BreadAVOTA is a story by rolypolyphonic.

rolypolyphonic is the author of BreadAVOTA.

You can leave a 'clap' by clicking on the Clap link. The clap is the equivalent of a 'like'. The Clap page also has an optional guestbook.

E-mail [ mail@breadavota.cafe ] is the most suited for private correspondences.

The Ask page lets you ask questions.

Discussing the story is best suited for the BBS. The BBS also has a thread for reporting bugs and typos and a thread for spam and off-topic/casual conversation.

If you find that the BBS is blocked, please change your DNS to 1.1.1.1 or use a VPN. You can find instructions on how to do that on the Internet.

There is currently no way to make comments on the individual chapter's webpages themselves.

I value messages, whether it's about BreadAVOTA or the themes it involves, and I will respond to most things (as long as it's not blatantly mean-spirited). Do feel free to drop me an e-mail if you want to talk about something.

I have a status.cafe that you can subcribe to via Atom. You can also subcribe to the BBS through RSS, however this will notify you of all discussion on the BBS and not only story updates. Updates are posted on the Update Log thread.

BreadAVOTA used to be posted elsewhere and had associated SNS accounts, but being on social media affects me negatively, so they have all been removed.

Please try a different browser or device first. Otherwise, you can report it and I will double-check if any links are broken.

I do NOT allow:

• Using my work for any monetary purpose (eg selling my work, using my work in something with advertisements, etc.)
• Reposting/reuploading significant portions of my work wholesale (eg uploading mirrors to a different website, etc.)
• Anything that involves harassment of real people (eg attaching bigoted/hateful messages to my work/characters, harassing other people involved with BreadAVOTA such as its readers, etc.)

You are permitted to:

• Create gifts works or derivative works
• Use portions of the art for personal use (eg icons, banners, etc.)
• Use my work as reference for your own work

Gifts, derivative works, etc. with sensitive themes (read: gratuitous sex, violence, horror, fetishes, whatever) are permitted. Asking for permission/notifying in advance is highly appreciated although not mandatory.

Any gift works can be mailed to mail@breadavota.cafe. Only works that have explicit permission to be reposted are shared on the Gift Works page, so please inform me if you would like your gift work to be featured along with your credit name/information.

Although I am strict about using my work 'as is', I am very lenient with any form of derivative/transformative work. If you use portions of my work as a basis to create a new work (copying, tracing, quoting, rewriting, etc.), this is all permitted as long as it is not for monetary purposes. Credit is not necessary for derivative works.

P.S. Although practically I can't stop people from sharing my work, I'm really sensitive to attention, so as a matter of courtesy discussing my work in populated spaces (eg an account with many followers) is heavily discouraged. I appreciate people sharing my work in small doses, such as to friends or in personal accounts. Please use your own discretion.

There is no update schedule, it will simply update when it does. The story updates in full chapters (not by page), so there are often long delays between updates.

I cannot control who actually reads the story. Regardless of your age, if you read it you're responsible for your own reaction to it, is all. You saw the landing page.

Please message me and I will try my best to accommodate. However, it is best to keep the general Content Notes page in mind for the entire series. While effort is made to put individual warnings on each update, because of the multimedia and occasionally interactive nature of the website some things (such as eyestrain, flashing, loud sounds, externally linked content, etc.) cannot be notified in advance, and some content notes are deliberately kept out if it is decided they spoil too much or make interpretations of intentionally vague aspects too rigid.

Having never touched Javascript in my life, in the course of three painful days without sleep I tried to learn how to do the stuff I wanted to do, in a process which felt very reminescent of learning Japanese from watching anime.

Yes, I would gladly appreciate any opportunity to cover up my tracks and continue the kayfabe of my linguistic perfection.

The best place to report bugs, issues, typographical errors, etc. is on the dedicated BBS thread, but you are welcome to send an e-mail if it is more convenient. Any help in sculpting BreadAVOTA into relative presentability is always appreciated.

1. The website is paid for in advance, so it will be up for a long time, and there are designated people with archives of the website otherwise. Anybody can download the story in its entirety for personal viewing but mirroring/archiving the website through other websites or online archives is heavily discouraged.

2. While this isn't an 'advocacy' comic, maybe it will spur you to research into the lives of the more stigmatised identities present within it, like people with personality disorders, or paraphiliacs, or schizotypes.

3. I enjoy reading messages, as it makes me feel like people do not simply read the comic but are able to engage with it in a meaningful way.

BreadAVOTA is a free story, but if you would like to send us money you can donate through itch.io or Ko-fi. The money will be used for the website's domain/hosting costs.

