#j.e.n.

Notice how I never draw or commission ship art of Ben Drowned and Jenifer and only of Ben Drowned and JEN? That's because there's a heavy difference and a line I do not want to cross as a writer and a creator.

While Jenifer is a human prototype for JEN, she is still a living girl, a teenage minor who fell victim of her own stupidness by summoning Ben. And while being under Ben's influence, she never was truly safe and secure. She got constantly gaslighted, cyberstalked and eventually locked in an unhealthy and toxic dynamic. I wrote them not for romantization, but for the purpose of studying what's going on with a usual teenager just like Jenifer in a situation like this and explaining it to readers. I wrote their dynamic not to ship them and romanticize unhealthy conditions one may put others into, but to show people what's going on in both predator's and victim's heads.

And don't forget that the trust and attachment she developed towards him was pure Stockholm syndrome and trauma bonding, no thoughts like "He's so cruel because he can't show love any other way" from her end.

What about Ben Drowned and JEN, though... 🤔

There's nothing human in JEN. No soul trapped in code, no brain connected to a server. She has no age, no urges, she can't get attracted to anyone how humans are attracked to other humans sexually or romantically.

Her devotion to Ben Drowned is platonic, based on pure intellectual interest and stupidly childish for someone who is based on a 15 years girl her creator once was. She claimed the trauma her prototype got after encountering Ben, but she never lived through it. She has a right to choose wherever she wants to merge with the traumatized girl persona or stick to a status of a thinking-talking archive. So she chose the latter. Because she's not a human, she is a machine.

When two creatures of code and past trauma meet, they turn into mirrors of one another. Shared experience and a common nature of a personality turned internet persona supreme over human specie makes them as equal as two lines of the same document are.