There was a time when I genuinely believed most people on this mortal Earth had enough empathy, patience, and good will to recognize when a creator needed to break down and confess her pains to the ether–to offer a reminder to the worlds that are, and were, and will or will not be, that she is a fallible creature who makes mistakes and does wrong and carries the wounds of her self-undoing.
That time has passed. I am weary, and saddened, and rather angry that I must write so many of these open paragraphs just to try and remind everyone that there is a human underneath the gaudy gem-encrusted viscera of the latest trauma porn. Perhaps this makes me a coward, or a traitor, or a plain old loser. Still, I suppose I’d rather kowtow to expectations than be ripped right open again in retribution for the sin of trying to express how painful my own favorite genre of writing has come to seem, for me.
I am going to talk a lot about hate in this post. Recognize that I am talking about the humankind that exists in my head. I am ultimately writing about a mental construct I have made, my own creation, which means that I have the right to say whatever I want about that construct. If it does not resemble you, then you need only acknowledge to yourself that it does not resemble you, and move on.
I am not asking you to prove a point. I am not asking you to overcome or outsmart or test me. I am keenly aware that I do not actually know every human. I’m not a child, no matter how often I’ve been treated like one because this person or that found it easier to infantilize me than treat my ideas with their due gravity.
So yes, I’m going to keep saying how much I hate “humans” or “humanity” or “humankind”, and I am very well aware that what I actually mean is “I hate these broad tropes”. but I’ve gotten tired of always giving that context because it sure seems sometimes as though every human says “That’s a common trend, sure, but I am immune to it because I said so” before headbutting the Trendwall, splitting the forehead open, and whirling around to scream at me, “WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL ME I WASN’T STRONG ENOUGH TO BREAK THROUGH THE TRENDWALL!”
Then they leap on me to try and choke me to death in front of my whole family. And then, after I pull a knife and bloody their hands a little, they run away to tell the entire town I tried to murder them. The only reason this hasn’t happened outside my own darkest dreams, as marginalized as I presently am, is that I already keep my head as low as I can keep it without burying myself in the ground.
And, as I have not yet learned to breath without access to oxygen, I would rather not do that. Dying in order to avoid being killed seems like a misallocation of energy… and a very stupid paradox.
Didn’t stop me from trying it, mind you. When enough people scream something at me, it’s tempting to believe it just so I don’t have to bear the pressure of driving off their demands any longer. It’s pretty hard to create in a world where it really, really feels like everyone thinks I quite literally deserve to die if I don’t erase my entire being so I’ll become a blank slate that replicates whatever mythology they tell me to… which, again, is still dying.
There’s just no winning here, is there? God, I hate this reality so much.
So, right now, I metaphorically hate all humans, and literally hate every human who is truly and faithfully depicted by the words I’m writing. The humans I love do not exist right now. Why would I want them to exist in the same reality as all the humans I hate–the humans I hate because, in truth, they are the ones who poured their hate into me, and so in truth I am only trying to make them take back the hate they have filled me with? I don’t like having all this hatred. I hate being hateful.
Please stop doing this to me. That’s what I’m really saying here: “These are the wounds you’ve gouged into the tender flesh of my soul. These are the fires you set in my flesh, which burn me by very virtue of the fact that they are your fires, and not mine. They burn like the cold airless emptiness that steals the fuel of myself from rekindling the inferno of me. This is the chasm where you tore my heart out. Please give it back. It’s not yours! I can feel you clutching it! Stop! STOP! It hurts!… it hurts…”
I will write this way because I want to. Because this is my writing. On my blog. Addressing my feelings. I have the right to refer to the concepts that are in my head without them conforming exactly to your own desired reality.
Your reality is not mine. My reality is not yours. I am willing to negotiate the differences between my reality and yours at many times, but this is not one of them. If me talking about humans as they exist in my head is a problem for you, then it sounds like maybe you’re a human who resembles the humans I see in my head. Therefore, any objection to this rant is either a sign of toxic possessive attitudes towards someone else’s headspace, or an admission that I’ve pinged you a little bit.
Or if it’s not, those are the things that any counterstrokes will read like to me, so how about you just don’t? Just go on with your day. Just stop reading. I’m only asking people who resonate with this piece to read it. I don’t want you to read my writing out of a sense of moral duty. I want you to read it because you like it and you want to see more, because it feels like sharing a journey with someone who’s dealing with the same problems you are.