If you donate to the Ko-fi you can describe your request (does not need to be BreadAVOTA-related) and I will draw it. If you want a more complicated/specific commission, you can view our commissions page.

You can send an e-mail regarding art trades and collaborations, and I will consider it depending on the nature of the request.

You are free to send a message recommending to look at something you have created. I find stories that can only exist through the Internet interesting and would be happy to try it out.

It's pronounced like 'fact' without the 't'.

I'm rolypolyphonic.

Software: Paint Tool SAI for all illustrations/comics, Camtasia Studio & Aviutl for the videos, EmEditor for the website.

Hardware: Ordinary computer mouse, Wacom CTH-490 (the old version of the Intuos), a dying laptop that should have been put down years ago. I use the tablet to draw and the mouse to colour, but I do not recommend this (bad for your wrists). It's just what I'm used to.

While some things like characterisation and a few major plot points are decided in advance, I do not use a script. The events of the story and the dialogue are just a surprise to me as they are to you, and I write them concurrent with the art.

I tend to draw a page or a few at a time to completion before working on new pages. Like most artists, I do a rough sketch of the composition, jump to lineart and shade/colour it. If an image is fully coloured/painted, I skip the lining and paint the entire thing on one layer. I do not draw thumbnails, because, uh, I have no script to work off of.

I do videos just about the exact same way, I just slap the individual pages (or in this case, frames) into an editing program, add a few transitions and ta-dah, it is a video.

This, by the way, is not an ideal way to make a webseries. It is just what I do because I am always sick as hell and cannot be arsed with warm-ups and preparations. I recommend streamlining your work more than I do if you are capable of it.

I take anywhere between thirty minutes to eight hours a drawing. A typical comic page is about 1-3 hours unless it's fully painted.

Videos take a full day or two to edit, though drawing the assets (predictably) is more time consuming.

These estimates do not count pauses/breaks: I may do a page relatively 'quickly' but considering I might only draw once every few months, I am not an efficient worker.

Thank you for the concern, hypothetical audience! Nobody actually says that. Well, nobody is left to say it, but even when there were others, nobody else said that.

