This Is Me Bumbling

this divaaaaaa

I think this is the closest to done this piece will get until I have some major brain revelations.

Inspired by the song “So Far So Good” by Jonathan Coulton.

A couple months ago I had a dream about a TAZ au where THB meet for the “first time” as contestants on a Survivor knock-off called Balance, where they become friends with each other by being competitive until camaraderie develops between them, and they slowly regain memories of their shared pasts while the game moves deeper into the treacherous island and the challenges become more and more ACTUALLY dangerous.

The boys endear themselves to their team by playing against their expected stereotypes. Everyone thinks Magnus is going to be a mean, self-centered brute, but he turns out to be gregarious, helpful, and warm-hearted. They think Taako is going to be too prissy to help out around camp, but he’s surprisingly well-adapted to rough living conditions and fiercely insists on making sure everyone is fed (although nobody can tell if he really likes them or not). They expect that Merle is going to be an intolerant old guy, but he’s accepting of everyone, unbelievably chill, and devastatingly profound when things become overwhelming for their tribe; he becomes a confidant for a lot of their teammates and ends up helping a lot of people pull themselves out of a hopeless place at least once.

The dream eventually moved into a high-tech space adventure (humanity’s pilgrimage away from an Earth under attack), but I had to immortalize this first concept somewhere!

This is kind of goofy so don’t make fun of me for it!

Even before I learned a little bit about the whole psychology thing I habitually thought of myself in, kinda, three parts, like. I don’t feel like my body is who I am, but rather some strange vehicle/social interface that scoots me around this weird 3d space while I watch.  I don’t feel like I am my brain, either; that thing is just, like, either a totally detached information center or a malfunctioning circuit.

My actual image of myself is perpetually me at age 15 - probably because that’s when I felt the most real. My hair was super long and I always wore big airy t-shirts and backward hats and jeans that were way too long, so my heels would wear holes into them about three inches away from the hem.  I think it was all those tactile things that made me feel present.  Incidentally, 15 was the age when my crappy anxiety first came to the fore and had to be acknowledged, so maybe that was also the last time I felt like a single entity, rather than a haphazard construct struggling against itself!

If I had to pick an emotion to pin to these thoughts, I’d pick… eh, wistful? Or… melancholy?  Not bad.  A little distant, if anything.

Anyway, I found these sketches from a couple of years ago when I must have been thinking about this stuff, and figured, why the heck not. Let’s share it.

Astarion failed a perception check pretty hard there, but in his defence, it’s been centuries since he’s seen his own face