i've officially dubbed this au "lifejacket simon"! i'm going to tag it and i'm so excited, i've never made fanart for an au of mine for anything before, let alone my own tag 🥲

first and foremost, is it crazy to thank you guys for all the love i've been receiving on my fanart?? i'm an artist who recently came from the dead desert of shitty instagram, getting maybe 10 likes on a post, so all of this is so insane to me; THANK YOU SO, SO MUCH! 💖💖my art is always for myself first, but the traction it has gotten really inspired me to be ambitious and gave me motivation to make more art (like this!) because i know people actually like what i create 😭 anyway,

LIFEJACKET SIMON AU breakdown + me being a nerd:

wherein simon attaches his body to the lifejacket/blackbox and survives the sm-13 explosion. instead of killing him, it just destroys the eel (sorry eel fans), and the pressure from the blast propels him close to the surface where he floats up in the life jacket.

is this humanly possible under canon iron lung circumstances? no. is it possible in this au? Yes. blood ocean is uncomfortably warm, but not boiling, so while it is hellish, the blood alone won't kill simon.

that being said, he still loses his arm, and instead of a facial mutation, he loses his eye due to blood exposure.

i just think the image of him floating alone in the blood ocean is so visceral, and i wanted to create a similar feeling of hopelessness that i felt after watching the shot of just the blackbox and lifejacket floating in the film. but maybe there is hope, because he is with the blackbox....

...i also have his seed pendant on his right arm. i needed him to have it with him. i yearn for the angst and tension of him having a physical reminder of his brothers/family on eden, and missing them even though they betrayed him. it's all the love he ever knew.

and i LOVE the paralell between the dead stars/ simon. is he not one himself? so here we are.

i like my art to be up to interpretation, so i'm not going to explain this comic (as much as i want to go into my exact vision and creative process making this) but if this is incomprehensible (or if anyone just wants to hear it) let me know and i will.

i can say that i love how much of an unreliable narrator simon is, and there will be more content for this au... maybe not as big as this comic but still some content For Sure.

anyway, and don't take this the wrong way, but i hope this comic broke your heart the same way it broke mine when i wrote it! 💔 making angst fanart is such a guilty pleasure of mine.

definitely more to come. also, i wasn't sure if i should add body horror to the TW bc of the missing arm; he isn't like mutated or anything, but let me know.

i'm not sure this is much of a better ending, though.

narratively speaking, i understand why simon had to die. but sometimes you just gotta cope and make an au where he still kinda has his humanity and he escaped and everything's definitely not fine but it's better than a lone life jacket and black box in a blood ocean!!