the journal page

ode to the transformatively uncomfortable

I love filth. I want the grimiest manga, the comics that ooze slime. Stories that seek to artfully wind a river of the grotesque are the ones that spark the most interest for me. If an author isn't making me uncomfortable, they're playing it way too safe. I'm selective; I found Dead Tube nauseating and boring, Saw never appealed to me enough to give it a single watch, Killing, Stalking was decent but I didn't care to finish it, and I dropped Tokyo Ghoul RE: after 12 chapters even though I loved Tokyo Ghoul. I don't play guro eroge. The rape revenge genre has nothing for me. And for all my love of filth, I have not seen Pink Flamingos. But god if Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita didn't worm its way into the crevices of my brain.

I think the most important element in the creation of these stories for me is the sense that the creator knows they're in the filth and has some kind of perspective on it. Grotesquerie for its own sake can be transcendent but requires an artistic hand that escapes many.

There's that saying that great art should disturb the comforted and comfort the disturbed, but I think I'm after art that disturbs the disturbed in just the right way. Making me nauseous with gore or cringe at misogyny on the part of the creator is not what I'm after.

What Happens Next...

Oh buddy. This motherfucker. This webcomic is why I started writing this blog. I found it through watching a youtube video by Lily Alexander titled "Transition Regret & the Fascism of Endings" (yay! more deeply uncomfortable subjects!) and at Lily's reccommendation, read through all the currently published pages in one night. This isn't that much of a feat, What Happens Next has been updating for a couple years but it isn't Homestuck length. But it is impressive how it sucked me in. What Happens Next follows the aftermath of a young trans man named Milo being released from a psychiatric institution that he was committed to after his involvement in the murder his friend Haylie at the age of fifteen. The very first page of the comic sets our stage: two twenty-something women chatting about the murder for a true crime youtube channel, with all the callousness and voyeuristic nonchalance that implies. In particular, they are talking about how one of the two teenagers responsible has a tumblr where people send him anon hate about the murder. The very next page is Milo's tumblr Do Not Interact page. This is something that What Happens Next pulls off flawlessly. Where many a joke has been made at the expense of the DNI-having, soft aesthetic vent-blogger, often with an excess of cruelty and a level of exageration that lacks any real [sense of the joke being rooted in reality], What Happens Next nails the form with real gravity. The absurdity of "don't follow me if you're against neopronouns" giving way to "don't follow me if you're going to talk to me about the murder I was involved in" could be a joke, but it isn't. And a mere 4 pages in, a dark pit opened up in my stomach. A pit that grew with pages of Kiwi Farms threads about ther murder, grew with Milo running away to live with a tumblr mutual after a confrontation with his dad, grew with the introduction of character after horribly well-realized character.

Milo is not a likeable character; he is self-sabbotaging, self-victimizing, not kind nor compassionate, immature, and absolutely, undoubtedly a realistic depiction of someone I would have been tumblr mutuals with when I was younger. I can't even say I find him unlikeable because he desecrated the corpse of his best friend on the orders of his other best friend. If anything that is his most sympathetic character trait. And my favorite aspect is that Milo still ranks pretty high on What Happens Next's hierarchy of likeability. The rest of the cast includes aforementioned true crime vlogger who refuses to take her videos about Milo down after it leads to his grandmother getting doxxed, a serial killer fandom blogger who is dating Haylie's killer and openly expresses jealousy of Milo for being manipulated by him, Haylie's bereaved sister who has dealt with her grief by TERFing out and campaigning for increased carceral violence towards minors (because 40 years in prison for the killer and 8 years in psychiatric confinement for the accomplice is "letting them off easy"). The least destestable named characters to date have been Audrey, TERF Sister's evangelical girlfriend who doesn't object to the ramping up of state violence towards minors, and Aaron, her childhood friend who is a little too passive and also makes some kinda racist remarks towards Audrey about her support of carceral violence.

Welcome Back Alice

looking at the cover of this manga, you probably wouldn't expect it to get a mention in a blog about the deeply uncomfortable. Unless of course, you recognize the author. Welcome Back Alice is definitely one of Oshimi's less grotesque works. It lacks the incestuous abuse sequences of Blood on the Tracks, or the disconcerting depictions of dissociation in Flowers of Evil, or the everything of Inside Mari. But this is still a manga where one teenager sexually assaults another. It is still a manga with an absolutely devastatng sequence of the main character trying and failing to castrate himself. But that's not important, what's important is that this manga is a raw and personal story about gender, adolescence, and sexuality.

Lolita

Higurashi no Naku koro ni