#writer ramble

are you still INTERESTED in where the story goes despite disliking the main character, and

will i be able to change your mind by the end

i don't really think it's a bad thing necessarily that TWE is weird as fuck. art like that needs room to exist somewhere. i guess i just sometimes wish that room didn't have to come from my own accounts. i don't wanna be someone who people think of as writing toxic stories, i guess.

i still like TWE a lot. i think it came out great for what it is and for the time period when i wrote it. team tempest has a special place in my heart just like all my other characters.

i hate commenting on my comics/stories, generally. the little patreon quip is almost always the most i can bring myself to do. when i was younger, i used to be a lot more anxious over wnating to make sure readers understood my work. my messages, most importantly. this was especially egregious during the The Things We Have era, i was obnoxious about it sometimes back then. these days, though, ive chilled out and am basically in the camp that i dont care what a reader's interpretation of the story is so long as they get it by the ending. you can leave me a long comment blatantly misunderstanding over half the text and i'd probably just heart it. i like comments that chew on the text a lot, i like when people leave well-written essays, even if i think theyre wrong. i do find myself still speaking up sometimes if i think the comment is like, overtly harmful or disturbing somehow, but even then i really try to limit how often i do that cause, i mean, just cause i think it's wrong thats still technically just an opinion of mine. i could be the one who's wrong there. who knows lol! this stuff is hard and i don't consider myself an expert on anything.

i think the point of reading is to like read and then draw conclusions on what you consumed. if i tell you how i want you to interpret the story, i'm ruining half the fun. i have word of god power in this scenario that i'm still not totally used to holding even after years, anything i say in a comment could be taken and widespread applied to readers' interpretations of the text, and that's almost like a scary amount of power to wield and i don't generally like having to use it. it ruins the fun for ME too cause most of my fun comes from watching readers work through drawing their own conclusions and figuring out what i'm trying to say with my pages. it's, honestly a delight, it's truly an honor to have people willingly and happily meet me in the middle here. it makes the art feel like a conversation and it deeply fulfills me. as someone who's become quite a jaded hermit in her old age, it's one of the few social interactions that i still genuinely love to engage in. i hate talking to people in most other contexts. im trying to go to school for a human services field haha;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;

but here's the thing. sometimes readers are so off base in their comments that it can be genuinely alarming. this is not something i necessarily consider a problem on the reader's part. cause, as i said, people are allowed to be off base and most of my comics aren't concluding any time soon. but there's just some things that are, hard?? to sit through??? as i wait for people to come around to the nuance, or to see a new side to a situation unfolding in the story. i think it feels especially tense to me when it leads to people hating on certain characters. it's absolutely fine and allowed, i don't actually mind people hating my characters, i know how they can be lol. but sometimes in writing their hate comments, people betray like, weird values?? that i then feel uncomfortable not commenting on bc it??? starts reaching a point where its maybe getting a Little Too Real? and then sometimes readers are SO off base that they interpret a genuinely harmful message from the story that they then feel the need to champion against and it's hard to defend my stance and explain to them why they're wrong about the story w/o, well, telling them they're WRONG. in those scenarios, i have to be willing to defend myself sometimes. if someone comes to tell me "your story has this hateful message in it" that i KNOW is not actually in there bc i painstakingly designed the story to not have that hateful message and i know that bc im the author the one who worked on the story and thus knows the ending and also excluded that hateful message deliberately... then at that point it can get really hard to talk to people about the comic haha;;;; dsfjkhdfjkhsfkjhdfjkdfg.

They said it was a “I remember the trauma/incident“ but it was more like a “i remember the death, the whole person not the incident, while moving on with the ones that are alive”

It was based on my own Christa’s Eve, that day we weren’t sad like yeah we wish they were still here we were in silent yet we also joked and talk and went to buy junk food, etc

And yeah maybe the fact that my Christmas special was visiting a grave instead of idk presents, silly adventures making dinner and in general vibe of “well we may be flawed and fight but the magic of Christmas can make the family gather together and have a great goofy time” speaks tons about me

Other posts that I didn’t intended to make it sad was The bat and the Robin tale, for me it was like a beautiful way to show in take format the relationship of Bruce and dick till that moment and goodbyes can be sad but it’s more about the lesson of being independent yet still letting people in, and not “after all of this you leave me alone”

It’s like a slice of life, it wasn’t angst yet leaves you a sad lil hole that people move on, not everything will stay as things are, goodbyes hurt but the moments together and a promise of healing and being able to get out of the safe space are the ones that matter

Even in my comedy posts there’s a random comment of “lowkey angst material” and I’m so confused bc i didn’t intended to make it angsty

Yet when I practice my angsty posts I feel it sucks and doesn’t move people

I bring this nostalgic, weirdo aura that even between laughs and awes in slice of lives, people get depressed I guess

I want to be a comedian yet I make people sad, such a tragedy really, making it all very ironic

If I were a clown I would be a Pierrot