About Me

Pearlnight
.-'''''-. .-'''''-. / ' . ' \ / \ \ /-'''-..-'''-.\ / \ / /\_/\ /\_/\ \ / \_/ \ n / \ n / \_/ / ______ \ ) (__ __)- / ( / / \_/ \ \ / \ \ / \ \__ '---''----' \_ _/----. / /____/ \ / / - - -' \| / / - - - -' ____\|_ / / PLEASE TALK \__________( ( ) TO ME ABOUT / \ / / VAMPIRIC / \ ___/_/__ DUNGEON .--------. / / __ \ SYNTH / / \___(__) \ ____ --..---..---. (_____ \__ / \ (______________/ ===='======'
Name	Pearlnight
Aliases	Draculover, Sanguine
Age	Between us
Location	England
Species	Gargoyle
Beliefs	"Leave me to do my dark bidding on the internet!" - Vladislav "The Poker", 2012
Likes	Black Metal, cats, dark rooms, grotesques, latte, lava lamps, Dungeon Synth, Petz, Scooby-Doo, Vampires
Dislikes	The notion that cats are mean (wrong), censorship, anti-intellectualism
Archive.org	Draculover
Email	draculover [at] protonmail [dot] com

The name Pearlnight derives from me, its webmistress, but you can call me Pearl. I'm an autistic queer lady and webcomic author since the winter of 2021. My primary work is the webcomic Dancing with the Dead, it's a 1970's period piece and my love-letter to the vampire genre. Besides this, I lurk in quiet holes in this web, play old computer games and prod at other niches with equally shy creatures. My art is derived from my love of darkness, my experiences with mental illness and my own repressed feelings. I invite you to interpret me through my pieces and make of me as you will.

History

How I got here

My time online is shrouded in long periods of lurking, but I've persisted here since the Dot-Com crash. It first started with a typical consumer copy of Windows XP, and a handful of CD-ROM games. Petz 4 and 5, two Scooby Doo games and my sister's Barbie games (too frilly for a tomboy to enjoy out loud). Then, I turned my attention to the Internet Explorer, and experienced nothing short of wanderlust. When I wasn't playing outside with bubble swords and grass-nests, I took to the homes of child-friendly games online. If I'd pored through all the papers of Club Penguin that day, it was time to read the educational sites and fill the gaps left by my encyclopedias. I'll admit I was lucky with something as wonderful and terrible as a rapidly-expanding internet. I was frankly, spared from its dangers, though not without a few scares. But as you can see, we like scares now, don't we?

One of the defining experiences of this period were the leftover patches of digital estate, cheapened since the crash, sold in the dozens, and what would become life-long adorations. I'm talking of course about the personal website.

People could make their own places online and plunge into an endless deluge of passion projects. Personal encyclopaedias, makeshift bestiaries for fictional monsters, fan-pages for characters they obsessed over (so lovingly named shrines), art galleries of hand-scanned pieces or crude digital experiments, all interspersed with original commentary. Original, there's the word. Even when sites were akin to hermit-crab shells, piles of refuse turned into a means of shelter, they were original. People really did want to tell me about their day, about someone elses' day, their pet's day, and all the other days they want to spend. They shared information from the depths of regional cultures, further enriching their ideas, like minerals deposited into a body of water. At times, these ideas were almost innocent in their simplicity. Their ideas felt invigorated, grounded in decades of pre-internet life that in turn fostered rich fantasy worlds. At times, these sites moved in such unison they seemed almost a single entity. I got to see new forms of human culture happen in real time, the products of people across the world gathering to create life through their screens. The goal, above all, was to create and make things exist, for the love of the ability to exist. Their zest for life emanated from the screen. For an unknowing, undiagnosed autistic girl, the feeling was hypnotic. Having my own childish obsessions, there was a piece of the self in these early webmasters. But perhaps I saw the future, perhaps now? That the website could alleviate one's loneliness, creative frustrations, and Hiareth in a world so lurid and incomprehensible.

The internet of my childhood is both notorious for its lack of rails, and celebrated for its proliferation of hobbyists. Yet I feel an immense love radiating from it and its surviving remnants that I rarely see addressed. The slow dance kind of love, letters and postcards, the embrace of a transatlantic friend. It's a tactile love; perching before a belaboured machine as it strains to wake itself. Glancing at the speakers that flank it, then the wooden shelf that looms over you, followed by the armchair and the tower that you're careful not to knock with an errant limb. These things, alongside the machine itself, carry an extra weight. Literal weight, of course, but then it's a psychological weight. The presence this altar of progress held in the room carried this grandeur and its internet felt grand too. It was weighty, corporeal and alive. It, no matter how strange it could be, felt truly grounded, unlike the ensuing mass fever-dream of Instant Net.

To be alive has no answer, and it’s solely up to the person living to define it with the mental framing devices they derive the most comfort from. For example, I see myself as deeply connected to the earth’s atmosphere, particularly the primitive lifeforms that paradoxically resume in the form of my every breath. To live and die means to be in a state of constant intimacy with those primordial creatures, and the sensory inputs that remind me that I am not alone, when they lived and felt the way I do now, however basic. To die means the bond increases, my organic energies dissipating and joining them. That is an afterlife to me. It’s taoist, but that is what to be “alive” is to me. This differs in my view of websites, though. They and their webmasters, here or not, have their own ideas of life. For some, it is a family by however they define it, others it is to display lofty achievements, but many of the websites I saw felt alive simply because they loved to live. This is not to sanitise the mental health issues likely suffered, but rather to celebrate that, even for the most suffering webmasters, they let me see their cats. Their bookshelves. Their bedrooms. Their huge monstrous towers that had to be activated by toe. They trusted me, their beloved peeping friend, to see into their world. It was curated even back then, but the seams still showed. The presentations felt organic, imperfect even amidst sparkling borders and strategic camera angles. Not unpolluted, so to say, for I am not that cynical, rather they felt unrestrained, gleeful about this magic machine that lets them exist so uniquely. They did it for the reasons they did, all of them fuelled by the love of being able to do it at all.

