LIMITED EDITION

art + webcomic

It's reallyyyyyy been something. I didn't think SSRIs were supposed to make you More emotionally volatile... I'm hoping I'll even out after the initial adjustment and stop feeling more crazy than before 🥲

I think what's haunted me the most is that, after the first summer on Brokeback Mountain where we see Ennis making deliberate choices to be intimate with Jack, inaction becomes the only course of action Ennis is capable of taking. And you can see why he constantly demurs from anything that would bring him real happiness, too; the story beats and the character explorations reveal the bars of the cage around him, even if the door is always open. His patriarchal sense of responsibility towards an idealistic family, even though he doesn't actually support them at all. One of the only mentions of Ennis' father outside of "he's dead" is that he might have carried out a hate crime, one Ennis flashes to in a truly great, harrowing, ambiguous scene. The abruptness of Jack's death too-- there's a sense of like... It's anticlimactic in a way that's both jarring and the direct result of how stagnant Ennis is. The world is always moving on, things are always changing, even if Ennis is stubbornly refusing to join. He finds a younger girl to repeat old cycles with. He's working the same job. He doesn't let his daughter move in with him. But Jack is changing, meeting other men and figuring out a future that he can be happy in... They love each other deeply, they miss each other, they both hold on to the freedom of their past until the very end. But Jack takes control of his life in a way that Ennis never does until it's too late for them to truly enjoy their lives together again........... 🚬