I am very sad and lonely and other negative descriptor words, and I have no friends or family, and my physical health is poorly, and along with it went the intellect I had when I was younger, which mattered to me because I was always mentally ill and socially incompetent but I made up for it by being reasonably smart, and then things happened in my life and something changed in my brain and I am an idiot now, and I am afraid when my inevitable death comes, some annoying YouTuber or whatever who specialises in Internet horror-inclined phenomena will make a documentary about an obscure schizophrenic artist, [ and I bet they are going to call me schizophrenic instead of schizotypal, because a person who makes a spectacle of miserable mentally ill artists only has enough superficial respect to avoid getting mobbed for ableist slurs or whatever, and not much else, it is bad to say the r-word in a way schizo and psychotic and psychopathic and crazyinsanedelulu is not, as it is, as it is ], whose magnum opus 'Worse Than Homestuck but Better than the Epilogues' was a demonstration not only of wasted creative potential but unconventional schizospectral insights, and whose digital footprint revealed several cries for help and suicidal ideation, and then their subscribers will comment things like, 'Wow, I wish I knew this person before they ended their life, I connect to them so much and would have reached out to them, I wish they held on longer because they had so much potential,' which is an embittering sentiment because I am in this situation where despite the explicit, blatant, not-at-all-subtextual cries for help and suicidal ideation that I present, I am still lacking in the friends department and left to fend against the insidious psychosis all by myself, and I find these people who only make the effort to reach out when you're literally dying and or dead [ Did I mention I am literally dying? Of my chronic illnesses? Right now? ] even more spit-in-your-face offencive than people who dare not say a word, and also I do not use they/them pronouns because I am nullpronominal, but nobody wants to use no pronouns for people because it makes the English sound clunky and annoying, which is a choice I made as a legitimate if self-defeatist demonstration of my point, and also you get virtue-signalling chucklefucks who tout and teeter with wanting you to die ('problematic people dni and kys!') and then when you die they post inane statuses on X formerly known as twitter things like 'This artist was evil and a pedophile but nobody deserves to die and they did not deserve to be harassed (ignore the fact that my very beliefs are about how it is a moral imperative, harassing these people)', it has happened to others and by golly will it happen to me. There is very little to be upset about when strangers treat you like strangers but people expressing sentiments, admiration for you, admiration for your work, desire for you not to 'waste your life' while refusing to acknowledge the pain of living, especially a life like this, a disinterest in the work that it takes to help you, something about it not being anyone's responsibility, something something, everyone deserves love and you should never be afraid to ask for help but only the selfish and entitled actually ask for it, the existence of the most insufferable are only useful once you can take the names of their corpses and use it to present yourself as a kind and loving person, about how you knew this guy when they were alive and wish you could have done something to help but it was too late and their depression was too much for your mental health (I did not even ask you for help, I just maybe wanted some ocassional company, except I cannot be afforded this either because I am too boring for fun and too stupid for pragmatics), and it's funny because they tell you to ask for help while also saying it is too far gone to help you, and it's funny when people say 'you couldn't have stopped a suicidal person anyway, because it isn't because of anything you did or did not do, and it is not up to you,' because it seems to be viewing the reality through peripheral vision, I mean, it implies if you can't actually stop suicide then why even try, and it's insulting to be ignored by people when they approached you first, because they promised that responsibility to you and left not even because it was difficult but merely because it wasn't very fun, because I never asked you of anything, and the thing is when people read 'today I was in the hospital because I survived an overdose' and then later go 'you can't read people's minds, how would you know that person was struggling if they don't tell you?' really it takes a fundamental kind of idiot to expect a person who hates living so much that they try to kill themselves to have the mental resilience it takes to tell you, specifically and individually, that they want to die, so is it so hard to use common sense to look at your supposed friend with their acid-lined stomach and line-lined skin and just connect two and two, and really the idea of ignorance is just used to mask the guilt of not wanting to make someone your problem, because the reality is if you're miserable enough you are a burden, and no amount of mental health matters infographics and neurodivergency-is-valid 'Message me any time!' status posts will change this fact, these sordid, miserly treatments, and I never even asked you for anything, except maybe some moral consistency, and isn't a principled ethical standard something not owed to others to keep them alive but merely a duty one must commit to regardless, deontologically even, even though I don't fancy myself a deontologist, who cares about the study of teeth, although let us be real for a second here, just you and me, we are all intellectuals here, except for me because I am an imbecile, frankly, I am overestimating my significance here, there will be no documentary and if there is they will probably correctly use the diagnostic label I described myself with, not because they genuinely understand but because I have made this noise of pointing it out, dziękuję bardzo dla la capacidad sa pagsaliksik de responsable, as I say you can largely avoid the sin of saying bad things about the schizoids by choosing not to say anything at all, kindergarten logic, baby, the best that is ever offered to me, it is really that simple, is it too much to desire that if a person offers you something they don't snatch it right out of your arms, mental illness is a conscious choice and a moral failure, I want you in my house, just not in my room, maybe it would've been better if you didn't tell me you cared, it is easy enough to die for the good and beautiful; the hard thing is to die for the miserable and corrupt, etcetera, etcetera.

Hi ヾ(･∀･)ﾉ

Dogs.

The general 'flow' of the story has been decided but due to a lack of actual script, a specific length cannot be assured. The current estimate is three Cycles long. My only guarantee is it won't be as long as Homestuck.

In the past, I labelled horror as a 'secondary' genre for BreadAVOTA. However, this isn't due to a genuine desire/intention to write a horror story but a save-my-arse disclosure for people getting impaled onscreen. It seemed a little disingenious so I will now definitively say that BreadAVOTA is not intended to be a horror story, and although it can feature explicitly 'disturbing' illustrations from time to time, I do not feel like this is enough to seriously warrant a label of 'horror'. BreadAVOTA is intended to be a fantasy with sci-fi elements.

The original rating I gave BreadAVOTA when it was started in 2020 was 16+. I do not feel like delineating the supposed diffence between 16+ and 18+ so now it's just an 'adult' series. The sensitive themes make it clear why, but another reason for the change is that in the future the story is likely to become more explicit in how some of those themes are presented.

That aside, I also make more explicit works that, while not in the BreadAVOTA proper/canon, still feature the same characters, and I would rather not deal with the drama that comes with having a 'general audiences' work while also being a 'NSFW' artist. I will simply consider my entire web presence 'NSFW' for this sake.

BreadAVOTA is written in 'Maldevaran English'. While colloquial Maldevaran English is mostly indistinguishable from 'real' English, a few neologisms and expressions are unique to the dialect.

The 'Honourary' English used by the Council and the Court, in particular for Legal or academic documents, features more original words/expressions and different grammatical conventions.

Maldevaran English is not designed to be a language distinct from English and most if not all words should be comprehensible through context clues alone.

It's an allegory for schizotypy, secondarily. First-and-foremostly, it's a hobby.

