CC: Your frankie/mac art captures everything I want in life, do you have any sources of inspiration for your /ss/ stuff or do you just go off the cuff with it? The body language in it is so good so I'm curious
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Oh, thank you! I don't get to talk about my inspirations very often, especially not to an audience that is receptive to it! I definitely pull from a lot of sources but the main one is how I process the world around me.
While I don't believe in the "needing trauma to explore dark themes" bullshit, I'd be lying if I said my art wasn't influenced by trauma. But at the end of the day, isn't everyone's work influenced by their own subjective experiences? That's just how humans work! My life is full of predominantly trauma that is still ongoing!
I try not to talk about it anymore because I don't want to come off like I'm justifying my work as different or more morally acceptable than any one else's, but it is a fact that if it weren't for my trauma, I don't even know if I'd feel compelled to draw what I do otherwise. I'm sick to death of people saying that I use trauma to justify my art because I don't, I use trauma to explain my art. My justification is it's fiction who fucking cares when there's no tangible harm.
So for inspirations...
Art for me is a very deeply personal area of self expression. I don't have a very positive view of the world and other humans. Since I was a small child, I was exposed to a lot of horrors I couldn't face and never knew what to do with or how to cope with them. I experienced conflicting emotions from someone offering love but also harming me deeply, watching people saying they were doing the right thing while hurting others, people justifying cruelty through their own hurt but thinking what they do is right and correct... these are polar opposite experiences that I could never make sense of or integrate in my brain. I felt a need to express this confusion and pain outwardly to feel seen and heard and so it made its way into my art.
I enjoy using fantasy taboo relationships as stand-ins for these types of contradictions that come with human nature. My difficulty in making sense of others and why they do the awful things they do never improved as I aged, and so the desperate need to pour these confusing experiences and contradictions into fiction that come from one's intent/words and behaviors/actions not aligning therapeutic for me.
Once upon a time, I desperately sought love and closeness and touch, and now I cannot receive it without feeling immense pain and fear and disgust that leaves me cowering under tables sobbing. Unable to reconcile this, I just avoid relationships all together in my real life. I try to figure out what these conflicting behaviors mean in fiction that led to me, an adult, still dealing with this to this day.
I love /ss/ because I had a mother figure who was both emotionally unavailable and unstable due to mental illness who would harm me deeply, but also deeply loved me and the harm was not always in her conscious control. These things were difficult for me as a child. It was different than the harm that came from those who abused me without remorse. Though funnily enough, while I love older woman/shota ships, I prefer the older woman to not be a biological mother but a mother figure, and the younger character to be a shota and not a loli. Perhaps because then it starts to hit too close to home, so even I have nuances in what triggers me. It's a fine line that I can walk safely because I know what is retraumatizing and what is healing.
There's something deeply cathartic in having a character, esp a character representing the concept of childhood, be in a situation that is wrong. But unlike my real experiences, it can be comforting in this fictional setting and turn out OK and ultimately be what the two characters need. Same with the older party or the one with the perceived power committing a taboo act and doing something that everyone around you would consider you horrible for but in actuality is helping and providing comfort (say, Frankie's relationship with Mac). It's about challenging societal expectations, what is and isn't traumatic by nature, and the nuances of why it's different than what we are anticipating.
Almost all my /ss/ ships sort of fall into that category. I don't see myself as one character or the other. I do not ever put myself into these scenarios because I do not desire them, but I do like mirroring feelings through the characters. In fact I flip between exploring how it may feel to be both characters. What is it like to be the kid seeking comfort and how would this play out differently from my reality? What is it like being the one to give the comfort to figure out what this younger character's needs are. Sometimes I imagine what it feels like to be the shitty character feeling guilt to make sense of those who hurt me, and how their brains may work. But also sometimes I enjoy the fantasy of the shota needing comfort and doesn't feel harmed by this taboo committed by the older woman to soothe the kid part of me that is still hurt. Trauma that is permanent, that meds and therapy cannot fix, it's like throwing these pained parts a bone to chew on so they don't act out. It's a little bubble of fantasy. Everything is completely in my control.
