pluralthey

[pluralthey]

"already dead" doodle of avery in opisthotonic death pose while alive

[pluralthey]

hey you are backing up your project on external drives rite?

only the cloud, chief. if my house burns down the external i'm storing in it is going down with this one, cloud isn't. if my one hard drive goes down then i just transfer the latest backup to the new one. usually backed up every month or so. it would suck to lose a month of work but i stream everything i draw so i would have to rehabilitate the art from screenshots of the stream at worst. most of it is cross-posted via other platforms as zip files or the actual art in some capacity as well.

[pluralthey]

I think you mentioned that Jesse snapped a personality change into her parents, what was that exactly & why not in Emily as well?

Also, on a very different note, I remember you mentioning in an old sketch that Dawn’s job is something you want to approach sensitively (they were getting blood work done iirc). I don’t know if you ever mentioned what their job was but would you be open to sharing?

She snaps both of her parents to support her actions unconditionally.

Emily isn't there at the time as she starts avoiding Jessie as much as possible. She is usually either crashing at the place of her new partner who later gets her pregnant, at work, or, in the case of that scene, taking really long walks with Trouble to stay out of the house where Jessie might visit.

Jessie also doesn't care about her sister's approval as much as her parents' and her sister didn't try to interfere with her new hobby of smiting people.

Also genuinely do not remember, I thought Dawn was unemployed due to illness.

[pluralthey]

If Jessie snaps someone to do something they don't want to do enough times, does it eventually lead to a cumulative personality shift? It seems like the more you want to resist following her commands, the more destructive they'd be, because more of you would have to be changed by the snap for you to be willing to follow them? If she snaps someone to do something that would require such a big personality/ideology shift for that person to rationalize as their own decision that the person would be unrecognizable after the snap, do they now count as being written by her? Or do most snaps, even ones making big changes to a person, only really affect how they view the specific subject of her snap and not really affect the rest of the person's psychology, worldview, personality, opinions, even if that ends up making that person's inner world and thought processes a lot more contradictory?

Generally people will know when Jessie has snapped them to do something because she is not so passive and would want to assert dominance openly. If she did, for some reason, then they could either write the behavior off as circumstantial or deny it even happened before changing significantly. These are defense mechanisms average people use every day. People at large may even rapidly develop the "a wizard did it" response knowing Jessie CAN and does randomly change people/force them to do things and blame her for anything they don't want to suffer consequences for like how one one may blame actions or feelings on demon possession. They would probably just become more contradictory.

Jessie would (and does) most successfully change other characters' psychological landscape by changing how they feel or think more than what they do, since actions are caused by inner motivators. Just directly changing their psychology.

That said, yes, she could change a character by making them do something like murder someone every Friday night. They would probably naturally become more paranoid because they know they will eventually be caught and there's nothing they can do, etc. But their fundamental ideology is unlikely to change without direct meddling. The schemata people develop in their minds are reinforced from multiple angles and it's why you can in real time see people pulling out excuse after excuse in an argument — even if you can disprove one point of rationale, there are others already ready to pick up the slack. Generally studies have shown people have the emotional reaction behind a belief first, and then they will use logic to rationalize that emotional belief afterwards. It is very difficult to change people ideologically entirely because even if you peeled away every justification, at their cores, the beliefs are still irrational emotional reactions. Hence why changing an emotional reaction will be more reliable in causing personality changes in a character.

For the most part, the characters aren't changed enough to count as "written by Jessie." She really is only forced to write them if the character's inner framework has literally no way to output a comprehensible response. Like no way for the character's original personality to even respond to it — more easily accomplished by replacing a large part of their personality instead. Then the original personality can't react because it doesn't exist anymore. Anything bizarre, traumatic, extreme enough to cause a person to just entirely shut down psychologically would force Jessie to write them to be able to interact with them further.

But yeah. Most snaps forcing people to do something or changing any part of their psychological landscape are done in plain sight, reactively, and there is no necessary rationale besides "Jessie forced me to do that," desire to Not Do That aside.

[pluralthey]

the sky in idletry changes color constantly. i got to asking myself: what do sunsets look like in the idletry setting, then?

a few stabs at more unconventional colors for sunsets (and one sunrise). i did them with jessie and shiloh in the more tender parts of their relationship because sunsets are generally considered romantic.

