Last panel: Ki Rata is a breathing technique. It was thought that angels cannot learn it, as they do not breathe. White Chain seems to have found, or created, a means to bypass that limitation.
So I read this page and cried a little bit. Is it weird that it hurts? It’s the kind of pain that happens when I imagine something nice that I know cannot happen. She gets to punch her way to a perfect female body. I’m happy for her, I really am. She’s been through an eternity of struggle and it’s great that she gets to have that. But it’s something that can’t happen out here, not so completely, no matter what you do or how much or how long you struggle, and it hurts so much.
It’s not weird. It’s a pretty common sentiment. The Sharing Trenchcoats community is no stranger to dysphoria.
The beauty of fiction, the beauty of lies, is that White Chain’s not wrong. Stubbornness and dedication and flat out not accepting an unacceptable reality CAN work miracles. Lies CAN become true.
Lies like this one will be the inspiration for the people who, one day, will make the dream of perfected bodily alteration a reality.
We won’t probably be here to see that, which is sad. But until that day, know that you’re not alone, and that there will always be wise people out there who will know you for the fire within rather than the shell.
I had a comment written out but it apparently got eaten by the timelords.
Suffice to say in a future where everything can be cured, it will be interesting to see which happens more, the mind cured of dysphoria or the body cured that disagrees with the mind.
I pointed out that some studies seem to indicate that even transitioning doesnt help some dysphoria sufferers, and that many others who didnt transition just ended up gay.
So in the super science future, it is likely that you will already be in the correct body and wont be able to believe you arent, since all that will get straightened out before youre old enough to remember. Assuming that dysphoria even can be cured, or that we ever can get molecular organic body makers, etc.
Im a personal fan of genetic modification and think we should go straight to nanobots and grey fog and superhumans able to survive anything, because why choose what anyone else wants for you and just make your own? That said, as long as we are a sexually dimorphic species and we dont somehow fuck that up, cloning your own new humans from scratch might be easier than using sex in the far future. I mean, pretty sure if you have the ability to make kids out of base materials and dont require sitting around for 9 months to do it, few would choose to undergo that unless theyre into like, egg laying or something. And if the desire for sex for pleasure essentially goes away as our brains become more powerful and able to cope with our desires, sexual organs might disappear entirely and we might just have dopamine buttons 😛
Meh, too many possible futures to know which will happen.
Gender dysphoria comes up out of desynchronization; the idea of ‘curing’ it in place is elementally terrifying and vastly worse than the disease. That is not fixing a person: that is destroying a person.
I have seen a cure to this, and it was becoming who I am. Some have always been so, some have become so over the course of time, and some – like us, like White Chain – used an act of defiance, of breaking ourselves, to become who we are.
We’re all different, but one thing is the same of all of us:
Those of us who suffer or have suffered from gender dysphoria are not sick. There is no ‘cure’ which is not either wholesale ego death or growing into ourselves.
Like… I get where you’re coming from, I know you don’t have skin in this game and I don’t think you’re trying to be weird or bad any which-way, but *please* try to understand that this angle is rrrrrrreal bad, like, bad for *real*.
Of course it hurts, that the world is an imperfect thing, full of imperfect things. We tell each other stories, grasping at the pieces of the perfect world we’d like to live in, and that’s what drives us. Never satisfied, always wanting more. The gap between the ideal and the real is what creates the pressure, the breath, the motion of a living world.
Knowing that doesn’t make it hurt any less. But we’ve got to find a way to channel that pain into overcoming the obstacles we face. Focus on the goal, cut it apart, separate what’s truly important from the distractions. Don’t obsess about the path, just keep walking towards the goal.
Trans and sad. Many years ago i was in your position. I have clawed and bled my way to perfection. This is no dream, it is a reality that you must reach out and make manifest with your own hands. Seek heaven through violence. My existence is proof of this truth.
Sibling, that ache is known. It is deep, but do not fall into it.
Our lot is harder than many, and we must endure this ache and many others on our path, but we can always grow into who we really are. We may not be able to step free of the shells we were given, but there is so much we can do to cultivate ourselves, to bud and blossom what we lack, and to cut away that which is dead to us. Time is our great foe–both for what it takes from us before we can begin to be ourselves, and how much of it we must wade through before our efforts can be made manifest–but it can be overcome, and you will be victorious.
You are not your shell. There are those who will only see the fire of your soul shining forth, and they will love and celebrate who you are. Endure. Grow. Become. Blossom.