Am I simply overwrought, or did a young girl realise she was in a once-in-a-millennium event? Were we the first land-fish to see the stars? Whatever this was, I know this can be felt again.

As for the Vampires

I've loved vampires ever since I was small. The vampire disguises on Scooby-Doo were the first to charm me, followed by its actual vampires and then a relative's torrented copy of The Fearless Vampire Killers caused things to coffin-bobsled from there.

I've loved vampires ever since I was small. The vampire disguises on Scooby-Doo were the first to charm me, followed by its actual vampires, and then a relative's torrented copy of The Fearless Vampire Killers caused things to coffin-bobsled from there.

Vampires were confident in a way I couldn't be. They were allowed to take up space, bite necks, threaten to do so, and do it all with aristocratic flair. Yet they could turn into bats, disappear in a puff of smoke, and in a way, have a license to be absurd. They're inconspicuous, unlike dragons, kaijus and other things from 20,000 fathoms. They have more control over their lives than ghosts, and their intelligence stops them from being single-minded hazards such as mummies and zombies and most glaringly for me, werewolves. With my own monstrous visage and tendency to draw animalistic characters, I should like the werewolf more. This is where I deviate to some of you, particularly monster lovers on the spectrum. Seeing as vampires and werewolves originate from the same folkloric motifs, I find it important to elaborate as to why. This is somewhat of a detour, but I intend to rule things out before we resume. You will see the evolution of what I enjoy, but also what I feel apathetic to.

Why not werewolves?

There are some I do enjoy. Werewolves such as Reverend Lowe from Silver Bullet, using his beast form to obscure his crimes. Ted from Bad Moon, suffering from his lycanthropy at first but becoming a sadistic recluse over the course of years. The Uath family from Dog Soldiers, fully aware of their crimes and operating as a Sawney Bean-esque cannibal clan, picking off hikers and concealing human remains in their home for generations. They move with the grace of composed, experienced killers, completely at ease in their forms and relentlessly deadly, even to a fully armed section of soldiers. Ginger from Ginger Snaps, too young and nihilistic to comprehend what she's doing as her sister watches her collapse into an insatiable bloodlust. All of them do different things, but they feel like individuals with the capacity to choose, sparing Ginger for her relative age. She, addicted to the sensory pleasure from being a creature, succumbs to her urges and thus ends her story as a tragedy. And even in the most simplistic vampire, who only wants to proliferate their kind, there is a true sense of consciousness.

But even with these few examples, most werewolves I observe do not have agency as characters. This is a problem because the werewolf feels, as said, more like a hazard than an autonomous being with its own interests. It blurs the line between a monster and what is simply a dangerous animal. The werewolf feels like an unwanted guest in its own story. To be monstrous should not mean a loss of agency, but a reclamation of it in the face of death and loss.

A monster's body is a fascinating thing, especially to be inside it. To even think of oneself as an animal, from the colour-blindness of so many mammals to the post-human rainbow seen by creatures such as the mantis shrimp. So many things humans consider benign can glitter in the eyes of a monster, so many things can reveal themselves in its extrasensory world. How even in your appearance, so fearful to the fragile bipedal apes that surround you, you see things that they can't. You are not so simple, and even if you cannot speak you can know it and have it. Away from these humans you can go somewhere they cannot, and stay there if you choose. To me, monstrousness is but another form of existing, not a shorthand for evil by default. Evil is chosen, monstrousness is to be born different, often hated for it and yet experience sensations that are beyond the veil, under the dusk and past the barrier of human comprehension. We can never know what a dog's nose knows, how it feels to have a cat's whiskers, a rabbit's soft feet, to breathe through your skin as an amphibian. We can never know but the monster can be our tool to communicate this wonder and grief.

The vampire, for all of the instances that fail to explore its sensory world, does not fail to show us what it feels like the way so many werewolves are let down. Even the most evil vampires feel like they have agency, and so vampires that choose to be goodly feel sweeter. I see the person in the monster and vice versa, in that a monster can be used to communicate human issues. When a vampire threatens me, I understand him as a being of immense power; his coolness comes from the fact he is in control, and this makes him feel satisfying as an adversary. To slay a vampire radiates with an awesome power, like slaying a dragon, another being of enormous grandeur and cruel wit. The werewolf does not give me this. The whiplash between a friendly person and a violent beast that cannot stop itself hits too close to home, and yet I am asked by werewolf narratives to sympathise with them and on some occasion, sexualise a being that when killed, radiates with the air of a euthanised dog. I am not charmed by the concept of imprinting, the idea that some biological tether keeps you bound to a partner whether you chose them or not, and especially not the prospect of reinforcing gender roles with a furry overcoat. Werewolves as caste systems of alleged Alphas, Betas and Omegas, each knowing their place without question. The constant imagery of canid anatomy rendered in lurid detail, alongside the ensuing insemination and pregnancy as narrative centrepiece. The sexualisation of controlling men that beat, kidnap and rape prospective mates, their appetites framed as biological necessity.

I understand the attraction to being wanted, however most actions are chosen and even with the veneer of animal instincts, the werewolf's individuality flattens into an eat/mate/kill triad. This does not do the wolf as an animal any form of justice. Ferocious for it is wild, but it is a social creature that culture misunderstands in both directions. In positive interpretations, the wolf is a pseudo christ-like figure of a mythical, utopian nature. This reaches its most explicit form in Werewolf: The Apocalypse, where shapeshifters of all species gather into racially-stereotyped warrior tribes fighting for the mythical Gaia. Their primary enemy is an extraterrestrial force of death and entropy, oxymoronic as life cycles require death to function at all. Then there is the wolf we know, the symbol of hunger, the savagery of the wild, yet also of masculinity, sexual appetite and wanton violence. A lone wolf is an aspirational figure for some men, a she-wolf is a predator of other men, to be wolfish is to appear voracious and greedy. Further colloquialisms, to wolf things down, to keep the metaphorical wolf of poverty from the door, a wolf in sheep's clothing. The wolf is used to symbolise human malice, and this baggage follows through into many a werewolf, regardless of sex, orientation or identity. It embeds itself deep into the subconscious, and informs these depictions with the idea that the wolf cannot choose or think. It simply happens.

I attest however that there are far more positive examples of werewolves in contemporary internet art, ones using the monster as symbols of personal freedom. I have seen other autistic people use werewolves as communicators of being autistic, that for the capacity to do harm like anyone else, the wolf is ultimately a shy creature that wants to live like anyone else. I get that, I have feared things that were actually good for myself. I like that far more. I like the examples I listed. However my opinion has settled on the vampire as my choice, and I think at worst, that werewolves are dealt a bad paw.

As for the vampires: Resumed

Even as a comedy, The Fearless Vampire Killers was a landmine of world-building ideas that could never be dredged from the ground. The vampires could gather in a society, be visibly from different periods, show dry wit, homoerotic fixations, and even in their seriousness, demonstrate the absurdity of such power. This then continued with my childhood video-game, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, which let me play as one of these creatures. As a vampire, you retain your ability to speak, do quests, and generally exist. At the same time, you are now immune to diseases, and the longer you go without feeding, you gain new powers instead of starving. If you feel inclined, you can cure your vampirism, but this is optional. As with any supernatural disease, so-called Porphyric Hemophilia in this game, there are drawbacks. By default, you don't take damage from sunlight, until you try to stop feeding for the aforementioned vampire powers. With the stages of vampirism, this worsens, up to eight points of sun-damage per second. You take even more damage from fire, and more still if you chose "The Lord" as your birth sign. Regardless of what stage of vampirism you are on, other vampires remain hostile to you, and at stage four, the city guards stop negotiating with your right to live. They know what you are, hate what you are, and have no choice but to chase you across all of Cyrodiil. To play as the monster from such a young age, on top of the game's existing bestial Argonian, Khajiit, and Orc races, further defined my interest in the undead.

When Twilight became a phenomenon, vampires were not only trendy but apparently the expertise of everybody ever:

Vampires don't sparkle.
Vampires have fangs (which is why Bela Lugosi had that killer rack of teeth).
Vampires shouldn't love people.
Vampires shouldn't refuse to eat people, even with an abundance of easy four-legged prey.

It was in this swathe of discourse that I was having an inordinate amount of fun. I hated Twilight, but I loved to hate Twilight. I hated its characters for being vapid and melodramatic, its fans (Twi-Hards, derisively named Twi-Tards) equally so, and its ability to provoke such an intense fascination in me. I couldn't look away; I couldn't stop watching it, and I couldn't stop thinking about it. The girls in my class would delight about Edward, and I'd openly show my disgust, yet I'd secretly love that they brought it up at all. Hating Twilight was a hobby, perhaps even its own fanbase. As I vandalised the "Cullenism Wiki" under the name "Thunderblade", a new vampiric inspiration came to me in the form of demotivational images and parodic drawings. As meme formats common for the time, they proclaimed a similar hatred for Twilight, and they went something like this.

"Alucard is about to beat the glitter out of Edward"

This was the anime Hellsing, specifically its original TV release. I was shocked to see a vampire story set in England, one that was not a Dracula adaptation, no less. Its main character was the enigmatic vampire known as Alucard. Formerly Vlad Tepes, he served as the titular organisation's main assassin, a killer of rogue monsters. He wore a red trench coat, a matching hat, and round orange sunglasses. His hair was not like that of other vampires, not long like a Lestat, not clipped like a Lugosi parody, but shaggy. His gloves bore strange, esoteric symbols that I did not quite understand, a pentagram adorned in runes for each hand. With each, he carried two blocky pistols that shot explosive steel rounds, every bullet carrying a sliver of melted silver. He didn't turn into a bat, but took the form of a multi-eyed dog, which he can summon from his body like a symbiotic organism. He represents himself with clusters of eyes, in a form akin to Lovecraftian monsters, making him an especially unusual vampire. Alucard, despite these powers and unlike so many archetypical hired killers, was different. He wasn't cruel for the sake of it, unlike the artificially created vampires he hunted down. He hated sadists, despised thrill-seekers, and mercilessly mocked them to their faces. In the very first episode, he spares the life of a young policewoman, accosted by the very vampire he was assigned to kill. While Alucard has to mortally wound this woman named Seras, this kills her assailant, and he turns her before she can succumb to her injuries. But here, and this did not have to be done, Alucard cradles her as she lies inches from death on the chapel floor. Then, through the scarlet skies of the English countryside and that gaudy png of a moon, he carries her back to his human master, swaddled in a blanket. She, named Integra, is unamused by this, but Alucard doesn't mind; he's happy to have the company. I was obsessed, and even after watching its "Ultimate" adaptation, it stands out to me as a pivotal moment in my vampire fixation. Being a lonely and socially isolated preteen, I found Alucard comforting and empowering. He and Hellsing showed me that vampires didn't have to be campy imitation Lees, brooding bad-boys with a suspicious ability to mimic coercive control dynamics or oversized bats. Alucard was eccentric, eldritch, and unashamed of it. The story he lived in thrummed with atmosphere, and I could envision his world blending seamlessly into my surroundings during long car rides, in unfamiliar places, idle daydreams, and glimpses of the sunset that relieved my exhausted nervous system. When I'd find myself outside at night, the grime became stylistic and purposeful. The dark was always my canvas for creative pursuits, but Hellsing and its influence intensified it. Wherever I went, it followed. Hellsing would go on to inspire my current work, putting vampiric horrors into sleepy English moors and hamlets, set to the sounds of jazz and luxury cars patrolling the claustrophobic country roads. After all, the dead travel fast.

