▲ I'm a Billiever ▲

my american lit professor went to this poe conference. like to be clear this is a man who has a doctorate in being a book nerd. he reads moby dick to his four-year-old son. and poe is one of the cornerstones of american literature, right, so this should be right up his alley?

wrong. apparently poe scholars are like, advanced. there is a branch of edgar allen poe scholarship that specifically looks for coded messages based on the number of words per line and letters per word poe uses. my professor, who has a phd in american literature, realizes he is totally out of his depth. but he already committed his day to this so he thinks fuck it! and goes to a panel on racism in poe’s works, because that’s relevant to his interests.

background info: edgar allen poe was a broke white alcoholic from virginia who wrote horror in the first half of the 19th century. rule 1 of Horror Academia is that horror reflects the cultural anxieties of its time (see: my other professor’s sermon abt how zombie stories are popular when people are scared of immigrants, or that purge movie that was literally abt the election). since poe’s shit is a product of 1800s white southern culture, you can safely assume it’s at least a little about race. but the racial subtext is very open to interpretation, and scholars believe all kinds of different things about what poe says about race (if he says anything), and the poe stans get extremely tense about it.

so my professor sits down to watch this panel and within like five minutes a bunch of crusty academics get super heated about poe’s theoretical racism. because it’s academia, though, this is limited to poorly concealed passive aggression and forceful tones of inside voice. one professor is like “this isn’t even about race!” and another professor is like “this proves he’s a racist!” people are interrupting each other. tensions are rising. a panelist starts saying that poe is like writing a critique of how racist society was, and the racist stuff is there to prove that racism is stupid, and that on a metaphorical level the racist philosophy always loses—

then my professor, perhaps in a bid to prove that he too is a smart literature person, loudly calls: “BUT WHAT ABOUT THE ORANGUTAN?”

some more background: in poe’s well-known short story “the murder in the rue morgue,” two single ladies—a lovely old woman and her lovely daughter who takes care of her, aka super vulnerable and respectable people—are violently killed. the murderer turns out to be not a person, but an orangutan brought back by a sailor who went to like burma or something. and it’s pretty goddamn racially coded, like they reeeeally focus on all this stuff about coarse hairs and big hands and superhuman strength and chattering that sounds like people talking but isn’t actually. if that’s intentional, then he’s literally written an analogy about how black people are a threat to vulnerable white women, which is classic white supremacist shit. BUT if he really only meant for it to be an orangutan, then it’s a whole other metaphor about how colonialism pillages other countries and brings their wealth back to europe and that’s REALLY gonna bite them in the ass one day. klansman or komrade? it all hangs on this.

much later, when my professor told this story to a poe nerd friend, the guy said the orangutan thing was a one of the biggest landmines in their field. he said it was a reliable discussion ruiner that had started so many shouting matches that some conferences had an actual ban on bringing it up.

so the place goes dead fucking silent as every giant ass poe stan in the room is immediately thrust into a series of war flashbacks: the orangutan argument, violently carried out over seminar tables, in literary journals, at graduate student house parties, the spittle flying, the wine and coffee spilled, the friendships torn—the red faces and bulging veins—curses thrown and teaching posts abandoned—panels just like this one fallen into chaos—distant sirens, skies falling, the dog-eared norton critical editions slicing through the air like sabres—the textual support! o, the quotes! they gaze at this madman in numb disbelief, but he could not have known. nay, he was a literary theorist, a 17th-century man, only a visitor to their haunted land. he had never heard the whistle of the mortars overhead. he had never felt the cold earth under his cheek as he prayed for god’s deliverance. and yet he would have broken their fragile peace and brought them all back into the trenches.

my professor sits there for a second, still totally clueless. the panel moderator suddenly stands up in his tweed jacket and yells, with the raw panic of a once-broken man:

Part 2 here

some actually fleshed out red string PHM au comics! (ft. qpr grocky)

happy pride month 🙂‍↕️ some doodled comics are below, plus a (warning: long) detailing of this au because i'm crazy!!!🧡

Recommended song to listen to: <Obstacles> by Syd Matters

First off, GIGANTIC CREDIT to @intrstellarisms and their BOMBASTICALLY FANTASTIC Coltland fic <based on a true story>. This mini-comic exists because of it and it is specifically based on chapter 2 <The buoy>. Please check out the fic here!!

really worked my ass off this(literally, I got rashes from sitting too long in a humid and hot environment) but I am just so obsessed with the fic that I feel compelled to create something for it. I really want to capture that constant melancholy and hurt present in the Coltland twins dynamic when grace is sent away. A perpetual hollow in Colt's heart where it makes all his memory with Ryland dreamy and fairy-tale like.

The recommended song <obstacles> by Syd Matters is also from the recommendation in the original fic. (Honestly the fic is like the age of enlightenment for me）

sorry if this doesn't rly have a nice flow and if the arrangements are a bit hard to read(My friend beta read this for me and that's her feedback), it's my first time trying to draw comic and I think I'm still a bit stuck on the static fanart mindset. (oh and i'm gonna add this into the 100 days drawing challenge hehe(13/100) Pls feel free to throw in any feedback on it as well!!

Lastly, huge thanks again for @intrstellarisms for giving me the opportunity to create this. And for being such a sweet author(did you know the comment you replied is my first ever comment on AO3?) That really made my day!

Leaving Grace with no closure, with feeling they have no way to express and who will Grace talk to about this ? , how can anyone understand what Grace is feeling ? everyone from project Hail Mary is gone.

Just Grace and a headstone with Eva Stratts name carved into it.

And I bet no one’s visited her grave in years. It’s dirty and grass a has grown over it slightly.

Grace doesn’t cry as they wipe the grave off with their hands. There are no flowers and no one has mourned her.