#jthmnny

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.

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.

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.

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 that 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.

the reason why that is is because throughout fandoms in general, people tend to choose what ships they like based on how much they personal find a particular ship sexually/emotionally attractive rather then based on any idea of "chemistry" or whatever.

Most fandoms, including JTHM, are filled with people with women who have fetishes for gay male relationships, so they gravitate towards MxM ships and move away from het or FxF ships even if those other ships might share similer dynamics with their preferred MxM ship. sometimes "dynamics" aren't even a facter in the MxM ships some people like, some people just like how some characters look standing next to each over.

but regardless of whether someone likes a MxM ship for the dynamic, the way the characters look with each other, or both, most of the time more people are going to gravitate towards that ship more on the basis of it being between to males because that's a big thing that a lot of people in fandoms are personally attracted too, which is fine btw.

I'd notice In old Fandoms the content being made for it will eventually reach a upper limit like its a damned exponential growth curve where everyone just stopped making fully new material and would just end up writing the same group of tropes and plot over and over again for infinity with seemingly no cause—with it happening even faster in new Fandom because so many people were introduced to Fandom and ao3 during covid. The only small exception is the occasional DPxDC post with a slightly different take on a old trope and then it quickly becomes just like every other post in the dpxdc community with the reposts added on to it, and that was the only reason I still dont have the tag blocked.

And the jthm Fandom is just sort of stuck with a quick post about devnny, mmy/nny, and edgar/nny or an au. It's done almost none of the normal Fandom things Fandoms with half the size and half the characters have done, there's no essays about a character with 30 seconds of screen time, no taking a small detail about them to project on to squeezing as much angst out of them as possible, and there's basically no multi shipping. There's not even any of the nicknames the ships have to stop full government naming the ship repeatedly because smushing the names together doesn't work and this comic is over 30 years old.

I just ended up staring at a edgar x nny post and wondering why the train of thought that caused their ship was never applied to nny and tess when she has twice as much screen time and at least had the possibility to form a connection with him that edgar couldn't in that time. So im just gonna rant about my blorbos for however long this takes or someone wacks me over the head and hopefully convince more people to ship this so im not as lonely....

Fuck I had a decent transition then I lost it, Anyway...

At least psychologically nny and tess are near perfect foils to each other and allow for parts of Nny's character that usually isn't explored as much.

We know from tess's background info page that tess is a possible military brat and moved around constantly never allowing her to form decent friendships or a healthy style of attachment. In her adulthood she's still relatively behind her peers, her move to los angeles is implied to be newer when the other characters her age already settled into an apartment years ago, or in nnys case owning a house with a gateway to hell. She's even further behind when attempting to be in a stable healthy relationship. The men she ends up with show the more abusive sides of themselves midway through through the relationship and she will stay with that person because of the importance that relationship gives her in her community until she gets a free shot out. She still actively craves attention from these people so badly that even despite her efforts to handle being alone after the world reset she can only go 2 days without talking to her shitty friends effectively resetting her progress with any harmful things they do that indulges her need to be included. She has zero healthy friendships to fall back on when something happens to her or to steer her away from harmful behavior her other friends encourage. During her time with nny she gets the only concern for her wellbeing that shes probably gotten in years, even if that concern is a very twisted idea of comeuppance and really concern at all. He acknowledges Dillon is a terrible person and correctly assumes he treats her terribly. During her canon time with nny all she has time to talk to him and realize him as a full human through whatever weird routines he mentions on his Twitter he does with her. Her final opinion of him is a crazy idiot that has an extreme implementation of a typically morally lighter gray idea and that should haven't taken her—which is right if he was more mentally stable he would have let her go after showing her what fate Dillon ended up having or would've left her passed out in the parking lot—and actively defends him when dealing with kirks bullshit. Which most people who were kidnapped and forced to watch their boyfriend be tortured for months don't usually do even if the kidnapper never harms them whatsoever. Putting her in a more likely position to forgive him if he actively tries to redeem himself or at least be more comfortable around him repeatedly post-canon.

Johnny is more hot and cold with his desire for company, he actively craves relationships but is stuck in the mentality that something will eventually go wrong and he needs to kill them before it happens or that friend group will do something that makes him want to kill them, and if neither of those happen moose warps reality enough that they all die on accident which has supposedly happened repeatedly.He's also self aware about this like he is with most of his negative behavior and regrets that he does this but will eventually wave it off as something he'll always do.

