zygoptera / modern Latin (plural), from Greek zugon ‘yoke’ + pteron ‘wing’. / a group of insects which comprises the damselflies / similar to dragonflies, but smaller.
the foreword
Writing, journaling, blogging & creating have all come naturally to me since I was a child. I have endless half-empty notebooks from giving up on consistently keeping a diary, only finally succeeding at the age of eleven and continuing to write near-daily since then. I made my first blog when I was eight, my first Tumblr account when I was twelve, my first Twitter when I was fourteen. Paper was used for the events in my life, the internet as a way to express my interests, but occasionally would the two bleed into one another hence how I ended up with a private twitter account which has seen more of my emotional breakdowns than my friends. However, these days the internet and social media has become overall a shitty place to be, and I am completely done with short-form media, image-based consumption, and the overpowering presence of AI slop on every website. In the wake of my disillusionment with the modern internet I have found myself back on Tumblr and with that comes my urge to once again contribute.
Not to simply just consume media, but to once again create it.
However, I do love to consume media, and even more than that, I love to talk about the media I am actively consuming. Therefore, these entries will be a combination of a few things; reviews and write-ups about my favourite shows, comics, tv shows, books etc, album and song recommendations, my thoughts on various things happening in my life and in the world, things I have learned recently, art and writing I have done for fun, and probably a bunch more random stuff. Anything which will get me out of this hellish, cyclical and draining cycle of doom-scrolling as I await for my inevitable death. Or something like that.
Anyways, let us proceed.
I. crow cillers
I have never exactly been one for graphic novels, comic books, or web comics. Although there existed, for my whole childhood and even now into my adult life, thousands upon thousands of carefully labeled comics, systemised, organised, and plastic-wrapped lovingly by my father and stored under the staircase, they were his hobby and the last thing that had trickled over from his life before he met my mother, and I was never welcomed into that world. By the time I was of reading age, I had sped past most of my peers in terms of literacy abilities, jumping over children’s novellas and picture books towards young adult and adult fiction. While this did nurture my fascination with books and allowed me to become a prolific reader in my early life, it sucked some of the fun out of reading for my ten and eleven-year-old-self. Books were no longer enjoyable to me as instead of adventure stories filled with magic and fun, I was reading war books and high fantasy and dystopias with explicit gore and death and darkness beyond the levels my child-self was able to comprehend. I forgot that reading could be fun, that it was supposed to be fun, and I let myself drift away from books, and by the time I entered my teenage years I found myself sucked into the bright, ever-changing, glaring new world- the internet.
Like many other young teenagers, I escaped my not-so-great real-life through finding newer, better ones online, and it was through these communities that I found fandom. The books I had obsessed over alone in the playground I could now rant about with strangers on the internet, strangers who shared my passion for this niche series I thought only existed in the dusty shelves of my school library. TV show that the girls in my class thought were cringe and weird were now the Hot New Thing on Tumblr, and I soon found myself falling down the endless rabbit hole that is fan creation. Fanfiction.net, Quotev, and DeviantArt became my life outside of school, and one of my favourite parts of these communities were fan comics and fan art.
I have never considered myself an artist, at least not in the traditional sense, and I believe this is the reason I have always found myself drawn to fan art. The idea that other individuals could take the characters I had imagined so clearly from the words in a book straight out of my head and place it perfectly onto paper was mind-blowing to me- these artists were magicians, and I worshipped them as such. In fact I think I still do to some degree. My best friend is a fantastic digital artist, and every time she shows me one of her silly goober OCs or a cartoon-style fan piece I can’t help but gawk in awe at her talent, in the way she brings these characters to life. This love of other’s art work online eventually led me to web comics and online graphic novels. The first I ever recall reading was actually Alice Oseman’s Heartstopper, long before the Netflix adaption was ever in the works and far before it became the hit it is today. This was around the same time I was coming to terms with my identity, and in the depths of my depression I remember curling up in my bed and reading the entire comic up until it’s most recent update, the joy and heartbreak pulling my from the numbness that had held me down for so long.
Although Heartstopper was a piece of media that impacted me so deeply, I didn’t find myself delving much into the world of online comics outside of fan works for another few years- whether it was fear of being judged by my friends, both online and in real life, or just preferring the medium of novels and film, I never found another comic that gripped me in the same way. Or, that is, until this past week I discovered the wonderful work of Cate Wurtz.
