blueathn

BOOK COVER REDRAW of one of the most insane and gutwretching books ever written. (Art without text and full process on my insta!)

It was my first time designing a book cover and I have to say the process was painful. I started with a strong idea in mind: I wanted to portray Harrow at the exact moment she got her memories back. It had to be spectacular, dramatic, atrocious. There had to be skeletons, lots of skeletons, the castle of her House, and of course, Gideon's sword. Then came the hard part, colors. I changed the colors I think 4 times, just couldn't get them right, but in the end can say I'm quite happy with the result. During the whole process I kept looking at the original cover from @studiotommy.co (insta) trying to grasp even a small fragment of his tenique (ps. Posting this 2 days before a big tit announcement wasn't in my plans👀)

I hope I've done this book justice, because at the end, that's what it's all about.

your identity, your dignity and your worth as a woman have absolutely nothing to do with how or why abusive people lash out at you. the insidious narrative that survivors should feel special on some level for having been worthy of their abuse is battered wife rhetoric. it's the perpetrator-system of violence grooming you to accept, and even shamefully yearn for, violence it always intended to inflict. and women are so often complicit in repeating the narrative back to each other. sometimes it's very well meaning and springs up out of the solidarity of shared experience, trying to reclaim power from situations where power was wielded against you, but sometimes it's lana del rey sadgirl coquette I need a man who'll slap me around so I know he cares. sometimes it's eating disorders and self harm. the twinning of femininity and female worthiness with suffering, associating the scars of misogynistic violence with acceptance of one's femininity by somebody who hates you, is profoundly unhealthy and profoundly unfair.

bottom line: trans women have never needed to be identifiable by their abusers at a glance to be subject to misogynistic violence. they have never even needed to be out. remember the early days of the internet when online culture was so outspokenly misogynistic as a baseline that most women just never disclosed their gender, never went on mic, never posted pictures? would anyone ever seriously argue that women weren't subject to misogynistic abuse online until they broke anonymity? and that being the case, would it ever ever seem appropriate to hear someone had been doxxed or sexually harassed for disclosing her gender and respond "heh, proves you really are a woman"?