#..........maybe this is why so many writers on tumblr seem to hate writing.??.....ill never get that | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

0ceanoflight · 4 years

Text

My thoughts on Gaya Sa Pelikula now that I've watched all 8 eps.

Cause I need to write down my thoughts and Twitter's character limit just isn't enough so thank you tumblr. This is gonna be a rant

Also, just wanna say this is from the point of view of a gay trans masc enby, aka me.

First impression

Gaya Sa Pelikula is just.... Wow. It's hard to describe. I originally watched it cause some moots on Twitter kept talking about it and they recommended it to me. It doesn't take much for me to watch a gay show, so of course I checked it out. At the time I think maybe 2-3 eps were out.

I knew nothing about the plot. I had no expectations for it. Just hoping it didn't have any problematic stuff in it, hopefully some cute stuff, same as any other gay show. It was just some show to watch to pass the time. I was wrong. It's so much more than just a good show. It's rare for me to get THIS emotionally invested into a show.

From the first ep I thought "Oh, this is pretty realistic lol. I've said stuff like this", referring to Vlad's lines. That continued as I watched the remaining available eps. Later my moots mentioned that it was written by a gay man and I understood right away. GSP is a gay show with the intention of being very realistic. It wasn't just gay for entertainment's sake. It was gay for the sake for real gay people.

Characters

The characters are so well written. They are flawed. They're not perfect. They all have their own struggles that you wouldn't know until you sat down and talked to them. Their lines and personalities are real. They feel real. I've met people like that. I have friends like that. I see myself in them. Also the acting is incredible. Really brought it to the next level.

The Music

A golden sound track. Every song just fit. It felt like the songs were made for that scene. The lyrics, the vibe. There were so many times when I thought that lyrics perfectly fit the scene in a way that would make me connect even more to what was happening. Really couldn't have been better. 10/10.

The visuals and plot devices

The way everything seems to have a purpose. Everything seems to be interconnected. There were so many things that were mentioned earlier in the episode, or I'm previous episodes that you originally didn't fully understand, then they would come back and suddenly *mindblown*.

The lines in the first prom dancing scene in the first ep. The ghost stories (still blows my mind). Vlad not liking his hair being touch which wasn't explained till later. The keychain. The theme song test. The movie they were watching about the imaginary beach (I forgot the name). The reason behind Judit's seemingly fake/weird ally speeches. The reason why Karl always seemed so stiff and awkward. The closet. The orca. The remote. Ect.

All of that came back later in the show and added so much depth. The metaphors used seemed to almost add extra explainations. Like... they didn't just give more layers of complexity, but it gave us a stronger understanding of what was going on. Or at least it made it more emotional. Idk. I was just one of he people who read posts of others dissecting the show cause I'm not as good. Lol.

Also there were beautiful scenes visually. Karl's dance scene. Beautiful. The film scenes outside, looked gorgeous. The use of mirrors and the TV. Great. Awesome

Connections

There were a lot of things I connected to.

Vlad's lines like I mentioned above were among the first. I've personally said or thought very similar things. Or even those exact things. I was actually shocked at first. By how real that felt for me.

Vlad being lonely, but faking it. Aha. I'm an introvert, and people know it. As much as I need space, I get lonely very easily as well. And friends online sometimes aren't enough. It's not the same as having someone there. With covid, and the fact that all of my friends live far away or are normally too busy to meet up, I very rarely am actually with friends. It almost hurts tbh. Especially since I'm a very affectionate person. Also the gay yearning hours are real and powerful.

Karl's dance scene, letting out the inner femininity. So I'm a bit different. I never came out as gay. I'm a gay trans guy. People already knew, or assumed, I liked men. However I did have the struggle of inner femininity. I hated fem things up until I was maybe 15-16, maybe almost 17. I didn't know why I hated it, I just did. Clearly now I know why. However my evolution to being a fem guy from hating fem things happened around the same time as discovering I'm not actually a girl. It was confusing 3 years (yes it took me about 3 years to piece everything together, a bit longer to settle). My point is, once I opened up to fem things, it was beautiful. It really really was. I felt more comfortable. I felt freer. I went from "ew makeup, skirts, leggings, pink. I hate it". To wearing makeup, wearing leggings, liking pink, often painting my nails. I've worn pretty short shorts with a loose t-shirt and a cardigan. Peak fem. Felt great. I want to wear a skirt, but I'm too afraid to do that. I may feel better with being fem, but society is still society and I might get looks cause "wtf, a man wearing a skirt?". Maybe one day. Uhhh anyways. The times I've grown to become more fem felt like how watching Karl dance felt like. Just like that.

Karl's struggle with his sexuality. Ok again I can't relate on the gay part, cause my coming out was coming out at trans. However yea. That was an adventure. I remember being so confused in 8th grade & 9th grade. God that was.... something. At first I thought I just wanted to be more tomboyish, more androgynous. So I found androgynous girls with short hair and said "I want this". Everyone was confused. My friends said "is there a reason you cut your hair so short?". I was afraid of that question. At the time I didn't know why I was so afraid. I don't remember exactly what I said, but tbh I was pretty defensive. Of course I later realized why I felt that way. I remember finally figuring things out after I settled into knowing I was trans, I didn't know how to come out. I couldn't say it directly. In fact, I never did. To my friends I just said "he/him, they/them pronouns" when asked at events, and of course they knew, but didn't ask more. In fact one friend found out cause I wrote "agender" on a form cause he looked over my shoulder. For my family... I just dropped a big hint, and they understood something was up. I wasn't able to explain it well then either. It took another 2-3 months till I couldn't take it anymore and did my best to explain it better so they would take it seriously. I was afraid. I couldn't say it directly. I actually didn't come out to my my high school. I was too afraid. I had friends who were out and I was jealous. I was jealous of their bravery. Same as Karl to Vlad. I was out to friends, but couldn't be open in the real world, much like Karl. I was only out within the space of the GSA, and of the local lgbt center. That was my "apartment". It was only until after i graduated where I promised myself I would live my real self.

The prom dance scene. I missed my high school's prom too. I wasn't brave enough to wear a suit. That would be like coming out and I wasn't ready. So I missed that. I wouldn't have been able to be open of course. I went to the senior dinner. I guess that was the start of me trying to be open. I went in a suit. Tailored men's dress pants too. I went with friends.

Wanting to write my own stories. That's a big one isn't it? I never really do see myself in films or tv. An autistic mentally ill gay trans masc enby? Yea, not a thing. Not a popular role in hollywood, will never be. I'm not a writer, I wanted to be as a kid, I was going to go to uni for writing, but I'm not really good enough for that. I really really do want to see more of myself in media. I wish I could be able to create such things for other people as well. Cause things like Gaya Sa Pelikula are truly magical. It literally made me cry whenever something I related to happened.

#gaya sa pelikula #like in the movies #yea its long #i am emotionally attached to this show

17 notes · View notes

mannatea · 4 years

Note

Excuse me I want the opinions about the apocalyptic humans are the real monsters please!

>Are you sure you would like to board this train?

Anyway, sure! I have a lot of thoughts. And opinions. And considerations. Hopefully this train of thought is worth the trip. All aboaaaaard!

Part I: This Mentality Doesn’t Exist in Just Fiction!

I take issue with this phrasing as a general rule because humans are still human. Calling them “monsters” for their evil deeds—something everyone is capable of performing, by the way—is just...asinine to the nth degree. Sure, we’d all like to imagine we’re not capable of Great Evil, but WE ARE.

I don’t want to dive into Purity Police Politics here, but here’s a question for (general) you: where is the line drawn? What makes a “bad” person “a monster” vs. just being a bad/thoughtless/careless person?

I think we can all agree that objectively some acts are evil. If you’ve been following the news this year, you probably have a million examples, but (TRIGGER WARNING FOR THIS LINK) here’s a particularly terrible one; they even call the abusers monsters in this news article. Why? I think you know why. They want to emotionally distance themselves. They want to believe that these people are unique in their ability to cause harm and suffering to another human being.

But WOWEE!!! Spoiler alert: the writer is just as capable of abuse as the people who committed the crime!!!!

Don’t get me wrong, I think most people are UNLIKELY to commit a crime like that, or even hurt another person with malicious intent or hatred in their hearts. But to pretend we are not all capable of it is putting yourself on a pedestal above the rest of humanity, and...I dunno. That’s awfully cocky.

Tumblr in particular loves to talk about toxicity and abuse, and they love to paint themselves as “better than” or “above” that behavior, but 1) we are all capable of toxicity, have been problematic in our lifetime, and have probably done something abusive to someone else at one point or another, and 2) we must remember that this is true of everyone else as well as ourselves. The important thing is that we strive to behave better, to learn to recognize when we are hurting someone else, to CARE THAT WE MIGHT BE HURTING SOMEONE ELSE, and to actively work to just be better/kinder people.

I totally get the desire to call a cruel, abusive, or evil person “a monster” but THEY ARE NOT. They are people. People are not infallible. Monsters by definition are imaginary creatures, but the abuse these people inflict is real. The crimes are real. The hurt is real. The effect these people have on those around them is as real as they themselves are, and to pretend for even a moment that it’s not, that they are somehow separate from you and I, that the rules apply differently for them than you and I, is just...harmful?

Because again, where do you draw the line?

Part II: Using Monster as an Insult

Monsters are creations, always, as they are by definition imaginary creatures. I think some might look to the Nature vs. Nurture Debate when it comes to criminal acts to try and justify their use of the word “monster” to refer to people like the abusers in the link above (aka: “society shaped them into that, it was never their natural inclination”) but that feels vaguely like cherry-picking to me, and I don’t like it.

Also, “Monster” is used as such a joking insult online these days (you’re a monster for dissing my anime waifu headcanons) it’s lost its bite if it ever had it to begin with. My beloved cat CiCi’s nickname was ‘Monster’ because the first Christmas I had her she rolled around on the Christmas presents and hissed at anyone who tried to move them. We also have an energy drink named Monster. Cookie Monster. Created ‘monsters’ with their own lore like werewolves and vampires and kelpies and Bigfoot.

So you risk one of three things by calling someone a monster: 1) it comes across like a joking insult/cute pet name, 2) you’re putting them on par with beings that literally do not exist except in fiction, and that half of this hellsite wants to fuck MANY people actually enjoy talking/reading about as part of an entire literary genre, or 3) you’re saying they’re literally not human beings and therefore not worth being considered as such.

None of these options are good.

Part III: “Humans Were the Real Monsters All Along!™”

Maybe when literacy levels were super low and only the wealthy had the leisure time and access to literature they could read for fun, this kind of reveal was Intriguing, but I’m here to tell you that it’s never been interesting to any person who has lived in the real world, like, ever.

I feel like for children this may be different (I dunno, as a child you don’t always understand what’s going on around you/are more likely to be sheltered from these kinds of truths outside of fiction), but I highly doubt that, say, peasants in 1620 weren’t well aware that humans were capable of evil.

Sure, they did the same thing we like to do and called people who committed particularly heinous acts ‘monsters’ (probably for the same reasons we do as well as because they wanted to believe they were safe in their communities and that their neighbors were also different and not capable of doing that sort of thing) but again you see the general level of denial:

This person is not like me.

I am different.

I must call them something else.

Which, yes you are different, but the difference is NOT in WHAT you are, it’s in HOW YOU ACT and the emotions you act upon!

