Somnus is going to be something like this. Claire is a queer femme who, due to trauma and some horror-sci-fi shenanigans, had her younger years stolen from her. She's going to community college in her 30's, looking for direction later in life.
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Having to start over, becoming a new person who actually reflects who you are, that part of her story is just a fictionalized version of the past decade of my own life. There aren't many stories like this, even though so many of us go through something kind of like it.
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So much of this story will be about people trying to reclaim their lives and selves amidst all of this horrific, fantastical stuff going on. With Claire it's also happening in the context of being borderline, and trying to do all of this personal and emotional development she-
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-never got to do. She's not going from one thing to another per se. She's so broken she's going from nothing to something.
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One of the more pernicious mainstream ideas that parts of online queer culture has replicated and adopted wholesale is that your life is pretty much "done" at 30. Especially if you're femme in any way. Kinda messed up in a world where older people keep pulling up every ladder.
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Coming of age stories made sense in a world where you really did start to make your way in life around 20, when you picked a lifelong stable career and all that. Those stories were wrote in a world designed around that life pattern.
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But our's increasingly isn't. Our world is now one of reduced opportunity and mobility and an economy demanding hustling and reinvention, where we're expected to all have the same life milestones despite the boomers dismantling the systems providing said milestones.
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And of course many of them have done all they could to keep queer people closeted, moving on from one letter of the community to another as that got harder and harder. Forcing us to often have to come out later, develop later, meet our own milestones later.
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Then they have moral panics over "the millennials!" not buying homes and being too gay or whatever. Anyway, part of my objective with Somnus is a story that reflects this reality, and not the romanticized coming of age stuff that more reflected middle class boomer experience.
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Coming of age is seen as a YA genre, at least most of the time. Re-coming of age is a decidedly non-YA, adult genre for those of us who have been lost in the world because the people in charge destroyed all the roadmaps and are currently tearing up the roads.
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So we have to build our own, chart our own direction, and figure all of this out ourselves much later in life while being insulted and demeaned for not having figured it all out earlier.
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18+only. Horror/kink artist, photographer, fashionista. Social justice goth. Non-binary trans girl, fluid. She/they.