Violapse Project Overview

CONTENT WARNING: DOMESTIC ABUSE

Hello! Thank you so much for pledging to The Private Gallery! 

This tier is where I'm going to be sharing the development for my passion project, Violapse. It's a graphic novel that I was developing in my final year at artschool before I dropped out. Violapse is a deeply personal story to me and was originally conceived in 2016, but at various points I had to put the project down to focus on my own healing. Violapse is both cathartic and highly triggering for me but I'm glad I took the time away from it. I know I'm at a place now where I'm ready to work on this again and I can't wait to share it with you as I finally bring this project to completion!

-

Violapse is the story of Melody's journey as she learns to let go of false hope and leave her abuser. 

Melody has built a perfect world for herself and her husband, Zarthur. It's her escapist fantasy where she can remove all the external factors that she believes are responsible for Zarthur's descent into violence.

Unfortunately, she discovers that no-matter what she does, things end up the same. When she sees even a hint of things going down a dark path, Melody resets the situation and tries again. Eventually, Zarthur begins to suspect Melody of something and the distrust between them poisons their relationship to the point where Melody can no longer truly reset everything.

Zarthur's perception of Melody bleeds into her perception of herself and she finds that she can no longer hold everything together. She's exhausted at being the one to put all the effort in for his sake. She has to be the one to try and fix everything while it seems Zarthur is determined to destroy it all, maybe even just to spite her.

Eventually there is a confrontation between the two. Things get violent and Melody takes great delight in telling Zarthur that everything is a lie. She twists her fantasy into something dark where she is in control. She's at her limit. She wants to make Zarthur feel small and frightened but she stops herself before she goes too far.

Realising what the relationship is doing to her, she knows that she can never let herself continue the cycle of abuse. She wanted to stop the hurt and the fact that she got so close to wanting to cause it frightens her to death.

She laments that everything she did was for nothing and the world falls away around them.

Melody ultimately has no choice but to return to reality. She is not and never was responsible for her abuser's actions and even though a part of her still wants to stay, still wants things to work out, she knows she has to leave.

There is no dramatic confrontation, she feigns an excuse to visit her parents without her husband and the two bid farewell at the train station. She holds him tightly, not wanting to let go but she doesn't reply when he says 'see you soon'.

-

This comic is intended to be a thriller with most of it being told through Zarthur's eyes. He doesn't really know what's going on, but slowly starts to suspect Melody of something and in general gets weird vibes from her. Upon a re-read, it should be clear that Melody is just very strained. She's trying to keep things together and her focus is 100% on Zarthur's happiness but from his perspective, he finds it off-putting.

I want play around with perception vs reality as it pertains to people and relationships. I'm interested in how two people can interpret the same situation entirely differently. I'm interested by abusers' ability to turn everyone around them into enemies and then make their victims believe it. I want to explore this in my work by telling large parts of the story from Zarthur's perspective, but a huge concern I have is that I'm worried about making Zarthur sympathetic.

Having him be sympathetic at the start is fine. Intended, even, but I will need to be very careful about how the story is framed as a whole. I'm really interested by the idea of turning Melody into a monster because Zarthur ends up perceiving her that way, but it needs to be clear by the end that Zarthur was just really fucked up and using her to escape his own guilt.

It's very important to me that it is clear that Melody was in the right. Most of what happens in the story is her own fantasy and when it comes to her real-world actions. She is passive. She takes his beatings and ultimately leaves quietly.

-

I'm also concerned about sensitivity and the fact that this is an incredibly personal topic for a lot of people, myself included. Violapse draws heavily on my own experiences of domestic abuse from 2016 but there are many different ways that people experience domestic violence. Mainly I'm worried about the resolution. It was fairly easy for me to leave my abuser once I'd realised that I had to do it to survive. I was fortunate enough to have parents to go home to and friends to look out for me. I was also not married and had no children. Not everyone is so lucky. It takes victims of abuse an average of 7 attempts before they can successfully leave their abusers for good and that is a terrifying statistic. I'm worried that the ending may read as disingenous to some, but it's a very accurate reflection of how it was for me.

When writing about such serious topics, I think it's important to keep in mind who it's for and how you want your work to affect people. The last thing I want to do with my work is to hurt other survivors, however this project is also for me more than anyone else. I think I would want others to read this and feel like they do actually have some power in their situation, whatever it is. Your abuser has the power to hurt you but you do have the power to leave. The sticking point is that many victims don't want to leave, whether it's because they're scared to or simply because they still love their partner. That's why this story focuses so much on Melody's fantasy. She needs to work things out in her own head before she can act. She needs to reach her breaking point and really see what staying with her abuser is doing to her and what it's leading to. 

No-one can convince you to leave an abusive relationship. You can only reach that point yourself.

An interesting and perhaps haunting bit of trivia is that when I was first developing this idea, I was very much still in my abusive relationship. My abuser actually agreed to work on it with me and it was going to be a collaboration between us with me having written it (although he insisted I put his name on the script which is something that still deeply ruffles my feathers to this day!!) and me doing the character drawings and layouts and him drawing the backgrounds. Back then the story was very different and the ending was very disturbing to me now but very telling of the mindset I was in back then.

Originally, the ending of Violapse was that Melody and Zarthur stayed together and worked through their issues. I find that extremely gross to think about now and if I had made Violapse back then with that ending, it would have been a deeply troubling message to have put out into the world. In many ways, I'm glad that I put the project down and let myself heal before digging into it again!

-

Anyway, if you read all of that, thank you! I know it probably sounds really confusing and hopefully I'll have some layouts to show you guys soon to make it a bit more clear. I'm going to post some of the character designs I did a while ago in my next post and then show what I've been drawing lately.

Pretty much everything I do for Violapse will be exclusive to Patreon from this point. Thank you so much for supporting me! You have no idea how much I appreciate it!