#explains my lack of posted art

[backpackevil]

H e y

I made a thing

...an unfinished and very much still in progress thing BUT AN OUMOTA THING NONETHELESS

[iridescent-lightning]

question: what's the last film you watched and what did you think?

statement: easter eggs are the best shape of chocolate and i should be allowed to buy a big hollow egg all year

Oooh. That's a good question, and unfortunately I don't remember the answer 😅 to be entirely honest I don't watch many movies or tv shows! I mostly just have various videos essays or astronomy college lectures on in the background while I make stuff. Keeps me sane.

...yeah chocolate eggs really do hit special don't they? Nothing quite like that first cronch. Gonna have to delve into my chocolate stash at work tomorrow now LOL (I've been really enjoying the Reece's eggs lately. Peanut butter. I'm too hungry for this 😭

For the art tax (stuff I do while half listening to youtube) have this Espeon I made! Patterned it up myself through Much Suffering... I really wanna make glaceon but I need a Very Specific Color that.. kinda just doesn't exist? So I had it printed on plain minky and it's now in the mail.

Anyway I can stop rambling now, thanks for the question and the 100% correct statement, friend!

[artibirdi]

Posts are gonna slow by quite a bit because I've hit a rut artistically. I'll try to post the occasional doodle while I figure out what to do without burning myself out. (Ordered from newest to oldest)

[doctordoombignaturals]

artfight stuff ^_^

[chiropteracupola]

I like when books have Maps and Charts in them and I think that all books should have such things.

and books which already have them? I think they should have More Maps and Charts.

[mutodaes]

By the way, if anyone wants to ALT text my art, go ahead!!

I struggle with concise descriptive language, so I thought I should open the doors to anyone who actually knows what they're doing haha

[gemharvest]

Guhhhh gonna have to fuck with my Sheezy membership thing this is the second month it's trieeddd to bill me but it got blocked by my card refusing to process it.

[yandere-daydreams]

Title: The Freeze Incentive.

Pairing: Yandere!BatFam x Reader (DC).

Word Count: 6.8k.

TW: Non/Con, Fem!Reader, Kidnapping + Prolonged Imprisonment, Mentions of Past Suicide Attempts, Lasting Suicidal Ideation, Age Gap (Reader is Mid-Twenties, Bruce is Late Forties), Obsessive Behavior, Masturbation, and Gratuitous Pseudo-Incest. DEAD DOVE: DO NOT EAT.

[Part One] [Part Two] [Part Three]

You were released from the hospital after forty-eight hours exactly. Bruce never ate, never slept, never left your side. You didn’t speak to him, but he didn’t force you to.

His hell spawn kept their distance. Once, the first time you fell asleep, you thought you might’ve seen Cassandra in the doorway as you drifted off, but it couldn’t have been her. Even she wasn’t slippery enough to come and go under the vigilant radar of your new, raging paranoia.

By hour forty-nine, you were being shepherded into an apartment on the opposite side of Gotham. “The walls and windows are bullet-proof,” Bruce explained, as you shuffled through a long, narrow entryway. There were two doors – both made out of a brilliantly silver, blindingly reflective metal and requiring some combination of facial recognition, fingerprint scan, and physical keys to unlock. That apocalyptic level of security might’ve made you feel a little more safe if you hadn’t already known that the people you were afraid most of would be able to come and go as they pleased.

“The ventilation system is on its own rig, and there are cameras in every room – dormant. Just raise your voice above a normal speaking volume if you want to activate them.”

You coughed out a laugh. “Why? Trying to get baby’s first assault on film?”

Bruce didn’t answer. Your tour ended abruptly, and he held you in a vice-grip against his chest as he made up for two days’ worth of sleep.

The penthouse was, for lack of a better point of comparison, not all that you’d imagined it would be. Floor to ceiling windows encircled the living room, providing an unending bird’s eye view of the city. The second guest bedroom had been converted into a makeshift art studio, stocked with materials for every hobby you’d ever had and most that you hadn’t. All the bedsheets were in your favorite color and all the mounted art was to your tastes and there was a poster of your favorite local band in the kitchen – an design they’d only sold once at a concert that’d happened years before you discovered them. But, all the walls were painted an unfeeling shade of off-white, and the balcony door had been sealed shut, and the band poster had been framed – locked behind glass and hung with a perfectionist’s precision.

You would’ve used glue-dots.

You had the poor thing pinned to a countertop, butterknife in-hand as you tried to pry it out of its entrapments, when you noticed Tim.

Dark and lanky, looming in the corner of your vision. He was dressed in his civilian clothes – all over-sized pullovers and ill-fitting jeans. He smiled when you glanced over your shoulder, but his expression fell as you whipped around, holding out your butterknife like it was ex-fucking-calibur.

“Bruce!” You called into the penthouse, keeping your back pressed against the edge of the counter.

“There was a fire in the warehouse district. We traded posts early.”

Of course. You weren’t sure why you’d expected him to say goodbye. “Touch me and I’ll slit my own throat.”

“With that?” He laughed, the noise airy. “We had the edges of the cutlery dulled. Anything sharp enough to break skin is—” Tim cut himself off, shrugging. “You’ll have to ask, if there’s anything you want to use. Standing flight-risk and all.”

God. If you’d known trying to kill yourself would cause this many problems, you would’ve made sure to get it right the first time.

Tim took half a step closer. You squared your shoulders.

“I’ll hang myself with the bedsheets.”

“Tear-away. They can’t hold anything heavier than fifty pounds.”

“I’ll drink boiling water.”

“The stove is bioencrypted. And the microwave. And the kettle.” Tim smiled apologetically. “I’m not going to do anything, I promise. The others, they’re a little—” Another abrupt pause, this one followed by a dry swallow. You wondered if Bruce had briefed him on what to say to you, or if his siblings had been the one to put a script together. Your little stunt probably didn’t help with that, either. Proving you could get hurt put the idea of protecting you into their minds. It gave them an excuse to treat you like something fragile, something that didn’t know any better. The narrative could be rewritten, their fixations tailored to better fit the new angle. You wondered if the Oedipus complex of it all would crack and give way under the added pressure, but ultimately decided not to hope for silver linings in rock-bottom scenarios.

“—overzealous,” Tim finished, finally. “I get it, though. You need your space. I’m just here to keep an eye on you.”

You scowled, wearily. “That doesn’t sound like giving me space.”

“Give me a chance.” His grin brightened. “You won’t even know I’m here.”

You were always going to try and pretend he wasn’t, obviously. That didn’t necessarily mean he’d make it easy.

You kept the butterknife with you, even if it was too blunt to puncture and too small to inflict substantial trauma. Never more than thirty feet away, Tim followed after you as you wandered through the apartment, trying to pass the time without letting your guard down. You flipped through the clothes overflowing from your new, Bruce-tailored closet. Tim watched. You sat in front of a window, trying to make out the world miles below. Tim watched. You tried your hand at embroidery. Tim cringed every time you pressed the needle into fabric, and he watched.

You were pretending to read a book (a low stakes romance, more fluff than substance, something Bruce would’ve picked out with distraction in mind) when Tim broke the tense silence.

“You’re supposed to take a shower, now.”

You eyed him wearily. “You know I'm almost a decade older than you, right?”

He grinned, his face going a telling shade of pink. Okay, that was on you, but still – gross.

“Whatever.” The master bath seemed the most private, the most tucked-away, so you fled in that direction. You were a few inches away from slamming the door shut when Tim’s hand caught the edge, pushing it open despite your best attempts to stop him.

“Bruce’s orders,” he explained, shrugging. Like that made up for the red now steadily creeping towards his ears, the way his breathing seemed to hitch as he stepped inside and closed the door behind him. Like he’d ever listened to Bruce a day in his life. “You have to understand why he’d be touchy about bathrooms.”

The anger was hot, thick, and immediate. You didn’t have to understand anything. It’d been your body folded up and lifeless on the tile floor. All he’d done was call the ambulance.

“Either you leave or we spend the night here.” You crossed your arms over your chest. “Get out.”

Tim chuckled. “You’re being so stubborn.”

“Out.”

“Take your time.” He propped his back against the door. “I’m not going anywhere. We have all day, literally.”

Butterknife be damned. You were going to kill him with your bare hands.

You took a long moment, evaluating your options. Tim had always ranked on the lower side of your danger scale – creepy and perverted, but too buttoned-up and close to Bruce to ever do anything more direct than stealing your panties or planting mics in your bedroom. Their new arrangement would change things, sure, but Bruce’s ongoing denial that kids were here to do anything but protect you seemed to have a dampening effect, keeping the scales from tilting quite as dramatically as they might’ve, otherwise.

You were also, undeniably, scared. Scared of testing the waters so quickly, scared of finding out how Bruce would handle disobedience, scared of who might be taking over after Tim. You pictured Cas, undressing you with care, then Jason, smile cutting into your throat as he forced you under freezing cold water. Tim wasn’t good, but he was preferable. The lesser of many, many evils.

“Face the wall. With a towel over your head.” Tim’s smile quirked, but he complied. You waited until he was fully turned towards the door, pitch-black fabric blocking his peripheral, to go on. “Bruce has every room bugged. If I scream, he’ll be here in minutes.”

A lie, but a fair one. Tim nodded slowly, as if processing new information. Bruce must’ve been keeping a few of the penthouse’s security measures to himself. Even he didn’t trust his kids when left to their own devices.

Getting undressed was the worst part. You were caught between the logical awareness that ripping off the Band-Aid would ultimately prove less painless and the gnawing instinct to cling to what might keep you safe for just a little longer. Forcing your conscious mind to a distance, you kept things military – water, soap, rinse, repeat – and let yourself think only of how thankful you were to finally wash off the hospital grime. You were only a minute or so away from being done when you heard something over the water’s rhythmic pattering. A clicking sound, except it was a little too wet, a little too off-beat. For a second, you were delusional enough to consider that one of the pipes in Bruce’s ten-trillion-dollar apartment might’ve sprung a leak.

Then, dread cold and hollow in your chest, you looked to Tim.

He wasn’t facing you. Thank God, he wasn’t facing you. What you could see of him like this, though the fogged glass of the shower stall, was bad enough. He was hunched over, his forehead pressed against the wood of the door. His left hand was planted at the same height while the right worked between his legs, moving in time with that awful, repetitive noise. The towel had fallen to his shoulders, but you could see that his eyes were clenched shut, like he was still trying not to violate your one boundary. In his mind, you were sure this didn’t count as an overstep.

Vaguely, you remembered Stephanie saying something about Tim being the voyeur type. You wondered if the fact that he wasn’t technically looking made this any better.

Your original goal was immediately forgotten. You stayed where you were until the water went cold, until you could hear Tim’s strained breathing and see white dripping from his hand. You waited for him to clean himself up before moving on to the salvage – towel, clothes, etc. You kept your eyes low, your lips pursed, but Tim wasn’t as stand-offish. He orbited around you as you shrugged open the bathroom door and stepped out, his voice chipper. Giddy. “Feeling better?”

“When’s Bruce coming back?”

“Can’t be sure. His schedule’s the hardest to pin down.” He rested a hand on your shoulder by way of apology. Your skin crawled. “Barbara has the next shift.”

You mumbled something affirmative. Still fully dressed, you crawled into bed and pulled the sheets over your head.

Tim watched.

~

You were right. Bruce’s insistence on the pretense of deniability put the others on-guard, all reluctant to be the one to condemn their father’s favorite lamb to death.

Some were worse than others. Barbara let you watch a season’s worth of some perfectly generic, perfectly mindless reality T.V. dating show in one sitting, only occasionally looking up from her laptop and paperwork to yell at the screen on your behalf. Cas pawed at your tits through your shirt while cuddling until you were too sore to lay on your chest. Damian took advantage of the art studio to paint a terribly forlorn, but relatively flattering portrait of you while you struggled with a crochet hook. Stephanie had you try on three shopping bag’s worth of lingerie, snapping pictures all the while. Kate told you every piece of gossip she’d picked up during Gotham’s social season. Jason stayed away, which was the worst thing he could’ve done. Even serial killers had the decency not to leave their victim’s corpses to the scavengers.

