Index
Author Notes
The Trauma I’m Projecting Onto Tails This Time
“You can write your bad poetry and hole yourself up in a quiet house with a girl who will never understand that poetry, and perhaps there you can find happiness. But I know that you want more.”
“Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad I have someone who believes in me so fervently… I just wish it wasn’t him, you know?”
chemicalsheep 07/30/2023 4:33 PM
When I talk to you, a lot of the time it feels to me like you’re on a boat and you’re stuck in a whirlpool, and instead of picking any direction to get out of the whirlpool, you tell yourself, “well I hate being in this whirlpool, and it makes me really upset, but also picking a direction to go in is scary, so I think I will stay in this whirlpool and feel miserable and nothing changes instead”…
writing on this work began in february 2021, shortly after wrapping up my attempt at baring my heart to the srb2kart community. initially, it began as a more expansive project, chronicling an attempt by eggman to seize power by becoming a sort of ideological influencer, because killing an idea is much harder than just blowing up a space station.
i wrote a handful of scraps circling around the idea until one automatic writing session happened to birth the central vignette presented here. that one seemed like the strongest path forward – if not the only part worth keeping.
after a couple month’s work of writing myself into corners, i put this away until ring racers came out in 2024 and reaffirmed my belief that eggman and tails make for a fun character dynamic, and then during the leadup to version 2.4 i decided that it was high time that i pulled this out and finished it for good.
i consider finishing this fic to be a symbolic gesture, as my own creative output slowed to a crawl from 2021 onward. much like tails here, i felt like i was stuck in a rut, with no clear path forward nor much encouragement to try to find one. yet somehow in that time, i managed to make friends who still saw something in me, find communities of people who like me and want me around, and fall headlong into a passion that perhaps will see me through so long as i fan its flame well enough.
special thanks to chemicalsheep, matilde park, and the paralogue/milkmedicine crew for believing in me when i could not.