#because trying to sleep while they're moving around and shit would be... there's a meltdown hiding in that i just know it

[ourceliumnetwork]

good news: the noises i keep hearing outside are NOT intermittent fireworks!

not as good news: the noises i keep hearing outside are RIGHT outside because it's the neighbors doing stuff again because it's the weekend

[femboyclownpierce]

17 (hard mode: it has to be a non-minecraft character) and 23

17. Tell us about your favorite character? what do u mean they have to be non-mc. okay ummm

so. have u heard of this game called omori. im about to spoil tthe hell out of it ok so it follows this teenager named Sunny. 4 years ago he pushed his sister down the stairs onto his broken violin and she accidentally died, whoops! so his boybestfriend basil helped him stage it as a suicide. ever since he's been a shut-in and escaping the real world via maladaptive daydreaming. he sleeps his days away and spends all his time in his dreamworld called Headspace where he plays a version of his 12 y/o self called Omori, and his friends are all still close and his sister is still alive. now he's about to move in 3 days and his bestie and neighbor kel drags him out of the house and the friend group is forced to reconcile, and sunny is forced to face and accept the truth of what happened instead of lying to himself that it didnt.

cool? ok now forget all of that THIS IS ABOUT BASIL. BASIL DESERVES THE WORLD. HE DOES NOTHING BUT SUFFER THE ENTIRE FUCKING GAME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! the kick-off of the plot in headspace is that basil's gone missing, and the gang adventure around trying to find him while they all gradually forget who he is and why they're looking for him. in the real world plot he's been bullied relentlessly by aubrey, who used to be his best friend, and his other friends havent done anything to help. and then sunny shows his face again and basil cant face him, until basil's grandma dies and he has a suicidal meltdown that sunny steps in on and basil tries to kill him instead. "DONT LEAVE ME SUNNY, NOT AGAIN, EVERYONE KEEPS LEAVING ME STOP IT STOP IT STOP IT!!!!" basil lives in denial the same way sunny does, the difference is that basil is an anxious mess as opposed to depressed and dissociative. and basil doesnt get the same happy ending of acceptance that sunny does. there's a "neutral" ending, where you can do all the real world stuff, but instead of going to comfort basil at the end, sunny can go back to sleep and let basil kill himself. from there, either sunny can go to bed and move away the next day or also kill himself. there's no good ending for basil, we dont know if he accepts the truth or if he continues to live in denial. the only other option is to kill himself. he does nothing but suffer and get discarded by his friends, he deserves so much fucking better. he's only 16.

23. Talk about a WIP? ohhhh the one im most excited abt rn is one where i explore my "clownpierce is a porcelain doll" hc :3 im going to explore several key moments in his life; his creation, the first time part of him was broken in a fight, the first time he went too far in punishing someone for breaking him, and then being forced to do something soft on the realm that he physically cannot do because of his jerky ball joints. and then, ofc, shit hitting the fan on the realm and him scaring absolutely everyone :3

here have the first few paragraphs, im really happy w how its turning out!!!

Most people can’t say they remember being born, but Clownpierce does. Well, okay, it’s not a perfect recollection. But it is a recollection nonetheless. His earliest memory is hot. Blindingly hot. A heat he has never since felt. Something he would later learn to be the feeling of flames lapping at his surface, and the smell of something he would learn to be wood burning filling his nose. He remembers feeling soft, and as the time passed…not, anymore.  And then the heat of the flames subsided, and then his Creator let him out. He often wonders if they regret it. He doesn’t remember a lot about his Creator. They taught him how to move and fixed him when he broke. They put a sword in his hand and told him to use it however he saw fit. It should come as no surprise, then, that he killed them. 

distracting asks :)

[living-for-fiction]

I've been putting together a realization over the last several months, since I moved in with my girlfriend and metamours; and since an extremely close, important, but ultimately toxic relationship ended.

I love fiction. (No fucking shit, look at my username.) And when I get into a piece of fiction, I tend to latch onto characters that I identify with. Often they are my favorites - not always, but often. Rarely are they the protagonists or the good guys (on occasion they are) and, if they are the antagonists or bad guys, they are sympathetic. They tend to have a few things in common, though.

