The Content Divide

Where are you and where do you want to be? Can we cast a wide enough net to be genuine and fun?

Last week, I posted a late night entry that felt like my thoughts were dribbling out of my ear. If you read 589 Miles, you read that I was concerned that I wouldn’t provide enough value in a post that didn’t have enough thought put into it.

Since launching Fighting the Good Fight, I have had a creeping obsession with dichotomy. It’s been the subject of many posts. The obsession crawls into my wriggled brain when I think about working in multiple worlds. Can one person be allowed to teach and create content for adults? There’s a fine line between balance and cognitive dissonance. Dichotomy straddles that line. The more I think about it, the more I realize this reckoning is the same one I’ve been having my whole life. Utterly, the entire time.

An old entry of This is my Private Life

Cognitive dissonance is when our beliefs contradict each other. A popular example is that one might believe raising livestock is (even in part) cruel, but that meat is delicious. Maybe you’re wrestling with that situation as you read it. Most of us eat a burger and don’t consider where it comes from, or how it got to us. Maybe it’s easier to make arguments that animals don’t have feelings? Or is it easier to say that the system we have is the only way, it has to be this way? Whatever the case, situations of cognitive dissonance often involve arguments that attempt to justify the conflict. Sometimes it means denying any new information as it arises altogether, or even lying when our minds change.

I’m not here to convince you to go vegan — though a few more days without meat will be better for all our hearts. I’m here to once again look at dichotomy while considering cognitive dissonance to peer deeper into what I’m starting to identify as the Content Divide. Last week’s article ultimately came down to me being unsure if my skilled figurative work has less public value than Dylan’s Drink & Draw. This hit me like a brick, because I painstakingly put hour after hour into the figurative work. I strive to get better and better at illustrating people, and I think that’s worth celebrating. However, comic conventions bring me out for a silly, often raunchy drawing game that I do put time into, but not in the same way.

“Am I wasting my time?” is something I think all creators worry about.

The Content Divide is the gap between what I want to make and what you want. I also think the Content Divide is the gap between what I have to say and what an audience wants to hear. When I think about how the divide is always with me, I can identify it hitting me in my art from the very beginning. I wanted my work to say something. As a younger person, I wanted my work to discuss how painful living in the world is. I wanted my work to talk about depression, disability, and sin, without knowing how to be honest. Somehow all that work distilled down into stupid jokes and brainless content.

A while back, I talked about feeling trapped by a goofy and shallow horror film series I worked on in College, Filled With Pinecones. It was far from the sad white boy content I wanted to make. But, it was popular on campus. It was my first piece of content that people made fan art of! The entire second movie was created by a crew paying homage to my first film being played in their class. It lit a fire that I was on a rollercoaster of pride and shame over. Could I have a voice with something of value to say while also making primarily braindead content?

Almost all of my figurative work in the last five years has had small embedded messages. My entire series Faithless, Fearless, features atheist symbols, or peaceful models rendered as otherwise maligned characters like devils. It sought to ask what good and evil is, and how well we can rely on our instincts. However, few people buy these pieces because of what I have to say. The best instances of sales involve women, or female identifying folks, feeling seen in the confident poses and models I’ve worked from. The least powerful purchases often come from anyone else buying because the image is hot, or because, through snickers and snorts, “boobies.”

Astronomy from Faithless, Fearless

Does the reason someone wants something matter?

Lately, my figurative work is more about celebrating confident characters. The religious message is dialed down, and some risqué pieces are the way they are because it was fun to draw. There’s less to say. Does that mean I’ve sold out to the lowest common denominator? Is this a new Filled With Pinecones? Is my cognitive dissonance, “figurative work can matter, but I’ll sell to anyone?”

The deeper end is when this all collides with Dylan’s Drink & Draw. Dylan’s Drink & Draw has been in development since 2017. It’s grown and changed so much. But its goal is all the same, “have a great time.” Having a great time is the opposite of deep content, right? If one goes up, does the other go down?

A figurative journal sketch from Twitch

When I was a Twitch streamer, I was starting my adventure into figure work with sketchbooks. Most of these pieces were created to highlight depression and loneliness in the midst of the pandemic. I saw my viewership rise and fall over a few years. I was frustrated because I felt that things only fell because I wasn’t a happy-go-lucky spazz. I wanted to work on my work and make something that captured what I was feeling. I wasn’t online to scream and harass my audience. In hindsight, I do think my streaming failed because I wasn’t performative enough. But, I think the big loss came when people went back to the office and the world started to look normal again. People went on with their lives and kept up with the art streamers who had more presence.

