pluralthey

[pluralthey]

i have spent waaaayyyy too long on this strip. just take it.

David and Christie are both siblings in the Antrewson family and rhealeah is pronounced (ray-uh-lay-uh).

glossary:

clinging to your chorion - chorion is the outermost layer of an insect egg. essentially, clinging to the eggshell, refusing to be an adult independent of your parents. can be likened to weaning off the teat, idiomatically.

hemo - arthropod circulatory systems transfer nutrients and oxygen through a fluid called hemolymph rather than blood. they will casually refer to it in conversation as "hemo." they will also refer to it as blood sometimes. sapphira is a maintenance custodian at a hotel, meaning she fixes things, and also cleans up things that aren't dealt with by housekeeping. she's basically saying there will be so much bug blood her employer will pay her to clean it up. as the general custodian.

outie - vertebrates sometimes refer to arthropods as "outies," because their "skeletons" are on the outside, and arthropods can call vertebrates "innies," because their chitin is on the inside of their bodies. vertebrates can also refer to arthropods as exos, chitters, arthros, legs (referring to a single arthropod as "a leg") and they do still sometimes say invertebrates. "invertebrate" inherently centers vertebrae as the default, and arthropods usually refer to their group as "chitinoids," whereas vertebrates are "cryptochitinoids," creatures whose "chitin" is hidden (much like how we refer to it as an exoskeleton even though it isn't a skeleton). they may call vertebrates spinos, backies, skellas, softies, tochos, and other equally stupid names. (A/N: velvet worms, the only Stood Up animal that does not have a skeleton or a chitinous exoskeleton, will refer to both groups with all of these terms, but they generally consider themselves "basically arthropods")

touch tens - touch antennae. ants (and some other social insects, but especially ants) communicate through touching antennae. an idiom that means to initiate communication with someone. equivalent to getting in touch, touch base, drop a line. over time, through the process of deletion, it has been reduced to "touch tens," which was then interpreted as, literally, touch the number tens. any animal can use this idiom, but it is infinitely more common for insects to use it. when other kinds of animals use it, it's sort of like the level of someone who says "it's a doggy dog world." sometimes it will also be said as "touch tennies," as the "ae" in "antennae" mutated into "ie." however, because ten is a widely recognized word, and it kinda-sorta makes sense to the general population as The Number Ten, "touch tens" is the common form of this idiom.

tiff out - touch-sniff out. insects use their antennae for many senses. they touch with them, but they also smell with them. insects with more sensitive olfactory senses will often call smelling tiffing. in this case, it's being used idiomatically to mean tracking someone down. however, because samwich could tell sapphira was being vague with her question to not give any more personal information away to her coworkers, they answered it in an ambiguous way. to the coworkers, it was interpreted in a different idiomatic sense meaning, to identify someone and their intentions or true character. equivalent to reading someone like a book. ants identify each other through this touch smelling, and when they say they're tiffing someone (out), they can also mean it in this "deeper intimate understanding" way, instead of just using smell to find someone physically.

[pluralthey]

Designed one of Samwich's 100 siblings... Also the sibling's car... Also the logo for TTZ...

[pluralthey]

Designed one of Samwich's 100 siblings... Also the sibling's car... Also the logo for TTZ...

[pluralthey]

i have approximately worked out how arachnids look in idletry after a lot of thinking about it. i kind of needed to do it because i need more arthropods to fill backgrounds, and i wanted to write a little bit about why spiders look so different from insects when a lot of people see them as basically the same thing: bugs.

to be clear, though, i have had a strong idea of what arachnids should look like in idletry for a long time.

just didn't really know how to deal with that last pair of legs.

i will probably eventually post about bats and pterosaurs, which would also be very easy to stylize similarly, but i wanted to make them very visibly different. another type of animal i really haven't figured out how to work with yet is frogs. i may end up stylizing them in a way similar to kangaroos.

[pluralthey]

pride icon for this year (also i just really needed a new icon drawing of jessie)

[pluralthey]

Fate opening pin feathers on Avery as teenagers in the lesbians doing makeup meme format. They are butch so they couldn't do makeup.

[pluralthey]

i have approximately worked out how arachnids look in idletry after a lot of thinking about it. i kind of needed to do it because i need more arthropods to fill backgrounds, and i wanted to write a little bit about why spiders look so different from insects when a lot of people see them as basically the same thing: bugs.

to be clear, though, i have had a strong idea of what arachnids should look like in idletry for a long time.

just didn't really know how to deal with that last pair of legs.

i will probably eventually post about bats and pterosaurs, which would also be very easy to stylize similarly, but i wanted to make them very visibly different. another type of animal i really haven't figured out how to work with yet is frogs. i may end up stylizing them in a way similar to kangaroos.

[pluralthey]

after accidentally hooking a couple of scenes together with match cuts, i decided to run with it and match cut every scene into the next. wanted to post a few of the match cut transitions.

[pluralthey]

idletry is 2 years old now.

in theological philosophical discourse, the "paradox of omnipotence" reaches its terminal velocity at a change of definition from "all-powerful" to "maximally powerful" -- usually defined as able to do anything possible. this resolves the "can God make a rock so big even God can't lift it" issue at the cost of a lot of ground in the argument.

but i'm not typing this to talk about that. idletry is confined to a fictional story, and jessie's powers are that of an author. authors are allowed to not make sense or comport with possible reality, because they are exercising power in a non-reality: fiction. i wanted to really explore and lean into this big difference between a biblical, immanent god, and a fictional god of a fictional world, especially on axes where jessie's power surpasses a biblical god's capabilities. anyway 1+1=1 now.

also the bugs are a figwort sawfly and their larva. do not ask me how pupation happens, i know it would be funny for a couple jokes but i've decided that all insects are hemimetabolous and liberties would be taken with their biology to bridge the gap.

[pluralthey]

posted this on patreon a few days ago, but i wanted to animate jessie so that the color-changing was visible and i think most people imagine it like this, which is reasonable.

but i imagine it more like this:

clearly lacking polish (extra tweens) but made my hand hurt to draw all at once anyway. tried to make the color shifting as easy on the eyes as possible while not betraying the coloring style by making it pastel.

[pluralthey]

"already dead" doodle of avery in opisthotonic death pose while alive

[pluralthey]

hey you are backing up your project on external drives rite?

only the cloud, chief. if my house burns down the external i'm storing in it is going down with this one, cloud isn't. if my one hard drive goes down then i just transfer the latest backup to the new one. usually backed up every month or so. it would suck to lose a month of work but i stream everything i draw so i would have to rehabilitate the art from screenshots of the stream at worst. most of it is cross-posted via other platforms as zip files or the actual art in some capacity as well.

[pluralthey]

I think you mentioned that Jesse snapped a personality change into her parents, what was that exactly & why not in Emily as well?

Also, on a very different note, I remember you mentioning in an old sketch that Dawn’s job is something you want to approach sensitively (they were getting blood work done iirc). I don’t know if you ever mentioned what their job was but would you be open to sharing?

She snaps both of her parents to support her actions unconditionally.

Emily isn't there at the time as she starts avoiding Jessie as much as possible. She is usually either crashing at the place of her new partner who later gets her pregnant, at work, or, in the case of that scene, taking really long walks with Trouble to stay out of the house where Jessie might visit.

Jessie also doesn't care about her sister's approval as much as her parents' and her sister didn't try to interfere with her new hobby of smiting people.

Also genuinely do not remember, I thought Dawn was unemployed due to illness.

[pluralthey]

If Jessie snaps someone to do something they don't want to do enough times, does it eventually lead to a cumulative personality shift? It seems like the more you want to resist following her commands, the more destructive they'd be, because more of you would have to be changed by the snap for you to be willing to follow them? If she snaps someone to do something that would require such a big personality/ideology shift for that person to rationalize as their own decision that the person would be unrecognizable after the snap, do they now count as being written by her? Or do most snaps, even ones making big changes to a person, only really affect how they view the specific subject of her snap and not really affect the rest of the person's psychology, worldview, personality, opinions, even if that ends up making that person's inner world and thought processes a lot more contradictory?