Sibling, be comforted. Even dragons know this pain, and we who are dragon carry the memories of Truth Becoming Real, for like all memories and experience, it is a treasure we can hoard forever. A treasure to share without losing.
I too am on the path of pain, the path of Becoming.
I will share something of common draconic: “Refthi Efthnauvra” translates as “Brightly Shining/Glimmering”. “Efth” is the quality called “albedo” or “gleam”, and is a quality of many gemstones. I am thus named Sparkle, Starshine, or Starfire, depending on which culture or dialect is used to translate.
We are stars, you and I, but gemstones need care to be shaped from the rough form found in stone and clay. We are stars becoming. Let us hope to see each other shine in joy, peace, and love.
Reach Truth Through Joy And Sorrow; Destroy The Fallen Self; Achieve Heaven Through Love! Thus shall we conquer everlasting.
We know your pain: we struggle to become, to imagine, something nice that we know can happen. But in this journey, as we align mismatching elements; not so completely…
That which we make together is a great machine: for us, this can be safety and self-determination for ourselves and for people like ourselves.
I’m sorry this hurt so badly. I’m glad you got to see it, and it’s heartening to see all of us coming out of the woodwork to help bear you back up, such as we may.
[What you will have is not what White Chain has; that is true enough, though it is not fair. Still: what you can have is a glimmer of the experiences which underpin such transformation. The family she chose when hers rejected her, the presence of those who understand us in a way that the wider world will refuse to do.
Persist, o counterpart ours. You will never be without a place in this machine.]
We can’t snap our fingers, for sure. There’ll never be a box we can step into and pop out the other end our ideal self, the thing we want to look like. That’s… rough. It’s been rough for my whole life, for our whole lives, even as I continue to approach the thing I made and said ‘yes, it would be a fine thing to grow up into this person’.
I never thought it could happen. That -was- a story, it was an insurmountable fantasy, for decades.
Today, it’s true. Would that I could’ve gotten here in a single fistfight; I’d have thrown that punch a long time ago. Still, it wasn’t to be, and I had to be the despairing person I was in order to become the fascinating new thing that we are.
You can be who you are, if only you will. [We believe in you.] Maybe more than we believed in ourselves, having seen how impossibly far we can go when we act in defiance instead of submission.
Several things:
1. Salami’s face in panel 4. Heh.
2. Aww, I sorta liked WC’s design. Had to happen, though. That shell was bound to get obliterated soon as Allicio cracked her arms.
3. White Chain’s angel juice trailing behind her since time is stopped.
4. Abbadon’s ability to make the characters not look awful at such awkward angles. Wow. And fast work, too. (panel 5)
5. The rain is started back up at the end. This means two things: both everybody sees the results now (as opposed to later), and, more importantly: Salami didn’t get his armbands.
6. Lastly, panel 3 reminds me of something from Berserk.
Our good friend White Chain – if she chooses to keep that name – appears to have Reached Heaven Through Violence. Notably ‘Attained Divinity by figuring out how’, and purely by accident. She chose not to be herself as she was, she chose not to lose, she transcended. And ‘transitioned’ in that she appears to be physically sexed now! Good on her, though.
Solomon punched White Chain so hard she turned black
Nice
Metamorphosis!
dinnae expect that o_O
The egg known as Chainbreaker has officially hatched.
Her next reincarnation indeed.
So she’s black now? I thought she was blue…
Her ideal human self was seen in a much earlier page with brown skin.
Can you link?
Da Ba Dee, Da Ba Die.
Last panel: Ki Rata is a breathing technique. It was thought that angels cannot learn it, as they do not breathe. White Chain seems to have found, or created, a means to bypass that limitation.
Another girlfriend for the sorority chick?
I thought that was obvious from waaay back?
So I read this page and cried a little bit. Is it weird that it hurts? It’s the kind of pain that happens when I imagine something nice that I know cannot happen. She gets to punch her way to a perfect female body. I’m happy for her, I really am. She’s been through an eternity of struggle and it’s great that she gets to have that. But it’s something that can’t happen out here, not so completely, no matter what you do or how much or how long you struggle, and it hurts so much.
It’s not weird. It’s a pretty common sentiment. The Sharing Trenchcoats community is no stranger to dysphoria.
The beauty of fiction, the beauty of lies, is that White Chain’s not wrong. Stubbornness and dedication and flat out not accepting an unacceptable reality CAN work miracles. Lies CAN become true.
