dicot.moe

about this web­site

di­cot.moe is the per­son­al port­fo­lio web­site of Va­lerie Hal­la and Drools Cute­ly, who are the same per­son.

Va­lerie Hal­la

I’m a car­toon­ist, writ­er, song­writ­er, and gen­er­al sto­ry­telling dweeb. I start­ed post­ing art un­der the pseu­do­nym Va­lerie Hal­la in the fall of 2014. My first (and short­est-lived) we­b­com­ic, Port­side Sto­ries, gained a sur­pris­ing amount of trac­tion im­me­di­ate­ly af­ter it de­but­ed, and I’ve been at this ev­er since. If you know me for any­thing, it’s prob­a­bly my sec­ond we­b­com­ic at­tempt, Good­bye to Ha­los, which I worked on for six years. That com­ic is cur­rent­ly on in­def­i­nite hia­tus while I pur­sue a change in for­mat.

I like to write sweet sto­ries cen­ter­ing queer and trans char­ac­ters. Gen­er­al­ly those sto­ries are not ex­plic­it­ly about be­ing queer or trans; in­stead, I’m big in­to the idea of queer mun­dan­i­ty.

By that, I don’t mean sto­ries where the pre­sen­ta­tion and ex­pe­ri­ences of queer char­ac­ters are “nor­mal­ized” by mak­ing them in­dis­tin­guish­able from those of non-queer char­ac­ters. That’s the Cow­ard’s Path. What I mean by “queer mun­dan­i­ty” is that I like to write sto­ries where the thoughts, feel­in­gs, and bod­ies of queer and trans folks are high­light­ed and drawn up­on so uni­ver­sal­ly that they be­come mun­dane.

When you do that, you leave the au­di­ence no es­cape hatch. The read­er is forced to in­hab­it these char­ac­ters and feel their feel­in­gs, be­cause they’re giv­en no non-queer per­spec­tive from which to ob­serve them: a can­dy-sweet Saw trap of non-ne­go­tiable queer em­pa­thy.

It’s a lofty goal, but peo­ple seem to be in­to it, so you could say I’ve found my eco­log­i­cal niche.

So­cial me­dia links:

For busi­ness types:

Drools Cute­ly

This is an­oth­er pseu­do­nym. I use this one for post­ing adult con­tent. If you know me for any­thing, it’s prob­a­bly ei­ther An­i­mal Girl­friends, a mar­gin­al­ly erot­ic short sto­ry first post­ed in 2015, or CURSE/KISS/CUTE, my cur­rent project!

In ad­di­tion to the queer stuff, my adult work tends to high­light a dif­fer­ent sort of mun­dan­i­ty. This is tricky to put in­to words, but you know how ev­ery­one’s al­ways draw­ing girls with six-gal­lon jugs? When I see that, the first thing that runs through my head is: D’y­ou think she ev­er knocks stuff off the shelves at the su­per­mar­ket?

What I mean is, hu­man­i­ty has col­lec­tive­ly con­struct­ed a fan­ta­sy menagerie of erot­i­cal­ly un­usu­al body ge­ome­tries. I like to take these fan­tasies at face val­ue. Like, what if that was re­al and it was fine? How would it feel to be some kind of cute horny mon­ster? I guess you could call this in­ter­est of mine erot­ic mun­dan­i­ty.

So­cial me­dia links:

al­so there’s a dis­cord serv­er

If you’re 20+ years old and you can chill, then come check it out! Twit­ter’s kind of a drag these days, so I tend to be most ac­tive on Dis­cord.

what’s a di­cot?

It’s when a ba­by plant has two leaves like this:

I just think that’s moé.