ALWAYS ON MENTAL VACATION

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[pluralthey]

ALMOST FORGOT BUT I DIDN’T!!!

[pluralthey]

idletry is 3 years old now, and i decided to make a comic this year about what jessie was like with The Delusion and why her parents encouraged her to seek continued psychiatric treatment for it.

jessie is 18 years old in this strip. author's note: all teenagers are considered children in the idletry universe. the idea of deeming people adults slightly before a nice, round number like 20 and muddying the implications of the word "teenager" would seem bizarre and maliciously chaotic to them. once someone turns 20, they are legally emancipated from guardianship, and they begin transitioning to adult independence through increasing responsibilities. they aren't dumped directly into being considered fully adult, though. most young adults still remain fairly dependent on legal structure and older adult guidance, and many have little real life experience until the age of 25. for the sake of legibility, you can interpret her as more like a 16-year-old in the characters' eyes. additionally, the school system in jessie's municipality -- a "10-hour schoolday" municipality, contrasted with a "6-hour workday" municipality -- dismisses children for the day around 18:00/6 pm during this quarter of their calendar, not something like 2 or 3 pm like a typical high school.

i think a lot of people assume that jessie basically had a strange belief and her family forced her to see therapists for a decade because she was wrong about something. i always pictured the manifestation of her spontaneous conviction that they were in a fictional story as easily mistaken for actual psychosis and, more critically, an actual risk to her well-being. like jessie in idletry, she believes there aren't "real" consequences to many things, but unlike in idletry, she isn't invincible or omnipotent. as a teenager, i found it unfair that when some people said they could hear god's voice talking to them, it was unacceptable delusion, and other times, it was a completely fine, regular religious experience. i was raised somewhat anti-religious, and any expression of religious beliefs was plainly a false belief to me, but some people were more allowed to hold the same false beliefs than others, if it was socially acceptable in their culture. conversely, it holds that something true can be deemed a delusion if it's culturally unacceptable, especially but not exclusively if you can't prove it. some people can act in increasingly erratic ways solely because they're continuously told that a true thing they believe is not actually true, such as someone who's gaslit over and over. do i think psychosis is a social construct? as a category i suppose so, but as an experience, no, i've lived it and it is incredibly physical, chemical in nature in some cases. in others, it is very much a social issue. but when i wrote down the idea for that half of the two ideas that ultimately fused into idletry's plot -- a character in a story who had a delusion that they were in a story -- i was just a child myself, heavily inappropriately medicated for unprovable realities deemed delusions. i didn't really want to (and wasn't able to) write nuance about the social defeat hypothesis or the social model of disability. i wanted to write about a character whose delusion was ontologically, unfalsifiably correct in a way that we could see, but they could never prove. i wanted, simultaneously, to be able to relate to this character as a character who ACTED LIKE they were psychotic. that initial motivation for writing the plot idea down ended up carrying over to how i wanted to conceptualize jessie's delusion in idletry.

[pluralthey]

i made a comicfury site where it's easier to read the side strips. this image is not related to that, i just don't want to draw something to announce this. a few of the strips aren't uploaded there yet, but i'll get to them.

[pluralthey]

two designs of characters who appear in act 3 of idletry and whom i also want to draw in a couple of side strips. the coywolf is this character from a side strip but older, after deciding that working with children wasn't for her and returning to the medical field.

the taylori is her apprentice on the job.

[pluralthey]

EDIT: this is no longer available to buy for now, i got scared by how many people bought it--

i hate advertising so i'm gonna make this quick: i posted a collection of all the sketches for act 1 of idletry so you can read them like an ebook. i had to reread and smooth out some issues last night and i enjoyed the read so if you want to also read it, here you go. if you don't that's fine i don't care live your best life.

if you're not a $15 patron it's $5 to have it forever. please mind the disclaimers posted as the image on patreon.

Idletry Act 1 (sketched), now more readable | gray Folie

Get more from gray Folie on Patreon

i think this is how you link posts you can buy, i'm not sure, i've never done it before.

[pluralthey]

oh i ended up sketching to page 200 of idletry last year (it's at around 250 at this point) so here. have some snips. a lot of the scenes were long, so there aren't as many to snip from.