And Dick…

Dick let you out.

Never to go very far, never for very long, and always to somewhere mind-numbingly civilian - a café, or a boutique, or the nicer stretch of docks tourists tended to flock to in the summer. Like the rest, he’d established his own set of boundaries, as defined as they were irrational. He never talked about Bruce, to Tim, or any of the others. He kept his distance when you two were alone and held your hand when you weren’t. If you had to say anything, he said it for you. It was weird, but nothing you couldn’t live with. No – your fears were more abstract than that, more likely to take the form of ticking clocks than groping hands. Things were bad, now. You could live with that. You understood that.

You were just having trouble keeping yourself sane while you sat around, wasted time, and waited for things to get worse.

“Don’t like the view?”

Ah. You must’ve been lost in thought again. You glanced towards Dick, your head resting gingerly on his shoulder, then outward, to the grassy plains of the local park. It was a good day (or Gotham, at least) so you weren’t entirely alone. Couples jogged. Families picnicked. Children played. It might’ve been nice if Dick hadn’t decided that you’d spend the day rooted to a bench on the outskirts, a half-eaten cup of ice cream melting to your side, his arms slung over the backrest and some part of you always making contact with some part of him. So he could be sure you didn’t run, he’d claimed. As if any amount of distance would be enough to get you away from him.

“Just wondering why you’re doing this.”

He chuckled. “What do you mean?”

“Taking me outside. Making me look at happy, smiling people.” Delaying the inevitable. Giving you false hope. “It’s a little mean, considering I’m just going to be rotting again in a couple hours.”

“Better than leaving you locked up all day, right?”

You scuffed your heel into the dirt. Dainty kitten heels – nothing you’d ever been able to run in. “I guess the fresh air is nice. And the lack of security cameras.”

At that, Dick cringed. You were still testing for sore spots, trying to find holes in the fabric that held your captors together, less as part of some future plan and more to keep yourself busy. Bruce’s near-constant invasions of your privacy was, rather transparently, one of Dick’s. “Tell me he’s not recording you.”

“He’s not supposed to be,” you sighed. “I think Stephanie might’ve gotten into the system, though. She’s been on an amateur photography kick.”

It was his turn to sigh, to groan, to let his head collapse onto your shoulder. His arm found its way around you, hauling you that much closer to his chest. “…I don’t like it,” he admitted, his reluctance layered on so thickly, it was hard to believe he didn’t choke. “You know I don’t like it, right?”

“How the others treat me?”

“That they know you exist.” Another groan. You kept your eyes trained straight ahead. “B told you I was the first, right. I… I think I’m always the first. He knows I can handle the deep-end.” And then, more sentimentally, “He knew I’d fall in love with you at first sight.”

Hands curled into fists. Eyes forced open. You couldn’t look at him. You couldn’t blink. “Please don’t say things like that.”

“But it’s true. I used to let myself into your apartment at night – you always left the door unlocked. And remember the last time you went out with your coworkers?” You did. One minute, you’d been at the dive-bar closest to your office, happily accepting another round of shots bought on the company card, and the next, you’d been waking up in your own bed, undressed and hung over. You’d figured you’d managed to get yourself home despite blacking out, but the way Dick was grinning against your throat suggested otherwise. “It should’ve been like that all the time. Just you and me – taking care of each other.”

You couldn’t blink. You couldn’t blink. You’d fall apart the second your eyes closed, and you couldn’t keep letting them break you like that.

“B’s mind works on a switch,” Dick explained. “He can turn it off whenever he wants to, but I’m not like that. I can’t decide when not to love you.” He paused, smirked. “Even if you could be a little nicer to me, some—”

“Help me escape.”

The sound of your own voice caught you off-guard. Dick jolted against you, raising his head, equally surprised. Your face suddenly felt warm, and your heart was beating too quickly. It was by someone else’s – someone stronger, someone dumber - volition that you went on, digging your grave that much deeper. “If you hate the way I’m treated, if you think you love me, then help me leave. I’ll go wherever you want to, I just—” The air hitched in your throat. “You know I can’t stay here, any longer.”

For a second, Dick didn’t respond. For a second, he stayed there, pressed against you, all-but unmoving.

Then, he straightened and laughed, taking your hand in his. He squeezed gently, like he was trying to show you that he cared. Like he loved you.

“Bruce’s shift is coming up. We should get you home, right?”

You let your eyes fall to the ground. Not blinking hadn’t helped – you could feel tears forming in the corner of your eyes, regardless.

“Right.”

~

It rained on your walk back, despite the clear sky. Neither of you had brought an umbrella, and the downpour was too sudden to seek cover, so you were soaked by the time you reached the apartment. The artificial chill clung to you like a second skin, turning your body to shell hostile to its contents. In hindsight, you probably should’ve taken it as an omen of things to come. Or, maybe you just should’ve expected calamity in general – predicted or otherwise.

You were late, too. Bruce was already there by the time you finally made it through that suffocating entryway – sitting on the foot of your bed, a suit jacket hung over his knee and the first few buttons of his collar undone. With a nod by way of acknowledgement, you moved to scurry past him and find something dryer to wear, but he caught your wrist on the way by. “Can you stay for a second, honey?”

Absolutely not. No way in hell. You’d rather die. “…I guess so.”

There was a gentle squeeze by way of gratitude, then he turned to Dick. “Be honest with me. Have any of you touched her?”

Dread formed a bottomless, pitch-black well in your chest. Even Dick seemed reluctant to answer – setting his jaw and squaring his shoulders. Making himself into one of Bruce’s soldiers, rather than his son. “No. Not like that.” He swallowed. “Not since Jason.”

“Good. I was hoping we could talk, first.” With his free hand, he waved Dick closer. Silent and unquestioning, Dick obeyed.

The blocking of your little scene was awkward. You were too close to Bruce and Dick was too close to you while the distance between them was left deliberately more vast. Dick didn’t touch you. He never would, not with Bruce watching, and Bruce seemed to know that. “It’s alright,” he said, with the same stoicism he might’ve showed to a wild, rampaging animal. “Go on. I want to see how you handle it – if you can handle it.”

Dick glowered. “This isn’t something you can train out of me, old man.”

“I’m not trying to.” You made a half-hearted effort to pull your hand out of Bruce’s hold. His grip only tightened, in response. “Show me that you know how to put your hands on something without breaking it.”

There was a second’s worth of hesitation, but not much longer. One of Dick’s hands wrapped around your forearm, replacing Bruce’s, while the other caught your chin. He kissed you – messy, sudden, hard – and you wondered if you really did die on the bathroom floor that night, and this was your own special brand of hell.

When Dick came up for air, there was no pretense of consent, no pause taken to assess you for the mutuality Bruce always seemed so desperate for. His lips pressed into the corner of your mouth, then your jaw, then the corner of your throat – lingering there while his hands dropped to your waist, pawing at the fabric of your sundress. On instinct, you thrashed, shoved at his chest, dug your claws into his chest. Dick only laughed, pulling you that much closer against him. “C’mon, sweetheart, we’re just making up for lost time,” he mumbled into your ear, his breath warm and tacky against your skin. “You remember what I said last time, right? It’s just you and me – you don’t have to think about anybody else.”

“I don’t even want to think about you, little prick complex-having fucking bast---” Your hissed insults were cut off by Dick’s hands on your hips, by your feet suddenly being torn from the ground as he half-lifted, half-threw you onto the bed. The collision was rough, sudden, knocking the air out of your lungs and giving Dick time to get on top of you. Two fists found the collar of your dress and tore, cold air rushing over your chest, your navel, your legs. You tried not to think about the technicalities of it – how planned it seemed, how little hesitation there was, how his grin stretched wider with each inch of mutilated fabric. Your mind was more focused on broader concepts – the all-encompassing hateyou felt for both of them, the acid sitting heavy and thick on your tongue. The fact that you’d already showed Bruce what you do if your life ever turned from unpleasant to unbearable, and the haunting awareness that he was sitting there and watching it happen again, this time from the comfort of his own bedroom.

Dick wasn’t helping. You hadn’t expected him to, but there was still a fresh sort of sting to the feeling of his mouth on your neck, to the sound of his voice in your ear. “So pretty,” he muttered, cupping your cunt through your panties. You lashed out at random, scratching at his chest, but Dick only chuckled, leaned into your assault as if he could pretend it was the sweetest, most saccharine form of affection. “So perfect, and all mine. Could’ve been doing this months ago, in a better world. Would’ve, if I had it my way.”

His thumb pressed harsh circles into your clit, made coarser by satin fabric. You let out a miserable whine, and Bruce clicked his tongue. “Too rough. She’ll bruise.” He moved closer to the side of the bed. “Use your mouth. She prefers it.”

Dick nipped at curve of your throat – another pitchy, humiliating sound. “I don’t hear any complaints.”

“Have I ever told you that, when I first brought you home, Alfred suggested having you neutered? Less hormones that way. A smoother rebellious phase, when you hit teens.” He drummed his fingers against his knee. “I wonder if it’s too late to reconsider the offer.”

Dick grumbled, but the message was clear enough. With one more lingering kiss, he was on his stomach between your legs, head buried between your thighs and tongue drawing shapes into the seat of your panties. You tried to keep your eyes shut, to imagine you were anywhere else, and when that failed to blur the images of claustrophobic car interiors or stop Dick from pulling the now-soaked fabric to the side, you went rigid and tried to sit up. Emphasis on tried. Bruce was already there, of course, holding your shoulders, easing you back down. He always seemed to be at your beck and call when you didn’t want his help.

He wasn’t smiling. You could still feel Dick’s as he ground the bridge of his nose into your clit, but Bruce wasn’t smiling. His gaze bore into your expression appraisingly, occasionally flitting to Dick to make sure his grip was still loose, his teeth kept behind lips. It took seconds for him to break, and even then, the extent of his falter was a sigh, a new set of crow’s feet on the corners of his eyes as he leaned down, pressing his lips into your forehead. “You’ll be the death of me,” he muttered, pulling away. As if you cared. As if he hadn’t already been yours. “Keep that pace. She’s getting closer.”

You weren’t. You really, really weren’t. But, you’d gotten so used to Bruce touching you every minute of every day, and you hadn’t even touched yourself in weeks, and Dick was moaning unabashedly as he fucked his tongue into your cunt – the reverberation steady and pulsing. You didn’t let yourself cum. You wouldn’t let yourself cum, but your thighs kept trying to shut around Dick’s head, and your skin felt like it was on the verge of melting away, and Bruce wouldn’t stop looking at you with the same slight, softened expression he put on whenever you tripped over your own feet or cried after a spanking. Dick’s fingertips bit into the plush of your thighs, and Bruce’s hand came up to cup your cheek. You tried to push him away, but even lifting your arms off of the mattress felt like a waste of energy. You wondered if playing dead would be more effective, would make them stop. You knew it wouldn’t. It hadn’t the first time.

“So beautiful,” he mumbled, leaning down to kiss you. His lips were chapped, and his teeth scraped against your bottom lip too roughly, too clumsily. “And so generous, too. I always hoped you and the kids would get along but—” He paused, chuckled. “It might’ve gotten a little out of hand.”

You tried to open your mouth, to tell him he and his hoard of orphaned sex fiends could go to hell, but all that made it past your lips was a cracked, trembling sob. Bruce hushed you with a low coo, calloused fingers carding through your hair. “Daddy’s right here, honey. Just lie back and bear with me for a little longer, alright?”