Lies like this one will be the inspiration for the people who, one day, will make the dream of perfected bodily alteration a reality.
We won’t probably be here to see that, which is sad. But until that day, know that you’re not alone, and that there will always be wise people out there who will know you for the fire within rather than the shell.
I had a comment written out but it apparently got eaten by the timelords.
Suffice to say in a future where everything can be cured, it will be interesting to see which happens more, the mind cured of dysphoria or the body cured that disagrees with the mind.
I pointed out that some studies seem to indicate that even transitioning doesnt help some dysphoria sufferers, and that many others who didnt transition just ended up gay.
So in the super science future, it is likely that you will already be in the correct body and wont be able to believe you arent, since all that will get straightened out before youre old enough to remember. Assuming that dysphoria even can be cured, or that we ever can get molecular organic body makers, etc.
Im a personal fan of genetic modification and think we should go straight to nanobots and grey fog and superhumans able to survive anything, because why choose what anyone else wants for you and just make your own? That said, as long as we are a sexually dimorphic species and we dont somehow fuck that up, cloning your own new humans from scratch might be easier than using sex in the far future. I mean, pretty sure if you have the ability to make kids out of base materials and dont require sitting around for 9 months to do it, few would choose to undergo that unless theyre into like, egg laying or something. And if the desire for sex for pleasure essentially goes away as our brains become more powerful and able to cope with our desires, sexual organs might disappear entirely and we might just have dopamine buttons 😛
Meh, too many possible futures to know which will happen.
Child, you have spectacularly misunderstood life.
There is a lot to say about what you wrote, but I am going to content myself to this:
I, for one, hope sex never goes away.
…there is nothing wrong with my mind.
Gender dysphoria comes up out of desynchronization; the idea of ‘curing’ it in place is elementally terrifying and vastly worse than the disease. That is not fixing a person: that is destroying a person.
I have seen a cure to this, and it was becoming who I am. Some have always been so, some have become so over the course of time, and some – like us, like White Chain – used an act of defiance, of breaking ourselves, to become who we are.
We’re all different, but one thing is the same of all of us:
Those of us who suffer or have suffered from gender dysphoria are not sick. There is no ‘cure’ which is not either wholesale ego death or growing into ourselves.
Like… I get where you’re coming from, I know you don’t have skin in this game and I don’t think you’re trying to be weird or bad any which-way, but *please* try to understand that this angle is rrrrrrreal bad, like, bad for *real*.
If conversion therapy worked, then the thing to be scared of is the DollHouse.
Of course it hurts, that the world is an imperfect thing, full of imperfect things. We tell each other stories, grasping at the pieces of the perfect world we’d like to live in, and that’s what drives us. Never satisfied, always wanting more. The gap between the ideal and the real is what creates the pressure, the breath, the motion of a living world.
Knowing that doesn’t make it hurt any less. But we’ve got to find a way to channel that pain into overcoming the obstacles we face. Focus on the goal, cut it apart, separate what’s truly important from the distractions. Don’t obsess about the path, just keep walking towards the goal.
Trans and sad. Many years ago i was in your position. I have clawed and bled my way to perfection. This is no dream, it is a reality that you must reach out and make manifest with your own hands. Seek heaven through violence. My existence is proof of this truth.
It’s monumentally hard work.
[…but it is a good hard.]
Sibling, that ache is known. It is deep, but do not fall into it.
Our lot is harder than many, and we must endure this ache and many others on our path, but we can always grow into who we really are. We may not be able to step free of the shells we were given, but there is so much we can do to cultivate ourselves, to bud and blossom what we lack, and to cut away that which is dead to us. Time is our great foe–both for what it takes from us before we can begin to be ourselves, and how much of it we must wade through before our efforts can be made manifest–but it can be overcome, and you will be victorious.
You are not your shell. There are those who will only see the fire of your soul shining forth, and they will love and celebrate who you are. Endure. Grow. Become. Blossom.
Sibling, be comforted. Even dragons know this pain, and we who are dragon carry the memories of Truth Becoming Real, for like all memories and experience, it is a treasure we can hoard forever. A treasure to share without losing.
I too am on the path of pain, the path of Becoming.
I will share something of common draconic: “Refthi Efthnauvra” translates as “Brightly Shining/Glimmering”. “Efth” is the quality called “albedo” or “gleam”, and is a quality of many gemstones. I am thus named Sparkle, Starshine, or Starfire, depending on which culture or dialect is used to translate.
