We keep trying to dedicate this blog to one thing then it ends up being a bunch of different things I give up. Follow my comic devblogs @i-mythical-concept-art and @oxygen-masks-devblog More from me: http://mycomicsare.gay/
As a trans woman, I really, really, don't appreciate people acting like they know what it was like for me growing up. Like yeah, I realize that your childhood was like that and I'm sorry that you were treated that way. But don't act like that's how it is for everyone.
I was very much seen as one of the guys growing up. I went to "boys nights" with the guys, which typically consisted of very masculine activities, I had gay cis dudes hit on me, I never once was seen as anything other than a dude.
Guys never once mistreated me, or saw me as anything other than a man. Even through University, I was seen as a man to the point where my University friends were shocked when I came out to them as a trans woman.
I was even treated as "one of the safe ones" all through high school by the girls I hung out with. I had an all female friend group that I hung out with and gossiped with, and was allowed to hang out with them in and out of school, because friendship with me never came with the possibility that I was gonna make things weird and try to fuck them. I showed no interest in dating them and treated them like any other person.
They literally called me a "Girl's guy".
So, your experience isn't universal, and I really wish people would stop acting like their trauma is standard. Because it's not.
And then there's my husband, who hated being a girl, hated femininity, was bullied by girls growing up, never had any friends aside from a few guys in high school, and was never accepted as a girl by girls.
They truly aren’t, because I for one actually grieve the boy I used to be, even though that isn’t who I am anymore. I mourn what could have been and yet I’m excited for what is going to be. I felt fine being a boy, and was very much seen as one of the “bros” once I finally found a friend group (even if they still treat me as one of the bros but that’s a separate matter) I personally had very little trauma surrounding my identity growing up as a young lad, even if I constantly felt out of place. Just like being trans is a spectrum, so is trauma. No one’s trauma is the same and you CANNOT presume what other people have gone through.
I have such complicated feelings about my body and gender and growing up, like... I wouldn't be who I am if I hadn't been an Oldest Daughter and an Oldest Of Three Sisters in a very conservative rural home*. I loved being successfully pregnant! I hated everything else about having a uterus. Once we were done working together, I wanted it gone.
There is not one true way to be Trans any more than there is one true way to be a man, a woman, or non-binary.
*my brother and I had a loooong conversation about that once we both came out, bc like... having been that thing was important to both of us, but so was no longer being that thing. And it felt shitty to me to deny our sister's life experience too by saying "sorry, that didn't actually happen. We were never sisters."
I said "when I was a little girl" to TH recently, and bless him, he tried to correct me.
"NO, Imi. You aren't a girl."
Sweetheart, back then I thought i was.
"NO"
Which is to say, gender can't be flattened without losing something. It's a social construct. It's a set of traits linked to secondary sex characteristics. It's a spectrum. It's a Potato Head of expression and performance and identity. It's all of those things and none of them and I'm going to shake it shake it shake it shake it until all the weird stereotypes fall out and then I'm going to EAT IT with GLITTER and KETCHUP.
And if there's one universal way to experience any of that^, I'll eat that too.
I truly identify as being that "2010s middle school girl who was into dragons and unicorns and manga and YA isekai novels" archetype and at no other point in my life have I ever been a girl or will be.
au where instead of trying to surpass rad weekend, vbs are birders trying to beat a big year record. vivid bird squad
additional thoughts and context and such below the cut for the interested ✌️🐦🔭
birding has a reputation as a relaxing and chill retirement hobby, but if you're enmeshed in the subculture you will soon come to know the epic highs and lows. the cutthroat drama and betrayal and crashout fights and gossip and grudges and incorrigible, life-ruining, life-saving obsession. the pushing your mind and body and the goodwill of everyone around you to the absolute limit. the property damage and trespassing and run-ins with the law. the exhilarating passion and beauty of it all. joy and idiocy in equal measure. it's extremely easy for me to imagine it as a vbs-appropriate high-octane life calling, lol.
since this is based entirely on north american birding culture, they’re japanese-american and from LA instead of shibuya. sorry. a lot of the specific locations/birds are based off my experiences birding with my gf and friends while visiting california :]
vivid street itself crosses a naturalized strip of the LA river that has colloquially borrowed its name and hosts a passionate naturalist community... i've based it on the willow street estuary - where the concrete encasing the LA river recedes and green things return, great egrets roost on discarded shopping carts and flocks of shorebirds forage along graffiti-lined riverbanks. very resilient and defiant and absolutely brimming with life. ken is a highly-regarded birder who has opened a café-slash-interpretive-centre since completing his own Legendary big year (a Rad year, even) with taiga and nagi 3ish years ago. these days he's mostly left the numbers game behind him but is still an active presence in the community locally.
vivids + bad dogs bird dogs are birding/travel partners, but it's also the nature of the lifestyle that you continually run into the same people as you all orbit the same birds and follow the rhythms of migration, and thusly they increasingly keep winding up in the same places and kinda fully join forces at some point. the order of how everyone meets is directly parallel to canon still, so an and akito have known each other the longest and kohane is pretty new to it all. i think they are a tiny bit older than canon here but not significantly so - probably like late teens or early 20s.