As if you were having a tooth pulled. As if his oldest son didn’t have his head buried between your thighs, as if he wasn’t tracing his own name into your cunt over and over and over again. The flat of his tongue ran over your pussy, your clit, and with a stifled gasp, you were pushed over the edge, sent plummeting into an abyss of heat and tension and bright, white lights. Dick nursed you through your orgasm lovingly, but hastily, and Bruce turned his attention away from you to ruffle Dick’s hair. You tried not to linger on the gesture longer than you absolutely had to.

Eventually, Bruce moved aside, and Dick was on top of you again, his chest pressing into yours as he rushed to pull his shirt over his head, to undress in a way you hadn’t been given the choice to. You thought about calling out for Bruce, reaching for him, begging him to make it stop, but you were really too old to be entertaining fantasies. He’d already told you what you needed to do: lie there, shut up, and take it.

Dick wasn’t so pragmatic. He pushed a long, open-mouthed kiss into the side of your neck, sucking and biting until you could be sure that you’d wear the bruise for weeks. You felt something hot and blunt slot against your entrance, but did your best to pretend it was only your imagination.

The contact was too much, too hot, too stifling. Dick’s tongue ran over your cheek, then he dipped lower – hiding his face in the crook of your neck. “I love you.” And then, again, like there was a quantity of desperation that would make you believe him, “I love you.”

He might’ve believed it. You almost did, but then hips were grating against yours, his cock thrusting into you, and suddenly, you weren’t in a state to believe in love at all.

~

It was dark by the time you were allowed to leave the bedroom. Bruce insisted on a long, well-monitored bath and Dick held you against his chest like he was afraid you might be taken away from him, but eventually, Bruce took a call from Barbara and Dick fell into a deep enough sleep to make slipping away something more than a delusional, escapist fantasy.

Once free, you made your way to the kitchen, tore the framed band poster off the wall, and smashed it against the tile floor until the glass shattered. Dick found you less than a minute later, trying to pick up a few of the larger pieces with your bare hands.

He was still grinning. The expression seemed more off-kilter jagged than it should’ve been in the dim light, more patronizing as he lifted you onto the counter, checking your hands over for hairline cuts or other micro-injuries before squeezing them in his. “Stay right here. I’ll get something to clean up with, and—” His eyes moved from your hands to your face, and his voice cut out abruptly. “You’re so perfect,” he sighed, leaning down to press his lips into the apex of your wrist. “Let’s do it.”

Something sharp and hot stabbed into the back of your throat. More out of self-preservation than curiosity, you asked, “…do what?”

“Leave. Run. Get out of here.” Another kiss, this one to the base of your ring finger. It wasn’t hard to picture what kind of life he was imagining for you. “I’ll get a new place in Bludhaven. You’ll lie low for a little while. We’ll be together.”

You grit your teeth. Bruce and his ilk weren’t the type to play mind games with you, but only the most idiotic man you’d ever met, so deeply entrenched in his own delusions that there was no hope of ever dragging him back to the surface again, would’ve believed you had any love in your heart for him after you’d called him so many awful names. After you’d spent hours practically catatonic in his arms. After tonight.

Thankfully, the most idiotic, delusional man you’d ever met was standing in front of you right now. Little miracles, you guessed.

“You make me so happy, Dick.” You ran your fingers through his hair, and he melted into your palm. “It’s just – there’s one thing I’d like to do, first.”

“Anything. Whatever you want, I’ll do it.”

“I think I should talk to Jason.”

Immediately, Dick’s expression fell. “Why Jason?” 

“Just to tie off loose ends. Make sure I’m not leaving anything behind.” You forced yourself to smile, letting your head tilt to the side. “And then I’ll have the rest of my life to spend with you, right?”

You could practically see his eyes glazing over, the same way they had when he found you reading to Damian or chiding Duke for getting himself hurt. Your current reality immediately substituted for a glossier, more appealing replica – or, more appealing to Dick, at least.

“Right.” And then, with one last kiss pressed into your knuckles, “I love you.”

For once, the words didn’t taste so bitter on your tongue.

Dick was a lot of things, but he wasn’t a liar. Bruce clung to you for the next few days – monitoring your diet, watching you sleep, fucking you with more care and more fervor than he ever had before. When he was forced to leave, he held you up until the point he absolutely had to go, then spent another few precious seconds promising Tim would take his place in twenty minutes. That didn’t matter, though. Jason was there in five.

“I love you.”

~

You found him in the living room. He’d come through the balcony, left the door ajar and everything. A handgun was strapped to his thigh, and his helmet sat on his knee. He’d never worn it around you, not so far as you could remember.

Ever the coward, he left it up to you to break the silence. That was fair, in a way. You were the one who wanted to talk.

“Hi.”

“Hey.”

“You look like shit.”

He rubbed one of the dark, sunken circles under his eyes with the back of his hand. “B can’t keep us all trapped inside and sedated. Some of us have to be outdoor dogs.”

“Guess so.” You let a measured beat pass, then asked, “Wanna get out of here?”

There was a twitch at the corner of his lips, a spark of something familiar. By the time Tim was due to arrive, you were on the back of a black and red motorcycle, miles away from the nearest sky-scrapper.

Jason’s apartment was just how you remembered it – albeit, slightly less intimidating in daylight. Bloody clothes and dented body armor laid over couches and cluttered and tables. Drawers filled with bullet casing and pocketknives sat open, on display, while anything comforting or sentimental remained hidden in safes or behind closed doors. His corkboard had gained a few more pictures, and in the corner, there were new sketches of Dick and Bruce. They looked recent.

Steering clear of the makeshift bedroom, you collapsed onto a worn leather couch, sinking into the beaten cushions and savoring the feeling of a well-loved piece of furniture. Jason skirted around you, never lingering, never edging too close. You followed his erratic pacing in the corner of your eyes while you spoke.

“You haven’t visited me.”

One step forward, two back. Both hands shoved into pockets. “I know. I’m sorry.”

“You should be. I’ve been bored to tears.” A pause, a breath of a laugh. “I didn’t realize how much I relied on you, back at the manor. The only people I can talk to now are either in on it or completely oblivious. I’m pretty sure Damian thinks I’ve driven his father insane.”

“He was like that before he met you.” A lap around the couch, then to the nearest window. “They all were. Dick can’t stand being along and Tim would jerk off to a cardboard box if it looked at him the right way.”

“It’s the girls now, too. I think Steph’s just having fun, but Cas…” You trailed off, shaking your head. “I feel a little bad for her. I mean – she’s so young, and she’s already been through so much. It’s hard to blame her for taking after a marathon of bad examples.”

That was enough to have Jason turning on his heel, making a beeline for the front door. You caught his wrist as he passed by. “Slow down. You’re acting like the building’s on fire.”

“Sorry, I just—”

You squeezed, and he sucked in a harsh breath, shutting his eyes. You did your best to keep your voice light, gentle. “When was the last time you got any sleep, Jason?”

“It’s been—” He opened his eyes, his gaze landing on you before quickly moving away. The answer was obvious enough. “—a while.”

“C’mon, Jay. You can’t live like this.” You tugged on his hand. “Why don’t you lay down for a few minutes? I don’t want to watch you fall apart on me.”

He swallowed, his shoulders squaring. There was a moment of reluctance, of hesitation before he asked, “Can I…?”

It wasn’t hard to guess what he wanted, not with his eyes trained so intensely on your lap. Smiling, you nodded, and in an instant, he was on his knees, limp and clutching at your ankles as he laid his head over your thighs. The position was awkward – he was too stiff, too tall – but you tried to make the best of it, running your fingers through his hair. At least he’d asked, this time.

“I’m sorry.” And then, again, his voice raw enough to break, “I’m sorry. I thought they’d back off, or we’d run away together, or—”

“You didn’t want to run away with me.” With your free hand, you patted down your jacket pocket. “And that’s alright. You’re a part of a family. I was never going to ask you to leave them.”

You could practically feel him try to deny, try to say that if you ever asked, he would’ve in a heartbeat. In the end, though, it was all he could do to sigh, sinking further into you. “I love you.”

How many times had you heard that, lately? You tried to remember if Bruce had ever parroted the same phrase. “I love you too, Jason.”

Tucked inside, your fingertips brushed against something hard and jagged. You curled your hand around it. “Every day, I had to watch them pretend they felt the same way about you, watch you pretend to tolerate it. It was like having to rip my own heart out of my chest.”

A sharpened edge sliced into your palm, breaking the skin. You ignored it. “That must’ve been hell.”

“I shouldn’t complain. You had it worse. Obviously, you have it worse.” His nails bit into your calves. “I’ll kill them. If they’ve so much as looked at you, I’ll kill them.”

You hated it when they lied to you.

You couldn’t wait any longer – didn’t have a reason to. In one motion, you tore the long, ragged piece of glass out of your pocket and stabbed it into Jason’s shoulder.

You’d managed to hide it before Dick found you huddled over the broken frame, stowed it away on your person as soon as you realized Bruce was going to take his eyes off of you. Reflexively, Jason jerked back, clamoring for the gun on his waist, but he was staggered, caught off-guard, and you weren’t. Your fist was already curled around the grip, already dragging the weapon out of its holster and forcing the muzzle against his stomach. Your index finger rested on the trigger, the safety disabled, but you didn’t shoot.

“Please,” you whispered, instead, as Jason froze against you. “Don’t say anything, don’t stand – just back up. I don’t want to hurt you.”

Slowly, reluctantly, he did as he was told. Staying on his knees, he edged back, giving you enough space to push yourself to your feet. You kept the gun trained on his chest, never once turning away. His distraught expression had twisted into something more raw, something more angry. Not hateful, but hurt, betrayed. You knew the look well.

“Drop it, (Y/n). You don’t know what you’re doing.”

You tilted the barrel down, shut your eyes, and fired. There was a crash of deafening noise, the pure force of recoil, and then Jason’s muffled cursing. By the time you could bring yourself to look, he was  clutching his ankle, fresh blood seeping through his fingers. “I spent a lot of time with Alfred. I mean, a lot. Basically whenever I wasn’t on the verge of getting molested by you and your gang of traumatized fetishists.” You took a step backward, then another, inching your way to the door. Eventually, your back pressed into wood. “I know you keep cash on-hand – for when Bruce finally cuts you off. Slide it to me.”

“Or what? You’ll kill me?” His laugh was awful, barking, pained. “Go ahead, baby. I’ll finish the job myself if you leave me.”

He wouldn’t. Jason wasn’t that directly self-destructive, none of them were.

Thankfully, you’d always had a little more motivation.

The muzzle was hot against your skin where you pressed it into the underside of your jaw. Jason’s expression didn’t drop, but it changed, stilled, every thought save for those of preservation erased in a fraction of a second.

You didn’t have to make your demands twice. He rummaged one of the holsters on his belt, and then, a stack of hundred-dollar bills was lying at your feet, secured by a single band pulled taut. You let the gun drift from your jaw to your temple as you bent to pick it up, watching Jason all the while.

Finally, you grappled for the knob behind you, sliding deadbolts out of place and turning locks until you stood in an empty doorway. You were free to leave, free to go, but you lingered, keeping your eyes on Jason.

“If you ever really loved me,” you said, fighting to keep your voice even, your hand steady. “You won’t try to find me.”

He might’ve said something. He looked like he was going to, but you were already over the threshold. The door was shut before he could try to convince you to stay.

Once safe on the other side, you lowered the gun to your side, took a deep breath, and started to run.

[chow0w]

i come to suggest kinkajou for redesigning!! :3 your style is so incredibly BEAUTIFUL bro

It's been a long while, but I finally have the redesign! @steve-the-dino wanted to see this too!

I love this baddie, but she was SO incredibly hard to design for like no reason at all. This is my third attempt. I was going for some kind of flower-power vibe... almost like those wallpapers you would see at playplaces/party rooms as a kid. I really like the electric, exciting vibe that they have and thought it would be a good fit for Kinkajou since she gives off the same intense positivity!

