AETERNUS

Holy shit please make more comics I am BEGGING on my knees

Really fucking good. I always appreciate a comic with nice paneling and this one absolutely delivers.

I. Okay. This comic made me so angry. I mean, like, it's extremely good, and I love it. But also it makes me unfathomably furious.

So, okay, I am pretty firmly of the opinion that if eternal life were possible it would in fact fuck hard, and that all the various "Immortality Is Bad" stories we've told ourselves over the millennia are all just cope, in the truest sense of the word. Like, it's true that mortality is an inescapable fact of life, and we as humans do need some way of coping with it, but I'm just not convinced that sour-grapes-style self-deception is the way to go about it. And if Aeternus (comic) was intended to change my mind about that then I'm sorry to say it did not succeed. Demeter's life didn't suck because it was eternal, it sucked because Aeternus (guy) sucks at their job and isn't creative enough to properly enrich their daughter's enclosure with anything she finds more interesting than sleep, and is too stupid to figure out how to use their unfathomable divine power to relocate two (2) plants.

Like, there are so many little contrived details about how life on Aeternus (planet) works to make it worse than it needs to be. The plants are capable of growing roots into Demeter's body, presumably tearing up whatever flesh or bone or grey matter was in the way in the process... But then Demeter can't move or damage the plants at all except by killing them outright? If the roots can damage her body, then surely so could, say, surgical tools, which she could get Hestia to use to get the roots out and then stitch her back up? Neither of them seem to actually need their physical organs intact in order to live so it wouldn't matter if Hestia did a sloppy job, and she'd have infinite time and infinite tries to get it right. But no, apparently having all the memories of every mortal being on earth beamed into her brain at once is the only conceivable solution. Oh yeah, and then Aeternus (guy) says that Aeternians can't feel pain, but according to Demeter's poem(?) in the artbook she can still feel discomfort? Aren't pain and discomfort just different degrees of the same thing? A message from the body saying "hey, something's wrong, you should probably try to fix it?" By Aeternus (guy)'s logic, as an immortal being, she shouldn't need either, should she?

And speaking of THAT bullshit! Who says that eternal life with the possibility of pain has to be some kind of terrible hell!? Or rather, who says that it would somehow be worse than the non-eternal life with the possibility of pain that we've already got!? An eternal life consisting only of pain would be... Well, I'm pretty sure that's just literal actual Christian Hell at that point. But it's not as though us mortals live in 100% constant pain! The whole point of pain is to escape and avoid it, and we've gotten pretty decent at that over the past two millennia or so! And we may not be able to escape ALL the pain in our lives, but a big part of the reason for that is that our lives ARE finite! We simply don't have enough time to figure out how to solve all our problems and fulfill all our desires, but if we had infinite time to work with then we could! THAT is the true curse of life that dies! We are born into this world ingrained with the desire to survive, to live, to ENJOY life, to seek out pleasure and new things and to make meaning out of what we find! But we are also born into a world whose laws of physics are simply not capable of keeping us working long enough to do everything we want! No matter how hard we try, no matter how well we live our lives, no matter how determined we are to keep going, eventually the logic of our reality will decide that the stupid fragile flesh-sacks that are our selves are too broken to fix, and then we'll never be able to want anything or enjoy anything or understand anything or find anything beautiful ever again.

And apparently, NEITHER WILL THE AETERNIANS!!! Because, oh yeah, apparently Aternus (planet), the planet created by the God of Immortality, populated exclusively by immortal beings, whose ostensible purpose is to support eternal life in contrast to Earth which only supports mortal life, REGULARLY GETS ALL ITS INHABITANTS EATEN BY AETERNUS (guy) AND COMPLETELY RESET. Like. Is what happens to Hestia and Demeter at the end not supposed to "count" as death, because they just get "absorbed back into their creator?" By that logic, death on Earth doesn't count as death either! Getting broken down and re-absorbed into new life is one of the main things that dead stuff does down here! If the girls are ceasing to exist as independent conscious subjectivities then THAT'S DEATH!!! And, like, I guess maybe from Demeter's perspective that could sort of be considered a happy ending, but POOR HESTIA!!!!!

God, just... Poor Hestia. It's just so sad imagining this story from her perspective. While Demeter has resigned herself to sleep forever, Hestia is out there living her best eternal life, finding fulfillment in raising her cute little blorbos! And not only that, while it's not 100% clear to me what exactly is going on with what little page time she gets, it appears to me that she's working with said blorbos to actually try to fix and improve upon the shitty always-falling-apart unenriched enclosure that Aeternus (guy and I guess also planet) saddled her with! Filling in potholes, fixing broken bridges, using the infinite time she has to figure out how to solve all her world's problems! Eventually, completely out of nowhere from her perspective, she gets her chest ripped open and her heart devoured by her sister - but that's also a solvable problem with the infinite time and infinite tries that she's supposed to have! Except no, the god who dictates the logic of her world decides that, despite the fact she doesn't actually need any of the organs she lost, her eternal flesh-sack is simply too broken to be worth salvaging, and so she can never be allowed to want anything or enjoy anything or understand anything or find any more blorbos cute ever again.

IT'S MORTALITY. THE ULTIMATE TRAGEDY OF YOUR "IMMORTALITY IS BAD" STORY IS JUST MORTALITY AGAIN. DO YOU SEE WHY YOUR AMAZING AND BEAUTIFUL COMIC FRUSTRATES ME SO DAMN MUCH!?

...I hope I've made it clear enough that, despite aggressively disagreeing with the intended message, I truly do love Aeternus (comic). If I didn't, I would've just shrugged and moved on with my day instead of standing there spacing out and contemplating life and death for a full hour after reading it. Your art is incredible as always; I'm not a visual artist and I lack the language to describe what specifically I like about it, but suffice it to say it very pretty. Demeter's ambivalence and frustration in the first half ends up wrapping around to being very cute and endearing. Hestia is my favorite and I love her and I wish she got more page time. Despite everything I did enjoy just how much Aeternus (guy) sucks and is awful and just really needs to get their shit together wrt the whole godhood thing (and NO that does NOT mean "learning from your mistakes" via eating all your kids and making new ones whenever you fuck up STOP THAT RIGHT NOW). The Animals are wonderful and beautiful and I want to slurp them up with a bendy straw. The wacky wavy tunnel into the observatory was fun and whimsical. I really liked the three pages depicting Demeter's metaphors for getting hit by the Mortal Experience Beam, they're all gorgeous.

Thank you for sharing this with the world, and thank you for putting so much wonderful Kriselle into the world as well. Also, apropos of nothing, you should play Pokemon Reborn if you haven't already, it's extremely fun and well-written there's some toxic yuri in it you'd probably enjoy. OK that's all thank you

This is an absolutely beautifully illustrated comic with a super compelling story!!