So tbh even though writing The Colours You Hate was a big learning experience for me, mentally and emotionally, and it allowed me to really figure out how to reckon with personal demons surrounding my personal history of emotional and Other abuse 

There’s a part of me that wishes I’d never written it.

 Or at least never allowed it to get to that Dark place.

There’s a big piece of me that just wishes I’d let those dumb kids tell Kurumi and Kuniharu what was up before shit rolled all the way down hill. That Aren and Kusuo got to enjoy their date that Sunday, and learn to grow up together. Under that is the piece of me that stresses to myself that, even though I dont have and don’t want children, I AM of the age to be a parent and therefore beating the shit out of kids in my wriiting isn’t.......great. And writing anything remotely sexual about kids when I’m NOT a kid DEFINITELY is. Worth some deep thinking about and requires Very Careful Framing if I don’t want to be an extortionist sack of crap.

(Adults who write straight up spank bank material about kids will never not be gross.) 

Which, ngl, is why it mostly turned into Kusuke beating the shit out of his kid brother and I alluded to the rest. Still not great. Still wasn’t fun to write. But it almost...feels like I needed to? Idfk.

(Well that and my discomfort with that, ahem, GENRE in the first place.)

It was an honest reflection of the tribulations I was and am still dealing with. So much trauma comes out of that age, and that’s where most of mine stems from. Yeah I’m of the age to be a parent but I’m still agonizing over shit that was put on me when I was a kid by people who were my age now, then. And by kids who were in my age group too. The stuff that people do to other people? Is HORRIFYING. Especially so when it’s happening at the developmental stages where we’re building those fundamentals that carry us through the rest of our lives.

I think that’s why so many adults are stuck writing about 10-18 year olds tbh. Money making demographics aside, we’re still trying to figure out the shit that happened to us then, now. 

And maybe that way we can start to get over it and move on.