#i very like the. toxicly codependent and making each other worse

[applepixls]

theres a relatively small scene in grian's episode 4 of secret life where he's caving and accidentally breaks a stalactite that hits him in the face and he expresses a large amount of grief over losing silly hearts. later in the episode he crawls home after nearly starving in the mines and finds scar in his egg to which he sorta chases him out and then decides to go try to make friends and regretfully goes to his neighbour who's also not got really any friends.

i drew a small comic about it in November but there are a few parallels there between secret life and double life. first of all, grian reveals that they're bonded at the end of the first episode by dropping a stalactite on scars head at which point they share the damage and scar realizes they're soulmates. additionally, a smaller piece, many double life pairs were incredibly concerned about starving because of how much food they were constantly using because it was so easy to lose hearts and kill both yourself and your partner. then there's the grian chasing scar out of his flammable newly built base, this time without the jellie pandas

the premise of my mini comic what the idea that in getting hit in the head with the stalactite c!grian sort of flashed back to double life and then with all the time to ruminate in it as he was crawling back from the mines he realized it was kind of messed up what he did to scar back then and was going to try to make friends with him again (all the art I've seen of grian asking scar to be friends again with a bouquet of sunflowers genuinely breaks my heart a little bit each time with all the parallels between that and 3rd life-)

[dennydreadful]

HI THANKS FOR ANSWERING MY UNHINGED ASK THIS WILL BE VERY LONG BUT I READ THE COMIC IN ONE SITTING. im now going back and forth between imagining what kind of deeply toxic pseudo-vigilante shenanigans bunny (and caleb by association) get into post epilogue and thinking up scenarios where before shit got really real they both get soooooo much good therapy and heal together and end up toxicly codependent and kinda bad for each other still but in a way that doesn’t involve murder. like one of those aita posts where the general consensus is the couple should stay together bc even tho they’re both just exacerbating each others Issues at least nobody else is getting hurt. also i think dave and juicybaby hook up at some point.

have you ever seen that post that’s like “media in which it’s so very obvious all the problems could’ve been avoided if this guy got some therapy and a consensual bdsm relationship but that is very much Not What Happens in the story”? bc i feel like that applies to caleb. rip caleb you would’ve loved being a more well adjusted girl’s puppy and being led around the mall on a leash until security kicked you out. maybe next time king.

none of this to say i didn’t enjoy the comic as presented immensely btw. despite my ramblings here i think the comic ended in the most satisfying (for the audience at least) way possible. we love to see a dogboy beg for his own demise <3 we love to see a pretty girl go from justified anger to righteous rage <3 we love when characters have a deeply unhealthily fucked up perception of love and care and mental stability <3

like imo psychological horror is at its best when you take relatively normal people facing relatively mundane horrors then letting the aftermath of those horrors warp them beyond repair. in a good psych horror (at least when it’s like ii is and based on deeply human characters dealing with stuff in the most unhelpful way they can) you should be able to understand why and how things turned out like they did. you can think of a million ways it could’ve turned out differently if only the characters had seen the end coming, but the end they met was inevitable bc they *can’t* see it coming. the red flags aren’t obvious bc they increase so gradually. the bones of the building were there from the very beginning, but how were the characters supposed to know whether it’d be a home or a slaughterhouse? there were no plans, just bricks to lay and a storm coming. and that’s exactly how i felt finishing ii.

anyways. a caleb shaker charm would be so awesome i would love to go darla from finding nemo on his ass. thanks for the incredible comic my brain chemistry is different now and i’m kissing u on both cheeks in thanks MWAH MWAH

Cut because this post ended up really long, but here's Dave and Juicy:

idyllic island is a big old vent comic in a lot of ways. i drew on a lot of my own emotions and experiences to make it. i was in a very dark place for a very long time. i could have very easily gone down an even worse path, and very easily have been taken advantage of in a very dangerous way. but "guy goes to therapy and learns how to stop climbing into a wood chipper" is not a terribly interesting story imo, even if it's obviously the better outcome in real life. much more interesting to read about characters hurtling headlong towards certain doom lol

that said i always enjoy a good tragedy that leaves me feeling like "it didn't need to be like this..." (even though I know it was always the only way it was ever going to be) and imagining a happy world where everything worked out as best it could, so it's really cool to hear about someone doing that something I made!

before you read the next part just know that i LOVE hearing people's headcanons so feel free to disregard anything/everything i say here. death of the author and all that lol

imo he would have needed to never meet bunny for him to actually heal, and for her to not charge ahead on her path of destruction. even if he had gone to therapy and straightened himself up, bunny is so toxic she would have found exactly the right way to break him again (and honestly she would enjoy the added challenge). and couple's therapy would be SO BAD for him because she'd learn how manipulate and gaslight him even harder.

honestly I can't see a future for bunny where she DOESNT commit murder. she's a scorpion. it's simply her nature. it's not her fault we live in a society. perhaps she could have become a doctor and euthanized her patients discretely. i think she'd enjoy forensic science as well, but that would literally make her girl Dexter lol. maybe she could work for a three letter agency.

but yeah I absolutely agree that caleb would have LOVED to be in a 24/7 lifestyle BDSM relationship with a girl that did not want to grind him down to dust and scatter him on the wind. being a kinky freak with a loving partner would have fixed him 100%