I find the vampire to be an enduring tool of conversation, storytelling and self-expression. The criteria is simple; it's an often parasitic hemophage that likes to play sommelier with the living. The ubiquitousness of an evil hungry spirit means almost any person can speak of Vampires, thus turning a seemingly-simple topic into a cultural wellspring.

A vampire can be the yearning husk of someone from times past, skin condensing in the heat of your fire. A vengeful echo of aristocracies past, desperate to keep itself glutted at all costs. In its opposite it can be a victim of circumstance, socially and spatially consumed by its elders. A human mind buckling under the implications of eternal life, only stopped by violent death or slow starvation. A slave to hunger, akin to the notion of a zombie that so many are depicted as. It can be a kitschy, neon-skinned caricature of the former groups with a thing for puns and interior design. Or it is a small, flittering thing that is eccentric at worst, and wants to be left alone to peacefully wiggle its ears and eat worms.

Admittedly I identify the most with the very, very, very last of this list. Though cartoon animal vampires like Nyanpire don't tend to have thumbs, and I need those.

"And for the gargoyle thing?"

And the gargoyle thing is my author avatar, Sanguine!

I first made Sanguine in 2020. That year I was troubled by just about everything, minus a certain disease. Out of all these troubles, the biggest was a single feeling. That being the feeling of lacking an identity. It wasn't a total lack of self; I knew what I loved, but I didn't know how to present that to the world. Every time I tried to cobble something together, it led to more questions than answers. I’d describe it as a form of selective mutism, where I’d lock up and retreat into myself at seemingly random moments. I knew better than to imitate others, but I struggled nonetheless. Sanguine was my latest attempt at closure and miraculously, they landed straight into my heart.

They were simultaneously unsettling, yet cute, cuddly without being furry. An anthrothomorphic animal, while remaining bestial. It did not read like a mascot costume draped over myself, an aggressive compensation for issues of gender and certainly not an act of creative desperation. Their traits were invigorating in their freshness, yet a callback to earlier designs, an echo of a 12 year old self’s “Koi-Lynx”, with glittering fins and the same chimeric, yet feline features. Sanguine made me feel gothic in a way that could also be whimsical, serene and comical. The wings harkened to my love of vampires and bats. The tail still draconic, reminding me of previous dragon characters I used to represent myself. The giant mitt-like paws that mirrored my own experiences as an autistic, constantly out of tempo with her body, constantly feeling like she took up too much space. Sanguine was everything I felt, and unlike my previous attempts, embraced the uncertainty inside myself and reclaimed it.

I consider introspection a virtue, and moments like this are why. A year later, I worked through our gender, and Sanguine evolved with me. In their completed form, Sanguine is a mirror of myself, only exaggerated to comedic effect. My friends know me as affectionate and conscientious to a fault, while Sanguine is a nervous wreck. Thus, they serve less as a power fantasy and more as a performance of self-awareness.

This even shows in their very design. Blue was chosen for my pre-dawn motif and its typical link to human sadness. Their horns are not a proud crown of bone and keratin; instead, they point forlornly downward. Their eye markings furrow their brow into a constant look of gloom. Combined with their horn shape, they carry the air of a depressed court jester. Their ears, once sharper in earlier designs, are now lopped and soft to the touch. Their face is catlike, closer to a small cat than a lion; so the poor thing can't even roar. They don’t have claws, but large, plushlike paws. Seldom is there a sharp edge on this beast, softened by its blobby contours and heart-shaped tail. In short, they're designed to look absolutely pitiful. Their name came from a line in our favourite childhood video game; the Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion. Amongst the game's more law-abiding guilds, the player can initiate into an assassins’ guild. When they complete the guild's initiation quest, they're led to a dilapitated house in one of the game's major cities. Once inside the house, the player needs to go downstairs and speak to a magical door, which riddles “What is the colour of night?”. To this, the player must respond “Sanguine, my brother”. Sanguine in that context is likely a reference to blood, but in the context of naming this Sanguine, it comes with a double meaning. Sanguine’s skin is a mix of the colours Pearl Night blue and Pearl Gentian. So alongside the prior allusion to blood, this Sanguine is also the colour of night. Although, the word Sanguine can also describe an absurd sort of optimism, which matches about as well as me and broad daylight.

But what would this page be without reference material? This section is mainly for any artists I commission, but it can be a fun trivia bit as well. I'm hopelessly spellbound by the list format, so here we go:

They’re an ethereal entity, psychically projected from the dreams of their corresponding (and identical) statue. Physical flesh, blood and other such attributes are absent. It explains all the sparkling and glowing; which is most visible on their nose, horns and pawpads. It's like a glow-in-the-dark effect.
Like many grotesques (and after some wondering) they are toothless. They used to have teeth but they're gone until further notice.
Sanguine can wear clothes, but would most like the company of oversized jumpers and ghost-themed pyjamas.
Sanguine can nurse a glass of warm milk, a vial of pond water or apple juice served in the skull of an enemy. If you're feeling devious, you may depict Sanguine with a block of cheese.
Sanguine likes to haunt crypts, chapels, cathedrals, woodlands and anything else of that sort.
Sanguine also has a fixation on touching things. They’re overly aware of the sensation of touch, and you can find them just kind of stroking things a lot. They really like knobbly textures and fluffy things, but they also get nervous touching fluffy things because they feel like they’ll somehow make it dirty, contaminate it, press too hard, or mat it. So Sanguine prefers to get something fluffy and then just stare at it awkwardly without touching it.
Sanguine’s favourite things in the world overlap with mine, naturally, being an author avatar, but their number one obsession is hugs. They will go insane if you give them even the slightest amount of attention. They will literally curl up and die. Fair warning: if you hug them, they are not going to let go for at least a minute. This is normal protocol, you are not in danger.
Sanguine is too nervous to speak but can compromise by scrawling on chalk boards. The reason for this muteness is still not really very well known. When I think of Sanguine, I just cannot imagine them with a voice whatsoever. Which, you know, I find ironic given how much of my writing actually originates from dictation. But in general, there’s just not really a voice that I could see suiting them. Everyone I’ve met has said they actually feel the same way, they cannot imagine this character even remotely trying to speak. At most, it’s like you touch their nose and it makes a clown honk or something.
Sanguine also has very cat-like mannerisms. They’ll curl up into a ball, perch, tuck their arms underneath their body and look like a loaf. Personally, I call it an igloo. Cats look more like igloos to me when they do that.
Sanguine doesn’t read as predatory to me. I never resonated with the idea of being outright dangerous. I like the aesthetic of looking strange, unseemly, or a bit frightening, but not the power fantasy of flattening people and eating them. Sanguine is murder-agnostic. They can kill, but they don’t want to, it just keeps happening in increasingly comedic and stupid ways.
Tail posture follows cat rules; curled when happy, tucked when afraid and vibrating/thumping when annoyed. Although you may notice, they like making it go all over the place.

Whatever you come up with, all Sanguine asks is that you do your best.

The thematics of grotesques

I identify with grotesques for my love of chimères and Gothic art. I adore vampires, but I don't see myself as one. I'd say I'm an onlooker, a prop to the vampire set. Their bombastic personalities and lurid backstories, while fun to watch, clash with my own. Instead, I'm more akin to a Castlevania enemy or a creature you'd see in a 70's toy line. It's modest, and some may say overly so, but it's right for me. Also note the absence of "fursona", "furry" or even "funny animal" as I speak. Sanguine and I are furry-adjacent at most. Back when I was a furry, I couldn't relate to other furries. I felt like something else.

The main appeal of the grotesque, like other chimères, is its sheer versatility. There are no real rules, and surprisingly, not all grotesques befit their name. One atop the Château de Pierrefonds depicts a mother cat holding her kitten, thus showing the grotesque as an exercise in cuteness. They can be quadruped or bipedal, sapient or feral, gendered or ambiguous. They can mean anything an author wants them to mean. How one must wonder what it feels to be one that hates its own shape, or yearns to feel living flesh?

In the 1997 book "Holy Terrors, Gargoyles on Medieval buildings", Janetta Rebold Benson theorises about the grotesques of medieval europe. Her first theory suggests they symbolise the creatures of hell.

"It is possible that members of the medieval Church recognized the potential of gargoyles to in-trigue, to entice, to attract attention and perhaps even attendance. The medieval preference for grotesque gargoyles is clear; they far outnumber the comparatively few realistic depictions of humans or animals. The frequently monstrous nature of gargoyles makes obvious that all medieval art was not intended to be beautiful. In fact, ugliness had a fascination all its own, and images of the macabre were very much a part of daily life in the Middle Ages.

Because it is extremely unlikely that there is one meaning for all gargoyles; various interpretations must be surveyed. Some are of limited plausibility, such as the suggestion that gargoyles were inspired by the excavations of skeletal remains of dinosaurs and prehistoric beasts, or that gargoyles were derived from the constellations. Rather, the key that unlocks all discussion about the meaning of gargoyles seems to be the great concerns about sin and salvation that prevailed during the Middle Ages. The preoccupation of many medieval Christians with the eternal fate of their souls, coupled with widespread illiteracy and the consequent emphasis on the instructional use of visual imagery, resulted in the creation of many monsters in medieval art. Evil was both an abstract idea and a concrete fact something very real that could be given visual form by artists."
- Benson, 1997, p.23-24

Writing a century prior, Abbé Auber and Ludwig Gerlach suggested another idea. Where Benson describes visual shorthands for evil, Auber describes man's triumph over it. These demons, once wild and free to terrorise men, are domesticated servants of the church. For the French folklorist, this will conjure images of La Gargouille: the scourge of Rouen and its eventual war-trophy. The dragon's neck, once the passage of many hapless maidens, was too hardy to burn. Thus, it found itself mounted on the church walls as a warning to other creatures. Yet the inverse could be true. Instead of being bound to the church, the grotesques are being driven from it in a mass exorcism. However, this idea is ambiguous; it does not clarify whether they serve as a reminder of the Church’s power or of its initial consecration. Gerlach and Auber also disagreed on the importance of this exorcism, as explained by the latter:

"Although I concur with the idea that gargoyles visualize the cleansing power of the church through exorcism, the cleansing force of the Church's sacraments and the force of prayer should also be added. The petrification, to my mind, is not significant, but was a mere side-effect of visualizing how a strong ecclesia, community of the faithful, could expel all evil."
- Auber, 1871

Benson nears this theory, but alludes to a long-standing folkloric motif. That grotesques, despite their monstrous appearance, are man-made sentinels. Like dried cats, immured shoes and witch-bottles, their presence is not a display of dominion. They're secretive, but in their numbers they paralyse lurking threats with hundreds of eyes.

