Whens Your Bf Is Off To Build A Doom Device With Someone Who Wants Him Dead So You Got To Cuddle The

Jayce: omg dude we were so drunk last night! (had 1 mimosa)

Viktor: yeah (was sober)

??????

Hey!! What would Jazz look like as a ghost in your style?

I haven't thought about it yet but I drew a Jazz Phantom.

same coin different side

I, and I, and I--

having spoilery thoughts about The Archive Undying in the context of that post that someday the queer couple that says "let's fuck it all and run away together!" should actually do it:

Sunai and Veyadi don't actually run away but I do think that's what emotionally/ethically happened in the last quarter or so of the book?

Sunai's initial motivation was to prevent the totalitarian state from getting to keep an enforcer mecha to oppress his home city. Made perfect sense. Despite the emotional upheavals and betrayals and murders, that kept being true pretty much up until the Maw eats him. We learn that the Passenger trying to help him do this is the same entity that has caused Corruption aka the deaths of AIs who became tyrants.

And there's a whole ethical quandary there bc the AIs who died were tyrants and Iterate Fractal ate people and there should be some force that can stop even gods. But also the Passenger killed these AI in ways that led to the deaths of millions of people and left their corpses as weapons that could be used by the Harbor and left their remnants as hungry scavengers who kill people.

And so as various characters align with/against the Passenger I am just lost on how I should feel. It's cause is noble in abstract! It's methods cause great suffering! It's unclear why the Passenger cares about killing the Maw at this point given that it is no longer controlling a large group of people. Perhaps it is just that Sunai asks and Veyadi asks and Ruhi asks and the Passenger always answers when people ask because that is it's purpose.

And then Sunai is one with the Maw, who is a remnant of Iterate Fractal and that larger plot goes out the window. His friends want to separate them or mercy kill him or kill the Maw with him as collateral damage. He can't be separated from the Maw, who had always wanted him as their conscience and thus horribly abused him his whole life. Veyadi, on realizing that they can't be separated decides he wants to protect Sunai more than he wants to kill the Maw. They fight the Passenger and Ruhi, who remains laser fixated on the larger cause.

And that's the point where the pair of them decide to leave and they leave. Sure, the Passenger might be the only force capable of protecting humans from tyrant AIs. But they no longer care about that compared to the fight to live and get to be together. They imprison it and Ruhi (and, if I understand correctly, entomb Ruhi alive in eternal torment??) to prevent it from ever trying to kill them again. They survive together. The End.

And, well. The gays sure did run away from their problems together for once! but boy howdy was I unsure of how to feel about that final arc.

I got sick, my brain is boiled

Been real busy with work and school lately, but I wanted to document the progress of what will be my semester-long project for my comics class 💜

I maybe didn't prepare a story ahead of time and need to do at least 10 pages, so I decided to adapt the first chaper of The Archive Undying by Emma Mieko Candon (@/emcandon)!

I also haven't had a dedicated drawing area set up in forever, so it's kind of nostalgic to be drawing like this. Anyways! This is my first take on Sunai (MC) and Veyadi; I don't have a ton of time to work on their designs so I don't get to tweak them to death and back, but they're close enough to my mental image for now. Some earlier sketches and illegible thumbnails beneath the cut!

glowing green eyes

"AI symbiote deeply respectful of its hosts autonomy and thus, though wishing he desired differently, doing everything it can to arrange the world to enable his martyr complex, profoundly annoyed by this presumptuous asshole who keeps stopping him from getting himself killed" is actually an amazing character concept