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IM BACKKK WITH SOME DOODLES OF AN OLD HYPERFIXATION AWAKENED

I forgot tumblr existed lowkey

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and i present to you, messy lesbians

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I miss these freaks

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catradora was a gateway drug for toxic yuri

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the difference between their reactions to john falling is killing me 😭😭😭

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The West Chesapeake Valley Thunderbolts!! ⚡️💛 i finally finished these silly guys for charms 🫶

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Harpy Hare, where have you buried all your children?

You can't keep them all caged

They will fight and run away

Mother, tell me, so I say

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There's something about the idea of Charles loving the way Edwin moves and speaks that heals me.

Like, Edwin was probably murdered in large part because he moved in a more "effeminate" way. He sashays. He moves his arms loosely at his sides. He has Little Hand Motions™. And, yeah, he definitely tried to hide this when he was alive if his stiff movements in the episode 1 flashback were anything to go by!

But in the end, we know that's why he was targeted. He wasn't running after men or coming out because a) it was 1916 and b) he is Edwin and Edwin's... not the most emotionally open person in the world.

But then Charles comes along. And, as we see in the show, he just stares adoringly at Edwin whenever he says something cunty or snaps his fingers like ta-daa! or spins around or pivots and walks like he's about to slay the boots house down.

He's not girlish or cringey or [insert slur here!] He's graceful! He moves with dignity! He's elegant and delicate and beautiful!

In the flashback where they met, Edwin's movements are still compact. It's 35 years of love and adoration that made him more comfortable moving in ways that his peers killed him for. And idk, this is just one of my favourite things about Payneland that I feel people don't talk about enough

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In Pride month, I think it's important to remind you of this iconic dialogue. You don't have to talk about who you are if you don't want to❤️

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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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alive boy Charles for you. oh to be a teen boy in the 80s applying makeup in a grimy bathroom at a ska show because you know your parents would never let you put it on beforehand at home

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Boris Zadvytsky - Lights (1964)

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i'm never stanning a pop band again holy fucking shit

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hold on a fucking second. delaware is a state?? i thought it was a river? or is the river more important than the state? why don't i know this? (i should mention i don't like in america, i'm just confused)

there is delaware (state) and delaware (river) 

both are equally strange

the state is a tiny little cryptid thing

the rive is a monster that spans new york, pennsylvania, new jersey and delaware. also washington crossed it once and that was like kinda a big deal i guess. like crossing the rubicon in rome.

the state tries to me more important with its “im the first state!!!” bs (seriously its even on the fucking license plates) but we all know. its the river.

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you balance the catholic guilt & you still eat too many servings of pasta. you split the pomegranate but you think of the lord jesus and his guts spilled across your dining room table. yesterday was father's day and you went to church. your father is also a deacon. he wants you to marry a nice man one day, when the lesbianism wears off.

you are religiously traumatized, probably, but also the world is in absolute chaos. you feel guilty all the time about not being endlessly informed - about the mini breaks you take between in-person activism & volunteer work and doomscrolling through online news articles. you feel guilty you dropped a sweater on the ground. you feel guilty you cannot afford rent. you feel guilty, and you quite actually feel guilty that you feel guilty.

your father isn't a tall man, but he is good at being imposing. yesterday was hard. all father's day activities are. you watched him radicalize in the last 10 years, moving from a man who had some ignorant views to - whatever this is. he crowed at you that 250,000 people showed up to trump's military parade. you have seen the pictures and think that it's very unlikely there were more than 100k. but your father has no shame. your father just says the thing without checking it.

you have a conspiracy theory that, in some small part, the parade was also to rebrand june as military appreciation month. how often they have said why is there no veteran's month, even though there is. the white house's stance on pride this year was that they did not want to acknowledge something that "only affects 7% of the population." you don't know where they got that number, but it's guilt-free. it's just, like, out there. they get to just say things. you can't even fucking imagine.

you haven't grown up. you still wear the 2014 tumblr style shit sometimes. you are still on tumblr. you are still thinking about girls and "holy holy holy" and it always does feel magical and rebellious and incredible to kiss her. nothing is new about love until it is your love, and then it is impervious. and yet - still you feel stuck, and guilty, and the acid in your stomach refuses to settle. all the yearning and the stupid shit, and the fucking guilt.

you make a little poem in your notes app. you make your hands into a little prayerful steeple. your mother tells you that you make yourself crazy. you have a running joke with your friends that if you had no mental illnesses, you'd be unstoppable.

but when you kiss her, you feel it. when you buy groceries. when you forget to text back - you feel it. the little thing inside of you, always fucking chipping away at things.

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I’m dreaming of the future.

In it, you don’t have a face. You are a warm body to the side of me, close but not too close. The molecules of my body are twitching, shying away like a kicked dog.

I’m so miserable all the time, I confess. I can never escape it. You must notice. I stop in the middle of streets and clutch at my eyes, knuckles in my cheek. The enormity of it disgusts me. What do I have to be miserable about?

I knew I liked you as soon as I talked to you. You described, in a halting, anxious way, how you weren’t really sure what you wanted with your life. How you would probably join the army, so they’ll take care of you for a while. As a cook, probably --- you were too gentle for the battlefield. The banality of your existence mesmerised me. I knew you didn’t listen to music with the volume piercing as you walked home from school. You were steady. You were a blank slate. I knew that when you closed your eyes at night, you wouldn’t dream.

What do you have to be miserable about? You ask. Everything. Anything. There are genocides everywhere I look. There are ecosystems dying. There are children dying in Africa. America. Europe. They’re burning down people. Everything is horrible horrible horrible. And worse, there are essays I can’t write, poems I can’t read. Sometimes I can’t get out of bed. Sometimes I lie there, marinating in my own sweat, feeling my eyes rot out of my eyeballs. Sometimes I think I’ll just let it happen. Liquid evaporating out of me until I am skin and bone and sinew. Goodbye, goodbye, contributing nothing except poetry that totters after others’ footsteps, resonating with no one.

Everything I write is a knockoff of something else. When someone tells me they’re a poet, my heart sinks to my throat. Everyone wants to be a poet. Everyone can be a poet. That’s what’s wonderful about poetry. It’s so fucking annoying. You can get as good as you want with enjambments and rhyming, and then a thirteen-year-old-nobody will scribble something on bathroom tiles that knocks your socks off. It's horrible.

I’m tired of being miserable. I inform you. But misery is what I’m made out of. If I’m not miserable, there’ll be nothing left.

You look at me. You don't get it. I didn't expect you to. It’s what I liked about you in the first place.

I’m dreaming of a future. I want you to be in it. I don’t see how you’ll possibly fit. What will I talk to you about? Football games? Dishes? Do I teach you how to cook? Will you listen to me if I tell you about the fundamental injustices of natural selection? Does the misery matter to you?

Alright. Alright. Sure. You’re so strung tight. You are a warmth to my left side, not touching. If I don’t reach out, you are both there and not. If I never reach out, I’ll never find out.

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'Someplace Quiet'

This piece was partly inspired by a scene from the Demon Slayer series where the protagonist (Tanjiro Kamado) find himself in a dream sequence wreathed in wisteria flowers as he wrestles his sanity and sense of self.

For collectors interested in this work, please feel free to contact sherri@coreyhelfordgallery.com

#brbchasingdreams

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