Early Access - DS #166

wrt "born different" I'm just thinking about Kim drawing her mom like the equation (if memory serves) including the rising sun symbol.. like maybe they're both somehow born of the ether, sort of. some universal mother deity type situation or other

Wow! Sure seems like Ling is... in...? Kim's... ... ... pickle?? (You can tell me to stop)

And all while reading these recent pages, a poem continues to whisper in the back of my head (always there, but louder now): "At twilight's end, the shadow's crossed, A new world birthed, the elder lost. Yet on the morn we wake to find That mem'ry left so far behind. To deafened ears we ask, unseen, Which is life and which the dream?" ...I wonder why that might be?

I'm so not obsessing over this page, absolutely not trying to figure out everything going on. Like it's funny how that last panel looks suspiciously close to Starlight, the page where Kim overcomes her trauma (or at least some of it).

almost like an NB flag in the last panel

My thoughts on what's going on: To love someone is to make their story yours. To start to see the world with their terminology alongside yours. The Myth of Them opens up to include you. You understand them through your own memories and experiences, and so the light and the flame and the rising sun of Kim's story is painted with the colors that Ling knows. The story of struggle and despair that Kim is made to recount is recreated using the familiar scenes of Ling's life. You love someone and you enter into a dialogue not only with who they are, but who they were.

you are on a sacred mission to make trans people feel hope

Can't stop reading this page over and over. Feels weirdly relatable, and is also beautiful

I cried. This is beautiful.

:o

Lore aside...this page is stunning. It just leaves me gobsmacked.

This is making me manic. My brains are going a mile a minute processing what this could mean. Is she a ninth equation? Or are the other seven false and the real ones are now waking? Maybe she's something else entirely? New? Old? Neither? Both? I need to be frozen until you finish the story so I can consume it all at once and not have to anxiously wait for each little crumb to be dropped on the trail.