hazelmonroe

[hazelmonroe]

yeah same

[hazelmonroe]

The Broken TVs Car

(from this post. listened to a lot of loops of Naiad by Ada Rook while drawing this)

[hazelmonroe]

The Beehive Car

(from this post)

[hazelmonroe]

The Sumi-e Car

(from this post)

[hazelmonroe]

Learning curve

[hazelmonroe]

Skate park shenanigans

(I thought it would be fun to draw them at various ages from about 13/14 to 16, hence why they look different from one pic to the next. Grace tends to extend her arms like a ballerina even when she's rollerskating. Simon tends to fall and hurt himself more often if Grace is watching him lol)

[hazelmonroe]

Two months ago I wanted to comment on trauma-express' excellent post about the more or less one-way emotional support dynamic between Grace and Simon, but then I realised that it wasn't polite to hijack a post, and that I had far too much to say about these two idiots. And by the time I decided to make my own post, the thing had turned into a fucking essay. Then the essay developed branches and turned into a mini-thesis on the main characters of Book 3. At this point the thing is like 20 pages long, so I’m going to divide it between several posts because it’s going to be unreadable otherwise. I don't know when I'll post the other parts. but yeah

So here's a part I'd like to call

On the nature of leadership

Grace and Simon have fundamentally different ways of seeing what it means to "be the leader", and each is, in my opinion, a direct consequence of their stubbornness in developing their toxic traits and defining themselves by their problems rather than solving them. And each is also visible very early on in Book 3, way before everything starts going completely awry

Grace obviously cares about all these lost children. But given her behaviour in Book 2 and throughout the first episode of Book 3, I think her central problem, this lack of affection and recognition that makes her do anything to get attention, has led her to conflate "attention" with "affection". For her, being the leader means being admired, being the centre of attention, having total control over other people, and never, ever being neglected.

To be admired, and therefore in her logic, loved, she quickly discovered that the easiest way was to lie, consciously or not, so as to appear to always know what she was doing, and to always look like the one who is right and who knows how things work. She built an entire cult out of it, and it seems to be almost by accident! It was simply the most effective way to get attention, to be surrounded by a lot of people, and to have total control over them.

It clearly puts a massive amount of pressure on her. It’s no coincidence if that golden mask is a recurring motif with her - she’s constantly trying to keep the illusion intact, and in turn, it prevents her from examining her own issues too closely. We literally know her by that mask before we even know her face or her name in Book 2. It defines her, and it defines her vision of what she has to do as a leader.

And we see in episode 4 that it makes it really hard for her to talk about how she really feels, because she’s afraid people won’t see her as the leader anymore, and by her own logic, neglect her. She's genuinely scared to show any kind of vulnerability, even for only a couple of minutes, and even if it's only to her best friend. It breaks my heart

By contrast, among the Apex, Simon is clearly less popular than Grace, judging by Lucy's attitude in episode 1. I'm under the impression they go to Grace first when they have a question or need something, and don't interact directly with Simon that much. He's not interested in being admired or popular, it seems.

Instead, he clearly has an interest in anything resembling rule systems (he quotes protocols regularly and episode 2 implies that he writes a lot of them) and pseudo-militaristic structures - he too wants to feel like he's in control of everything, but in a very different way. He wants to follow the rules, and he wants to be right because he's following them.

My guess is that his central problem, this need to be right all the time, was fully validated when Grace was the leader, so he didn't actively want to take her place. For him, the leader is the one who is always right, and who doesn't break the rules. And she was exactly that person for him, so he didn’t mind her being the boss – if anything, he liked it because he didn’t have to make choices, something that clearly stresses him out.

When you're insecure and under the impression (regardless of it being correct or not) that you're in perpetual survival mode, following strict rules and having someone else who calls the shots for you according to the same rules feels really safe. It feels validating, too. I've been there. I mean just look at his stupid smirk whenever Grace confirms he's right about something

So basically in one corner we have someone who thinks being a leader is being admired, and who does that by pretending she knows how everything works and that she's always right - and in the other corner, we have someone who thinks being a leader is, in fact, being always right, and who admires anyone who he perceives to be like that.

The thing is, because they both seek validation in these two completely complementary ways, they created another negative feedback loop (I’ve talked about the cycle of abuse they both perpetuate in this other post) that was slowly but surely turning them into the worst possible versions of themselves

[hazelmonroe]

i looove book 3 guys oh grace you will always be famous

[hazelmonroe]

all of infinity train now on the IA

[hazelmonroe]

from jan

[hazelmonroe]

Grace Monroe from Infinity Train

Rubric

[hazelmonroe]

I'll never get over the Book 3 promo art that makes it look like a wacky sitcom (credit/links under readmore)

1st pic/2nd pic

3rd pic/4th pic

5th pic/6th pic was taken down, drawn by Kellye Perdue

[hazelmonroe]

one-one and caine parallels are kinda similar if you think about it

[hazelmonroe]

"Ghost in the Wind"

Can anyone hear me now?

[hazelmonroe]

was doodling stuff about 13 y.o Grace and Simon finding random items lost by former passengers. drew the cd player I had as a teenager. then a very old Evanescence song came up on shuffle and I just HAD to draw the resulting mental picture because it was too funny to ignore

[hazelmonroe]

guess who remembered infinity train on 2025 <3

[hazelmonroe]

some very old doodles