We are stars, you and I, but gemstones need care to be shaped from the rough form found in stone and clay. We are stars becoming. Let us hope to see each other shine in joy, peace, and love.
Reach Truth Through Joy And Sorrow; Destroy The Fallen Self; Achieve Heaven Through Love! Thus shall we conquer everlasting.
We know your pain: we struggle to become, to imagine, something nice that we know can happen. But in this journey, as we align mismatching elements; not so completely…
One learns. We do not submit. One rediscovers.
We are a white hot flame.
This is our story, Sibling.
That which we make together is a great machine: for us, this can be safety and self-determination for ourselves and for people like ourselves.
I’m sorry this hurt so badly. I’m glad you got to see it, and it’s heartening to see all of us coming out of the woodwork to help bear you back up, such as we may.
[What you will have is not what White Chain has; that is true enough, though it is not fair. Still: what you can have is a glimmer of the experiences which underpin such transformation. The family she chose when hers rejected her, the presence of those who understand us in a way that the wider world will refuse to do.
Persist, o counterpart ours. You will never be without a place in this machine.]
We can’t snap our fingers, for sure. There’ll never be a box we can step into and pop out the other end our ideal self, the thing we want to look like. That’s… rough. It’s been rough for my whole life, for our whole lives, even as I continue to approach the thing I made and said ‘yes, it would be a fine thing to grow up into this person’.
I never thought it could happen. That -was- a story, it was an insurmountable fantasy, for decades.
Today, it’s true. Would that I could’ve gotten here in a single fistfight; I’d have thrown that punch a long time ago. Still, it wasn’t to be, and I had to be the despairing person I was in order to become the fascinating new thing that we are.
You can be who you are, if only you will. [We believe in you.] Maybe more than we believed in ourselves, having seen how impossibly far we can go when we act in defiance instead of submission.
Welcome to the family?
White Chain cuts open the gender reveal solomon david to massive applause
82/1 Diamond Chain Resurrects to Defeat Evil
Queen’s Princes of the Universe suddenly begins playing.
I am immortal, I have inside me blood of kings,
I have no rival, no man can be my equal.
Take me to the future of you all
-Queen
Several things:
1. Salami’s face in panel 4. Heh.
2. Aww, I sorta liked WC’s design. Had to happen, though. That shell was bound to get obliterated soon as Allicio cracked her arms.
3. White Chain’s angel juice trailing behind her since time is stopped.
4. Abbadon’s ability to make the characters not look awful at such awkward angles. Wow. And fast work, too. (panel 5)
5. The rain is started back up at the end. This means two things: both everybody sees the results now (as opposed to later), and, more importantly: Salami didn’t get his armbands.
6. Lastly, panel 3 reminds me of something from Berserk.
Applauding this comment. You nailed all points, my friend. Agreed on all counts.
I guess you could say white chain is… back in black?
She got him.
She’s now the ruler of his empire. Does he give her the key, tho?
He wishes to abandon his key and join the SwordsWoman’s (Demiurge 6, Incubus’ Master) quest for godhood.
Since when does Maya want godhood?
this makes me a very happy being on so many levels
free at last….
Our good friend White Chain – if she chooses to keep that name – appears to have Reached Heaven Through Violence. Notably ‘Attained Divinity by figuring out how’, and purely by accident. She chose not to be herself as she was, she chose not to lose, she transcended. And ‘transitioned’ in that she appears to be physically sexed now! Good on her, though.
Is this not the action of royalty? A continuous cutting motion. An act of self-obliteration, to shape oneself into higher form.
Best. Bday present. EVER.
Huh. I wasn’t aware that was an option for an angel.
Presumably this is going to end the fight, else White Chain may find that trading Ash Armor for flesh has it’s disadvantages.
Twas flesh that broke her ash armor, so perhaps flesh needn’t be the weaker of the two.
But the carapace is just oh so useful, and you can get a new one when the old one breaks.
Well… flesh and the power of a king’s key to 1/7 of the universe and the power of ki rata and…
I’d also note that even the ghost of Zoss makes use of Ash armor in preference to going in bare.
What, and I cannot stress this enough, the fuck?
I think she transcended into godhood
panel 5 : bruh, everything is a jojo reference XD
APOTHEOSIS: THE SHAPE OF A SOUL, REVEALED!
fuck, i love this webcomic.