(CONTENT WARNING for mentions of Child Abuse)
(SPOILER WARNING for the webcomic The Order of the Black Dog)

I sometimes like to say, “If you knew me in high school, then I apologize.” That’s because my high school years were pretty torturous. I was dealing with constant anxiety and anger issues, brought on by my mother. She was adamant that I had Narcolepsy, a sleep disorder characterized by prolonged tiredness. Every month she would take me to this doctor. I won’t disclose the doctor’s name because, in all respects, he was actually a legitimate doctor. The man was part of a MASH unit during the Korean War and had been practicing medicine for about 60 years overall. I was a regular patient of him for the last 10 of those years, and as far as I could tell, he was clearly out of it. A feeling supported by the fact that by the time I graduated from high school, he was in his last year of practice before retirement. He prescribed me Ritalin, a stimulant, for something that I was not tested for in a proper sleep study, like my mom had done for herself back in the 1990s. He kept mentioning that fact as well, but I guess he figured that a mother’s instinct is best, or he just didn’t want to argue with her. Pretty sure it was the latter.

My mom was…a tough parent. Actually, that is seriously underselling it, I’d say she was straight-up abusive. Smashing my head in with a flowbee when cutting my hair, smacking me in the private parts as motivation for me to be potty trained, throwing whatever she could at me and calling me an idiot for getting bad grades in math and not doing my homework, and then turning around and wondering why I never come to her, an engineer (something she loved to brag about) for math tips. She often butted heads with everybody, from co-workers to planning commissions to her own family. When I was born, our family was in the first of three lawsuits over an old, run-down house in the old village of Concord, now a part of Farragut. This lawsuit was dealing with my aunt over property rights. After that, she fought off a condemnation lawsuit with the water treatment plant next door, namely because the treatment plant wanted land that they didn’t need. Then she faced off against Farragut over property rights and a slightly loony member of the municipal planning board (although Farragut is one of those places that’s always slightly loonier than average).

This lawsuit over a house built by slave owners, confederate sympathizers and people who embody the term “I’m not racist, I have black friends!” pretty much left little time for them to…be parents. Oh, sure we went to St. Louis three times a year, only after my mom butted heads with her mom one too many times over what to do for Christmas dinner. But otherwise, they’d be kind of invisible. Our house was always in squalor, my parents had no idea what a cable V-Chip was, I was unrestricted on the internet, and they would often blast Fox News when there was nothing else on television, at least according to them. And when they did parent, yelling, screaming, crying, hitting, and thrown objects were the absolute norm. Mostly from my mom. My dad just kinda watched a lot of it unfold.

This all came to a head in Middle and High School, when teenage hormones were raging and I often dreaded coming home every day. While at the same time, making a scene of myself every couple of weeks, to the point where I could’ve sworn that many of the more popular kids treated me like someone who was about to commit a school shooting. Faking acting nice just so they’d be spared. My mom’s abuse got worse, and often yelled at me for joining the robotics team to do t-shirt designs instead of doing “practical stuff” like woodshop or engine building or whatever. While she stressed that she waned me to learn practical skills for a successful life, she really just wanted me to become an engineer like her. She even pushed coding classes on me because she kept screaming that the classes were good for animation…not even hiding the fact that she only wanted her little boy to become a computer engineer, something she could never get her head around. All the things that she wanted me to do were fields that a sensitive and artistic-minded kid like me would never be cut out in. The Ritalin did not help…if anything, it made it worse. If I wasn’t on Ritalin, then I would not have lashed out nearly as much back then.

What was worse was that I was just starting to get into the furry fandom, as many teenage outsiders often do. So, as I was dealing with eventual PTSD from my abuse, I was also dealing with the worries of being a minor in the fandom, like, “What if I get somebody arrested for horny role-playing?” Of course, as with many people going through puberty, I was plenty horny, and often binged on porn that I wasn’t allowed to see because, like many online kids my age, I didn’t give a damn about age laws. Around that time, I discovered one of the two prongs in my interest in spacesuits: I have a fetish for them. A deep fetish for them, alongside other related concepts, like diving and hazmat suits and, later, liquid breathing, but that’s a topic for another time. Anyway, I basically treated furry spacesuit art pieces like Playboy centerfolds. Through thick and thin, I’d always have Furaffinity to bring me the latest spacesuit goodness, and trust me, the thick and thin was plenty.

