#...also.......

Firstly, up top here I’d like to say thank you, thank you, one thousand times thank you, to absolutely everyone who read, enjoyed, or even just tolerated me rambling about my brainworm fic :’) from friends who saw the first few drafts on discord and inspired and celebrated it with me to stunningly kind comments after its posting, y’all make my soul absolutely alight with the joy and warmth of community and it absolutely cannot be overstated. I don’t care if that sounds like purple prose the fic is very much the same anyway lmaoooo

Commentary time! I may as well mention I don’t have much to say about the first and only full color illustration but I do still love how it turned out! As you can see from the signature, most of these are from around two years ago in 2024. I don’t often have the motivation for full color and I’ve long since given up on lineart lmao, but I had a blast with the warm colors and painterly style on this one. Fun fact, the original Google doc has a sort of warm, vintage pink as the page color too. For some reason that color just feels emblematic of the work to me, god knows why lol.

Lmao that feeling when you’re a new dad and it’s scary and also your best friend is here and oh my god he’s so nice and it would be so so cool if you could share a family and be dads together but you fucked up years ago without even realizing and now you’ll forever be close enough to feel teased but not close enough to be fulfilled!! Lmao that feeling !!! That we’ve all uh. Definitely felt

Fun fact, this beautiful comic from honeyciub depicts the moments directly before this so they kinda tie together well! :D

My designs for Suzanne and Maud!! I love them dearly and honestly if I could choose where to put my hyperfocus, they would absolutely deserve a side story of their own. Particularly I always felt like Maud’s perspective would have a lot to be explored. I see her as having been raised to be very permissive and submissive to her family and her husband, poor thing, the type of person who’s just trying to balance a delicate life so hard that she won’t even acknowledge it’s in danger of collapsing for fear of causing it. She knows things aren't really that good with Maximus and their family, she's not stupid, but she's desperate to believe that everything is okay and it puts her pretty deep in denial :'( I think of Suzanne as being more headstrong and practical, and after their husbands disappeared she might have grown a little bitter over the whole situation—but particularly in regard to Maximus, who she always held accountable as a bad influence on her husband and a real letdown of a husband to Maud. And like, sure, Max is trying, but it’s hard and Suzy’s still not particularly wrong. She's the type to try and take up for Maud by criticizing the way her husband treats her, only to be frustrated when Maud insists that there's nothing wrong.

I think after the disappearance the two of them would have grown closer as Maud struggled to cope with it all, with Suzanne sort of defiantly becoming her rock and doing her best to keep both their families afloat. Ruth for sure got a lot of her can-do attitude and toughness from her mother :’) oh also tangential but I think Suzanne could be an author that'd be cool! anyway they both deserve the world and honestly if they decided to be lesbian lovers and finally find real happiness in one another then like. I'm just sayin that'd be neat lmaoooo

The Kiss !! (Non-Gustav Klimt edition lmao)

not too much to say here, this was just one of the scenes that really made me crazy when I was coming up with the fic and so of course I had to draw it. Honey Whiskey by Nothing But Thieves starts playing in my brain every time I reread it hehe

a nice smooch :) a smonch if you will. idk sometimes you just gotta draw em smonchin y'know

Humorous take on Sameth's personal epiphanies in the wake of the honey whiskey kiss lmaoooo. If only Maximus really felt confident and secure enough to walk away casually from such a thing :') ah well don't worry bud your descendant will do that kind of thing and much worse all the time to make up for it!

Nother kinda humorous take on the confession scene teehee I can't help but be sillay it's in my blood. side note it's so hard to take Sameth seriously with that mustache LMAO

nother sad smonch :> that's uhhhh that's it lmao. smonch good

and last but not least, y'all have actually seen this one before--it's a sketch request I took possibly before I ever actually wrote the first draft of the fic! This was my first time drawing them, but not my first time thinking about them and how much tragedy I could possibly fit into their sad little lives lmaoooo you can actually tell from the tags on that post that I was already diseased. actually lookit this it's funny

surpriiiiise I did not stop. lmaoooooo