[pluralthey]

two characters designed for a side strip I've referred to as "the shrimpdick comic." the last strip ended up taking way longer than I intended and then as soon as the new year rolled over my psychiatrist messed up and put me into med withdrawal that I'm still dealing with right now, so combined with the fact that both of them will need bikes studied and designed for them (and this is already AFTER I had to research Glocks and some bullet physics for the strip) before I can start the comic, and I'll need to boot up cities skylines for reference screenshots, it's on the back burner once again to prioritize the actual story of Idletry.

dendropsophus leucophyllatus and loxosceles deserta. both characters are female.

additionally, the badge design for orderlies — Jessie resistance militants whose duty it is to replace the police force and enforce social order. I will need to add it to the frog's outfit somewhere. the badge design is two arrows feeding into each other. the tail of one breaks up the head of the other, creating the pattern seen in the Jessie hazard symbol.

unlike the hazard symbol, the orderly badge has the dark side on the left, opposite to Jessie's actual facial markings, which is the visual marker shared between all Jessie resistance factions across all regions of their planet.

[pluralthey]

[pluralthey]

okay two of the pieces of that strip set horizontally side-by-side instead of vertically and it's going to annoy me forever so here it is a second time.

the croc is a they, the spider is a she, the bunny is a she, and the pterosaur is a he.

iirc the bunny is ~37, the croc is ~31-32, the pterosaur is ~29, and the spider is ~25. jessie resistance militants skew young because they are like... functionally the same as people who'd sign up to be soldiers. they are highly opinionated, suicidally stubborn, and often inexperienced.

in this specific scenario, the younger 2 are used to letting the older adults with more life experience lead and probably expected the bunny to deescalate the conflict without intervention. the croc, prior to jessie taking over, was a peace officer as well, so my take was that they were much more experienced with firearms than the other 3, which doesn't help; even if the younger 2 did try to intervene, they are aware that the croc is capable of using the gun and the croc is aware of who would be able to retaliate with a weapon the fastest.

i initially wanted to make this comic because after sapphira couldn't follow through with her threats when her bluff was called, the reverse scenario where a threat that's challenged is followed up with execution seemed refreshing.

everything AFTER the rabbit being shot was not planned when starting the comic, but a lot of these strips isn't planned, and that's kind of what makes them fun and different from the more planned and edited plot of the story. the original comic was supposed to end with the character who executed another one threatening the others and remarking that jessie's methods of getting what she wants have some merit.

this was a big learning experience wrt the city... an absolute nightmare to do. i used screenshots from a city i built in cities skylines for the explicit purpose of using as reference for many of the scenes in idletry. some of them are freehanded, some of them are referenced, and some of them are traced (which i think i earned personally considering it took hundreds of hours to put the city together). even in the panels where i freehanded the city, spending so long building the city ended up informing a lot of what i decided to draw because i remembered where i put stuff and what is in a general area. even though you don't really see stars in the sky in a big bright city like this, it looked really empty in the simpler color palette without them so i just left them in. maybe jessie changed it idk lol. maybe i will fix the ammunition belt on the rabbit in those later panels but i gotta be honest i'm real tired of working on this strip.

anyway happy new year, take 2

[pluralthey]

[pluralthey]

happy new year, everybody

[pluralthey]

[pluralthey]

i finished sketching another 100 pages of idletry, but unlike the first 100, there were like, 5 scenes total. a lot of the scenes in later act 1 are horrible amalgamations of multiple other scenes to shorten the act. so instead i decided to upload a few of the thumbnail comparisons i did for patreon some months ago, i think that would be more interesting.

i don't do thumbnails now. this is the one scene i thumbnailed, and i quickly realized that drawing such small images hurts my hand. a lot. i learned later, when actually drawing it, that the pages would often also change drastically in composition as more complicated demands were introduced to the pages and their context.