They're messy. They often have a good core, or once strived to be good people. Then they were badly hurt, usually for a prolonged period of time, generally by people meant to protect them. They began to hurt others, either intentionally or unintentionally. Sometimes it was in search of a greater good; sometimes not. Sometimes they're redeemed; sometimes they aren't. But they tend to have these traits: either started out good or have a good core, which becomes buried very deeply under trauma; either starts lashing out from pain or making decisions that harm others in a misguided attempt to minimize pain; hurt and misunderstood, but also genuinely have committed atrocities that cannot be undone.

Lotor. Sam Winchester. Catra. Shigaraki. Toga. Castiel. Dabi. Angel Dust, to an extent. These are the characters I can think of off the top of my head that I've connected to like this recently (by recently I mean within like the last 12 years lol).

Anyways, I had a bit of a realization today when I made a throwaway comment about relating to Catra, and it's that... I don't, anymore. Not as strongly, at least. Oh, I have the strong memories of being so consumed in pain and self-loathing, of knowing that I'm hurting people around me and being unable to stop and sometimes bitterly feeling like I shouldn't need to stop because it's not fair that I have to hurt so much alone. Certainly an incredibly unhealthy way to feel, but I felt that way for... honestly, for most of my life. And I think that's a big reason why I connect with the characters I connect to; the ones who scream out their pain and who end up putting misery into the world, even if they started with the desire to put goodness into the world. Because that resonated with me.

And now, I can connect with that feeling more from memory than from actively feeling it.

I'm currently living in a place where I am accepted wholeheartedly, warts and all. Where the things about me that are strange aren't brushed off when they affect me, minimized, looked down on, anything like that. Where when something feels wrong, the response isn't "get over it" "that's not a problem" or "what the fuck is wrong with you" but "we'll figure it out." Where making accommodations is just part of the way we do things rather than some kind of big fucking deal.

Living in a household with three pther neurodivergent people, I no longer feel like no matter what I do I am HURTING others and like I have to repress parts of myself until I stop hurting them or explode and make things worse.

It's not to say it's a utopia. Four neurodivergent adults living together, of course there are times we run into issues - but that would be the case with four neurotypical adults living together. L has meltdowns, J doesn't always communicate well, S tries to take on everything herself, I have memory and sleep issues... but we don't treat these as moral failings. Because they aren't. We give each other grace and understand that no one is trying to hurt anyone else.

I don't have to feel like that hurt, broken THING screaming into an unhearing void and desperately trying to do good while hurting others with my coping mechanisms or even just by being myself.

[crow-of-ohio]

ya okay so I'll give context now

Recently an attempted call-out post was made about me and my girlfriend Nexus on the rry2k blog so I'll just get some misconceptions straightened out:

We left of our own volition after bad personal experiences, we were not kicked off the team.

the "leaks" that happened happened in a private server only with a few friends after I left and I wanted to show off the art I was really proud of that I wasn't going to let them use after I left on grounds of it being mine + wanted to talk about the project with people who I thought weren't going to be looking at it anymore. In addition, Nexus only "leaked" plot points she had never actually proposed to the project manager, as well as a character that was meant for post-canon plot that she revoked permission to use once she left. the rest were done by me and a few of my ex-partners, I assume at least one of which is still on the writing team.

the operator board account was made to drive interaction on the blog and get more eyes on it and only ever posted things that the project leader was frustrated people weren't getting yet, I made it specifically to make the project leader happy. I acknowledge now that it was kind of a shady way to do that, but the characters of Team Switchboard and their interactions with the blog+with other fans were meant to be confined to helping along the plot so we never got stuck at one place or another (which we often did, there were many times asks stopped coming in completely and made the team antsy)

Ultimately rry2k was a project promised to us as something where all the characters would get a moment to shine, but the project manager increasingly locked down on making it all about the character Darnold and wanted to control everyone's story arcs and made it a hostile environment for a lot of the team to work in (I genuinely feel bad for the folks still in that group in that environment, it sounds like people are still miserable if they're bringing this up months after the fact, Nexus and I have moved on)

That post was also unfair to Nexus, she was never an active part of the issue. All she wanted was to write Benrey as a character with depression who was looking for an escape, and wanted his mental health to be treated seriously, but was denied that and made to reduce his character to being, generally unserious comic relief whose plot relevance was only that the other characters had to lug his sleeping body around. I can't stress enough that Nexus is only being treated like this in that post because she's the only person who decided to keep being friends with me after my meltdown and mental health crisis.

