#HIIII VERO TYY

[trans-xianxian]

mahonia, camellia, and sage!

mahonia ⇢ what place, thing, activity inspires you most and how do you express yourself when it does?

mm well obviously other media inspires me to create. I make so much art about cql because it just gives me a million thoughts in my brain and I have to get them out, and music and poetry inspires me even further to create things about that media. my little comics are all about the intersection between what I feel about cql and how songs or poems make me feel about those feelings. I'd say that my own experience are what inspire me most to write tho. my wei wuxian fic is so much based on my own experiences with growth and healing and sorrow, and when my mom was dying, and after she died, it was so much easier to say how I felt about grief and anger and the struggle to forgive someone who is dead via jiang cheng, than to try and explain anything about my own life

camellia ⇢ what were you like when you were younger? do you think you’ve changed a lot?

hmmm as a kid I was very curious and talkative and opinionated. I remember chasing a neighbor kid out of our yard with a bat and yelling at him when I was like 5 because he had tried to hit our chickens with the bat and that "wasn't nice". so yeah I'd say I'm pretty much the same

sage ⇢ what ‘medium’ of art (poetry, music, fiction, paintings, statues etc.) is the most touching to you? why do you think that is?

wugh I love them all and they all speak to me in different ways, but music usually makes me the most emotional and is the medium I connect w other people the most through, like I have so many songs or musical experiences that are foundations in my relationships w others. I was in choir in middle school and in high school I did my final in junior year on the power of creating music in a group setting. I think one of the most primal, fundamental human experiences is to create music. before speech came melody. my sister used to sing me to sleep when I was little, my mom always played a lot of music growing up, and I remember singing with my dad as he played guitar a lot through my childhood and adolescence, so it probably stems from those early experiences with music. in middle school I often found that sharing and enjoying music with other people was the easiest way to connect with them when I didn't know how to say the words. as you can tell from my extensive, curated, and very specific spotify playlists, music is also one of the easiest ways for me to sort out my feelings about experiences or relationships or fictional characters. I also cry about songs all the time. cried about songs today in fact

I do think tho that the easiest ways for me to express my own feelings via creation is through physical art and writing. I'm not very good at making or writing my own original music, but I find it very easy to be creative with art and writing, I think because with art I can show what I can't explain with imagery, and with writing I can be as wordy as I want, put my big vocabulary to good use to make other people feel what I feel