I Was Supposed To Be Cool And Mysterious Like Sherlock Holmes But Instead I Can't Stop Yapping About

chapter 40 wha spoilers ///// am i making you feel sick☹️

i think one of the best things about starting a new series is when you had it on your list for so long and when you finally give it a chance, it’s one of the best series you’ve ever read/watched! or when you go back to a series you’ve paused for a while to catch up on everything you missed and falling in love with the story all over again. it’s always so much fun to discover new media! it’s also amazing to finally catch up on the series you have loved for years!!!

Urgent Appeal: Support Needed to Save My Family in Gaza

Hello everyone,

I hope you and your families are all in good health and safety.

I am Dr. Tamer Al-Deeb, a dentist from Gaza, Palestine.

We have been suffering from the bitterness and harshness of war for the past nine months, and we can no longer endure it. We are exhausted and drained, with no option left but to escape with whatever remains of our mental health out of the country.

I hope you can help us preserve our lives and support our cause until the very end. You are our hope and our reliance. ❤️

Please help us by donating any amount you can. If you are unable to donate, sharing our campaign would mean a lot to us. 🙏🏻🍉

Thank you.

gofundme.com

Donate to Standing with a Family Escaping the Horrors of War in Gaza., organized by Abdallah Ghunaim

The story will be in three languages: English, German, and Ar… Abdallah Ghunaim needs your support for Standing with a Family Escaping the H

Our campaign is vetted by :

- @ibtisams 🫶🇵🇸 : click here

- @90-ghost 🫶🇵🇸 : click here

- @el-shab-hussein 🫶🇵🇸& @nabulsi 🫶🇵🇸 on Vetted Gaza Fundraiser List Number [ 191 ] : click here

@communistchilchuck 🫶🇵🇸

@sar-soor 🫶🇵🇸

@fallahifag 🫶🇵🇸

@plomegranate 🫶🇵🇸

@fairuzfan 🫶🇵🇸

@vakarians-babe 🫶🇵🇸

@palestinegenocide 🫶🇵🇸

Dear Reader,🌹

I am Dr. Mohammed Aldeeb, a dedicated medical professional specializing in emergency care, hailing from the Gaza Strip. 🇵🇸 ✌🕊

For years, I poured my heart and soul into my work at Al-Shifa Hospital, tending to the wounded and the ailing with compassion and skill.😀

However, the ravages of war tore through our lives😓, forcing me to abandon my cherished home and the familiar walls of the hospital where I once found solace😥💔.

gofundme.com

Donate to Help Us Escape the Ravages of War: Emergency Evacuation Fund, organized by N ALDEEB

Help Us Escape the Ravages of War: Emergency Evacuation Fund … N ALDEEB needs your support for Help Us Escape the Ravages of War: Emergen

Leaving behind the echoes of laughter and camaraderie, I embarked on a painful journey southward, bidding farewell to the streets where I grew up😓💔, the corners where I sought refuge, and the colleagues who felt like family. Memories of my formative years and the countless lives I touched during my tenure at Al-Shifa and other medical facilities flooded my mind😥, as I struggled to come to terms with the sudden upheaval.

Despite the adversities that besieged me, I persevered in my pursuit of healing. My determination led me to Al-Azhar University, where I embraced the role of a teaching assistant, imparting knowledge to aspiring medical students with unwavering dedication. Dreams of specializing in internal medicine beckoned me back to Al-Shifa Hospital, but alas, the brutal onslaught of war reduced it to rubble, shattering my aspirations in its wake.

In the chaos and carnage of conflict, I sustained injuries, and the sanctuary of my home was obliterated, leaving my family and me destitute and displaced. Yet, amid the ruins, a flicker of hope persists. At Al-Aqsa Hospital, I continue to extend a helping hand to those in need, drawing strength from the resilience instilled in me through years of education and service.

Today, we find ourselves sheltering in a humble tent, stripped of our possessions and livelihoods. The loss of my job, my home, and the comforting presence of my loved ones weighs heavily on my heart. Nevertheless, I refuse to surrender to despair, clinging to the belief that brighter days lie ahead.

It is with a heavy heart that I reach out to you, dear reader, seeking assistance in securing safe passage for myself and my family from the turmoil of Gaza. With your kindness and generosity, I hope to reclaim the path to realizing my medical vocation, enabling me to provide for my loved ones and contribute to the healing of our wounded world.

Your compassionate aid would mean the world to me and my family.

With gratitude and hope,

Dr. Mohammed Aldeeb

Gaza Strip

WhatsApp: 00972599095244

I hope this version captures the depth of your story and resonates with your audience. Let me know if you need further adjustments!

