Reflections on the "Found Family" & Siblings, Parents, and Love in Strange Places
(amazing pretty original illustration by lemy. kind of gives me the feels for this essay. i was looking at this while writing, so thank you <3)
For those who don't know me in person, you might not know that I've recently been embracing my inner mother a lot. I've been finding a lot of personal comfort being able to nurture, care, and pour my love into someone. In the past this has been a part of myself I was mildly reluctant to engage with, due to the idea that I thought being mother-like represented a specific type of female archetype. But as I've continued to grapple with the pitfalls, stresses and disasters of my current life, I think I've matured past the stage of early-early transgender-hood that implies I could only find comfort in my superficial identity and youthfulness (or I'm too stressed out to care). The way I look and the way I act are still undeniably important and unchanging aspects of my identity, but being able to provide a nurturing and maternal level of love and care has drastically changed my perspective on not just my relationships, but my own perceived identity and how that affects my writings.
I feel a little stupid saying this whilst I've always continued to write about the "found family", because these days that term means far more to me than it used to. Not trusting my parents from an early age, I had always looked to other places or people in my life to find that same maternal form and love. I'm glad I found someone who was willing to provide me with that when I did, during the period of my life where I was the most lost and confused I had ever been. There is still only one person I feel comfortable calling my mom, and I think I learned from the best. But with that came the sheer will to convey as raw a form of love as possible, and that came out in the form of a book.
{ twolonelyheavens }
This section contains major spoilers for Act 1 and Act 2 and mild spoilers for Act 3 of { twolonelyheavens }.
Jules is not a mother.
A maternal instinct isn't a personality trait of hers. Jules is too obsessed with her plans and geometry to care about Cadence in any sense past her immediate impact on the Outworlders. However, upon first meeting them. Jules and Cadence are on the same frequency. They are both performing roles learned to keep themselves safe. Jules's need for control is just a softer version of the Axiom Directive that broke Cadence. As much as Jules can try to convince the rest of the Outworlders that she is pushing and planning out of care, it is the only way she can feel like she has any agency or control over an environment that could easily get them killed, and is ultimately another form of fear that could easily get them sent the other way.
"What is wrong with you, Cadence?"
It's easy to read that as just another person being mean to her. As a continuation of her cycle of abuse. For 300 years, Cadence lived a life that was trained to view her own existence as a sequence of data points. The asset she was forced into while biologically being a 12 year old girl gave her a large sense of cognitive dissonance. When Jules snaps, it is actually a line she crosses that acknowledges that Cadence has an interiority, a capacity for fear, and a reason to be wrong that isn't a technical glitch, and it establishes the character arc that forces Cadence to become vulnerable and confront her trauma. It's when she becomes a troubled child instead of a machine.
Both Jules and Aris are positioned as maternal figures to Cadence, and this is represented in a major way through how they used their clothing as a form of protection. Aris isn't a villain and I really wanted to make sure she didn't come across as one. She represents the tragedy of someone who is too held back by the systems that govern us (the real enemy, if you will) to actually be a mother. She gives Cadence her coat to keep her warm, but it is also a desperate, last-ditch attempt to connect with her daughter. An act of love for sure, but an act of love that ultimately left Cadence as disposed biomass.
To say that Aris wasn't a perfect scientist would have been a stretch of the imagination. In my mind, she was one of the greater researchers to work with Axiom, but being 'perfect' is nothing more than a label to people who don't have any more space to dedicate morality (or love) as axis's in their life. Conversely, Cadence waking up wrapped up in Jules's coat at the end Act 2 was probably one of the most formative parts of the text to me. At a point where Cadence is at her least operational and essential, failing to properly guide the Outworlders, slowly breaking her composure and logic, Jules uses her care to preserve a girl she's proud to know. The role of a parent could be defined as biological, and is often socially defined as something vague about bravery in a vacuum. But maybe having the opportunity and using sheer will to choose a person over ones own fear is what it's all about, baby.
My friends would know about my continued attachment to the 'Earth AU' headcanon. On the surface, it's just a way for me to spend more time with these characters because I am so attached to them and love them so dearly, but on a deeper level, it's a place where the Axiom Directives (the systems) finally dies for good. And that's the main reason why it's a headcanon, unfortunately. In the headcanon, mothering is allowed to be mundane. It's about Jules teaching Cadence how to brush her hair, or pick out clothes, or navigate the normalcy of a grocery store.
It's my own way of parenting Cadence, letting the survival machine become obsolete. Jules becomes the person who creates a space where Cadence doesn't have to be useful to be kept. There is historically a very slow process of a child learning that they aren't a product of abuse, or rather, that they aren't hardware, and a mother learning that her most important job is just being home for that child. There's a form of love that exists here, the kind that doesn't need a crisis to prove that it exists. It's always there, in the snuggles early in the morning, in the dirty breakfast dishes, in the lazy afternoons, proving that we were always more and were never less than the variables the world tried to make us.
Thirteen Orphans
Rue and Wren are peers, or rather two people sharing a form of sisterhood, trying to navigate the shared headspace of a house full of trauma. They are grounded in a mutual of understanding of what it takes to survive, holding up the corners of their world.
Despite the chaos of the house, Rue and Raine are arguably the two closest characters in the entire story. Raine is the part of Wren's system that the world (and Wren) would deem useless. She is the child, the manifestation of all the vulnerability that Wren had to tuck away to get through the day.
Wren and Rue are often sharing the bathtub. However, silence is deadly for them both. For Rue, it makes her itch violently, and for Wren, nothingness is a pit of fear that triggers Raine's distress. In a heartbeat, Rue is no longer sitting with her peer, but face-to-face with a broken, sobbing child who has been dropped into the void with her.
And Rue, without a single second of hesitation, pulls that child into her arms.
Thirteen Orphans is ultimately a story about the big systems and structures that control us too. Rues love is the choice to protect someone's right to be small, vulnerable and useless in the greater system that tried to force them to grow up too fast, and with far too little care. Rue hates being reminded that she is a sister, but the other side of the coin is that she is far too afraid to admit that she wants nothing more in this world than to BE a good sister. And in the opportunity where she can be loving and caring without judgement or without performing, Rue becomes the big sister Wren never had and the mother Raine was denied. Wren doesn't have to be a single, high-output machine to be kept. Her fragilest parts are actually the ones most worth holding.
There is a performance I have to output being an adult in the world. It's something I upkeep with the biological family (that I don't trust, if it wasn't obvious from my writings) and at work. Or when responding to business emails. Or when interacting with acquaintances or the outer portion of my friend group. Caring for someone demands that you let go of your ego and stop worrying about your identity for a while. You have to strip away all the armor. In that head space, I find myself lowering my own defenses to meet them. Not in an intellectual sense, but about lowering my guard.
A child doesn't have schemes. They aren't looking for a subtext or judging your social standing. They just want to be loved and cared for. There's something profoundly healing about that simplicity, and it lets me set myself down: the labels, the dysphoria, all the pressure to be a functional unit in the greater system, and just be a source of warmth.
Rue's care for Raine is a direct act of defiance. If the women and Rue didn't hate society enough, every act of love and care, every time Rue chooses to sit in the tub and hold a sobbing child is a middle finger to every parent and every system that failed to protect them.
We live in a world full of ghosts, haunted by the people we were supposed to be before trauma forcefully shaped us into functional units. By creating these bonds, my characters have the agency to rewrite their own history by filling the void where a parent's love should have been and filling it with each other. To say that Rue was reaching back through time and validating the right of every orphan in the story to have existed without fear is a way of saying that even if the past was a series of cold rooms, you don't deserve to live that existence and should never have to.
Found family isn't just about surviving who hurt you, it's about proving them wrong by becoming the very thing they told you didn't exist. It's about taking the love the world tried to optimize out of us and using it to let someone go to sleep knowing they are safe.
Conclusion
If my writing can do anything, I hope it gives you that same radical permission to set down your armor, stop performing, and just be a source of warmth for someone else, or even for the discarded version of yourself.
The world is always going to try to optimize the love out of us. It will always try to tell us that we are only as valuable as our output. But as long as we continue to waste calories on hugs, the system is a smidge less powerful than it was yesterday.
Wires don’t bleed, and machines don’t weep. I’m glad I do. I’m glad I can be a friend, a mother, a sister, and a home. And I’m glad I have my friends (or my real family) to remind me that we were always more than enough.
Problems for Tomorrow are projects that I haven't been able to figure out how to complete, posted so they wouldn't go forgotten and to document my process. Suggestions and ideas are greatly encouraged and appreciated.
The world doesn't know what to do with people like us.
Four sickeningly toxic, traumatized young women, alienated from normal society by their own destructive behavior, find themselves locked in a permanent, high-stakes Mahjong rivalry. They routinely bleed each other of money, hurl vicious insults, and sabotage each other's lives. Yet, Mahjong requires exactly four players. No more, and no less.