I do not write characters who act like 'real people' because it does not interest me. I think of my characters as mere plot and lore vehicles. This is generally not a wise writing choice, but let it be known I do it on purpose.

Nobody reads BreadAVOTA to enjoy it, full stop. This is the first supra-famous hyper-popular literary-classic webcomic that is essentially literal homework. You read BreadAVOTA for the same reason you would subject yourself to other mind-boggling works of disbelief, like Finnegans Wake or League of Legends.

Okay, dishumourous jab aside, the 'Help' tab in the Archive provides a reading guide. Short answer: No, the Mainline can be read on its own.

Long answer: While Sideline, Altline, Further Reading, etc. updates are 'optional' to read, the story is still written with the assumption/intention that it will be read in totality. The Mainline drives the plot and everything else drives the lore/setting is how I would put it, and BreadAVOTA is a story highly reliant on the 'philosophy' of its lore. The plot exists because something has to happen in the story, but it isn't really the 'point' of BreadAVOTA.

There is definitely a 'hierarchy' of importance, if that matters. From most to least relevant: the Mainline; the MV's; the rest of the Sideline; the Altline, the Further Reading panel, and finally the Notes. The Blog is also not part of the story but I do talk about my narrative choices and loony imparsable logic there sometimes.

Both the in-universe story and the metatextual context of how the story is presented is in service of (my attempt at) the Mild Schizotypy Simulator. The disorganisation is essential to the experience. breadavota.cafe is a cognitohazard for realising my manifesto to turn schizotypy from a theoretical personality continuum and list of symptomatology to the Living World's first ever virally infectuous mind disease. We take it whimsycore and sillypilled all up in the Café. We're pulling a Rick and Morty Unity Maneuver. To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand BreadAVOTA. The humo(u)r is extremely subtle, and without a solid grasp of theoretical physics psychodynamic theory most of the jokes will go over a typical reader's head. There's also [insert any character here]'s nihilistic outlook, which is deftly woven into his characterisation - his personal philosophy draws heavily from Narodnaya Volya literature Andrew Dclussie Hussie's Homestuck, for instance. We're doing the Time Cube but without all the racism, and with significantly more moeiosity. I am moe, right? All the Hypothetical Audiences find my eccentric behaviour endearing and adorable, and not at all grating. You agree. Of course, your mileage may vary and we all like different things, but if you find you don't enjoy the stuff outside the main plot, BreadAVOTA as a story may not be suitable for your preferences.

Also, my best works are outside the Mainline and I put a lot of thought into writing them so please support me. Pwetty please.

I find most things boring, due to my anhedonia/avolition. Thus I'll automatically file any story I manage to finish as an 'inspiration'.

Homestuck by Andrew Hussie - It is literally the only webcomic I have ever finished. Multimedia formatting, astounding sci-fi/fantasy worldbuilding, interesting alien species, time travel shenanigans, etcetera, etcetera. Truly the most inspirational work for me.

The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker - It is a very mundane book about a guy who has lunch with its appeal being the highly detailed writing style. The protagonist narrates minute ruminations about things ranging from straws to escalator railings. The writing style is something I find both lightheartedly amusing but amazingly thought-provoking and is something I would want to emulate in my own writing, albeit I doubt I will ever reach such a level of detail. My vocabulary for one isn't that expansive.

Glitch: Jinn Devoidist by Woraya Chotikul - A sci-fi horror webcomic that unfortunately got cancelled but is supposedly being remade into a one-shot that is yet to be released. I really like the concept of the digital species the story has and the Marginals are partially inspired by Cadwalader Toratad's species. Story aside, the art is fantastic.

Hetalia by Hidekaz Himaruya - I never did understand why more people shipped England with America than France.

Steven Universe by Rebecca Sugar - Steven Universe! Woooo Steven Universe. Universe that is Steven. Such a good show. Deserved so much better.

The Stranger by Albert Camus - My schizoid card will be revoked if I don't put this here. My personal interpretation is that Meursault committed the murder as a subconscious way of processing his grief over his mother dying which appears to be an opinion few if any other people share. Apparently.

1984 by jorjor wel - Sorry for choosing something only snuffy[1] intellectuals read. In my defence I liked Simon Prebble's audiobook version of it. Can I be blamed for my affinity for old British narrators? That's what I thought. My favourite part of the book was the fake Goldstein book-within-a-book, which I have heard people find very stuffy and boring. Which might reflect more about my tastes than anything else.

