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.
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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.
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i accepted im not finishing the timkon vday fic today and instead launched into yet another new wip instead. i present to you: a snippet of kon vs his deeply repressed medical trauma, featuring core four and what is gonna be some gratuitous kon & clark fambly focus...
The voices are still talking, too loud and too fast to understand. Kon tries to breathe harder, his heart racing—the beeping doesn’t help—and looks around frantically. Where’s the exit? He just came through a door, but he doesn’t know where it went—
A gloved hand settles on his arm, and a cold wipe that smells of alcohol scrubs over his skin. Kon tilts his head to see what’s happening.
A needle glints in the doctor’s other hand. They’re prepping his arm for intravenous injection.
“NO!” He jerks away, terror flaring through his stomach. It’s so poignant it almost drowns out the agony. His TTK flares, too, and the doctor and the needle in their hand fly across the room, far away. A flash of light and a person with chestnut hair catches them, so they’re not hurt.
Good. Kon didn’t mean to hurt anyone. He just—he just wants them to stay away.
He’s safe for the moment. Kon sobs for breath—
“Kon!” The person from before, the one lying and saying it’d be okay, appears again. They grab Kon’s hand and squeeze it. “Kon, she was only trying to help! You’re safe, I swear—”
Kon jerks away. “Don’t—don’t lie to me—” he manages. He needs to get up. He needs to get out of here. He needs… he needs…
When he tries to sit up, pure agony lances through his entire body. It radiates out from his gut and spears up through his chest like lightning, so sharp he can’t breathe and stars sparkle across his blurry vision.
What did they do to him?!
He isn’t safe here, he needs to get out of here! It’s only gonna get worse the longer he stays; they’ll get another doctor, another needle—he has to sit up, he needs to move—
Strong hands clamp onto his shoulders and hold him down. Despite all his strength, they hold him down. Kon cries out, a new wave of ice-cold terror spearing through him. “No! No, no let me go!”
“Cassie, you’re scaring him!” the other voice says, tugging at the new person’s wrists, completely ineffectively. “We need to calm him down, not—"
The new person, Cassie, ignores them. “Kon, listen to me.”
Kon shakes his head, terrified. “No no no no no!”
“Kon, you can’t hurt the doctors. They’re trying to help, okay? You’re badly hurt, and they’re trying to help, but you need to let them do their jobs!”
Another person in surgical scrubs approaches. Kon barely hears what they say over all the roaring in his ears, but it doesn’t matter. He knows how Cadmus operates.
“…you restrain him until we can administer anesthesia?” he overhears. It’s enough. He hyperventilates, sobs for breath, shoves ineffectively at the strong arms holding him down. Desperate, he shoves at Cassie with TTK. Thankfully, that has some effect: she yelps as he shoves himself a few inches off the bed, but then sharp, white-hot pain sears through his entire body, and his vision blacks out.
When he comes to, Cassie is over him again, and—and—
Glowing, golden ropes wind tight around his shoulders, his wrists, his thighs, his legs. He’s completely pinned to the bed. One end of the ropes is wrapped around Cassie’s hands.
He can’t move.
He can’t escape.
No. No no no no this can’t happen again, they’re going to hurt him and he needs to get out but he can’t—he can’t—oh, god, this is happening again and he’s just gonna have to take it, and—and it already hurts so much, he can’t take it—
Kon chokes on another sob. “Please,” he begs. “Please please please please—”
Cassie looks anguished. “I’m sorry, Kon,” she says, but she’s not sorry enough to let him go, so it doesn’t matter. “It’s for your own good, I swear.”
He can’t move. He can’t move and it hurts and he can’t move and it hurts and no matter how hard he struggles, he’s pinned, and it hurts it hurts it hurts so so so bad, and oh, god, he’s trapped. He’s trapped, he can’t—he can’t—
Terrified, Kon does the only thing he can think of.
“SUPERMAN!” he screams. “Kal! Kal-El! Please, please—help me, help me, don’t—don’t let them do this to me again, Kal, Kal—”
There’s a pinch in his arm.
The needle.
Kon falls silent.
It’s… it’s really happening again, isn’t it? No matter how much he fights and screams and pleads. They’re gonna cut him open and hurt him and put him back in the tube. They’re gonna make him just another slab of tissue. An experiment and not a person. It’s happening again. And he can’t stop it. He can’t escape.
He can’t escape.
His chest hurts. A single tear rolls down the side of his face into his hair.
The door slams open. Kon’s gaze snaps over.
“What is going on here?”
Superman stands in the doorway, resplendent in all his glory. He’s an even more welcome sight than the sun, and even though Kon can’t move thanks to the golden ropes, he whimpers, fingers twitching as he yearns to reach for him.
He looks furious.
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is there any death in the rewrite that you consider to be really graphic? where do you draw the line in the violence of a character's death?
Hmmm... Probably Tigerstar honestly! The cats wrote a song about his organs falling out.
I think when it comes to the "line" of a character's death, it's very subjective. Me and every other kid who read WC pogged out when Tigerstar had a really drawn out, horrific death on-screen, but I'm still haunted by Sootfur with his broken leg, falling down towards a badger while Squilf couldn't save him and seeing the aftermath of his "sightless eyes" when the animal moved off him.
One of those was objectively less graphic, but imo a LOT more harrowing. I think emotions are a lot more important in how deaths are received by an audience than the actual blood and guts, which I think gives you a decent idea of what you're gonna get here.
I think Leopardstar's rock concert is the "ceiling" of how intensely I describe deaths. I think that one's pretty graphic, but it's for a reason. The point is that it's a brutal killing that haunts Mistystar, you get me? And I try to write "around" the gore, describing sounds, the rest of the body, etc.
There is also cosmic/body horror with the Ancestor Rats, and more importantly, BB!Cats do food processing. They skin dead animals and separate the organs and such. When I get around to doing an entry on animal fat, I would also like to show WHERE in the body the fat is stored on certain animals. It's a lot more important to nutrition than you think it is.
BUT whenever I feel like I'm "around" Leopardstar's Boulder Appointment or an Ancestor Rat, I always always tag that. Less "violent" things like the song about the organs (Tiger's In A Heap) and more gentle food processing (like an offhanded mention of removing entrails or skinning) isn't tagged.
If I ever end up including a "diagram" of where fat is stored in the body or "how to properly skin a small rodent" It will be tagged as gore and I'd try to stay tasteful to begin with, I would ABSOLUTELY never drop something like that on anyone untagged and unwarned.
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