TL;DR: gonna be deleting this account at the end of the month, leaving time for anyone who wants to save/share my art for whatever reason.
This is a somewhat bittersweet post that’s been weighing on my mind for almost a year now, debating on whether I wanted to make it or not. I don’t normally care for long goodbyes and prefer to just delete and move on but this is a lot more personal than the many other times I’ve done this in the past.
Heh, very long response only cause this got my brain rolling-
You know I often think about how much Mmy art I’ve made and lately it makes me feel this horrendous gross pit in my stomach. Part of me knows I made most of it to cope with whatever the hell I was going through while being completely delusional/depressed and so I accept that it helped me retain some sanity in knowing I just used him as a way to vent my feelings and frustrations with my own mind but…another part of me is stuck with “wow what the fuck were you doing, why Mmy. Why him.”
I’ll be genuinely honest, anything revolving around Jthm these days puts me in a really bad headspace, I don’t like seeing it, hearing about it or even thinking about it. The only reason I keep this blog up is as a reminder of how completely obsessed I became over it, how it fundamentally damaged everything I once enjoyed about it and how I’ll never let myself slip like that again.
I cannot think about Jthm without thinking of how I spent hours upon hours, months upon months, living in a fantasy world around characters that don’t even belong to me. Like not sleeping for days and coming up with these weird and often completely insane concepts that made no sense at all while truly believing everything would come together if I just drew a little more. That what I was imagining would have some kind of magnificent impact on anyone who came across it simply because no one could compete with my ability to pump out art the way I did.
As for drawing Jimmy….His character for me transformed from something that was just an interest in the psychological aspects of a fictional predator, stemming from my own want to understand a character like his, to a sick delusion that he’s basically a parody of myself, a fan who takes things to seriously and is obsessed with Johnny to the point of convincing himself that everything he assumes about Johnny the Homicidal Maniac is right and he alone would spread that message by dressing up like him and pretending to be him. Much like real people do to him now.
I wanted to show this part of him so bad, I wanted to really get across to extreme fans who hated him that he is a parody of Jthm fans who think they know everything about Johnny, that he is written to be a rapist because without that aspect of him, he would basically be Johnny but stupider and ugly and there needed to be a distinct reason for Johnny to kill him so that Nny could explain to Jimmy(you/the audience) why it’s wrong to pretend to be him. That doesn’t mean I think people shouldn’t hate him, but really think about the context of his character and realize that he is there to make fun of YOU.
And so my obsession with showing this part of him grew and grew the more I realized others just didn’t get it. I tried everything, I tried showing him in different point of views, parody’s, vent art, aus, writing and even just trying to have discussions about it. But then I realized it was all pointless because at the end of the day, he’s still a shitty character who doesn’t really deserve all that energy and my opinion doesn’t really matter because he’s not my character, what I say about him is just the babbling of a fan who can’t change anything about what’s canon and what’s not. My opinion will always just be an opinion, never fact.
I don’t know if I’ll keep making Jthm art anymore. I check this blog now and then to answer questions but my care for it has faded dramatically. I hate how people are always trying to start drama over this stupid ass comic and using it to bully others, especially using it to hate on kids and teens who are just discovering it. I’d rather just spend time working on my own stuff. So I’ll be very distant for a while.
Anyways, that’s all I have to say. Have a good night.
Posting this here since a lot of my old jthm art applies to this—
I’ve been struggling with paranoid thoughts lately, mostly because of my old fanart and my perceptions of using it to cope with trauma.
So here’s a cautionary tale about using fictional characters to cope.
There’s a voice that constantly haunts me, an inescapable auditory hallucination that speaks in riddles and fills my head with the worst thoughts imaginable. I started applying this face to Jimmy, because the voice reminds me of him, crude, ugly and a monster with no morals.
It helped a lot at first, being able to apply a face to one of the voices I’ve been struggling with for so long, but after months it started to take a drastic turn from coping to completely feeding my delusions, writing everything they say down and over analyzing it in an attempt to figure myself out. At some point I didn’t even consider it fanart, just my intrusive thoughts and the voice being projected onto this character.
Suddenly everything starts to get blurry and I can’t tell fiction apart from reality, I start to get extremely paranoid because now the character is suddenly a piece of me but no one else knows this, every comment about them and every controversial opinion feels like an attack on me personally, but I’ve put myself in this situation in my attempt to cope with fictional drawings that don’t exist.
Now everyday I still hear the same voice but it’s stuck to this fucking cartoon character that I hate and I have a hard time drawing him constructively without overthinking about how much time I spent losing myself over it.
If you’re already having difficulties coping with reality, please tread carefully when bringing fictional characters you enjoy into the mix. It doesn’t always help and learning the hard way fucking sucks.
