#- which is especially frustrating for him because the lack of control and his inherent distrust of most people fuel his paranoia-

[spontaneousglitterbees]

[roobylavender]

considering what you have spoken about regarding selina do you also get frustrated with like…i cant quite explain it but sometimes especially in more recent years shes been posed or positioned like some sort of damsel that needs a big strong man to save her and like im not saying she should be portrayed with the “hollywood level feminism” for lack of a better term im just think about how old versions of selina would have hated that. like im just thinking of anytime in the reeves movie where bruce grabs her or forces her mouth shut or even when he didnt allow her to kill falcone and im just thinking she should claw the fuck out of him for that. i just miss a version of selina who wouldnt allow anyone to walk all over her personal autonomy like that

oh absolutely! in fact this is specifically why i can't stand loeb's take on her character lol (and as we both know that was a significant point of reference for the reeves film). it's really jarring to transition from her volume one and two canon to the long halloween / dark victory / when in rome. i think a lot of people tend to latch onto these books because tim sale's art is to die for and it's obv hard not to enjoy a good murder mystery. in that aspect they're still books i can enjoy in isolation. but i find it very difficult to enjoy them as a selina fan specifically because in every single one it's like she's looking for solace and security in a man and i'm not sure why. like what was so bad about her original backstory of having a deadbeat dad (whether you ascribe to the volume one or volume two version of him) and why did she need to go looking for her "real" father in carmine falcone. why did she need to seek out temporary boytoy relief in italy. why did she dream about being saved by bruce. none of it really has a reason other than to create a "lack" in her for the sake of it being there, because she'd never needed a man like that before in her post-crisis narrative. as you mentioned it was quite to the contrary and she was fiercely independent and protective of her own peace, esp from men. when she felt empty or without a connection or lifeline to someone real, it was mostly about people like maggie or holly or arizona. her people

what i think it ultimately comes down to are two things: the first thing is the diminishment of her post-crisis origins. after all, it's convenient to ignore how distrustful selina is of people, and of men with power at their leisure to abuse specifically, when her post-crisis origins are no longer relevant to her personal characterization. although selina's status as a sex worker is more prominent now, it was more or less completely swept under the rug for the bulk of volume two. loeb also refused to engage with it in any capacity. it only really resurfaced with the conclusion to volume two because it drew direct parallels to how we initially found her in volume one, and then brubaker expanded on it once again in his take on the character, which was notably juxtaposed against a pre-existing romance with bruce and brings me to the second thing. i've already waxed about this at length so this may very well be recap but i really don't think selina's lack of control over her personal autonomy can be divorced of the modern portrayal of the romance. when selina looking for security and understanding and comfort in bruce is what drives the romance forward there's not much room to maintain her original values and guarded demeanor, if not her outright defensiveness and hostility. a lot of people look at the extensive trauma selina has experienced and argue that she deserves to be in a relationship with someone who allows her to let those walls down. this isn't incorrect in theory. but it does repeatedly ignore who she is. it's kind of like the point i was making about bruce yesterday. exploring the inherently abusive nature of robin or of bruce's right to his children in light of that fact is interesting to do, but the actual execution has rarely managed to take into account who bruce actually is

for however nice it might be for selina to let her walls down romantically and look for solace in bruce—and i say this mostly for the sake of argument, personally i would argue against its necessity—it's realistically not something she's actually going to do. at least not as willfully as she's been portrayed to. realistically she's going to make it extremely hard, which if anything is precisely the appeal. i love it when selina gives bruce a hard time. i love that it's not supposed to be easy or maybe even a possibility for him to win her over bc there's so much about his own ideological stances that's flawed and in opposition to her own. she doesn't have to be any less unrelenting in her principles and worldview for that romance between them to be compelling bc at the end of the day the entire crux of it is that against all odds bruce cares. for however wrong he thinks she might be in a given moment or in her stance against the government, he knows who she is and how hard she's fought and what she's survived and it makes him sympathetic to her because she's real. she's a wonderful character through which to explore the logical limits of bruce's self-righteousness and categorization of crime, as well as a wonderful mirror to hold up to his face as he starts to ask himself whether what he's doing is really the only means of keeping the city safe. and the novelty of it all is that you don't have to sacrifice her character for any of that to be true. writers have simply deluded themselves into believing that they have to and that's why we are where we are today

[ao3feed-danganronpa]

Stop It. Get Some Help.

read it on the AO3 at https://ift.tt/8CzGRxc

by calculatingMinutiae

"[...] headcanon that kokichi kinda. for several reasons has a bit more intense a time than most of his classmates and sometimes he Needs to sleep at arbitrary times during the school day. if he wont do it voluntarily he'll just kinda faint- which is especially frustrating for him because the lack of control and his inherent distrust of most people fuel his paranoia- and over time he designates a couple of Probably Secure places around campus that he can sleep if his dorm is too far."

