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“the curtains weren’t blue on purpose. why should we care?”
my love! let me ask you this - did you eat breakfast today? this tiny moment in your life. just think about it. did you?
for some of you, the answer is yes and for some of you it is technically and for some of you it is does coffee count. some of you reached for cereal or gmo-free overnight oats or frozen waffles or 3-day-old pizza. sometimes we eat the same thing, every day, for weeks. i get tired of eggs randomly, only to go back to craving them desperately. i’m cuban; i take my coffee like my father showed me, very milky and sweet.
some of us ate in a hurry. some of us hate eating breakfast but if we don’t we will get nauseous later. some of us took our meds first or took our meds after. some of us have a kitchen 5 feet wide and sometimes it’s the biggest room in the house. some of us are confident there will be food in the pantry and some of us flinch and say well, the paycheck is coming. some of us turn on a podcast while we eat or we scroll our phones or write in our diaries.
some of us are choosing, specifically, not to eat breakfast. some of us are too busy. some of us are pretending we “just forgot,” but we are ignoring the warning signs that everything feels too-heavy. some of us are so consumed with anxiety or grief that we can’t eat. some of us can’t stand up long enough to make our coffee. some of us have no table to sit down and eat.
i cannot tell you what an artist “meant” by their choices. but they did have to make a choice, conscious or otherwise, to give you information. to give you a little bit more light. each of these choices are little stars of data; connecting speckles for you to weave through, drawing a line.
you cannot use a mirror in a dark room. for some of us; we will not care that the curtains are blue, because that will just be a data point and not enough light to see by. for some of us, the blue curtains will be the same as our childhood bedroom. it will make us seasick. for some of us, blue will be the color of frostbite. it might look like a pixel up close; but from a distance, oh! the picture blooms.
i cannot tell you what will stick out for you. what will carry meaning. some of you will read the sentence “i didn’t have breakfast today” and say “this means nothing.” some of you will read that and say “oh, me neither.” some of you will say “this means the character is probably a little grouchy.” some of you will say “oh, i wonder if they’re okay. why didn’t they eat anything?” … art is a mirror. i am holding hands with you, over space and time, and asking you to feel something with me.
i want you to read my work and find a blue pair of curtains. i want you to read my work and find things in it that i never imagined placing. i have no way of knowing what will resonate with you, that’s true. and maybe i just was hungry while i wrote this, and thinking about the eggs in my fridge. but if you found meaning, that meaning is yours. it cannot be erased just because i didn’t “intend” it. you created a different world by interpreting my work. it’s collaborative! that’s beautiful! that’s stunning!
just! imagine looking at the night sky and saying - it’s stupid to have a favorite constellation or a favorite star. they’re just there.
because here’s the thing - across centuries and cultures, we look up. we still find meaning in the stars. these beautiful, lovely scattered accidents. are you looking? they call. and we look back and say oh! of course we are!
Once, when I was still a very young writer, a friend of mine was doing me a favor and editing a piece for me. It was a short piece focused around the concepts of loss and re-connection, growth and separation and the pieces of yourself that are held inside of others.
When my friend had finished her first read-through and was gathering her thoughts she called me and, completely breathless with excitement, said, “I love the way you structured this! The seasons changing with each new movement, the fact that each passage initiates a new physical aspect of the reunion- I just love that.” It was all she could talk about for fifteen minutes. What beautiful motion I had created, how circular it made the whole piece feel.
She was so excited that I couldn’t bring myself to tell her that none of her favorite parts of the story were intentional. I didn’t realize I’d done any of those things when I was writing it. But upon rereading for myself, I could see what she meant. The opening of a door, the crushed leaves of fall, the first step toward a new life. It was all lying in wait for me. I only needed another pair of eyes to show me the way.
All of that to say that nothing is created in a vacuum, and the choices that we make are, in fact, choices- whether we realize we’re making them or not. Life is collaborative, which means that art is, too. By default. The things that my friend saw in my art and in me changed my perception of my own piece and in this way, we made something together.
That’s how this is meant to go. All of us learning from one another collectively, changing each other on and on. Forever.
I came to a realization recently that I still struggle to properly articulate but: online leftists who have extremely socialist progressive politics but still think its okay to partake in like doxxing and harassment and other toxic practices are eerily similar to conservative Christians who piously go to church every Sunday but still verbally abuse service workers and leave 50 cent tips
Its that same. I guess. Cognitive dissonance between beliefs and actual behavior. That idea that you are a good person because you believe the correct things which conveniently absolves you of having to be conscious of your own behavior and how you treat people. Its okay that you called your Olive Garden waitress a dumb bitch because she brought you bleu cheese instead of ranch with your salad because you can just pray your sins away to Jesus and still get into heaven. Its okay that you told someone who you didnt like on Tumblr to kill themselves because you have “trans rights are human rights” and ACAB in your bio. Its that same kind of Performance of being a Good Person TM while still deciding its okay to treat the people you consider to be “beneath you” like garbage.
Your beliefs are simply step one in determining your personal character, frankly one of the easier steps. The next and more important step is *how* you, personally, treat the people around you. And frankly, you could have the most progressive politics known to mankind but if you still act like a middle school bully at the most minor percieved infraction then you are not a good person. Full stop.
Request night was very fun, thank you all for playing! Here’s a bunch of Gamzees, Gamkars, and miscellaneous clown/clown church nonsenses, for the very kind folks who are always encouraging me to Clown Church on main.
lfksdlf @volant-endeavor I’m pretty sure I know the fic because I’m pretty sure I wrote it. was it like 350,000 words. was there copious inter-clown sloppy makeouts. were gamzee and karkat disgustingly pale for each other. if so you may be entitled to compensation thanks for the rec and if not thanks for the very sweet art compliment haha.
Watching you revisit your Homestuck AUs recently and seeing how much you've grown has given me new life. Definitely riding that nostalgia high, and it made me remember From Under Bridges— it was one of my faves from you and another prime example of how you manage to take clown church and make it into something really unique 👀 if ever you were inspired to revisit FUB with some hastily scribbled doodles or project notes, just know I, an anonymous fan, would be sighing dreamily into the void
Aww, haha! Let’s see. If anybody remembers From Under Bridges (the unfinished concept/fic where Karkat is a scout in the ongoing landwar between the human and alternian empires and gets captured by the alphas/betas and culture clash and scheming ensue) here’s an enormous post of thoughts. (Possibly art to follow, we’ll see).
I have inserted a readmore because I love you all and respect your dash length, and this got…quite long.
needs more recognition of the self through the other. I feel like this is an underlying theme in a lot of culture-clash fic; I think that if I wrote FUB now, rather than being some kind of well-respected noble house or something, the alphas and betas would be the KIDS of well-respected noble houses, who were all scanadalous or inappropriate enough in some way to their society to get half-exiled to a “prestigious” guard post near the border
this gives them a reason to connect with Karkat, when it comes to light that he’s also been outcast, because of his own societal rules/standards. It also makes it a secret that they have him, which makes things significantly more dramatic lol.
*INTENT CHIN-STROKING* what if…..my attempts to think about character designs and improve my costume design for this AU got promptly sidetracked into self-indulgent gamzees/pale Gamkar and conlang bullshit again.
What if I made long hair/braids an indicator of status in troll society and then immediately wanted to chop all of Gamzee’s hair off and excommunicate him. What then.
clearing out my sketchbook scans folder and found some bare-faced clown drama flashbacks. So here’s Clown OCs “i was dating the pope before he got appointed and we broke up on emotionally-fraught terms but also he’s now my boss/religious leader and we’ve been painfully formal and polite to each other for several hundred years instead of talking about it” edition
