Manic Pixie Dream Girl Bobby Brackenreid.

For another piece of media that delves into similar themes, I cannot recommend enough the webcomic What Happens Next by Max Graves. It’s about Milo Holliday, a chronically online trans man who was an accomplice to murder at age 15; he was coerced into dismembering the body of his friend Haylie Gorski after his other friend, Griffin, killed her. In the present, due to factors such as his abysmal mental health and trauma, his status as someone who um well dismembered a body, and losing years of development and his entire transition into adulthood to psychiatric institutionalization, he’s barely functional, and copes by spending his time running his pastel aesthetic My Little Pony blog on Tumblr.

Through Milo and the other characters whose stories are connected to him and the murders, the comic explores multitude of topics such as internet culture (Tumblr culture, the true crime community, and the queer and trans experience online), guilt and accountability, and the flaws of the judicial and carceral systems. Everyone knows the end of the story when someone is murdered: The killer is jailed, the family gets justice, the world moves on… but what happens next?

I found What Happens Next through the Obscure Blorbo Bracket on Tumblr back in 2023, a year after posting MPDG1. As I’ve really developed and written about my thoughts on Bobby’s story, I feel like I’ve gained lots of inspiration from this comic. The parallels between Bobby and Milo are easy to see: they committed/were involved in terrible violence when they were young, and now that it’s over, how do they just… Keep on living? What happens after the unspeakable? The unforgivable?

On a more individual character scale, I get a lot of characterization inspiration for both Bobby and Junior from Vikki and Xandra in the chapter “you’ll all be sorry”, especially their younger selves who were edgy, cynical trans girls at various stages of awareness. (Vikki Escamilla is my favourite character; my current Tumblr profile picture is a drawing I made of her, actually.)