In addition, the post claims that we are stealing character designs and concepts from rry2k for future projects. I can only assume this is in reference to Nexus continuing to use "lackadaisy," a character she originally designed and wrote, while updating his design and changing his name to Daisybell. He is not going to be used in any future public projects, and exists in a crack au with a completely different plot that's confined purely to making shit up over discord messages. Daisy is Jonah's character. She can't steal something that was hers to begin with.

yall, it's been months since things went down with that friend group. We were doing our best to put the past behind us and grow as people. Bringing things up now is a petty attempt to ruin the friendships we have now when it looks like we're actually starting to be happy again. I can't express just how petty of a picture this paints of them in my eyes, especially since I already spoke with one of them last month on my birthday to go over why many of my actions while in that friend group were wrong (and I admit that I made a lot of mistakes that hurt a lot of people, but I am genuinely trying to do better now that I've been informed of how exactly many of my actions hurt the people I cared about. I'm using that information to be a better person.)

Thanks for reading my long-ass post

hiiii asking anyone who's seeing unfair claims being made abt me to come and talk to me about it before taking things said about me at face value thanks xoxo

[emersonfreepress]

ROs + MC as camp counselors during a horror movie 😀

oh my godddd 🤣 dear goodness, i skimmed over the first time and was delighted, but now that i’m sitting actually answering this ask, i don’t even know where to begin 😂 this lot as horror movie camp counselors (with a few other filler counselors ofc), ok let’s gooooo

oh but first and foremost, I must address the thing that came to my mind like twenty seconds after starting this answer:

Gabe as Bill from Sleepaway Camp kthxthatsall

Ok now that I've gotten that out of the way, I must start by answering the most important question:

Who is the first to die?

Curt. Because of course he is! Fornicators always die first. I don't make the summer camp horror film rules—the genre does. Everyone thinks he's hungover and sleeping in on the second morning when really he was our opening scene kill, caught unawares while fooling around with a fellow counselor. He could be surprisingly durable in a few horror sub-genres, but definitely not any old school slashers 😂 Whether he has a dignified death or an undignified one in a vulnerable position depends entirely on how trashy the film is.

The Kill: Likely undignified, with his pants down. smdh 😔 it's hard out here for a ho i swear

That means whoever he was caught hooking up with was second to die, BTW, so MCs have been warned! But assuming MC knows better, let's move on to...

(the time to place bets for who makes it to the end credits is now!)

Rain

A filler kill. No one even knows what they're doing here since they clearly hate kids and show no desire to work 😂 They keep to themself and just sketch the surrounding nature. They're the first victim to actually see the creature (because why shouldn't it be a monster?), caught unaware while raiding the pantry at night.

The Kill: Off-screen. They manage to get a hurtful one-liner in before their demise. Good ol' Rain.

Rupan/Rohan and Vivian/Vincent

A two-fer kill. R's spent all of camp so far paired up with Vi on activities and concentrating on bothering them the whole time, in a bid to get them to loosen up enough to actually work well with kids. Vi, on the other hand, is concentrated on getting these little shits to respect them—so it's just a cycle of Vi being humiliated by children and R saving the day (then laughing at them). The two of them are focused on, like, actually being counselors, so they're not paying much attention to the others being lazy or not showing up for shifts or whatever people are complaining about.

The Kills: They're in the woods having a slightly serious argument about R knowing when to let up on Vi's extremely fragile ego and all their noise attracts the creature. They never resolve things because R gets eviscerated in the middle of their apology. Vi runs off in terror but doesn't make it!

Gabe

Gabe is on the verge of a meltdown for all of his screen time 🤣 The cabins are a disaster, the schedule is being completely ignored, the director is acting like everything is fine, these shitty fucking kids won't stop pranking him, and Kile's straight-up fallen off the face of the earth—! Honestly, his plight would be half of the comedy relief. Gabe ends up compensating for everyone else's slacking off (brutal slayings), all the while muttering and swearing about how he wishes people would stop hooking up and gossiping and do some damn work. Frequently spotted urgently stomping across campgrounds, barking orders at a fellow counselor, or barely stopping himself from swearing at children 😂

The Kill: He's just found out someone hasn't shown up for cleaning duty, again, so he takes it upon himself. In reality, that counselor did try to complete their task—they were just interrupted by one very rude, very blood-thirsty monster. Gabe discovers the horrible aftermath but is unfortunate enough to be sharing a room with the beastie. Chomp.