The design speaks for itself - heavily saturated from long periods of time in the sun, with flower/polka dot patterns being the main recurring theme of her design. Even though her design is mostly pink/purple/yellow in canon, I wanted to add some greens to reinforce that flowery vibe + put a little more diversity into her pallet. I'm forever going to be slightly upset that Kinkajou didn't get her own book, especially considering how important her character is to the jade mountain arc! It would have been nice to see the darkness of dragons timeframe from her perspective, or even just get a winglet that explains her thoughts during the conclusion of the arc. I love you forever Kinkajou...

That's all for this design! Sorry for the short (In my standards) blurb - I might revisit Kinkajou's design in the future, if a better idea ever comes to mind. Thank you all so much for your support of this redesign series! I didn't really start posting consistently until mid-April, and to see that I'm already nearing 1k is a massive win in my book!

You may notice the lack of list on this post. I usually put my waitlisted/completed characters down here, but it's getting a little long so I moved it to a pinned post! Feel free to check that out if you're looking for your favorite - and drop a request in my inbox if not! Bear in mind, you can always inbox me for a character who's already waitlisted. I'll tag you when it's done!

edited:

Hi guys! just wanted to put the vote here too so more people see it. For context, this is a vote on what we should do to celebrate 1k!

later (＠´ー`)ﾉﾞ

[alchemiclee]

4 and 20 for the Artist Ask Game! 👀

4. Fav character/subject that's a bitch to draw

not sure about character...but subject? probably poses/anatomy in general. still bad at it. brain can't quite comprehend shapes lol all the anatomy tutorials just go in one ear/eye and out the other. no brain process in between 😅 same with lighting/shadows. basic art things make me trip and fall

20. Something everyone else finds hard to draw but you enjoy

eyes?? do people think eyes are hard? I always enjoyed doing eyes. maybe hair. hair is fun but i've seen many people say it's hard

[badgertracksart]

Portfolio advice, from a lead who hires Concept Artists

(This was originally a twitter thread I wrote before the site self imolated, hense it's strange structure.) I wrote this after a weekend of portfolio reviews - 1. Like a maths exam, please please show your working. I want to see thumbs options, mid options and of course a final design.

2. Arrange your portfolio, I don't want to bounce about between subject matter and pipeline. Your portfolio's narrative should be as strong as your work... 3. Please make worlds that excite the viewer, make them want to go in and explore them, explain to them the interesting parts of the town, or the way the character's hat unfolds. How will this draw the viewer in? 4. As I've said before the majority of your project work is explanatory not mood, make sure your portfolio contains explanatory work. Explained here -

5. A lot of beautiful post apocolyptic paintings, , but 80% of realistic games and film, we just give the environment artists photo ref, they are capable artists in their own right. Different work in stylised where you do need to create rules for how things can be translated. 6. Production art contains call out sheets, material references and flat graphics. This doesn't have to be your final image, but it should support it.

7. Design characters on a swatch(es) of the environment they will be viewed in. Not on white. I make swatch backgrounds from screenshots, it avoids assumptions that damage readability. 8. Reverse of this, put people in your environments, show me the scale.

9. It's not a deal breaker for a review, but if you intend to get a job, please show me your work on a screen larger than a smartphone (print outs probably the cheapest option with the best battery life). 10. Please have your contact details clearly visible, and by that I mean email address, I will not pass your social media contact on, I cannot input your form into my tracking system. EMAIL ADDRESS emblazoned and bake it in, sometimes recruiters do funky stuff to pdfs

11. Your portfolio will never feel done, not to you anyway. You will have learnt from your latest pieces and want to apply it to older work. But we know art is a journey. Send your portfolio anyway. I've been in the industry 10+ years and my portfolio is still not 'finished'. 12. If you are applying to an environment centric Concept Art position then please vary your times of day! Golden hour is cool but show me some happy sunny days, looming overcast days, what about at night? Vary your weather too! Sunny snowy day? Rainy Spring day? Stormy night?

13. If you are applying for a character centric Concept Art role then please ensure your portfolio shows a variety of body types and ethnicities. 14. Designing characters for games? Please show back views and feet (!) Many potfolios contain only front views. This is a problem because:

You haven't shown you are considering the design from all angles.

In many games rear view is the main view.

Stop cropping feet.

15. If you are entry / graduating and looking at Portfolios to compare content and standard of yr own work too, look at hired grad/junior artists as opposed to seniors Seniors and leads often have old or personal work in their portfolio which isnt representative of the day job. 16a. Show clearly the intended use case for your Concept Art. Mention the game type in the description. Are these player character designs for a 3rd person adventure game? Then more back views please. Bonus points for diagetic ways of showing health / equipment / role etc.

16b. Are these designs for an FPS? Then really the player view of the gun needs to sell the player style/ choices, in an FPS your weapons are almost your character. Are these world designs? What's the view distance? For an RTS your shapes need to read from above & a distance. 16c. The lack of clarification means I am judging the design in isolation, which both harms the design (you might be considering the backview of a char as the main adventure character.) Or an NPC, their waist up expressions may be important for conveying exposition and mechanics.

16d. Concept art is not separate from gameplay, great concept art serves the game team before it is a good illustration.

17. Play games. A variety of games. Think about them. IMO to be a good concept artist you need to understand the common language & references used by your peers. Also understand the principles and common language your audience are used to. FPS design rules are v.diff from RTS.

18. There are many skills that are needed in concept art, please show them. For example: Graphic design - logos, liveries, typographic use etc. VFX concepts - Abilities, Ambience, motion concepts. Architectural knowledge - How buildings are built! & more but I'm out of space :O

[anistarrose]

I don't even use Bluesky very much, nor do I want to use Bluesky very much; it's got it's own problems — but if only more social media sites would just adopt their strategy of "remind people to include alt text, with a message that also explains who alt text is for."

The reason this has been on my mind? I've seen some artists who consistently include alt text on Bluesky, and consistently don't include alt text or image descriptions when posting the same art to Tumblr. That's clear evidence that Tumblr, and other websites that squirrel away their "add alt text" button where no one sees it, could be doing more for accessibility with just a few simple changes — which would make a meaningful difference for screen reader users.

And to be clear, Tumblr would also have a lot of work to do to make their alt text less glitchy in general — which is one of many reasons you might still see people writing IDs in-post, or even putting them both places. But I can't stress enough that a lot of progress will quickly result from just teaching people, on a wide scale, that:

Blind and low-vision people do in fact use social media, and

There's a thing you* can and should do to accommodate those blind and low-vision people.

(*If you're experiencing a barrier to writing IDs, like a lack of mental energy, not knowing how to describe something, or needing IDs yourself, then that's nothing to be ashamed of. However, in that case, it's good to familiarize yourself with methods of crowdsourcing IDs.)

[meetthegofer]

me trying to explain the intricacies of my gender identity to my boyfriend who drinks an ungodly amount of coffee like Okay so you know mugs, right

this is just me rambling but there's something so interesting about selfshipping for a series that takes place in the past when you're trans/nonbinary/gnc et al, since you get the chance to think about How it would work in that context.

obviously i love myself and im not here to imagine my ugly video game boyfriend trying to change things about me. however i think trying to navigate fossey balancing personal self expression with his professional life at first before eventually letting loose and presenting more masculinely would be fun... especially since it would tie into their switch from being purely the computer guy -> also being a gofer and being given the run around every day. which ill elaborate on soon LOL

[rna-world]

DEBUNKING COMMON RAIN WORLD MISINTERPRETATIONS

The target audience for this was for people who don't know too much about the game as well, so I'm going to explain things that a normal player might already know.

Rain World is known for how it simply throws you into the world with almost no tutorial, and is often praised for it.

But this lack of explanation if you do not go out of your way to find it has also lead to a lot of misinterpretations from those who did not read all the game’s available information, or misunderstood what they were being told. I used to watch some RW lore videos that would explain and summarize these things, and in the past I believed them.

I’ve since stopped doing that after having some time to actually process what I’ve been reading, and I’m here to say...

YOU ARE ALL WRONG ABOUT RAIN WORLD.

Ok, hyperbole. Not everyone believes these, and art can always be interpreted in different ways by different people, and I won’t stop you from having these beliefs. But also, there’s plenty of ingame content which completely disproves most of these unsubstantiated points from those who do not fully research the game before making videos about it.

Looking at you Tale Foundry…

The purpose of this is to pick apart some of the sadly far too common points I’ve heard many times before from Youtube videos, to Tumblr posts, to people I’ve spoken to on Discord.

Starting with my least favorite…

------

“The 5 karma were seen as sinful”

Obvious westernization of a game based off fucking Buddhism aside, there’s no ingame text directly supporting this claim. There isn’t any that says otherwise, but we have good reason to believe this isn’t the case.

The 5 natural urges, as they’re sometimes called, were NATURAL. They were what bound you to the cycle. They never worsened your life or made you a terrible person should you keep following them, but an aspect of life on the same level as suffering or ecstasy.

Hey, I’ll break down the 5 karma and their meanings to show you that they're not just "sins"

I believe the natural urges have 2 different meanings: an animalistic one, and a more “human” one.

KARMA 1 This obviously represents violence, as you see one guy stabbing the other. I believe it also represents competition and intense emotions, For example: Artificer experiencing intense grief and lashing out in violence as a result. It was not the violence that started it, but her emotions. (Yes, its Downpour. But it’s a good point.)

KARMA 2

They’re having sex. They’re fucking. They’re- ok you get it. Karma 2 represents reproduction. But, I also believe it’s desire. Joyful bodily experiences, and such. The 2 figures seen here are in a much more playful pose than if they were simply doing this only to reproduce. No, they’re having fun.

KAMRA 3 Connection. Bonding with others. Yet also trade and personal belongings. Attachment to things that are not yourself.

KARMA 4 It’s mentioned ingame that this represents gluttony It’s overindulgence, you know. Similarly to karma 2, it can also be searching for fulfillment. I'm not particularly good at telling what the meaning of this could be.

KARMA 5 Self preservation. Self preservation can come in many forms, from an animal running away from a predator or somebody getting defensive after being accused of something or being threatened, this one is rather vague about its meaning.

I do this to show that the 5 urges have very NEUTRAL meanings. It being positive or negative is entire dependant on context. They’re not sinful, get out of here with that Catholic shit!

The 5 karmas have both positive, negative, and neutral contexts which they can fit into.

------

“The ancients hated being alive”

The ancients simply hated the cycle itself and its unknowable properties, as well as being much more aware of things like karma and the urges. Rather, they valued being effortless to disconnect themselves from this cycle.

“This was an eternal dilemma to them - they were burdened by great ambition, yet deeply convinced that striving in itself was an unforgivable vice. They tried very hard to be effortless.” – Bright Green Pearl (DS)

Some practices did of course include things like starving yourself, but as mentioned by Moon, these methods proved to be mostly obsolete. Void Fluid fundamentally changed their culture from what we see. Rather, we do see the ancients enjoying life and valuing it in their own way, which is INCREDIBLY important to some of the games themes, but I’ll get into that later.

"[...]'In this vessel is the living memories of Seventeen Axes, Fifteen Spoked Wheel, of the House of Braids[…] Seventeen Axes, Fifteen Spoked Wheel nobly decided to ascend in the beginning of 1514.008, after graciously donating all (ALL!) earthly possessions to the local Iterator project (Unparalleled Innocence), and left these memories to be cherished by the carnal plane.The assorted memories and qualia include:Watching dust suspended in a ray of sun (Old age). Eating a very tasty meal (Young child). Defeating an opponent in a debate contest, and being applauded by fellow team members (Late childhood/Early adulthood).’...and the list goes on. I'm sorry, little creature, I won't read all of this - the list is six hundred and twenty items long.” – Deep Magenta (SH)

There’s quite a lot to pick apart here, I had to cut down some parts short, but even the cut parts have important details. Just not important enough for me to bring up here.

