Hera from Wolf 359! (I couldnāt just stick with one design, come on.)
Anyways, not to get personal on my fandom tumblr, but Hera Wolf 359ās glitchy voice and the way it was addressed in the series is probably the only time Iāve actually felt represented by a fictional character as someone whoās dealt with a speech impediment for most of my life. IDC if it was intentional or not, I love her for it.
i don’t know. i’m falling apart, and it’s probably going to get worse after my birthday. my therapist fired me months ago, after telling me i could “always come back if i wanted to” and i don’t have the time/money to find another one, i have been through so many and it doesn’t matter. i cried for hours the other day about the mexican gray wolf that was found dead. i feel guilty for hoping for anything at all. i think i’m just a lost cause.
i feel like i come across like i’m attached to my own misery but i really really don’t want to be. i want to be wrong about myself. i want it to turn out that everything is actually easy and i can have what i want and that i can be a part of the world and happy and happy for other people too and that everything can be better. i’m so desperate for things to change and nothing ever happens and i’m always let down. anything i feel hopeful about gets taken away. sometimes i feel like one of those posts like remember that your pet is one part of your life but you are their entire life. like ordinarily you should remember that what you see about people online is only a fraction of who they are, but in my case it’s actually all of me and that’s what’s wrong with me.
heya! i loved the wolf 359 10th anniversary neocities page you and avesmonster put together. i'm wanting to put something similar together for the malevolent 5th anniversary -- would you be willing to share some info with me about the process for making that site?
yes, of course! i’m not sure if you mean more organizational stuff or the actual, literal “putting the website together” part, but i’m happy to help with either. please feel free to DM me; i could try to give general advice, but i think it’ll be more useful if you let me know what you’ve got in mind. good luck with everything; i’m sure some people who follow me would be interested in participating!
i posted that out-of-context clip of michelle agresti saying maxwell “would definitely be a chaser” because i think it’s kinda darkly funny, but… i actually kind of do believe that? in a certain capacity. even just socially, maxwell is interested in hera because she’s an AI. she’s not interested in getting to know hera, the regular woman with regular interests and desires; she’s interested in getting to know how hera, mother program of the u.s.s. hephaestus, operates. that isn’t to say she isn’t interested in hera’s personality at all, as a blanket statement, but i am saying that she wouldn’t be interested if not for the initial, crucial fact of hera being an AI. that’s it. and i know it’s probably controversial to say, but i can never personally see maxwell as a trans woman because she is very aware that she’s seen as a bright, bubbly young woman - and granted a certain assumption of innocence based on that, in spite of other potential red flags - and she actively uses that to her strategic advantage. hera empathizes with maxwell and believes they share a comradery that maxwell does not return. even before the worst of it - maxwell never respects hera’s privacy, and frames her self-defense precautions in a way that’s meant to make the others assume she’s a danger. there’s something about who is granted that assumption of innocence, whose ability to defend herself the same as anyone else is perceived as an act of aggression, that really puts the final nail in the coffin for me.
last time i was talking about eiffel’s favorite holidays, i didn’t consider april fool’s day, and that was a grave oversight because not only does he consider it a holiday, it is one of the holidays to him. between “unbelievable. the first time in three months we’ve had, like, downtime and i can’t think of a single way to prank everyone else. me! the master of the prank!” and the time he hid a randomized buzzer in minkowski’s quarters (and made a bet with hera to see how long it’d take her to find it), and his lame attempts to scare lovelace in the hiccups method… that guy is a menace. eiffel would be so, so annoying on april fool’s day. it’s one of the few things he actually plans for in advance, and he still forgets like 80% of the stuff he sets up until his own pranks backfire on him, sometimes days later. and he’s so bad at lying that even when he does remember, he looks too eager and hangs around expectantly and everyone else can recognize he’s waiting for them to fall for his trap. and on top of that, minkowski knows a thing or two about traps, and every year she’ll disarm one of eiffel’s and then set it back up so it’ll get him when he checks to see why it didn’t work. this happens every year. eiffel still thinks he’s a genius.
regarding hera’s self image (especially within a trans reading), i think it’s interesting to consider that her internal self is kind of, by nature, both idealized and flexible in a way that a physical body would not be, even if she’s unaware of the extent of that and trying to be realistic. features, style, the way her hair falls, the way she moves - she’s built up this image of herself, and i think it’s a reasonable fear, in the context of hera getting a body, and the broader context of that as a partial metaphor for transition, to feel like… what if i go through all of this and i don’t look the way i want to? what if i still don’t look like me? i would hate for hera to resemble pryce, because hera would hate to resemble pryce, but i think that’s also a real fear: will she need to have similar eyes? will she need to have some similar features, in order to keep her voice (and, despite everything, i do think hera would want to keep her voice)? etc. it’s crucial to me that, whatever the outcome, having a body is the right choice for hera, that it’s worth it, and that her fears are (mostly, in the big ways) unfounded, but i think these are questions that resonate with the experience of transition. so much of it is about seeing and being seen, and this constant negotiation between the parts of ourselves we can choose, and the parts we can’t; i think that aligns with hera’s overall character arc.
