Love Lockdown (Patreon)

Topher finds traditional dating to be a skin-crawling idea. He can’t wrap his head around how anyone can do it without getting bored, or feeling trapped. It’s a bit like only being able to listen to just one song, and some people choose to marry their partner! Locking themselves together forever! Get married and buy an overpriced house in the boring ass suburbs and turn out tiny future wage slaves? Oh, no. Topher would rather die.

I haven’t shown it much before, but Topher can be a bit of a contrarian, pretentious butthole sometimes. And he does say “normie” unironically, lol

Topher is promiscuous and pansexual and does indeed have trust issues. People getting close to him make him feel suffocated, so he keeps folk at a distance and avoids relationships that last longer than say, a week. ”Settling down”, at least the way Topher sees it, feels like a fate worse than death. Toph would much rather maintain his life as a radio personality and (underappreciated, in his opinion) musician, meeting new people and and having many various rolls in the hay/music festival tent/bedroom/couch/random bathroom stall. Dating is a scam, and so is love.

….All that said, Topher does have a handful of friends and partners that he does like enough to have repeat performances with. One such person is Mal here, short for Malika. A quiet, ultra-chill trans leopard with both melanism and gigantism, Mal finds Topher pretty entertaining, in more ways than one. Mal is one of the few people that can call Toph on his bullshit without him getting all yappy and surly about it. Mal and Toph are not dating, and they’re certainly not exclusive, but they are close friends (with benefits, obviously) that can count on each other for just about anything (read: Toph crashes on Mal’s couch to sulk and brood and complain a lot).