I don't like it when something I like is too common. It becomes faceless, belonging to everyone, my eyes glaze over, and the brain stops perceiving pleasant things as pleasant. It becomes nothing.
Take, for example, dark, vomit-colored clothes. I like them. I feel like a wild swamp creature from a wild forest. Black is a gloomy gothic classic, pure evil-wizard vibes.
But everyone around me wears shitty vomit-colored clothes! How can I feel like a wild creature when there are hundreds of the same wild creatures around me? I wear swampy rags for ideological reasons, and everyone else does it to just fit in. We have different motivations, we are not the same. So what if we end up looking the same? My eye glaze over, and I stop feeling like a swamp sorcerer.
For me, beauty lies in the coincidence of external appearance and internal personality. It's not in facial features: facial features are neither beauty nor ugliness, just a template. If I posted my mug here, you might say something like, "You've got a plain mug, what's the big deal?" Exactly! This "plain mug" is true ugliness. Facelessness. A mismatch between the outer and the inner, because beyond facelessness there can be no personality. I have no face, therefore I am not a person.
I've never wanted to be beautiful in the conventional sense of beauty. I'm drawn to the aesthetics of the disgusting; I like what others find repulsive, vile, and outwardly sick. I don't want people to love me; I want them to fear me, which I'm not particularly successful at. Inside, I'm a spiteful beast, so to achieve a match, to gain a face, I must become just as outwardly vile.
How simple it all is for people with ordinary tastes and an ordinary perception of appearance. I read someone say he thought he was the most repulsive freak, and his friend was like, "OMG, you're not a freak at all!!1!one!!" And that's it, the dude stopped thinking he was ugly. It's as if such people's entire self-perception comes from other people and they don't have any opinions of their own.
Why does someone else's opinion even confirm your ugliness/prettiness/beauty? It's a different person with different tastes. Although... Most people don't even have their own tastes; they consider what their parents told them to consider beautiful, what their parents drilled into them as children, that's what they consider beautiful. That's the simplicity: they all look up to the same type. And when someone calls an ordinary appearance, one that doesn't fit a strict template, pleasing, it's considered a fucking revolutionary and "unique" idea.
I don't like that I look too ordinary. And I like that I look like I just died. No, not like some mopey, pale aristocrat from the Gothic novels of the late 19th century—that's pop and the same old facelessness. It's as if I were sending a plague upon the villages, devouring all the abandoned food, devouring some of the corpses, and using the rest to create a new batch of undead for the next raid.
How can people even be beautiful? Beauty is easy on the eyes. Cats can be visually pleasing. But what about humans? Humans can have an unusual appearance that's interesting to look at. Humans can inspire both terror and respect. Humans can be envied because they look comfortable, and you want to be like them. Humans can't be beautiful. A pleasant-looking person, in my opinion, is a completely dull and expressionless creature.
So, for me to be satisfied with myself, I need three things: an unusual, almost concept art kind of appearance, menace, and comfort. Concept art is simultaneously simple and complicated—I simply don't have the money for it. If I had more money, perhaps I could create a swamp sorcerer image without the vomit-inducing color scheme. Or come up with something else comparable in vileness, like a goblincore.
The menace part is more difficult. It's not external, but more internal, about how you present yourself, and it's hard to build that inner way of presenting yourself. Although I'm working on it, my journey will be long and difficult.