[pluralthey]

do you use programs besides word documents for planning out your stories? :o starting a project of my own made me realize word documents aren’t exactly suited for branching out plot points from multiple directions and I’d love to know what your process is! especially if you use anything visually based

scrivener. shelled out for it when i started writing idletry due to the project's size. my first draft file looked like this

.....i did not realize the scene in focus was a sex scene until now. i guess i will leave it because it's mostly jokes.

scrivener has nested documents with subdocuments that i found very useful. there are folders in addition to this.

there is also a different mode called the corkboard where you can move notecards around.

there are multiple visual modes for working on the corkboard, but i used the mode that allows you to move the notecards anywhere.

all of the options in the binder are green because i used the labels for the scenes to make it that way. red meant completely not done, orange meant outlined or summarized, yellow meant somewhat done, dull green meant fully written, and bright green meant cleaned up for the beta readers and copy pasted into the document (or not, since i apparently forgot like. 5 scenes.) but since my first draft is finished, they're all just bright green here. that's not the default look for scrivener.

anyway i hope that communicates what level of visual scrivener is. i've used libreoffice for other projects.

this is what my game document looks like. i did not have scrivener at the time. i would probably switch to it if i ever picked up the game idea again.

[pluralthey]

i know it would necessitate a hefty content warning - but i would love if you eventually crossposted “transition of power” here from your comic archive! it’s probably my favorite folie a dupe strip, and i routinely come back to it. it’s totally cool if you don’t feel comfortable with it either though. thanks and have a great one <3

sure. it is a defining point in my own life, but i didn't really think it left an impression on anyone else. the more a strip ages (or the older the actual events become), the more vulnerable it is, i think... it's a time in my life when i didn't really understand a lot of what was happening to me or what happened happened to me, or why. mostly though, yeah, i don't like fussing about whether i delivered content warnings the right way or not, and transition of power is definitely one of the more triggering comics.

content warning for graphic depictions of self harm, overdosing, suicide, needles, blood, smoking, drinking, vomiting, i think that covers the big stuff. this is a big comic and will need a reblogged addition to fit all of the panels.

[pluralthey]

i know it would necessitate a hefty content warning - but i would love if you eventually crossposted “transition of power” here from your comic archive! it’s probably my favorite folie a dupe strip, and i routinely come back to it. it’s totally cool if you don’t feel comfortable with it either though. thanks and have a great one <3

sure. it is a defining point in my own life, but i didn't really think it left an impression on anyone else. the more a strip ages (or the older the actual events become), the more vulnerable it is, i think... it's a time in my life when i didn't really understand a lot of what was happening to me or what happened happened to me, or why. mostly though, yeah, i don't like fussing about whether i delivered content warnings the right way or not, and transition of power is definitely one of the more triggering comics.

content warning for graphic depictions of self harm, overdosing, suicide, needles, blood, smoking, drinking, vomiting, i think that covers the big stuff. this is a big comic and will need a reblogged addition to fit all of the panels.

[pluralthey]

after hearing "idletry style" birds multiple times, i thought a bit on the differences between the styles here. i think idletry has more differences in style and design principle than just this, but i thought it would be interesting to write up the differences between what probably just reads as "two characters in my style."

not depicted: both have human style genitals, but drop-out universe avians give normal placental mammal births and idletry birds have a similar pregnancy pattern but with an actual shelled egg held internally instead. they lay the egg and it hatches usually about 24 hours later, but it can take up to a week in rare cases (a scenario where the egg would be put in an ICU and yeah i'm imagining an oxygen mask uselessly thrown on top of an egg in an incubation tank). cracking an egg after it's been laid instead of waiting won't harm the chick inside but it's generally frowned upon. breathable air permeates the shell and creates a bubble in the egg after it's laid. the chick doesn't really die from being confined to the egg for over a week necessarily, but typically if it hasn't broken through the shell in a week that is an indicator that the chick was not alive even when the egg was laid. with modern technology it probably does not take them a week to determine this, though.

[pluralthey]

Are you okay with people drawing characters from your comics? I was wondering that because you said at the end of drop out that the comic was based on stuff you experienced and I wanted to know if you were okay with people drawing the characters.

"based on" but it is not autobiographical and neither of the main characters are self-inserts of Literally Me (or anyone else that i knew at the time). they are fully fleshed out fictional entities who have issues similar to my own, but far from unique to me. i have actual autobiographical comics which i would consider Personal and About My Experiences. i'm fine with people drawing any of my characters from any of my stories. i think it kind of comes with the territory of posting your characters publicly.

[pluralthey]

As far as I remember, or like years ago, you’ve used sai right? Sai or sai2(man the brush engines better and Binary brushes feel smoother..) but I also saw you used procreate at some point for that one Jessie draw- which digital programs have you used that you enjoy the most for different things, or which kind of traditional medium for example also, is interesting and/or satisfying? Have been doing lots of ref and tutorial searching and looking at art inspiration for the direction I wanna take my stuff and I was curious about your preferred setup; I just like to hear people’s workflow and what they use to create what they do. I think it’s neat. Also if this is too long sorry 😅

I use sai 2. I switched to sai once oekaki became more and more inoperable. The binary style aspect ended up sticking. Oekaki has limited layer capabilities and this rewarded a simpler pixel style that was more easily edited. I still miss the ease of using pixelated screen tones in oekaki. There are other programs that can make them, but not how oekaki did. But I prefer sai 2 most now.

