"The Impossible Dream"

It's strange what one's emotions can do to a drawing. This picture was originally intended to be an illustration for a Gundam X fanfic a friend is writing, but then all of a sudden, a day after I started it . . . I was struck with a bad case of depression. When it happened, all I could do was look at the light pencil sketches that it was when it struck and wonder . . . "Why can't I have that same thing? Why must my artwork be the only way I can experience such love and tenderness? Why must the one person I've fallen so in love with be nothing more than a fictional character?" And so, it was because of these questions and the terrible emotional pain they caused me that I slowly altered the woman depicted in the picture to start looking like me as much as I could. It was time to show the rest of the world the real person behind that mask of a wild and crazy fangirl.

Of course, the preliminary pencil outline version of this was not met without some criticism, especially on the Gundam.com message boards. When I became upset that people weren't acknowledging my emotions in it, people started mocking me and bringing me down even more. If those of you who did that read this, I cannot begin to tell you how much your comments stung me, and you should be ashamed of yourselves for that. But anyway, just when I was about to lash out at those people and make myself feel even worse, this was posted in response to them by CassiopeiaRX, a good online friend of mine and fellow artist himself, and was also there, along with a few other friends, as I dealt with my depression in our nightly chats. I was so moved by what he had to say on the board (which was reprinted here with full permission, of course), as he summed up my then-in-progress picture in better words than I ever could have . . .

Oh, it is subtle to even a casual viewer, but not invisible: MUCH of your love has been bared out for the world to see, and not many have seemingly given a damn about it. As an artist, I can almost entirely understand the feeling. And knowing of what you've been going through lately, knowing of your frustrations, adds even more dimensions to what I have to say now:

This picture, to me, is like finally finding your soulmate. The two don't have to look at each other. "You" don't even need to stare off into the abyss. There is tenderness, comfort, solace, the warm and fuzzy feelings which constitute the core of truly loving someone.

Even now, after the picture is completed, there are no other words that could better describe this picture. Sure, it may be brightly colored now, and it bears a striking similarity to "Human Touch II" in terms of style (which, given the emotional power of that picture as well, I wanted to emulate), but I wanted to color this to better show more of the things that make the woman in the picture the real me. From the eye color to the rings and crystal pendant to the long fingernails . . . that's all me. My hair is a bit different in real life, and I usually prefer to wear it pulled up off of my neck, but it's still me no matter what. Nothing can ever change that.

The title of the piece should make sense if you've read everything on this page thus far, that I feel like I've created such an impossible dream and goal for myself in finding myself so attracted emotionally to someone who doesn't exist in real life (or at least in this dimension--I believe that there could be a parallel dimension out there where the events and people in the GX storyline really do exist) that I feel as if no one else out there will ever come close who I truly love and desire. It may sound absolutely crazy, yes, but it's just something that cannot be explained in words and goes far beyond the emotions depicted in this picture.

I don't care if people's respect for me as a GX fan and fan artist goes down for drawing such a blatant self-insertion picture as this, but that only means they're refusing to look at the true meaning of this drawing as well as refusing to look at the real person behind what they've known for so long.