♦ Bliss ♦ WiP ♦

A little thing I started, to "test the brushes" I said. In retrospect, a poor excuse to draw a millionth Rick portrait :,D It's his fluffy era, though, so it's a bit more excusable haha, I don't draw nearly enough of Rick during the whole fall of the Underground saga

He had many points in life when he was just generally not okay, but the ending of the Kostrov Traces is by far the top two scariest Rick moments for me in the entire series. Not because of what he did specifically, but because of the complete separation from reality he went through when he finally realized just how much of his life has been a lie, and just how many of his paranoid thoughts, his fears, his worst nightmares, were true the entire time. His life was, essentially, destroyed because of a decision he made decades ago, and for someone who had already struggled with blaming himself for a lot of tragedies that struck his family, this was the final nail in the coffin, the final push that turned Rick who struggled to cope with his reality into a person that was no longer able to accept any of his fears were irrational to begin with.

Fun fact but, before "The Kostrov Traces" and "The Fiasco Elite" were ever a thing, there used to be a single book about these guys called “The Man Who Yearned for Freedom”. It was like 1500 pages long which was, UHM hahahha a LOT, which is why I eventually settled on making a series of books, separated in two main trilogies and a slice of life side stories in a form of "The Crisis Logbook". The Man Who Yearned for Freedom title is still something that is mentioned sometimes in the narrative, but it was very symbolic for this journey of Rick's, a path between a youngster, trying to escape his hometown and his father's wrath, who yearned for nothing more but to be free, and a man, destroyed by life, whose revelation made it clear that he was as much of a prisoner of his own mind as he was of the people who tried to hunt him down. And for a while, freedom, truly, meant death.

And that's why he ended up in therapy and started maniacally buying fluffy coats :,D I have to joke, otherwise I'd just cry, but in truth, a lot of the story has been inspired by the lack of control mental health can leave us with, this sense of being merely a watcher in a movie that is your life, with no way of escaping the invisible prison our minds can trap us in. It's not a nice place to be, it affects all aspects of life, and in many ways, it's a tragedy as unfair as they get, but it doesn't have to be the end. And in a way, for future reference once the books are out, as much as the Kostrov Traces ending could be viewed as Rick's ultimate punishment, I also believe it could be interpreted as a second chance. Whether he deserved that chance or not, and whether the ending was a punishment or a saving grace, I will leave up to readers to decide <3