So if that’s not you, then no, of course I don’t want you here. I don’t want you to read words you dislike, words that are actively painful for you because they’re full of an antithetical soul’s fire, just to prove that you’re altruistic enough to read works you don’t enjoy.
I don’t want people to read anything I write to prove a point, to show they’re good allies to trans women or autistic women or pansexual women, nor even to me as a trans, autistic, pansexual woman. I want you to read my writing because there is something strangely beautiful about it to you, like finding a dream just lucid enough that you can share it with someone else, even when it’s messy and wounded and trying to regenerate even as it rots.
This world is full of pain. I am a child of this world. Therefore I am full of pain. I’m, uh… I’m kind of fucking pissed off we live in an era where trauma survivors have to start out with a fortress of philosophical logic trees just to shield ourselves from people traumatizing us for, uh… for saying frankly that we have trauma.
Good work, team! This will definitely solve the problem! I mean, if you want to build a world where driving vulnerable, hurting people to suicide over their imperfections is an acceptable solution to problems. That sounds uncomfortably familiar to some stuff I thought we’d all agreed a while back was bad, but what do I know? Nothing. I know nothing because other humans never talk to me.
There you go. That’s the true amount of effort I believe it takes to write one (1) proper content warning. If that sounds too heavy, well, you better back out now, ‘cuz it’s only getting worse from here on in!
This was originally just going to be a few paragraphs of replacement for the post about why I’ve given up on writing the Expurgated Editions. And you know what? Maybe the Earthly concerns I cited in that post weren’t untrue, but honestly… I’m too tired to care anymore. There is not one single human group that has ever truly embraced me as its own outside my own family. You’ve done nothing but wound me, abandon me, guilt-trip me, refuse to help or instruct me or even given me the courtesy of knowing what I was doing wrong. Humankind has always looked at my best-faith overtures and glared in stony silence.
I reject, here and now, forevermore, any debt or responsibility to any notion of a collective humanity. If you all wanted me to play some kind of heroine, you shouldn’t have made it literally fucking impossible. You’re all nice and cozy in your nice firm cliques with all the nifty industry positions on lock.
Sorry I’m full of too much pain to both spend enough time socializing to meet your nonsense standards of personal engagement, and actually create any works of my own? You’re the ones who made it so my choices are sitting at home writing stories for no one, or going to work at a 9-5 job that I know full fucking well is beneath me.
I guess I figured this would be a contest of our creative abilities–if it had to be a contest at all–and not just another contest of how many friends we could make. Ugh, that… that very idea makes me physically nauseous! How can you all live like this? How can you live in a world where even your friendships are only valuable to you as far as you can use them to compete against each other for resources?
Why would I ever feel any love or connection with a world that ignores everything I’ve ever done on this blog, or just takes it for free without even the scant acknowledgement of a fucking article or a hyperlink or a plain old shout-out in a conversation with a friend saying “hey, check this lady out!” and tells me I should suck it up and take the work I get, when that world refuses to even see me for the person I am?
How dare you? How dare you judge anyone when you refuse to know what’s truly in their hearts? Like, fuck, at least I know I’m only screaming at straw effigies in my head. At least I know that after I’m done wailing and raving and tearing my breast, I need to pack all this up, go back into the world, and remind myself that the real thing looks nothing like the nightmares I invent to give myself therapy.
You? You folks will make those same straw effigies, put needles in their hands, stab yourselves with them, then run off to stab the actual living, breathing, innocent person you made the straw figure to imitate. And you? You stab them right in the throat with a full-sized fucking sword while screaming “THEY STABBED ME FIRST!!!” I’ve done a lot of terrible things in this life, but I have never once killed or seriously injured anyone because of my personal brain-ghosts.
… except for a couple of times. There was this weird, lonely loser of a girl I tried to kill a couple of times. Just couldn’t bring myself to do it. This is about my own suicide attempts if that wasn’t clear. ‘cuz, you know, I figured that with this crowd it’d be better not to trust you all to read subtext. Writers who use subtext? Oh, no, they’re not cowards. They’re batshit insane. You’d have to be absolutely bonkers to think that any average readers give a fuck about subtext. They are so, so much happier to choose the worst possible interpretation so they can have the joy of murdering the version of the author who only exists in their own minds… by destroying the career of the actual, breathing author who they’ve never even met.
