fairandfatalasfair

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pride month psa from a librarian!

if your local public library celebrates pride month, let them know you support that. if they've posted a picture of their display on social media, leave a like or a comment. if you see it in person, leave a comment card. if there's a program, even if you can't attend it, find some way to contact the library director to say you think it's great they're having something.

people protest pride in all kinds of ways. they don't want queer books where people can find them. community support where library leadership can see it makes all the difference. be as vocal as you can.

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some love for my girl niko! she looks like she's watched every episode of glee

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"The Alpilles" and "Mont Gaussier", Yoann Crépin

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A cosmic tribute to my current favourite comment in YouTube history

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i was at an event last night in california and i went to the bar to order wine bc wine was like, a thing, and i looked at the menu and saw i was completely out of my depth bc idk any wine names, so i turned to my right and there was a man in a gorgeous suit standing at the bar beside me and i said “do you know anything about wine?” and he said “a little, yes!” i told him i liked white and dry wines and asked if he’d order for me. he asked the server for two glasses and had one poured for each of us and then he clinked his glass on mine but he didn’t take a sip, he just watched me taste mine and then he asked what i thought and i said “it’s pretty good, but like i said, i wouldn’t know.” he laughed and told me to have a good time & i walked away. fifteen minutes later i found out he’s the winemaker.

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Notre-Dame-des-Neiges, Montréal

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dead boy detectives (7/??) + Text Posts (edwin ver.)

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My piece for Asidian for the 2025 @fandomtrumpshate Craft Bazaar!

This was my first time doing pottery for a charity auction, and I had a GREAT time. Asidian liked the style of my fossil pots and is into Dead Boy Detectives, so we tossed around a couple of options and came up with this design.

...And then due to various life and studio delays I didn't get it completed until late May and didn't get it back from the kiln until early June. At which point I hastened to get it mailed off before I left the next day on a trip, which is why these pictures are in poorer light than usual: I had to take them at night and then get the package ready to go out in the morning, rather than waiting for good sunlight. Sorry about that!

Anyway, I'm honored and delighted to have gotten the chance to make this in thanks for Asidian's donation to a good cause!

Progress pics below the readmore:

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Happy Pride!! 🏳️‍🌈 It felt like the right time to finally draw the Dead Boy Detectives, which was long overdue considering I've been basically watching the show on repeat since it came out. Now to draw the Cat King....

Prints and stickers will be in my Etsy shop!

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back to pondering my orb (the throughline of consent and bodily autonomy in DBDA and how crystal, niko, charles, edwin, monty, and jenny are all united by the experience of being physically controlled by another person with bad intentions)

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I'm doing as much good as I can, so eventually if I go back to hell, I can make my case for leniency.

Now, doesn't the truth feel better? You never, ever, ever have to pretend with me. I like your secret parts.

I'm ashamed. It's selfish.

Edwin Payne - Dead Boy Detectives - The Case of the Lighthouse Leapers (1x04)

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Hmm. Thinking about Edwin and Learned Helplessness

To rapidly summarize a complex psychological concept (and skipping over some nuance we’ve discovered recently), Learned Helplessness is basically when an animal internalizes the idea that they have no way to escape/control an unpleasant stimulus or situation, and stops trying to do so.

The classic example is with an electrified floor and two rats. The floor shocks the rats periodically. One of the rats has a way to escape or end the shock: by jumping over a barrier, pushing a lever, etc. The other does not. The rat that has a way to escape will keep trying to do so, even if it doesn’t always work. However, the rat that reliably has no way to avoid the shocks will stop trying. They’ll eventually stop looking for ways to get away and just lie down and let it happen.

And here’s the key part: the rat that gives up will stay given up even if you later present them with a clear way to escape. Once a rat has accepted that there’s no way to avoid the shocks, you can give them a lever, let them jump over a barrier, or just straight up open the cage, and they’ll just keep lying there.

Experiments have shown it’s possible to retrain animals who have acquired learned helplessness to believe they have control, but it requires active work from an external source. Something like physically lifting them out of the cage repeatedly to show them that they can leave and that leaving stops the shocks. If you leave them alone, the rats will keep just sitting there getting shocked right next to an open door forever.