I use clip studio for larger scale images like print pages for its more versatile and expensive selection of brushes. It has unique settings that still allow me to turn these brushes into pixelated work without anti-aliasing artifacts. There is a setting for level of anti-aliasing, but this is often not enough for more complex brushes using spraying patterns. Using the "replace alpha" blending mode forces many brushes into a binary color mode because drawn on top of a solid color the brush's color can only be 100% opaque. The binary layer color mode also allows you to do this. Both of the latter options often only let you do this with black and white. I usually do this to be able to transfer it back to sai 2 where it's more comfortable to work in. I also use it for its ability to produce text in multiple sizes without anti-aliasing. Sai 2's text tool is fairly primitive.

I use Aseprite for animating. It is mostly for pixel art. It reminds me of an animation program I used to use a long time ago called easytoon due to its simplicity though...

For traditional I prefer paint pens (I mostly use poscas). Gel pens are okay but very small and cheaply made. I really wish someone would make paint pen versions of gel pens. I also had a big black and white plain ink and hatching phase a long time ago. Generally I gravitate towards opaque materials that make the process feel straightforward. The ability to "erase" or white out mistakes for correction is one of the most important qualities in a medium to me.

Less opaque, more time-consuming layered media yield more textured and nuanced results, but I hate few things as much as ruining a piece of art irrecoverably over a relatively small mistake be that accidentally pilling the paper or drawing a line wrong or splashing watercolor the wrong way. Mixed media was fun, but I just prefer having more purpose to what I'm doing. When I'm too preoccupied with the aesthetics I waste a ton of time on useless tweaking or experimenting that never goes anywhere.

[pluralthey]

the colors on idletry drive me crazy in the best way. even when the art has the 'correct' colors it still gives the vibe of a painted cel that only had a handful of shades to work with, you keep the values so consistent. so my question is, is there a rhyme or reason to how you shift hue from panel to panel, or is it all intuition from a shit ton of practice? does it have rules? if this has already been asked then i apologize for wasting your time. the analysis and explanation of your process is just very interesting and useful.

i actually have a whole ass post about the coloring style on my patreon.

colors are selected with ~5 primary methods: 1) selecting for mood. the red foreboding panels need no explanation for why i picked them. 2) selecting one color i wanted to be dominant, then coloring the rest of the image around them, usually making the background either complementary or neighboring colors. 3) altering colors from the previous panel to "slide" the hue to a nearby color. 4) selecting for symbolism. many panels have hot pink or teal as representations for jessie and shiloh either overtaking the panel or lurking in the background. or 5) copying a previous panel's colors as a reference or callback to the previous panel and its contents. these methods can obviously be combined, such as with the three shots of the city, which slide to progressively go from blue and green to being overtaken by pinks and purples, so 3, 4, and 5 all contributing to palette decisions. i've really been trying to avoid nurturing "rules" and going with what looks nice and feels right, but a list of my reasoning can make it easier to understand how i got to the choices here. i'm typing it now because i will forget my thought process otherwise, lol. some of the panels i left looking "bad" to me to have a reference for what i didn't like, and it'll all blend together without writing down what i was thinking.

here's a small sample...

there are gradients, but objects don't necessarily slide at the same pace. i don't necessarily color the panels in order and there can be a "goal" color that i have to work backwards from as well.

[pluralthey]

Just read duck and dive. could you explain what the big deal around the time was and why it was a 🤯 moment when the goat asked if she needed the time?

It's been a REALLY long time since I wrote the comic, but the reason she kept asking the time was simply because there is no way to tell the time without some kind of belonging to do it, usually one easily broken or lost or one that needs to be maintained constantly such as a phone that needs charging. It's very difficult to keep track of the time but simultaneously our society runs on timekeeping. When stores are open, when people get on or off their shifts, happy hour at the bar or when it closes, when the garbage is picked up, etc. a LOT of things rely on timekeeping that our brains simply do not do naturally. At best you can estimate twice a day based on sunrise and sunset.

I had to go look at what you meant by the goat but she is like that about being asked if she needs the time by the jackalope because she went to great lengths to try to keep track of what time it was when she knew someone who would give her the time. She didn't have to bother different people about the time, she didn't have to try to keep track of when things open or close or when someone comes back from lunch break or count episodes playing on someone's laptop to track half hour increments or whatever, she could have just asked.