"Perhaps grotesque gargoyles were intended as guardians of the church, magic signs to ward off the devil. Amalgamations of animals have long been used by artists and authors to create frightening images. This interpretation would justify making a gargoyle as ugly as possible, as a sort of sacred scarecrow to frighten the devil away, preserving those inside in safety, Or perhaps gargoyles were themselves symbols of the evil forces such as temptations and sins— lurking outside the sanctuary of the church; upon passing the gargoyles, the visitor's safety was assured within the church."
- Benson, 1997, p.24

This reminds me of the Church Grim. A Church Grim, in contrast to the grotesque, is not a demon or sign of evil. Instead, a Church Grim is said to be the ghost of a dog, buried alive in the foundations of a church to guard it eternally. Unlike other black dogs, it's explicitly christian and actively protects its land against acts of sacrilege. Despite their differences, grotesques, Church Grims, and the mounted head of La Gargouille all serve as symbols of sacrifice. By dying or remaining in servitude, they become a monstrous echo of the original Crucifixion.

Alongside Christian analysis, other texts suggest more secular reasons for the grotesque. In a November 1912 edition of the Arts & Decoration Magazine, one of its writers G. Mortimer Mark, discusses this concept.

"For the grotesque is always an architectural surprise, besides being an architectural joke. It grins down at us from a safe and unexpected perch overhead, high up on a column, or leers out from the shadow of a balcony or overhang, with varied multiplicity of facial contortion. It is obvious that the grotesque in architecture must be sparingly and judiciously used- being essentially humorous, it must realize that brevity is the soul of wit, and that if too much in evidence, it could be as tiresome as the man who is never serious. "
- Mortimer, 1912, p.22-23

Given many gargoyles exist as naked men spewing torrents of rainwater from their buttocks, this is more than plausible. One atop the Salisbury cathedral in England spends its time nibbling the cheek of another, who screeches in silent torment. The aforementioned mother cat clutches a kitten, and is hardly a portent of any kind. If the hard work of a sculptor can't be adequately rewarded in financial compensation, they can still take amusement from their creations. Another proponent of this theory is ex-president Theodore Roosevelt, as seen in his review of the 1913 Armory Show.

"The makers of the gargoyles knew very well that the gargoyles did not represent what was most important in the Gothic cathedrals. They stood for just a little point of grotesque reaction against, and relief from, the tremendous elemental vastness and grandeur of the Houses of God. They were imps, sinister and comic, grim and yet futile, and they fitted admirably into the framework of the theology that found its expression in the towering and wonderful piles which they ornamented."
- Theodore Roosevelt, 1913

This theory of levity is unique, and to ignore its humanity would be a display of ignorance. The people of this time believed in hell, and bearing that weight daily would fill the mind with its own demons. A peering face might bring mirth to both its sculptor and the overworked onlookers below. Even the most devout, much like their counterparts today, could not have been overly certain of their afterlives. While their prayer commences, it happens amidst the company of grotesques. Choir stalls, corbels, doorways, misericords and rood screens seldom stand unadorned. Why should a potential sinner let their eyes rest away from God onto a dreary corner? Why not remember the perils of sloth, through a piteous, slavering creature peering back at them from the gloom? It's a reminder of evil, yet a reprieve from the oppressive dogma that so defined the time. These misshapen creatures, as absurd and unwelcome as they look, frighten things more frightful than external “ugliness”. I designed Sanguine, beneath the sensory and aesthetic appeal, to protect myself from the riptides of dissociation and self-doubt. Evil spirits in their own way.

History of the Lair

2019 - 2021

. _.--._ /\| / \' _\ \__\ \| /\ \ / /_______ \ (_/ \| /::::::::\_/ \|_\| \_/ 0 0 \| \| \| \| (_)_) \| \| \| \| / \_/ \ \| \|_\| './_____\_.' : : prl '...'
An ASCII-render of Penelope, Neocities' mascot since its founding in 2013 by Kyle Drake.

I first found Neocities in late 2019, six years after its creation in 2013.

The post found its way to me during one of my lurking sprees on Tumblr. Between posts about otherkin and lovingly curated clutter, I saw the name Neocities. While I am yet to find the original post, which I would much like to show you, it struck me with one terrible, obsession-forming idea. I wasn’t too late to make my own website and experience the joys of self expression. I was in fact, just in time. That despite the state of things, I wasn’t going to miss out. I could relive these lovely experiences, and create more. I just had to make an account, and learn how to code.

Putting together an entire static website as a self-loathing, much-abused nineteen year old only months shy from passing with flying colours on an NHS autism test was a tall order to say the least. I am of a particular neuroticism, even to this night, that if I don’t pick up things as fast as I like, I hate myself until the sun implodes. While the self-esteem’s since improved, at the time even looking at the editor was enough to send me into a fit of overstimulated muteness. I was paralysed, too confused to proceed but too embarrassed to drop the idea entirely. So I put down the idea of coding for time being, while a less agitated ex of mine hacked at crude dashed-border boxes and in-line styles like it was 1999. To dampen the shame and get a start somewhere, I turned to Wix.

2021 - 2023

Wix, for those unfamiliar or wilfully shirking its existence for its mutilation of DeviantART, is a drag-n-drop website generator. Now to attempt some modicum of respect to the megacorporation, this format lends well to prototyping. Dragging things about the page without a single div let me get used to web design, however unskilled it was. My first layout, which unfortunately evaded the crawls of the Wayback Machine, was as stereotypically vampire-themed as one could get.

I’d liken it to a medium-sized scroll-box in the centre of the page, with a sidebar on its left side studded with appropriately gothic blinkies. Two gargoyle gifs bobbed their heads atop the box, flanking its corners. A fun fact as I was writing this section, but I tracked the source of the gif and it points to an e-vendor called GargoyleStatuary.com. He’s been going since 1993, since the internet literally got started! The gargoyles I picked are listed on there as the Roaring Sentinel model, nice to have a name after years of wondering. They look straight out of a Castlevania game.

But let’s get back to things. It was very much a sort of play, excessive, frivolous and unconcerned with accessibility. It was not a serious project but it was a passionate one. I sincerely wanted to join the others, and felt increasingly insecure as my site grew in size but yet not with code that I made (or stole from someone elses’ site as is customary) myself.