[1] Snobbish and stuffy

Mystery story that I don't remember - Here here hear my plea. So maybe I said it before, no idea if I said it anywhere here on this blog but I've related the anecdote on my old SNS accounts, but the characters for BreadAVOTA came from old standalone vignettes I wrote intermittently over the years. And Scarecrow, one of the oldest characters creation-wise, one whose humble origins a-stumbled into our reality almost a decade ago, came from a story that was inspired/based on/ripped off of this other short story. The story beats (parent looking for dead red-headed son who died in a war) and Scarecrow's name itself (from the line of parents being the best scarecrows because they keep everything away from their children) were taken from that story. Shamelessly unoriginal? Sure. I actually removed Scarecrow's origin story a bajillion times before because I knew I was aping off of someone else. But then I realised. Actually maybe someday someone will recognise what this story is based off of and I really want to find it because that one short vignette alone became the basis of my writing style for years. The problem is. This story must have been published in the early 2000s. I don't think I ever even read the actual book it's from, if it even came from a book, and I think I just read this one story from somebody else showing it to me, so I couldn't even describe what the physical tome looked like to even start looking. But hey, if anyone out there, as unlikely as it is, ever stumbles upon good old breadavota dot blog dot ef see two and goes 'this Scarecrow character's a rip-off of a better story' then please do let me know that this story is because it has been haunting me ever since. Ought to give credit where credit is due at some point.

That aside:

My own experiences - Generic answer all artists are obligated to give. I make my characters heavily schizo for a reason.

'Bits and pieces of every single thing I have ever seen' - Generic answer all artists are obligated to give.

I'll update this as I think of more stuff from my past that must have insidiously wriggled its way into the BreadAVOTA bloodstream. Of this list, Homestuck is the biggest, most blatant inspiration, and the one I would recommend people to read the most.

The Wiki has a Recommendations page provided by the three readers. I'm not familiar with these works, but I assume they're on that list for a reason.

No.

Jacques Emfoi explicitly has schizoid (and schizotypal) personality disorder in canon. Some of the other characters, particularly the Marginals, are definitely designed to be schizoid (et al) in mind, although canonically they would not have the diagnosis because they are not... Living beings.

Maldevaran culture approaches the concept of mental conditions somewhat differently from real life. How schizoidism and schizotypy is approached is based on its own conceptual model of schizospectral phenomena.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Genders: Whatever it says on their reference sheets.

Orientations: Unless specified otherwise, everyone is some kind of variation of being asexual-aromantic. Some characters are also paraphilic, in the general sense of the word (a non-normative attraction), not the DSM-5 brain disease way. Here is a website with useful explanations.

Media likes birds, specifically, in a very normal way with the normal degree of intensity. He's a sadomasochist. Also the more he likes something the more he wants to eat it, so predictably, he likes the idea of putting birds. In his mouth. And crushing their hollow little bones and soft little feathers between his sharp little teeth and listening to their pathetic little chirping. To clarify, he just likes the idea of it.

Jacques is a xenophile, which if you search up is described as a person who likes foreign cultures, but in the context of the multi-species world of the story it means Jacques has no interest in other Crows or even Birds in general, has a mild interest in other Living species, and a deeper intrigue with species the less Living-like it is, especially if it's evil and dangerous enough to kill him to death for all eternity. If it isn't obvious he's masochistic through and through. Jacques also has whatever other fetish you think would make him a less respectable person. All of them. Every single one. Despite his disruptive fixations, he finds fantasising about such scenarios more gratifying than acting them out, and he has a lot of reservations (enough reservations to beat the band like a dead horse) over the idea of other people even touching him.

Jacques is also loveless. In the context of the story, he considers this more of a political philosophy than a relational orientation, but the concept is similar to that of real loveless people. Here is an informative essay about lovelessness. It is neither wholly representative of the beliefs held by Jacques or of other loveless people, but is a good introduction for those unfamiliar with the concept.

Anthony equates attraction to hatred Hussnasty style and wants to be stuck forever with somebody the more he detests them (so he can torment them until the end of not_time)! Unlike Media, it isn't because he's sadistic per se. Rather, it's just that he's vengeful.

There are three potential candidates here for the worst relationships on earth, if you think really hard about it.

Some Marginals like other Marginals, which in Marginal culture is Illegal, but more important than being Illegal is that they find it icky and weird.

They canonically have some sort of exclusive/dyadic relationship, but one that is non-romantic and non-amorous.

I don't care if people ship them or not, but I clearly like making them interact, because Jacques is my favourite character and Media is a cringey self-insert.

That is not a question.

Please send a message if there is anything else you would like to ask.