Harmless Free Radicals

From The Inmara
The logo for Harmless Free Radicals, both for the webcomic and the actual team of system members, the HFR.

Harmless Free Radicals refers to both the central webcomic and overarching story of all our fictional works, and to the group of system members who volunteer to trouble shoot inner-system conflicts, the HFR.

The website harmlessfreeradicals.com currently hosts all of our comics projects, including most back issues of the original comic, a newer chapter that is in hiatus, and Systems' Out!. The Epic of Sally Robertson, also in hiatus, is hosted there as well, but redirects to its own domain name.

Systems' Out! is our current project, set in the future of the Harmless Free Radicals timeline.

Origin

On July 31 of 2000, we published the first page of a webcomic, originally titled The Chronicles of Fenmere the Worm, that would later that year be titled Harmless Free Radicals. This project quickly became the center of all of our creative work and efforts.

When we started this project, we were also reading a lot of mythology, and Irish mythology in particular. This definitely influenced some of our decision making, and we were idolizing the concept of Finn McCool and the Finnians (Fionn mac Cumhaill and the Fenians). So, in the comic, the Harmless Free Radicals slowly became a group of people coerced by Fenmere into working on her behalf to fulfill her schemes of uniting the disparate factions of the Ktletaccete, the Outsiders, and the Children of Akailea as they appeared in the comic, and to find a way to survive the eventual destruction of their world by realizing that they were comic book characters and using the magic of the suspension of disbelief to exit the imaginary world and enter the outside world.

Upon outlining and scripting the last pages of these stories, in which Fenmere's plan succeeds, we came out to ourselves as trans and plural in a rather forceful and trauma induced way.

In the process, we learned that we were in fact the characters in our comics, and that we'd actually finally achieved what we'd set out to do originally by convincing each other through completion of the story to shed our internalized sanism and transphobia.

Mounting dysphoria and c-PTSD were the overall driving forces, however. We were at the end of our limits, and one reason we finished outline the story when we did was because we were afraid we were going to die by our own hands very soon, and wanted to get it written down for someone to read. Still, the story itself was instrumental in our subsequent survival.

Plans

Our current plans are to complete Systems' Out! first, then to review the abandoned prequel comics and consider finishing them, with the Epic of Sally being highest priority.

These plans are subject to change, due to outworld circumstances, disabilities, and our ability to work out the problematic elements worked into the stories that we no longer wish to be in them.

Cast

Links to the listed cast members lead to their system member's pages.

Cast Members of the Original Comic Included:

Cast Members of Epic of Sally Included:

Cast Members of Systems' Out! Currently Include: