So, it’s October 20th — a date that as far as this blog and especially Cherish’s author and first artist is concerned, is practically some sort of international holiday.
I wanted to have something much more substantial than these two tiny rough sketches out by the time the date rolled around, but as you all know, I’ve been quite busy with all the Cherish content I’ve been wanting to release for this month, so this is the best I can do for the moment, until I have the time to more properly clean them up and color them.
There’s a whole lot that I could say on a day like this — a lot of thoughts in my head just itching to find their way out onto the post, but I think that saying some of it would be a bit premature without first lining up all my proverbial ducks in a row, and I want to keep this post mostly lighthearted, anyway.
So…for now let me say this.
In the past I’ve made posts talking about how just precious and irreplaceable of a character BSD Arthur is, of his sweetness, of his kindness, of his gentleness and selflessness, and how dearly I love him and am glad he came to exist through the series.
All of this could not be more true, and I think that my intense interest and love and respect for him as a character still — all these five years and seven plus months later from the day I learned of him — should speak volumes about just how unique and incredible of character he is, despite his confinement to mostly only two light novels in official canon.
He is a wellspring from which my blog was primarily born and on which it still runs today, with no sign of drying up — a topic I could continue to talk of for ages.
…And yet, I would also be remiss not to mention the real life 19th Century poet of the same name upon which he was heavily and inseparably based, and to which we owe the entirety of his existence.
I had said once in passing that I wished a happy birthday to the tragic disaster of a human being that was him, but in hindsight, I don’t think that such words carry even half the weight that I wish to evoke when I say that I want to celebrate his birthday, too.
I know that a lot of people when they talk about BSD will wish the irl namesakes of their favorite characters a happy birthday, and I feel like my well wishes in the past also came off in this same way as many of them mean it: “Here’s an obligatory celebration of your existence because without you, this character couldn’t have been”…but the thing is, that in no way sums up how I feel about the situation at all.
Maybe, in the early days of my research into the author, it might have been like that, but it is not anymore. And it is not just as a poet, but most especially as a human being, that I wish to see and partake in Arthur’s birthday celebrated.
My lengthy and dedicated research over the years has taught me that at heart and in truth he was actually not this heartless, needlessly cold, absurdly cruel and gratuitously offensive, irredeemable little shit “everyone would hate if we met him today” that we see sensationalized in the various forms of media and clickbait articles, but rather, just a deeply troubled teenager who from a very young age continuously suffered through some of the worst shit imaginable, surrounded by terrible people and circumstances in a time where he quite frankly didn’t belong and in which the odds of his chances at finding genuine happiness and peace were almost nil from birth. Yes, he made many mistakes and sometimes did things that were definitely not quite right — he was absolutely as flawed a human being as you or I, but not more flawed, not evil. Once he broke free from the people who made his life hell, he became a perfectly decent and average — though withdrawn, emotionally devastated, and creatively burnt out and defeated — adult.
And it is to him — the tortured soul who yearned for more than the unlucky cards he was dealt, who dared to dream but whose dreams burnt up in the atmosphere and left him just a shadow quietly navigating the world he didn’t want to live in until his premature death — that I reach out to today, and on every day and every time that I write Cherish.
If I could reach out to the past and just give him a hug, tell him that he and his works are loved and heard and remembered by people that will not be born for decades — even centuries — after he has passed, and that he is not alone, then I would in a heartbeat. But since I cannot, all of this will just have to be enough.
Happy Birthday, Arthur Rimbaud. Both you and your BSD self. I’m so far beyond glad that you were born.