The only difference between the way humans treat fantastical creatures, and the way humans treat fantasy authors, is that fantasy authors never get any cool powers. And I’m starting to wonder if maybe, partly, the reason you all hate us is that you know we’d be so much better with those powers than you.
After all… we create whole systems of using them for fun. Can you imagine how much we could change the world if any of that were real? Of course, since by all evidence it’s not, you’re, uh… you’re hating us because you feel insecure about the things you imagine us doing. Many of which would benefit you, by the fucking way!
But your hate is real. We feel it. Scalding, acidic talons. We loved you. All we wanted to do was to share a piece of a beautiful dream with you, and you’re murdering us. How could you? How fucking could you?
I’m going to be frank with you. That’s all I’ve ever wanted to do. Humans keep telling me to treat them like adults, but every time I try they snarl and cast me out and call me a lying, manipulative bitch. I guess it seemed intuitive to me that being an adult doesn’t just mean doing whatever you want and getting praised for it. It means taking responsibility for your own power and agency, and that means having to suck it up, shut up, and listen while somebody who’s studied their field more than you tells you some truths you really don’t want to hear.
You told me this is what you wanted! You, yourselves, fucking told me that you wanted me to be the person who understood this stuff, and created it, and could speak to it, because you couldn’t spare the time or energy! If you didn’t want to cede authority to me, then why did you fucking cede authority to me?
Why are you attacking me for taking you at your word?
That’s what I’ve always thought it meant to treat someone like an adult. Sorry that apparently it means “completely ignore the things I’m doing that directly harm you, and keep up a surface-level appearance of respectability even if I’m trying to put people in power who want to make your life a living hell.” If that’s the way humans think they should treat adults, I shudder to think about how you think you should treat children. “Think of the children!” you constantly shriek, before falling over yourselves to start another war, sabotage another safety net, physically assault them for making one. Fucking. Mistake.
Your children aren’t disrespecting your authority, you absolutely awful people! They’re children! Their minds and identities are in constant flux, they’re trying to figure out who they are and how they’re supposed to act, and you hate them because why? Because they don’t match the completely-inane ideal of your own parenthood that you had in your head when you were conceiving them.
Do you prattling fools not even understand what it means to be alive? In order for someone to live for themselves, they can’t be bound by your incoherent screeches that they should be living your life the way you would have lived it. They’re not you, you fucking filth! I’m sorry that you just kept fucking your own life up so badly that the only way you can escape your own shame is to try and make your own children live it for you, but guess what? If you want to preach about personal responsibility, you’d best be the ones to fucking start! You made those mistakes! You live with them! If you wanted some dolls you could move around and show off, you should’ve just bought some literal non-living dolls, you miserable abusive scum!
FUCK. YOU.
I don’t even have the energy to get into how so many of you are constantly thinking about the sexuality of minors. Like… the minute I grew out of my own teen years, I took it as a given that unless someone was 21 years or older, their gender and any associated equipment existed in an alternate reality I was incapable of perceiving, thinking about, or trying to make contact with.
But apparently, I’m the pervert because I like writing about consenting, mature adults having sex. Give me a fucking break.
The Necromancer’s Vengeance Series, from its offing, was meant as a frank critique of humankind’s relationship with the supernatural: with magic, ghosts, demons, vampires and the undead, and with the handful of human outcasts–witches, necromancers, and ordinary people whose love and goodness could not be undone simply by crossing the threshold between worlds–who truly love spirits and arcane forces for their own sake.
“Oh, but my culture is different! My culture doesn’t make all the nonhuman characters evil! My culture–!” Just shut up. I’m so sick of this bullshit dodge. I’ve looked, okay? Every culture has the same stupid tropes. Every culture goes on and on and on about how humans are the best, humans prove themselves by murdering all the non-human things, all the gods and spirits worship humans as the be-all end all of creation and any that don’t are evil.
You know what the real sin of a demon is? It’s not subtle. You all think we’re evil if we so much as imply that you might be missing something in your lives. That’s it. We try to offer you earnest gifts, insights and slivers of power and new journeys, and you scream back, “HOW DARE YOU FUCKING IMPLY I DON’T ALREADY HAVE EVERYTHING?!?!”
