Schrödiner's Artist

JTHM is such a short series and most of the characters are static which isn't a bad thing people on the internet have gotten increasingly allergic to a character only serving their purpose then leaving and insist that every single character needs to be fully developed and "real" feeling. But i think its actually one of the positives of the non directors cut and invader zim as well, when characters tow the line between static and dynamic you are never stuck from writing an arc you cant take back or just not knowing what to do next like you are with a 3-dimensional cast and now that shows are constantly being canceled with no notice, being able to go and stop at any time and any point is good for leaving your audience satisfied and we shouldn't be so afraid of writing that way.

I honestly feel like the constant feminization he goes through attributes to how he manifests his trauma. Victim blaming,internailzing and making excuses is usually how women deal with most abuse from loved ones and why there isn't as many female serial killers.

The fact that this is my first ask when this exact thing is why I am still currently considered a dropout and why I decided to start posting on the way I analyze Canon of Fandoms im in.

I was stalked by a student 5 years my senior and had been held back from graduating multiple times about a month before finals and I had sat there like a doll dissociating for over a hour of him trying to do more than just touch me because of my chronic pain and his belief that his dry dick had a magnet in it. And was forced into group cbt therapy after it, it was a terrible program that taught anyone with anything over mild anxiety absolutely nothing. There were therapists trying to pick at you for an answer that was relevant to what they were talking about and would get irritated when you weren't traumatized in the way they wanted you to be, and constant enabling and I know how you feels to patients that you shouldn't give those words to.

I felt just like all those people nny rants about, judging people who clearly came back to the program every time it ended doing nothing with what they learned just so they could be told they're right.

Anyone can see themselves in any character for any reason, every time i look at nny and then myself ever since originally finding this series I see him begging to turn his emotions off, his body off, and every time i want to tell him he doesn't, That he has no idea what its like to feel NOTHING all the time. He doesn't know what it will be like when he's standing over the casket of someone he was supposed to love and feel nothing, what it will feel like when he realizes that hes tried to feel sad about it five times already and hes no closer to actually doing it, and if he doesn't find something to copy the emotions of the family that still infantilizes him because all he used to do was copy his autistic cousins and age regressed mother who went through the same thing he just with the man who was stalking her and isolating her except she had two children with him and all three of us turned out "fine" once we didn't have to see him anymore, that they'll finally notice something was extremely wrong with him.

There are many ways that you can see this happen- usually in 80s and 90s series that switch direction and teams, or student films/essays that try to take a familiar concept and turn it on its head without understanding how and why that concept functions- but almost any example I'm familiar with enough exemplifies how badly it can warp from what you were trying to say while also blending in perfectly with the world building of their story more than Johnny The Homicidal Maniac does.

Now Vasquez has stated himself that the story and how it could be interpreted ran away from him, and what was originally a one shot being continued with no plan is a breeding ground for your characters gaining a mind of their own and ending up different from what you wanted but these problems were there in the first issue due to JV not realizing the extra implications those inspirations bring with them.

Almost every panel of this comic takes inspiration from the fly, alien, hellraiser, and other body horror films from the time. And because of the nature of our protagonist he is also based off of stereotypes attached to well known serial killers with mental issues, that cause the main dissonance between what JV wanted to write versus what he actually wrote that being sexual abuse from a woman in nny's life.

Nny differs from these male serial killers in almost every way, they usually target mostly or only women and are driven by sexist and sexual motivations. Nny kills an even number of both men and women, and is loudly sex repulsed, but Nny does a bias towards women that shows in a weirder more subtle way. Excluding nny's Twitter for now nny actually has a more positive dynamic with the women he's killed, most female victims are killed at the first location not fitting nny's criteria for being kidnapped and brought to the basement which is seemingly him recognizing you from before gaining the doughboys or thinking you deserve some type of additional punishment. If a woman is kidnapped they aren't held for long, the method of torture is generally less painful comes to the men drawn on the same page, and their deaths are faster.

When taking Nny's Twitter into account nny has a clear preference towards pregnant women, giving every pregnant woman he runs into a free abortion then killing her or leaving her to bleed out. This is one of the only clear preference he has except for cheerleaders- a female dominated sport by the time jthm was written- and cats a pet that is considered feminine and will give no reasoning as to why besides "cat people are weird", never even killing the owner of the cat afterwards.

The distaste for pregnant women even looms in the background through the entire series, with multiple side comics about parents (usually the mother) regretting having children, Or it literally being in the background. Body horror itself as a genre is inherently feminine with its entire premise of your bodily autonomy being forcefully being taken from you and repeatedly use sexuality as symbolism/metaphor including Alien and hellraiser that is repeatedly used as an Easter egg in the backgrounds of each panel. When these movies got used as inspiration for the setting of the basement become sadomastic, every device is either a real bdsm machine or could be used in a extreme way where the person in the machine will consensually die in a painful way, and the use of electricity is never deadly in itself (nny had to tie someone in a bathtub and throw a toaster in to kill them in that way). Even moose themselves can be interpreted as a metaphor for a fetus/pregnancy when viewing jthm with these movies in mind, it's a parasite that demands to be fed and mentally and physically drains you to get that food with no care that its at your expense. Most people that bleed out and die when the baby is born is because their body couldn't handle it from the baby making them unhealthy or some underlying condition or to much gets damaged on the way out.