the history / experience / talent dynamics that initially inform a lot of the vbs relationships translate really fluidly to birding in interesting ways, and it was fun imagining which type of birder each of them might be... kohane the motivated, talented amateur with a big camera, an the birder-by-birthright with something to prove, akito the perpetually-in-motion lister with nothing to lose. and to toya, i have given the highest honour of all: the keen-eyed, inscrutable larophile. though obviously they're all listers here which is a particular and hardcore slice of the subculture - remember, all birding (as long as you respect the birds and each other) is good birding no matter if you're “hardcore” or "casual" <3
i have many more ideas I wanna draw (kohane's philosophical development... toyas spark bird and how he met akito.... exploration of akian friendship..... more about the previous generation...), but this is already a kinda hefty post... for now enjoy this glimpse into the funny & chaotic & life-changing & and beautiful world of looking at birds!!! i tried to make it a) entertaining and accessible for people with no knowledge of birding and b) hopefully in-character while still keeping it faithful to the ways birders at this level really act and talk. the intersection is where the fun lies lol
if you're still here thanks for looking at my long post
Ok so lemme get this straight the boys get advertised their body weight in protein powder and girls are told to get by on uncooked foliage and I’m supposed to believe that the observed differences in gender are strictly because of sex chromosomes with no cultural influence at all uh huh sure hey buddy what kind of idiot
it’s actually wild how terrified of the general public most usamericans are. like you don’t realize it if you’re someone who mostly walks and takes transit and spends a lot of time in populous public spaces but then you talk to one of the thousands of people that seemingly never set foot in any public space besides a parking garage or a starbucks and you suddenly understand why it’s so easy for fascist rhetoric about the dangerous alien to take root. this country’s median voter pretty much never interacts with strangers who aren’t their coworkers or people they met on dating apps
saw a post on instagram that was literally someone citing statistics saying public transit is one of the safest travel options out there and the comments were literally just “ummmmm op this is so ableist and misogynistic of you :) don’t you know the average public transit user is a dangerous violent criminal who wants to set you on fire :)))”
it must be so terrifying and sad to go through life convinced if you set foot outside your car in public or interact with people outside your nuclear family you’ll instantly be raped and robbed by the Evil Poors no wonder so many of these people are reactionary tar pits
If you add something mean to my posts you're getting blocked instantly btw. "You're essentially telling people that it's okay to never improve // if someone is talking to you like this you're in a cult" what. What is like. Wrong with you. To add something like this to a post promoting whimsy and free creativity for making ocs. Especially on a post that's also criticising how misogyny makes people view female characters under hyper scrutiny (whole reason the mary sue trope exists. Hot take.)
No no, actually, come back. Come back. (holding back laughter) come back.
It's okay to NEVER improve in your writing and ocs.
Did you hear that (snickering) (snorting) did. See how. Heehehe. Yeah. I'm promoting it now lol. Artists making silly ocs for fun on the internet don't owe you writing or characters that you think is good. If this is how you view standards I don't think anyone should be obligated to. Fucking lol? Fucking lmao?
Make art, write, make ocs, be creative. Get better if you want, or never get better. It's not that deep I promise you. Just express your damn self how you want, we live under the rise of fascism for fucks sake.
"Make it exist, you can make it good later" is great advice if it works for you BUT IT DID NOT WORK FOR ME and it hung up my process instead. Don't let that happen to you!
I didn't realize how much editing and refinement I actually do in my head before I even put something onto the page. So then I would draft it out and expect to have ANOTHER refinement stage and somehow that just messed up my process. It also eroded my trust in my own creative instincts, it trained me to believe whatever was in my head was always flawed and that it must be externalized to be refined.
And yeah sometimes what I put on the page IS really flawed and I won't have much of an editing stage later to fix it because that's not natural to my process. But that's still ok. Because my new answer to this is not "fix everything as much as you can before you call it finished" its now "whatever lessons you've learned from making this thing can be set aside and applied to the next thing"
This is not just permission to make flawed art. Flawed art is actually GOOD. "Its good because you made it" is fine advice but here's a different reason: flawed art is way more unique than good art. It's gonna be way more out of the box, way more likely to be something nobody has seen before, and I love that. So will other people.
Seriously, I LOVE reading shitty webcomics. Nonsensical plots, weird art, incoherent dialogue. I know I'm gonna get something I've never seen before. And seeing that someone else had the courage to publish something before their skills or work was "ready" gets me so motivated to create, too. Gimme more of it.
"Make it exist, you can make it good later" is great advice if it works for you BUT IT DID NOT WORK FOR ME and it hung up my process instead. Don't let that happen to you!
I didn't realize how much editing and refinement I actually do in my head before I even put something onto the page. So then I would draft it out and expect to have ANOTHER refinement stage and somehow that just messed up my process. It also eroded my trust in my own creative instincts, it trained me to believe whatever was in my head was always flawed and that it must be externalized to be refined.
And yeah sometimes what I put on the page IS really flawed and I won't have much of an editing stage later to fix it because that's not natural to my process. But that's still ok. Because my new answer to this is not "fix everything as much as you can before you call it finished" its now "whatever lessons you've learned from making this thing can be set aside and applied to the next thing"
This is not just permission to make flawed art. Flawed art is actually GOOD. "Its good because you made it" is fine advice but here's a different reason: flawed art is way more unique than good art. It's gonna be way more out of the box, way more likely to be something nobody has seen before, and I love that. So will other people.
Seriously, I LOVE reading shitty webcomics. Nonsensical plots, weird art, incoherent dialogue. I know I'm gonna get something I've never seen before. And seeing that someone else had the courage to publish something before their skills or work was "ready" gets me so motivated to create, too. Gimme more of it.
Fungus has done so much for humanity. Penicillin. Radiation cleanup. Delicious mushrooms. Deadly mushrooms. Psychadelic mushrooms. And now my boy RA has chosen the humble mold spores as his vessel through which to cure cancer.
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