So I recently sorta-stressed out my arm and had to take yesterday (and most of Monday tbh) off from drawing.

I didn't feel my arm was strong enough today to risk it on a commission, so I did something personal today. Cause with this commission coming up I'm trying thicker lines and if my arm was still weak I didn't want to cause such a rift between line strengths blah blah blah, y'all get it. Also I'm allowed to. I work hard.

Anyways I found this ancient doodle buried in my hard drive. Doodled even before Zuza and Gillian were formally designed. It took a long time, I went very slow bc sore arm, and I just kinda meditated while drawing it. Had to change it a lot which took more time cause it still had their concept designs. Just so I could have fun with this and kinda flesh it out. Gillian is nb (she/her) as is Zuza (she/they).

If y'all don't mind, or hell even if you do, I kinda wanna share some personal feelings just so I can talk about the lore behind this doodle or rather its original version.

As some might remember I used to draw nsfw stuff, pretty frequently actually. This doodle def originated from that time. I talk about this to anyone who will listen, but I was sexually assaulted by randos at furry cons and eventually I would be discredited, dismissed, and told to just sit down and only put out good vibes if I was going to speak. This would eventually lead me to understanding I had been treated badly, objectified and made uncomfortable and my boundaries so horribly waved off, almost all of the time spanning years before it actualized into sexual harassment and assault. I had just clearly decided, back then, it was the price to pay for having friends like the ones I had, to be close to this community without being in it, to being fem-presenting. Very obviously I just kind of, I don't know how else to describe it other than I developed a coping mechanism of being 'cool, open-minded, and the one who wouldn't make such a big deal out of things'. So I endured it, kept from feeling a lot of the sexist degradation that is so rampant by just being 'too tough' to even let it bother me. I drifted further and further away from nsfw content, and then I had my mental breakdown of 2018-2020. This compounded exponentially on the feelings and realizations about nsfw content that had been brewing since my partner's porn addiction was finally realized and properly dealt with.

You get the point I'm all jumbled up inside with trauma and knowledge of the people who peer on the other side of the 'it's just harmless fun' iceberg. I've changed permanently since then. But you know, when I find a stash of my old projects it compels me to talk about it. If nothing else than just to share some fun facts people would never know about me or my artwork otherwise.

Buuut anyways, even back then I would often get on my soapbox and go on about how stupid sexuality and relationships and the sexuality in relationships is portrayed 96% of the time. At the time I was also developing characters to describe how I felt or ideas I wanted to introduce or dynamics I really liked and felt I could portray healthily. I had Hendrix and Gretchen, characters that helped me discuss mental illness and this phenomenon of childhood abuse chipping away even after it's been stopped that "being properly loved now" couldn't fix. I had August and Hyun-Jin, who were my way of exploring 'healthy and actually-sex-positive slut' characters (I despise that word but, yeah, it cuts right to the point because hurr we live in a society and all that), and I had characters like Anjou and Bruno-Jo who explored concepts like 'letting sexuality be a healing venue' and stuff like that.

So when I was writing Zuza and Gillian I had a series of ideas. What I really wanted to do was make a series dedicated to their sexual lives. Zuza, love starved and well-balanced despite lots of challenges, engaging in a sexual relationship with the mopey, slightly-self-hating lesbian Gillian. How they try and have meaningless sex because they're convinced that's hot. How they try to then go over the top and use porn as a navigation guide which fails horribly. Both afraid they're each too boring or vanilla, they eventually try to settle on light bdsm. And their story was them trying, doing it poorly, doing it slightly better, getting the hang of it, and finally having the type of play session they wanted. Only to realize, truly, that it doesn't hold a candle to just being sincere and honest with each other and not projecting their insecurities through sexual "feats". This 6 month, very intense explorative game to try and impress the other one so they feel worthy enough to be kept, and how it both hurts and helps the dialogue a good couple with personal baggage needs to have. Until eventually their bedroom antics venture where they actually want it to, for the right reasons, and it's so much better.

Which lead to the inevitable statement/honest joke to a friend that Gillian and Zuza are what you get when you combine a bad and ineffective dom with an over-eager and aggressive sub.

Which is where this silly doodle comes from.

So I doodled a lot of that and still have those concept sketches and even comic pages. But of course, would eventually come to realize every nsfw thing I would post would just be an excuse other people were looking for to grab parts of my body then play it off, to make jokes they had no business making, or to have their eyes gloss over once I tried to bring humanity into relationship concepts. This didn't help combined with the fact that I just couldn't do it anymore. Nsfw stuff is very triggering to me now. But that's also okay. I appreciate the way things are now much more, just hate how I got here but I think that's also understandable given the uh everything.

So yeah. A cute and silly doodle with some silly info dump behind it. :)