I'm pretty sure the reason she was trying to track the time was because she was waiting for a different acquaintance (the tree shrew at the end) to get off shift work or something to bother him. He gets off work, he gets drunk, he passes out alone and does it again tomorrow — the window to bother him is small I believe.

[pluralthey]

do you relate to any of your characters? which one(s) do you relate the most to?

It really depends on how you would define "relating" to someone. Do I feel seen, some kind of connection with the character? No, not nowadays. Do I understand where they're coming from? Sure. I try to avoid writing characters I don't understand at all, even if I consider them ideologically repulsive. Perhaps it's only because I predominantly feel fulfilled by my own self-recognition aside from a pervasive sense of not being understood, not feeling connection. It isn't a rare emotion, but clearly multiple people feeling Lonely in proximity to each other, all talking about it, doesn't take away the loneliness. It's kind of why we're dealing with it at a societal level, even though plenty of us are also saying that it's a thing. I don't relate to other people who feel the same emotions, even if I can acknowledge that we share circumstances. We are the same in the sense of the objects surrounding us, but not in the phenomenological sense as subjects to our experiences; similar objectively, but not subjectively. If real people cannot easily elicit a sense of relating, fictional characters surely aren't any more capable. Art is parasocial, a one-way mirror -- I can see the characters, but they can't see me; I can make someone feel understood through the art, but they still can't make me feel understood.

But in terms of understanding where they're coming from... maybe Drake. Xyr slow-moving, resigned disposition is one I can understand. Life wears on you and disappoints you; uniquely, Drake still cares deeply about the world, but simply doesn't have the energy to actualize that. The thematic core of the story with xem is feeling a "true self" pulling xem inward, away from reality, away from other people. No one can see that "true self" -- they're stuck interacting with, from Drake's perspective, a mediating puppet xe's forced to use. There is no way to abandon that physically impossible authentic self in order to make the connection with others, either. That's something that I relate to, which is why I made the character, but there are many elements I don't relate to. Jessie feels misunderstood as well... but she has a critical difference from Drake: she has no romantic partner. Her loneliness is broader than an inner neglect; it encompasses everyone around her as a bystander at best and a perpetrator at worst. There are literally 0 people in her life to represent "the rest of the world" as anything other than an amorphous entity motivated to harm her as something exterior to itself. She has a contempt for others and a habit to assume malice in others' actions, both self-sabotaging, that I can understand. Drake distinctly lacks those qualities. I don't have the energy, or the entitlement, or the unified personality, or the motivation to feel it so deeply, so consistently, and act on any of it, though. In truth, the emotions tend to evaporate as soon as I'm actually talking to another human being (whether you want to call that dissociation or not). She is emotionally immature, and self-absorbed -- literally justified by the story, informed she is the main character and everything was invented just for her. I don't personally relate to these qualities.

Outis has themes related to never being seen behind the art, but they are also emotionally immature, in my opinion, and too invested in other people's approval of them for me to truly relate to the voluntary alienation they feel. They're hidden behind their art because the art allows them to craft a more desirable persona for this approval, not because they literally have no other way to be seen. They also have an ignorance of the dissociation in their own mind, and in their relation through their art instead of through genuine interaction, that I really cannot relate to.

Basically, every character I make is tempered with idiosyncrasies to make them less relatable to myself. These three characters, who seem to have the same issues that I'd find relatable, don't really elicit a sort of catharsis or empathy from me. I hope that makes sense.

[pluralthey]

New Jessie ref. I can't believe she's already almost 2 years old...

[pluralthey]

where can we read the bonus comics for drop out at?

[pluralthey]

on a scale from 1 to 10 how much do you enjoy seeing/receiving art of specifically sugar lola and kim. mainly sugar. not entirely sure how connected you are to certain eras/interpretations of older characters so i dont want to be like. weird. but i have an ungodly amount of sugar art from highschool (with some lolas and kims sprinkled in).. a few of which part of me wants to share (shes. Totally not a character thats stuck with me and recirculates in my brain consistently(Lying.))

idk which account would be best to ask this on but i went w this one bc i was already looking at a post here lol

my feelings are neither strong enough nor cohesive enough to assign a number value to them. i don't consider being shown art of characters from older stories aggravating like being asked questions about them or looking at old art. for the latter it's like, you're asking my last 2 brain cells to continue juggling the same thing for 10 years, can i rest, can i focus on something else--

probably better to send it to @gynandromorph but i doubt anyone following cares if you send it to this blog either. people still like sugar and lola more than any other characters i have for the most part.