Society has a history of doing this separation, and of revealing in fiction that humans are actually the real monsters, but again, those of us who exist in the real world already know that human beings are capable of great evil. Even if we are surprised by the level of vileness or not is irrelevant; we all know that logically this kind of thing happens in the real world and that human beings are responsible for it.

Part IV: Bad Reveal. BAD!

In some pieces of media, the writers go out of their way to be like, “THE MONSTERS WE’VE HATED ALL THIS TIME AND HAVE BEEN FIGHTING WERE ONCE HUMAN LIKE US. WE COULD BECOME LIKE THEM! OH NO!”

Which...lol.

Let’s look at zombies, a monster created for the sake of this kind of narrative. They were “once human” but are now mindless beings completely unaware of the hurt they are inflicting, even on those they might have known in their lifetime. Zombies can infect living human beings, turning them into zombies. The humans in these stories don’t want to become zombies, so they fight the zombies (with varying results, depending on the particular piece of media you choose to consume).

Zombie stories have a huge cult following; people love this kind of thing. On the surface you might think zombie stories fit the above narrative, and they do, but like...literally. “They were human once but aren’t anymore!” is almost never a reveal in these stories; it’s something everyone already knows and is actively fighting against.

"Humans are the real monsters” rarely has much to do with the zombies. It almost always occurs when a human in the group of survivors betrays the others in a big way.

The betrayer is then painted as the REAL monster here, the REAL threat. You might notice that lot of post-apocalyptic and/or humans-vs.-monsters fiction follows the same pattern: humans fight monsters, (optional ingredient: the monsters were once human!), and then they find out that Actually, Humans Were the Real Monsters All Along!

Again, anyone reading this post already knows that. They go out in public and see people who can’t be assed to wear a mask. “Wah it itches.” “Wah I can’t breathe.” “Wah it’s inconvenient for me and I’m not infected I know I’m fine!”

These same maskless fools would tell you to your face that the betrayer in these stories is a monster. They themselves, however, are not capable of hurting other people! They’re better than that! That person is a monster! They would never betray their allies. Except they do, every day, by refusing to wear a mask to protect other people from themselves. “Just in case” isn’t a good enough reason for them because it’s an inconvenience and they don’t like how it feels.

Sure, wearing a mask during a pandemic seems like such a small thing compared to, you know, betraying your fellow survivors in the apocalypse, but you have to consider context. If wearing a mask during a pandemic that has literally killed huNDreDS oF thousands is so inconvenient they won’t even wear it for the 3 minutes they are in the gas station...would you trust this person in a post-apocalyptic setting? Would they gather food for a physically disabled survivor? Would they literally fight to protect someone ill? Share resources fairly? You know if they can’t wear a mask for three minutes in a whole damn day they wouldn’t step up like that. They could easily end up being the betrayer in a situation like that. They’ve never been desperate enough to do something like that before, and they probably don’t think they’re capable of it now, but we know what they do when something is a minor inconvenience to them. Imagine a major inconvenience. Imagine their whole life being turned upside-down!

My issues with the reveal of “Humans are actually the real monsters!” are many, but the biggest issue I take with it from a writing perspective is that it’s almost never accurate when you look at the scope of the story.

Tens of thousands of zombies vs. one (1) betrayer: and you’re telling me the betrayer is the real monster? The bigger threat??? BULLSHIT. Sure, it takes a real asshole to betray people during the literal apocalypse, but that act doesn’t take away from the fact that they are human, LET ALONE the fact that using this particular point as a Big Important Reveal tells me you’re a shit writer who thinks you’re smart.

(For the record, you might have a character who will prioritize this and consider that betrayer the bigger threat, but we’re not talking about character development/motivations so much as overarching narratives the writer includes in the story separate from that.)

Anyway, I’m not saying stories with this premise in them are shit, I’m saying that this concept as a big plot reveal/climax of a story is shit. How can this even be a reveal worth revealing? Has anyone ever turned on the news?

Part V: Drawing the Line and Other Particulars

I definitely do not have the expertise or the experience to make this a detailed point, so please forgive me for that, but let’s talk about that line again, because this point absolutely cannot be overlooked.

Where is it? What makes one person who commits a crime or evil act a monster and not another? Is it the act committed? Their mental state? What about the mentally ill? What about neurodivergent people? What about children?

As an extreme example: is a woman who throws her baby off a building a monster? NO!!! SHE’S HUMAN and she did something terrible. We might like to say we’re different and we would neVeR do that, but we don’t know because we have never been in her shoes. We are missing context even the courts will never have or fully grasp. We do not know or understand her mental state no matter what the doctors say. Calling her a monster doesn’t do anything but put her in a separate category from the rest of us, which is harmful on SO many levels, starting with the fact that it means nobody talks to her, nobody gets her side of the story, nobody listens, and so we have no perspective, no understanding, no desire to learn.

Things like this are why it took so long for PPD to even begin to be understood, and why EVEN NOW women are afraid to talk about it and all related issues. I follow a ob-gyn on YouTube and the amount of women in her comments who thank her (oftentimes VERY emotionally) for openly saying it’s normal to not immediately feel a connection to your baby when they are born is mind-blowing. Not everyone will feel that! Sometimes you have to get to know your baby because they are an individual person and that is how love works for some people! But 5 years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 100 years ago: that was unthinkable to admit. You lied about it and you felt like a terrible person instead. What kind of mom doesn’t love their baby instantly? You must be the worst. Meanwhile, the woman you’re getting your information from doesn’t feel that bond either and is lying about it because she feels pressured and just as bad as you do. All this suffering, and for what?! Stigma. Being told you’re not human if you don’t feel like that.

Don’t you know the bond with that baby suffered from this issue, too? Don’t you think it affected the parent/child relationship for the rest of their lives?

Not everyone who commits a crime falls into a category like this, and maybe the woman in my example doesn’t either, but I hope your takeaway is that calling people monsters keeps them separated from other people to the point where their story becomes just as fictional as the monsters they are called, and when it is heard it is enjoyed as fiction, rather than seriously considered.

Let’s not pretend that this separation of humanity into “human” and “not human” based on the way someone acts hasn’t hindered progress in the mental health/medical fields for everyone. When people are not considered human they are not given human treatment, rights, consideration, or empathy.

Part VI: TL;DR:

we are all human and capable of doing bad things.

the difference between a bad person and you or I is a lot more complex and multilayered than “they did a terrible thing and I did not do that terrible thing.”

calling people ‘monsters’ for the bad things they do dehumanizes them and may:

strip them of responsibility for their actions by insinuating they were born that way or they aren’t actually human like you and I, and/or

prevent them from getting the help they need/from others who have not done anything bad yet getting the help they need

it’s not a good reveal in fiction

because most of us already know people commit evil acts,

and it is oftentimes is presented in a way that doesn’t actually make sense for the story.

Sorry that it got long and probably isn’t very well organized! I wrote it in bursts at work. But anyway yeah...

I don’t mind when characters feel this way about other characters, but to see it used as a narrative feature/reveal/et cetera in fiction is like, so tiresome. No shit, Sherlock. I turn on the news. I followed true crime for a while. WE ALL KNOW PEOPLE ARE CAPABLE OF DOING TERRIBLE, AWFUL THINGS TO OTHER LIVING THINGS.

Having *that* be your big reveal in a story is so childish it embarrasses me to see it. Wow, congrats on figuring out something at 47 that the rest of us learned on the playground before we turned 7!

#highwind91 #answered mail #tw: abuse #long post #idk i feel like posting this is a bad idea...??#oh well it's make idiot decisions day!#it's ok to reblog if u want thx for asking chi!

15 notes · View notes

gilmesc1 · 4 years

Note

Do you have any thoughts on fictional portrayals of DID, like danganronpa, spl!t, and others?

Yes, I usually would take time to do research but lucky for you I already did XD

I looked into Danganronpa a while ago since we have 1 or 2 system mates from it, and in that case, prepare yourselves for a hot mess of my opinion and facts I got from a google fest.

So, to start out, I guess I might share spoilers?? So you hath been warned. Additionally I’m not going to sit here and rephrase the entire story so, honestly why am I even explaining this. Anon at least knows what’s going on XDD

So Danganronpa is a psychological mystery anime that focuses heavily on the themes of hope and despair, where in most versions of the story characters are forced into a killing game where they have to kill each other. Bet you couldn’t have figured that one out on your own XD

One thing I like about it is that the characters overall are written fairly well. Many of them are complex multi layered gems of writing with good development and story arcs. One thing that I found interesting is the semi accurate portrayals of mental illness and how it impacts the characters in this insane situation.

So, let’s break into that. I focused on the portrayals of NPD and DID specifically, and I could go back and look into others, but we’ll focus on those for this post. And just going to throw this out now, I think it’s interesting and also kind of a bold move to tackle those kinds of things in an anime.

So let’s look at the DID portrayal. The character’s name is Toko Fukawa, and she is a fucking wreck. Confirmed emotional abuse gives a lot into her character, and we see her as this timid, deflective, honestly broken shell. Later in the series we are introduced to her alternate personality, I know, exciting.

However it’s a literal serial killer. So like. Yeah.

I don’t love that part. I mean, out of all of the portrayals for this alter, you had to go with serial killer? And not only that, but a really famous, generally acknowledged as insane serial killer. Thaaaanks writer.

To recap what a lot of tumblr says, this kind of portrayal is dangerous because the majority of DID portrayals are of crazy violent stereotypes. It was quite honestly disappointing, and I wish that the writers hadn’t used this as their big reveal.

But hey, neutral standing here, let’s look at why he did do that from a different perspective. Since the theme of the game/anime is killing, it does make sense plot wise to have a serial killer. Additionally, it’s a clever way to get said serial killer into the game in the first place. Plot wise and with a few things I’ll mention in a second, it does make sense in a twisted way.

But let’s get the bad out of the way first. One thing I really don’t love is her appearance. It’s like someone took the original character design of fukawa, took some drugs, and then drew a nightmare creature. Seriously, there’s crazy eyes, hair flying everywhere, and this freaky inhuman tongue that the alter has out no matter what she’s doing. Like whaaaaaat the fuck.

Firstly this spreads misinformation that we can change appearance at will. Like don’t get me wrong, I wish I could, but the best I got is changing clothes if I have the time. Also the tongue I really hate because it gives the impression of the alter being this inhuman monster. Also again with the impression that we can morph stuff when we switch. I mean, if I had that, I’d be having a lot more fun in my day to day life than I do now.

Do what you will with that information.

Additionally we do see Fukawa’s tongue, and it’s not a weird demogorgon kind of thing, so, yeah, the tongue thing is weird.

Finally her name. It’s Genocider Syo/Jack/Jill. Not a normal name, no the only name we have for her is her serial killer name which I feel serves to continue to show her as this inhuman thing where we all go, Oh god oh fuck time to be afraaaaid.

But hey, let’s look at what they did right.

The backstory of how genocider came to be is really accurate to how it works. Fukawa has a history of abuse at a young age, and genocider eventually comes into the picture to protect her.

Let me explain: So this is a theory on my part (Check out Weeby Newz’s youtube video, that’s where I got this) but Fukawa was revealed to have suffered massive emotional abuse at the hands of a boy who she had romantic interest in. Since he was moving away, she decided to confess her love to him in a letter before this happened. Turns out the boy pinned the letter in her classroom so everyone would make fun of her. Dick move.

