260905, Thoughts from Early August, Thoughts from Late August, and What I Think Now (Patreon)

What are comics, anyway...? Maybe I’ll spend my whole life feeling like I’m not good enough. Still, I thought I’d write a little about what’s changed.

There are three big things.

I tried making original work.

I tried drawing things even when I wasn’t particularly interested in them.

I became sure that I’m going to keep drawing comics.

Those are probably the biggest changes I’ve noticed in myself.

Maybe I should start with a little look back... In January this year, I was into Hazbin Hotel. Seeing people still enjoying the fanworks I made back then makes me proud, but also a little embarrassed. I was in a bit of a transitional phase. How do I put it...? When I reread those comics, I can feel how much I wanted to express, and how clumsy I was about getting it all out. Still, I’m sure some of you like that kind of raw emotion. Anyway... I do still love it. I’m planning to come back when season 3 comes out... (Because, at the end of the day, I still love Vox and Alastor very, very much...)

And now? I’m into JoJo and Umamusume. They’re both a lot of fun, and since JoJo is originally a manga, I think it got me thinking more seriously about comics as a medium. I stopped drawing comics from March through June. I was having so much fun with my original work that I took a break from fanwork.

Looking back, I do wish I’d made some comics with my original characters, too. Maybe that would’ve left me with more of a record of that time... All I did was draw illustration after illustration of my character pairings, so even what I loved about them has gotten a little hazy.

In July and August, I made my first doujinshi. I put the whole thing together myself, from beginning to end, and filled it with all the brainrot in my head. The book that came out of that, fragement!, is something I’ll always treasure... I also went to D-Festa in July, and ah... it was so much fun. I should write about that sometime, too. But this post is supposed to be about comics, so I’ll save the life updates for another post.

Comics... In something I wrote back in January, I described them as something that only comes out when I’m about to burst. I feel a little differently now. I can express things without reaching that point. Of course, that feeling of “bursting” still matters. Because... it’s what gets me going. If you’ve ever drawn a comic, you’ll know that making one is a huge hassle... You’re not just writing dialogue. You have to draw the scenes, too. Where the speech bubbles go, how the panels are arranged, the spaces between them... I mostly go by instinct with that stuff, but if I tried to study it all properly, I might lose my mind. A single page can have as many as eight panels. Of course it’s not going to be easy. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is... I can express things without having to burst first. Not every little thing has to be a big deal. Quiet things can be comics, too. It doesn’t have to come pouring out of you to count.

Hmm... What else should I write about...? Thinking about comics also gets me thinking about subject matter. Recently—around early to mid-August, maybe?—a manga called Mii-chan and Yamada-san was causing quite a stir in Japan. Thankfully, I was able to read the whole thing using Grok’s translations... so I gave it a read. Provocative subject matter, shocking developments... I’d never read a manga that opened with its bad ending already set in stone before, so I found it interesting. It got a lot of criticism for being a manga for “dopamine junkies,” and... I can see why people would say that.

But I don’t think there’s any manga that shouldn’t exist... What I mean is, no matter how fucked up the story or subject matter is, if someone turns it into an actual comic, then okay. If it gets torn apart after that, I think the biggest issue is probably that the author didn’t pull it off... (Obviously, I’m not defending outright abuse. Criticism is something you can take on board...)

Reading this manga made me think a lot about social safety nets for disabled people—especially the issue of disabled people’s right to mobility in Korea—and it left me feeling so frustrated. But... there are probably also people who look at Mii-chan’s miserable life and get off on thinking, “Well, at least I don’t have it that bad!” That difference stresses me out, but in a way, it reassures me, too. How do I explain it? People really do see the same thing in wildly different ways, and there’s something comforting about how powerless I am in the face of that. We’re all so different, and that’s why we can each make different things, express different opinions... and that’s how society keeps going.

So those were my thoughts on that whole discussion. That’s about it, really...