The New Kid

It's hard to include the MC since their potential personalities can be very different... but I think one of the base traits of the MC is, honestly, being nosy. Nosiness is a disadvantage in a slasher flick so the New Kid doesn't last long. You're on the more admin side of counselor work, like Heidi is, so she enlists you in keeping tabs on the counselors. Everything has been chaos but you find yourself distracted by the appearance of shady dealings going on. Jack and Jessie having urgent private talks, Curt still hasn't shown up to flirt with half the others yet. What could it all mean? You're trying to connect the dots to satisfy your own curiosity more than anything, though—if the director isn't concerned, you don't see why Heidi or you should be. Wait, Heidi doesn't even want intel anymore? Have you seen Curt? No—huh. Why are all the kids going home? And what are the adults freaking out about...

The Kill: Taken unawares while listening in on the director and the head chef. Something about a giant, bloody mess in the pantry? What the f—

Jack

Jack is the first to worry about people going missing and he tries to ring the alarm as early as Rain's disappearance. Everyone either wants him to take a chill pill or brushes him off by directing him to work that needs doing, admins included. R and Vi going missing isn't the biggest red flag since he's assumed their winding each other up was just build-up to a fight or a make-out—he's trying to stay out of that lol. The first person to take him seriously is Jessie, who also starts getting truly worried after Curt still hasn't turned up. He's quickly got both Jessie and Heidi on his side and trying to convince the adults to shut down but they... won't listen??

He helps Jessie execute a plan to get the campers home before nightfall and then spends the rest of the last day trying to round up the remaining counselors and inform them the show's over, time to go home—and the ones with their own cars do leave. After that, Jack does all he can to find the others before he has to accept the fact that he, Heidi, and Jess are the only survivors. They meet up, ready to get the fuck out of there—but where the hell are the keys to the van??

The Kill: The search for the car keys turns into a carnage discovery parade as Jack finds corpse after corpse of whoever didn't make it. After giving up on finding the keys in the director's building, he trips over the New Kid's remains (way to blow it, guys) and looks up to a looming shadow and a low, inhuman growl. At least his screams alert Jess and Heidi!

Heidi

Man, this girl thinks she's in a mystery novel. Wrong. Her work mainly has her working with the camp director and other administration peeps but things are way too hands-off and weird this summer. The adults are hiding things, holding hushed meetings, barely looking after the kids or counselors. She can't find her useless brother to bounce ideas off of. Recruiting the New Kid worked a little bit for collecting intel but now they've gone AWOL for some reason... As she realizes that counselors are going missing and not just sneaking around, she starts falling behind on both plots. Do the adults know something? Have people left or been taken? Why is Jessie taking Jack's babbling about a monster in the woods seriously?? The director left? Wait, they all left?? And for fuck's sake—where is her stupid brother?!

The Kill: Heidi's got to find Curt. She's got to. She has a sick feeling he never left and she just—ditches Jessie! She has the grace to apologize but she can't go home without finding her brother. Idk y'all, I think you know how this ends. Heidi speed-searches every last place she can think of in a growing panic, hyper-focused on what she can't accept is a hopeless endeavor. She's so focused she doesn't hear the thing creeping up behind her. She smells the blood first. Gobbled up!

Kile

Fled into the woods the moment Gabe's chore rampage started and spends most of the runtime there! They only came along 'cause Gabe, but he's busy being sucky so they just skip out on work entirely and take some basic camping supplies into the woods lol. They stumble across what's left of R and Vi on their way back to camp a few days later, then book it back to camp, worried. They arrive past dark, just before the climax of the film, and things have gone to complete shit: the campers are gone, the adults seem to have left in a rush—and then they start finding blood trails. Then carnage. They've equipped themself with a decently dangerous, suitably summer campy weapon which is smart! Because they end up using it pretty much immediately when this gnarly, slimy, scaly thing nearly catches them off-guard. Insert Kile fighting a monster they're totally outclassed by, the first full shots of the freaky, practical effects on the monster, etc etc. Kile manages to do actual, serious damage but loses their weapon in the process and has to book it for the van. They don't escape injury either!

