lead balloon (the tumblr post that saved me)
if this comic resonated with you, it would mean the world to me if you donated to this palestinian family's escape fund.
--
no creative notes because this isn't that kind of comic.
I know I don’t owe any of you anything but I still felt compelled to write about my long term absence. And I feel far enough away from the dangerous spot I was in to be able to make this comic. I have a therapist now, and she agreed that making this could be a very cathartic gesture, and the start of properly leaving these thoughts behind me. I am still, at seemingly random times, blindsided by fleeting desires to kill myself. They’re always passing urges, but it’s disarming, and uncomfortable. I worry sometimes that my brain’s spent so long thinking only about suicide that it’s forgotten how to think about anything else. Like, now that I've opened that door for myself, I'll never be able to fully shut it again. But I’m trying my best to encourage my mind in other directions. We'll see how that goes.
I am still donating all proceeds from my store to Palestinian causes. So far, I've donated over $15K, not including donations coming from my own pocket or the fundraising streams which jointly raised around $10K. In the time since I made my initial post about where this money would be going, the focus has shifted from aid organisations to directly donating to escape funds.
If you'd like to do the same, you can look at Operation Olive Branch, which hosts hundreds of Palestinian escape funds or donate to Safebow, which has helped facilitate the safe crossing and securing of important medical procedures for over 150 at-risk palestinians since the beginning of the genocide.
23K notes
·
View notes
3 reasons I can think of, for why the first Three vestiges were too hard to find information on
[Reason 1]
The time they were born in.
Their births, and any records of them, could just be completely undocumented or non-existent.
They were born in times where systems and governments were down, and it's everyone for themselves.
People aren't going to register their existence, especially the Metas, when they all want to stay under the radar and hide from everyone else.
If you're in the middle of a war zone that spread to where you live, and your baby brother was just born, are you really going to go [Oh no! I have to register his birth for that sweet sweet child tax!]?
Or something like that. But still.
There are more important things, like survival, than registering a baby's birth and going through hospital paperwork. And it's been explicitly stated that the first appearance of Abilities caused a Great Depression all over Japan.
The government is gone. There's no point in registering anything anymore.
Yoichi was literally born at a riverside, and never went to a hospital. By the time the first Three are toddlers / young children, Japan is already chaos and up in flames.
Children are actively avoided because they're the most likely to be Meta Humans. No one wants anything to do with them.
Chances are, the records about the first Three never existed, or were destroyed in all the strife.
Or maybe, if some did exist, Kudo destroyed them. I can see him doing that, to protect themselves from AFO or anyone else having the chance to track their personal histories down.
It makes them ghosts. Exactly what would be best for not only their own survival, but anyone affiliated with them. Like family. It makes them untraceable, and invisible to bodies of old authority.
[Reason 2]
The three were a part of the Resistance. They could've kept information about themselves under lock and key, to protect themselves.
Like how Kudo is referred to as Leader, and never by his real name. Even in the void, up to the very end, Bruce still says "Leader" to address him.
I actually HC them as using codenames in the Resistance, exactly to protect themselves from each other, and outsiders. This makes Yoichi an anomaly among them, for going by his real name. Meanwhile,
Leader, Boss = their leader
Bruce = a reference to his Quirk
Codenames about their Meta Abilities, or roles in their cause, to better remember whose nickname belonged to who.
Outsiders won't know the Resistance members' real names. The Resistance can't betray each other by selling each other out for personal information as easily, if no one knows each other's actual names.
At the same time, this alienates them from who they are, and their humanity. They have to make tough choices that would classify them as monsters. And they're locking themselves under a false name.
They're protecting themselves from everything and everyone, including themselves. At least the person committing all these atrocities is [CODENAME], not me.
[Reason 3]
Bruce, when he was supposed to pass previous information to Shinomori, couldn't.
Maybe he didn't have enough time to tell Shinomori the whole story.
Or maybe he did, and passed on the previous holders' histories, but Shinomori didn't pass those on himself.
Or maybe reminiscing Yoichi and Leader as actual people just broke him, and he could only stick to the bare minimum of the history of this Factor.
Notably, the OFA story is known as "All For One's younger brother was sickly and frail, but he had a strong sense of justice."
We never, ever hear Yoichi's name in the spoken history of OFA. All Might couldn't even get their names. And since AFO hides himself so easily, and birth records just don't exist for him as an undocumented birth, Yoichi legally doesn't exist even as a birth.
Bruce is the first one to find the existence of Yoichi's "unformed dud". The Factor that let him pass on his current Quirk to others. How could the information of that dud be passed on, if not from Bruce?
Somewhere, the information breaks during Bruce or Shinomori's turn with OFA.
Bruce never passed on their names. Or maybe Shinomori didn't. But their names weren't necessary to pass on anymore. All Might only managed to dredge what he could, starting from the time society started trying to stand on its feet. Exactly because that's as far as the records went.
[Reason 2] could add credence to why the first Three's names were never passed on. Bruce could've kept quiet about Yoichi and Leader's personal details, not just to help himself stay together, but to protect anything they might've left behind.
113 notes
·
View notes