I think genocider formed after this specific event, firstly because this is a huge defining experience for Fukawa. Additionally, the way genocider acts serves to prove this. Her target victims are boys, and her first victim was the boy who hurt Fukawa. I mean yeah, killing was waaaay extreme, but bear with me on this next part:

I’d say that genocider is a protector. A lot of her initial actions were to protect Fukawa from getting hurt in the same way, and protectors do have a history of going to the extreme to protect their hosts and systems. Even though she seems like a persecutor, I don’t think any of her actions have been directed at herself and Fukawa, they actually seem to have a decent relationship, and to end this theory that is completely non canon and just me pretending I’m smart, I’d call her a protector.

Next, looking at the relationship they have. Genocider at one point tells the protagonist that they have a “non disclosure policy” when they switch when the other is in the middle of something. (like murder??) And I personally really liked this, as it was a kind of realistic DID humor in my eyes. Take it or leave it, that’s my opinion.

And that’s really all I have on that behalf. Genocider really isn’t shown as a “normal person” often, which I guess is the point but also leaves me with nothing to evaluate. (Side note, this is only V1 of the series and I’m aware she changes but dear god go easy on me)

Finally, here are a few things that I find a little weird tbh.

At first glance when they switch, it’s a touch accurate, if over dramatic. Losing consciousness and coming to as a different alter is possible so I do like that, however they also have her constantly switching when sneezing, which is a little out there.

I mean, I think I’ve done that before, but for it to be a consistent theme, idk. Maybe overdramatized again.

Secondly, there is a voice change, which is accurate, but it really just serves to fit the crazy image, so I’m conflicted on that.

So that is really all I can say on that specifically, to end things I’m going to talk about one other character Fukawa has interactions with, Togami. (He has a first name but I can’t spell/remember it.)

So I gravitated towards him while watching the series because he reminds me of me, hence me saying that he seems to be a dead ringer for npd. Let me explain.

He’s very cold and distant from others and obviously feels superior, additionally he is willing to fight tooth and nail to consistently be on top and win in any situation, leading to him doing some fucked up things.

But like I feel for him. It’s like watching me XD

His past was a very competitive cuthroat environment, where he was taught that losing is worse than death. Additionally he was almost groomed to be this untouchable figure so it’s no surprise that he believes that. I might make a second post about him because there’s a lot more I can say, but I’m going to double back to Fukawa now.

So Fukawa gains a very unhealthy obsession with Togami, despite him wanting literally nothing to do with her. He’s verbally abusive to her and does go out of his way to attack her, but she thinks it’s a sign of love. Poor Fukawa.

This also kind of fits with NPD, because we can have some pretty gravitating personalities. I think the attraction has a lot to do with Fukawa’s mental state, but I just found it interesting that the emotional abuse victim gravitates to Togami of all people.

So I brought him up for that above thought I had, and also to compare this last point. So Fukawa was confirmed to have DID, like it was specifically stated. To my knowledge it was never stated that Togami has NPD, but I strongly assume that he does. (key word assume, I could be wrong.)

So I found it interesting that Togami has this very accurate portrayal of NPD without ever confirming that he has NPD, while Fukawa is specifically confirmed to have DID while having a semi accurate portrayal. I think the writer really wanted to include mental illness in his story line and I doubt he intended anything to be intentionally harmful.

Writing mental illness into a story is very very very tricky, and it’s practically impossible to satisfy everyone, but the fact that he did do it is in my opinion, very bold.

He made good and less good choices, but overall he did make very compelling characters. Genocider admittedly fits better in this plotline as a crazy killer than she would as a realistic alter, but this is fiction.

So final statements: Toko Fukawa is not a bad character. I like a lot about her and overall I think she is very well written. Genocider is very less developed and more of a surprise plot twist than a character, which is unrealistic. The writer made some very awkward choices from a realistic standpoint despite it fitting well with his story.

So overall, she really isn’t a good portrayal of DID. You can enjoy her character like I did, but the main takeaway here is to not take her as a realistic portrayal. I know it seems obvious but this is the kind of thing that forms unhealthy ideas in viewers.

I’m not hating on Danganronpa or Toko, I actually really loved both. I’ve tried to stop ranting about fictional works that I hate. I used to be a loose fucking canon but I realized that I had been bashing a few autistic friend’s special interests, so now I try to be hyper aware that a fictional work might mean everything to someone even if I personally disliked it.

But that isn’t the case here because again I loved Danganronpa XD

So friends, that about does it for me. I liked doing this kind of analysis so if you want me to do more, send them my way XD

My next post will probably be the syscourse analysis if I can get that done before I get an easier topic. So thanks for reading, hope you enjoyed, thank you for the ask anon.

And I’m now out of words. You all should be happy. XD

#did #did tag #dissociative identity disorder #actuallydid #actuallymultiple #actuallydissociative #actuallytraumagenic #danganronpa #toko fuwaka

14 notes · View notes

dinosaursindisarray · 4 years

Note

Where'd you go?

We were considering making a post about this - Month has been wanting to come back on and off for ages now. So this ask seems like a good way to answer.

Judging from our lasts posts, it’s been over two years, since the last post is the night before our SSI hearing. That seems impossible, but also, time is fake. We had our SSI hearing - it went well, I’m told. The judge was nice and iirc, a job expert or something listened to our lawyer and therapist and said there was no job in the workforce we’d be able to do, not even folding towels for 8 hours a day. Folding towels came up a lot for some reason. I don’t know if there’s a high demand for that in the workforce, or if it was just a good example of a low-stress, low performance job that we’d potentially be able to do. Answer was, given our level of dissociation we deal with daily, no. So within a week of the... trial? Was it a trial? I’m going off of second-hand knowledge - we got SSI. Got a small income each month now. Our blog came up in the trial. That was weird for Month. I think that might be part of the reason we left, but it was really a number of things. It was around that time that tumblr had it’s nsfw ban, you all remember that? There was a lot of talk of if tumblr was even going to be staying up, and uncertainty isn’t something we deal well with. There was talk about moving to other platforms and I think one of us tried to move this blog to another site, because we really don’t want to lose the posts - it’s helpful to look back. But that’s... a lot of work and overwhelming, especially since, after getting SSI, we sort of collapsed.

For some reason we had associated the date of the trial almost like the date of our death, and when we didn’t die from the stress of it, it lead to a while of dissociated confusion for a lot of the kids. No idea why we thought that way, but brains are weird.

Once we hadn’t posted in a while, it became even more overwhelming to try and come back. Our living situation was precarious at the time, if I remember right, and we eventually wound up moving in with a friend, but I have no idea how many months later. We didn’t have anything, not even a bed, and even now, we don’t have like, furniture, chairs and whatnot. We do have a bed though, so that’s nice.

Another reason we stayed away is because, well, we started learning more about our traumas. Before, Month had the thought that maybe she’d be able to be an advocate for people with DID and mental illness, because while we knew some abuse had happened, the general thought was that most of what caused our DID was medical trauma. So we’d be safe to talk about our experiences. And then we found out that no, that wasn’t it all. Not by a long shot. I know from memory there’s some posts that start to vaguely allude to things back in the blog, pieces of memories that started to break through and were met with denial, and those were the very tip of the iceberg. Things were honestly so much worse than we could have ever imagined. We think we’ve remembered the worst of it, that honestly, it can’t get any worse than what we’ve already recalled, and then we get surprised by something newly horrific. We don’t know how we’re alive. And now, there’s intense fear and paranoia that because some things done to use were so specific, if we talk about them or ourselves in any context, we’ll be putting ourselves in danger. Being seen feels dangerous, even anonymously. We’ve isolated ourselves (long before this corona virus).

The number of alters in our system that have come forward is so much larger too. There’s well over a hundred, and that’s low-balling it. When Month thought that we had around 20 or so, using this blog for communication, a journal, etc seemed like a good idea. Now, she’s not the host, time has passed, and there’s a lot of debate about whether we were ever doing the right thing at all. Talking to a void that housed a mostly anonymous crowd of people helped, and we could always block anyone we didn’t want to interact with. Some people understood. We never really got hate or anything. I suppose, if we wanted, I could just have the blog be private and do the same thing as before. But there’s a sense of being heard and supported that comes with knowing people _can_ read these posts, even if they don’t. Even if it’s only a handful. And the support we got was helpful on dark days. Plus, linking our therapist to a post, or going back to one to help with amnesia was pretty helpful. Looking back now at the posts, I don’t recognize the writer. I don’t recognize the events. I’m glad they’re there, and writing this, I can feel someone’s longing to get back into this. Reconnect. I have no idea if we will, but journaling might help us.

I’m basically just talking to myself now. Answer to the question: Life happened, things are shitty and have been for pretty much our whole lives (but less so than when we were a kid, def) and tumblr became a weird variable that we dissociated about and forgot.

-Misty

7 notes · View notes

lovehoperomance · 4 years

Text

Confessions Of A Fic Writer

Hey guys, I’m taking a break from editing my latest Larry fic (MrsStylinson on ao3) and I need a distraction so I decided to conduct my own interview...of myself. But it’s basically a quiz and anyone can reblog and use :) Tag your fave authors if you wish.

1. Fandom(s)/Main ships(s). 1D. Larry. I have others but this is the only one I feel compelled to write about.

2. Favourite trope. It’s probably a tie between enemies to lovers and friends to lovers. So I guess that probably means my true favourite is slow burn!

3. Favourite fic idea that you’re yet to write. Mongrels to Men. Sort of like ladette to lady or ladettes to ladies or whatever it's called. So like Louis would be a promiscuous party boy type with like substandard manners. And for whatever reason his mum signs him up and Harry is like his mentor and has to teach him to be all posh and stately and Louis just makes fun of him and ends up teaching Harry to loosen up. And it involves some kind of makeover scene/bit

4. Favourite one of your fics. This is also tough because I’m so critical and I hate everything I write hahah. But maybe my Bridget Jones’ Diary AU? You Drive Me Crazy (But It Feels Alright). I feel like that one had a more fleshed out voice. The characters were well formed (possibly because of all the help I had from the original). My drunk in love fic comes close and I have a lot of love for two of my WIP’s when I don’t think about the lack of attention they’ve garnered but yeah, basically I hate everything.

4. Favourite fic by someone else/Fave author. I am making this so tough on myself because I have so many favourites. @cherrystreet’s bachelor fic (This Wicked Game) is a huge one. I never get sick of it. I love @all-these-larrythings (reaverview dreamer on ao3) and the medium fics by deathchamber on ao3. There’s so many more: (whoknows on ao3 whose tumblr I found but can’t manage to link or @louiswolves: grapenight on ao3 whose fic featuring a cat is an absolute must.) But I digress.

5. The first fic I ever read: I don’t remember this. I think it was a supernatural one and I wasn’t too keen but after being introduced to a YouTube compilation of Larry, I read a fic where Louis played soccer and Harry was a popstar and Louis proposes at a game at the end (I cannot find the name of it. I don’t know if it’s been deleted or if I’m an idiot because I’m pretty sure it’s a hugely popular fic.) I remember bawling my eyes out and after that, I never really went back to het romance. Not long after I started writing myself.

6. If someone could write YOU your dream fic, what would it be? I think it would definitely be a slow burn (surprise) with plenty of angst, plenty of fluff and plenty of smut towards the end. I would LOVE to read another bachelor fic but I just love really specific ones, maybe cause it’s something I struggle to write. I love fics based on movies or a really particular area of knowledge.

7. If you had to sum up your writing style in three words, what would they be? Descriptive. Emotional. Angsty. Is that the same as emotional? Okay. Descriptive, emotional and....poetic. It was really hard to come up with positive ones tbh.