The Memory Crypts we see ingame are… well where memories are kept. The qualia (personalized experiences) is stored within these mutated fleshy neural organisms referred to as “cabinet beasts”. These of course, contain the “living memories” or qualia of those who have ascended. There are people smarter than me who have already covered these ideas of course, so I won't go TOO indepth.

The ancients greatly valued titles and achievements just as us. They still lived normal lives. As well as this, they valued personal experiences and memories of the carnal realm so much they built an entire citadel to store memories.

As we can see as well, Seventeen Axes has quite a lot of enjoyable memories from throughout their life. Eating nice food and winning a debate contest and getting validation from their peers? That sounds rather… complacent with the 3rd and 4th natural urges, doesn’t it?

I do not believe this screams “I hate being alive!” as much as people have made it out to be, and is honestly ruins part of the game’s messages of compassion and personalized experiences, especially in the game’s ending where Survivor dreams of home.

“You have no name. I once had! I was embalmed, adorned, readied for the journey. So proud. There was jubilation! My name was sung, loud and clear. Did they know? That I didn't quite leave, didn't quite stay? Should I be ashamed? That I linger here, where my memories are kept? Should I be ashamed that I now envy your flesh prison?” - Four Needles under Plentiful Leaves

This is leaning into personal theory territory, but...

I personally believe that the ancients were somewhat terrified of the unpredictability of the cycle and the fact that life would always have more suffering in it.

RW’s religion is heavily based off Buddhism. This is well known of course. The Cycle is a variation of Samsara. Now, I’m not Buddhist, and I’ve tried to do my research about some of these topics. Feel free to correct me, I’m simply going off what I know. (Also I'd love to hear what you have to say regarding your thoughts on the game!)

In Buddhism, each new life you could be taken into the body of an animal, or even end up being tortured in hell for a very, very, VERY long time if you made the wrong decisions, which made escaping it as soon as you could seem like a rather reasonable thing to do.

The ancients never fully grasped the scope of the cycle, and the prospects of having your soul wake up in the body of some miserable worm with no memory of your past or any ideas of your future might’ve seemed bleak.

Suffering is inevitable. But that doesn’t mean they hated being alive, like I said before.

------

“Rain World is post-apocalyptic.”

It really isn’t. There was never any apocalypse. The ancients simply left on their own accord, leaving behind their mark on the world that will slowly be buried once again in the ever so present cycle.

“The bones of forgotten civilizations, heaped like so many sticks.” - Two Sprouts, Twelve Brackets

The world is thriving, even. The purposed organisms left behind have evolved and taken over and become it’s own ecosystem.

The iterators are dying though. Dying very slowly, but soon they’ll all decay and everything will move on.

It’s all just another manifestation of the cycle.

------

“The creatures in Rain World cannot die”

This is definitely something I hear from people who haven’t played much of the game and only hear about it from outside sources and watch the gameplay.

Yes, it is easy to believe this. As slugcat, when you die, you wake back up again. This is entirely a gameplay thing and not actually related to the lore. Saying this might seem like I'm avoiding the question at hand here, but the rules that apply to you do not seem to apply to other creatures.

Every creature in the game has a 4 integer ID (it can go higher, but not in a standard playthrough).

This makes every creature you see an individual of sorts with its own randomized values or appearance.

As well as this, creatures spawn from specific marked dens. When you kill a creature that spawns from a certain den, the next cycle, that creature’s ID will never appear again. Instead, the den spawn is replaced by a creature of the same species with a different ID, or a new species entirely.

Through gameplay, you see that the respawn rules that apply to you do not apply to other creatures. I’ve heard many points about how these dead creatures are transported to another alternate universe where they are alive, but I really do not want to delve into that theory. You do that yourself.

Excuse my unprofessional language, but this is kind of stupid. Billions and billions of little timeline splits accounting for every single insect and microbe that dies seems far too complex of a solution. Occam's Razor and all that.

With this gameplay element you see, I also want to give LORE explanations as to why this is incredibly stupid.

1) If death had no impact, the 5 natural urges would not matter

If no creatures died, there would be no point in eating (karma 4), competing with other species (karma 1), or any form of self preservation (karma 5). Reproduction (karma 2) has no role and there would be absolutely no reason to do anything any longer. All natural processes would be useless.

2) Light Blue Pearl

The information received from the cycle is most likely from the Light Blue Pearl, found in Outskirts.

“[...]The repeating mantra is important because it symbolizes the cyclical nature of life and death, and the termination verse is a symbol for ascension above and beyond it. I don't know how familiar you are with the nature of life and death, but I imagine like all living creatures you have some intuitive knowledge? Then you know that death isn't the end - birth and death are connected to each other like a ring, or some say a spiral. Some say a spiral that in turn forms a ring. Some ramble in agonizing longevity. But the basis is agreed upon: like sleep like death, you wake up again - whether you want to or not. This is true for all living things, but some actually break the cycle. That doesn't apply to you or me though, you are too entangled in your animal struggles, and for me not breaking that cycle is an integral part of the design. Our mantras keep repeating.”

“Then you know that death isn't the end - birth and death are connected to each other like a ring, or some say a spiral. Some say a spiral that in turn forms a ring.“

This line is very misunderstood. Moon specifically mentions birth and death. She mentions death. She never brings up the notion that nothing truly dies either.

As well as this, Moon says that “some say”, implying that even the ancients weren’t sure what the cycle was either. This is more important to my point regarding how the unfathomable nature of the cycle was why the Ancients were so averse to it from above, though.

------

“Sliver of Straw found the solution.”/"There is/isn't solution"

No she didn’t.

.

.

Ok fine I’ll explain.

If you’ve played Rain World you know that the purpose of the iterators is to find the solution to the “Great Problem”, the problem of how to ascend ALL living creatures.

You’ll also know Sliver sent out the Triple Affirmative…

“[...]affirmative that a solution has been found, affirmative that the solution is portable, and affirmative that a technical implementation is possible and generally applicable. She's also one of few that has ever been confirmed as exhaustively incapacitated, or dead. We do not die easily.[…]” - Pale Yellow (SL)

After sending out this affirmative, the iterators became conflicted. They never could figure out if she really ascended and had found the solution, or if it was some sort of catastrophic error.

The answer to the Great Problem is clearly intended to be as obscured as possible. There cannot be an answer one way or the other. The themes of it and the endless tolling of the iterators would not be as impactful if we knew there was or wasn’t a solution.

“[...]Either way, after that these different factions developed, as well as a huge forensic effort to recreate and simulate Sliver of Straw's last moments. Some of the simulations were wrapped in a simulation wrapped in a simulation, in case something dangerous might happen. Nothing much has come from it.[…]“ - Pale Yellow (SL)

Here’s my favorite way of explaining what I mean…

Imagine Schrodinger's Cat, the famous thought experiment. There’s a 50/50 chance that when you open the box, you either find the Solution, or find out there is No Solution.

Except you cannot open the box. And the box is entirely theoretical and nobody’s seen it. It seems impossible, but maybe one day you’ll find that box. That’s what the Great Problem is.

Sliver apparently having found the solution would have completely broken everything. Five Pebbles wouldn’t have ended up hurting himself and Moon had Sliver finding the solution been known with certainty. He was taking a shot in the dark.

------

“Ascension is akin to suicide.”

I strongly believe this point harms the role that ascension and the void sea play in Rain World’s narrative. Ascension is meant to be a final destination, a goal you build up to and prepare for when you’ve lived every bit of life you possible could, and can now move on.

Bringing up the Memory Crypt pearl from earlier, Seventeen Axes lived an incredibly fulfilling life from what we see, and ascended happily.

As well as this, Buddhism strongly encourages those who wish to liberate themselves to discover their own path, which is also subtly shown through the gameplay, as there are many many routes you can take to Five Pebbles, Looks To The Moon, and The Depths.

I do also think this is why Five Pebbles failed. He tried to brute force his way to ascension.

Suicide implies that ascension is only meant to be a fruitless escape and that it’s wrong to ascend. I… do not want to go into why suicide is bad. It’s a strong topic and I’m just here to talk about video games. But ascension is a neutral thing that you can choose to do or not do and to wait until you’re ready.

------

Conclusion...

I really only have the time to cover these 6 misconceptions, and I believe it should be enough. There have been many others I’ve seen, such as the ancients being malicious or that there weren’t any civilizations before them, but there’s not as much to say about them, and they aren’t as common.

Rain World is a very confusing game. I’m not upset at people who think these things to be true, and I do not believe they’re stupid or don’t have any media literacy. I just wish that the people who did actually cover this game did some more looking into it, and actually discussing it with Rain World fans.

Also I should say, that during this entire discussion I have avoided talking about Downpour- RW’s DLC- as it’s more of a official fanmade project. And so much of what it says may not be entirely in line with Vanilla. Because my life isn’t easy and of course there has to be an incredibly divisive and confusing thing like this that I need to avoid bringing up so that way the conversation isn’t muddled.

Thanks if you managed to make it through all this by the way

[dolphin-diaries]

Death Of The Woman

Originally posted on the Dolphin Diaries substack.

The following essay is not my usual fare. It’s my personal story as a detrans woman, and as such, it will lack in abstracted theory or argumentation. After this I will be publishing a special interview, and then I’ll return to my usual programming.

For now though, be advised this isn’t quite light reading material. There is some cursory description of sexual violence. If you do not feel like you can engage with that, skip from the paragraph beginning “At one point, …” to the next titled section.

Girl/Flesh

Before there is an adult, there is first a child—a not-so-blank slate, a state of being with an expiration date. Boys must be made men; girls must be made women. To the end of that becoming, childhood is a prelude and adolescence a ritual.

Contemplate for a moment, without any input from me: how is a girl made a woman?

My upbringing was rather feminist, compared to the average for my country. My mother did not take my father’s name; she earned more; they had a whole and loving marriage. A husband-and-kids were expected of me eventually, but ever nebulously and not quite yet; my own family’s example seemed perfectly encouraging. For the time being, the biggest expectation placed on me was intellectual accomplishment. You might think a boy child would be preferable to such an endeavour, but it was quite the opposite. Boys will be boys, after all: rowdy, willful, lascivious, ever in need of someone else’s care. Handed gently from the mother’s hand to a wife’s, they’re basically eternal children. But girls? Girls are born older. Mature faster—biologically, essentially, fundamentally. Girls listen. Girls obey.

By all accounts I was a fantastic foundation for such a purpose. Tallest, strongest, bursting with curly dark hair. You couldn’t possibly mistake me for a fragile doll, no, not like some other, more childish girls; I was obviously ready for responsibility. And not just in superficial appearance. Speech came to me quickly and easily; writing flowed from my fingertips with perfect calligraphy; I made art worthy of fridges and walls; I took to learning with all the energy of an insomniac puppy.

Did other kids like a fat, moustachioed girl that beat them at everything, and after class also won at arm-wrestling? Fuck no! But that was alright. I was born into intelligentsia, and envy was our natural curse, one to be proud of. At any rate, someday puberty would come. A body-shedding into something physically desirable; combined with all this accrued talent, it would ensure I’d have the pick of good men. Though I didn’t yet know men, only the irksome boys from whom they hatched. I lived for the attention of adults and for making other girls laugh—if clever ogres are good for nothing else, it’s humour. There was something transcendent in seeing someone fae-pretty and so unreachable be made happy by my effort. Even if they bullied me after. Of course, that meant I was too rowdy—oh, and too stubborn. Girls are supposed to understand the rules of the world exist for a reason; I didn’t. I needed things explained before I obeyed.

The rule I didn’t understand most of all was touch. I was brutish, and my brutishness marked me for disgust—and yet, I was constantly touched, even as I was told I’d never be touchable. My body burgeoned with entirely too much flesh, and every hand was drawn to grab it, to pinch and assess it in some unannounced Try-Before-You-Buy. Teachers, children, family members. It would not stop and it made my skin crawl, but it was also normal. The adults I liked did it. My peers did it. No one remarked on it.

