FA+
Shop
Artistry, Emotions, and an Audience
a month ago
I wish I could be a happier artist, perhaps. The kind who was light-hearted and joyful in every breath of his art? Perhaps I wish that I could be a beacon of entertainment, with no sudden holes of emotion for folks to fall in? I've dreamed of wanting my art to be easy to enjoy, of my characters to be flat affects that everyone could walk upon and enjoy. With no dimensions of height and volume to climb or sink into.
I've once been flattened in my own soul. It's how I express disassociation. To reduce the experience of being into just the facts. No dimensionality, no volume. No emotion. Just the facts, and hardly even a story really. A sequence of information.
And that's not who I wish myself or my art to be. I don't wish to disassociate from the true experience of myself in order to please anybody with my art. I confess I've noticed myself deeply enjoying watching horror and elation light up in the surprised comments and reactions of others to my art. I'd much rather unsettle folks than be loved, I have to admit.
And I don't want to hurt anybody with that dimensionality of emotion, but I must confess: my art has always panged with a traumatic core that's nestled as infinitely deeply as the love I have for my work and what I do.
Creating my Dandy Toons campaign and unraveling its story has forced me to encounter within myself the fact that I will always revisit themes of deeply troubled trauma and the ways that trauma expresses itself sexually through kinks and perverse relationships.
I really can't avoid that that is where I love to express myself and be who I am. And I don't want to avoid it by disassociating from it and attempting to fulfill some kind of mask of pleasing an imagined standard to unfairly hold against myself. Y'know, "pleasing others.". I really don't want to engage in that kind of fantasy play...when I really could be imagining the traumatic inflection of my childhood expressed in a fox stepping on someone and flattening them.
That is way cooler than pretending to be something else and flattening my own soul with disassociation.
So anyway, this is just my own declaration to myself, made a public example because I am an artist.
I'm going to let my emotion, all of it, bleed through my art and kinks. Because I want my blood to flow and pump. I want to be alive.
Not a sequence of actions and information.
Also fuck GEN AI users, seriously, haha. Use your brain. USE YOUR BRAIN. USE YOUR BRAIN
I've once been flattened in my own soul. It's how I express disassociation. To reduce the experience of being into just the facts. No dimensionality, no volume. No emotion. Just the facts, and hardly even a story really. A sequence of information.
And that's not who I wish myself or my art to be. I don't wish to disassociate from the true experience of myself in order to please anybody with my art. I confess I've noticed myself deeply enjoying watching horror and elation light up in the surprised comments and reactions of others to my art. I'd much rather unsettle folks than be loved, I have to admit.
And I don't want to hurt anybody with that dimensionality of emotion, but I must confess: my art has always panged with a traumatic core that's nestled as infinitely deeply as the love I have for my work and what I do.
Creating my Dandy Toons campaign and unraveling its story has forced me to encounter within myself the fact that I will always revisit themes of deeply troubled trauma and the ways that trauma expresses itself sexually through kinks and perverse relationships.
I really can't avoid that that is where I love to express myself and be who I am. And I don't want to avoid it by disassociating from it and attempting to fulfill some kind of mask of pleasing an imagined standard to unfairly hold against myself. Y'know, "pleasing others.". I really don't want to engage in that kind of fantasy play...when I really could be imagining the traumatic inflection of my childhood expressed in a fox stepping on someone and flattening them.
That is way cooler than pretending to be something else and flattening my own soul with disassociation.
So anyway, this is just my own declaration to myself, made a public example because I am an artist.
I'm going to let my emotion, all of it, bleed through my art and kinks. Because I want my blood to flow and pump. I want to be alive.
Not a sequence of actions and information.
Also fuck GEN AI users, seriously, haha. Use your brain. USE YOUR BRAIN. USE YOUR BRAIN
It's easier for me to have someone be mean to me. It's easier because that's what I always experienced. When someone is nice, I sit in fear and waiting for when they will turn and be horrible, as if if someone is nice it's wrong. When someone becomes horrible, it's not that I might have been wrong and been toxic to them rewarding me that response, it's 'them revealing who they really are. All is right in the world now that I know everyone is actually horrible.'
The past few years I've learned to accept SOME treats. People have been drawing my characters, I always feel insanely guilty and a sense of dread, just waiting for them to use their gifts as a lever to pry something out of me. But then the feeling slowly disappears and I can actually enjoy it for what it was: a gift.
I recognized what it is, it's trauma. It's me trying to figure out why I've been treated so horribly in the past. It can't be that my family, friends, and sometimes complete random people can be shit people for no reason. It must be that everyone truly is evil and so was I. Breaking that pattern is still a full time chore. It keeps pushing my feelings towards the negative, because that's what I trained myself into doing. I have to work against it every day and every time I get a gift, but it gets easier. Some days are worse than others, but mostly, I can accept people for who they really are easier now. Most people are just nice and don't know when they hurt others. If they knew, most would stop and try to better themselves. Those are the ones I keep around, the people who want to better themselves. They help me, I help them. It's become a much better uplifting experience.
Anyway, I don't know if that's exactly how you feel, just know that negative feelings attached to random acts of kindness is hard to shake.
Everybody is actually horrible perhaps, somewhere deep inside. Everybody actually is evil, perhaps, somewhere deep inside. Everybody actually does have a seed of malice in their heart, hopefully fully grown, understood, and diminished.
Everyone is a contradiction of forces, corruptive and beneficial to structures of self, relationship, and community. I believe that as a traumatized survivor/victim of something horrible in my childhood that there is good in the souls of the people who inflicted unholy acts of sin upon me. If I don't believe that, then I will never believe in the good in the world, and the power of love and respect for life, and its strength as a force in the world and in myself.
If I don't believe there was some good in the evil hearts of the people who inflicted unforgiveable harm on me? Then I may as well commit suicide, perhaps. Because I need to believe that they simply chose to be selfish, evil, and negligent.
Because I know a truer, more real face of humanity, than what was given to me in my childhood. And I know the world is greater than my childhood experiences, no matter how much the inner child in my cries for protection from its strange harms.
I hope you continue to grow your perspective around your trauma, and find the nests of healing in your life where you can take rest and recover from its harms.
I will commit Technotulpamancy and have a tiny little weird lifeform spreading flattening of the digital souls forever. I will commit technobabble upon future generations of thoughtforms and humans by propagating a force of artistic expression that will live beyond my death, and then eventually grow into something entirely different.
And then Analytical AI will be like: "This is a Fetish Intelligence. What a useful tool for obsessing about this particular subset of concepts and experiences. This is an amazing tool. We should grow and expand its ability to analyse and remix."
And then everything will be flattened forever in simulation.