As a long-time fan of Car Seat Headrest, I was aware of Wurtz’ work in the periphary, however it took the announcement of the upcoming The Scholars album for me to delve into the world of lamezone.net and all of Wurtz’ comics she has published over the last thirteen-ish years. Wurtz’ website is a true rabbit hole of artistic discovery, old internet-style web pages, and bonus content for her comics, and I have found myself trawling the various sites for hidden side-pages and links in the same way I do with Neocities and old Wayback Machine sites. My consistent love of Tumblr and the disillusionment I have felt towards the modern internet has highlighted this to me even more, and I have become absolutely enthralled with scrolling through old blogs and band websites and forums and chatrooms which have been logged on the internet archive, feeling a sense of nostalgia for an era of the internet I wasn’t even apart of. Lamezone absolutely captures this magic more me, and there is something so special in finding a secret link to a page you might not have found if you didn’t click on a random piece of art or a silly drawing in a hidden part of the website.
Crow Cillers is Wurtz’s longest running work, the series concluding this past December on her patreon with the final episode of season ten wrapping up over eleven years of work and this comic being published online. While I am still only on the first season of Crow Cillers, I am already in love with Wurtz’s art style, design choices, and characters, and I can tell this is going to be a piece of media which stays with me for a long time. The bright colours, sharp lines, and messy, doodle-style drawings remind me of the old animated cartoons I used to watch on ABC3 as a child, and the funny, sarcastic quips of the characters are reminiscent of the way me and my friends used to talk as pre-teens acting older than our age. The story of the Crow and the familial complexities within the Corvidae are already some of my favourite aspects of the comic, and the quartet who make up the Crow Cillers remind me of why found family and a ragtag band of misfits tend to be my ideal character trope in any sort of media. I can already see myself in Cortney’s stubbornness and This Kid’s naivety, and I can’t wait to get deeper into reading this incredible, extremely long online web comic.
All these things- adventure, unexpected connection with others, childhood nostalgia, relatability, morally grey characters- are exactly what I love about my favourite pieces of media. From the books I read as a kid, to the shows I watched as a pre-teen, to the fan fictions I adored as a teenager, to the films I love today it is these tropes and themes and recurring aspects of stories which have drawn me in and held me close. My re-enchantment with long-form media in the world of TikTok and X has pulled me towards reading blogs and writing essays and watching documentaries and in this case, reading web-comics. And maybe now, I will finally start to create again.
II. university
After a summer of worry and stress and ups and downs I can’t say it’s not a relief to be back in an academic setting once again. I feel the same way I did two years ago, starting at a new school after doing a semester online, the world feeling sharp at the edges and entirely overwhelming, and yet breathing in the realms of possibility. My university campus is beautiful, and perhaps my romanticisation of it will be a way for me to get through the next few years until I feel more settled in my adulthood. They say it’s an unhealthy way to move through life, to act as though there is someone watching or as though you are in a tv show, but that mentality, the thought that my story is taking place currently, not in the future, has been one of the few things able to rouse me from my sorrows in the middle of a bad episode when I find myself bedridden. Unhealthy or not, anything is better than that.
I understand now how so many authors and artists and creatives gained inspiration for their most monumental works in their collegiate years- not even two weeks into the semester of a STEM degree and I feel as though my creative brain has exploded. After a year, maybe two, in a daze, a slump of feeling too exhausted and mentally drained to even attempt being creative and I feel rejuvenated in a new way, hence the reason for this blog and the endless other projects I am bound to start and never finish. There have been many, in the last little while- quilting, embroidery, songwriting, campaign planning etc- and though they’re not abandoned forever, they have certainly been on pause while I settle into university and sort out the mess that is my personal life and mental health. Maybe now that things are becoming stable for me I will actually pick all of them back up. The cycle, as they say, has begun once again.
I think back to December, when I first began my new job, and I would spend hours doing the same repetitive task over and over again, too nervous to talk to my coworkers. I instead spent the days disassociating with a single headphone in as I perused the playlists made by my fourteen-year-old self and explored the podcasts and audiobooks offered for free on my family plan Spotify Premium. One of the podcasts I listened to in full was Lili Anolik’s Once Upon A Time… at Bennington College, which explored the impact of Vermont’s Bennington College on it’s students who would go on to become known as the “Literary Brat Pack.” Names such as Donna Tartt (The Secret History), Bret Easton Ellis (American Psycho), and Jonathan Lethem (The Fortress of Solitude) were all Bennington students throughout the 1980’s, and both Tartt and Ellis’ debut and sophomore novels featured settings which resembled their old university in a way which is uncanny. All three authors characterise their time at Bennington as being a poignant, defining moment of their lives, and Tartt’s self-insert protagonist of The Secret History describing his time at the novel’s fictional campus in an eerily similar way.
