Not To Alarm You, But We're Doing These Now.

Are you caught up?

Good. I've waited a long time to write one of these.

May 1st, 2026 is the day that a main cast member of Objectified has officially kicked the bucket for the first time. And no, we're not counting Mushroom.

Minty is dead. Not only does this mark a major turning point for Objectified as a story, but it also signals the beginning of the series carrying out what makes it a performance art– something I’ve kept to myself until today.

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He was created in 2021, originally as an accessory to Brandy for the now defunct "Super Gwa Gwa Show" webseries, a mild competition show featuring the same cast of characters that was later repurposed into the horror webcomic series Objectified.

To explain Minty you'd first have to understand Brandy's origins. Brandy’s design dates back to a period when I was not yet familiar with alcohol the way adults are– I didn’t have a deep understanding of which glasses were meant for which drinks, or how different liquors paired with certain ingredients. As a result, his design initially resembled a mojito crossed with an old fashioned.

My father often made mojitos and old fashioneds using mint from the garden (and oranges from the grocery store), so in my mind alcohol was something that was sometimes orange, sometimes clear, and often included mint and ice. “Brandy” was a type of alcohol that sounded the most like a name, so it was chosen.

For a short time, Brandy carried a large mint leaf in his glass as part of his design. Eventually, that mint leaf was separated into its own character, which led to the creation of Minty.

His design was inspired by something I noticed in my family's garden when we would harvest mint. When a mint leaf was pulled from the plant at a certain angle, it would peel away with a long, curling strip of stem attached that resembled a tail. This was integrated into his design. Some of the points of his leaf were also exaggerated to resemble the silhouette of a cat.

Despite his cat-like features from day one, in his original iteration, Minty was a hominid character. When I started conceptualizing Objectified, some characters were changed to fit the graphic novel style and new setting, and Minty was updated to be bestial. The role of “cat” was originally assigned to Dynamite, but changed once I realized I could give characters fur patterns more feasibly now that I wasn't animating them. Dynamite was given rosettes and the jaguar assigned animal, which would serve his story better.

In SGGS, Minty and Brandy would have still been divorced, though the reason hadn't been decided yet. The show was canceled in its infancy.

What I did have planned for Minty in SGGS was for him to be basically the same guy, much to the dismay of the show's Host. Foul language comes to Minty naturally, which had to be censored by the Host. Over time, however, the two would get along.

Ironically, Minty was always meant to place first in SGGS.

In Objectified, he is the first to die.

I think on a surface level, Minty was easy to dislike. He made selfish mistakes that I don’t think most people would forgive him for easily (if at all). But Objectified isn’t really about that. I want to separate object show fans from the need to weigh every character’s heart and let that decide whether or not they’re allowed to enjoy them. I want you to be free from those chains.

We’re not really meant to pity him as much as we’re meant to fear his position, where everything goes wrong. The real horror, to me, is never being forgiven, being rejected by your own family, and being killed having done the best you could despite your imperfections. To simply not be enough for the cruel world. That is what Minty embodies in execution.

I figured that his actions culminated to make a character that was more human. Unfortunately, many readers only saw the bad in him.

His entire life sparked debate within the community. My target audience is teens and young adults, and for many of them, few things are worse than being cheated on. Many of them have personal experience with it. Sometimes I wish I had made him do something else, just so people would stop projecting their own negative experiences onto him and clouding his purpose and nuances as a character. That's mostly on me.

I rolled my eyes a lot seeing people say he was a monster who should never be forgiven and deserved to be beaten or killed. Sometimes people even insisted that the parts of Minty that made him human were only there to make us feel bad for him. Whenever I saw those kinds of comments, I would vent my frustrations to my friends about the parts of characters that felt like they weren’t widely seen or recognized.

It’s easy for me to say that the things that happen to the characters in Objectified are projections of my fears, but Minty is especially personal because some of those fears actually came true, both before and during production.

I began my transition in 2022, around the time I had only been working on Objectified for a few months and had just moved with my parents into their new house. I drove three hours to the nearest gender-affirming care clinic to sign an informed consent waiver for a testosterone prescription. About a week later, my parents figured it out on their own. They were not stoked.

Sparing most of the details, I was told that I was still loved, but that my transition would never be supported. That’s not even the bare minimum level of support a person should expect from their parents. It hurts to grow up being told you can be or do anything, only to realize that promise apparently comes with exceptions. My mother in particular believes there’s a “hole” in my heart that needs to be filled with “Christ”, but I’d rather it be filled with her acceptance for what I am.

Naturally, my own worries fed into the FTM character over time. I ended up using him as a vessel not just to evoke fear, but also to let people know they’re seen by drawing from my real experiences. He also carried my worries for what might become of me: homelessness, retail, city living, and being physically abused by a cisgender lover.

Around the time I was writing Minty into Objectified, my future felt especially bleak. I put my fear of the future into him. My catastrophizing manifested into his life.

Rumors were spread about me online that lead to SGGS getting canceled, and everything with my parents was unraveling. I was mortified. If I wanted my art career to survive, I needed to start showing some extreme resolve at rock bottom.

So I did.

I have to admit, I was driven by restlessness. I didn't think anyone would listen to my side of things, so I didn't bother trying and simply focused on working hard. I lost count of how many times someone had to hold my hand while I cried, and I kept having dreams where people welcomed me back into the community, only to wake up. I had dropped out of college because of COVID and needed to start making money soon, now in my twenties. That fear and anger fueled me.

As a result, Objectified is filled with unrelenting tragedy.

Now I’m able to support myself thanks to Objectified, and my name has been cleared. I can look back on Minty as more of an unrealistic negative expectation. When people are struggling, they’re often told to write their worries into a letter and tear it apart, to let it go.

When my characters die, that's what they become.

Of course, I make Objectified to entertain others. It has to. But first and foremost, I make it for myself.

I’ll miss Minty, in a way. But I think we can all breathe a little easier knowing he represents the worst that could possibly happen, and that a real person’s fate is, more often than not, something they can control.

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