 After the hijacking and spectacular failure of the Talent Acquisition Program Pilot at Hope's Peak Academy, the 79th class is left to pick up the pieces. Nobody— not even the bravest, most "talented" among them— emerged from the simulation unscathed. The difference now lies in how they deal with it. [Primarily a series of comics on tumblr, will port to Ao3 at a later date.]

Words: 3502, Chapters: 1/1, Language: English

Series: Part 1 of The Talent Acquisition Program Pilot (Post-game V3 HPA AU)

Fandoms: New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing, Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences

Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings

Categories: Gen, M/M

Characters: Oma Kokichi, Momota Kaito

Relationships: Momota Kaito & Oma Kokichi, Momota Kaito/Oma Kokichi

Additional Tags: brief references to the training trio, romance angle optional, Alternate Universe - Non-Despair (Dangan Ronpa), Killing Game Was A Virtual Reality Simulation (Dangan Ronpa), Post-Canon, Post-Game, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Past Character Death, (they got better), Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Injury Recovery, Oma Kokichi Is Bad at Feelings, Oma Kokichi has Chronic Pain (Post-game), Talent Acquisition Program Pilot (TAPP) AU (Dangan Ronpa), Oma Kokichi-centric, Autistic Oma Kokichi, it's not a plot point this time but still, Suicidal Thoughts, not explicitly or majorly but theres an undercurrent and better safe than sorry, Survivor Guilt, kind of

read it on the AO3 at https://ift.tt/8CzGRxc

[kingofthewilderwest]

Hi Haddock! Sorry for the kindof strange question but I'm taking abnormal psych right now and it got me thinking... what mental disorder do you think each of the dragon riders would have/are prone to developing based on their traits and personalities? (i.e. OCD, depression, general anxiety, etc.) thanks as always!

Hello there, friend! XD Questions of all varieties are extremely interesting to chat about, so no judging on this end. ;) I hope you’re enjoying your abnormal psychology course and learning lots!

I’m not going to assign a mental illness or disorder to every dragon rider in the DreamWorks Dragons franchise. As I’m sure you’ve seen already in your class, these are serious conditions that are not at all romanticizable. The last thing I would want to do is give any sort of disrespect to the individuals who actually suffer from these conditions, or to make incongruous connections between one character’s personality trait and a symptom of something else different and debilitating. To give an example, just because Fishlegs is particular about cleanliness doesn’t give me a right to say he’s prone to OCD, as OCD is something altogether separate. It’s best to represent everything correctly, rather than creating mental illnesses in characters for the sake of creating mental illnesses in characters.

We as people of course have the right to headcanon what a character goes through beyond strict canon, and there is something to be said about looking to fictional characters as ways to relate to our own problems. But that’s different than assigning disorders to characters hypothetically for the sake of doing so. The former’s a coping mechanism; the latter’s an easy way to slip into misrepresentations, misunderstandings, and hurting others who actually struggle. I wouldn’t be morally comfortable with the latter.

But. That said. There are characters in DreamWorks Dragons that I do think exhibit actual mental health struggles. I haven’t taken a formal psychology course on this topic, so maybe you should be the person writing this instead of me, but here are the characters I think demonstrate feasible evidence that they could have these conditions.

Heather: Depression. As someone who has my own fun string of depression issues, I suppose I see a lot of what I and other like friends have struggled through in her. I think there’s a reasonable case to be made that Heather is undergoing depression during Race to the Edge times.

How Heather handles friendship in the first few seasons is a sad situation. Heather doubts that situations can grow better, saying she’s “destined for loneliness” in “Have Dragons Will Travel.” Emotionally troubled, she struggles to trust others and to believe that she will ever not be alone, to the point that Heather is quick to feel betrayed if her friends don’t agree with her, and to the point that she’s more willing to go behind their backs than believe they can help her. The dragon riders have done their best to reach out and help her, historically they’ve never done anything to warrant distrust, they’ve offered to help her in tough situations multiple times in the past, and the friendship Heather has formed with Astrid could have allowed her opening in trust. Of course every human opens up and trusts at different speeds… but there is something to be said that Heather acts under the mentality that she is destined to be alone, and is quick to see signs that the dragon riders won’t be friends she can trust, either. There’s a want to bond - she opens up and tells Hiccup about her struggles - but there’s also the underlying struggles of someone who’s internalized the belief that her life is just meant to be bad, that her social situation is just meant to be bad, and something is going to happen to prove that her time spent with the dragon riders isn’t going to be secure. You could read this as someone internalizing the bad in their life and believing there’s no improvement, which is something that many individuals with depression experience.

