I - god, there is like so much to unpack like the more words I say the more it’s like, welcome to reSWAN, Lady’s accidental multi person autobiography, because like
I’m gonna say in the last two months? Three? I’ve had this giant concern over whether or not I could still get crushes on people. And after sitting and dissecting it for probably far longer than any other person would have spent with it, I figured out that it’s probably not working the way everyone else does. In the same way that I thought that the way I functioned sexual attraction wise was the same as everyone else, I also thought the way I did romantically was too. I assumed that everything I saw depicted romantically on TV was you know an abbreviation and a shorthand, and that no one would just develop romantic intent without knowing someone. A lot.
So here I am like the opposite of SWAN Edgar like, “everything on TV in regards to this is fake, surely”, but I’m starting to consider it may be demi-romanticism, and that it has been all this fucking time, and just me saying that I would want to be friends before a romantic gesture wouldn’t feel kinda uncomfortable was really normal. And maybe it is.
But now I’m looking at SWAN like
Johnny is based largely on how I am - identity wise and just that he feels self contained and easily violated by other people’s normal, but still needs other people to understand
And Edgar largely on how I realized I was anything I am - comparison to media versus other people and how valid I think my experiences are
Like that I literally sat here and thought about “well, in movies/tv…” shocked me for a second, but honestly where would half of us learn shit if not from there. I think about marriage proposals all the time in this respect and how I’ve never seen one in real life but I know exactly what one looks like or what it “should” look like because of media.
There are other things in them too, like, there’s a lot of my ex boyfriend in Edgar becauae he was a current boyfriend when I started writing and he was so romancey I used to hide from him a little. So a lot of Edgar and Johnny’s dynamic in places comes from me and my ex from 2004 haha.
But the bisexual in that I don’t want anyone sexually thing was a feeling I definitely had too. And then when enough people made me feel like that was not a real thing to do or be, I just transferred it to Johnny.
Yay, coping mechanisms, haha