If JTHM was a novella written by someone else taking what they were actually writing down into account and doing this on purpose it would have been a well written story about some college age man getting taken advantage of and raped because of his mental illness, killing her in self defense and instead of taking it out on more women he blames himself and kidnaps, kills, and sexually mutilates the other men around him that connects every aspect to nny's behavior and mental state to the setting around it

But JTHM isn't a book, and it wasn't made to bring awareness to men's mental health, it was made to be a satire on how the alt community is cruel and hypocritical to each other while they believe they're part of the "good" side of that community. And if it wasn't for issue 7 creating Reverend meat and the headcannon that nny was assaulted by the woman that gave him to nny this entire analysis would sound completely fucking insane, but because it does the Fandom can go back and reread from the beginning with the ending and mind and find new details to analyze like I am now. Because that is how death of the author is supposed to work and if you don't have multiple people beta read your story more than once so you can identify where you messed up and you stopped writing what you wanted to, you are gonna have some words in your mouth you really don't want and no amount of Q&As and retcons online will fix after you publish.

**I only realized I forgot this after posting it also missing tags but one of the art pieces that can be assumed johnny made pre-splinter is the wall of dolls shown when the survey guy is at the house are the ''sexually abused person takes of the clothes and damages the crotch of a doll" trope and they are also all male or a rabbit which johnny is associated with.

Meaning Todd can never sell his soul to pepito (securing his safety during Armageddon) and he will die during it with pepito never being able to see him again without knowing why or todd will kill himself before hand and pepito will have to deal with the grief of losing his only friend, go through Armageddon alone, and may even need to see Todd's suicide multiple times depending on how the waste-locks death and world rest is supposed to work?

And that is how mental health affects your capacity to create art and your mark in art history. Devi's and johnny's styles and relationship to their art vary wildly but they both cleanly fit into the two main boxes I and many others most likely place different types of art into, art made for consumption and art showing the artists mental decline that people that never shut up about how "scary" it is.

Artists that fit into nny's category are obvious; Bryan Charnly, Bryan lewis Saunders, Louis Wain, van gogh, ect. artists that gained their fame and place in a art museum because of the way they portrayed their mental struggles through their art, something unique that disturbed the calm natured and made people feel the way art from the same era didn't after that artist was already dead or to far gone.

Devi's art is everybody else's, especially artists that have art getting spread around for commission, comic artists, film makers, wood workers,people that sell their knitting and crochet, storytime animators, most digital art in general. Art that you are constantly exposed to and will likely be ignored by historians, there's nothing wrong with this side of the art community but it obvious to everyone that anything after the era where photography became a thing your art will mean nothing if it doesn't start a movement, disturb people, or isn't already in a museum.

Now everyone's mental health always changes their art at some level no matter how neurodivergent or neurotypical you are, art is an extension of the self you can never truly separate the art from the artist. With a keen enough eye you can tell what and when an artist was struggling with something when the art was created, even subconsciously. Let's use music as a example; daddy, by Korn, and Tag your it by Melanie Martinez. Both songs are about sexual assault but if you asked someone who never heard either what one was made by the person who was raped repeatedly as a child and what one was made by the person with a fetish for it every person you asked would know.

When this comes to JTHM which is also a story about art block as well as edgy teenage rambling...johnny's and devi's relationship dynamic mimic it nearly perfectly. Nny is a (giving him the most "basic" mental diagnosis i can here for simplicitys sake) Schizoaffective bipolar type with no hope of getting to a stable state and devi is neurotypical with a support system and practically no mental struggles whatsoever, she handles the trauma of watching romantic interests die/get extremely injured and nearly getting killed by nny disturbingly well when not accounting for when Jimmy was stalking her. Art is her only outlet but she isn't really in need of one, her lack of socialization causes her lack of self identity and she relys on her expression through her art to replace it.

If her and nny made a painting about the same exact thing her's would feel empty and flat by comparison. Even as a woman with mental illness myself ( C-PTSD and a unspecified mood disorder at this current moment.) My art does the same thing hers would, I have constant apathy and not in the depression way in the "everything is exactly the same as staring at paint dry all day everyday". even my panic attacks are extremely calm, my heart and breathing slow down, I feel colder, I look like a statue getting rained on while im internally having a mental spiral.

I've never been able to portray emotion in my art the way someone else who doesn't have my problems could, I mirror everything even when its about my own trauma, I'm physically unable to draw a topic without some music or audio about that same topic. Every "abstract" line that looks like it was made erratically without care was deliberately placed there to look that way, it may look and feel real at a glance but under the microscope its not.

Maintaining a relationship with severe mental illness is extremely difficult and painful for both parties. Even in their first date you can see clear disconnect between them during the talk they have on the hill. They are never fully on the same page and both temporarily get frustrated by how the other responds, it physically hurts the more I reread I feel sick and I see them unable to properly understand what the other is asking of them especially as someone who has spent her entire life constantly around people on all different levels of the autistic spectrum.

Nny is unable to communicate his issues properly and devi is unable to understand his needs in a good enough way. Nny will continue to self destruct and self harm in multiple different ways, sick with guilt from burdening her with all his damage, and she will struggle with the mental strain it takes to try to support and drag someone out of a hole they aren't even sure they want to actually leave until they destroy each other.