8. What is your favourite thing about being a fic writer? The appreciation from my readers. When someone lets me know that something I wrote connected with them or made them smile, I feel like I have a very special power that not everyone has.

9. What is your least favourite thing about being a fic writer? The pressure. The insecurity. The hours spent working without pay hahah. Just kidding. I do enjoy it and I’m not skilled enough to get paid for it anyway.

10. If you could give any advice to your past self or to people thinking of trying out fic writing, what would it be? Well I’m not really qualified but i’m interviewing myself as if I were a success so, to my past self, I would say...stop trying to find a million different ways to say blue or green eyes. (I’m still guilty of this but I’m getting better.) Edit more and use flowery language less. Find active verbs and metaphors instead of more adjectives and adverbs. Remember to show not tell!! To other future writers, I’d say remember to write what you love, not what you think other people will love. This is how the best stuff comes out. If other people don’t like it, remember that writing, like art, thrives on your sole purpose/happiness and wastes away when you’re dissastisfied. Also, inspiration is endless! I often get writer’s block but I’m slowly learning to look for cues in new places.

11. What inspires you to write? And what other forms or genres do you write in? I’m inspired to write by the complexity of human emotion and human struggle. Having suffered from some illness or another, be it physical or mental, since I was a young teen, I am always conscious of our ability to survive and for me, there is no greater way to honour my own survival than to follow my passion and write romance. I mostly write romance but I have dabbled in thrillers and dirty realism. I also write in the form of poetry and short opinion pieces aka rants.

12. Why do you think fanfiction has become such a phenomenon?

think it’s because we live in an age of information overload where we’re always able to get our hands on more of the things we love. However, when it comes to characters, those die with the final line in a novel or the final line in a television series. Fanfiction resurrects them. As for fics based on real people, I think it’s just a form of escapsim. Sometimes you see two people who seem like they’d be absolutely perfect together and the fantasy is more enjoyable than the reality.

#calling all fic authors #confessions of a fic writer #MrsStylinson #ao3 #larry stylinson #interview with a writer #amateur writer

5 notes · View notes

afinepricklypear · 4 years

Text

Mother’s Day and Mental Health Awareness Month

**Warning - This post talks about depression, mental disorder, and an attempted suicide. Please do not read if you are sensitive to these topics. The events described here are real and true to the best of my memory.**

I went to make a post May 1st and Tumblr was kind enough to inform me that May is Mental Health Awareness month. It isn’t without irony for me that Mental Health Awareness month occurs the same month as Mother’s Day.

My relationship with my mother is a difficult topic, it’s usually only one I can talk about with my sisters, but it’s this time of year that people most want to talk about moms. When I was younger, I didn’t know what to say when people brought up their moms and mom-like behavior in general, mostly foreign concepts to me. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned I don’t have to say anything at all, like in my work meeting this morning when our supervisor reminded us all to call our mom’s this weekend, you know, “if they’re still alive”, since most of our department are near retiring age, but I don’t always know how to feel. Here comes the guilt: do I call, do I text, do I take the risk that she’ll be in a good mood or will she turn it around, again, like the year I sent her a gift and she used my gesture as ammo to attack my “ungrateful” older sister that’s still trying to untangle her own complicated relationship with our mother. I’m ten again, twelve again, sixteen again, walking on eggshells around a house where the air is so thick with the constant fog of her misery, I can’t see farther than a minute into my future.

There were good moments, of course, like any home. She was always the more encouraging parent when it came to my writing, my father would pick it all apart – in the long run, both approaches helped me become a better writer. There was the time she was given two tickets to see Mama Mia at the casino where she dealt, and she chose to take me. We got dressed up, she leant me this white faux fur jacket and some of her jewelry, curled my hair and did my make-up, she was riding high on her emotions. She took me to a fancy dinner at the Hard Rock Café before the show. We didn’t get spoiled often, and to this day, Mama Mia and ABBA hold a special place in my heart. I always think of her singing along to the radio in the car, she has a nice voice, and maybe in another life, she could’ve been a singer.

There were moments when she was trying to be sweet and it still leaves me with conflicted emotions. Like the time the German shepherd she took off the hands of a coworker who was afraid of him violently attacked me. She bandaged me up, laid in bed with me and comforted me, it’s the most motherly I ever remember her being. She kept the dog for a while after that, I still have scars on both my arms from the attack, I’ll have them the rest of my life, just like my little sister will still have her scars from when it attacked her, and my friend who came to visit will still have the scar it gave her…my older sister was only lucky that it was muzzled when it went for her face. My mother was convinced she had a special connection with this dog, that in his heart of hearts he believed he was protecting her, so I get it, she didn’t want to get rid of something that she felt loved her unconditionally.

Sometimes it’s hard to conjure these kinder memories, they become overwhelmed with the harder, darker ones that feel infinitely more numerous. There are the moments that seem innocuous, when you could say I was acting a spoiled child, like the time I was in middle school and I wanted to keep my hair long, but my mother decided I needed bangs. My dad tried to stop it, but she had made up her mind. I cried and pleaded with her but she commanded the reluctant stylist to chop the hair off. Armed with a brush and blow-dryer, she attempted to show me “it was cute” that night and things escalated to the point my dad and older sister were stepping in, arguing with my mom to let me be. I went back to that same hair stylist with my friend who was getting her hair cut the next day, and the stylist apologized, confessed that she didn’t want to cut my hair, told me it was so healthy and beautiful too, and she felt terrible doing it. Years later, when I was an adult and decided to cut my hair short with sideswept bangs, my mother would throw this memory back in my face, “sure, now you want bangs”, still incapable of understanding that it wasn’t about her, but about me wanting to define my own body and style. She did the same to my older sister in high school, dyed her hair blonde – it took so much bleach to lighten her naturally dark hair color that the hair looked fried afterwards and we were all amazed it didn’t fall out. Never mind that my older sister never wanted blonde hair to begin with, it was antithetical to her personality, and she won’t even go near the hair dye aisle now.

There are the moments where my mom was so unreasonable that everyone felt helpless, like the day I was alone in my room, my sisters in the living room talking and watching television – doing I don’t know what – and my mom was sleeping in her room because she worked graveyard shift at this time. Suddenly, inexplicably, my mom came into my room in a rage, “how dare you call your little sister stupid,” she scolded me, she continued to berate me for being cruel and mean, even as I told her, baffled, I didn’t know what she was talking about, even as my sisters argued with her, “no one called anyone stupid. She wasn’t even in the room with us.” My mother wouldn’t listen, she knew what she heard, she grounded me and, matter settled, left back to bed. My dad got home from work not long after, and I was in my room still bawling, inconsolable and unable to work out what I’d done wrong. He asked my sisters why I was crying and they explained, and, again, my mom comes storming in my room yelling, “how dare you tattle on me to your dad!” I don’t remember much of what happened from there, my dad stepped in, they argued the rest of the night, and he would later assure me I wasn’t grounded. It was the only thing he could undo from that day.

There are other, harder to define moments. The nights my mom would argue with my dad, we’d be in bed, school in the morning, and she’d turn on all our bedroom lights, rip the covers off our beds, and scream at us to get out of her house, that she was putting us all out on the streets and it was our father’s fault. I remember vividly the fight between my parents that happened in the day, everyone awake in the house, I collapsed in the kitchen as my mother ranted that we all hated her so she should leave and we won’t have to deal with her anymore, and I cried and trembled, overwhelmed with the thought, I don’t want anyone to leave, I don’t want to lose my family. I had to get out, so I did, walked right out of the house, not sure where I’d go, and my mother panicked and raced after me, put an arm over my shoulders, coaxed me back to the house. The moment the door closed; she was yelling at us again for not loving her enough and I realized I couldn’t leave, I was trapped. There was the gambling addiction, every Christmas we would be prepared, “mom lost a lot of money at the casino last night, we might not have a Christmas this year” – we had learned not to expect anything anyways and that every gift came with a quid pro quo and years of ‘remember I did this for you’. My older sister and her then-boyfriend, now-husband, watched my mom gamble away more than a month’s mortgage and spend the entire night chasing it back.

I’m thinking about all of this more recently, I think, since I started writing some fanfics for the Bungou Stray Dogs community. One of the main characters of the show is named after and inspired by author, Dazai Osamu, a man that died prematurely from a double suicide. This is treated tongue-and-cheek by the anime and its original manga through Dazai’s many failed suicide attempts and his odd flirtation strategy of asking ladies to commit double suicide with him. I kind of like this approach to the topic, it might on the surface seem insensitive to make a joke of something so serious as depression, but humor can be therapeutic and give us an easier way to broach otherwise difficult subjects.

I was in high school when my older sister and I were allowed to be in on the conversations about my mother’s mental disorder, both undiagnosed and untreated. We’d all speculate, my father and his sister, my mother’s sister, my sisters and I, the favorite theory was bipolar disorder, but we may never know. My mom refused then and refuses to this day to seek help. There were little things about her past before marrying my dad that we were allowed to know as we got older, too. Like, how she’d been put in a hospital that wanted to keep her there for further treatment – they knew something was wrong but didn’t know what, this was during a time when bipolar disorder was unheard of and they called similar diagnoses ‘manic depression’ – and she had to threaten legal action to get released. When she was eighteen, she had married a man knowing he had a terminal illness in order to help him get his green card, he died two years later, and she still considers him the great love of her life. We’re told by the media, movies like A Walk to Remember, that this is romantic, but in reality, it’s an unhealthy fixation on a relationship that was doomed from the start. She idolizes the memory of it, puts it on a pedestal as the standard for all of her other relationships to compare to, but it isn’t realistic. It was a relationship with a known expiration date, it wasn’t a real commitment, nothing had to matter because it would all come to an end soon, and they never reached the hard parts of a marriage – children, growing old, changing bodies, financial struggles, loss and disagreement. She went through a deep depression after he died and it reached a point that her sister had her placed on a suicide watch and thus began her long and sordid history of depression.

There are a lot of fanfics in the BSD community that explore a darker tone to Dazai’s depression, to varying degrees of accuracy. I mostly steer clear of them. There is one writer in the community that I won’t name, they’re an amazing writer with beautiful technical skill, and they do an impeccable job of showing depression exactly as it is for those who live it and those who live with a person that suffers from it. I left a one-word comment on one of their stories, the only positive thing I could say, and I couldn’t write anymore without the comment turning into an emotional lecture, I don’t know that author’s personal emotional state, but I also won’t read any more from them. It wasn’t the accurate depiction of depression that turned me off from the story, but the depiction of Dazai’s depression being known by all the characters in the story, including himself, but he won’t seek treatment for it, and all of the characters are shown to enable his depression and put up with his abuses that stem from his disorder. In the story he was placed in an intimate relationship with the character, Chuuya, and Chuuya is painted as the patron saint of boyfriends, willing to overlook Dazai’s every episode, draw him back from the ledge and bandage up his scars with an endless patience and gentleness. I couldn’t move passed the romanticizing of this relationship dynamic. Chuuya is shown to be noble and celebrated for his self-sacrifice and unconditional love that compels him to stay beside Dazai despite everything Dazai inflicts upon himself and Chuuya, and more importantly, despite Dazai’s refusal to get treatment.