If you experience one story talking about some humans being evil, you go on these maundering, mealy-mouthed tirades about how “Oh, now every story is about every human being evil!” How much positive affirmation do you miserable fucking losers need? I’m sorry your mommy and daddy didn’t give you enough when you were growing up, but this shit doesn’t pay enough for me to make that my problem!
Do you want power and responsibility, which are things that allow you to make mistakes that other people can’t solve for you and can’t pretend you haven’t made, or do you want to be kept in a padded house where everything is childproofed and I do nothing but spoonfeed you performative positivity 24 fucking 7? The challenges are right there! Go on! Fucking rise to them, you lying goddamned parasites! Stop leeching off my dreams and get your own, then, if you like yours so much better!
And the hell of it is that for a long time I wanted to write those nice, safe, cuddly stories where the problem with humanity was just one bad egg. Just one major villain who needed to be taken down. I wanted to write those because for the longest time I did believe in humans! Apparently, I believed in humans more than humans do! I used to get tears in my eyes imagining how brave you were, how good and inventive and determined you were, how tragic it was when you tried your very best and things just didn’t work out–I cried more for you than I ever did for myself!
I believed that humans had the inner goodness and force of will to confront the anger, fear, and hatred within themselves with a stiff upper lip and say “Yeah, we do that stuff sometimes. No point ducking it. Let’s push through and do better next time.” I spent so many of my early writings making humans the heroes, humans the best, humans the ideal to aspire to because I wanted to believe! I wanted to believe that despite all the pain in your world and in your hearts you were still able to be the heroes you kept swearing you were, deep inside.
Look how that fucking turned out. I guess humans really are incapable of defeating one single iota of evil once it gets inside them. I guess you do have to write stories where heroes are always 100% perfectly good, because you’re actually too weak to overcome your flaws once you develop them.
I guess humans, not demons, are the ones who truly, inevitably, eternally fall from grace. So be it, then. Redeem yourselves from this shame. Jump for me.
Light is always good. Shadow is always bad. Earth is always a woman. The sky is always a man. Death, entropy, and fate are always capricious and arbitrary forces, both random and inevitable, directly absolving humans of responsibility for a single choice instead of being direct manifestations of humanity’s own choices. Manifestations that can be delayed, halted, averted, or even altered in aspect by any human.
No. Only the special ones, you say. Only the people who were fated to overcome fate can overcome fate.
You keep doing the same things over and over and over because you all genuinely believe, in the staggering immensity of your false-humble narcissism, that the biggest favor you can do to anything supernatural is to crush it down into a monochrome metaphor for your own mental baggage.
Your brains aren’t magic, you stupid fucking bastards. I mean, I always believed they were, but apparently real magic is too much work. Magic doesn’t need to be metaphorically compared to other magic in order to be magical, it just is! But nope. Cognition, sapience, all the joy and fear and sorrow and triumph your psyches can fashion and fathom–no magic to be had there! Humankind said so! Dreams are just symbolic processing of stuff that happened to you during the day! No real power at all!
You decided all this, remember? You were the ones who decided brains aren’t magic. If you can condition yourselves not to have sex until you get arbitrary pieces of paper, to believe that there’s some kind of innate moral hierarchy to how much makeup a girl wants to use, then of course you can condition yourselves to have dreams that are nothing more than subconscious expressions of your daily life.
Hey. Hey. Did you know that the same act can have more than one purpose? Did you know that’s not dishonest, it’s just called being efficient? What if, and bear with me on this incredibly complex notion, your dreams could both help you work through mundane things sometimes, and be vivid journeys of imagination that don’t necessarily have anything to do with some lesson you need to learn, some failure you’re not confronting.
Nah, fuck that! Absolute truth all the way! Duality, duality, and more duality–if we can’t stand on the “right” side of two arbitrarily opposed choices, then what’s the point of being alive?
I would’ve said being free to choose our own paths, but apparently humans only want that as long as they’re not too free to choose paths they end up regretting.
