On the "Iris Archetype", Childhood Projects, Fixations, etc.
Those who have known me for a while - especially if I've subjected you to old projects, or somehow, amazingly, you've been around since the late-ish 2010s - might notice a couple patterns in my work and the characters who live in them.
One of these I have come to know as the "Iris Archetype" or simply the "Iris". Currently, Iris is an interdimensional priestess living somewhere in between Earth and Sey with her wife and various ghosts, fixing cars, dressing fancy, drinking wine, banishing demons and painstakingly categorizing the music she likes. But she was not always this person, and there are many forms she has taken and continues to take within these worlds, within memory and drawings and concepts and in real life.
This is all tangled up and takes a little bit of insight into my own history. I don't like to be the person that talks about how I have been drawing or writing since I could hold a pencil because it sounds very cliche to me... however there is a lot of truth to it. I've been doing this kind of stuff in some capacity since I framed it as "imaginary friends" as a small child. Later I messed around in Microsoft Word making new stories based on books I had been reading. Around the age of seven I began to write and draw in composition books which was my format of choice for a few years. It took over most of my life.
When I grew out of that I was embarrassed by my old writing and I put the books away, and at some point I stashed them in boxes in the attic before I went to college. I didn't bring the boxes back out until maybe last month, and I sat up in the 100-degree attic, looking through every single book.
The near complete stack of composition books spanning a few years (and some unrelated stragglers). I think there's some that are still missing...
The first thing I noticed about these books was that all of them, except for three that I will write about in another post, had a lot less content than I had remembered there being. By that I mean there were a lot of drawings. There were a lot of beginnings of stories. But most of what I found were lone starting sentences to three pages of writing maximum. These were often paired with elaborate cover art. But I didn't know how to stick with a story, or write what I liked, and I knew even less about the idea of having consistent characters. I would give up and start something entirely new.
Naturally, this is where the Iris archetype is most prevalent. I started noticing her everywhere - from central characters, to friends of the protagonist, to simple one-off drawings.
But what is Iris? What constitutes an "Iris"?
At its core an Iris is a weird girl. She is usually otherworldly, or at least holds a secret that others cannot know. She's usually not like her classmates or her peers and has her head in the clouds. She often has features that differentiate her from being a normal human girl. Often this would be a special eye color or blue hair, or significantly strange or sometimes plain clothes. Sometimes she has magical powers, other times she does not.
A few notable lines from "The Magic Keepers", a rare seventeen-page abandoned project, written by me in the fifth grade -
"I hop on the bus and find I have to sit by Charasma, a girl who never takes her hat off, is very weird and that no one ever talks to."
"'By the way,' Charasma continues, 'Call me Char.' She takes off her hat, revealing a head of curly blond hair with a strip of blue on the side."
"She holds her hands above her head and, just like in my dream, butterflies erupt from her hands. Her hat flies off, revealing nearly three feet of bushy electric blue hair."
While our protagonist was often unknowingly distressed and dysphoric, an Iris had no time for such flimsy human troubles and was always a positive and reassuring force, if not unsettlingly twee. (I've remedied this in my current iteration of Iris by giving her quite a few issues to work through as well.)
I've retroactively recognized Iris in many other fixations I had as a kid. This wasn't just her various strange blonde girl inspiration origins, but also traces in people I knew or wanted to know. Girls I was friends with a very long time ago, weird girls from hippie families that I never saw again after elementary school, nerdy girls from other schools who drew Sonic OCs at the after-school program, girls that I met just once while camping or on vacation or at some faraway pool, never to be seen again.
The more I thought about this archetype and things that reminded me of her the more I started to understand her. I realized that Iris the character is a fragment of the whole thing. Iris the concept is somewhere else. I recognized her presence in strong gusts of wind blowing through the trees, and in objects like fairy statues and old silver jewelry that I used to trace in my hands as a kid. At some point she obtained conscious thought, gained a tangible form and split off from the concept to become a person.
I often joke that Iris was born out of a deep, bored and lonely desire for a friend who was a weird girl, in a way that made even me look regular, and that I didn't realize that I could make myself the weird and overpowered mystical girl. It's also true that her form in those stories went away for a while when I did make friends as a kid. But the fact that she had been reinvented those countless times, and yet persisted and returned to me later in new ways, makes her presence all the more interesting.
Sometimes she is a partner to nostalgia. Sometimes it feels like she just left the room before I walked in. Sometimes she is here when I least expect her to be.