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doesntafraid:

ladyyatexel:
doesntafraid:
Title: Song Without A Name (SWAN)
Author: Lady YateXel (or on tumblr)
Fandom: Johnny The Homicidal Maniac (Yes, really)
Warnings: I actually don’t remember, probably self-harm and minor violence between high-schoolers. Poverty. Unreality.
Summary: "Reincarnation is complicated, and apparently, not a refined system. When the lines between lives are blurry at best, and memories seep in from the person you were, do you stay the person you are? Who do you want to be, and do you want to be seen?“
When he bothered to look, he saw three people in the mirror. They were layered over each other, and each layer was a little older and a little more gaunt than the layer in front of it, but they were all him. Where age and fullness of face and facial hair tried to trick him, he could always line up the eyes.
One of the other people in the mirror had made a decision, and he, the latest sheet in the stack, was the result. He’d volunteered to be here, or at least one of him had. It was hard not to wonder how much he deviated from the palest, oldest-looking man in the back, and the man in the middle hadn’t expected to be reborn so poorly when he signed up, but the teenager in front shouldn’t have known that any of the others existed, let alone how they felt. Instead, he existed in a strange vacuum: no family, no connections, a big empty house, and a brain that was anything but.
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Doesntafraid says: I first read this story 6-7 years ago, in high school with my first girlfriend. It’s one of those things that is wrapped up in a million conversations and feelings and songs from a time in my life that I remember fondly, so it’s oddly nostalgic to be rec’ing this.
If you were an angry goth kid in the 2000s, you probably read a frankly bizarre comic book called Johnny the Homicidal Maniac. The comic is a rage fantasy of the creator of Invader Zim, who created a character (Johnny) who kills a bunch of people brutally for petty reasons. In the world of JtHM, everyone and everything is disgusting and the world may or may not exist.
This fic is a band/highschool AU of that. Kind of. With songs. And boys kissing.
Just read it.
I’m gonna reblog this like a tool because it makes me happy to see it.
Ok I’m doing it, I’m writing out what I meant by “one of those things that is wrapped up in a million conversations and feelings and songs from a time in my life that I remember fondly”.
I found SWAN in about 2006. I know I followed Lady YateXel on DeviantArt, so that’s probably where I found it. As a bit of background, fanfiction means a lot to me. If I were to make a list of the things I have spent the most hours doing in my life, it’d go like this:
sleeping
school
reading fanfiction
eating
Fanfic was the logical progression from being a bookish 11-year old with an internet connection and few friends, having by that time already read most of the Young Adult section of the local library. By the time I found SWAN, fanfiction had already been a formative influence in my life.
And I was dating someone, for the first time in my life. I don’t remember if I started dating her before I read SWAN or during it’s run, but the relationship between Edgar and Nny immediately struck me as similar to me and my girlfriend. It wasn’t just that we were both queer couples in high school among a unpopular friend-group with a penchant for giving everyone nicknames. My girlfriend.. back then, K wore a furry tail to school and tended to growl at people. Sometimes she’d lash out and do strange things, like when she pushed people against walls or ate a piece of paper that was shoved in her face. She was volatile in a similar way to Nny is in SWAN, and has the same charisma that made them each the ringleader of their merry band of misfits anyway.
I was a lonely kid at a new school who was used to being bullied. It gave me the same kind of tone Edgar has in some early chapters, where he is hesitant, quiet, and ultimately trying not to make any sudden movements lest the group throw him out.
I was always aware that Edgar and Nny mirrored me and K, and I was also aware that it wasn’t particularly a good thing.
SWAN reminds me of those high school years in a million tiny ways, from the way K moves her face into a predatory grin as she sings dance music under her breath to the way the SWAN art, full of contrast and splashes of color mirrors K’s color scheme (although, to be honest, K is always more put-together than SWAN!Homicides ever were. She brings color-coordination to an art form). I wore a necklace with a key on it for weeks that year (has somewhat more to do with my nickname, which sounds like “key”.)
The oddest part is that I haven’t been close with K for years. We’re still friends, but I went off to college (and grad school) ages ago.
Now, I’m back in my hometown indefinitely. And I managed to step back in with my high school friends like the intervening years never happened. It’s surreal, is what it is. I’ve seen K more in the past week than I did in the entire year before that.
It’s just… strange and oddly fitting that Lady YateXel would decide to revisit SWAN during this summer, when I am back here, in the awkward space between college and careers, when I’m still wondering how to be an adult without losing who I am to a veneer of professionalism.

