crystal chimera
bewildering being of bites
pointedly plural
Horn, claw, fang and feather, spinning in maelstroms of shadow and dance
The official post-Cohost permanent URL for this piece is https://irenes.space/leaves/2024-09-29-inscrutable
we say that line a lot, along with "our mandate also includes weird bugs"
we would like people to know what we're referencing :)
those characters were amazing role models for a young autistic plural system, so much so that even the gender stuff was bearable
My partner jokes that my superpower is to always have a relevant Calvin and Hobbes strip available for every situation. I'm glad I'm not the only one who reflexively references Calvin and Hobbes. 💖
Calvin is "egg" material, surely. adopting a reflexive posture of ostentatious hypermasculinity, with all that Spaceman Spiff / Tracer Bullet stuff? going into comical excesses of disgust for girls that his own imaginary friend doesn't actually agree with? (Hobbes is always undercutting the G.R.O.S.S. nonsense) I can almost believe the "Calvin = 'Jack' from Fight Club" theory ~Chara
this has always been my feeling towards the gender stuff in calvin and hobbes too. we remember behaving in a similar way when we realized we werent "supposed" to want to be a girl
it makes sense to me. I find myself thinking about how the only models of masculinity we ever developed fondness for, in pre-transitional days, were on the outer edges of respectability—often people who were catastrophically out of place in modern society. we had our own Tracer-Bullet-ish fondness for the old-fashioned gumshoe, a character type who was a cultural joke by the 1980s. you'd think we'd have noticed how little we actually identified with the usual sort of male audience-identification character in popular entertainment but nope ~Chara
thinking about it more, you know.... yeah, this was what was going on for us. thank you! that's really neat to have talked about <3
oh! super. gosh, we actually said something cogent for once ~Chara
lots of stuff you say is awesome and well worth saying! it's just we've often already kind of gone done the route of whatever it is, meaning we don't have much to add. we always enjoy seeing your thoughts though!
that's something we've reflected on sometimes—the probability that when we feel moved to write about some insight, we're late to the party (so to speak) and lots of people have gotten there before us. I suppose we're trying to get better at guessing when we're really treading new ground ~Chara
Oh gosh, I miss seeing that comic strip in the papers every day. Younger me adored it...
we saw the final strip in the paper while on vacation at a relative's house - it came out on Christmas day. we were heartbroken. eventually we came to understand that nothing lasts forever and that Watterson had said the things he had to say and didn't want his creative vision to be compromised by commercialism. the profound influence the strip had on comics more generally makes it obvious he was right to do that... it was just hard.
i really like it when calvin does stuff like this. It made child me feel like other people like me exist
Thank you for this post! It reminded me I can just go and read Calvin and Hobbes whenever, and it really brightened my day!
