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The more you repress your emotions, the stronger your elemental eruption attack is going to be. Bottle it up!

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“Knowing everything is too much like knowing nothing; without a story, it’s all just information.”

— Jennifer Egan, The Candy House

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⛤ : / ›› like or reblog if you save/use. and if you want, credit bawkugos ♡

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9jedit  -  https://grafolio.naver.com/creator/detail.grfl?creatorId=9jedit  -  https://twitter.com/9jedit

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Melting Candles Cakes

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Mary Marvel, Wonder Woman and Wonder Girl by Jasmin Darnell

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Dreamscapes

1, 2, 3 by Uroš Novina on Flickr

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4 prisoners immolated themselves protesting the conditions in Virginia

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Trauma and Healing in Children's Media

 I love reading fantasy as much as so many others do, but I cannot be the only to notice the extreme lack of care and appreciation for the abuse, mistreatment and trauma of these characters. Especially in media meant for young adults, teens mostly. From Percy Jackson and Harry Potter to Naruto and Danny Phantom, these varying stories all showcase extreme and painful sources of abuse to their main characters often from their own families that are either completely ignored and even made fun of. Never do we see healing, or the natural results of such torment on these characters. 

Here are just a few examples of the abuses I mentioned... 

Percy's mom doomed her son to misery just by having him, got with an incredibly abusive man to protect her son and keep him near. He was in constant life ending danger for literally years, the center of a prophecy, constantly threatened by the gods who he was actually related to, mistreated by the demigods and forced into terrible situations over and over again. He saw kids his own age and younger die... 

Harry lost his parents, was forced into an abusive home with his so called family for more than a decade. Forced into a cupboard, starved, hit and hurt, told he was worthless and his parents were too. He was forced to save the Wizards over and over despite near death experiences and being treated like garbage by all of the wizards for no reason. He was abandoned by his friends and literally died at some point. He was literally tortured and forced to see people die. 

Danny was forced to act as a hero despite constant threats against his life and well being, terrible friends and parents that wanted to kill his alter ago... neglectful parents at that. 

Naruto is literally all trauma, abused and neglected by all of his peers and the adults around him. He had no friends or allies, betrayed by someone he admired and nearly killed. He had a demon/timebomb in his soul and so on... his parents were killed to save him. The boy is all trauma. 

In all four cases, these kids give everything to the world, altruistically over and over again... they are the center of servile behavior for those that do no deserve their love or appreciation. The people they save and help are often their biggest abusers. 

There is this pervasive idea that trauma makes you stronger, it doesn't healing does. None of these characters got help, just more trauma and neglect! It is a terrible message we send our kids, that you just have to buck up and ignore the pain, sacrificing your needs for others. 

The only example I can think of challenging this is in Percy Jackson where Percy and several others at least point out the abuse and call it out. Percy gets the gods to be good parents, or at least less terrible ones. 

I for one look forward to the day where we get to see a story where the Main character fights for themselves and is not just the center of salvation for others... that would be a revelation, to see someone, especially a kid, being healthily selfish for once... 

So... yeah. 

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"Somewhere along the line, our sewing circle took a strange turn." (The New Yorker, January 27, 2003, by Nick Downes)

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Dragon and Sparrow by Sandara Tang

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The SS Warrimoo, a passenger steamship traveling from Vancouver to Australia, was silently knifing its way across the mid-Pacific waters. The navigator had just finished calculating a star fix and handed the results to Captain John DS. Phillips.

The Warrimoo's coordinates were LAT 0º 31' N, LONG 179 30' W. The date was December 31, 1899. "Know what this means?" First Mate Payton announced, "We're only a few miles from the intersection of the Equator and the International Date Line."

Captain Phillips was prankish enough to seize the opportunity to do the nautical feat of a lifetime. He summoned his navigators to the bridge to double-check the ship's position. He altered his course slightly to focus directly on his target. He then altered the engine's speed.

The calm weather and clear night worked to his advantage. At midnight, the SS Warrimoo rested on the Equator, exactly where it had crossed the International Date Line. The ramifications of this odd arrangement were numerous.

The ship's bow was in the Southern Hemisphere, in the middle of summer. The stern was in the Northern Hemisphere, in the midst of winter. The date on the aft portion of the ship was December 31, 1899. The date on the forward half of the ship was January 1, 1900. The ship experienced multiple days, months, years, seasons, and centuries simultaneously.

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I understand why a lot of fantasy settings with Ambiguously Catholic organised religions go the old "the Church officially forbids magic while practising it in secret in order to monopolise its power" route, but it's almost a shame because the reality of the situation was much funnier.

Like, yes, a lot of Catholic clergy during the Middle Ages did practice magic in secret, but they weren't keeping it secret as some sort of sinister top-down conspiracy to deny magic to the Common People: they were mostly keeping it secret from their own superiors. It wasn't one of those "well, it's okay when we do it" deals: the Church very much did not want its local priests doing wizard shit. We have official records of local priests being disciplined for getting caught doing wizard shit. And the preponderance of evidence is that most of them would take their lumps, promise to stop doing wizard shit, then go right back to doing wizard shit.

It turns out that if you give a bunch of dudes education, literacy, and a lot of time on their hands, some non-zero percentage of them are going to decide to be wizards, no matter how hard you try to stop them from being wizards.

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Supercell, Brownlee, Saskatchewan

herry.with.an.e

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Meteors and Red Sprites l Paul M Smith

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