Vetted by :

@90-ghost : the verification

gofundme.com

Donate to Help Us Escape the Ravages of War: Emergency Evacuation Fund, organized by N ALDEEB

Help Us Escape the Ravages of War: Emergency Evacuation FundT… N ALDEEB needs your support for Help Us Escape the Ravages of War: Emergen

comics as an art form make me insane. they’re so difficult to do well. there’s so many different ways to make sequential art work and most of them are deeply unintuitive. onomatopoeia that feels completely ridiculous to put down often reads seamlessly. panels on a page become a fractally nested image composition challenge that’s only possible to lose because if you do a good job no one will notice. you have to direct the readers’ eyes on a specific path across the page but also account for the fact that they won’t follow it. comic time isn’t linear. if the order of events isn’t crystal clear the story becomes incomprehensible. sometimes you need to do this on purpose. all this for a medium almost universally considered less effective than animation and less respectable than plain text. even its own name doesn’t take it seriously

Nomad esims are needed!!!!

If you want to support Ukrainians, DO NOT donate to Red Cross. Can't speak about their work in other countries, but they're useless in Ukraine. The only trustworthy international organisation I can think of is World Central Kitchen.

Donate to World Central Kitchen

And it's even better to donate directly to Ukrainian organisations. Here are a few good legit places:

hospitallers.life - "Hospitallers", Ukrainian paramedics on the frontlines

savelife.in.ua - "Come Back Alive", assistance to the army

prytulafoundation.org - "Prytula Foundation", assistance to the army, humanitarian causes

starenki.com.ua - "Starenki", helping elderly people

everybodycan.com.ua - "Everybody Can", helping disabled children, elders and hospitals

uanimals.org - "UAnimals", saving animals

Here's a website where Palestine GoFundMes are vetted and shared that you can send out to people. The url is gazafunds.com

Easy to use and simple. Just share the site whenever someone asks for GFMs for Palestine.

Nowhere, Black Sorrow and an interpretation of Ivan's love

Gonna talk a bit about Ivan's emotional state in Nowhere and how it… is mostly right there in Black Sorrow too, just in a slightly more matured manner. I've got some similarities and differences I wanna highlight!

(It'd be good to read my lil initial impressions on the release of Nowhere first, tho!)

Firstly, the key thing about interpreting the content of Nowhere is that it's a private song. Written for Ivan himself, composed with no outside input, never meant for public performance. Therefore, in it, we can trust that Ivan is expressing himself as freely as he can (through the lens of his stunted emotional development yet strong ability to look inward and rationalize, but still), which is a very rare occurrence, given that one of his biggest traits is being private and cagey. The song Nowhere is raw emotion for a change, an open display of his head and heart.

And it sounds like just that. We hear the result of Ivan trying a romantic, ballad-like love song, starting with that and presumably just scrapping it for the subsequent melodic, hopeless freestyle rap session about his loneliness, pain, sense of being fundamentally unlovable/unwanted, belief that his existence is devoid of value and his pessimism.

But the love he knows he feels for Till IS there, fantastically represented by the ballad-like part that stays in the background for the rest of Nowhere. And it's recognized for what it is. 

… which is a big deal in itself!! Ivan talks down on his capacity for love a lot and would later call it a "shallow emotion", but he's way too analytical and knows himself too well to be avoiding that love is what it is. He damn well knows he's in love. And this song, the earliest song in his musical timeline, is pretty much the only place he says it out loud. 

Followed, of course, by all those verses about his meaningless and inconsequential life, being overwhelmed yet persisting calmly/numbly, the light he can't look at and dreams/hopes that are unreachable from the beginning because everything (and himself) is stained. And yet, the recognition of his emotions stays running in the background; to be literal about it, his feeling of love stays present and sung no matter how deep he dives into his bleak outlook. Constant, steady, never drowned out. Two things that are truths to Ivan. It feels to me like precisely the two factors that govern his inner emotional life: the belief that he's not built for it and the knowledge that he loves, regardless.

And "this always happens to me" is the sentiment that results from all that, taking the spotlight as the general mood and baseline of Nowhere. 

His belief that that the boy he was in the slums - a human who didn't feel like he belonged anywhere, neither an equal existence in relation to the segyein nor feeling part of humanity, a type of existence that's stained and rejected - is the same person he is in Anakt Garden and the ame persona he will continue to be. Of course, that applies to his love too. Not gonna work out because that's just how it is for someone like him, another piece of the "this always happens to me", destined to be unwanted. 

(We've gotta remember that Nowhere was written at the time he was living in Anakt Garden [source: official post], the time where he developed his feelings for Till and tried to be close to him in ways that neither Till nor Ivan himself could understand properly - so, is it surprising at all that he'd continue to feel mismatched with other humans, stained, wrong and hopeless? My personal belief here is that what he experiences with Till echoes with what he experienced in the slums, all contributing to sustain his view and thoughts about himself as an individual. It's all the same. Again: this always happens to him.)

