#alterity

Can't stop, won't stop yelling about this.

She's not on tumblr and I'm posting here with her permission. Hit up her instagram for her other art.

"Time offers him a hug, and somewhat to his surprise the kid takes it. Wrapping his skinny arms around the armour. A brief, unfamiliar thing. He’ll do better, he has to. For the boys that were never ‘his’, for the Hyrules he left behind."

Love when a character has to look their younger self in the eye, a tragedy in the making.

@toyouhellohowareyou's Alterity series has been on the mind lately and this zine is the result.

My partner of many years explains one night, while I am smoking in the garden those cigarettes I am always trying to quit, why I'm unable to separate + discard the grief of my friend's absence from my daily life. He says it is because he was one of my people, that recognition beyond the regular enjoyment of another's company, although those connections can be nice enough themselves.

As he is describing the "these are my people" connections, one would be hard-pressed to not think of chosen tribes, what the members may complete within the group. Still, I struggle with it. Street signs, pubs, characters, churches, + saints all immortalizing his name in my psyche like an inescapable specter, or perhaps they are all their own bad actors within a universal conspiracy to keep him present. How at night, no matter what I may be thinking of instead, an essay or the plans for the following day, my worry for my family, the 1917 Bath Riots or the Cadaver Synod of 897 AD, his name breaks through, as if my memory of him is its own autonomous + sentient being capable of hijacking techniques so advanced they can control my thoughts in spite of the months of a purposeful forgetting.

Once I wrote "Call it the Zeigarnik effect," a bond as an interrupted task, the procrastinated, pending undertaking yet to be finished. But is there ever a finishing of such a thing, or is it always to be, by its very nature, suspended in the air with tenterhooks? + when I say nature, I mean what does not + cannot break. 

I don't really believe in things like synchronicity in the mystical sense anyway. I do not believe in fate even if I may indulge it as an idea for some pink feeling. In my estimation, all is psychology + the uncivilized subconscious thrashing through the room of order, that mirage we keep to function within society's rules, the expectations we feel compelled to meet. Inside all of that still remains the space for special identifications among each other.

Biologically speaking, our genes are likely compatible. Our minds think similarly so as to make the natural progression to a point of intellectual intimacy almost unavoidable. We share language, metaphor, a way of seeing. Through this, we become a mutual mythos. + the traumas, insecurities, + unmet needs of childhood wounds complement rather than compete. Two nervous systems in constant synchronization, resulting in easy co-regulation without effort or intent. Admiration, gentleness, + a willingness toward sacrifice all culminating in the inability to harm the other in any grave manner; + all this + more create the rare instance I found myself within.

A care that is as pure as is ever possible, unmarred by the typical misunderstandings. Forgiveness itself even without its usual practical purpose as to be deeply hurt is not possible when you feel the other as a full counterpart, as their own goodness. You hold them in the kindest light, that generous compassion often only reserved for the innocent + yet this time without idealization dulling the mind. 

+ how do you know it is without idealization? As when they exercise their agency, or do what you would not wish them to do, the view does not collapse, does not melt in distortion like Dali's clocks. An adoration devoid of the implications of the other's compliant performance. How you'd sooner die than take part in their diminishing. Our non-injurious regard.

Still, I don't want to write about it. I don't want to think of it. Sick with my own ego that never wants to be caught longing. The decisions it leads me to. Nearly thirty-six years upon this planet yet still controlled to varying degrees by psychic fears. So self-aware + yet all these steps behind myself. I drag it along behind me, all this knowledge. I throw it onto the butcher's block. I chop off its head. My friend. My love. I'm grotesque in the violence I inflict on my own body. + that takes us somewhere else. 

Like my lover who contemplated leaving me during the very beginnings of March after having found my writing. Inhaling 38 pages of my interiority without context, I was flattened by him into simple threat. + nothing has been recovered since. Reading not to encounter alterity but to wrest narrative control, to change the very lens I may filter through, + so when he found himself faced with the partial revelations of my complexity the romantic ideal I'd inhabited shattered fantastically as if I'd been made a girl of glass. Hurriedly, he finished the handiwork he'd already started -- to dress me in the skin of another woman he loved + once suffered for, overlaying me with prior meaning. Projections came. + then the distance.

Seeking to possess my beauty, my sex, he punishes me for both + then he tells me who I am. If I were weak, I could be at risk of buying into the script, at risk of nonresistance. But he's admitted to it all now, cornered by my precision + the clarity I see with. Amazed by my ability to confront, to speak, without heightened emotions or weaponizations, he says it makes him love me more. He says he feels like crying while I hope for the return of softness, of affection or anything I may want on offer. Instead, his moods. Instead, all his ghosts. Instead, I hurt. 

Now, when he talks of love, he stuffs it into my mouth like a cloth to pull out. Magic trick. It never ends. + I like the Geronimo of desire. He only wants to hear me say it. + if I won't, he will animate my mouth. I am puppet. I am doll. Polyfill sticking out from the spaces between my hollow ribs. 

Again, one may be surprised by my admission of another understanding. This time for the one so mired by poltergeists that he squanders the chance at love, that he seems intent on deeming it unrecoverable, that he decides what the truth is + harms only himself in the end. How even with these realities, their consequences, if I refuse to offer myself, butterflied on a platter all limp + lifeless + yielding, a waterfowl for his consumption, despite the lack of reciprocity required to feed me back, he will see his imagined future confirmed exactly as he authored it. How I wanted, with my large heart, to fall into some true passion alongside him + land upon clouds of romance. How I will not fall alone. 

Fanart for “Ocarina Oracle” by @toyouhellohowareyou .

I absolutely love this fic! 🥰🥰

Hear me out

First, has everyone read the series Alterity by @toyouhellohowareyou ? If no, go fix that right now. Like right now. It’s amazing and just the perfect blend of funny and heart wrenching. (Well done serbii). Read it right now.

Now, for those of you that don’t want to break halfway through a tumblr post to read a novella, here’s what you need to know:

Alternate downfall timeline with an alternate baby Legend. The chain meets him, names him Folklore, and shenanigans ensue.

He has the cutest baby crush on Wind. Understandable. The boy has good taste. Wind is a middle school heart throb.

They meet Lore again during OOA and Legend notices the crush and is mortified. Wind and Lore are now the same age.

With me so far? Great. May I now present to the class the new ship I am captaining: Folkwind!

It’s cute! It’s wholesome! Wind is oblivious! Lore is oblivious! Legend is not oblivious and hates his life!

But wait, there’s more! So when Lore goes on to do LA, he doesn’t meet and fall in love with Marin. No, no, no. Instead he meets an island boy named Gale, who looks identical to Wind, and the two of them have a whirlwind summer romance that will forever traumatize Folklore and ruin his friendship with Wind.

Do you see the vision? Yes? Congrats you have been drafted. Get in the boat, we’re taking Folkwind and sailing into the sunset!