cool:

So maybe I'm unqualified to say this as someone who's never been in a relationship, but actually, forehead touches are much more romantic than kisses