Over time, my feelings about illustration have changed a lot, too. At first, I thought it was less fun than drawing comics and just ate up my time. But as I changed, I gradually started finding illustration fun, too.

It isn’t easy to capture two people and their relationship in a single image.

But, well... the more I drew, the more I started being able to do it. I still prefer comics, but lately, I’ve been thinking that I don’t want to give up on illustration entirely, either.

I’m the kind of fan creator who never really fit into the so-called doujin scene.

I don’t really do much networking or socializing. I post whatever comes out of my head without filtering it, and I don’t bother reading the room... I think that has caused me quite a few problems. People talking behind my back, anon hate, things like that...

I’m human, so it’s impossible not to care about any of it. To be honest, it used to hurt me a great deal. People would screenshot my work and post it on locked accounts to mock it, calling it “Eungyo-esque”—basically accusing it of being some creepy old-man fantasy—or tell me directly that it was disgusting...

I’m not bringing this up because I want sympathy. These are things that really happened, and thinking back on them now, I realize I went through all kinds of ridiculous shit. From where I stand today, it feels like nothing, and I can accept that people might say things like that... but now I know that the best response is to block, mute, and not feed the trolls.

When I was into Hazbin Hotel, I was no longer taking my medication, so I was constantly anxious, crushed by depression, and on edge over things that really weren’t that serious. I was younger too... even if it was only last year.

These days, though, I’m in a much better place. I feel depressed much less often, and I’m far less anxious. In that sense, I can feel myself gradually becoming more emotionally mature. Maybe that is exactly why I feel even more ashamed of and sorry about the things I did in the past. I’m ashamed of the person I was—the way I ran away from so many people, cursed them out, went after them, and then turned around and avoided them.

Even so, lately I’ve come to feel that doujin culture can be a truly wonderful thing. That is something I never felt when I was in the Hazbin Hotel fandom. Maybe it’s because I’m into a rarepair even by JoJo standards, but I feel less exhausted now, and I feel like I’ve finally found what I genuinely want to create.

There are feelings I never could have experienced if I had kept doing fandom entirely on my own, and perhaps I owe all of them to the good people I met. Two people in particular: Cho and In.

We became close very quickly this past July. They are also two of the most fascinating people I have met in my twenty-two years of life, so there is no way I can write about this without talking about them...

Cho is someone I had known for a while. Because of them, I watched JoJo again and fell back in love with it. In that sense, I could even call them the savior who pulled me out of the deep, dark pit of OC brainrot.

In is someone I met simply because we became mutuals. Our tastes align really well, and... they’re fascinating in all sorts of ways. I had never had anyone around me who regularly wrote, fanfic included, so that makes them even more fascinating to me.

These days, the three of us spend our time hanging out in Discord calls while we work. Focusing together has made me much more productive and... how should I put this? I don’t feel alone anymore.

There’s a saying that even the rarest ship becomes a major ship as soon as three fan creators gather around it, right? Creating RisoDop fanworks together with In and Cho has made me feel the truth of that in my bones. We devour each other’s work, make fanworks inspired by one another’s fanworks... and just have fun like that. Sometimes I think creators can only feel fully satisfied when they meet other creators.

A lot has changed since I got back into JoJo. For one thing, I’ve started attending a ridiculous number of doujin events. I’m tabling at the upcoming October D-Festa, a fan meetup in November, and January D-Festa, and I’ve already applied for a booth at a Nintama-only event.

I’m an event regular now. I’ve become one of those people who tables at everything.

There are people who love the things I make, and I get to meet them in person. That is such a wonderful thing... Of course, there is nothing wrong with only posting online and doing everything through the internet. But holding a physical doujinshi in my own hands and meeting actual readers feels so, so good... Being able to feel that all of it is real is just...

Now I understand that this is the real joy of doujin culture. Agonizing over engagement by chasing popular ships, forcing myself to network when I don’t want to, obsessing over softblocks... I think my version of “doujin” is learning to do less of that toxic stuff.

I’m incredibly grateful to those two... and to everyone else around me as well.

