My comic Silver Tears were inspired by an essay I made.
The task was that you were to write an essay on the human rights and why would one rights were important for humans. Some of my classmates chose abuse or racism, I chose the protection of children against sexual exploitation and the arguments was:
- Why take prostitution as a serious issue, especially in the child sex
trade (the child can be an unwanted child that nobody wants, so why
take care of it)?
- How can it hurt the child when it’s just sex?
- How many children are there in the world and are forced to sell their
bodies?
- How should you treat a child who has experienced sexual abuse?
Something inside me broke when I did this essay. When I finished, the first thing I did was to go to my mom and cry. Then the next day, I cried again when my teacher asked me how it went to the task. And then, I cried for the last time when everyone in the class noticed that I was sad and asked what had happened.
Of course I knew about the terrible things that happen around the world, but I never thought of them and they were not part of my reality. After the task, the child sexual exploitation was a part of my reality.
And it affected me a lot.
I watched a lot of anime and read manga. But now I have become more critical of it. When characters that looks they are 8 years old is really 15 and Hubie dooo~ops~ "pantyshot" "Kyaaa" makes me frown. It is one of the reasons why my watching of anime has decreased.
But of course I still read some comics and watch some anime, it's just much less than before.
How my comic Silver Tears were created was because of also a task, but it was completely different. You would listen to 10 different music and then write 10 different scenes of that feeling that you get from the music. Then you had to assemble the parts into a single narrative story. Obviously the story was influenced by the heavy thoughts that I got from the previous essay, but that did not stop me to write a "happy ending".
The story was Silver Tears. And my teacher said to me that she liked it and wanted to see a continuation of it.
It inspired me to do a continuation, and then make a comic of it.