So where does this rather depressing and fairly unethical concept relate to Edwin, you ask

Well - remarkably enough, Edwin doesn’t seem to have fully 100% acquired what one might call generalized learned helplessness. He keeps trying to escape, eventually succeeding after 73 years. But! There are two sources of nuance here

One: he clearly does canonically experience some form of learned helplessness, because that’s exactly what he expresses to Charles when huddled against the wall in Hell. There’s no use trying, I run and it catches me, over and over, you should leave without me because there is no point in me trying to escape. That’s learned helplessness in a nutshell.

How he was able to get past that to escape in 1989, I’m not sure, but it seems to fluctuate for him from moment to moment. (He has it badly in that scene, but the previous scene, when he first sees Charles before getting eaten, he seems to have hope).

Two, and this is less canonical and more me spinning off canon-compliant thoughts, he might have a more specific learned helplessness response going on, as opposed to just a generalized one. Because running, trying to escape, can delay the pain. But fighting? Fighting does nothing but make things worse.

We talk a lot about him freezing, but I’m imagining him, in the first while after Hell, when a threat gets too close, just… going limp. Because he’s had 73 years of continuous torture conditioning him that running may help delay being caught but once he’s caught, there’s nothing he can do. Flailing around just gets him more pain, gets a slower death instead of a quick one. Relaxing his muscles makes it hurt less when they’re torn off his bones. He’s just loosening into the fall, is all.

Charles figures this out pretty quickly. It’s hard to miss your partner just… flopping down on the ground every time he’s about to get injured.

He starts finding ways to accommodate it. First by keeping an eye out and jumping in whenever Edwin goes into Accept Death Mode, but then trying to pre-empt it. Keeping Edwin back, at the edge of the fight, so Edwin never gets close enough to the threat for his learned instincts to kick in, which over time turns into a fixed dynamic of “Charles as brawn”, and over more time Edwin picks up offensive magic so he can stay at the back but still fight.

Charles realizes at some point that Edwin won’t fight for himself but will, occasionally, fight for Charles, and starts trying to leverage that, putting himself in danger to make Edwin start fighting so Edwin will learn he can fight. Edwin puts a very harsh stop to that, once he figures out it’s happening, but it remains true, that Edwin will fight for Charles but not himself. (We see him try to throw a punch at Esther after Esther tosses Charles, in canon, but not, at any Post-Hell point that I can recall, when anyone tries to hurt him.)

Edwin stops collapsing, eventually, after a lot of work from him and Charles, starts just freezing instead, and to other people that freezing would be Bad but it’s a step up, for Edwin. Eventually he starts even being able to still move a bit, and talk - like when he puts a hand over Crystal’s mouth and mutters an explanation to her before freezing, with the Misery Wraith, and… and when he just stands there and keeps talking when the Cat King rocks up to him and puts him in a binding spell. He still doesn’t try to stop the threat, doesn’t fight or even run, once it’s already close, but he doesn’t become completely incapacitated, either.

And that’s about where he’s at, by 2024. Charles is still trying to work on him, but they’re still at a point where Edwin physically can not defend himself from a nearby threat: hence the failed boxing lesson. Charles wants him to be able to physically fight, and he may even want that himself, but he can’t, can only throw a punch to protect Charles. He can’t even properly swing at Charles with boxing gloves, because either Charles isn’t a threat, in which case Edwin doesn’t want to attack him, or he is, in which case Edwin can’t attack him. (There’s no in-between space in his head for “putting force behind a hit without either of you being in danger”.)

Anyway. Yeah. That’s my thought, I guess, is the boys developing their role-division because of Edwin’s learned helplessness, and Charles working with him to both accommodate it and try to decondition it over time, but only able to get so far, even after 35 years, because it was conditioned into him over more than twice that time and a lot more forcefully than Charles can do.

But it’s progress.

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edwin being attacked by doves. enjoy

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thinking about the fact that the WW1 ghost in ep 1 represents a possible future for Edwin if he hadn't died and the fact that Hope Devlin represents a possible future for Charles if he hadn't died.