My mother’s emotional state was constantly our responsibility growing up. She was sad because we didn’t love her. She was angry because we were ungrateful. She was miserable because we couldn’t see all that she did for us. If she hurt us with her words, if she lashed out at us irrationally, it was our fault, because we didn’t do everything right. Never mind that what was right could change within a minute in a day. Too often when someone in your life is suffering from a mental disorder, you’re made to shoulder the blame, either unintentionally by them as they suffer from their illness or intentionally by well-meaning individuals outside of the situation that don’t know better: you just need to give them love. If they take their own life, it’s your fault, you didn’t love them enough.

It was the Friday before Mother’s Day, I was in my early twenties, finishing up my degree in Anthropology (after changing my major, I don’t know how many times). My parents were long since divorced and my mom lived alone in the house where I grew up, still shrouded in all of those dark memories. My mother’s sister had recently left town after a short visit, she had called me a few days earlier to let me know my mother lost her job that week and was struggling to get out of the depression. In retrospect, she’d been sinking for a while now, after the violent dog and so many other incidents like it left us all with too many scars to overlook and we didn’t know how to walk back into that house, how to feel safe there. She’d covered herself in tattoos, cut her hair short, wore different wigs to work every day, she’d gained a lot of weight and was chain smoking so much there was a permanent haze in the house. None of these things should be thought of as red flags for everyone, it should be taken on an individual basis, but for my mother they were all signs that she was spiraling. She didn’t like who she saw in the mirror and was desperately trying to cover it up, find someone she did like. I had promised her I would come over, make her a dinner for Mother’s Day, and I would take her to see a movie. I was on my phone with my aunt when I pulled up, snowballing ideas for what to do if things got serious and if we needed to think about placing her on a suicide watch, how that would work. I rang the doorbell; it was outside of the gate she put around the front yard for her dogs to go in the front yard.

No answer.

Rang it again.

Still no answer.

She knew I was coming over.

I opened the gate, went to the door, the door was cracked open, my aunt was on the phone in my ear, “what’s going on?” I opened the door fully and my mom’s dogs came to greet me. The house was in disarray, furniture toppled over, papers scattered across the floor, so many of the details are blurred out of memory, I remember distinctly a ceramic statue broken on the floor but I couldn’t tell you what it was a statue of. I could hear a low intermittent moan coming from farther in the house. I followed it down the hall to my mother’s room, into her bathroom, where she was collapsed, naked, on the floor of her shower.

I told my aunt I had to go, I hung up and dialed 911. In the moment, I didn’t know how panicked I really was, my voice unnaturally high, my body warm and shaking and electric with adrenaline. That feeling hits me again, sometimes, when I don’t expect it. There was white like foam around my mother’s mouth, her eyes stared wide and blank at the ceiling, her every breath was that guttural moan as she attempted to draw air in, an autonomic action, she was completely unresponsive. Her body was on autopilot, and so was mine. I’d been rehearsing for a long time what to do in that situation, it’s the only way I made it through everything that needed to be done. I gave the dispatcher the address, answered her questions, “I think she did something to herself but I don’t know what…no, there’s no pills nearby…no, I don’t see anything in the trash…she’s been severely depressed…she has a history of depression…”, between pleading with my mom, “please don’t leave me, please stay with me, mom,” and wrestling her dogs into the front yard and out of the house. The dispatcher told me the ambulance was on its way and asked if I wanted her to stay on the line and I begged her not to hang up, not to leave me with nothing but the moans of my dying mother, she didn’t say anything during that time, was just silently present as I talked to my mom and waited for the paramedics. They couldn’t come in until I got the dogs out back, I cursed and screamed at the unruly mongrels and felt an irrational anger that my mom never got them properly trained.

I took a seat in the kitchen, let the paramedics work and my brain shut down. I called my aunt back, told her what happened. The paramedics came to ask me questions, I tried to answer them but I didn’t know and my aunt was correcting me over the phone, so I handed her over and let her talk to them. They took my mother away to the hospital and I was alone, in that childhood house, that held so many horrible memories of my mother’s untreated disorder, and every aspect of our lives that it colored and perverted. Every Mother’s Day was always fraught with anxiety, I think it was my mother’s least favorite day, her mood was always sour, and no matter what we gave her or tried to do for her, it wasn’t enough. Even the year before, the Mother’s Day when she told us exactly what to get her. She was so happy with her present, a sterling silver ring with our birthstones imbedded that cost us all a pretty penny – I was paying my own way through college, my older sister was paying rent on a Starbucks salary, and my little sister didn’t have a job – but a week later we were ungrateful brats again. There was one Mother’s Day when I was maybe ten or eleven, we’d set her up roses and two cards – one from my father and one from her daughters. I was watching television and waiting for her to come home from work to wish her a happy Mother’s Day. She came in and years of practice had taught me to recognize she was in a dark mood, a cigarette on her lip, her posture tense, muttering under her breath about how nobody loved her, nobody cared. She stalked to the desk, ripped the cards in half without opening them and threw them on the ground in front of me without sparing me one glance or word, and stormed to her room, slammed the door behind her.

We would later find out that my mother drank antifreeze, a method that has about a 5% survival rate. She was in a coma for about a month. It was another few weeks before they took the respirator tube out and her throat recovered enough that she could talk in small sentences, and not without effort and pain. She told us she filled a cup with the antifreeze, showed us with her fingers set apart how high she’d put it in the glass, when she finished, she washed the cup and stuck it in the dishwasher, hiding the evidence. She’d always heard antifreeze was flavorless but it tasted awful – they add flavoring to antifreeze to deter people from accidentally ingesting it. She’d thought it would be quick, but it’s really an excruciatingly painful and long, drawn out way to die. She’d stripped in her deliria and taken a shower because her body felt so awful, feverish and almost on fire, as it was shutting down and her nerves fried from the chemical reaction. I wrestled for a long time with the ethical delimma of my choices in that moment after finding her, and there was a thought that stuck with me through it all: What did I get my mother for Mother’s Day? I saved her life, and it was still the wrong gift.

It isn’t noble or romantic to stay with someone who refuses to get professional treatment for their mental disorder. There is no amount of love or patience or understanding that will heal them. In most situations, the harder and braver thing to do is walk away. None of us is a perfect person and none of us should have to bear the burden of another person’s unwillingness to get help when they need it. It took me a long time to come to terms with the notion that there is no one to blame in this situation. It isn’t my fault that I can’t give my mother the love she craves. It isn’t my mother’s fault that she can’t see the love that her daughters wanted to give her. But it is her responsibility to get help. If she refuses help, no one can force it on her.

It’s been years now since this happened. My mother is now as recovered as she’ll ever be. Her mind isn’t as sharp, and she struggles with controlling her muscles and the devastating damage to her nervous system that will never fully heal. She remains undiagnosed and is not receiving any kind of professional guidance or treatment. There have been new, dark memories, added to the old ones, in those times when we tried to be supportive and “there for her” during her recovery. Episodes that remind us she doesn’t want to change and she never will. So, we keep our interactions to a minimum, answer when she texts, try to help her when she asks for it, check in every so often. She lives on the other side of the country with two cats and goes regularly to the neighborhood karaoke bar. In a weird way, she seems happier with this set up, this distance between her and all of the pain that my sisters and I seemed to bring her, that constant demand for love that we couldn’t fulfill, maybe it really was all our fault and we were the ones to blame, or maybe it’s because I’m not living with her depression anymore.

I don’t know if I’ll call my mother on Mother’s Day, but for anyone else out there with a complicated relationship with their mother, it’s okay if you decide not to call your mother either.

1 note · View note

solaciummeae · 5 years

Text

{ Laws of the Land: }

Please read these before interacting. (:

My blog is PRIVATE. Typically I prefer to write with MUTUALS ONLY but I am currently open to NEW INTERACTIONS. I usually write && talk with someone OOC for a while BEFORE FOLLOWING to make sure we vibe.

I’m HIGHLY SELECTIVE with PARTNERS/FOLLOWS. I’m trying maintain a cleaner dash this time around. sidenote: When choosing partners: Literacy is a thing. I understand typos but basic spelling and grammar are easier to manage than trying to mentally fix things as I go. I DO understand language barriers. But BOTTOM LINE: If I can’t understand what just happened in your post, I can’t reply adequately because I have nothing to go from. I also prefer people who are dedicated and interested in writing detailed plots. Moving the story along.

By stating that I am PRIVATE: I reserve the right to work on the things that speak to me the most at any given time. I’ve had a lot of stress this year && this is a coping thing for me. I will write what I have MUSE for. Typically I will NOT start something unless I know I have MUSE for it to avoid dropping THREADS && INTERACTIONS. I’m simply focusing on things that I have the most juice for. sidenote: This means that while I have a ridiculous number MUSES && VERSES, I’ll be sticking pretty close to my MOST ACTIVE LIST unless we have heavily established PLOTS && CONNECTIONS OR I have explicitly offered to give you a MUSE OR VERSE that is NOT on the MOST ACTIVE LIST. I post this list regularly, it’s easy to find on my blog.

My blog is currently on LOW ACTIVITY temporarily. There are a lot of things going on in my life right now. I am trying to be on as much as possible. However, I won’t be here 24/7, nor am I obligated to THREAD/POST/TALK all the time. It is not personal. I was just diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis && have existing severe mental illness. Some days just suck.

IMPORTANT: I have roughly 230 muses, 40+ verses, my blog is ALWAYS under construction. These projects are my passion, that’s why I have them. Don’t be a jerk and tell me maybe I should cut back. I operate how I operate.

My writing is PG-13 to Mature. It’s not always this way but violence, explicit language, substance use, etc. happen here. NSFW of all kinds. I’m 28 and will only write with adult partners. So 18+ only on this blog. IMPORTANT: I will NOT write SMUT with others. It may happen occasionally in drabbles I write. But not in threads. I don’t mind sexual references, headcanons, jokes, etc. But no threading with NSFW language. Fade to black for me.

The length of my writing tends to fluctuate. Para to multi-para mostly. You do NOT have to match me because sometimes I might not completely match you. Just how it is. Sidenote: Do NOT give me one or two sentences if I gave you a solid paragraph. It makes it really difficult to adequately reply. I might write a one liner starter, but it will ALWAYS grow.

On the topic of ORIGINAL VERSES && MY POST SERIES FANDOM VERSES: I welcome anyone to take part in my ORIGINAL VERSES or my POST SERIES FANDOM VERSES. PLEASE DO, that’s why I created them. However, do NOT steal my verses or post series for your plots. I work extremely hard to WORLD BUILD and develop these complex plotlines. DO NOT STEAL THEM && certainly DO NOT TAKE CREDIT FOR THEM. I do not mind if you and another person involved in that verse or post series with me write for the verse or plot but do NOT just openly steal them && start writing them with other people I don’t even know. I work my ass off for this stuff. Don’t be gross.

GRAPHICS IN THREADS: I use ICONS &&GIF ICONS. They keep it cleaner looking && more accessible. IMPORTANT: I have a very large number of UNDERUSED FACECLAIMS. For this reason, DRY POSTING WILL BE A THING. I’m working to make resources, but it takes time. IMPORTANT: I AM HERE FOR THE WRITING NOT THE GRAPHICS. I should already know what your muse looks like if I’ve seen a picture and likewise, you can find pictures of mine. NOTE: If my muse has no resources, I will post a pre-designed icon of them at the beginning of the thread so you know what they look like. After which it will be dry threading.

