pluralthey

[pluralthey]

Legend's factures... not all of them, but some of them

[pluralthey]

Drop-Out is easily one of my favorite webcomics I've ever read I love it so much <3 Do you like Thelma & Louise? Hope there's nothing wrong w/ asking that!

It's a classic but there is too much straight bullshit, they never kiss at the end, and most pressingly, I can't really enjoy any movie with an attempted rape scene on-screen. I literally just spend the rest of it triggered and dissociating, at best. I know it's an important topic but I cannot handle it at all personally. For this reason I have watched the film all the way through exactly once

[pluralthey]

I'm sorry to be nosy, but do you and Splendidland know each other? Samanthuel "Samwich" just feels like such a loaded? choice of character to name after someone with a unique name your audience is likely to know of, absent context, so I assume I missed something.

? no, i don't know who that is. i named samwich a combination of the common feminine and masculine protractions of the nickname "sam," samuel and samantha.

[pluralthey]

A Jessie I drew with poscas a century ago... Probably around March or April, because I drew this in a sketchbook I bought for my birthday. It's bristol. I wanted to see if it would hold up to multiple layers of painting without pilling like my other sketchbook tends to do... She IS really satisfying to color in traditionally, but I haven't been drawing in the sketchbooks much.

[pluralthey]

Procreate Jessie to keep the blog from being totally dead as i work on Idletry

[pluralthey]

Sorry if it has been asked before, can I translate your work and post it on popular scanlation site?

sure, go ahead, though idk how i would feel about translations of my autobiographical/folie a dupe stuff, i assume you mean like, drop-out and fresh meat.

[pluralthey]

what is folie a dupe?

It's comics :)

[pluralthey]

okay, so this was a folie a dupe strip i drew years ago, which came months after a comic i call "the breakup". i know sometimes people read these comics and relate powerfully to the more... overtly dissociative stuff, even though i assume they won't, because i'm mostly just processing emotional experiences and preserving them.

regardless, i've been thinking about uploading it here for a while, so, it's here now.

it's interesting to look back at the neat sequential tricks i do in some of these, but the emotions aren't raw anymore. in this one they're even a little ironic, because these two are most frequently "merged" back together in deeply cooperative cofronting following my dog's death.

i considered making a strip about it, about how blue's memories of her started at the point where she was diagnosed with the brain tumor, and he retreated once it killed her, or how the indifference of reality can devastate hope for a kinder world, but i ultimately didn't find it pressing enough to draw over other works... perhaps for more reasons than one.

"just checking in" is a reference to a comic from 2019 called "tender mercies":

[pluralthey]

i was reminded of how much i enjoyed making these animations -- a lot of them aren't done simply because i have to decide what's most important to spend my time drawing on now. much like comics, sketching the gist is the fun part. cleaning them up was less fun.

my favorites were the ones that reacted to chat triggers, like the third one, which would activate whenever anyone typed "dupe" in their message

[pluralthey]

another nofna style emulation strip... i haven't drawn anything about Legend's HIOT treatment, even though it is kind of important, mostly because... no fight scenes, lots of tiny letters and twisting roots, and its contingency on other events happening first (like it'd be weird to draw her going to HIOT before even drawing the strip with the voice in it). at the same time, most of the information here? totally just restated information already known by the audience--

Resolve looks small compared to JS, but she's actually quite large... they're just very different heights.

(technically you could also call Remitting Dr. Remitting because she is also qualified to treat patients......) The Rationale member is an african savanna hare.

i want to say that Resolve's an interesting character, in that i don't really have strong opinions about her, which usually means They're Complicated, but i'm kind of meh about her. she's just very Normal. eventually i will write a follow-up strip with her and Remitting post-JS-treatment where her relationship to her patients and work is elaborated upon a little. she is almost 46 years old and she has outlived generations of patients -- for short-lived rodents, probably generations in the double digits. she gets to see from admission to death the results of her work, or lack thereof. i wouldn't say that she has a sense of superiority, as i think she tries to cultivate an open-mindedness, but she has so much experience, she can be quick to solidify her thoughts on matters, and she is not easily swayed by dissenting opinions from younger individuals when she knows her opinion will outlive theirs by her mere act of Continuing to Exist.

as demonstrated in Glyptography, it seems that some HIPAA-alike doesn't exist in this society, and HIOT members are free to comment on any patients in their care. still, with a more legally binding case of committal, i decided that there would be one "lead" individual who had legal guardianship over a patient, and, consequently, the final word on their treatment. Parabola described HIOT in a variety of ways, along with its functions, which included "cataloging anomalies" and "behavior oversight." he also noted that cataloging or investigating behaviors was more of an "early" stage of HIOT, whereas modern HIOT ascribes meaning to the findings and formulates legal conclusions (along with, presumably, still monitoring and controlling anomalous behavior). i treated the admission of patients as fairly common, then, perhaps one of HIOT's main purposes at this point, where members would contend with the fact that there was just an endless stream of new people to treat -- their work didn't seem to change anything about the root of the problems they're tending to.

JS failed her metanoia proposal due to incompletion. what she had while sparring with Machinations, was mostly all she still had by the time she was expected to turn in a thesis, albeit she could spell entire words now. her proctor was willing to pass her with a low grade because it WAS undeniable, even if devoid of apparent purpose.

