Category: Commentary

Deep in the ocean’s crushing darkness, male anglerfish are born with a single purpose: find a female and bite down. What happens next is biological horror—teeth fuse, tissues merge, and the male dissolves into her flesh. His eyes cloud. His brain shrinks. He becomes a living appendage, nothing more than tissue and gonads feeding on her blood. Evolution doesn’t care about dignity or selfhood. It only cares that genes survive. But if we’re all just meat puppets dancing to genetic strings, where does that leave human freedom—and the soul?​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Every mother knows the moment she looks in the mirror and sees a stranger. The woman she was is gone. The woman she’s becoming hasn’t formed yet. In my novel *Immortal*, I explore that identity destruction at impossible scale—a warrior with amnesia discovers she’s pregnant with a genetically impossible child. Her body becomes proof that a three-thousand-year empire is built on lies. All she wants is to disappear and be a mother. But her pregnancy is prophecy, her daughter the True Heir to a stolen throne, and her womb is political property.

We’ve internalized Golding’s vision: strip away civilization and children become monsters. But in 1965, six Tongan teenage boys actually got stranded on a deserted island for fifteen months. Instead of tribal warfare and murder, they thrived. They organized into rotating work teams, maintained a signal fire, built gardens, and created conflict resolution systems. When one boy broke his leg falling off a cliff, the others set his bone and adapted their work to include him. When Captain Peter Warner found them, they were healthy, organized, and still friends. The real story was unknown until 2020 while Golding’s fiction became cultural gospel. Maybe the question isn’t whether human nature is good or evil—it’s what conditions promote cooperation versus conflict.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

As a philosophy, Kintsugi treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise. My daughter survived open-heart and spinal surgery. Other girls mock her scars in the locker room. They don’t understand she’s a warrior. Whether our scars are from surgery, war, or trauma; whether visible or hidden—they’re proof we survived. It’s our scars that make us beautiful.

Someone suggested I do a series of Goth Disney Princesses, and I thought it sounded like a fun AI art challenge so here we go… Cinderella Rapunzel Snow White Sleeping Beauty Merida Belle Pocahontas Ariel Jasmine Moana Mulan Tiana Elsa