MILD RUMINATIONS ON ISEL

Originally written in Summer of 2022.

isel is a very important character to me just for personal reasons… he’s very much representative of the Disabled Artist and fears about waning ability and whatnot that i occasionally fall into. it’s very very profound to me that isel finds another avenue of expression for creativity that he finds fulfilling, it’s something i think about with regards to juggling art and writing… when something constrains one ability there’s a fallback… and one thing i adore especially is that by the time isel’s settled into the train, or at least by the time dalisay’s there, he’s confident enough to hang up ‘rough’ new paintings of his in his train room. because. honestly. there’s the fear of loss of ability but another more niche thing is the kind of insecurity that comes with being disabled and trying to present your work, especially when holding it up to the work of ‘everyone else’. isel and i both have vision problems that result in a kind of distortion in what we lay down as artwork — sometimes it’s awkward! sometimes it results in a weak grasp on linework or depth or whatever and there’s always the fear that someone will notice or whatever… there’s this weird perfectionism and fear i guess about deviation that should be ‘under control’. i’m just fond of isel regaining confidence in himself to simply put out any kind of visual work, regardless of how ‘tilted’ or ‘inaccurate’ it may be… he embraces this abstractness and lack of stability to make something unique to him, which i myself and trying to build up confidence about lol. but i love that he’s gotten to a point like that… creating is in his blood. he’ll get sick if he resigns completely.

i only have a mild accretion of complete writings done so ignore invisible referencing but he probably has my favorite speaking voice out of every character just because it’s probably the one most earnest to mine. because it is intentionally the least filtered — i have personal problems with word retrieval and misattribution, along with neologism, overtalk and register, and getting to express that through isel is genuinely very cathartic. isel’s dialogue is the one i touch up the least out of first drafts, to a very high extent because i have a rule where any ‘mess up’ of a word i think of gets preserved. he makes the same speaking ‘mistakes’ i do! forever! it makes me happy!

another important facet of this is that he’s never ridiculed for his speech. he’s got a lot of weird sayings and replaces words with nonsense sometimes but it’s never a point of contention and people are patient with him! specifically wrt cassiopeia this makes me happy — freya and olzhas are particularly perceptive of his exhaustion and strain and either put in the work to grasp his speech or convince him to rest if he seems overly beat. it’s a very particular love and dedication that i wish was just inherent but it means the world to me to have people willing to accommodate for isel…

additionally his bad eye is on the same side as mine :+) i often mistranslate directions (demeter was supposed to share my bad eye but i messed up!) and so he was technically the first character to properly inherit my visual asymmetry. this is a very minor thing but it makes me smile still…