Remitting and Resolve are, like Misgivings, wearing Guthriea capensis, hidden flower, as corsages. Resolve is wearing a female flower, and Remitting is wearing a male flower. it grows hidden under its own leaves, and its nectar is very bitter, driving most pollinators away. i could have used the same flower that smoothie wore, but i Did Not Feel Like It. the Rationale hare is wearing pale everlasting flowers (Helichrysum pallidum). i figured they would all wear the same corsages? but i don't think we've seen a Rationale member clothed... Maybe the wolf official from Syconium, but that's ambiguous. I had Legend wear a rather formal and pricey mantle, because this is a very humiliating situation for her, and I feel she'd dress up to the 9s to compensate for this loss of face. her corsage is large mountain ink flowers (Cycnium racemosum), a semi-parasitic plant which primarily uses sedges and long grasses as hosts. these flowers turn dark like ink when damaged -- hence their name. they can grow very large, up to multiple feet tall, and she has the long stem threaded through the front of her mantle. her paws are covered in abrasions, not dirt, and her claws have been worn down almost to the quicks due to excessive digging and scratching at surfaces like tree bark.

anyway i think that's all i have to say about this one it's not my most interesting strip. it facilitates later strips like legend asking Resolve about false memories or accessing HIOT documents to pass time and developing her thesis with this new knowledge.

[pluralthey]

not sure if ur aware but ur about link on ur mobile bio is broken!

i think when tumblr tried forcing the /tumblrname instead of tumblrname.tumblr.com format it messed something up bad on my end. -_-; i'll work it out, but removed the about link for now

[pluralthey]

im pretty sure you were one of the people who subconsciously made me feel more comfortable in identifying as a nonbinary lesbian thank u for your service o7

happy to do my part 🫡

[pluralthey]

i didn't sleep well today, and i took a nap where caboodle curled up right next to me. she's a very cuddly cat and i miss being able to have her in my room all the time. co-sleeping with pets is important to me, and the current dog is really wishy-washy about it. you can't really predict whether an animal is going to want to cuddle up to you every night or not. but with caboodle, it reminded me of my old dog, and these images that i'd drawn before, as i was aware of the time bomb in her head ticking faster and faster.

[pluralthey]

had a dream that jessie was real. by the end she turned into flowey undertale and i just straight up drowned her since she was kind of evil. congrats on having your characters invade my zoloft dreams

Drowning Jessie like a rat is actually the only way to kill her--

[pluralthey]

Hi! This have probably been asked before, but do you host Idletry and Commital somewhere other than tumblr?

nah. Idletry is paywalled for reasons like "it will have mature content in it" and "it's going to be expensive to print," and Committal is just a fan comic posted out-of-order on a whim, so it didn't feel worth it to make a separate site.

[pluralthey]

i missed the strip where the nofnaverse girls are looking down at the city, very very cool!! unless its fireflies or something? looks like a city i think, is it a particular one or does it not matter enough to pick one lol

i really like the panels where legend is taking a pause to think, i noticed you do it in quite a few of these strips. these are some of my favourite kinds of panels to draw, you do it super well

yep, it's Cape Town. A very populated city -- the light pollution is plentiful. i think if it were North America I would just put it in whereversville, fuckyoushire, but because it's in Africa, it feels like I should actually put forth the effort to research some of this. here is cape town at night:

i have a habit of calling those types of sequences "face journeys," and i use them less than i used to, partially due to my hand's limits vs. the total payoff from many of those sequences, partially due to the no face journeys joke, lol. i do try to use them more in the committal strips because they are pretty common and... generous. in nofna. although, the singular "pause in speech" beat is much more common.

[pluralthey]

a smaller NofNA style emulation strip with the girls... this one takes place after the misgivings comic, but before the comic at sunset. pegging doesn't score until almost the end of the story, the critique is kind of the catalyst for the climax (no pun intended).

they are looking down on Cape Town from the devil's peak, which i was kind of happy to draw. the NofNA canon emphasizes that the animals need to stay away from people because the denial royally fucks them up, so it kind of sucks, because it means that you have to put the characters in deep jungle/barren wasteland territory forever always, and Africa has a problem in American media where it's like exclusively portrayed as uninhabited savannah or starving children. was just nice to be able to portray a really dense city alive at night Existing Around The Characters. I also tried to add in an active construction site by Pegging's residence (abandoned power plant that has no basis in reality), but it's nothing compared to a city.

i was trying to think of how Legend would express the number of animals that have died ever since life on earth started (from the perspective of a society that doesn't even know what evolution is, but knows that there are A LOT of animals constantly being born and dying intuitively) -- if a character in the canon can just not know what 1 million is because it's not common enough, i figure they probably do not deal with numbers that large, generally, and even trillions would come nowhere close to the number she'd need to use.

i thought about what the MOST NUMEROUS THING Legend would know is, and, well. it's stars. of course. there's billions of trillions of them, and in a habitat largely uninhabited by people, she would be able to see many of them (i actually didn't push the sky enough in the other comic with the moon delusion). she would compare the number of lives that have been lived and died to the stars, probably. then from there it was very easy to just go "holy shit, she can think the stars are LITERALLY the lives"...

i removed a bit about Legend saying she's no longer really afraid of being apprehended by the Rationale because her thesis works well enough that it's undeniable by literate members of society at this point. the Rationale selection process is picky and focuses heavily on grades, from what 10%+ has implied, so i can confidently say that there is no member of the Rationale who would NOT be literate. she is feeling rather bold at this point.