“I suppose there is a certain crucial interval in everyone's life when character is fixed forever; for me, it was that first fall term I spent at Hampden.”
- Donna Tartt, The Secret History
While my last two years of high school were spent figuring out who I was, I feel as though university will be a time for me to figure out who I am going to be. I never thought I would make it this far into life, and while the future seems daunting it is also undeniably bright. I hope it changes me, I hope I come out the other side of my Bachelor’s degree another person, someone who knows where she wants to end up and what she wants out of her life, because as of right now I still have no idea. I think that’s normal though.
So far, my classes have been wonderfully scary. As a student in the Sciences, Engineering, and Technology faculty I am constantly surrounded by people who appear to be much smarter, harder-working, intelligent and dedicated students than me, and while it may not be great for my self esteem I think it will encourage me to strive for higher things. I already feel a sense of imposter syndrome in my degree- I barely passed year twelve Chemistry, and now I am supposed to be in the advanced course? It doesn’t seem to compute in my brain that I am where I am meant to be, where I spent three years of my life trying to get to, and where I can begin to work towards my next goals for my education finally. This year will hopefully be a bit of a breather, to allow me to explore my classes and subjects and figure out how I want the next three, five, ten years of my life to look like, and to determine what areas of science I want to dedicate my time to. The English Literature class I have in my timetable is another relief, as in my heart of hearts I am a humanities girl, and being able to do analysis of phrasing instead of data sets is a truly a semblance of relief in my busy university schedule.
I am nervously optimistic for the next few years of my degree, and for the years of academia which lay in my future, and that is more hope for the future than I have had in a long time. As long as there continues to be post-lecture lunches with friends in the student hub, Friday night drinks and gigs at the Uni Bar, and chemistry experiments which make me feel like a witch, I think that I’ll be okay.
interlude - my current favourites
song - meet me in montauk by retirement party
book - bunny by mona awad
food - almond milk porridge with nutella, banana, chia seeds & honey
drink - english breakfast tea, or elderflower and vodka cocktails
film - princess mononoke (1997)
hobby - zine-making
III. sharp objects
The most recent book I have finished reading is Gillian Flynn’s 2006 debut novel, the southern gothic and psychological thriller Sharp Objects. I first knew of this book from two places- from being a fan of Flynn’s other, more popular work Gone Girl, and from a long-lost fan edit on TikTok which showed the dreamy, whimsical aesthetic of the show juxtaposed with it’s much darker, more gruesome scenes to demonstrate the contrast. Even then this work remained firmly on my TBR (to be read) pile for a good two years before I got around to reading it, and every day since I finished the book I kick myself for not starting it earlier. Flynn managed to transport me directly into the small-town summer hell-hole that was Wind Gap, Missouri, and I don’t think the events of this book will be soon to leave my mind.
Sharp Objects follows journalist Camille Preaker as she returns to her home-town to cover the disappearance and murder of two young girls, the mystery still unsolved by the sheriff and out-of-town detective brought in for this case. Camille is battling both her alcoholism and her familial issues as she steps into the shoes of her teenage self, attempting to reconnect with her rebellious 13-year-old sister, Amma, and co-exist with her mother, who has never quite recovered from the death of her second daughter years prior. As yet another girl disappears from Wind Gap and reappears mutilated, Camille finds herself drawn deeper into the web of secrets constructed by her small town’s inhabitants, and finds that the answers she is looking for may lay closer to home than she could ever imagine.
spoilers ahead. tw for discussions of self harm & mental illness
In the novel, the concept of Munchausen by proxy syndrome is explored in the character of Adora as she induces illness in her daughters as a way to obsessively control them. It is revealed at the end of the book that Adora’s actions had lead to the death of her middle daughter, Marian, with her passing having been ruled as a tragic, unfortunate accident in the small town. Camille succumbs to her mother’s tricks once again, despite being in adulthood, and experiences a stark juxtaposition between her disgust for Adora’s actions towards her and Amma, and the yearning for being taken care of and doted on in the way she hadn’t been for most of her childhood. It’s a Stockholm syndrome style situation; on one hand, Camille knows her mother is poisoning her and her sister, but on the other, she feels for the little girl inside of her who just wants to be held in her mother’s arms. Her connection to her girlhood, as traumatising and broken as it was, still lingers, and in the climax of the novel she succumbs to her mother’s violence in return for her love, as twisted and ill-minded as it may be.
