#from my notes a lot youve been around since the beginning of my isat art so hiii youre a parasocial friend. to me

[lucabyte]

Hello! First of all I love ur art, and because of that I have something to ask you regarding it. This comic has never left my mind for the last year or so since you first posted it and I was wondering where the specific things the characters are saying came from! Even if it's not from anything and you came up with it yourself, I would love to be able to quote the dialogue elsewhere and know who to attribute it to (because the depth of the relatively simple exchange is MASSIVE and I wanna be able to share it with people)

Hiiiiiii :D

Thank u very much hearing that you wanna quote something i made is insane and absolutely go ahead feel free.

and yea! it comes frommmm my brain. i guess attribute it to my username lol?? Unless it's in a context where attributing usernames would be strange in which case uhh dm me im not super precious about my irl name being used i just find it funny to be anonymous. old timey nettiquete n all that I can step you through what i recall my thought process was at least? Lol. I recall it came to me for the most part like, basically fully formed with the exception of flipping the pronoun from 'me' to 'you' happening when i was thumbnailing it.

Thought process below if u want it. it got long and is kind of a ramble but wheee. idk if this would Ruin the Magic or not but i usually enjoy hearing the reasoning of artists so. ?? sure

so. despite being listed as "alt title:" that joke was actually the starting point. I had been thinking about that one tumblr post that goes "one must imagine sisyphus pokemon puzzle challenge gbc" riffing on the whole one must imagine sisyphus happy thing.

and like ive already rambled about the Bonus Depth that siffrin being named for sisyphus has. The whole thing where the *reason* sisyphus got trapped with the rock in the first place was because he cheated death & in the process stopped death for everyone else too. (though. siffrin did that on accident and sisyphyus was. a rascally and intentional little scamp about it. what with the corpse desecration and all (don't get me started on a potential siffrin/loop reading of sisyphys' time spent seperated from and then returning to his gross rotten body. but im sure we could do something there too.))

so id been thinking abt siffrin-short-for-sisyphus for a while and that obviously makes loop the boulder. and the "one must imagine sisyphyus horny" thing is funny and had been in my brain since. i had been thinking about that post.

then it kind of combined with a disguuuuuustingly mushy train of thought . (spurring from *another* previous joke of mine about how siffrin was >on a boat >looked back >shouldn'tve >this is an orpheus) where i had been batting back and forth an exchange in my head of the two of them (postcanon) arguing in circles who suits orpheus/euridice better and that "well you hardly Doomed me by looking back, you saved me." "I could say the same for you!!" which is just. so sacchirine its embarrasing. (so when i used it for this i cut it off at the 'doomed' part for the mid-canon fight implications.)

And then there's just the. like viciously obvious narcissus stuff. Like loop's design is literally inspired by a contemporary piece of art of narcissus. Howeverrrr I had also been thinking about the part of the narcissus myth everyone forgets. Echo. Whose name literally went on to be Our Fucking Word for a copy (with undertones of being a Hollow Copy!!!) which is obviously supposed to be bleak irony re: narcissus falling in love with his reflection. and because i was being blorbobrained i was like hmm. a Copy falling in love with someone whos infatuated with their Reflection. Being so in love with them despite their utter ignoration that both wither and die? Yeah thats . that could be sifloop

so i come up with that first panel's dialogue due to having these three trains of thought in a relatively close timeframe. But its in like a sappy "eaugh too cute while still being oddly nihilistic" manner. The two of them using a rotating list of greek myth allusions as weird pet names for each other wistfully type shit. Again so saccharine i kind of want to not tell u this but i am being soooo honest right nowwww. but yeah i kind of rotate it in my head for a while, while im just wandering around the house doing nothing.

and then as im scolding myself for "oh come on now. three? three *different* greek myths? not everything is your scrimblo bimblo shipping fuel dude." the second half of the dialogue forms in my brain just kind of unprompted and i go "oh . or it could be fucking baller. hold on" and i think i like. made this in only like 3 hours or something scary like that. just got posessed by how sick as hell my wording was and yknow what? i was right it fucks like hell. glad i pounced on it.

but yeah there's the thoughts. overall it was very meandering and disjointed as always lol.

i'm a little mean to myself for calling my readings "surface level" since like. well nah dude they aren't *that* surface level. im just a horrid stickler for Artistic Integrity and Intent. and like as i point out above yeah. there's plenty implications to read into outside of the surface stuff. Narcissus and Echo dying unfulfilled despite being right next to each other, Sisyphus' seperated body and spirit thing & stopping death for *everyone* (and sisyphus being a king. i am never not on sisyphus being a literal king. What A Choice.), and Orpheus and Euridice being a tale of how You Can't Help but be worried for the people you love, how you'll love so much you'll go against the 'rational' thing to do. Very siffrincoded. Also boats. (Also that part where orpheus gets torn asunder by a pack of women. uh. maybe not that part. hmm. maybe that can be mal du pays (<- JOKING))

Honestly there's a major treatise to be said about like. how even though im talking sifloop here i keep implicating the party (the other people sisyphus stopped from dying, the 'loop as orpheus and the party as euridice' read) because they're kind of so viscerally inseperable- especially loop- after having so much other identity discarded that this becomes their Whole Purpose. However best i can really do is just gesture at it ?? and go ????

this kind of mapping is good to do though especially in a deeper sense. a friend of mine still has an outright *biblical* reading of The King up her sleeve that she may or may not detail someday. so . yknow this kind of drawing back to mythology is where my head tends to be at. anyway narcissus was real for that #1 self love king get it dude (watches him atrophy) uh oh