If you saw Dylan’s Drink & Draw in person, especially at a comicon, you’d probably assume I have what it takes to be a successful Twitch personality. But I like my wilder, show host persona to take over for less time and in fewer spurts. Ultimately I cut Twitch out because I couldn’t bridge the gap in the Content Divide. Twitch needs more attention and more energy than I am willing to invest for the success I find from other things.

Looking at current projects, like Violet 9, the series lives in the less serious end of my creative spectrum. I’m playing into more primal instincts, maybe even the snorting and sniveling audience I don’t rate as highly in my sales. But, as always, I am aiming for the characters in this project to have confident and powerful representations, even if the overall themes are less deep. The series is growing faster than any project I’ve put on Webtoon, and I’m excited by that. I reached 600 reads far faster than I did on my previous journal comic. Subscribers have steady growth, and I’m starting to get organic comments. Though these comments lean more towards, “that’s hot,” than I would otherwise look for in my work. I want to make meaningful content, Is Violet 9, me selling out to the shallow end? Am I on the wrong side of my Content Divide?

Back in 2006, I started going regularly to ska shows. My best friend at the time didn’t have a car. He offered tickets in exchange for a ride, which ultimately netted him a show buddy. It took years for me to care at all. Ska sounded same-y to me. The horns were a lot and the content of the lyrics didn’t resonate with me the way something like the Cranberries did. Dolores O'Riordan hurt and felt deeply. That’s something I resonated with, she was fighting a good fight. That’s what I wanted to be doing.

After a while I found some ska, and adjacent acts, that I liked. I’d collected a lot of albums from artists I’d seen, even if they weren’t for me. As things grew on me, I found more reasons to spin their records. But the true ska fan inside me didn’t emerge until 2015. I’d been to literally dozens of shows, having seen several bands twenty times, easily. It took a breakup, though, to find myself latching onto the songs that memes associate with the 90’s or finding an mozzarella stick in your fries.

Reel Big Fish, specifically got me through. Though their songs had pep, and were often about beer. The shallow end of what they had to say led me to deeper waters about relationships, careers, and just trying to stand for something. Go listen to Sell Out and tell me that’s not all in there. The shallow end is shockingly deep is the perfect definition of skillfully performed ska. It’s why I think ska can unite us while the United States slouches into insular fascism.

After a week considering the Content Divide and wrestling with my beliefs while on a teaching residency, I am still conflicted. I feel like I am rife with cognitive dissonance that I am working through. But I am moving towards a more grounded answer. Yes, the world around me is becoming a fascist hellscape. We need to fight, we need to have deep things to say, and powerful actions to take. I’m at risk of residencies drying up. And, as things grow rampantly more expensive in the face of tariffs, I need to prepare for events to bring in fewer funds. Art, unfortunately, isn’t a necessity when it comes to a budget. The world is rife with deep, challenging and troubling things. There’s no time like now for the shallow end, and there’s no shallow end like one that’s shockingly deep.

It’s important to bring people nothing but a good time right now. Dylan’s Drink & Draw helps people from all walks get out of their own way and draw something. Even people who tell me they can’t draw a stick figure! It makes people laugh and awards people for being clever. It creates connections in ways I can hardly describe. What small things can I add to the game show to impart more of the deep end? How can I ensure all players walk away knowing that the Dylan in Dylan’s Drink & Draw is fighting for you?

Violet 9 may be succeeding off a, “that’s hot,” crowd right now. However, I am tasked with keeping the characters true to their intent. At the same time, it’s my responsibility to dip into something with greater value as much as possible in the series. Though, in the face of repression, even expressions of sexuality can create power when everything personal is maligned.

I have a lot of work to do to decide how I sit on my Content Divide. Am I just going to focus on the lowest common denominator? Or can I find a way to cast a net that covers as many people as possible, and pulls them out to the deep end where I’m actually sitting? Maybe I won’t perfect it, but identifying the gap, and identifying my goals will do far more good than denying evidence.

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Today’s Tune