Jessie

How did everything go so wrong??? This was supposed to be a good summer but now there are bodies and a monster?!? Jess makes the executive decision, once the director has gone obstructionist, to call the entire emergency contact list and get parents to come pick up their kids, but it's only made possible by coordinating a distraction with Jack. The kids get evacuated and the remaining counselors carpool their ways home, but when she's bracing to be yelled at by the adults... they all just zoom past her and get in their cars—leaving the rest of them there while the final night begins. Jack runs off to find the keys since they're stuck with the camp van as their only way out of here, ok, cool... But then Heidi, who's been getting strangely quiet as things have gone to hell, has an anxiety attack about Curt and—fucking leaves her?! In the dark?! With a monster running around??! It's only moments after Heidi's disappeared from sight that Jess hears Jack screaming, huddled to herself next to the van. Minutes pass, it's totally dark now, and she's a sitting duck...

Until Kile shows up! Nearly giving her a heart attack too since they're covered in blood and—ooze? Ichor?? There's some weird fuckin sludge on them and—oh thank God, they have the keys! ...Wait, they had the keys this whole time!?

The End

Kile's hurt so Jessie drives. Books it the fuck out of there to a fast-paced guitar track and the end credits rolling. —especially now that the priority is getting to a hospital! She handles the van like a madwoman, driving way too fast since now she's got to get to a hospital. It's just a few miles left until they're out of the woods. The credits keep rolling... but the van slows down. Gas.

They're out of gas.

Kile sighs hard. Refueling was their task.

The van slows to a crawl, then a stop. Kile swears viciously. The van is full of pool noodles and random useless shit. Moments of quiet pass until a heavy thud on the roof rocks the van back and forth. Jessie and Kile exchange a look.

Scene cuts to black and we get a mid-closing credits title card.

...

i cannot believe i wrote this much has

[modgirlyreposts-revamped]

Kamiko and Minori are kind of this fangan's naegiri or maybe kuzuhina the way Rian and Alice are its saimatsu, in terms of personalities (Kamiko is cold, calculating and mean, Minori is determined and hardworking but not naively positive, Rian is uncertain of himself, though he's more emotional than Shuichi, and Alice, while more emotionally distant than Kaede, is kind and positive)

Kamiko is basically the cold, shielded person I've told you about before, but I don't think I've explained Minori, so a quick rundown: she has a very "driven by sheer force of will" personality. She's brave, outgoing and analytical, but also compassionate and always willing to help. She basically felt as though everyone around her was just letting things go to shit without closure or justice, so she got her start as a detective by solving a missing person case in her area, successfully proving the victim had been kidnapped by his abusive girlfriend but may have still been alive, and giving the police her findings saved the boy. Minori was renowned as a massive hero, especially for the way she promised the boy he didn't owe her anything for saving him but that she couldn't stand the refusal to "dwell on the bad" like that wasn't almost all there was. She isn't an optimist, really, but she wants to believe she can fix things, and she fears being helpless more than anything, even death.

Minori's hardworking personality endears her to Kamiko, who challenges her to push herself harder as Minori does to her. They develop a mutually beneficial relationship that grows into infatuation, as Minori is either really bad at hiding her attraction to Kamiko or just doesn't care (she's bad at it.) Kamiko, however, feels like she can't grow attached to someone else, because focusing on anything but her academic talent will cause her to stumble and fall and lose everything. Minori thinks if anything, anything at all, she deserves to have the one normal teenage experience of falling in love, which kind of drives a rift in their relationship that comes through in Minori's frustration with those around her, as after chapter 2 she has a completely justified meltdown, screaming at everyone that they're all idiots dooming themselves to their own deaths with their selfishness, which is especially directed at Kamiko and Heiran. With a proper understanding of Minori's character, that whole sequence becomes really upsetting. Especially with the notion that the stress of it all literally makes her physically ill as she's later found in one of the bathrooms throwing up. It's literally so much, she puts herself through so fucking much trying to save everyone else.

