The bottom half of this page was the first art I did for Cabin Fever, mostly completed in a foggy haze of inspiration. That made it sort of annoying when I finally got around to completing this page, since the layers and folders were a mess without any sort of ordering logic. Took about thirty minutes just cleaning up the file before I could get to work on the top half.

Now might be a neat time to talk about my feelings on sex and violence. Put simply, I don’t understand our society’s overwrought concerns about sexuality in media. That said I wouldn’t really push against “the mainstream” on that – by and large I think Western society isn’t all that Puritanical anymore, and anyway if you’re smart you can find whatever sorta sexy literature or visual stuff you’d like. I think it doesn’t need to be so censored in* everything, but by now no one’s really hurting to find *something they’d like.

Instead my big issue is with violence and how casually it’s presented. It always bugs me. Not in the sense of, “Oh, ew, don’t show gore!” Not even in the sense of, “Wow, all this wanton destruction is so trivialized!” If I had to put it into words, it’s the way that a character can be shown as murdering scores and scores of people to establish them as having a “hard edge,” and yet what truly makes them a “bad person” is how they end up treating our “main characters.” That bugs me. It strikes me as an odd willingness to ignore the humanity of “extras” and “cannon fodder” that feels hypocritical coming from us, since we are all so many extras and cannon fodder ourselves.

I don’t want to censor violence or have less violent characters; I would just like death to be treated with some sort of gravity. Death ought to mean something. It ain’t pretty, and violent death is even worse. But it happens and people ought to be aware of that. Too often I think we ignore the reality and brutality of death with a sort of glib sense that it’s okay that we ignore death since it isn’t coming for us.