I would hope that you would have ideas of your own. It works much better if we can feed off of each other and really go back and forth with plots than things being one sided. Sadly, this has happened to me a lot. Sidenote: We don’t have to come up with something first but it would be nice if there was an idea. However, I won’t ever turn away an intriguing starter with no back story. Though, I might ask questions to make my reply as accurate as possible.

DO NOT GODMOD. I should be the only one controlling my character. I really hate when people assume they know my character and get them all wrong. Or even insinuate some prior history I never agreed to. Sounds ridiculous? It’s happened. If there’s a time it’s needed, shoot me an IM. I’m totally good with that.

I’m EXTREMELY SELECTIVE when it comes to ROMANTIC SHIPPING. I’ve been burned way too many times. My muses are my babies. If they aren’t feeling it. I am not going to force it on them. You can find ALL of my MUSES romantic preferences on my MUSE DIRECTORIES including if they’re romantic shippable or not. I have several who are CLOSED. Chemisty. Chemistry. Chemistry.

IMPORTANT: I AM NOT HERE JUST TO ROMANTIC SHIP. I’m tired of only ever heterosexual romantic shipping– especially with my MALES. Come to me with bromance, familial, platonic, or enemy. I’m always looking for new connections to my muses. It helps them grow as people.

IMPORTANT: I heavily prefer LGBT+ romantic ships at this point especially as a queer writer myself. I’m real over the heteronormativity. If you come to me with a queer pairing I’m far more likely try it out.

IMPORTANT: Please give my FEMALES as much attention as you give my MALES. I’ve tried closing my MALES. I still get used for them. Especially to romantic ship. Treat my FEMALES the way you’d want yours to be treated. I’m always down for F/F interactions so we both win. I truly love female muses, I simply wanna get to use mine too.

Drama is pretty much a must, in the sense of the plot. I’ve had people tell me they don’t like it and that’s fine but without things happening, the story doesn’t really progress. IMPORTANT: However! NO DRAMA OOC. I worked with middle school kids for half a decade so my bullshit meter is super low. No OOC drama. No HATE. I DO have the following TRIGGERS: incest, rape, sexual assault of any kind, romanticizing the devil.

The first three are self explanatory. However the fourth has become really common with shows like Lucifer in existence. For personal reasons, treating the devil like he’s a cool guy is really triggering for me. I understand that his character from Supernatural is very popular. However, romanticizing him, making him seem like he’s “not actually a bad guy.” like he’s just “misunderstood.” or even “falling in love with the devil.” I can’t handle. If you’re writing him as a villain or enemy that’s perfectly fine. It’s really just the threads and content that romanticizes him that really really triggers me.

I’m asking that these things be tagged: tw: incest, tw: rape, tw: sexual assault, tw: devil friendly.

NOTE: If I ever post anything you need tagged with a trigger that I haven’t, please don’t hesitate to ask. If it makes you uncomfortable I don’t want you to have to see it. Typically I don’t post traditionally triggering content. But just in case, let me know.

Last but certainly not least, I’M HERE TO MAKE FRIENDS. Seriously. I want to get to know you OOC. You guys are my friends and I care about you very much. I love chatting. Likewise, I can make a great soundboard. If you need someone to talk to, please don’t hesitate. You guys are so important to me. I’ve been on Tumblr roleplaying for about five years. But I’ve been roleplaying for about 13 years total. And some of my closest friends have come from writing with others.

These have been updated as of 10/08/19. I tried to make them more streamline and I really do appreciate you reading them. It makes writing together easier. If I find out you didn’t read them before interacting I will be less inclined to write with you. I read all rules before I follow someone or write with them so I expect the same courtesy. They are here for a reason.

Thank you!

💜💜💜💜💜

#outofthisworld #these have been HEAVILY redone and updated #I'm posting them due to the edits as well as for new followers and mutuals #rules #important #about: blog

1 note · View note

dukeofriven · 6 years

Text

Hussie, Hitler, And Boy I’m Tired

I said earlier that I didn’t want to put on my hip waders and muck about in the Homestuck tags. *pulls off hip waders* I went anyways. I went even though I was feeling pretty good because I had a nice dinner and got to watch the New Years Bake-Off special. I went anyways, and I did it for you, my eight followers who aren’t pornbots. It turns out the Homestuck fandom of Tumblr is as scary and hyperbolic as ever, and has taken one lousy bit of badly written crap and extrapolated that backwards into ‘Homestuck has always been a racist anti-semetic pile of garbage and everything about it is terrible and Andrew Hussie needs to die.” I’m not paraphrasing, by the way. Someone out there is chanting ‘die Andrew Hussie die,’ because he had the gall to... clumsily dunk on Hitler like a fifteen year old trying to impress his English teacher with edgy comedy? This new stuff is too dumb to be offensive, especially in an era with, y’know, Hitler-praising alt-right Neo Nazis actually being mainstream media figures. Hey Tumblr fandom? Can you... mm not chill, chill’s not the word I’m looking for what is it... oh yes. Can y’all fuck off for once?

Tumblr doesn’t deserve to enjoy things because it doesn’t know how to enjoy things responsibly. It lurches from adoration to hatred without pause, and as a writer it gives me nothing but an anxiety. I cannot produce anything imperfect, I cannot ever write crap because if I do then all my work will be tainted by it forever. On Tumblr you are always judged by your worst effort, which is a fucking god-awful standard for large media franchises of any kind. You know who one of the greatest, most thoughtful, socially-driven authors of the twentieth century was? Terry Pratchett. You know what’s kind of sexist and lazy and awful? The Colour of Magic. You know what’s weirdly colonialist and smug and all-around shit? Snuff! Neither of those shitty books invalidate the forty other Discworld novels. The existence of Anchorman’s bloviating nothingness doesn’t erase Will Ferrel’s warm and desperately human performance in Stranger Than Fiction. The Forced Kiss Equal Romance kiss in Blade Runner doesn’t erase the rest of the movie piercing question on the nature of what it means to be human. And on and on and on. Andrew Hussie’s sneeze-shart dogshit history rewrite that was so embarrassingly bad it got pulled from the internet didn’t erase Rose/Kanaya, or gay Dave, or Joey Claire tap-dancing her little heart out to try and defeat a monster. And even if Andrew Hussie does a JK Rowling and produces nothing but ill-thought-out crap from here until the day we all die in the great Disney Final Merger of 2023, it still won’t invalidate the good moments that made you happy. I mean if Andrew Hussie toddles out of retirement onto a talk show in a bathrobe to discuss his new revelations on the Puppetgrandmasters of Scion who all have worryingly Semetic names, I’m not going to be so naive as to pretend that his earlier media can be consumed in some kind of vacuum, that the future cannot affect the past. but I am saying that the good that happened in it - the things that affected you in positive ways - are not ethereal. It mattered to you then, and that’s okay. Tumblr’s hyperbolic responses seem to be rooted in embarrassment and self-flagellation. People seem so terrified by the thought that anyone might associate them as a fan of something - gasp - linked to controversy that they... well, they say shit like “die andrew hussie die.” Hey dude. Hey. You need to redirect that anger, my friend. There’s actual Neo-Nazis in the streets. On the TV. In the US government. I guess what I’m trying to say is... Woof. Okay. You know, to give Andrew Hussie partial credit here, its nice to see someone actually write Adolf Hitler the way he really was - a pant-shitting constantly whiny toddler of a human being who endlessly threw tantrums and got to where he was largely on the strength of other people’s bad decisions. Remember kids: the biggest myth Neo-Nazis have ever perpetrated is that Germany under Hitler was well-run, well-organized, and anything other than a collection of squabbling dysfunctional fiefdoms run by party hacks propped up by a bureaucracy and military too bound by inertia, ego, and cultural racism to do anything to stop a lunatic from ripping their country to shreds. That whole ‘trains running on time’ thing? It’s nonsense. Go study the conduct of the war once Germany had exhausted all its pre-war stockpiled resources and ran out of useful shit to loot, once it had to start relying on its leadership for the things that make wars winnable - supplies, reinforcements, fuel, winter clothing. Watch the way from 1942 onwards Germany stumbled from one disaster to the next, as Hitler fired more and more generals and drew more and more authority to himself and his fellow party cronies. Hitler should not be feared as a man of competence or skill - he was a buffoon, a clown of a human being fuelled entirely by petty, vindictive spite and an unlimited capacity for cruelty. And before anyone goes ‘well if he was so objectively pathetic how the fuck did he take over Germany’ I direct you to google the last two years of American politics and the words ‘Donald Fucking Trump.’ [I recommend, on these war subjects particularly, Sir Antony Beevor’s bleak and sobering works, particularly Stalingrad, Berlin: The Downfall 1945, and Ardennes 1944: Hitler's Last Gamble.] Sorry this... kind of got away from me somewhat, but I really hate it when people get mad that someone didn’t take Hitler seriously (and, to be strictly fair, this is not what everyone is mad about in regards to Andrew Hussie, either). You should never take Hitler seriously. Take hate seriously - take violent words, and calls for purity, take his ideas of superiority and racial preeminence and anti-semitism seriously as the evils, the horrors as they are. But the man himself? He literally stank - a combination of his halitosis, chronic flatulence, and was constant diarrhea. [I am not exaggerating] He was a sad pathetic clown, and Andrew Hussie chose to write him as such. He just... went too far. It happens. It’s not good writing. It’s fucking shit, to be honest. Boring shit. The Minions movie decided to have the Minions sit out the entirety of WWII by having them get stuck in a cave or some such. Honestly that’s a better option than what Andrew Hussie went with - and ‘be more like the Minions movie’ isn’t advice I give that often. You want to be disgruntled that an author wrote something this bafflingly tone deaf and tedious? Sure. I know I am. But to chant for his death? Are you fucking kidding me? Look! Look out your window at those marching Neo-Nazis trying to establish a white supremacist state? What the ever-loving fuck are you people doing in here getting ready to string-up a man whose crime was making Adolf Friggen Hitler too petty???????? Tumblr. Tumblr, for the love of god this has to stop. This ‘Ceasar’s wife must be above reproach’ shit has to stop - it’s killing fandom, it’s killing good media critique, it’s burying proportional fan response, and its just exhausting. Why can’t you ever just let something be lousy without it being literal death warrant? There’s real demons out there - I can see them out the window, and every time I turn on the TV. Maybe - just bloody maybe - not every single crime deserves the exact same level of disapprobation and punishment? Maybe we could read some content and say “boy that sure had some lousy implications and also was just really poorly written” and then... stop there? Wouldn’t that be nice, for a change? We could dislike something without feeling like it required activism on our part. We could say ‘this piece of media was shit, but it didn’t advocate for a white ethno-state, so I will continue to think of it only until the end of this sentence.’ I am not advocating for an end to media criticism for anything that isn’t openly hate speech (but if you think that I am I am going to assume you’re already so needlessly enraged about this whole matter that I’m a bit puzzled why you’ve bothered to read this far since its obvious we don’t agree on many fundamental issues.) What I am calling for is the end to death threats against people who don’t mean you harm. Because that’s lunacy. That’s beyond the pale, actually, that’s really disturbing and sickening and you should seriously reconsider your relationship with media. Because there are people out there who do want to hurt you. Their lives are fuelled by hate, their philosophies are driven by it, as are their politics. I assure you that when a time traveller steps through a portal trying to prevent the rise of ‘the great Trump War of 2020′ the inciting incident will not be ‘Andrew Hussie trivialized the holocaust by citing its origins as a grudge Adolf Hitler bore Albert Einstein over a rivalry in secret clown ninja school before being taken on as an agent of a baking-obsessed alien space witch and bumped into power by the Peters principle.’ Because just by writing that sentence I have already reaffirmed a very simple truth: this is way, way too stupid to give the slightest shit about. So let’s tell Andrew Hussie that his new work is... mmm.... kind of like a shit if a shit had a shit that was itself shat out by a shit and then vomited on by another shit who had eaten nothing but shit since Sunday. Let’s tel lhim “hey dude, your clownish work summoned the spectre of anti-semetism, and you can do better.” Frankly, I think that message was already sent, since in the two hours between me going to make and eat dinner and then coming back to my computer, the new material was discovered, read, disseminated, and removed. Two hours. Sure, maybe a bit of lag due to what does and does not hit my feed but come on - this all took place in an afternoon. It’s already down. Our voices were heard - we didn’t think this was very good, and apparently Whatpumpkin agrees enough that they didn’t mount a defence of it. Rather than take the next logical step, though - which seems to be calling for the death of Andrew Hussie and removing all of Homestuck from the internet and maybe nuking Toby Fox from orbit just to be extra-sure? - we could do... something else. Talk about the release date for Stranger Things, maybe. Track down some local Neo-Nazis and punch them. Read some Antony Beevor books and really educate ourselves on what a smelly fuck-up Hitler was so we can chant that at Neo Nazis at their next rally. Or you could watch the New Years Bake-Off special. It was pretty good.

