Hey friendos! This week’s newsletter took me a bit by surprise because I was so busy chilling out. But I still have narrative thoughts I want to talk about. Let’s dive briefly into what makes a story human and conversely, non-human.

How Am I Doing?

I’m doing good! Last week I talked about experiencing a bit of burnout. I took pretty much the whole week to rest and I was so into it that I completely forgot about writing this newsletter! To be honest, I’m not too bothered by missing a week or two, but as long as I have something to say and remember in time, I’ll send one out anyway.

Also, I found out that the captions of images don’t come through in the emails, so you’ve been missing some information (and jokes) all this time! I’m going to look into how to fix that.

What Am I Doing?

The past week I’ve just been chilling. What does that look like? Well, I’ve been playing a lot of Against the Storm. It’s a settlement survival game where you manage a village of anthropomorphic animals as they try to expand into the dangerous wilds. It’s equal parts relaxing and challenging. The soundtrack is amazing, the atmosphere is somehow both tense and chill at the same time and the characters are cute. It’s set in a relatively basic high-fantasy world, but they went for beavers, lizards and foxes as playable species instead of dwarves, orcs and elves.

Aside from that, I’ve also been watching Mushishi. This one is a bit harder to explain. At its most mundane, Mushishi is an anime anthology about a guy helping out people who run into supernatural phenomena. These phenomena are caused by Mushi, some sort of lifeform that is more primal and ephemeral than any other. Mushi are distinctly non-human, closer to forces of nature than that of sentient beings.

Human Stories

But despite that, the stories Mushishi tells are incredibly human. They are about dealing with the death of a loved one, commitment issues, anxiety, impostor syndrome, dementia, and much more. The allegories are not that subtle: the Mushi represent external factors outside of your control that can alter the course of your life.

Against the Storm on the other hand, tells another kind of human story. Our unending struggle with nature is a tale that’s been explored since the dawn of time. The characters might be beavers and foxes, but ultimately it is about carving a place for ourselves in an unforgiving place that is ambivalent about our existence.

The Other

Naturally, these experiences made me think about Clysmoids. I set out to tell a story that decenters humans. A story that envisions a world without humans, with its own struggles and beauty. A story that’s ultimately alien to our own experiences so that we may learn to not see ourselves as the saviors or destroyers of the world.

But when I tried to create creatures that were distinctly non-human, with physiology and behaviors that weren’t relatable, I ran into a problem. They became… unknowable. There were no rules that we can project our own values on. They became the other, an esoteric force to be feared and rejected. Mind you, this only happened if I went out of my way to make each Clysmoid less human. They became Mushi. Is that what I wanted?

Posthuman

My natural process was instead to look at the things I’ve drawn and think about what their personality might be like. That’s the opposite process. That’s explicitly projecting human values on them, much like we do with our cats and dogs. I’d end up with very relatable stories. Stories about little creatures that just want to make friends, but have a hard time because they’re so different from each other.

But, their physiology is still different from humans. Some are made entirely out of slime, some are just a bag of bones with no muscles to animate them, some are big balls of hair. Their diets might consist entirely of fossils or nuclear energy or other lifeforms unknown to us. Their society is far removed from our own laws and social structures and indeed… morality.

But underneath that veneer of alienness, there are human stories. Relatable tales of anxiety, feelings of uselessness, codependency, and trying to fit in.

Why Am I Doing? (this)

So that’s the goal! As you get to know the Clysmoids, the unknowable becomes set-dressing to the human. You study the taxonomies like an entomologist and through gradual understanding find out that what initially felt so different, is closer to us than we initially thought.

Did you know that bumblebees like to play with toys? They roll around little balls for no apparent function other than having fun. Does it change your opinion about insects? It sure does for me.