If the two of them decided to interact post canon or enter a relationship it initially wouldn't be from any sort of affection for each other. It would end up similar to the dynamic edgar and nny are already given. Nny sees her as a way to force himself to becoming a better person, guilting himself into playing this role of the perfect boyfriend and sticking to it because hes already put her through the pain of months long psychological torment and forever fucking up her life. He can't let himself mess up again and hurt her, proving to himself that he's beyond redemption and doomed to ruin the people he loves and wants to keep with him no matter what he does. Tess sees him as a constant she can use to orient herself in her attempt to become less dependent. she knows him and his patterns he can never surprise her with a new behavior like her previous partners, with their agreed upon game of pretend she has a shield from any new person coming on to her that could possibly hurt her and someone to remind her her friends behavior is wrong and encourage her to remove herself from them.

Her friends would likely initially accept him, with him being also alternative (even if hes not goth) and a fairly well known self published comic artist. That support would quickly disappear however when hes continuously forced to interact with them and a slightly more accurate view of him shows and they learn that he's some mentally ill weirdo that doesn't tolerate them and won't let them walk over her. His toned down average behavior would help distance her from those friends—even more so if she refuses to spend time without him present if they ask to, but also pushes her away from new people. Her current friends could discourage others in the community to avoid her and from the outside to strangers tess looks like shes knowingly in a abusive relationship with someone constantly trying to isolate her and is volatile enough he could hurt her at any moment especially if he's ever lost his hold on himself and threatened,hurt, or killed one of her friends. Even the more decent people in JV's universe would cut their losses without even trying to reach her and consider her on her own and whatever happens to her her own fault. Removing any chance for a clear point for them to stop the act and for her to enter a genuine healthy and loving relationship.

Leaving them stuck together feeding each other's codependency on the other indefinitely feeding into tess's fear that she can suddenly end up completely alone and nny seeing her growing desperation making him more scared that he may suddenly fuck up or completely relapse as they cling to the idea of the other hoping it will "fix" them.

This dynamic also leads a more natural implementation for certain parts of each of their characters, things like tess's insecurities about her body or nny's extreme aversion to touch including things like the headcanon he was previously assaulted that normally don't have a spot in the story being told for those arcs to fit and feel like the come out of nowhere and push the main plot of the story to the side. And characters like todd,edgar, and devi having easy and defined spots they fit. A interaction with edgar at the beginning of the story can be the inciting incident that gives them the idea to be together and be a pillar giving a unbiased answer to if nny is actually getting better and can call out any counterproductive behavior they choose to ignore while giving time for edgar to develop. Squee being around gives nny a second thing to focus on to get better for and tess another reason to stay with nny so squee is actually being taken care of properly and just to make sure nny doesn't accidentally hurt him. Squee's relationship with pepito could even help them reflect on their own relationship and prevent Squee from the same unhealthy pattern with his relationships. And devi is one of the most important characters in this dynamic forcing nny to confront himself and put his reason for entering that relationship with tess and not hurting her but attempting to kill devi to words in the likely very explosive confrontation the two of them eventually have.

The argument(s) with devi make nny and tess start to make the decision if they actually have developed feelings for each other or if they need to stop their relationship and separate themselves from each other to heal without someone else to cling to. And why shouldn't devi put herself in between them? why shouldn't she try to take todd away and keep any other people away from johnny? He's serial killer and a complete monster, he doesn't deserve to manipulate these people into caring for him when he can and probably will hurt them at any moment. They don't know what he's done and they need to be protected from the likes of him— wait...they all know what hes done beforehand....shit what now? Self reflection on if she is going to let what a violent person in her life is currently doing without her be important enough to upstage her current path in life and if she is going to try to forgive him or move on and forget all about him that's what.

Look at me go, making a ship centric narrative that gives a relatively equal amount of development to the side characters that basically never happens.

Honestly this relationship dynamic is really interesting and this type of mutual destruction isn't present in a lot of official or fan work besides the whole megamind "I've made my life's sole purpose being angry at this one person and now that their gone/forgiven idk what to do with my life" trope, and deserves the attention.

Anyways I'm completely delusional and choose to believe these tweets are about tess

And I'm serious about needing nicknames for ships...i refuse to refer to these two as "ness" or write the full thing out multiple times a post, im also like 50% sure ness is already a ship name in a different Fandom.