#homestuck #andrew hussie #hitler #hiveswap #hiveswap friendsim #whatpumpkin #skaianet #bake-off #terry pratchett #homestuck analysis

7 notes · View notes

scifimagpie · 6 years

Text

The Free Speech Fallacy

In the wake of the sudden and catastrophic announcement of Tumblr's new policy, I found myself startled by the collapse of something long-assumed in discussions of free speech. "Female-presenting nipples," "sex acts," and "depictions of genitalia" between consenting adults or adult characters are among those being banned, but erotica is still okay to write. Ostensibly, the purpose of all this is to protect the internet from child pornography - but as usual, the cure is almost worse than the crime. Plenty of artistic photos are getting annihilated in the purge.

Obviously, child pornography is Bad, but banning all depictions of sexuality has sent Tumblr's stock plummeting and already devastated the community. But is it even working?

Predictably, since an automated ban system is being used, both hilarious and troubling results have been reported - on my dash, a building with three windows, a lumpy slime shape, and pictures of black men smiling were all flagged as containing "sensitive content." Obviously, this is ridiculous, but more nefarious and concerning is that posts about activism and LGBTQ+ issues were also immediately flagged.

As we speak, the exodus from Tumblr to Newgrounds, which does protect NSFW content, has already begun. So have the floods of sarcastic (but very funny) memes. The rest of the users are panicking or trying not to panic, and often staggering between the two emotions haphazardly.

I'll have more honest and cutting thoughts about this below, but for the time being, here's a visual pun about free speech.

Yes, I did create this silly, mediocre art just for the blog post. Learning to make art is hard.

Censorship - like, actually

Hate speech and sexy speech - and art - are often thrown together, as if they were one and the same or shared the same traits. Anyone who wants to support pornographic or artistic works for their own sake - such as myself - is often forced to accept their nastier cousins, hate speech and violent speech, as part and parcel of the ban list.

There's been some caterwauling about liability in lawsuits, revenge porn, and other such things, but the answer to that is not blanket banning. It's lazy, ineffective, and tars consensual and voluntary work with the same brush as harmful acts. If it's hard to understand why that's a problem, please watch this video about consent.

youtube

Lessons from the Exodus

However, this event shows that all forms of controversial speech are not, in fact, created equal. This has long been an argument, but - given that hate speech is surviving this purge easily enough and that nipples, of all the ridiculous things, are not - we can now officially divorce the two. The one is being attacked without any impact on the other. As much as they have often been companions in the penalty box, they are not the same issue, and we ought to be more honest about this, rather than letting Nazis take shelter behind our protection of sex workers and sexy content.

Hate speech, which I personally do not believe should be protected, is visual, verbal, and written expressions encouraging violence towards and harm of marginalised groups. The impact of hate speech and discrimination is directly dependent on how much harm they cause towards people. So for instance, a Muslim woman is subjected to far more prejudice than a white man on a regular basis, so she might be more in need of protection than the white guy. BUT - that does not mean that the white man doesn't need protection from individual acts of violence, such as a mugging or domestic assault (because men are abused, too, and our lack of men's shelters is criminal).

However, advocating for acts of hate using coded language, such as the ((( ))) technique used by alt-righters to distinguish Jewish people, or references to the Fourteen Words and that sort of thing, can be harder to pick up on. Do we silence those too?

On one hand, people should be allowed to exist freely. On the other hand, if those people decide their existence is predicated on harming others, the conflict that arises does not need to be defended. It does not materially benefit or even defend, for instance, the European cultures being talked about. If one demands that the existence of presence of others be punished merely at their whim, that person is wrong.

I can see someone saying, "BUT SJWs OR NPCs [Social Justice Warriors, or our new nickname, non-player characters] DON'T PERMIT THE EXISTENCE OF PEOPLE THEY DISAGREE WITH!"

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the position. What "we", broadly speaking, want, is to be tolerated and accepted as we are. We often have family members or friends who are or were centrists, right-wing, or even alt-right. It's their beliefs that are the problem. You might say, to put it in Christian terms, that we love the sinners and hate the sin.

But in all seriousness, "white pride" parades and groups have never done anything to actually preserve great works of art or literature. In fact, a lot of preservation work that's been done by various societies - such as by Muslims during the Golden Age of the Ottoman Empire - was done in a spirit of tolerance and sharing. In addition to that, questioning something is not the same as destroying it. I've talked about this stuff before, and it's a huge topic, so let's get back to Tumblr specifically and the future of the arts and queer community on it.

Where do we go now?

Well, Mastodon seems to be an option. I've heard Newgrounds, as mentioned, is a possible haven.

At this point, I think it's time for businesses to be more honest about sexual content compared to other banned content. This purge is timed to match with December 17th, the day to end violence against sex workers. I have gone on record many times as being in support of sex workers, and have occasionally tried to talk about the difference between trafficking myths and trafficking facts, as well as other related issues. Sex workers and creators of sexual content (including writers, artists, cam girls, photographers, and etc) are all being harmed by this foolish and ill-judged, puritanical move - and nobody is being saved from actual hate speech, things that could, in fact harm adults.

Maybe we can talk Tumblr down from its terrible, foolish decision. Maybe not. But I'm making a profile elsewhere just in case, and I'll keep posting and sharing there - and on Tumblr - for as long as they let me. Queer people are not a mistake, nor filthy.

"Filth" is not necessarily even harmful.

We don't deserve to be erased.

***Michelle Browne is a sci fi/fantasy writer. She lives in Lethbridge, AB with her partners-in-crime and their cat. Her days revolve around freelance editing, knitting, jewelry, and nightmares, as well as social justice issues. She is currently working on the next books in her series, other people's manuscripts, and drinking as much tea as humanly possible.

Find her all over the internet:

*** Michelle Browne is a sci fi/fantasy writer. She lives in Lethbridge, AB with her partners-in-crime and their cat. Her days revolve around freelance editing, knitting, jewelry, and nightmares, as well as social justice issues. She is currently working on the next books in her series, other people's manuscripts, and drinking as much tea as humanly possible. Find her all over the internet: The mailing list * Amazon * Medium * Twitter * Instagram * Facebook * Tumblr * OG Blog

#freeze peach #@staff #tumblr #free speech #nazi #mastodon #shut down

2 notes · View notes

amandajoyce118 · 6 years

Text

Why I’m Not Mad At Those Agents Of SHIELD Season 5 “Deaths”

During season five of Agents of SHIELD, I noticed that the end of the season saw a lot of outraged fans, fans who called out the writers on social media for stories they didn’t like, fans who were devastated by different plot points. Through it all, I was… fine. I joked that I had reached a new state of SHIELD zen or something. Nothing that anyone else complained about being emotionally manipulative for the audience seemed to phase me. After a couple of weeks of thinking about why the season finale in particular didn’t phase me or leave me angry with the writers, I decided to examine why the three big character “deaths” in the finale didn’t upset me as much as they have others.

Spoilers, obviously, follow, if you haven’t yet watched season five. I’m also going to get a little personal to explain how I feel about the roles each of these deaths fill, so… you’ve been warned.

I wrote this out as my own personal info dump, and I considered not posting it at all because I don’t usually share personal stories on tumblr, but after writing so much, I figured, I might as well. Maybe it will be interesting to someone else.

Let me start off by saying we have three “typical” deaths in the finale. You have the surprise death (Fitz), the one you know is coming even though you don’t physically see it (Coulson), and the hero who lives long enough to see himself become the villain (Talbot).

Let’s go ahead and start with the easiest one for most audience members to stomach, not to downplay it for those who hate the idea of his absence: Coulson.

The audience has, for one thing, already seen Coulson cheat death multiple times. Coulson is also the oldest and highest ranking member of the team we see. It’s a natural progression for him to move on from this job and experience life outside of SHIELD. Coulson leaving the team - whether by death or by choice - is a turning point in the story. It allows the next generation of agents to step up. It allows the story to focus on more characters. It is, in short, the circle of life.

When I was 11, my grandfather was diagnosed with esophageal cancer. He was forced to retire (for the second time) because the treatments, and later the surgery, made him too weak to hold down a job. Over time, despite eventually being termed “cancer free,” his illness took his appetite and his energy. We knew it was only a matter of time before he died. His death when I was 12 was expected, well earned after a long life, and marked a turning point for his wife and kids. My grandmother sold the house they’d lived in for more than 30 years and bought a smaller place. His sons had to step out of the shadow of a man who had been a member of the Coast Guard. My mother reconciled with her mother after not speaking for years.

Was it sad? Of course. But it was also a relief that he wasn’t having to hold up a body that was wearing down. It was expected, and his death was just another part of life. That’s very much how Coulson’s impending death feels to me, and why I was pretty quick to accept that the writers didn’t need to end the season by saving him. There are plenty of fans who don’t want to see the show go on without Coulson, and I get that he’s their favorite, but he’s also one person in the ensemble, and there are more stories to tell.

That brings me to Talbot.

Talbot began his time on the show as a threat, but not really a threat. He was comic relief, the guy who says outlandish things, but who doesn’t necessarily mean any harm by them. He was meant to be fun, but underneath all of that, there’s a bit of a menacing edge to him. He was never a bad guy though. Not until Hydra messed with his head and he got ahold of the gravitonium. Daisy launching him into space was a last resort to make sure the use of his abilities didn’t end the world.

Talbot’s arc actually reminds me a lot of Daisy’s season three Hive storyline. Instead of being addicted to Hive’s connection though, Talbot is addicted to the gravitonium. He wants more and more of it in order to increase his power levels. Granted, he’s not doing this to feel good, but because he thinks he’s making himself into a worthy hero, so there is a major difference there. The biggest aspect of the story that made me suspect there was no redeeming Talbot at this point in the series though is that the “big bad” of the final batches of episodes doesn’t make it out alive on Agents of SHIELD. It’s rare for the season to end with the previous threat still looming because the writers like to close off at least one story arc. They can’t leave everything with a loose end or just abandon everything. They have to choose.