Things started to change in 2017. That year, my grandma on my dad’s side died. She was a huge part of my childhood. She was the reason I went to St. Louis every summer, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. I loved her a lot, and when she passed, I felt like my childhood just kind of ended there, even though I was still about six months away from turning 18. When the day arrived the following December, I was looking up to the annual Christmas trip to St. Louis, the first one since her passing. As I was there, milling about, dealing with the emotions of the first Christmas without a major loved one in your life that happens to all of us, I saw something on my FA feed, which had just had the mature setting turned on. It was from an artist I really liked, then known as Immellmann, whom I followed because of their old “Immy-Drones”, despite not being old enough to look at them on FA when I found them. However, this wasn’t that…this was something different, something with Spacesuits! Hooray! These spacesuits look amazing! Wait a minute, why are some of the pages of the comic marked “18+”? Wait, why is that mouse beating on that cheetah’s chest? Why is everybody scared?

Oh no…

This was my introduction to the comic The Order of the Black Dog. A sci-fi furry lovecraftian horror comic by the artist now known as NX-42. This was also, although I didn’t know it at the time, my introduction to the second prong to my love of spacesuits: that in my head, they represent safety. Safety from the empty airless void of space, and, if you design them right, can be quite soft and cuddly. This turned out to be a harsh introduction to both the comic and the concept. Immediately, I panicked. I screamed about it online to anybody who could listen, including on the comic page’s post on FA, which is still there, but I’m too embarrassed to dredge up and delete it. All and all, I was absolutely horrified…and yet….for some reason…I kept following it. It was heart-wrenching and depressing to me, someone who was already depressed and anxious because of my family…and yet, I kept reading it. I kept reading it because I related to one character…one character who was as anxious as I was, and given the circumstances, possibly even more anxious than I was…Julia King.

So, the main characters of the comic are the romantic couple of Mel Khainouda and Julia King. Mel is a sand cat and is more of the shy, nerdy type. Mainly interested in old mythology and science, yet throughout the comic she comes out of her shell to be more of a fighting gunslinger type (appropriate for all the western flashback issues…yeah, it’s one of those comics). Julia is a black wolf, and is more of the extroverted, anti-authority type, with a keen interest in the stars. Yet this is just a façade for her deeper insecurities and anxieties, mainly regarding her girlfriend and the Black Idol. The Black Idol is the main “antagonist” of the series, as it’s mainly a standard Lovecraft-esque eldritch horror with more teeth than a shark and more eyes than the NSA. It has the ability to effectively “kill” a person and take over their body. However, this body is often unstable, and falls apart as the rest of the body is transformed into the black mass. This can be reversed, like via the titular black dog, a paranormal being that often “eats” the idol from whatever and whomever is infected. As the comic goes on, it’s explained that the being is more than a standard horror, it’s actually the true form of those living on Earth in this universe. This form is counteracted by a radiation field that the previous beings on Earth left. However, if this radiation is halted in anyway, then those not within the radiation field mutate into the idol. Essentially, the Black Idol, in this universe, is God.

There are other spirits, of course, like the spirit that eats the souls from the newly departed, and the old gods that are worshiped in this universe’s Egypt, the setting of the comic. But, there is also a “death cult” for this idol. A cult who wants the radiation fields to be stopped so everybody can revert to an eldritch goop, and presumably go about their daily lives…albeit as some walking talking goop monsters (I can’t help but imagine someone animating an episode of I Love Lucy with this in mind.) And that’s just the surface of what goes on in this comic. There is so much backstory and exposition, it can actually be quite a challenging read. Don’t let this be a deterrent, however, because there’s also some amazing action, well-written characters and some absolutely gripping horror that’s well worth digging through the backstory. I 100% recommend that you read it this Halloween.

Anyway, Julia saw what the black mass can do. She nearly lost her girlfriend to it, and when she was part of a group of people sucked into a moon base via a suicide bomber that I can’t make a joke about without punching myself in the throat, and then later discovered with the group that there is a massive inert pool of the Idol on the base, she was understandably horrified…as I was. Not helping was her group leader being killed right in front of her via a dead body possessed by the black mass.

