The Anaether

I’m still in the process of hashing out this idea, and I’m not feeling 100% with this illustration but it’s something. In any case, in this post I want to talk about probably what’s going to be one of the weirdest things about “The Anaether.” I always imagined it’d scare people away. But it might not, perhaps I’m being paranoid. I’ve been wanting to mention it early on so that you know what sort of weirdness you might be getting yourself into. And to see if you might want to bail. Kind of half joking but not.

I’m probably going to elaborate on this idea further in more illustrations later (the birth of Syf I mean), and as of right now I do plan on doing a whole chapter on the birth of Syf (well, probably multiple chapters…) but that’ll be way off in the future. Which is why I’m talking about it now. I have a weird fixation on this idea of birth and how it relates to existential stuff. Well, that plus making it alien and visually weird but appealing in a way. I also wanted to clarify the idea of Vas getting “pregnant.” They don’t get pregnant like humans do. Well, the fucking is the same more or less, but after that it’s mostly pretty different. The “womb,” or in this case I’d want to call it an “egg,” is external and kind of in the anaether. Actually to call it a “womb” would be more accurate but it’s not inside Vas’s nor any Voyant’s body. The gestation and birth have psionic, some cybernetic and of course physical/biological elements. In the story I intend it to be way more emotional and perhaps even spiritual.

I don’t want to get too much into all the ridiculous details of Therian and Voyant birth but Syf’s birth is a hybrid of the two since she is, uh, a hybrid.

There’s actually way more to Syf’s birth than just this image. I want it to be pretty but really sad. I’m breaking my own “rules” of only revealing more story through the comic pages but as I’d been saying, I’m horribly over-eager to tell you guys more about the story. And yet still, I don’t intend to come off as rude and I apologize in advance but if you guys ask questions, I’m always tempted to answer but I’ll also probably want to hold off on answering your questions immediately for the sake of not spoiling like, literally everything. Yeah. As you can tell I’m stupidly conflicted.

I’m gonna elaborate on how Vas is a male and female physiologically. Vas is a member of the 3rd gender of their alien race of Voyants. But I’m not sure if there’d be 3 or 4 genders and I’m not sure what to call them (man, woman and… 3rd genders?) terminology’s just not my thing.

Anyway, there’s at least 2 different variants of Vas’s “gender” I suppose. Vas appears male but with lower female parts in addition to male parts (so yes theoretically could impregnate others) but no mammary glands. Instead, they produce nectar orally. (I wish I could find a better term than “nectar” but it seems most appropriate) Presumably through… nectar glands in the stomach area? Something like that.

So yeah. Vas is a bird flower. A robot or… android… cyborg bird flower thing.

I haven’t completely decided all the rules of what Voyant nectar can do. I was thinking some 3rd gender Voyants can produce both milk and nectar but now that I think of that, it might be a bit excessive. Maybe not. Maybe I should just go over the top. Perhaps they can be more rare.

Well, at the very least Voyant nectar functions like milk except at least for Syf, it also serves as an almost all-purpose healing salve. At the moment I don’t really know if that should apply to all Voyant children or just exclusively from parents to their respective children. Today I’ll just talk about Vas and Syf.

So Syf is a special case. Trying to have Voyant-Therian kids is generally a bad idea because the mortality rate is high due to a guaranteed likelihood of genetic defects. Syf is pretty broken but in both ways. She’s both powerful and pretty messed up.

One of the defects I’m gonna elaborate on in this post is just the nectar thing. Here’s an excerpt from the main storyline in sketches/thumbnails:

Syf can’t consume anything other than Vas’s nectar. I’m still on the fence about water at the moment but still, this gives us a better understanding of why she’s so cranky. I’m gonna hold off on telling you guys how she can possibly know what she’s missing out on in real food.

So yes, theoretically a uh… nectarine Voyant? (I don’t know if that’ll stick) A nectarine Voyant would feed their infant like a bird. But I guess that’d only be okay for infants since it’d be equivalent to our breastfeeding.

Since she’s not an infant for most of the series, here’s an excerpt kind of explaining how it’d work:

I haven’t finalized the mask canteen thingy design yet but this is what usually follows:

So yeaah. That’s a thing. Vas is again, pretty stoic about it. They just see it as a thing that needs to be done, and Syf is intensely annoyed and sometimes hysterically sad about her own defects.

I don’t think I’m going to regularly “spoil” my own story this much. I had always planned on talking this much in depth about this part of the whole story early on because it’s one of the weirdest aspects of it and I just wanted people to have an idea of how weird it was gonna get. Maybe I’m worrying too much. Whatever, people who will want to stick around will do so and those who will bail will do that and I’m fine with all that. I’m just trying to be upfront about my content.

If you enjoyed this bit of (back)story exposition, I have some more semi-spoilers (but not really?) in the form of early access to 26 pages of thumbnails from the middle of the main storyline on my Patreon (once you get into the $5 tier you’ll have a link to a folder with early access/exclusive content), which kind of makes it exclusive because I probably won’t render out those pages for another… I don’t know… a year or more? Assuming I’m still working on this project? I don’t know what else to tell you. I obsess over this project every single day, I can’t make promises that far ahead but what I got right now is what I have, that’s all I can guarantee you lol. The 26 pages in there are related to what I talked about in this blog post here today.

I’d also like to mention, if I haven’t mentioned it before, so far most of the story I’ve given in the form of comic pages has probably given you the impression that “The Anaether” is light-hearted and cute. I’d always meant for it to be dark, intensely emotional, sad, violent and cool… but I guess my style of story-telling often just ends up more cute and comedic. It’s not some egregious crime but if you’re getting the impression that “The Anaether” is supposed to be a comedy or something, I really didn’t intend for it to be. But whatever, it’s ending up a certain way but I really try to do my best with the writing quality in the story and the characters.

Thank you so much for your continued interest in my content. I’ll be working on more comic pages now.