The real tragedy is, though, after chapter 2, she realizes how deep this whole thing runs. It makes it apparent that she is not going to find the mastermind and make it out alive, and she has to tread carefully to make sure the others don't die because of her. She withdraws and is unsure, just trying to get from day to day without telling anyone she's on the verge of giving up. The fear of giving up is her only driving force, and she wants to make sure she does something, anything- it's the only reason she can survive. If she ever stopped moving, if she ever stopped trying, she may as well die- and she probably would. It would be a slow and painful death on so many levels, so she keeps pressing forward, keeps searching, keeps fighting, keeps watching over everyone. She's quick to forgive Kamiko after she's apologized to Masumi for her behavior, not wanting to hold grudges. She doesn't want to be complicit in anything bad happening to Kamiko because she didn't care enough. She has to help everyone, she tells herself. She has to save them. Is she supposed to just look away from the bad? She fucking can't. She has to save them.

The last three nights before her death, she sleeps with Kamiko. Not in a suggestive sense, in a literal one. It happens simply- Minori knocks on her door gently just before nighttime, and despite Kamiko's hesitation to attachment, she agrees to let Minori share a room with her. One night, then the next, then the next, and then on the fourth she's gone. They find her floating in a water heater.

Kamiko burns her hands trying to fish her corpse out of the 130 degree water. She barely manages to grab her coat, but her clothes and hair are so waterlogged she can barely lift her at all, and can't get her out of the water. She only tries once before the pain is too much to bear. She's devastated, but can't show it. She refuses to show it. She can't give up. She can't stop moving. She can't stumble and fall now. She's already lost Minori, she can't risk figuring out what else she could possible have left to lose.

The nighttime announcement has gone off. They aren't allowed to investigate. Kamiko is a panicked mess, trying to figure out how to fix it. Every instinct in her body is telling her to retreat.

When she gives in to it, Rian walks her to her dorm. She loved Minori, she loved her so fucking much, but it wasn't enough. Minori's determination wasn't enough, Kamiko's love wasn't enough, it wasn't enough. It devastates Kamiko. All she fucking wants is to get Minori back.

Even years later in the sequel, Kamiko is suspected by other characters of being the mastermind looking to avenge Minori's death at the hands of everyone who failed to save her, leading to a scene that has lowkey crushed me to write where Kamiko, still emotionally repressed and just trying to move forward and live a better life, breaks down being reminded of it all, and admits she would have done anything she could to save her. Looking back on it, she wishes with everything in her that she'd just let her hands burn to useless wrecks to get Minori's corpse out of the water heater, or gone with her when she left early in the morning to help her, or just grabbed her by the arm and asked her to stay, but nothing, nothing will ever be enough, nothing will bring her back- Kamiko failed her, and nothing she could do would or could ever avenge her because Minori's death was her failure. She sees it as a failure, and she has held it against herself from the moment they opened the lid of that tank and found her body inside.

The devastation it causes her literally makes her contemplate suicide out of sheer grief. When Rian goes after Alice, she sees for a moment in the heat waves and the terror in Rian's eyes the night they found Minori dead. She sees herself in Rian's desperation, and sees Minori in the burning heat he runs back into to save Alice. It's why she stays. She can't run anymore. She can't evade and just try to survive. She has to be there. She'll wish for the rest of her life that she could have done that for Minori, her first real love, but she follows what Minori would have done in that moment.

In her future design, she wears a blue jacket similar to the green one Minori always wore. The loss weighs on her constantly. The memory hurts, but it comforts her. She knows she's lucky her hands weren't damaged by that one moment of stupidity she dodged out of- Alice and Rian, bearing possibly permanent burn scars, weren't as fortunate. She will forever wish she did. She doesn't want Minori to just be a memory, not yet. Sometimes it feels like she'll forever be that sixteen year old girl with braided hair, her face burning bright red an avoiding eye contact as Minori laughed, gently clasping Kamiko's hand in her own. Minori was everything to her. She has to move on, but she'll love her forever.

She watches the fire, begging to herself that Rian at least will come out. She can't leave. Her own bare-bones survival has taken backseat. She needs them.