I didn’t know all of that at the time, but all I knew was that she was horrified, and so was I. I saw a connection to her, and was also dutifully horrified when she wasn’t able to get out of the moon base. After that, with a friend whom I’ve recently reconnected with, I watched her try and survive on a desolate planet, become infected with the black idol because of that whole radiation thing I was talking about, seeing her going through mental hell in a hospital room while being infected, and then absorbed into another scientist, a fennec named Sedjet, who was testing the radiation theory, which turned out to be correct. I watched her deal with the soul-eating god who told her that she was nothing more than a useless pile of chemical reactions and that she never mattered, pushing her deeper into her infection-fueled depression, while another good friend, Rhoda, a Pangolin, gave her a helping hand, telling her that while she needs others, yes, she also needs to help herself. I watched as she told that god, “I am sovereign, bitch, go pound sand,” then smashed through the big Sedjet-Julia group whatever, taking Sedj with her, and basically, through her own will, re-birthed herself (almost literally as she lost all her scars after that…). I watched all of that, and I absolutely cheered for her while I was house flipping, dealing with high school senior stuff, ignoring Eurovison 2019 and getting ready for my first year of Pellissippi. While I knew she was my favorite character, I had no idea at the time how much she would mean to me.

2020 was an absolutely horrible year for me. I think the all know where we were when that NBA game was canceled. I was already concerned about it because my college had to extend the spring break for another week because of it, and my parents had canceled a trip to Myrtle Beach because of it, and I was in my city dump of a room when I read about the cancellation while doom-scrolling on Twitter. After that day, I learned very, very quickly that I do not like at-home schooling. I always prefer going to school rather than being at my awful, trashy house. Plus, I learned the hard way that I am pretty extroverted, and I prefer interacting with people in real life rather than through a screen, as much as I love my internet friends. In a way, I was like Julia when she was in that hospital room with the infection.

And things would get worse, as my mom, whom I already had a testy relationship with, had a series of strokes, which would basically trigger her being disabled to the point to where she could not eat and go to the bathroom without help. For four years, my family had helped her do everything, often in the middle of the night, and often with a lot of antagonism from my mom. She often swore at me, she accused me of lying about everything, insisted that I do something her way, would throw objects at me, and basically treat me like I was a kid again. She treated my dad and sister the same way as well, Often throwing things and arguing with them, and in one case, actually tried to beat my dad, but she had the most ire towards me. She threatened to call the police on me, multiple times, and basically all but outright stated that she saw me as nothing but worthless and disposable…kind of like what that spirit said to Julia in her deep depressive state.

Eventually, during those four years, with the help of people in my area and some close friends of mine, which thankfully none of them have had the same fate as Rhoda (I still miss her!), I was encouraged to go to therapy, often against my mother’s wishes. A pretty clear statement that I am my own sovereign person and that my mother can go do one. Talking to my therapist, I was encouraged to basically become more of my own person, do things that better me, keep track of how my OCD is affecting me, etc. He really helped me get back on my feet, to basically become reborn, in a sense. I also learned a lot about who I am, especially after my mother had to be put in an assisted living facility after a bout of pneumonia last Christmas. After much re-evaluating, I realized that I had a lot of repressed gender dysphoria, I always gravitated towards the girl characters in cartoons, I liked My Little Pony, and I often didn’t mind getting the occasional “Girl Toy” in my happy meal. I had realized that I am trans. Of course, this would had to have happened right as rights for Transgender People are becoming something that need to be won, again, but I didn’t go through all this hell just so I can hide in a closet…after all, Julia King wouldn’t.

I had no idea how much Julia meant to me on a deeper level. From the distrust of authority to the deeper emotional cracks, including instances of PTSD, which is something I have had in the past, I’ve realized how so much of my life is parallel to hers, and how much of it I can relate to. Okay, so I wasn’t harassed by eldritch beings and part of a big black blob of mass, but never, ever underestimate the power of a metaphor. I realize that, deep down, I am a lot like Julia. She is, probably, the single most important fictional character to me in all of media…which is why I am changing my name to Julia Rusty Ralston. You can still call me Rusty if you want, but I would prefer Julia. She is why I am coming out as Transgender (Yes, I use she/they pronouns, any comments complaining will be (circular) filed accordingly), as her struggles made me evaluate my struggles.

Of course, the depressing thing about fictional characters is that there is absolutely no way that you can directly thank them for inspiring your actions, although thanking the artist who created them is a very, very great alternative. Still, I would love it if I can give the black wolf girl a big ol’ hug. Then again, we don’t know much beyond this universe, maybe there’s a huge expansive multiverse out there, including a multiverse where the exact events of Black Dogs happened in exactly the same way…if so, and somehow we’re able to send messages through vast, infinite amounts of alternate universes, honing in on one in particular, then, I just wanna say something to Julia King herself: Thanks. Thanks so much for helping me be who I am. I hope you’re not creeped out by the fact that I’ve seen you naked.

Happy Pride Month, everybody.