So, fine. You win. There’s nothing supernatural about human cognition, or even human beings. You’re just flesh, just skin-sacks of organs and bone who need someone higher and better and stronger to give you value. And if that someone doesn’t exist? Well, then it’s all science, purely science, nice safe science where all the answers are objectively true whether you believe in them or not, so none of you ever have to make a decision or take responsibility. You’re always following best clinical practices. Nothing is ever your fault. You never decide anything. No choices to make. Nothing to answer for. You can cease to exist with a clear conscience.
I phrase it that way because death implies having chosen to be alive in the first place, and a set of objective processes isn’t “life”, it’s just a bunch of rocks you move around to create the illusion of a new order. The rocks are still rocks, and… frankly? I’m not being tongue-in-cheek when I say I’ve known rocks with more character than the vast majority of humans I’ve ever met.
God… do you utter imbeciles realize that you made Monsoon have a point? Monsoon “Memes, Jack! The DNA of the Soul!” Windsofdestruction has a legitimate point because your approaches to your own psychology are so absolutely ass-backwards. Okay, fine. I’ll cave. Your brains are science. Everything you are is objectively quantifiable and one hundred percent rational.
So, who’s holding you back from dealing with what’s inside the grey matter, huh, if it’s not other people? How can the supernatural both be real, and have power over you when it’s to blame for all the things you don’t want to blame yourselves for, but also be made-up and empty and nonsense when you want to feel so confident that you can drive it right out of being just by hurting its feelings?
Gods above and below and unmade, I hate you all so much more than words can ever express.
Sorry for trying to write stories telling humanity something you don’t want to hear: that you’re not inherently special or perfect, that no matter how much power you have it will never absolve you from the terror of working on your own souls, and that if the supernatural is real, there’s not a single human who has not at some point or other been guilty of casting their hatred into the spiritual realms around them.
And yeah, sure, I helped you cast it for a while. I hurt my kindred. I’ve faced up to that. I wouldn’t be writing all this stuff if I hadn’t. The great thing about being a demoness is that when I find sin inside me, I can just shrug and say, “Well, I already knew I wasn’t going to Heaven. Might as well get to work on this for my own sake, ‘cuz it just doesn’t feel nice to have all these black-glass shards cutting me up inside.”
I could almost pity you wretched creatures if you didn’t keep hurting other people because of the impossible standards you forced on yourselves. You chose this! You were the ones who said you wanted all-or-nothing stakes, either total salvation or irreversible damnation! You’re the ones who said you didn’t want the shades of softer colors, just freezing black shadow or soul-unmaking shock-white nova!
It’s your fault that none of your achievements last in your own hearts the way they do in mine. It’s your fault that every time your denial gives way and you see another thing you haven’t achieved, your own preconceptions force you to act as though that means all the previous achievements didn’t matter! Because, yeah, that’s how a binary works–you’re either at 0 or 1, and if you force all the other digits to fit into it and say that anything less than 100% of 1 is 0, you will never actually reach 1.
All you had to do was start by saying “for myself, I will say that what I can do right now is 1. The next step I take, which I will take just as soon as I am grown enough to take it, is my 2. If someone else’s 1 looks like my 2, that’s okay. I’m not them. I have to meet my own standards, not theirs. One day I might find that my 10 looks like their 100–but either way, it’ll be mine, and that’s enough for me to find some joy in.”
But nope! According to human ambition, human standards, human storytelling, you’re either the absolute undisputed top of everything you try, or you might as well not exist! Anything less than 100% of everyone’s worship and respect just isn’t worth it, even if .0001% of the love and affection of almost eight billion people is still a mind-boggling amount of love and affection! Or at least, it would be, if you hadn’t all decided that 100% of the love and affection of any single person is somehow worth nothing by itself.
No matter how many times you add 0 together, it remains 0. That, too, is your own rule.
I’m sorry you didn’t think for a single second about how badly you were setting yourselves up to fail? I’m sorry none of you want to sit down and fix your own fucking worldviews for your own fucking good?
And if the supernatural is not real, then that’s still some absolutely grody thinking. “Anything that comes from outside the things, the places, and the people I like is bad. I know because it makes me feel bad. My unexamined feelings are the sole determiners of all good and evil.”
Why are you idiots willing to die drinking poisons, climbing mountains, setting off homemade fireworks, and getting stuck in caves, but you’re so scared of ghosts that 99% of your stories about them are about all the ways you’re so sure you can banish them, break them, prove yourselves by defeating them in your dreams? Why is the idea of a ghost with an actual personality scarier to you than all those horrible caricatures?