I went from 😀 to 😦 so quickly, since I apparently forgot that this is a fan made Danganronpa-

I relate to Kamiko a lot, so that’s most likely why Minori’s body discovery got me fucked up, since if that happened to someone I loved that much, I would react almost exactly like Kamiko

[drdemonprince]

palindrom3

@drdemonprince So in that case, what happens when someone legitimately can't communicate their wants and needs, like with my grandma who had Alzheimer's and couldn't communicate in any way? How would the supportive decision making model work? It sounds great in the other instances you mentioned, and I'm all for it otherwise.

Great question! I think the really important thing to keep in mind here is that supportive decision making and disability justice in general are rooted in the ideas of body autonomy and respect. Those values can carry over into everything we do, and all policies we adopt should flow from them.

One thing we can think about here is how much people with Alzheimer's or dementia or high-supports-needs intellectual disabilities demonstrably cope better when they are not restrained, forced to do things that make them uncomfortable, and when they are heard and respected (including by respecting their behavior, because behavior is communication). Even if a person can't talk anymore, they have needs and reactions that are visible for a very long time, and deserve to have those feelings respected.

If a person's Alzheimer's has progressed to the point where they can't speak, can barely eat, have trouble navigating their home, etc, of course we can't expect them to make decisions about their 401k rebalancing or whatever. Asking them to go to the polls and vote for a political candidate would be cruel and unhelpful to them, and so would many other tasks.

That also means they're kind of past the point where they could even "hurt themselves" by making decisions regarding those matters in the way that people who advocate for conservatorships like to claim is necessary. Like, someone who can't read or work a phone anymore isn't going to be able to give all their money away to some smooth talker trying to scam them out of their retirement funds. If they were lucid enough to make that kind of decision, a supported decision maker could help explain certain concepts and risks to them. But if they can't even do the task anymore, they don't need a conservatorship to lock down their funds or tec.

Even once a disabled person loses the ability to engage in many complex tasks, or even to speak, we can still take notice of the person's actual priorities and interests and support them in meeting their own needs. For example, do they gravitate toward music? Do they pantomime changing an infant's diapers and rocking them to sleep? Does being around pets soothe them? A supportive decision maker can still follow the needs and preferences of this person, and advocate for them to have as much time and freedom doing the things that feel good to them as possible. They can get them babydolls to play with, put on music for them to listen to and help buy them more CDs, make arrangements for them to spend time around animals, etc.

A supportive decision maker can also help advocate for the person in medical environments. Are they having a meltdown while a doctor is trying to give them a vaccine? The supported decision maker can help articulate that the patient is obviously distressed and needs space, and help them leave the area safely. They can help guide them when they have a desire to walk around without a) locking them away in a room, worsening their agitation, or b) letting them wander without any guidance, out into the road.

The supportive decision maker is still helping the disabled person make their own decisions. It's just that what a person with that kind of disability values and what they make decisions about is different. They don't give a shit about their 401k rebalancing anymore and that's fine. They do want to be comfortable and free and talked to lovingly and to be able to do pleasant, comforting things.

If a person can move around, make noise, withdraw from touch, cry, lash out, smile, swallow, spit, reach, or laugh, they can still communicate their preferences and needs. And we can still do our best to listen to those things, honor what a person is trying to tell us with them, and support them in navigating what they want.

What do you mean when you talk about anti-psychiatry? Because on the surface that sounds like not getting treatment or not learning how to manage psychological disorders, and that seems like a VERY bad idea.

It's anti-psychiatry as an oppressive network of control. I don't know why people always assume that critiquing a power structure means you're saying individual people shouldn't do what they need and want to do to manage their wellbeing within said structure but those things are not the same. I'm an anarchist. I'm for disabled liberation. i'm literally never going to claim to know what an individual person should do.

If you support neurodiversity as a concept, you already support anti-psychiatry! It is literally an anti-psychiatry perspective. So is supporting self-diagnosis. Or informed consent approaches to drugs or to trans identity. Getting homosexuality removed from the DSM is an anti-psychiatry move. So is opposing forced institutionalization. So is opposing conservatorships.

The radical mental health subreddit is a great read on this. As is Nobody's Normal by Roy Grinker, Psychiatric Hegemony by Bruce Cohen, all of Jesse Meadow's writing at sluggish.substack.com, and also... all of my work.