Vote over at TWC and you can see the scribbly nightmare that eventually turned into this page! Then you can try and decode how in the world that even happened, because my thumbnails have gotten super loose lately. At the beginning of this comic, I developed Marisa's magic circle thingies because they looked cool...and then when I got to Charlene's magic I'm like...pink. She doesn't need circles for...reasons. Don't get me wrong, Clip Studio Paint has great rulers that make it fairly quick to draw all those weird circles, buuuut they'll stay Marisa specific, I think. She's more of a "put things back together" kind of witch, so I feel like they make sense. She's using magical geometry. One of the weird things about writing a comic, having no editor and being able to do whatever I want, is that I can subvert the hell out of tropes that piss me off just because I feel like it. You guys don't really NEED to know Marin and Marisa's backstory. I could focus this whole thing in on Malaya and you'd get hints about everyone else along the way and we'd all be probably pretty okay with it. BUT...I'm tired of lesbians dying. Not in the real world, because we're not immortal (yet), but in media. I wanted to go see Atomic Blonde, for instance. It looked pretty bad ass! Lesbian dies. (Sorry for the spoiler, but you should know.) It's to the point that GLAAD has been keeping track of and reporting on lesbians and women dying in media for something like 20 years (62 lesbian/bisexual women died on tv and film last year, surpassing the last few years), and the trope itself goes back to the 1930s when the Hays Code outlawed depictions of homosexuality in films. But! You could show homosexuals if they died in the end, a comeuppance for being gay in the first place. So, there'll be no dead lesbians here. I'm not a fan of writing people dying into stories in the first place, because I think death usually goes under-explored in media. ("He's dead! I'm sad!" "Okay, but let's keep the plot moving!") I've had to reassure a few people along the way that no, the lesbians won't die. It's kind of fucked up that I'd have to reassure anyone, but here we are. You know she lives, because this is a flashback! But they'll keep living. Consider MarMar to be unkillable, I guess. This should be my last post about lesbians for awhile! Though this comic will get gayer in the next few weeks, sooo not really :). Anyway, yesterday was overall better on the "gay author doesn't want to hear your opinions about homosexuality" front, but let's just bring back my post-election comment policy one more time so we're all on the same page: -You have every right to comment whatever you’d like, but you’re in my house. You’re reading this off of server space I’ve paid for, and if I feel your comment is inappropriate for any reason, I reserve the right to not approve it or disapprove it. I will read your comment, regardless, but I’m not going to subject other people to your nonsense if I don’t feel I should. -I will try and give everyone their fair shake. I’m not here to police thought. At the same time, if you want to keep commenting endlessly because I don’t agree with you and you think I should, I’m going to kill your thread and subsequent comments of people who want to reiterate your points over and over again. -I don’t mind if you use profane language because I do all the time, but if you resort to name calling, I’m going to disapprove or change your comment to something about how much you love kittens and how you hope unicorns are actually real and we’ve all been lying to you. -You’re getting this comic for free, and I work hard on it. I don’t know everything, but overall, rest assured that I generally know what I’m doing. I always invite people to point out errors in spelling or shit that I miss sometimes, like getting feet backwards. Normal mistakes that one might make if they’ve been, say, staring at the same page for 20 hours and their brain has fogged over. If your comment treats me like I’m an idiot, or you feel the need to needlessly explain shit to me like I’m dense as hell, I reserve the right to disapprove your comment. -I’m going to reply to your comment, unless I miss it, in which case I’m sorry. You’re talking to me. I will probably respond in the nature of how your comment comes across. Keep that in mind. If you want to be a creepy weirdo, I’m still going to respond to you. I am a human being, and your comment doesn’t exist in a vacuum. -*And I will amend it with: Your author and artist is gay and a non-Christian. If you wouldn't show up in my house and give me your opinion about either of these things to my face, then I do not need to hear it here. Think of me sitting right next to you on the couch: what would normal societal expectations dictate that you should talk to me about? Unless you have no social skills whatsoever, assume that normal, in-person rules apply here as well. You don't *actually* know me, so don't be an asshole and we'll be fine.