It was a pleasant summer, and I'd learned a lot about myself, so I was brimming with ideas. Watching everything happen so instantaneously made me feel productive. I belted out dozens of pages before sagging somewhat at my engine's 100-page limit.

Then with a pile of the things on my lap, I realised I had no idea how to lay them out. Even when I did, it felt woefully unsatisfying. I resorted to quick fixes like adjusting the same navbar a dozen times, or reeling because it had a separate mobile mode and now I had to fix that. This grew so unwieldy that I neglected a page for two years. In general I'd compare this format to a glob of clay: I can bend it any way I see fit, but I am not a sculptor.

I had ideas, but I didn’t have a backlog. I had some sense of a self, however scattered, but it was not fully lived in. I did not have what I needed to make this a truly interesting experience. It didn’t have any of what you see now, I’d have to make projects. I’d have to learn, and in a way, I’d have to put the site down. I just didn’t admit that yet.

2023 - 2025

By 2023, two years later, I had tired of this tedium, and further incentivised by the explosively popular Sadgrl layout, took to Neocities for a proper bout of coding. I deleted my Wix account, and the aforementioned company (kindly for them!) modified my Sadgrl layout to match that of my old Wix site.

The transition was smooth visually, but continued to be a chimera of failed ideas. I wanted, badly, to show the quaint oddities of my life. However, I wasn’t thinking laterally, the way all interesting things do. I had the zeal in my comic, just not myself as an individual. The few ideas that stuck were rare and special, but despite my best attempts I failed to trace a pattern between them. I wanted to know myself deeper, yet not fall apart into something I didn’t recognise. I didn’t want to make things happen for the sake of it, but I didn’t know where to look. I would read hundreds of websites, staring into their pages and wondering what I was doing wrong. I felt unintelligent; I didn’t provoke respect or intrigue. I felt I was stooping to a creative low; how could I even call the Lair a personal website if so much of my person was invisible to me? It was a uniquely unpleasant feeling to simultaneously know what I was, yet not be able to look inside myself and bring those aspects of my soul out with me.

It is also hard to look inside yourself when one of the only people in your life begins to echo the same mistreatment you have seen in so many others. It is one thing to have somebody insult you, but having someone sitting on your shoulder, whispering sweet nothings one day and booming proclamations of my helplessness the next is absolutely disorientating. I was "the light of her day" just as much as I was "infantile", "dramatic" and had "no empathy". My trauma made me endearing but also a burden, my struggles with intrusive thoughts ignored in favour of complaining to nearby people about how annoyed she was by me. When I disagreed with her, everybody else had to know. When I was happier, she'd do mocking impressions of me, apparently how me expressing my pleasures sounded to her.

"You don't get anything done because you hate yourself", all the while refusing to seek employment. I was angry, but too conditioned to downplay my feelings and achievements to call it out the way I wanted to. I would not be listened to, because I was the sick one who needed her to fix me. My life was defined by being and remaining sick. She claimed to have "caretaker burnout", for care that I did not demand of her. All I wanted was a companion while she positioned herself as my saviour. I was a problem that could not be fixed, the stereotypical mad artist with glimmers of potential, if only I were not so mad. At times I was treated like I was on the verge of death, and while I do love to play morgue with a good air conditioner, it was almost laughable in its audacity.

The rest of this relationship veers away from relevance, but I hit my threshold. Comparing a close friend of mine to a person who hurt them very badly was that threshold. From the moment I evicted this apparent oracle of my future, things improved dramatically*. I had an internet to explore without her.

During this time, I was developing my first ever text-adventure game. During its production, I wanted to add more sensory details to my writing, but was not sure where to start. I never considered myself much of a prose writer, and I have a tendency to type the way I talk, as compounding sentences that wind in eight different directions at once. This does not translate well into interactive fiction, where shorter sentences with more precise wording tend to garner better reviews. Overwrought, or “purple” prose, is the last thing one wants to see while playing a video game of any kind. The atmosphere, by the nature of this oxymoron, thickens from the mental image you have with these curated words. By not holding a player’s hand, you are letting them decide how to feel, while still absorbing the emotion you desire. So, out of curiosity, I went to ask a robot.

I do not care to justify my explorations with robots, for I saw them in a dream.

The LLM, or Large Language Model, is a divisive tool, but to me it is just that. It is a tool that can be used for good or ill, just like any other corporate invention. While I am currently turning my attention to open-source LLMs, I got my start with ChatGPT. I went in curious of its capabilities but derisive and embarrassed that I was even doing this at all. My wandering mind, however, had to be sated. Growing up with Cleverbot was one of my less satisfying internet memories, seemingly an act of wizardry until you put a few queries in and witnessed your first virtual lobotomy. Asking a contemporary LLM, as much as I risked the metaphorical red cross being slathered on the index page of my site, was a way of checking in on the robots. I asked it my first question: what would it expect to see in a séance room*. The robot responded with a basic sensory description, and I found myself wondering about the materials of this room. Perhaps it was because I lived in a sensory world of my own, or I was a pedant, but I probed it about the exact materials. I did not specify much, only that the setting was a haunted hunting lodge. I knew a lot of my vision, but there were gaps in my knowledge that I was not shy to admit. Of course, this was where I was further surprised, not only by the pattern-recognition doing its work, but by another thing. These robots told you upfront that they were not only liable to be wrong, but screamingly wrong. This was past the point of Google’s pet robot suggesting you eat at least one small rock a day, but as I came to see, it was a subversion of the narrative I had seen online. This was not to say I respected the corporations behind AIs, but rather I saw the AI as a currently useful method of sifting through the SEO schlop graveyards we called the surface net. The search engines I tried were too broken to satisfy my needs, and while I did have plenty of books on hand, there were things so specific even books could not quite graze them. Either that, or I did not know where to look each time. A librarian was a curator, not a search engine. A search engine was a broken pile of junk that was tolerable twenty years ago, not artificial intelligence. An AI, when it hit right, could give you exactly what you needed.