I started creating the art I did after I became horribly ill and was bedridden for months and abandoned by most people around me. At the time I did not foresee myself getting better so the consequences of how people would treat me if this art got out was not on my mind. I only got better due to a stroke of luck, and that trauma was a turning point for me to where I needed to just draw whatever, regardless of whether it made me relevant to an industry that doesn't value people like me. The more people abused and punished me for needing to express myself through this art, the more I needed to draw it to put these feelings SOMEWHERE because the more it dug up my traumatized kid parts. I dug into making this art so I could soothe myself and not inflict harm upon myself. But I also have just found I enjoy immersing myself in the weird, niche queer indie creator communities more than mainstream, I feel like I've made some of my closest friends by being myself, and I feel like I can truly live as myself when before working in animation I felt like I was creating under the expectation of what we are supposed to think other's want via the word of corporations, and not what I truly needed.
It's been deeply healing to create characters who think they are good people but aren't, like the ones who hurt me, or who know they aren't good people but are somehow actually doing something that the other party in the relationship needs, despite how it'll be viewed by those outside.
Along with that, I sometimes just get plain joy in jerking off to fucked up concepts because I can! I enjoy exploring fucky dynamics as an exercise in empathy or understanding situations that are beyond my scope and understanding.
A lot of my harder kinks that I jerk off to don't make it into my ship content. My ship content is primarily emotional processing, I actually cannot get off to most of my ships. I need to pull up some hentai of random characters to accomplish that. Meanwhile there's another side of me that just likes to see things mauled and mutilated to feel catharsis that the way I was mauled and mutilated as a kid makes me less alone. And also I get off to it in fantasy despite finding real life abuse horrific. It makes me wonder about how it may relate to concepts like cute aggression.
That's just how the human brain works, it's an odd and messy thing! These are sides of me that horrify people but sides of me that have existed since I was a child as young as 5 due to my own abuse. I always wanted to see cute cartoons be hurt and it never went away. On the flipside, I do enjoy seeing one side of my ship being hurt by an outside force, and then being healed by the other side of my ship, but otherwise I don't enjoy outright abuse in my own ships. I enjoy the messiness of more realistic subtle explorations of a dynamic.
Ultimately I'm inspired by emotions and the way the world around me makes me feel, both in how I am treated and how others treat each other. I don't pull much inspiration from mainstream media outside maybe being influenced by art style here and there, or latching onto these characters and wanting to play with them because I feel other people create work that touches on these concepts but will not fully immerse in them. A lot of people think my art is awful because i'm an adult with these sick twisted fantasies, but no, this was the child in me that felt this way and needed a way to get it out. I had been writing fucky fiction like this since I was, what, 8? Weird, gross, abusive fiction. I was shipping elricest at 12, this is just integral to my processing of the world. I think my refusal to avoid these things made me a better person.
I always wanted to see more stories with abused kids when I was a kid. Of course my art isn't for kids, and my nsfw work never will be. But this is the art that was born from the brain of an abused kid. Thoughts and feelings and disgusting perverted impulses that were there when I was a child. People don't want to view kids this way because it scares them but I was a hypersexual abused kid who had fantasies about being intimate with older women, one of those was my 3rd grade teacher who was a woman. As an adult I am gray-asexual and cannot form romantic attachments to my knowledge, at least with where I am right now in my life. That's where my inspiration comes from.
In the same way, I notice a lot of men who like /ss/ like to project onto the shota because they liked the fantasy of an older woman, but I think their reasons tend to be very different from mine as an abused queer with dissociative disorders and cPTSD. That's why my /ss/ art may be regarded differently than most out there? Which is meant to be horny fodder. However, I've seen many men say my work made them feel catharsis so clearly there are plenty who feel similarly to me. Maybe some who are impacted by this work who do not even have trauma because fiction is amazing like that!
I do have a handful of media influences but it's definitely up for debate how much they influence my /ss/ art if at all.