The Perils of Creativity

Wed, 14 Jan 2026 02:16:53 GMT

A comment on the Syconium arc of Nature of Nature's Art. CW: That arc deals with the topic of sexuality.

Hi Zack (and others). I feel like you've responded to an error of others with an error of your own. I'm not currently in a manic episode, I think, so hopefully this time I won't be hurtful or deranged in my comment.

I sincerely believe that NofNA has the capacity to be great art, and one of the attributes of great art is that it is larger than the intent of its creator. You express frustration that people are criticizing a story other than the one you are endeavoring to tell, and stating that it fails at goals it does not even have. But a great story tells many stories at once. While one of the stories within Syconium may be a powerful study of a primal force, another one may be a deficient sociological critique of sex work. My own personal version of the story seems so far removed from your intent that it's startling whenever you express that intent.

Personally, I read Syconium as a story about the perils of creativity, specifically the perils about making creativity a personal, intimate act. Art has a transformative power, and some artists, like our heroine, apply this power to transform themselves and their own lives. From this come a fragmentation of the self; a difficulty in expressing oneself fully, except via that art; an inability to view social relations normally, with a resultant vulnerability to abusive relationships; despair and frustration at not being understood, and worse, at not even being taken seriously. One of the recurrent criticisms of Syconium is Smoothie's dominance in presenting his ideas. I take the heroine's silence in these scenes to indicate a desperation to be understood, so that even a regard as biased and academic as Smoothie's is far more appealing and nourishing than that of all the others who don't even try to understand her. In my version of the story Syconium, sex is present because the intimacy of sex serves as a figure for the deep, close relationship people can have with works of art.

The point of the above is that it's entirely valid (and worthwhile, if done civilly) to critique the story you read, even if it's not the story the creator himself reads. And it looks like enough people have been reading the deficient sociological version of Syconium to establish its existence alongside other Syconiums. Perhaps you yourself will come back here one day and be surprised to discover one of its other aspects, and find a story that your readers read before you did.

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Tue, 10 Jan 2023 04:34:01 GMT

A comment on Syconium, an arc of the webcomic Nature of Nature's Art. Content warning: that particular arc abounds with (non-pornographic) sexual content, of such variety that I can't give a more specific warning.

When I was young, I thought I would be the one with fans, and that I would struggle to treat them with patience, firmness and understanding without hiding from them or exploiting them as most famous creators do. But no, it turns out it's the other way around. I'm the fan, and my task (outside physics) is to provide intellectual support for others.

When following this story, I and many others experienced it as a series of thesis statements, each sophisticated enough to supplant the previous one, but each newly sinister in its own way. Thus I regarded the graduate student's thesis with particular excitement, for here was a compassionate, intelligent, academic, but nonetheless subtly rotten thesis. Surely it was the next to last -- surely it could not be the last, if only because it was presented by an outside savior figure, because it had not been presented by the protagonist herself. But then, in his disastrous attempt to explain himself, Braun admitted that this was his thesis too, disappointing many of us. However, I've come to think that Egress did, in fact, present a new thesis, sufficient to supplant and overpaint the graduate student's. The problem for us as readers, and Braun as a writer, is that Egress' thesis is wholly visual, where we were yearning, and remain yearning, for one that can be expressed in words.

To guide my future work in the comments of this story, I'll leave a slogan. *grins* Ditch the author, date the text.

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Shed Fur

The Perils of Creativity