I’m glad to read this, and I hope it’s okay that I reblog it. I’m literally sitting here trying to unplug everything and leave for a giant (for me) road trip, but I really wanted to just spend time with this before I left otherwise it would just stew in my head on the highway. I’m feelings-y enough about this stuff as it is!

I was saying to someone else that SWAN worked back when it did because it was about, being read by, and being written by insecure teenagers, and I’m always sort of happy to see how often that that was the case. (She says, in a quarter of the way into a rewrite of it.)

A lot of Edgar and Johnny’s early relationship was my first relationship too, though I wasn’t Edgar. Edgar freaking out, every time, about so much as Johnny’s arm going over the side of the roof I took directly from my ex boyfriend’s reaction when I was taunting him while we were on a roof. A lot of him putting up with bullshit is that same guy. Later parts of Edgar and Johnny evolved more naturally, because they definitely were not me and him, but there’s still hints of my ex-girlfriend and I in there too. It was hard not to.

I used to get messages all the time from people who heard that I put so much personal stuff in this story hoping that the thing they connected with about it was something I’d experienced, something I could help them with, and sometimes it was, though often it was just people being lost and desperate, which I think is pretty SWAN Johnny all around. Seeing a lot of adults who read this as teenagers, I’m amazed to see how many of us turned out to be damaged queer people. The story becomes so much more important to me because of that, and it’s why I hope to make the rewrite more honest. The proportion of people who read SWAN (that I checked in with as adults) who are transmen or nonbinary is astounding. Johnny will be making direct mention of being nonbinary and asexual this time around, I am not fucking around with this stuff. I used to be terrified that people wouldn’t recognize that things were not ideal between Edgar and Johnny, and I tried to get that in the story without becoming preachy or weird, but there were a lot of things I tried to get in that didn’t go as well as I’d hoped and I really want them to be there properly this time. I know so much more now, I’ve experienced more, I want SWAN to keep being able to be important to me and the few people who find it.

What a great thing to hear about you wearing a key. I know it was mentioned before, but it still gives me such strong feelings to have done something that struck someone else in such a way that they decorated themselves with it. That’s enormous to me as a decorate-y, symbolic person, and I don’t often feel like "I’m so glad to hear that” really encapsulates the full measure of my sincerity on the issue. Please take this huge word spew as a better indicator.

It’s lovely to hear you say it’s come back at such a strange time for you, because it’s done the same for me, always. SWAN has always been cyclical for me, it just keeps looping around and aligning itself with just where it needs to be. I started this story when I first went to college, had my first relationship, then met a girl through the story and had a nearly six year relationship with her, even got engaged to her. I finished ISH a year and a half after she gave me a week’s notice that she was getting on a plane and leaving me, and it was such a emotional closure for me to finish a story that had meant a lot to the people who saw it, that had spawned Banshee (who saved my life), but also had a lot of baggage tied up in my suffering about my ex.

This isn’t to say I suffer when I read it (at least not related to my ex! I suffer when I read early SWAN because I want to punch my younger self in the face, haha), but that it actually became more precious to me. I felt like this thing I made had outlasted her, so it helped me be beyond her too. Banshee’s ending was as much to save Banshee the way she’d saved me as it was to express what I wanted, and what I felt. Granted, I used just as much DS9 to get through this stuff, but SWAN/ISH showed up just when it was perfect for it to do so, after Banshee saved me and right when I needed a bunch of self assured assholes to live in my head and sing for a while.

One day, I’m going to write down everything that was intensely personal in this story and share it. I put so much more of me in there than I ever told anyone.

I’m glad you’re one of the people revisiting it with me. Thanks for sharing. :)

(via lexlokiy)