My process went like this. I would ask a question, the robot would give me a statement, and I would check it. I would ask the robot to answer more of my questions, it would give me another statement, and I would check it again. I would check a few times, and watch my project grow. I described it at the time to my best friend as rubber-duck debugging, only this duck could talk and produce a stream of emoticons as you worked through problems. There were times I would ask one to assist with a task, only for it to go “Hooh, no! I’m not going in there!” or “Graham! Watch out!” right after I had fallen into another problem entirely. Now that I think about it, working with LLMs was more like working with Cedric from King’s Quest 5. It would probably even tell me to look out for poisonous snakes.

Nonetheless, I used it to help me define the materials of various rooms, improve my cadence so my sentences read better, and most importantly, debug. But also, actually debug. I also, as this website would come to enjoy in spades, used it to automate long, repetitive tasks. While I kept creative control of the game, its prose and its vision, the robot took care of the code. I playtested with it rigorously, for hours at a time. Foxtrot was an ambitious game with features I had wanted to see in other Adventuron titles. The groundwork was laid in the documentation, but its example was an owl following you through several forest screens. Its documentation was a recreation of 1986’s Excalibur, where a bloodthirsty worm would kill you should you linger a turn too many. Neither example had an enemy that could chase you, get trapped, escape from an improperly set trap to wander back to its home and resume the prowl should you alert it again. This enemy, a towering skeletal elk possessed by dozens of unintelligent ghosts, wears a key to the way out, but you can only get that key after defeating it. If you want to trap this osseous beast, it has to be chasing you first. If you run into a designated safe room too many times, it will finally get the memo and kill you. When it catches you, the game alternates between a few death messages, just to keep things fresh. This was quite a bit for a first-time project, so this was where the robot debugging shined. I wanted more human debuggers to balance out all the robot work, but I only had Alex on hand. Thankfully, when I got a working copy readied, I spent a morning walking them through, and we had a lot of fun.

Contrary to my initial opinions on using a robot for assistance, I did not seem to lose my creativity or my ability to fact-check, nor did I attempt to mate with it. How this relates to the Lair is simple: I turned my attention to using it for more general coding tasks. My favourite at the time was generating batches of boilerplate code, which gave me more room to work on my site’s CSS, rather than getting stuck in unrewarding copy-paste cycles.

In the immediate weeks of utter relief, Alex and I planned a redesign for their website. They were amused by the quirks of my AI, but once they saw how quickly it performed tasks, they allowed me to use it for their website. I needed somewhere to warm up and try new techniques before trying my own site again. The heatwaves were oppressive; I was staring down the past half of the decade, and most of all, I was preparing to fly overseas to meet Alex in Chicago, something I had never done before. I was experiencing an emotional upheaval, not a series of crushing blows but a profound reorientation of my sense of self. So much of my identity, while no longer as tenuous, was tied deeply to the dynamic and the ensuing pain it caused. I was not ready to address the lair; I needed to feel more at home inside myself, to let myself breathe, and when I felt a surge of it, expend the energy elsewhere while I waited for the answers from inside myself. With the AI, I examined its outputs, asked it questions, and learned a lot of CSS that summer. I even learned how to make a flex gallery without having to use a dozen separate thumbnail images, a technique I am still proud of. Three months later, on the verge of releasing Foxtrot for Halloween night, I felt ready to try my own site again.

It took another few sessions, a few more failed ideas, and an improvised graveyard to make the most of them. I learned to try more ideas and fail them faster, which in doing so freed up space for ideas closer to me. One of the biggest things that stopped the writer’s block, besides processing the relationship I so quickly left, was trying other projects besides my comic. I held myself to standards of creation, and did not consider myself a curator. I knew it was a legitimate form of creation, but I did not know what to curate. It was then in December, once the style had been relatively finalised, that I asked myself questions about what I wished existed. I had a dozen copyright-infringing books saved on the Internet Archive, but none of them were sorted. So then I looked about for vampire-themed bibliographies, saw sparse and thinly populated results, and decided I would make my own. After all, I finally felt good enough.

I've flayed it half a dozen times since, but it's mine. Ignoring honest business pursuits, I found other places to be mires of thought-terminating clichés.

Now this site is no longer a glob of clay. It is a lot of metaphorical things, but now I describe it as a vase of well-tended roses. Unlike their wild specimens, they have no threats and need no defences. Like my manners, I prune to keep the flower, not the thorn.

Fun facts

If I had to eat one food for the rest of my life, it would be fondue.
I have central heterochromia that I didn't notice until I was an adult.
I like to relieve stress by slowly destroying bars of soap. When Alex and I trade packages, they send me new bars if my supply is low.
My favourite time of day is Blue Hour, and I will always stop what I'm doing when it happens.
One of the first programs I ever learned was Wyre Bash.

Footnotes

* Now I'm no situationship expert, but here's a nugget from me. If you are in this exact situation, sick of it beyond relief and you intend to inform your beloathed of your decision to leave, there's the very real chance that they'll proceed to make a giant wall of text professing their alleged guilt, homicidal or suicidal intentions and/or tragic backstory. While they clack away, your chat client will kindly inform you of this through a "ASSHOLE is typing...". When you see this, remember that you have the chance to do the funniest thing ever. Kick them out of your chat mid-typing. Do it. I promise you won't regret it. I certainly don't.
* This room wasn’t to be; it was never meant to make it into the game. Not all ideas stick, especially in game development where bloat gets noticed and fast.