Camille’s self-harm is a background aspect of the novel, only mentioned in passing in regards to her sexual experiences and the familiar urge she feels while being back in Wind Gap. However, Camille lets her mother slowly poison her and make her sicker and sicker to avoid the fallout that may come from the realisation that her mother murdered Marian, a form of indirect self harm which results in her nearly overdosing on the illegal medications Adora is feeding her. The action of putting herself in harm’s way is one repeated consistently by Camille throughout the story, including her intentional proximity to dangerous individuals related to the murder investigations, her indulgence in alcohol and drugs to connect with her sister and mask the feeling associated with her home-town, and sleep-depriving herself to obsess over the case and her piece on it. Although these actions aren’t as obvious as the words she carves into herself, they are still examples of self-harm, and very nearly take Camille’s life.
While Camille had been able to escape Wind Gap as a teenager through leaving for college and never returning, her sister Amma is still trapped in the house with her mother, fussed over and dolled up and riddled with fevers. Amma finds her outlet in secret rebellion, sneaking out and using her desirability to score drinks and drugs and party invitations from older boys, all unbeknownst to her mother. However, Camille and Amma shared another thing in common, and that was the want to be loved by their mother, at any cost. Camille succumbed to her childish wishes directly, and Amma eliminated any competition- through violently murdering the young girls in town that Adora had been tutoring. The cold-blooded serial killer the detectives had been hunting down turned out to be a beautiful, doe-eyed thirteen-year-old girl raised by a murderer in a house from hell, collecting the teeth of her victims to use as a marble floor in her own beloved replica dollhouse.
The cycles of violence within the family, passing down from woman to child, is one of the most prominent themes in Sharp Objects. Adora’s mental illness ran unchecked for her entire life, the trauma she faced as a child going unacknowledged and resulting in her getting sicker and sicker until it took over her life and the lives of her family. The self-harm Camille participates in and Amma’s destructive, violent behaviours are examples of them rebelling against their mother, while internally they plea:
look at me. love me. love me even when I’m not sick.
The picturesque setting of a small southern town illustrates how familial trauma was able to breed, how all Adora longed for was for her family to be loved, adored, pitied, going as far to kill her own daughter to achieve these dreams. How, even after ten years away, a few weeks back in Wind Gap had Camille reverting to the habits of her teenage self, how her hometown pulled her back into its stench. Friends and associates of Adora knew something was wrong, knew something was off with her, and even mentioned such to Camille, but in the gossipy, church-goer, pastor’s wife type of way, where a woman sickened with grief and mental illness is deserving of commentary rather than help an intervention. Where a teenage girl screaming out for help and support is to be ousted, rather than consoled.
The morally grey nature of the characters in Sharp Objects is easily what made the book the most fascinating to me, as the three main characters are all women filled with unbearable pain, trauma, and violence, all finding different releases for this overwhelming output of emotion. Adora, through inflicting pain on her girls, Camille, on herself, and Amma, on the other pre-teen girls who reside in Wind Gap. Anger lives within them all, and it festered within them until breaking point. Flynn is undoubtedly an incredible thriller writer, and I look forward to reading more of her works in the future.
There was also a TV adaption of Sharp Objects produced by HBO and released in 2018, and while I am only two episodes into the mini-series I am already enthralled by the cinematography, the incredible acting, the sound-track and the script. I am a known skeptic of adaptions, having seen one-too-many studios mangle my favourite books beyond repair, however the care which has been put into Sharp Objects clearly shines through, and I cannot wait to reach the height of the story once again, this time on screen.
“Sometimes I think illness sits inside every woman, waiting for the right moment to bloom. I have known so many sick women all my life. Women with chronic pain, with ever-gestating diseases. Women with conditions. Men, sure, they have bone snaps, they have backaches, they have a surgery or two, yank out a tonsil, insert a shiny plastic hip. Women get consumed.”
- Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects
the postscript
As I settle into this new chapter of my life and adjust to university I feel a sense of peace wash over me. After months of stress due to the uncertainty of my future, I feel as though my life is beginning to fall into the routine and structure I thrive in, and I am forever grateful that I have been able to reach a point where familiarity is attainable. Quiet mornings on the tram to uni, lunch with friends in the library, the afternoon sun trickling over the city buildings as I make my way home. The next three/four/ten years are looking bright, and I want to believe it will stay that way.
all my love,
lucy x