prismaticbleed: (league)
prismaticbleed ([personal profile] prismaticbleed) wrote2021-08-10 01:04 pm

LEAGUE HISTORY




Since my earliest days, I have been blessed with a vivid and thriving imagination. Before even starting school I began to write stories, creating entire worlds to play with, even composing little songs to accompany the characters and concepts I loved to watch playing out in my mind. As the years went on, these stories became more complex, maturing from simple child's tales into the heart-deep thoughts of a teenager, and later into rich and brilliant gems polished by adult experience and lit by undying youthful wonder. The League continues to grow, forever blooming anew, and I firmly believe God put me on this earth to share these bouquets of creative beauty for His sake. Developing a League website will be my first formal effort towards that end. It is my sincere hope that the many LeagueWorlds debuting there will touch the hearts of every visitor with the same genuine joy that has illuminated mine in building them, and the sincere gratitude and loving wonder for the Creator of All Who made every heart that ever was.

Soli Deo gloria!



THE LEAGUE'S SECRET HEART

THE SONG OF THE SUFFERING SAVIOR

 

Before we expound the literal history of the League, we must first reveal and recognize its inmost soul. Yes, its infancy had a body built of colors and songs and imaginary critters, but deep in its heart, springing from my own heart, was a Source and Summit that invariably soaked into every aspect of each World I dreamed up, however small, however seemingly insignificant.

I was a very premature child, and even in my youth, I took pride in the fact that I had been baptized in the incubator, for fear that I would not survive the three months needed to stabilize, let alone the next three days. With that, I was a Roman Catholic from the first few hours of my fragile life, and that was something I later lived by to the best of my nascent ability. My grandmother is also deserving of the greatest thanks towards this end; she gave me a Bible which I read ravenously, taught me all my prayers, said a Rosary with me every night, and made sure I went to Mass every week with as much reverence as I could muster at that age. She also gave me my first prayer cards, my absolute favorite of which depicted Christ covered in deep raw wounds, a figure so shockingly deformed yet humble that I would easily lose track of time just staring at it. Something in that image spoke loudly to my own heart, and that stuck with me in an unexpected way, imprinting indelibly on my imagination. It made me a morbid child, and perhaps worried my teachers, that a kindergartener was drawing unicorns and dragons and bats with wounds over their own bleeding hearts, but that was already something I loved too strangely and strongly for it to not express itself in my ideas and art.

My Catholic faith thus continued to exercise a massive impact on the aesthetics and vibes of the budding League, in terms of it ultimately reflecting the same aspects I loved most in my religion. I had then, and still have, a powerful devotion to the Sacred & Immaculate Hearts, the Shoulder & Side Wounds of Christ, His Most Precious Blood, The Scourging, and the Crown of Thorns. I thought about Purgatory a lot, about angels, about Our Sorrowful Mother, and about saints with stigmata. In essence, the inherently Catholic concepts of sacred woundedness, love through suffering, life through death, and strength through vulnerability, became the fundamental cornerstone of the League at its very core. To this day, any Leagueworld lacking these qualities will quickly corrode and die. The reflection of and glory of God, especially in the very touchingly human life of Jesus Christ-- God with a body that breathed and bled like ours-- is the first and final goal of the League, both in its creation and in its communication, however uniquely that honor may be achieved in each.

 

 

THE LEAGUE BEGINS

THE SEEDS BEGIN TO BLOOM

 

My great-aunt, a Franciscan nun, gave me a gift at age three that I adored and still do: a giant plush unicorn with golden eyes and a backwards horn. I named her Unisalia, proclaimed her a queen, and went everywhere with her. She became my first imaginary friend, and many years later, would hold a position of utmost honor within the League... but I digress. In her sudden blessed bestowal, I can now see that already, before I even began dreaming up worlds of any solid sort, the Hand of God was planting the seeds.

