6. 2026-02-04 / index
Hello and welcome to THREAD ZONE.
We're kind of doing alright, right now! That is really weird to write and say because the last many days have been, you know, a lot. But it's 2026 and that's the energy anyway, so actually if you put it all together and just don't squint too close and take stock of where we really are, we're doing okay.
Tangle and Whisper are announced to totally star in the next episode of The Chaotix Casefiles! Sorry, spoilers for The Chaotix Casefiles. The gang is going to Spiral Hill. Ooooh exciting. We rambled about this a little on Discord already, where we said we're excited they're getting official voice roles (it's the first time ever) and we're curious to see how they sound, but also not putting a lot of weight into it. The best example of our canon voice cast is SnapCube's dub of The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog, which is the crew we're used to - we got back into Sonic mostly via the realtime fandubs, in the first place - improv-voicing canonical lines, instead of improv-voicing improv lines. It's really good and it's the Sonics to us. We haven't played Frontiers or Generations or more than an hour or two of Forces, or even the Sonic Adventure games for that matter, so we really don't have a good handle on the official cast, present or past. Then as we're listening to the Casefiles, we like Vector and Charmy's voices plenty (and Sonic of course), but most of the rest of the cast doesn't click so close to home... It turns out it's all the official cast there, which is cool! And exciting for T&W! But also a grain of salt to go with our imagination, since the official cast was never really OUR official cast.
Those two are also characters we've put so much of our own actual voices, and reading, into. There is a certain selection of stories we could point to as influential in how we flavored our own read, which tended to flavor our own writing, and bubbled into our real-world speech, too. When you tell us "It's nice to hear your voice again" we take it... you know, to heart? And it's just nice to hear each other speak in general, because, hello, 2026, we all only have so much in-person human contact (usually more like "so little"), and it's nice touching each other with sound. But for us, our voices are distinct and true and often pretty raw, and are some of the most direct expression of ourselves, or of our images of ourselves. We've made them up over about two years of speaking out loud, and alarmingly little "voice training" - we're just speaking who we are. I guess we practice enough in our head as we read. (And write, ha ha.) So yes, excited, maybe a teensy bit terrified, but we'll see where it goes. It's not like fictives the world over aren't used to more official media coming out well after they're full and formed.
We're working out more of what's going on with, well, Jade. I'm going to totally own her for having the balls to speak out loud this morning and maybe last night, and so on: she's here, whether she likes it or not, and making herself known. Of her own accord. So this is my acknowledgement.
I don't know if we got to saying this part out loud, or not. Maybe I'll, I don't know, attach what we wrote in Discord? You don't have to read that first (or at all, I'm not your mom). But we were leading into a sense of, like - here's Jade, yes she's around, but her impression is that maybe she would like to not actually be around, thank you very much, but... there IS good reason for her to bring back some of the knowledge and wisdom and ways of being that were familiar to her, and which we've still more or less left behind. As you might have figured out, there was a time where most of the rest of the crew melted back into her, and her own sense of self shifted and changed, largely in the wake of the 2021 trauma. I think she asserted that lots of the ways she changed are actually normal and just in line with how people change, and grow, and become new people. Yeah. But there's also no denying the circumstances, and part of our healing is trying to feel if there are things we want to bring back, which we'd maybe only left behind on accident... or want to change our perspective on now, years later.
So anyway, what's the plan, then? I don't know. Probe around and play nice, mostly. I don't actually like hardball. She wants to go back to bed and if she keeps wanting that, then I think she that's what she'll do, and we're going to take more of her with us - consciously with us, at least - than when we came into all this.
That's how she's framing the name "Everest" right now. It just doesn't feel like her own name. There's room in it for her, maybe... but it's not hers. A friend asked us "is Whisper still alive?" and the answer was a boldface, yes, but maybe it sparked something for us: Is that what this is about? Once there is Everest, will there not be Whisper? Is the final outcome really a kind of integration between those two in particular? Or is this all something else...?
Lavender eventually took on the name Lavender, and I think it's no coincidence that she also still hears a resonance with Terezi. I don't bring that up to 1:1 pair any of us, despite that there's stuff like that to say between Surge and Vriska too. No, not really.
But Jade is near our consciousness and Whisper was expressly reaching for her past self. Meanwhile the name "Everest" is still one that means something to Whisper, and she doesn't know what. What's our clearest sign that Jade wants to leave the reins to us? Lots of plainly expressed-out-loud stuff at this point for sure, and maybe plenty before, but... as undeniable as it comes: Everest means something deep and heartful and true to Whisper, and it doesn't mean that same something to Jade. It just doesn't. It's Whisper's name, it's a name for Whisper, it's not hers. She doesn't want it. Capital-R Rejected. Sorry, not sorry.
Anyway, Whisper already has a past self. Claire is right there. Isn't there a deadname there too, ▓▓▓ or something? Why doesn't she go take care of her own darn subsystem?
I can't turn away from the stuff she wrote about me, either. Or the stuff we wrote, about me, through her, blah blah blah. Co-consciousness is a ride and we've been on it all week (captain, it's only— you shut up, it's Wednesday). Scathing? Not really, just toothy. Sorry for being a perv: that's how I like it. What sticks out is that I feel like I've been really closed off lately, on an emotional "ways of thinking" front... I don't think that's actually true at all, but I feel it? Or feel for it? Maybe I just feel stuck-up, full of myself, whatever, damn. Anxious about how I look. Or am I being real right now? Tough to tell, but I want to try to tell, because most of all I don't want to rest easy. I guess that's the truest Lanolin moment there. I can't quit, I can't call it enough.
Here's proof I'm sensing something: I felt I'd picked up a pattern, or rather that our mom had correctly picked up a pattern, when she spat the repeat behavior, on my part, that was hurting her. Emotions 101: don't look for a rebuttal when someone tells you how you hurt them. Just don't. If it doesn't quite connect, don't tell them they're wrong—find the nuance that explains why and work on addressing that. Well, I tried, and I found it quick enough, and we talked that, and I hope it's productive. But I'm still worried about my gut response - the specific behavior she flagged. I'm not happy with it. That's what I really want to change in myself, and I hardly know where to start, because it feels like an expression of all the rules and grounding that make me work as "me". This is what we were foreshadowing when we gestured at "protector" system bullsh*t. (Bullshit, ha, ha.)
I don't feel at a loose end. I just am scared of how long it's going to take to make "real" progress. I guess I need to rephrase and accept all progress as real progress. Not "any" progress, "all" progress. Maah. I'll work on it.