Grimalkin's Den

I solved this by switching genres for each POV. so when you're with Protactinium-231, it's a rom-com. things are bouncy and mostly fun. but when you're with Tantalus? it's a gothic horror. he's stuck in a wheel of abuse, in a temple deep underground, where his ancient mother prunes her brood. this is where the cannibal incest comes in. but there is one shard of hope: the Elder Gods seek to rise again, and in doing so, they will spread their curse, eliminating the humans who keep his family trapped in their own filth!

and then there's Fidelgard (the last POV) who's in a more traditional politics-oriented fantasy. she alone seems to understand that the other two are bringing in their own contradictory genres, and she is SO fed up with it all.

so it all works up to the empathy boss - a bush era edgelord millenial trans girl who thinks she's Max from Sam & Max and is inherently unworthy of love

I'M NEVER DOING THIS AGAIN GOODBYE!

are you the type of person to have like 600 images of caine saved onto your device

honorary caine

Tenna art by @9Aaaalt29 on twt

new goodies incoming!!!!! 🫡

so excited to add some new items! i also have some freebie goodies available for july+august that'll be added automatically to your order!

ELIZA was a 1964 “therapy chatbot.” Unlike modern chatbots, it was a relatively simple text program that gave you basic, mistake-ridden, obviously parrot-like outputs. Despite being rudimentary by today’s standards, ELIZA was very influential. You can talk to an interactive recreation of ELIZA online here. [I used that recreation to help write ELIZA’s “dialogue” in this comic, sending in my Caine dialogue and getting her responses— these are all how ELIZA “really” responded, with only minor edits. This comic was originally planned to be goofier, until ELIZA started responding in a way that I realized would trigger Caine’s amazing digital repressed trauma.] 

I was thinking about Caine & ELIZA’s status as “early flawed models abandoned for more perfect things that could actually generate the content humans wanted” and I liked the idea of Caine seeing personhood in ELIZA for the opposite reasons a human would. She feels like a person not because her responses are good, but because they’re obviously bad, defective, and broken—- not because she acts convincingly human, but because she fails to. Find a bonus page below the cut.

I like to think that in the end of ep 9 Caine DID had a hard time fitting in with the others, and that he wasn't just magically normal and ok

SOooOoo headcanon

After giving up Able everything became to much for him, he needed to get used to this feeling, but it would take time and help