Comment:

I've talked about Zoa's hair before, right?

*googles own site*

Ah yes, here it is, the commentary under #30. I guess I'll talk about Lee's nose ring instead.

Lee has a nose ring. Lee does not have a pierced nose.

Lee's nose was grown from cells containing Lee's DNA, and was formed, from the word go, with a tiny hole in the left nostril. Similarly, Lee has no foreskin, but was never circumcized. Lee has purple hair, but it's never been dyed.

If I may play armchair psychiatrist with my own character for a moment, this type of reliance on modern cosmetic surgery is a big part of why Lee is so uncomfortable in their own body. If Lee felt like changing to green hair, they could bleach out the purple, dye it green, and have green hair within a matter of minutes. Lee connects very strongly with the ideal of their body, however, and would not be satisfied unless they submitted a cell culture, had a soup of follicles that "naturally" produce green hair grown in a petri dish somewhere over the course of two weeks, and had a house call from an autonomous surgery-bot to swap out their scalp epidermis cell by cell (completely painlessly and done while Lee catches up with the latest episode of Gu Gu JaxxonFive, of course).

It's that delay that gets Lee into trouble, self-image-wise. Lee gets a picture in their head of what they feel like, who they are, and they want to show that face to the world. By the time two weeks has passed, they've been inspired again, and now they have a different mental picture. The nose is longer, the skin is paler, the hair is ice blue. That's who they really are inside, how they really feel, who they really are, and now they're stuck with this stupid puke-green hair. Can't go outside looking like this!

As a creative person - an "idea guy" - one thing I've learned is that when you get an idea, you think you have the whole idea in your head. It feels like you have the whole picture, the whole movie, the whole game bouncing around in there! It's not until you put in the work and start making your idea a reality that you realize that no, you only had the facial expression, you only had a few scenes of badass dialogue, you only had the cool play mechanic, you didn't actually have a finished product stored entirely within your skull. A big part of being an artist is taking the time to fill in the 80% of the idea that doesn't actually exist yet.

Lee is their own work of art. They're convinced, at any given time, that they know who and what they want to be. They haven't come to terms yet with the fact that they aren't - and, indeed, they can't be - the person they think they are, because the person they think they are is 80% not there.