This was part of a Bluesky thread that I'd written out once upon a time.

With the image tags being outdated, I figured this was the perfect time to just respost all of it over here, in a more static location.

At the time I'd written it, I hadn't really clued anyone in to Lydia being a thing. People knew I was drawing "UnPhoebe" as a hairless cat creature and probably had a decent handle on her being her own character, but I'd been careful about what I'd said about her. I didn't want to give away too much of her story.

When that became too unweildy, though - and the behind-the-scenes images became to numerous to leave unposted - I wrote this up to introduce her to my audience.

So! Lydia. Let's talk about her.

Anyone who's been following me for long knows I took quite a bit to the Grave Robber ala Darkest Dungeon, a character that inadvertently became a joking-at-first point of connection between Ependa and I.

It's inspiration you can still see visually, and in little and not-so-little nods here and there.

When that depiction started taking on a life of its own, I knew it was time to take it out of fandom space. So I started building Phoebe. The nod to Audrey, initially, was that she had a dead sister who, rather than killing her husband in an attempt to escape him, had instead been killed. I hadn't known the shape of that when I wrote it down, but a picture formed pretty quickly.

At first, they were identical twins. But Phoebe saw Lydia as such an aspirational figure in her life (warts and all), and so badly wanted to *be* her, that a trans narrative started forming around that dynamic.

So I made them fraternal twins instead, both with a very complicated relationship to femininity. And to each other.

To Lydia, being a woman has always been an affliction. In a vacuum, she doesn't necessarily mind her body, or her gender (though she wouldn't mind either being a bit more malleable). As a social constraint, however, she despises it. She's felt the weight of it her entire life.

One of the challenges with Lydia is that I can almost never just show images of her without putting it behind tags or filters because she often wears an open shirt w/ nothing beneath.

It's a design decision I struggled with, initially, but it suits her far too well to drop, so, it stays. Full image linked here.

In her human life (as, obviously, she didn't always look like this), she made bucking decorum her full-time job. Born in the 1600s to wealth, she did her best to make herself as unmarriageable as possible. A disheveled magnet for scandal.

For the most part, it worked. Lydia's reputation as a sex-obsessed boozehound did wonders for whittling away at her list of potential suitors. And if that wasn't enough of a deterrent, simply meeting her usually did the trick.

It's probably worth mentioning here that it wasn't the behaviour itself that Phoebe found so compelling. Rather, it was Lydia's willingness to do pretty much whatever it took to maintain some semblance of the freedom she desired. She didn't compromise who she was, or pretend to be anything other than what she wanted to be.

Or, so it seemed, anyway.

The truth of the matter is that Lydia had already given up on any kind of life she actually wanted. Sure, she could flee the family (and probably tried to varying levels of success), but she knew the kind of uphill battle she was facing, and had already determined she was not its equal.

But she was quite capable of making her parents' lives miserable. And Phoebe graciously afforded her that opportunity.

Mother had caught Phoebe in Lydia's finer clothes and gone apoplectic, demanding she give Lydia all manner of apology while still wearing the "offending" articles.

It was not, sadly, Phoebe's distress that brought Lydia around to her side so quickly. It was, instead, Mother's *profound* discomfort with the situation. That was enough, more than enough, to get Lydia much more invested in playing along.

As you might guess, this wasn't without its bumps and bruises. These were two women, one of them a closeted trans woman, living at-the-time privileged lives in 1600s England. Lydia was not winning ally of the year even on her best days.

Add in that adversarial relationship to femininity and a lifelong lack of tact and you can be assured that many regrettable words were said. Lydia was (and still is, in many ways) completely baffled by the idea of a suffocating cage being in any way desirable.

She came to know that desire had nothing to do with it, though.

Phoebe felt the *wrongness* of the person she was being told she ought to be, just the same as Lydia. And Lydia saw the profound difference it made, being able to correct that mistake just a little, by having the space to try on clothes and makeup and all the other things Mother would so deeply dislike.

Though not born identical twins, they do eventually *become* identical, through means discussed in a post I'll eventually link. That said, the process that caused this to happen not only altered their appearance, but everyone's memories of how they used to appear. All artwork from the 'before times' reflects this.

Eventually, helping Phoebe out like this became its own form of living vicariously. Lydia could feel the noose of inevitable marriage tightening as her parents became more desperate to get rid of her. Moreso, as her influence over Phoebe became more and more apparent, both sisters actively refusing all efforts to see them both find a match.

As I said before, Lydia didn't see many opportunities to live the way she wanted to that didn't require some colossal effort on her part, using knowledge she'd been too lazy (too depressed) to acquire at that point in her life. It just wasn't energy she had to give. But Phoebe, impossibly, seemed to have it in abundance. So what energy Lydia had would go to Phoebe.

To herself, she would give the gift of Even More Drugs.

There's more I could add to that. A lot more. Obviously, 'how did she come to be a weird little cat gremlin' is a question that's been left unanswered. But I'm waiting on porting over Phoebe's thread before I get into specifics on that.

Watch this space! Or, better yet, go sign up for my Patreon. A free sub will alert you to small nuts-and-bolts site updates.