Generally people will know when Jessie has snapped them to do something because she is not so passive and would want to assert dominance openly. If she did, for some reason, then they could either write the behavior off as circumstantial or deny it even happened before changing significantly. These are defense mechanisms average people use every day. People at large may even rapidly develop the "a wizard did it" response knowing Jessie CAN and does randomly change people/force them to do things and blame her for anything they don't want to suffer consequences for like how one one may blame actions or feelings on demon possession. They would probably just become more contradictory.

Jessie would (and does) most successfully change other characters' psychological landscape by changing how they feel or think more than what they do, since actions are caused by inner motivators. Just directly changing their psychology.

That said, yes, she could change a character by making them do something like murder someone every Friday night. They would probably naturally become more paranoid because they know they will eventually be caught and there's nothing they can do, etc. But their fundamental ideology is unlikely to change without direct meddling. The schemata people develop in their minds are reinforced from multiple angles and it's why you can in real time see people pulling out excuse after excuse in an argument — even if you can disprove one point of rationale, there are others already ready to pick up the slack. Generally studies have shown people have the emotional reaction behind a belief first, and then they will use logic to rationalize that emotional belief afterwards. It is very difficult to change people ideologically entirely because even if you peeled away every justification, at their cores, the beliefs are still irrational emotional reactions. Hence why changing an emotional reaction will be more reliable in causing personality changes in a character.

For the most part, the characters aren't changed enough to count as "written by Jessie." She really is only forced to write them if the character's inner framework has literally no way to output a comprehensible response. Like no way for the character's original personality to even respond to it — more easily accomplished by replacing a large part of their personality instead. Then the original personality can't react because it doesn't exist anymore. Anything bizarre, traumatic, extreme enough to cause a person to just entirely shut down psychologically would force Jessie to write them to be able to interact with them further.

But yeah. Most snaps forcing people to do something or changing any part of their psychological landscape are done in plain sight, reactively, and there is no necessary rationale besides "Jessie forced me to do that," desire to Not Do That aside.

[pluralthey]

the sky in idletry changes color constantly. i got to asking myself: what do sunsets look like in the idletry setting, then?

a few stabs at more unconventional colors for sunsets (and one sunrise). i did them with jessie and shiloh in the more tender parts of their relationship because sunsets are generally considered romantic.

[pluralthey]

do you use programs besides word documents for planning out your stories? :o starting a project of my own made me realize word documents aren’t exactly suited for branching out plot points from multiple directions and I’d love to know what your process is! especially if you use anything visually based

scrivener. shelled out for it when i started writing idletry due to the project's size. my first draft file looked like this

.....i did not realize the scene in focus was a sex scene until now. i guess i will leave it because it's mostly jokes.

scrivener has nested documents with subdocuments that i found very useful. there are folders in addition to this.

there is also a different mode called the corkboard where you can move notecards around.

there are multiple visual modes for working on the corkboard, but i used the mode that allows you to move the notecards anywhere.

all of the options in the binder are green because i used the labels for the scenes to make it that way. red meant completely not done, orange meant outlined or summarized, yellow meant somewhat done, dull green meant fully written, and bright green meant cleaned up for the beta readers and copy pasted into the document (or not, since i apparently forgot like. 5 scenes.) but since my first draft is finished, they're all just bright green here. that's not the default look for scrivener.

anyway i hope that communicates what level of visual scrivener is. i've used libreoffice for other projects.

this is what my game document looks like. i did not have scrivener at the time. i would probably switch to it if i ever picked up the game idea again.

[pluralthey]

i know it would necessitate a hefty content warning - but i would love if you eventually crossposted “transition of power” here from your comic archive! it’s probably my favorite folie a dupe strip, and i routinely come back to it. it’s totally cool if you don’t feel comfortable with it either though. thanks and have a great one <3

sure. it is a defining point in my own life, but i didn't really think it left an impression on anyone else. the more a strip ages (or the older the actual events become), the more vulnerable it is, i think... it's a time in my life when i didn't really understand a lot of what was happening to me or what happened happened to me, or why. mostly though, yeah, i don't like fussing about whether i delivered content warnings the right way or not, and transition of power is definitely one of the more triggering comics.

content warning for graphic depictions of self harm, overdosing, suicide, needles, blood, smoking, drinking, vomiting, i think that covers the big stuff. this is a big comic and will need a reblogged addition to fit all of the panels.