[pluralthey]

alright well this is my attempt to learn how blender works lol, didn't rig it, didn't unwrap it, didn't texture it cuz honestly this was time consuming and i have a comic i'm already slacking on. but i have wanted to model sven for like. 5 years. from 2020:

all i did was force the shadows into a binary output because that's how sven's design was intended to be rendered because the hair looks like a nightmare otherwise. even for this it's dubious but whatever. i would never use this model for an actual project

[pluralthey]

forgot to post this. scorpions probably follow arachnid palp body language

[pluralthey]

made some designs canon-compliant with idletry

[pluralthey]

4 jessie resistance fighters, sometimes called "oggies" or "oggs," for a sketch strip i want to draw. this political faction took control over resources necessary to sustain their society, such as subsidizing hospitals, filling potholes, and managing waste after jessie dissolved all nations and their governments. how they utilize those resources and control over them depends entirely on the local group's members and their motives. they are not centralized and are only unified by their unyielding opposition to jessie. they may coordinate for larger, less local decisions. they are identified by masks, which they may or may not be wearing at any given time, that are black on one side and white on the other in the opposite configuration of jessie's face markings. other parts of their outfits can also have this color scheme. these 4 are part of a heavily militarized cell that controls the city of pentacost, where shiloh lives. the wealth and large population of pentacost combined with their frequent close proximity to jessie sightings (because she's usually around her girlfriend) has driven an authoritarian approach to many problems as terror management. the guns are technically fantasy guns but heavily based on common modern models. she he they she in that order. they don't have names and may never have them

[pluralthey]

i have spent waaaayyyy too long on this strip. just take it.

David and Christie are both siblings in the Antrewson family and rhealeah is pronounced (ray-uh-lay-uh).

glossary:

clinging to your chorion - chorion is the outermost layer of an insect egg. essentially, clinging to the eggshell, refusing to be an adult independent of your parents. can be likened to weaning off the teat, idiomatically.

hemo - arthropod circulatory systems transfer nutrients and oxygen through a fluid called hemolymph rather than blood. they will casually refer to it in conversation as "hemo." they will also refer to it as blood sometimes. sapphira is a maintenance custodian at a hotel, meaning she fixes things, and also cleans up things that aren't dealt with by housekeeping. she's basically saying there will be so much bug blood her employer will pay her to clean it up. as the general custodian.

outie - vertebrates sometimes refer to arthropods as "outies," because their "skeletons" are on the outside, and arthropods can call vertebrates "innies," because their chitin is on the inside of their bodies. vertebrates can also refer to arthropods as exos, chitters, arthros, legs (referring to a single arthropod as "a leg") and they do still sometimes say invertebrates. "invertebrate" inherently centers vertebrae as the default, and arthropods usually refer to their group as "chitinoids," whereas vertebrates are "cryptochitinoids," creatures whose "chitin" is hidden (much like how we refer to it as an exoskeleton even though it isn't a skeleton). they may call vertebrates spinos, backies, skellas, softies, tochos, and other equally stupid names. (A/N: velvet worms, the only Stood Up animal that does not have a skeleton or a chitinous exoskeleton, will refer to both groups with all of these terms, but they generally consider themselves "basically arthropods")

touch tens - touch antennae. ants (and some other social insects, but especially ants) communicate through touching antennae. an idiom that means to initiate communication with someone. equivalent to getting in touch, touch base, drop a line. over time, through the process of deletion, it has been reduced to "touch tens," which was then interpreted as, literally, touch the number tens. any animal can use this idiom, but it is infinitely more common for insects to use it. when other kinds of animals use it, it's sort of like the level of someone who says "it's a doggy dog world." sometimes it will also be said as "touch tennies," as the "ae" in "antennae" mutated into "ie." however, because ten is a widely recognized word, and it kinda-sorta makes sense to the general population as The Number Ten, "touch tens" is the common form of this idiom.

tiff out - touch-sniff out. insects use their antennae for many senses. they touch with them, but they also smell with them. insects with more sensitive olfactory senses will often call smelling tiffing. in this case, it's being used idiomatically to mean tracking someone down. however, because samwich could tell sapphira was being vague with her question to not give any more personal information away to her coworkers, they answered it in an ambiguous way. to the coworkers, it was interpreted in a different idiomatic sense meaning, to identify someone and their intentions or true character. equivalent to reading someone like a book. ants identify each other through this touch smelling, and when they say they're tiffing someone (out), they can also mean it in this "deeper intimate understanding" way, instead of just using smell to find someone physically.

[pluralthey]

Designed one of Samwich's 100 siblings... Also the sibling's car... Also the logo for TTZ...

[gynandromorph]

another one of samwich's sisters, christie, who is mentioned in the sketch strip with sapphira, and appears in idletry. she is 14 years old, 6 years younger than sammy. like them, she is mostly colobopsis explodens.