When I was a child, I grew up constantly being told to thank God. Every time, I would argue back, “What am I even supposed to be grateful for?”... Now I understand what that meant, too.

I’m 22...

Wow!!

This is exciting. I’m so excited.

From around seventeen to twenty-one, birthdays used to make me incredibly angry, irritable, and miserable. I would deliberately take sleeping pills and sleep for a full twenty-four hours just to avoid September 5 altogether.

But today, I’ve been working hard since morning.

That alone makes me feel like I’ve truly grown. Not running away and actually facing the day I was born feels much better than I expected...

Should I talk a little about the past?

As a teenager, I was an incredibly anxious person—though I doubt anyone gets through those years without feeling anxious—and I went through life practically half-dead. If someone had told me some hollow line like, “You have a future too!” back then, I might have jumped off a building right then and there.

Things gradually started getting better when I turned twenty and entered university. Of course, I was still anxious. There were times when I begged people not to abandon me, telling them that I was taking my medication and genuinely trying to get my life together. From those friends’ perspective, I must have seemed like an absolutely insane bitch. I know now that this was something to be ashamed of.

At twenty-one, I dropped out of university and did absolutely nothing but mess around. How much did I mess around...? I did nothing productive whatsoever. I lived alone, and there was no one to stop me from wasting all my time. I would wake up in the morning and drink, then wake up again in the evening and drink some more...

I developed a drinking problem, got my heart broken through an online relationship... and I also regretted dropping out. After all, hadn’t I thrown away everything I had worked for from seventeen to nineteen? Though honestly, I was half-dead back then too, so it wasn’t like I had tried that hard.

I thought dropping out was something shameful in the eyes of my parents, my friends, and everyone else. I used to be good at studying, but then I fell apart in high school, failed to adjust to university, and ultimately ran away... That was how I saw myself. Maybe that really is what happened.

Where was the place I belonged?

It probably didn’t exist anywhere in this world... which meant I had to create it myself. I didn’t understand that back then.

So I clung to people. I obsessed over belonging somewhere, and desperately wanted the shelter of something I could call a family.

But that was greed. Maybe it also meant that “I” could only exist when someone else was there... and I only realized at the beginning of this year that I couldn’t keep living that way.

I still don’t understand it completely, so maybe I’m only excitedly declaring, “My eyes are finally open!” But either way, I can feel that I’ve become much more stable.

Right now, I’m working incredibly hard to build a stable income. Even if I can’t get a regular company job—I only have a high school diploma, I don’t read webtoons, and I don’t have the kind of line art, coloring, or post-processing portfolio a webtoon studio would want—I’m trying to establish myself as a freelancer.

There are still a few problems, but... I guess life comes with problems like that. I’m genuinely relieved that I’ve reached a point where I can take them in stride. My follower count is growing, and I now have fans who actually talk to me. More than anything, I’m grateful that the things I know how to draw are helping me build a life...

Drawing NSFW art is fun. It might actually be the kind of work I enjoy most.

I like drawing fictional sex and satisfying other people with it. When someone tells me they jerked off to something I made, it makes me incredibly, incredibly happy.

I’ve wondered whether that has something to do with exhibitionism, but I don’t think I enjoy it in that kind of way... and it isn’t really a sexual fetish of mine. The joy of using something I’m good at—and something I love—to satisfy another person is simply much greater than I expected.

Of course, some people will dislike me, and there are probably far more people in the world who prefer SFW art to NSFW art. But I only need to provide it to the people who do enjoy NSFW. No one in this world can satisfy everybody.

I just need to become the best possible Mungkiho2 for the people who like what I make...

These days, I think I’m happy.

I meant to write something about my birthday, but unfortunately, it turned into a reflection on my life as it is now.

Still, I have no intention of polishing this piece. If I tidy it up too much, parts of it will inevitably disappear, and then I don’t think it will contain what I truly feel...

Besides, wouldn’t it feel a little too distant if I filtered myself even for the people who joined my membership?