jessie is 18 years old in this strip. author's note: all teenagers are considered children in the idletry universe. the idea of deeming people adults slightly before a nice, round number like 20 and muddying the implications of the word "teenager" would seem bizarre and maliciously chaotic to them.
once someone turns 20, they are legally emancipated from guardianship, and they begin transitioning to adult independence through increasing responsibilities. they aren't dumped directly into being considered fully adult, though. most young adults still remain fairly dependent on legal structure and older adult guidance, and many have little real life experience until the age of 25.
for the sake of legibility, you can interpret her as more like a 16-year-old in the characters' eyes.
additionally, the school system in jessie's municipality -- a "10-hour schoolday" municipality, contrasted with a "6-hour workday" municipality -- dismisses children for the day around 18:00/6 pm during this quarter of their calendar, not something like 2 or 3 pm like a typical high school.
i think a lot of people assume that jessie basically had a strange belief and her family forced her to see therapists for a decade because she was wrong about something. i always pictured the manifestation of her spontaneous conviction that they were in a fictional story as easily mistaken for actual psychosis and, more critically, an actual risk to her well-being.
like jessie in idletry, she believes there aren't "real" consequences to many things, but unlike in idletry, she isn't invincible or omnipotent.
as a teenager, i found it unfair that when some people said they could hear god's voice talking to them, it was unacceptable delusion, and other times, it was a completely fine, regular religious experience. i was raised somewhat anti-religious, and any expression of religious beliefs was plainly a false belief to me, but some people were more allowed to hold the same false beliefs than others, if it was socially acceptable in their culture.
conversely, it holds that something true can be deemed a delusion if it's culturally unacceptable, especially but not exclusively if you can't prove it. some people can act in increasingly erratic ways solely because they're continuously told that a true thing they believe is not actually true, such as someone who's gaslit over and over.
do i think psychosis is a social construct? as a category i suppose so, but as an experience, no, i've lived it and it is incredibly physical, chemical in nature in some cases. in others, it is very much a social issue.
but when i wrote down the idea for that half of the two ideas that ultimately fused into idletry's plot -- a character in a story who had a delusion that they were in a story -- i was just a child myself, heavily inappropriately medicated for unprovable realities deemed delusions. i didn't really want to (and wasn't able to) write nuance about the social defeat hypothesis or the social model of disability.
i wanted to write about a character whose delusion was ontologically, unfalsifiably correct in a way that we could see, but they could never prove. i wanted, simultaneously, to be able to relate to this character as a character who ACTED LIKE they were psychotic. that initial motivation for writing the plot idea down ended up carrying over to how i wanted to conceptualize jessie's delusion in idletry.