My second imaginary friend appeared around 1996, and she was, quite frankly, utterly bizarre, but I loved her. She was the result of my obsession with a shoot-em-up game at the local truckstop that my dad introduced me to: one in which you had to kill invading aliens in order to secure a spaceship. Of course, my interest was not in the killing, but in the presence of death in its rawest, most blatant state-- wounds and blood and terrible openness. After some time I became unable to play the game because I kept daydreaming about aliens with softer hearts who weren't coldly spattered on impact, but who instead survived in a wounded vulnerable state and forced the offending soldiers to rethink their actions and open their own hearts to compassion as well. So with this dreaming, something common to my young mind, I ended up with an invisible friend who was a rainbow-skinned Xenomorph princess. She shone like glitter on glass and her name was Jewel and her mission was to evangelize everyone who dared to assume that an alien couldn't be Catholic. In my daydreams, she and her ever-growing gang of technicolor pals-- all named after gemstones-- would endure countless conflicts with humans who adamantly saw aliens as evil and deserving of death, whereas these were seeking only peace and compassion, repentance and forgiveness, determined to help humanity soften its global heart to not only extraterrestrials like them but also to its own people, who were treated as aliens by their fellow man. Oh, and every Xenomorph in my head carried a matching color rosary. It was pretty awesome.

My great-aunt passed away when I was six. It was a few days after my birthday. I remember standing in front of the washing machine in the middle of the night, my mom and dad obviously upset but trying to break it to me gently. She had been sick for a while, and being the religious child I was, I already knew she was approaching death, and I dreaded it. So judging by their behavior, I knew. I burst into tears and shouted at them both-- "you don't have to tell me, I already know she died!"-- and ran into my room to dissolve into wracking sobs. I knew what death was. I knew what the afterlife was. It didn't make the loss hurt any less. It didn't make me miss her any less.

I can still remember her funeral, the feeling of her cold cheek as I kissed it in the coffin, the smell of her habit, of her powdered skin, of the flowers. I hugged Unisalia tight when I got home, dizzy from my first funeral, and that dear unicorn became secretly associated now with not only the nun who brought her to me, but also with her death-- with that very mantra of memento mori. Remember that you will die too, but remember also, that it is not the end. Remember that, while you live this life, gifted to you from God, you have a responsibility to that Giver. And that responsibility is to prepare for this life's ever-nearing death, for that final door out of this world, for what-- and Who-- lies beyond. So live your life with your heart set on higher things... because those are the only things that last... the only things that are truly real.

One day, both Unisalia and I would also face death. But until then, we had a mission...

 

 

THE EARLY DAYS

THE BIRTH OF A UNIVERSE

 

In its earliest days, the League began just like any other world-- a vast and shifting sphere of pure potential, wonderful yet unstable. I wrote a great deal of short stories and imagined a great many creatures, but none of these projects belonged to anything greater and grander than themselves.

The first hint of a deeper thread was glimpsed around 1995 with one of my first "imaginary friends," a singing king cobra that I simply called "My Cobra." As this was the 1990s, he was the frontman in a 5-man band, the other members being a frilled lizard, a bat, a unicorn, and a dolphin... my favorite animals at the time. A childish concept, perhaps, but they were the first individuals to carry their own faces and names across many mindscapes, creating a history and reputation for themselves, and building their own unique personalities. Furthermore, this basic idea of a character group with a musical heart became a sort of greater heart to the nascent League, as my personal gift of musical composition invariably went hand-in-hand with my other creative pursuits. 


In 1996, the first hint of a solid "world" coalesced with a new character: Zimbo the Alien. He was an amusing fellow, described as popular and intelligent yet still proving to be hopelessly baffled by earth culture and technology. I spent many hours drawing him and his four color-coded friends flying about in saucer-bubble ships, protecting the earth from hostile invaders, and searching for new planets to explore. These two new concepts-- a character color spectrum and the notion of good versus evil-- were truly the two deepest seeds of the League to come, as they would blossom again and again over the years in its Worlds. 



(...)