Twinn Swan

When I wrote these lines for After the Catfish, I was thinking about the quiet, devastating violence of conditional love.

The heart of the story rests on a dynamic inspired by the classic archetype of the Crane Wife. In traditional Japanese folklore, a creature plucks her own feathers to build a life for the man who saved her—a narrative so often romanticised as ultimate devotion. But I wanted to look directly at what sits beneath that dynamic: the slow, deliberate act of human extraction.

The protagonist’s journey was inspired by a true story of a man who masked his own insecurity as devotion. Three months into the relationship, the woman saw the truth of their incompatibility and asked to leave. Rather than honour her wisdom, he resorted to desperate pleading to force her to stay—not out of love, but out of a parasitic need to possess a life and spirit he could never generate on his own.

He knew she was unhappy.

Yet, day after day, he continued to take.

He drew from her vitality, her grace, and her patience without ever offering reciprocity.

It was a gradual emptying out.

Stripped of every layer until she had nothing left to protect herself, she was abandoned to absolute isolation—destitute, exhausted, and undone by his relentless taking.

When a person is pushed past the brink of human fairness, earthly entreaties become useless. Left with nothing, she turns away from the mortal plane and pleads directly to the Naga for justice—calling upon elemental forces to balance a karmic debt that he refused to pay.

We often mistake persistence for commitment, or romanticise the urge to hold on. But to trap someone in a relationship while knowingly draining them is an act of complete cowardice. It is the refusal to face one’s own emptiness, choosing instead to tether another soul to a hollow foundation.

After the Catfish is about the point where exploitation ends and the balance is finally called due. To force someone to remain, to take until they are hollow, violates the most fundamental law of existence: one can never possess another, one should never bind another.