When womanhood was yet a distant prospect, I dreamt of something ethereal. Power-suited. Someone that looked like mother, or like Barbie. Someone untouchable. Because surely this was all a growing pain. I was a girl, and that meant all the things that made me revolting, naive, and unruly would be purged by shed blood.

That’s not how that goes, though. How is a girl made a woman?

When adolescence finally arrived, it was rather early, eleven or so. I always was an overachiever. And I discovered I was not yet becoming something better. I was just myself, but more. More flesh. More hair, in all the wrong places. Same moustache, same swollen face, same ungainly buffoon demeanour, only now with hips bursting through trousers and a boyish deep voice.

The leering and touching did not cease—they got worse. The older I grew, the older my mother dressed me, dolling me up in heels and arse-hugging skirts with the vicarious glee of someone who got another chance at making a woman, and who was emboldened by the powerlessness of my ‘no.’ The dress-up had a goal in mind, of course. Same as my obligation to intellectual accomplishment; the only difference was, I was now failing, while the prospect of adulthood loomed ever closer. So I had it spelled out to me: it was all to ensure I could return to my family the debt I incurred with the costs of my existence. To birth them a child and uphold their reputation. If I was unfeminine, untouchable, unfuckable, they would not get a return on their investment. If I preferred girls—which, big surprise, I did—that would invite untold humiliation on the family name. That I was given to choose my would-be boyfriends, nudged to enjoy the makeup and skirts, was a just bit of carrot to the whip. If I sneered too much at the carrot, I’d get the whip.

So on I wobbled, a fleshy, moustachioed doll. Every new softness and curve invited a groping hand or a disgusting comment. Every fault of my body was bared as proof I should be happy to get this much at all. In old deformity and in newfangled woman-ness, I was just a girl.

I sought other ways of being. An escape from the barbed chain link of The Family. I had limited recourse in my small town, but the internet is a wide-reaching thing. No lesbian community existed for miles, but I could still read about the ring and the hanky code and whatever else. I could look at pictures.

(Although those were at times alarming, because all these lesbian women I glimpsed looked rather like me—whereas I had hoped that, by the time I grew up, I’d be something better.)

Regardless, I tried the codes and the cargo trousers, as much as I could—which wasn’t much. I stoked fascination in my classmates with giddy and secretive coming-outs. Only some showed me compassion and dignity, but I was even happy enough to be seen as a weirdo monster. At least they saw me. Worse was their dissecting vigilance. Their attention to the way I moved or spoke. The moment I’d do something girly, they’d cry, they knew it! I was just a girl. I did have a boy crush, and I should admit it; I was surely—as they put it—a faggot. Yes, really, literally ‘faggot,’ that word precisely. Even when I flicked my wrist like so while all dolled-up from head to toe, no one seemed to quite stomach believing me a real woman.

Giddiness over coming out doesn’t last. Disobedience brooks punishment. Through the listicles of lesbian identities and vocabulary, you dig through to testimonies. To rape. To abjected and dysphoric butches. To abuse at school, university, work, home. To the loss of all those things. To death. Elsewhere lesbians sometimes got their happily-ever-afters, loving families and the luxury of walking free, but here, we have not earned it. Visa-barred from leaving, doomed to die fighting for a future we would never live—even as far away, someone already got it just for having been born.

When I Saw The TV Glow

2011. A documentary, in all the glory of 480p. I’d heard of trans women before in concept—dear, some men just become women, it happens, okay?—but I’d never heard of trans men before. Never conceived of it.

I watched the screen like it was a revelation. A man in a white tee tucked into light jeans, cut like a Ken doll, strutting down a springtime street in low resolution.

Before then, I’d accepted that the burgeoning breasts and hips was simply something I had to contend with. That the way the boys around me were growing stronger while I was ever-groped was simply nature asserting itself. My body was proof of my place in the world.

I looked at the screen and thought, So that was a big fat lie.

The moment I knew it was possible, I wanted it like nothing else. The broad shoulders, the muscles, the dapper swagger. I wished for my body to take the shape of my being, instead of my being contorting to the body’s mould. Perhaps I could be loved for all the things that made me a deformed monster. Perhaps I didn’t need to watch every step to prove I wasn’t just a girl. Here was a place already in the shape of me, rather than a stifling lot I had to constantly fight against.

How could one go about changing sex? According to the documentary, it started with a psychiatric assessment—and so, my little twelve-year-old self took to studying the DSM. As I scoured it, I learned I could not be described by its standards as a true transsexual. I’d never before thought of myself as a boy nor had wanted to be one. Yet in the same breath, the DSM claimed no girl could ever desire physical masculinity beyond what came naturally to her. It was either transsexualism or some fetish or self-harming disorder. I had neither of the latter. My desire to inhabit masculinity was undeniable and crystal-clear, and the only kind of person that could’ve felt this way was a transsexual man—so that meant I must’ve simply remembered my life wrong. Or interpreted it wrong. If I twisted my memories this way or that, discarded one as an anomaly and repainted another in baby-boy blue, it would all make sense. It had to. Trans people online talked about a sense of mis-belonging, and I did feel like an outsider among the girls—what did it mean to feel like a gender, at any rate? I only knew what I felt like. And I felt like something sorry and misshapen.

Somewhat later, circa 2013, I did hear of weirder gender concepts in the distant West, mostly as just definitions of words. Genderqueer, nonbinary, et cetera. I comprehended them rationally but I did not understand or relate to them. Wherever I read about it, genderqueerness was described in a manner parallel to transsexuality—the sex-changing—or else as an exotic alternative to hormones and scalpels. But I desired body change so desperately, and regardless, I could not envision living as a nonbinary gender in my own country. Maybe in the West that was possible, but here nothing but derision would entail. It just wasn’t for me.

Naturally, trans men’s testimonies of hardship met and rivalled those of cis lesbian women. But the vast majority of them were concentrated on the times before and during transition. After that—sure, all of medicine reviles you and you’re at risk of a heinous hate crime. But the same has been true before; now though, when you walk down the street or meet a new friend, when you live, you’re just some guy. Your life is tinted by your queerness as much as any other sex/gender-deviant, but that constant, unabating struggle against a blistering torrent of humiliation, of being forced into the place of a woman? That seemed to end. Eventually. And then—who knows? Move to a new town, a new country even. No one need ever know who you had once been.

At that time though, I was still very young, and the thing about discovering a solution to a problem you thought inescapable is that it makes the problem itself feel that much more acute. So I did the stupidest thing imaginable: come out.

Dear reader, it wasn’t a good idea.

It is, after all, rather trivial to exact whatever punishment one desires upon one’s queer children, for children are parents’ property. It is true everywhere, but if ‘in some fucking America’ there is something called ‘child-protective services,’ here nothing short of murder, starvation, or exceptionally unsubtle and repeated rape could possibly broker an outside intervention. The debt you incurred to your parents for being born still holds, and you’ve just betrayed its very foundation. A woman still needs to be made of you. And anyway, who are you gonna call? The police? For what, total social isolation? For derision and humiliation? For the hours spent unmaking all your agency, all your desire as nothing more than delusion brought on by that damned internet? For total control over you, over every movement, every manner, every gesture, every word? For what you claim was assault? For what you claim was an attempted murder? I mean, it’s all rather sad, but it’s not a crime; not provably. Not against faggots.

I Win, Bitch

I am first and foremost a problem-solver. Even in total solitude, without access to the internet or to kindred spirits, there are plans to be made. I did not want to die, and I was still in the questionable position of being my family’s pride. Had to be. My parents couldn’t have any more children; they had to get it right with me.

So of course, if I got free admission to a prestigious university many kilometres away, and if I proved I’d learned my lesson enough to be trusted with leaving—who was to gainsay me?

Getting out was a decision I made almost the moment my abuse took on a corrective and violent turn. I knew what I had to do, even if it cost me immeasurably. Overnight I had to call quits on any remnant of childhood and learn to steal money to ensure future independence. Had to play my woman’s part convincingly. Had to look as if I’m enjoying it, convincingly. If I’d found the role stifling before, now it was as razors under my skin. Everything that ‘woman’ encompassed had been weaponised for my constant abuse, and I could not stomach a second of it—but I had to. Until I broke free.

Besides the severance of any familial support, financial or otherwise, my psyche was thoroughly shattered. All the times I’d been told, at length and for hours, that I was suffering a dangerous delusion, that I had to be forced to conform to my true nature—every single time, I knew that it was wrong. Even when I was as young as twelve, I knew I deserved none of it. I knew it was abuse and injustice. All the same it broke me. There was no pride and no resilience strong enough in me to withstand years and years of it. For a while I could barely look at women that whatsoever resembled me; the very concept, the very idea was a trigger. When it came to my own mind, I struggled to tell what was real, what I did and did not feel. Everything laid under panes and panes of ice, and that disassociation was the only way I could maintain a grip—or else everything erupted in screams.

The worst of my C-PTSD would be dealt with in the ensuing years thanks to NGO-sponsored therapy for queer patients. Unpacking pane after pane, unwinding coil after coil of the rage I had to swallow, piecing together shards of abandoned and dissociated memories. But I’d be paying mental dividends on my damage for longer still, and in ways I couldn’t even imagine.

For now though: I won.

Social transition was easy for me. It took little more than cutting my hair and swapping out wardrobes to pass as a man pretty reliably—well, a teenage boy, but I was only seventeen, so it didn’t raise eyebrows. I felt freed. Like I could walk and speak and make friends without chains attached to me. Only the softness of my shape gnawed at me, how it had shifted from despicable womanly maturity to boyish youth. I hated not having my coming adulthood recognised. Hated that other young men got to grow stronger and larger while I was stuck in perpetual pseudo-adolescence. I was free, I was no child, no property of adults; I wanted to be seen.

But it was also the first time I discovered queer spaces in person. Mixed and trans ones—especially trans ones. For the first time, I walked among people who understood. Really understood, the dysphoria and the otherness and the abuse and the whole lot. I’d found my home amongst the gender criminals; we talked feminism and activism; we braved protests despite threats of alt-right retaliation; we stumbled through relationships. Like most trans people, I harbour no nostalgia for my childhood or early youth—but for that time, I do. Not because it didn’t have its share of struggle, but because of my then-partner A. and my friends. Because it was the first time I felt the mutability of sex/gender, and breathed the freedom that entailed.

Things don’t last though, especially not in youth. Relationships fall apart; social circles reshuffle. I was leaving university to pursue a career—after all, I could not afford to be on HRT without income.

Moreover I felt… insecure, you could call it. Most of my social connections were to trans people and/or women. But I was a man. Shouldn’t I—commit? Make an effort? If cisgender men did not accept me as one of theirs, didn’t that make me a kind of impostor? I chafed in the body of an eternal adolescent, and the rift I felt between myself and cis men salted the wound.

Brain/Worms

The first problem was easily addressed with exogenous testosterone. Starting it was a euphoric experience—the rapid swelling of muscle, the spike in energy and hunger and libido. I loved the changes to my body, and I wished all traces of insidious womanhood would wilt from me.

The second issue was more difficult. I’d always felt at an arm’s length from cis heterosexual men, and never got much closer. No matter what, I simply felt other. That made sense, though. Once I re-conceptualised my gender as male, I did not identify as straight. I didn’t feel so sure anymore I was solely attracted to women, and that feeling only solidified the more I transitioned. If gender and sex were uncertain, how could I be so sure? I had no genital preference. What did it mean to be attracted to a ‘man’ or a ‘woman’ anyway? Some men could be as pretty as women. Wouldn’t giving a definitive answer be a little bioessentialist? Aren’t we all, as they say, a little bisexual?

Yes, I thought, it made perfect sense that I, a bisexual man, would find no belonging among cishet men. And the more I thought about the sort of relationships I desired, the more I realised I could not possibly be fulfilled in a straight relationship. I attempted facsimiles of a straight man’s role, and they all left me feeling hollowed. The attraction and relationship calculus of straight women was an arcane language to me. The sorts of women I liked were distinctly dyke-y; sure, some of those happen to be bisexual, but if they were to date me, they’d still be dating a man. I’d hate that as much as I’d hate not having my manhood acknowledged or recognised. And that’s to say nothing of how sleazy and dishonest it felt to intrude on queer women’s dating scene as a man. Now that I lived as a man, what made me so different from cis men? Innate birth-assigned woman-ness? Misogyny-flavoured childhood trauma? The vagina? All excuses felt like pathetic, opportunistic self-humiliation. Debasing myself by appealing to someone else’s cissexism so I could appear like something I wasn’t.

So naturally, I pursued community and companionship with gay men. As any gay trans man will tell you, it is usually a thankless and annoying task; transphobia is insidious and oft-unchallenged in gay male circles. The way they treat trans men ranges from hostile to patronising to weird. But overall I had a better time of it than most, and cultivated a few long-lasting friendships. The gay men around me had more class consciousness than average. They were not shy about liking me, even after apologising for speaking ill of vaginas. It was ego-boosting. But I was still afraid that when we took our shirts off, they’d stop seeing me and find a woman in me. Fuck me like one. Erase me.

A new ghost began to haunt me. It’d coalesced from pieces that already existed within me, but never before had this shape. What were fragments of my desires and thoughts coalesced into a singular fixation that constricted all of my libido, all of my sexual being. Fantasies of being fucked into womanhood invaded my mind and would not let go of it. In them, men were personless and barely corporeal, but the women existed in graphic detail. I myself was either completely disembodied and not present, not even as a voyeur—or else oddly, vaguely within the woman, both me and not-me at once.

I was horrified. Not even by the fantasy itself; its contents were murky and not particularly original. By my singular lust for it. I felt as though I’d discovered a monster within. A violent misogynist puppeteering the woman’s image to quench a fetish for sexist humiliation. A depraved and lowly creature fed on my own abuse.

But it made a kind of sense, I thought, the horror aside. I’d experienced plenty of misogynistic violence, the sexual kind included, and I guessed I’d sublimated it. Except—

There was a problem with that interpretation. That coercive return to womanhood, what I feared men might do to me—it was not the same as what aroused me. In the fantasy, I was not returning or reverting; I was not giving in to transphobic violence, which these scenarios notably lacked; I just was.

Despite all my efforts, this creature within responded to no self-insight, no cross-examination, no rationalisation. Everything I learned from the handbooks of either trauma therapy or kink-positive thinking failed utterly. I could not unlearn shame. I could not arrive at an epiphany. Like a hungry tapeworm, the unnameable thing inside me gnawed and gnawed, and any attempts to understand my desire, to make it less dissociative, only caused it to mutate to something more esoteric. The images morphed from banal patriarchal brutality to anonymous men forcibly feminised via sex by domineering, ultra-feminine women. Once my mind arrived at image, it sank its teeth into it so completely that it began to hollow my waking life, which now paled by comparison to the fantasy. And yet the thing still resisted knowledge even as it drained blood from me. I could not comprehend what pleasure I derived from this, what desire this fulfilled. When looked upon in the light of day, beyond the haze of arousal, the monster within me became only fear, a terrifying and nameless anxiety that liquefied all efforts to understand it.

In any case, the only ‘gay man’ I ended up dating long-term was a severely closeted trans woman. I failed thoroughly at sourcing validity from gay male partners as I realised I never wanted them in the first place; it’d all been a self-delusional charade whose only purpose was to forestall loneliness and to quench the thing within. So I settled on helping a girl find her gender. My perversion remained my little secret. No one in the world could’ve possibly shared it, and if they did, it was probably for the best that I did not know them.

A strange and nameless discontent festered. Past the initial joy in well-sculpted shoulders, the more virilised my body became, the more difficult it was to differentiate myself from the Average Cishetero Man, or even the Average Gay Man (which do not, in the end, look that different)—and it felt existentially important to be differentiated somehow. Looking like that made me feel dead. Whatever ‘that’ was. I found myself confusedly wishing for jewellery and makeup and feminine fashion—things that were once violently forced upon me. So the desire itself made me squirm. At the same time though, it’d been a while since my abuse. Years. Therapy, time, et cetera. I knew it was normal enough for someone later in transition to mellow out on strict gender expression, now that doing it ‘incorrectly’ no longer threatened misgendering. I’d met plenty of people with that exact experience. So, I thought, maybe that was my damage. Desire for gender-nonconformity, which I’d repressed in a bizarre manner.

Of course, experimenting with being a feminine man in public would get my head kicked in; discovering a craving for femininity was very inconvenient for me. I wasn’t pleased to regress back to stifling my gender presentation for social security. But no one could stop me from crossdressing in private—so, bit by bit, I tried.

When I finally built up the courage to order proper womenswear and put it on, I looked in the mirror and saw a man in a dress. I did exactly as I wanted and achieved exactly what I thought I would. Except, instead of relief or joy, a wave of such profound disappointment hit me that I could neither understand nor describe its nature. I could only comprehend it as a compulsion to tear my skin off. As dysphoria.

Well, duh. I was a trans man. Of course dolling up would make me dysphoric. Especially after all that’d happened to me. What did I expect? This had all been a waste of fucking time. There was nothing to discover behind my desires. I abandoned my pursuit, resigned to the daily kaleidoscope of sexual depravity that I couldn’t stop my mind from spinning; I’d given up on understanding the source or goal of any of it; I would simply entertain it in the privacy of my head and carry it to my grave.

Or at least, I’d try.

At one point, a cis woman took an interest in me. That interest was not reciprocated; something about her person was off-putting to me. She acted towards my friends with extreme jealousy, and even though I rejected her advances in no uncertain terms multiple times, she would not stop offering. At the same time though, now that I realised I did not belong among gay men, I felt extremely alone. And revolting. How many women were out there that’d even want to touch me? I really shouldn’t look a gifted horse in the mouth.

We were drunk, and I a complete mess. I’d bristled before when she pointedly asked if I knew she was bisexual—the implication being, she wasn’t afraid of vagina—because there was nothing un-straight about a woman wanting a trans man. But with so much wine in my veins—you know, maybe I wasn’t such a trans man after all? Maybe I was—I dunno. Like a girl—like, only for sex, though. I had stockings and lingerie in my bedside drawers and shit. If you squint and turn off the light.

I remember a shift in her gaze, once it finally sank in. From giggling and alcohol-addled to something sharper. Not quite homicidally disgusted, but still vicious; like I’d been made a thing. I didn’t know what I did wrong; I didn’t tell her about any of the truly despicable things—I was still me! Wasn’t she bisexual? Wasn’t she queer? We don’t have to do it, I said, forget it.

The next thing I remember is a body forcing me down. Vicious, gleeful lust. “Oh, you’ll be a girl, alright.”

My whole body stiffened. I snapped at her to stop, tried to push her away, but she only pressed down harder, fingers sinking into flesh.

When I threw her off me to the floor, blood split her lip. She cried and shrieked. So much for a feminist man! How dared I hit her! She just did as I asked!

I yelled at her to get out, but once the door slammed shut, I thought of the unending parade of rapacious fetish in my head. Of how well I knew this woman didn’t take ‘no’ for an answer, and how I caved to her anyway. And, well, I couldn’t help feeling like—

Didn’t I ask for it?

Unmoored

A few years later, I found myself abroad. Far from family, and from most friends—except one. Shortly before I moved, I had met my once-partner A. from my university days and felt drawn to her all over again. Our relationship rekindled, and hand in hand, we flew westward. It was a dark time for unrelated reasons, but in a twisted way, it granted me as much of a ‘clean start’ as I could’ve ever hoped for. I was untethered from traces of growing pains I left all over the city I once called home, from the messy parts of transition—it’d been, at that point, well over five years since I started.

No one here needed to know who I’d been.

I’d never doubted it. In fact, I was then in the process of fighting bureaucracy to re-ensure my access to hormones. They were the only way I could ever hope to rid myself of that bodily displacement I’d been feeling. That was how it went with trans men; it helped them, so it should help me.

Only I’d already been on T for a while then. Whatever ‘feminine curves’ I had left, had melted away; a beard had sprouted from my face, which now increasingly resembled my father’s. Even if I stripped naked, I looked more like an intersex man than anything else. That was basically what I’d expected. I’d always been rather cold-blooded about my transition expectations and proud of that fact; I’d sourced my information from many sources and first-hand accounts, and I neither underestimated the changes nor hoped for the impossible. All in all, I got what I sought. The thing I kept waiting for had already happened.

And I felt nothing. The disappearance of features I used to despise evoked naught more than a quiet oh well. My photos seemed oddly unfamiliar. A numbness had subsumed me, as if I’d been encased in wax.

But I had more pressing problems. Relocation, unemployment, the lot. Dealing with a subtle and unnameable depression seemed like a waste of time. Perhaps there was just something broken about me—that much had been clear for a while now. If I just kept a lid on it, I could live a happy enough life. On and on years went.

Lesbians In My Phone

What to do, when you’re hopelessly unemployed and feeling like there’s a black hole inside you threatening to swallow it all? Try to find a Discord to distract yourself, of course.

E.: mostly girlies in here so I hope you won't feel too out of place! we do strive to be an inclusive place

Me: haha i hope i got here thanks to a diversity and inclusion programme

My excuse for entering a transfem-majority space was an invitation thanks to my writing and editing. I’d put out a short story myself, and I was eager to help fellow authors. Of course, I was still a community outsider on the gender side of it, so I didn’t expect to get much out of that space personally. It just felt good to be involved in something, anything.

But, it turned out, many of the women on that server were good and easy company regardless. Unfamiliar subcultures are easily learned when its members are not hostile to you; they seemed to like me.

Most of the server members were transfem lesbians writing and reading sexually explicit fiction—some of which resembled my personal nonsense kaleidoscope, if… unpacked, let’s say. It was rather surreal to see the sorts of things my mind inflicted upon me being discussed in jest or dissected for the purposes of creating more elevated, self-conscious art. When I thought about it from the perspective of a trans woman, escapism via fancies of forced feminisation only made sense. Trans women internalise what society deems to be the place of women as much as anyone else, but also, trans womanhood is violently flagellated for existing in any way whatsoever. The fantasy would then revolve around removing the element of choice from it—so you could not be punished for wanting it.

Intellectually fascinating, but why it appealed to me made no more sense than it ever had. I wasn’t a trans woman—quite the opposite. They just wanted to be women; what the fuck was my problem? Although it calmed me somewhat to see normal people have experiences so similar to mine, I still felt like an intruder, stealing away pieces of someone else’s intimate life for my own shallow pleasure. I spoke nothing of it. No one would take kindly to me skin-walking their innermost desires this way.

As I spent my time in the company of trans lesbians, silent or not, I was still exposed to a stream of art and stories and images. Their depictions of women differed drastically from what I’d seen before. Two metres tall, or tiny as a gnome, or more muscular than a Greek god, or more voluptuous than a fertility idol, or werewolf-hairy, or covered in scales, or made completely of metal. A thousand melodies in fractal variations of flesh, all desired and lauded. I was no stranger to ideas of body positivity or ‘celebrating queerness’, but that all came wrapped in stipulations and activism. Always a statement, a process of battling or quieting shame. Never before have I experienced such utterly shameless, sincere, and carnal fanfare for everyone and anyone who claimed the space of ‘woman,’ in such a way that ‘woman’ meant nothing more and nothing less than simply ‘human.’ Not for statements. Just because it made them happy.