Like, it’s not just in this episode that Heather both shows a desire to make friends, but also a pessimistic stand that she’s not going to have these friends. In “To Heather or Not To Heather,” Heather thinks that Windshear’s inability to cooperate with other dragons means she has to keep the dragon distanced, which means she doesn’t seem to believe she has a genuine shot at becoming one of the dragon riders. Hiccup encourages her, “Just let me work with you guys,” but you can tell from Heather’s facial reactions that she has a much more pessimistic view about her slated standing with the others. After two incidences between Windshear and the other dragons, Heather gives up, venting, “Clearly this was a mistake. We just don’t fit in here.” 

Heather does in fact retreat from the others on her own in episodes like “Have Dragons Will Travel Part 2″ after her first run-in with the Dragon’s Edge crew. It’s a somewhat premature departure. Now, I have the need to get distance, too, when I’m sorting through big thoughts, and that can be healthy… but it’s worrying that Heather is more willing to retreat back into the world where she’s alone without a social circle - than to take advantage of any support network. Her go-to is to be alone, despite loneliness being one of the issues that tears at her the most. Her lonely retreat is shown not to be healthy, given how she vents to Fishlegs in her letters.

And speaking of her letters… we know Heather struggles with dark and unsettled thoughts from “To Heather or Not To Heather.” When the other dragon riders find Fishlegs’ correspondences with Heather, Ruffnut emphasizes, “Uh wow. Those are some depressing terror mails. I may need a mace to the head to cheer me up.” And when Tuffnut shouts “On it!” and grabs his mace, Ruffnut retorts, “Metaphorically speaking!” This means that Ruffnut is speaking in rather grim humor - it’s more fun to be bashed in the head (in a way that’s not recreation to her) than it is to read Heather’s emotional struggles. That doesn’t say anything good at all to Heather’s mental state.

Astrid also finds these letters concerning, saying that, “She seems worried and confused.” In fact, the entire team’s discussion at the start of this episode is about how they can find a way to help her, since they realize she’s been through a lot of struggles and isn’t doing well alone.

Dagur: Antisocial Personality Disorder. How Dagur characterizes in later RTTE episodes miiiiight counter some of my earlier interpretations of his psychological state, but I still believe there’s a strong case to be made that Dagur could have ASPD. I hope that my discussion of Dagur doesn’t sound like I’m treating individuals with ASPD as inherent villains or bad people, because I don’t believe that at all; I’m attempting to speak with objectivity about traits Dagur has that are often symptoms of ASPD, such as a violent temper. These traits are most evident when Dagur acts as an antagonist in the series (though not absent even when he becomes an ally).

ASPD results in a persistent disregard for social norms, morals, and others’ emotions. Individuals who have ASPD may be arrogant, irresponsible, impulsive, aggressive, hostile, socially detached, and risk-taking. They may feel no regret harming others through superficial charm or violent threats, they may have poor ability to bond with others meaningfully, and they may not have much control over their temper, a temper that can spike violently when they’re frustrated. So many of these characteristics fall right in line with Dagur.

In my old analyses from several years back, I kept oscillating between saying “psychopathy” and “sociopathy”, which annoys me to no end, especially since there is a difference between the two (sociopathy being more agitated and volatile, psychopathy being good mimickers of emotion but internally lacking empathy). I think I’ve re-edited everything in old analyses to say sociopathy… but anymore, I’d say the best thing to say is ASPD. Still, if you want to read longer (albeit older) commentaries about why I feel Dagur has this vein of condition, I’ll plop in a few links.

Dagur as a sociopath in ROB/DOB

Why I thought Dagur would be better without a redemption arc

Why I was unconvinced with Dagur’s loss of antisocial traits

Dagur as a villain and Dagur developing in RTTE

The essence of Dagur when he’s an antagonist is someone who demonstrates inhibited empathy and remorse, high violent tendencies, and uninhibited, brash behavior. Even as a child, Dagur tries to drown Hiccup, locks Fishlegs up without food, and uses Hiccup as a target to throw his knives - without any demonstration of remorse for his actions. Dagur is shown to quickly fly into a rage when irritated - for instance, all Savage has to do is say one sentence in “Dragon Eye of the Beholder Part 2″ before Dagur starts shouting and screaming at him. Other times, Dagur seems to legitimately enjoy hunting Hiccup down to harm him. Especially in ROB, DOB, and the first few seasons of RTTE, I’ll admit I’ve thought Dagur has been intentionally modeled to have such a personality disorder.

Beyond Heather and Dagur, there’s no character I’d personally pin as obviously having a mental ailment. It’s true other characters struggle, have highs and lows, etc., but that’s not enough to say they could be medically diagnosed with something. People are free to still read characters they love as coping through like struggles, though! It’s a fair way to be able to relate to a character and emotionally process one’s own life experiences. And I have seen some other headcanons go around in this topic. On my own personal end of interpretation, though, trying to be as objective as possible, I wouldn’t list anyone outside of the Oswald siblings.