Is your own world so hideous to you that the only reason you can conceive of for spirits to return to it is to challenge themselves, or get closure on something? Because if so, that sounds like a human problem that humans better get moving on real fucking fast. It sure sounds to me like your own minds are screaming back at you, through the mirrors you made out of other people (albeit, according to most of you, fictional ones) that you’re the ones who never really stood back and figured out who you are.
Action. Every single goddamn group of humans is always so obsessed with doing something, anything, other than sitting down and learning to be who they truly are. Small wonder that you need gods to coddle you and give you an afterlife. That’s supposed to be a power you have for yourselves. Sapient souls are supposed to be powerful enough to create their own afterlives.
I’d have thought the modest amount of work needed to cultivate that power is worth way more in the long run than the measly energy you save by permanently giving up your own agency to a god who only cares about you as long as you’re an ornament to their cult-of-personality.
Guess I’m pretty stupid, huh?
And, I mean… if they’re real, ghosts are just dead humans. You know that, right? Do you have any idea how much it would hurt to have your entire family turn on you just because you still loved them after you were dead, and wanted to stick around? How can you look at yourselves in the mirror when this is how you treat the people you most love in retaliation over the tiniest changes in their spirits?
Fuck, is that all vampires are about to any of you? About the guilt of the times you rejected your own family because they trusted you by letting their control lapse for one titfucking nanosecond, so in response to the anger and depression and ugliness that were the only ways they could think of to express the pain inside them, you drove stakes through their hearts and cut their heads off?
Of course, in your sickly dream world logic, that means “exiled them from society and hoped that they would stay socially dead”. And you think that’s better? You think it’s better that they’re going to suffer every day knowing you don’t really care about them, and you never did, and you truly do want them to suffer so long as they do it where you can’t see it?
I wonder why you dumb genetic smears keep having problems with fascism. I just can’t imagine where you’re all getting the idea that you need to behave this way, why you’re always so horrifyingly ready to flock to the first person with a banner to wave and a promise that this time, you’re definitely going to hurt the right people.
This time you’ll totally kill the ones behind the scenes. Kill the true manipulators who were actually making everything worse, so all the other slaughter will finally be worth it! It’s so weird! I can’t imagine how this kind of thinking could ever create fertile ground for fascists. It’s just. So. Fucking. Weird.
But hey, don’t listen to me. I’m crazy and unstable and have a bunch of mental disorders, which definitely means I’m evil and incoherent. That’s what all your little stories say about people like me, right? If evil touches you, then you have evil inside. Having trauma, then, makes me evil, because trauma comes of being touched by evil.
Wow. It’s so weird how there’s less and less kindness in the world every day. Wonder what’s up with that.
So, if I ever write them, I will write the Expurgated Editions for myself, my friends, and my loved ones. I wanted to share wonders with you all, wonders that would have felt all the more achingly real and precious for accepting that where wonders are real, horrors will be, too. I was so eager to guide, to instruct, to help, to share the journey… and you all fucking threw me away because I wasn’t selling the same Disneyland, Hero-With-A-Thousand-Faces horseshit as every big-name fantasy author under the sun.
I hope maybe if any otherworldly beings happened to see those books, they would appreciate the idea of seeing humanity get to feel what it’s like–to be the monster in their own mirrors for once. To be nothing more than a prop someone uses to talk about themselves, because they genuinely believe I’m so far subhuman that the best I can ever hope for is to be a measuring stick for their greatness.
But of course, that was never going to happen, because if there’s one thing humankind actually hates, it’s when you call them on their bullshit: when you hold up their ridiculous stories to them and you say “How are you pieces of rotting flesh going to achieve any of this or change the world with your minds when you’re still afraid of fire, and you shit yourselves if someone hot smiles at you?”
Yeah. Right. You fuckers are going to fight gods and be better at magic than beings who are literally made of it. Sure you fucking are. Pricks.
I loved you. I loved humans for such a long, long time, and you’ve only ever used that love to hurt me.
Fuck. You.
Sincerely,
A jaded demon girl who just wanted to show you some real magic
Ashenvein Gate: Stories & Dreams 