It was as alien as it was beautiful.

It’s not that I felt like I was missing out. Or that I wasn’t sufficiently fanfared. There were other spaces that did the same for men, run chiefly by gay transmasculine people, and they seemed to be having a great time of it. I just didn’t personally care for them one bit. I wanted this.

Naturally, it was all only fantasy. Art and books. That’s great, but that’s not real. In reality I was a twink with a receding hairline. It seemed prudent to know my limits rather than get too hung up on the fact I couldn’t be a two-metre-tall lesbian cyborg.

Except that some of it is real. Not the cyborgs and werewolves, but the diversity of body; the desire for its freedom and customisation. Women discontent with taking simply what they’re given. Through acquaintance and anecdote, I met lesbians with the same ‘unnatural’ desire I’d had. Lesbians on testosterone, desiring embodiments which, according to all I’d ever known, were never meant to be. Lesbians who wished for phalloplasty or for top surgery or both; lesbians that went on T temporarily to drop their voices and grow more muscle and body hair. Lesbians that weren’t women at all. Only there was no DSM attached. No packaged deal of ‘total’ transition, no script, no chain of demands that followed one to another.

No requirement of man.

It felt like anathema—and like a revelation. Whereas before genderqueerness seemed hypothetical and divorced from my reality, now I suddenly understood it. Now that I saw it, I knew it.

And I felt only directionless, ennui-steeped anger. As if someone stole the last ticket to a train that would never again leave my station. I didn’t know—how could I have known? No shit the things that helped trans men didn’t help me. I looked at all the past incongruences I’d revised and sanded over to fit the fucking DSM transsexualism diagnosis, and found only someone groping in the dark for a path they couldn’t even imagine existed. Except this realisation was arriving some fifteen years too late. Had I been younger or born elsewhere, then sure, I could’ve been one of those lesbians middle-fingering gender and microdosing T. But I wasn’t. I was a man. And when I dared think of relinquishing my grip on manhood, memory clawed at me. The assault. The humiliation. The un-personing. What would I be asking for? And what would that even yield? Look in the mirror, idiot. You are a man.

It wasn’t a rational calculus of consequences. It was a buzzing storm inside my head, pitch-black, impenetrable. I’d long stopped seeing women in their totality as my conversion-therapy prison, but even still—to see myself attached to ‘woman’ even slightly, even tangentially, even if I wanted it—this all evoked visceral, horrible fear.

But: knowing that a problem has a solution only makes it that much more impossible to ignore. My off-handed remarks and jokes about my miseries had my transfem friends looking funny at me. As if they recognised something.

T.: do you mind if I ask what you conceptualize your specific gendered deal as, or is that invasive?

Me: great question, i’ll get back to you in 5 to 10 business years.

Although I still loved the early changes I received from my HRT, everything I’d accrued since then was undeniably eating me alive. It was becoming difficult to dismiss dysphoria as mere vanity or body image issues; through all my attempts to make peace with my flesh, nothing helped even slightly. When I stopped binding, that felt better. When I lowered my T dose, that accomplished nothing in particular, but it felt comforting in a placebo sort of way. I tried to schedule laser hair removal—and that was too much. I panicked. Too obvious. What if someone noticed? What if someone asked why? I couldn’t deal with it. What if my partner noticed? She didn’t sign up for this shit. She was dating a man. What if—

No, it couldn’t go that badly. My partner wasn’t like that. Still, I felt paralysed. If I just did nothing, it couldn’t get worse. No one needed to know.

T.: hey, what’s up with the depression beard? do we need to get you laser?

Fuck it. I understood what my friends were seeing in me now. At first I thought myself definitionally far-removed from any transfeminine experience, but now that I’d met trans lesbians in truth, I couldn’t stop noticing patterns. And I wouldn’t have treated a transfem friend with the same denial or nihilistic abjection that I reserved for myself. She would’ve deserved help. A way out.

Didn’t I, too?

Detransition, Lady

The date I mark as the start of my detransition is April 16th, 2024, although I wouldn’t be calling it that for a few months yet. It was the first time I told anyone I was not a man, and that I was a lesbian, even though I didn’t exactly feel like a woman. On the surface it seemed a small thing. I had not yet decided on any particular body modifications (except laser—god, someone flay that thing off my face), and I felt deeply uncomfortable changing my gender presentation too much. So it seemed almost a question of semantics alone. Inside me though, it was a titanic shift: I allowed myself to name that which I’d been avoiding at all cost. To voice a desire I thought would brook only disgust, humiliation, and exile.

It did not.

The reaction of my partner and friends was, across the board, positive—none of my worst fears came to pass. Apparently I’d been far too obviously depressed, despite my best efforts to hide it—and now, I was far too obviously happy and, as some put it, ‘unclenched.’ Nothing in my loved ones’ behaviour should’ve led me to believe they would ridicule and hate me; still, it felt monumentally difficult to stop seeing myself as uniquely undeserving and pathetic.

I pursued my detransition incrementally. I pinpointed sources of dysphoria and addressed them. Laser, first. When my droning bass baritone started getting on my nerves, ensuring as it was that I’d always be gendered male—voice training. Soon I discovered that, despite the kinship I felt with transmasculine lesbians, I did not quite belong with them; whereas they relished the virilisation they’d carved out for themselves, my situation was different. I’d lived as a man for far too long to experience the world the same way they did. Most of them did not share my degree of distaste and distress at getting dude’d and he/him’d; they did not quite match my flavour of alienation from ‘woman.’ They usually strove to distinguish themselves from the category that would have them stifled and consumed—whereas that category now repelled me almost definitionally, whether I liked it or not. When I braved the outside world, there was no amount of social signalling that would make strange cis women see me as akin to them, or at least as not akin to men. Often not even lesbian cis women. Markers of an androgenic puberty singled me out as something categorically Other, and I’d not yet been in detransition long enough to change that.

Only among the transfeminine was I witnessed. Trans women I didn’t know loudly and protectively she/her’d me. The pronouns I actually used at the time were they/them, and my internal gender was nil with a side of ‘dyke,’ yet I found myself unwilling to correct anyone who decided I was a woman. Trans women that did know me playfully teased me for being ‘transfem-coded.’ Beyond initial recognition of repeating patterns, I’d started to realise that of all the people I knew, I belonged with them the most.

It was… confounding. In a way, it made no sense at all. And there were clear lines that delineated us: they would not relate to my visceral hatred of my first puberty, and I would not relate to theirs; I did not share their childhood of a girl trapped among boys. My ever-unchanged legal sex now granted me a degree of protection they could never take for granted. My birth sex gave me leverage to sacrifice trans women for a shred of acceptance—to shriek that I, unlike them, was a real woman. Even when no one but them saw me as one.

But in my daily existence and in much of my psychology, I was indistinguishable from my transfem peers. I’d transitioned a decade ago, right out of school; socially, I’d once been a girl a long time ago, but never a woman. Now I danced a dance I’d only before witnessed as an outsider; longed for and imagined, never performed. I had not the same continuity of belonging that cis women did, and nor did cis women know what it was like to walk among men, a secret alien, slowly realising every step you take is wrong.

I supposed, it made an intuitive kind of sense. Transition works. Not my now-distant history, not my birth, and certainly not my chromosomes or genitals had made me somehow more innately or inexorably woman. As all transsexuals learn sooner or later, lived experiences and hormones trump the rest of sex/gender with ease. So, although I wasn’t a trans woman, when I applied the same logics to myself, it simply worked. Despite the imperfect match, all my current problems had answers from the same solution sheet, from the way I treated myself to the way others treated me.

Well, almost all my problems.

Now that I compared myself to women and not to men, body insecurity cut much deeper and bloodier. I despaired no one would ever believe I was anything woman-shaped; they barely did before I took testosterone. Which I was still taking. I looked at the small dose of T gel I’d been applying, then at the finasteride pills I’d been chasing that with. And I thought, What does this even do? What is this even for anymore?

Stasis. It was for stasis, and a little placebo. I feared that if I stopped T, I’d tumble all the way back into the spiral of dysphoria I felt as a teen and young adult. That my body—for all its flaws still mine, still fought-for, still tailor-made—would dissolve again into an adolescent blob hatefully sculpted by others into the image of a future child-bearer. Only now I hated most of my virilisation and would claw at walls if I received any more of it—and my fear was not exactly rational, was it?

I breathed out. The testosterone wasn’t going to spoil the moment I put it away. I could try, and if it didn’t work out—a short period of a second-and-a-half puberty could not be that extreme. Whatever new changes I’d cause would likely revert fast.

For a while, nothing much happened. Nothing dissolved or melted. But little by little, my skin smoothed; my face softened; my wiry limbs lost their mesh of veins. My hips and breasts, once so maligned, swelled and enveloped muscle. I didn’t look the way I used to—of course not. I was stronger and a decade older; all the things I’d done to build my own self did not vanish, but merely, well—feminised.

I’d never met myself in an adult woman’s body before. In a self-made body. Although this flesh too did not feel mine, but for a different reason; I felt as if the moment I looked away, it’d all be gone. It wasn’t mine because it couldn’t possibly be. I wasn’t allowed this, I was never allowed this—the only shape of woman allowed to me was future-husband’s broodmare, mummy’s doll. I wasn’t allowed this.

But I did want it. And now I knew I could have it. Now, that gnawing monster inside my head had dissolved like it was never there at all. No disassociation, no torment, no total death of all other desire, no compulsion to retreat from the real world into a singular fantasy. Just… me.

At almost midnight I walked into mine and A.’s bedroom rambling. What does it fucking mean to feel like something, like a category; I only ever feel like me; what does it mean when you’re a forever-outsider; what does it mean when it’s been used to fucking hurt you, how can you then feel like anything at all; but what if I want it, what if I want it anyway. What if I want to be a woman anyway, the way my friends are women. The way lesbians are women. What if I want to belong among them? How do I know if I feel it? How do I know I’m real? How do I know I deserve—

In a space where freedom is possible, how is anyone made a woman?

Blearily, A. looked up from her Crusader Kings and said, “Look, uh—it doesn’t have to be that deep. If you want to be a woman, you can just do that.”

Could I?

I knew my transfem friends could. They built new shapes of ‘woman’ to their liking, in spite of all outside insistence they cannot. I had no reason nor unkindness to believe that their efforts amounted to less or more than mine. If they could, so could I. If I saw them, they would see me. They already did.

Perhaps sometimes, what makes a woman is who she calls a sister.

Recommended Reading

On embracing the constructed nature of one’s sex/gender: Susan Stryker, My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage.

On the asymmetric forces behind patriarchal gender enforcement: Talia Bhatt, Degendering and Regendering.

[churomo]

hellooo your anatomy is always so pretty,, do you have any tips or pictures of your anatomy?? tysm 🥹🥹

im so sorry for the late response </3 but hiii and ty!!!

first things first u need to plan what that guy is doing. i usually do that with a line of action :O im not great at explaining it so heres a visual:

-> and then i work around it in my sketch :) it helps with the posing and weight distribution !! . . . i dont think i posted that bart and jenni art here tho. im so bad at crossposting from twt

next is to use references. yes i know everybody says this but its true. gestures and shapes Are important, but the body is more than that!! it doesnt really feel. for the lack of a better word. alive? if you only treat the body as a stick to pose. there are things Under the skin to consider ykwim? so go on google dot com and see how those arms look when theyre folded instead of trusting that you can figure it out in your head patrick

okok back to shapes tho. the basic form of the body is Super important and its easier to think of not just the limbs but muscle groups (like in the stomach and hips) as 3d shapes that just. work around each other. cylinders cubes rectangles spheres etc. think of the body as a collection of all of those and once you’re used to it it kindof comes naturally? i just sort of. draw lines nowadays.

i am not a professional (as in im not in art school or anything atm) so. i hope this makes sense. ahhshhrbf sorry if this was kinda rambly???