#it really made me realize I have a very uneducated view on sex and romance

[bitchapalooza]

I was thinking I wanted a queer platonic partner, but thinking about it more I don’t? I don’t want any intimacy whatsoever. I don’t wanna be touched unless it’s simple arm holding/arms linked together or a quick hug or lean on when in troubled times. I don’t want to be called a partner or anything either. I guess I just want a best friend to maybe live with? Just be close to someone with mutual trust and comfort and understanding and respect? I don’t wanna rope someone into a relationship that’s other than friendship because that’s all I want; I wouldn’t ever want to hold someone back if they want to be an intimate or romantic relationship! Having a close friendship sounds so heavenly to me, while having any other kind of relationship makes me feel anxious and uncomfortable to think about. God this book did so much for me ngl..

[tgtahr]

Hey! I just found your comic on Webtoon, and I was wondering where you got the inspiration for it? It seems super intricately planned, I really like it!!

Aw thank you, anon! I’m glad you liking what I’m putting out so far!The answer for this is going to be a bit long.  Bear with me, I really like babbling about my comic.It’s a weird source but the inspiration for my comic are topics that stood out too me in media I’ve consumed over the years.  When coming up with TGtaHR I wanted to sort of analyze or subvert a few tropes I always had a some beef with.  Mainly dealing with the gender/sex roles that are usually queer/LGBT+ characters in romantic fiction, the depiction of mental and physical illness, lastly relationships and abuse.Sorry about my grammar and spelling!Gender/Sex Roles - This one goes back when my character Julian was first created back in 2010, as the main character in a different comic called ‘WYIHN!’, who was meant to be in a romantic role with another character named Matthew. (Once getting the story down on paper the story was changed to something platonic because I’m not very good at working with romance)  This was going to be my depiction of sexuality and companionship from a more dreary standpoint given my recent criticisms with BL/Yaoi and the romance genre as a whole.I used to be a huuuunge, gross, fujoshi funny enough... until I realized how I fetishizing real people in the queer community, and how toxic most romance is.  WYIHN was going to be a romance with a much more melancholy ending with Matthew losing his home because of his sexuality, leading to him and Julian living in a small studio apartment, barely making ends meet as they’re both still kids. (Julian being just becoming old enough to leave the orphanage, and still figuring out how to live on their own)Of course the whole thing sorta flopped, losing direction after realizing their relationship was still toxic, and I didn’t have the experience or knowledge at the time to know how to fix it.  Ultimately Julian, a fight or flight type of character with an interest in science was extremely incompatible with Matthew, an entitled religious fanatic who is fine with using force to push their beliefs on others.Why am I bringing up all this? Well, Julian was meant to be a subversion of the heteronormative ‘uke’ stereotype.  Julian was original created as a cis-gendered, gay male, who was comfortable enjoying feminine things while still being more masculine.  Of course as I developed them as a person, and I myself grew mentally, they evolved from cis and gay to non-binary and pansexual.  Which fits much better with the extremely fluid or vague ideas they’ve had of gender to begin with. (being a child not raised by conventional means, Julian has no solid concept of gender, so it makes sense that their view on sexual attraction and their own gender identity would be just as vague)In turn when creating Apollo, who was literally just made so Julian can have a friend of some kind, he was also made to challenge stereotypical masculinity of a ‘seme’ type.  While he does display toxic masculine views, Apollo is not a masculine person himself, having some feminine mannerisms, finding himself in situations being lead or dominated by others, and later in TGtaHR enjoying a more subservient or domesticated role.  In a way Apollo himself is struggling with finding himself, sticking with a certain set of beliefs because he was raised to think that’s how things should be, and due to the pressure of his peers.In sort, I wanted to take the masculine vs. feminine gender roles, and pick them apart while observing how these characters with their very specific personalities work these social standards.  Especially as people in the queer/LGBT+ community.Mental and Physical Illness - This one has more of a personal spin with it, but I’ll bring that stuff up last.If you’ve watched a movie ever, read a book or comic, or played a video game, chances are you’ve seen some unnamed illness or something along the lines of cancer being used as a way to make the audience feel sympathy for a character.  Most of the time this is used as a lazy means to bring emotion to a character with little to no personality, and the illness is rather... romanticized, normally being magically cured or the person showing little to no physical signs of the illness outside of a bad cough and looking tired.On the subject of mental illness.  Growing up with the horror genre, and the occasional thrillers and dramas, I’ve seen a lot of negativity surrounding this topic.  In a way it’s very similar to how physical illness is used, but rather than being a tool for sympathy it’s normally used to villainize a character, sometimes using a mental illness as a reason why they murdered their family or something along those lines.  This particular trope is used A LOOOOOT in indie horror games, as well as a good number of horror movies and such.  It’s an easy way to make a character do something bad.To me both of these subjects are very misused and very misunderstood, so I wanted to make a story that focused on them.  Mainly centering around how to deal with these issues, how to live with them, and the importance of having help.  Many people live normal lives with chronic mental and physical illness, it’s not something that should be glamorized or demonized.  So I wanted make a story focused on characters fighting through this stuff, depicting these subjects in a very down-to-earth light.  Showing it’s just something that happens, and it doesn’t make you a victim or a monster.On the personal side I myself have always been a cynical person, dealing with a lot of mental turmoil.  Especially in the past 2-3 year.  Not gonna lie, I think about the benefits of death a lot, and see myself and everything I touch as the most worthless garbage to ever be dumped on the planet.  I’ve had this mindset for so long that it feels normal, I don’t know how to feel and act a different way.  Working on TGtaHR has been a way for me to put all this into perspective.  Dumping all my mental problems in a character or characters, reading up on these issues from a scholastic standpoint, then figuring out how they tackle the issues with their given personalities helps me recognize my own mental illness(es).If you’ve ever seen me talk about how I work TGtaHR 100% for myself, aside from the escapism that drawing gives me, this is the main reason.  In a way I’m doing a bit of “self help” with a comic. (But hey! There’s nothing wrong with that, everyone has their own way of working through things)Relationships and Abuse - This is also in relation to the romance genre.  For the longest time I thought that rape/abuse = love thing was normal.  It really messed up my views on my body autonomy and what abuse is, leading me into a relationship where I was guilted and scared into using my body for my partner’s benefit.When this sort of stuff is showed in movies and such it get’s a similar treatment as mental/physical illness.  It’s overly simplified, and used as a way to squeeze out sympathy for the victim while turning the abuser into some cardboard cutout villain.  While abusers are awful people, due to how little is know about emotional, verbal, and mental abuse an abuser could just as easily be someone totally uneducated on the subject.  Surprisingly enough I’ve spoken with a lot of people who think abuse is just all physical stuff, even my mom didn’t know that she was being abused when her ex would manipulate her emotionally with abusive language.  I wanted to play around with these subjects, give them a little more depth, along with playing around with what a relationship is in a general sense, and how do you make one healthy. (hence the title)Lol in a way my comic is an experiment playing with how different people handle difficult situations.  If Apollo were in Julian’s shoes he’d handle everything waaay differently, same with Julian in Apollo’s shoes.TL:DR: I guess my inspiration is my own experiences, and misused/misunderstood subjects that interest me.