#opia

♡ OPIA - IOS

Finally got around to designing the Champion of [Redacted] Rumble!! Opia means so much to me as a character and as message. She's fitting for this month too as she's canonically trans! The bars are also not just for artistic show and are part of her body. I put a lot of heart into this one, enjoy!

Spikez2heaven and Tadi Bravo photographed by Boy Pillow, for OPIA, hair by Amy Melbourne

I have this theory that people have just made up the idea of getting over it to ease the pain of knowing that they’ve let themselves forget. They aren’t prepared for the pain and so they come up with one of two strategies to replace. The one is to tell themselves that they’re progressing, that they’re moving forward, away from the actual rawness, when actually they’re just living on top of it. They can just live their lives interacting with the world as this kind of a surface layer over their actual humanity. All the rest of it, the things that they can’t look at so easily, they shove under them; but then it becomes their foundation. It defines them because they try so hard not to let it. Some of them have just become familiar with that surface and lied to themselves for so long that they act the part really well because they forget that they were ever more than that. The other way people handle pain is to slowly and methodically destroy the meaning of the memories. They don’t pretend they’ve forgotten, but they perform emotional surgery to cut out the pain from the memory; but then, it loses its meaning. If you can look back on losing something and feel no pain, no emptiness, doesn’t that mean by definition stop feeling like a loss? That the value of what you lost is getting smaller and smaller the more time passes since its presence? Some things can’t be accepted organically. When you start telling yourself you still love them but it doesn’t hurt as much, you’re saying that you’ve changed the relationship without their consent. You’re breaking from them. And you have to remember in the right way because it’s the last thing you can offer. You’re obligated to. So what can you do? You can concentrate on and study the pain, and hope that by holding onto it, you’ll keep yourself from destroying the meaning of what you lost.

the game can be played on itch.io!

its my first time drawing a blood splatter be nice

Nowo meets… himself? But this version of him is oddly circular for some reason, and also has “OwO” as their default expression, yeah you can tell where this will go.