(rue is my favourite character, but I consider Emily an icon and a staple of the universe. shes too girlboss)
Sometime around march this year, I had this conversation in my friends Discord server.
Me:
m planning a Canon ill be working on after tlh
And its just a bunch of asshole nutjob women
If I gave you a character description and told you to take every creative liberty you hage to come up witj their character design would you do ut
Lemy
AMi mean i could Try
(please ignore the god awful typing. i think i was on my phone)
And like every single good idea I've ever had (I don't think I've ever had a good idea), I stole one of Lemys OC's and shoved her into the story as a creative pivot for the rest of the characters.
Present
Thirteen Orphans (13o) is a psychological drama centered on four broken women living in a dilapidated two-room apartment above a failing dry cleaner. The narrative is anchored by their collective competitiveness in Mahjong.
The characters are named after the cardinal directions to the Mahjong wind tiles, each representing a different failure of the traditional world.
Emily is a warden. A hyper-vigilant manipulator with a god complex who grew up as the secret adult for addict parents. She keeps the others caged and broken because she only feels useful when fixing a crisis.
Vivienne is a surgical instrument. She is a disgraced high-society heiress and a data auditor who views people as variables. She is secretly their financial shield that keeps them afloat while maintaining her icy elitism.
Wren is the scavenger. A pathological liar and grifter with Dissociative Identity Disorder (alters: Raine and Ora). She survives by mirroring the needs of others, acting as the houses social lubricant while secretly hoarding for her own survival.
Rue is a black hole. A self-destructive addict seeking punishment for the accident that left her brother brain-damaged. She is the group's scapegoat, wielding her nihilism like weapon to drag the others into her despair.
As a continued pattern in trope defiance in my writing, 13o explores survival through utility as opposed to a found family where characters heal each other with love. These women don't necessarily like each other, in fact, they are often cruel, elitist, or manipulative. However, they are psychologically locked together by their trauma-induced roles.
Traditionally, a story's goal is for characters to get better. This is technically true in the case of 13o, however their history and trauma prevent them by healing in a traditional manner. The separation that the characters face leave them utterly incompatible with most of society. Each characters worst traits are the only things keeping them alive, which means healing said things would leave them exposed and vulnerable to the outside world, which is a far more complex conflict than "will they be happy?"
The Wall
It's an uncommon occasion where I find myself stuck at a wall not because I don't have an idea, but because I am struggling to maintain the thematic integrity of the characters. In my projects I continue to feel the desire to create a Hero's Journey once again, to send the characters away on a grand expedition, but every time I force the girls out the apartment, they have to come back.
As I was going through my Rue high (she's my favorite) I built a complete, compelling story line written specifically for her. It works for her character, it has an emotional and narrative direction, but the moment it is implemented, the other three characters fade into the background.
The intention has always been to create an ensemble piece. This is a compromise I am not willing to make. These four characters are a very intentionally built chemical compound.
The real wall is the core thesis of the story itself: these women shouldn't leave these walls. It is a study of why society can never truly accept them. They are not "lovable rogues" or "misunderstood victims" waiting for a hug and a reception arc. They are functional monsters forged by a world that views them as faulty or unwashed. If they step outside, they are asked for a level of humanity they have already traded for survival.
The Future
I need a crisis that demands the absolute worst from all the women. What is the one thing that all four monsters would be willing to fight for, or the one thing they are all equally afraid to lose?
But these characters have traded happiness for survival. If I refuse to give them a traditional redemption arc, what does a victory look like for them? Is "we managed to stay in this room for another year" a satisfying ending, or do they need to collectively burn down the world that rejected them?
Thirteen Orphans is about being broken and stuck. If not incredibly pretentious, maybe my own struggle to unstick them is simply a reflection of the narrative's own truth. To force them out into the traditional Hero's Journey would be to kill the very things that make them breathe.
The question I need to ask myself is what I want for these characters. But until that storm arrives to sweep them away, they stay behind a double-bolted door, sitting in a two-bedroom apartment above a dry cleaner, watching the winds of their dingy neighborhood. They are a problem for tomorrow, because today, they are simply trying to endure.
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Κομοτηνή: Με επιτυχία πραγματοποιήθηκε το 13ο Σεμινάριο «Διαταραχές Ηλεκτρολυτών και Οξεοβασικής Ισορροπίας»
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