The Winter Maw, 2026

a totally handmade, fully-functional marionette created for the annual "Winter Exquisite" gallery show (this year's chosen medium was puppetry) at the Forbes Library in Northampton, MA - if you're local, you can visit anytime between the 7th & the end of the month!

And to be clear, it IS shitty and there's a lot that can be said about the intersectionality between racism and dismissing an oppressed people driven out of their homeland and fighting for their right to live with dignity as "politically angry", and how in the Ala Mhigan Resistance's case it may very well be rooted in the player's own discrimination towards brown people...

...but for the most part I think this just shows how shallow and self-absorbed the Fragments author is—not just about engaging with the game's lore but just in general. The Ala Mhigans in Little Ala Mhigo mirror many different real-world refugee groups fleeing their war-torn homelands who struggle to adapt and assimilate in the countries that have given them refuge—countries whose cultures are so different and dissimilar to their own that they'd have to give up their cultural identity to be properly "accepted". If he's dismissing the Ala Mhigans in Little Ala Mhigo as "politically angry men", how does he view refugee groups in his country? How does he view a minority group (that he doesn't belong to) protesting for their civil rights? The answer is simple: he doesn't. He's never thought about it. He equates everything he doesn't care for with "politics (derogatory)", even when it involves fighting for the civil rights of an oppressed group.

If it's not about him, he doesn't care. Note how he says the Sylphs and the Little Ala Mhigo sections are important because "we get to prevent the primal summonings". It's important to him because it revolves around (his) WoL doing stuff and being cool, but he doesn't give a rat's arse about things that don't actually impact him or his WoL directly, such as the people who are affected by Laurentius' treachery or Wilred's well-meaning but foolhardy actions. He doesn't care about them, and to "personally dislike the politically angry men" shows how much he dislikes having to engage with things that do not relate to him and that he sees as disruptive to his nice little bubble of a life where the biggest struggle he has is not having enough eyes on his self-indulgent webcomic and being one of the precious few gay creators in the horrifically straight FFXIV fandom /s

And it's genuinely mirrored in the very thing that propelled him into this mess! He doesn't give a shit about biphobia, he doesn't give a shit about bisexuals constantly getting flack for not being queer enough for liking the opposite gender as well their own—all that matters to him is his struggles. He's the one being oppressed as a gay person. He's the one who has to see all these icky "straight" M/F ships. He's the one who has to deal with the indignity of seeing his favourite blorbo that he identifies so much with headcanoned by other people as anything other than gay. He wants to claim Emet-Selch as gay because Emet-Selch is so camp and flamboyant and theatrical that it's an affront to gay people to deny his stereotypical gayness, even though stereotypical determinism in 2026 is the opposite of queer progress. It's all about him and what he thinks being gay is, and fuck every other queer identity. Up yours, he's fighting for his.