Now here's the thing: that defeatist attitude about loving Till is honestly the same one he carries over to Black Sorrow and is guided by throughout all of the main Alien Stage storyline.

Another thing that's very important to remember in regards to THAT is that Ivan never told Till how he felt in any type of way, he also didn't intend to show it or let it be known in way Till could interpret, understand and give an answer to [source: Vivimeng Q&A at the 2024 GAF event of which we only have attendee records]. He mostly fought, made up, played and spent time with Till. The most straightforward example of "acting upon his feelings" we could refer to is when he asked Till if he wanted to kiss [source: official comic], which was absolutely not framed as a confession of romantic inclinations, but just as "something some kids in Anakt are doing". It was neither expressed nor understood for its true human meaning. Ivan never says anything because he has simply assumed that he's unlovable, considers himself rejected by default (he's aware Till likes Mizi, but it's been made clear that this is mostly irrelevant to him, Till could love anybody or no one at all and he'd still have his pessimistic outlook because he considers himself the problem [source: GAF event Q&A again]) and leaves it at that. Around the segyein, he even goes out of his way to protect either Till, the privacy of his own feelings or the nature of love (as one of the few freedoms pet-humans have) by giving the impression that they're not that close and Till is not that important to him [source: Ivan interview from the Alien Stage Patreon, specifically these bits].

With that said, let's recall Black Sorrow.

It's inevitably different because it's not the raw and fully honest Ivan, but a song meant for performing, for an audience and for the competition. Still, it's his character introduction song and it's the one that tells us his viewpoint on Till. And in it, his definition of love is already, well, that it's "his black sorrow". A feeling surrounded by darkness, love for someone unreachable, the knowledge that it ends in a "cold spot stained with blood", not meant to work out for him in any way. Just as he thought at the time of Nowhere. 

Because that always happens to him. He thinks that way in Black Sorrow, he thought that way in Nowhere, he still thinks that way in Cure.

But there's one thing that's extremely different between Black Sorrow and Nowhere! And I think it's an important aspect of Ivan that the new song and the new opportunity for character analysis allow us to bring forward.

It's in this little moment, the prelude to the climax of Black Sorrow:

When the first point tally is coming, no matter when you pause the video, Ivan's points are gonna be the same as Marty's. Unlike in Blink Gone, with Luka shown to be leading and Till falling in second place, Ivan and Marty don't know how it's going. But they'll get their final count soon, so this is the point where things need to get real serious. And it's the point when – as he watches the set's falling stars – Ivan dives into his most painful but also very important memory with Till. Through which we reach the song's climax, his performance turns much more emotional and he ultimately crushes Marty's score by a great margin.

What I'm trying to say is: in Black Sorrow, Ivan is in a very similar place as he was in Nowhere, in regards to his emotions and his love. We can assume he's more accustomed to it. But most of all, he's purposefully tapping into his feelings (both his love and his pain), drawing strength from them to deliver a winning performance. It's like opening his chest up and reaching into his heart, yes, but it's also done in a very controlled manner, because as soon as he's able, Ivan composes himself. When he finishes performing, he's his usual calm self again. 

(Writing this I realize I'll need another post to dive deeper into Black Sorrow alone to cover some more points that are unique to the song, so I'll leave that for later.)

And that's the aspect of his character that I think is so important to highlight, the fact that he just… know himself so well. And how, despite viewing himself negatively in some ways, he also greatly accepts himself.

Nowhere is a very downbeat song, of course we're all face down in puddles of tears for Ivan, but him? I think it'd be… in a way, misjudging and underestimating him to settle on a very depressive or fully self-loathing view of him. Because he's pessimistic, but in a rational, "that's exactly how things are" kinda way. He looks down on what he considers his bad sides, but also keeps them close and doesn't hesitate to use all of his skills and traits. He's hurting, but he remains collected and undefeated by his various pains. He's emotionally vulnerable but also SO full of sentiment, determined, clever, capable of great acts of gentleness and dedicated as few will ever be. 

And, when it comes to his love for Till, his belief that it's doomed to be unrequited doesn't stop him from continuing to feel that way, continuing to look after Till, drawing strength from his love when needed and ultimately do what must be done to push for Till's victory in Cure.

That's all for now! Please remember that these are only my views and that for this piece I focused on interpreting Ivan's love in particular in the context of Nowhere tied to Black Sorrow, so other themes are not as covered (not because they're not important in Nowhere or his whole character, of course) and even most of the nature of that same love is also not covered. I'll continue to write more analysis posts if possible.

I hope it's been an interesting read!