Now, when I was a kid, my mom was engaged to a guy for a few years. Their initial relationship was great. He was charming, funny, the life of the party. He was also an alcoholic and an addict who was abusive when he was under the influence of, well, anything. When I was 12, the month before my grandfather died, he also died. Unexpectedly, yes, but his life had been spiraling for so long that it also wasn’t entirely unexpected. He overdosed. His death, like Talbot’s, was like the end of an out of control storyline that had reached its breaking point.

So, I could understand Talbot’s death, even if I had hoped for a different outcome for him.

Now, Fitz’s death is, of course, the one that’s the most controversial of them all, it seems. There’s a lot of anger at that particular plot point, and I get it.

We’ve been set up this entire arc to believe that Elena, Jemma, and Fitz aren’t going to face death. After all, the three of them live long enough to be tortured by the Kree and start a family, respectively. Their safety is (relatively) built into the storyline. They might be able to be seriously injured, but death? Out of the question. Of course, this storyline was also all about breaking a time loop, so there had to be changes to what we thought we knew would happen.

I’ve seen lots of fans argue that it isn’t fair, that Mack and Polly were already safe, that Fitz’s death shouldn’t take their place. I agree. But that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? Life, and more often, death, isn’t fair. Shit happens. Sometimes, we’re prepared for it, like Fitz knowing that Mack and Polly didn’t make it to the Lighthouse in the original timeline, and preventing that. Sometimes, we’re not, like Fitz finding himself impaled by a building as a result. I mean, I could argue that this is, for all intents and purposes, Fitz being proven right about you not really being able to change the future: a tragic death is still going to happen in the timeline, no matter how hard you try to stop it. But I don’t think that was the case here. I think this was a reminder that this group of people has actually been relatively safe from mortality for a few seasons now. They live and work in a dangerous world, and this is the consequence.

Mortality can rob of us our favorites at any time.

Which brings me to my final story of death. Not the final death I’ve experienced, but the final story I’m going to share with you in regards to this particular trio. When I was 12, before my grandfather died, before my mother’s fiance died, my father went in for what was supposed to be a routine surgery. And I never got to speak to him again.

My parents divorced when I was four, and I wasn’t exactly a daddy’s girl. We weren’t close, but I still went to visit him on holidays and summers. My dad introduced me to comic books and science fiction and a lot of the things that I adore as an adult. But when I was 12, he had surgery on his heart, checked out of the hospital because everything went as expected, and then still felt off. He went back for a checkup, and they decided to keep him overnight for observation, just in case. His heart stopped. And no one knew right away because the nurses on his floor were all with other patients. He was temporarily put on life support when he was discovered, but ultimately, there was no brain activity. He died.

It was unexpected and scary and I hated it. And I wanted to blame the nurses on his floor, but how could I when they were all doing their jobs? Surgeries that are called “routine” are supposed to be simple, ones that have been done a thousand times, like Fitz saving a friend has happened countless times. But there’s always a danger to them, complications that could arise, just like Fitz doing his job is always dangerous.

So, yes, this death was surprising on the one hand, but not on the other. I get it. I accepted it. A writer wants to make you feel something in their work. And it’s not always going to be warm and fuzzy smiles. And I remembered that, unlike in my life, this wasn’t entirely the end for Fitz.

It’s important to note that all three of these major “death” storylines feature a silver lining of hope. Not only has Jed Whedon remarked in interviews that there could be a way to bring Talbot back to the show, that launching him into space doesn’t necessarily mean he’s dead and gone, but the original Fitz is still out there, and Coulson gets a chance to have time for life instead of work.

Sure, Coulson could lose his life at any time. And sure, there are plenty of fans who are upset that he didn’t get a cure. But Coulson got to choose. Something Daisy didn’t get to do when it came to getting her powers back. Coulson is going out on his own terms. And he gets to do it in Tahiti with the woman he’s loved for a very long time, but been too stubborn to admit it. He finally gets a break from being the world’s shield. Not many people get to choose how they go. It’s a nice “end” for someone who spent most of his professional life following the rules of a secret organization before learning that sometimes, you couldn’t trust the system. Also, Clark Gregg was supposed to meet with the producers about appearing in some episodes in season six, and he’s back in the movies. He’s not completely gone. Fans can rest easy.

Some people have referenced Fitz being out in space as lazy writing, as in, “oh, look, this means nothing because double Fitzes!” Something isn’t lazy writing just because you disagree with it. I think that’s something that fandoms in general have forgotten as the social media culture has grown with television/movies/books over the last decade. Any time a large contingent of fans disagrees with a storyline, they decide it’s written poorly and everyone who doesn’t think the same as they do is simply uneducated. Everyone’s entitled to their opinion whether you agree with it or not, but to call something lazy writing just because you didn’t like it is, well, a lazy response.

This plot point is actually the opposite of lazy writing. Lazy writing is having a gifted individual who can ice their body over left at the bottom of the ocean without ever mentioning him again even though ice floats instead of sinks. Lazy writing is never addressing the fact that an Inhuman is going through his second terrigenesis at the bottom of the ocean as well. Or, you know, that there’s a member of the Inhuman royal family on Earth in your same cinematic universe who survives in water. So many ocean related things that never intersect simply because the writers have pushed them aside. Maybe season six will be Agents Of SHIELD: Submerged. But I digress.

This particular plot point does something Agents of SHIELD doesn’t usually do for a few seasons: it circles back to resolve a plot point writers would otherwise expect fans to forget. If this had happened in an earlier season of the show, Fitz out in space would probably have been abandoned for a few years before the writers remembered they left him out there. It also solves the problem of what happens to Fitz decades from now when he wakes up in space and the future he thought he was going to actually didn’t exist. He now has a future, thanks to Jemma deciding they’re going to find him and wake him up. The time loop has already been broken. The Kasius family is not taking over the remnants of Earth. Fitz would have woken up alone, orbiting a planet where there was no one for him to find with just Enoch for company.

If the writers choose to do it, this plot point also allows the writers to take a proactive approach to mental health in the next batch of episodes. Fitz’s friends now understand just how badly his memories of the Doctor affect him. He doesn’t just have those memories. He hears the Doctor’s voice in his head. He’s been living on his own for six months in a military prison, stretching his mind nearly to its limit to find a way to get to his friends. He was already nearing his breaking point then. The stress of trying to save the world, heal a rift in space time, and go against Daisy’s wishes to do it all caused him to suffer that psychotic break. That exact same set of circumstances doesn’t exist anymore. But similar ones still can. This time, the team knows Fitz is both their old Fitz and the Doctor. They can help him instead of just label him as unfit and lock him up. Again, that’s if the show decides to go there. They might not. But I feel like we haven’t seen the last of this whole situation. This Fitz isn’t going to be magically “healed” just because he didn’t do the whole time travel thing.

When I was a kid, my grandmother always said that tragedies occur in threes, and that’s been true as long as I can remember. This season finale reminded me very much of that in my life. I think my reaction as “zen” is more a result of me being able to see the events mirrored in a completely different way than anyone else can. I’ve been there and seen them all happen already. So none of them are cheap, lazy, or given to characters less deserving than others. They all made perfect sense to me.

(As a side note: I feel the need to point out that these three deaths are also all white males, bucking the TV trend of killing off women and people of color for shock value. It’s actually a nice change.)

I realize that this is incredibly long winded, and I highly doubt everyone is going to take the time to read this. So, if you did, thanks for following me down the rabbit hole of death and writing.

#agents of shield #aos season 5 #aos spoilers #real life #long post #i wrote a thing

4 notes · View notes

ecccentrick · 7 years

Note

hi! um lmao im sorry for the dumb question but i was just wondering... do you think it would be okay for me, a straight girl, to write a sexuality/coming out arc for a gay boy? im prepared to do a heap of research, including reading academic material and talking to other people who've gone through that so i can be as informed and respectful as i can when i write. but im also aware that i wont be able to perfectly capture the experience, or do it as well as an actual gay boy. what do you think???

This isn’t a stupid question!!! At all. In fact, asking these questions are part of the process.

I think it can come down to empathy, and the scope of your research. I’m bisexual, so my journey is a little different, but I can better grasp the feeling as opposed someone straight like yourself.

But, I don’t think that should stop you. I know a lot of people in my community will be screaming “no! no!” when I tell you this, but I think you should go for it, myself. Writing is about stepping into others’ shoes and feeling emotions other than our own. If everyone only writes what they know, how will we ever learn about others through ourselves? Empathy can be severely stunted if that was so, in my opinion. But you need to do some things first.

The Do’s

1. Ask yourself, why am I writing this?

Things like this needs to be from a good place. Why are you writing this? The purpose, and why do you want to write about a gay boy? Is it because you want to help bring a voice to the issues they might face this issue? If you’re not doing this for the right reason, the readers, especially all the young gay boys that might be reading it, will notice.

I’m not trying to discourage you, at all. Every writer has to ask this, even more so when dealing with things out of their scope of experience.

2. Research

As you said, doing research is super important in writing things you haven‘t experienced yourself. I’d first look into personal accounts, like maybe read some blogs and autobiographies. Academia still leans towards “wrong” when speaking about LGBTQ+, so you’d have to be careful. Lean more towards psychological, if you can, but look for red flags such as words like “unnatural” etc. You can usually tell by tone.

3. Betas

If entirely possible, get a gay beta. Even a bisexual one. Have someone who’s gone through this journey themselves, and have them look over it. You’ll have to really be okay with taking potential constructive criticisms, because you most likely won’t get it 100% correct the first time. No one does, no matter what they write.

Don’t let yourself get discouraged. If the beta himself doesn’t seem to be taking your inexperience into account, or is rude, don’t take it. It should be a symbiotic relationship, writer and beta. But make sure you evaluate whether he’s actually being rude or you just don’t like what he’s saying. (Finding this balance is super hard, but it’s possible.)

4. Diversity

This one isn’t entirely required, but the LGBTQ+ audience will appreciate it. There are all kinds of LGBTQ+ people: Religious LGBTQ+, PoC LGBTQ+, disabled LGBTQ+ (I’m one myself), mentally ill LGBTQ+ and so many walks of life that LGBTQ+ live. There are trans gay guys, trans female lesbians, and all those in between.

Look at how other puzzle pieces of people’s lives affect their outlook on their sexuality and gender identity. If you add these nuances, a lot of people will thank you.

The Don’ts

1. Don’t kill us

LGBTQ+ people are thirsty for happy endings. Most content we get is sad, bittersweet, and usually ends with the death of one, or both main characters. Now, you can have it be sad and bittersweet if it’s needed in your story, but happy endings are much appreciated in this day and age. We want to see people like us get a happy ending, even if we can’t.

2. Don’t make the protag’s entire identity revolve around being gay

As much as I, and most of the community here on tumblr, joke about being gay, or bi, or trans etc, we want to see characters being more than their sexual/gender identity. We joke and cling to this facet of ourselves because for a lot of us, the internet is the only place where we can outwardly be proud of it. I know you mentioned that the character will be figuring out his sexuality, but perhaps establish him as a character before diving into his discovery.

One reason, at least for myself, I like to write LGBTQ+ characters, besides being LGBTQ+ myself, is to have people empathize with the characters. There will hopefully be straight people, as well as those figuring out their identity, reading this, and writing a relatable character that happens to be gay is usually a good move.

3. We’re not all repressed

This comes down to personal experience, but I never hated myself for being bi. I definitely repressed it until I was ready to deal with it, but I not once hated myself for liking girls as well as guys.

If your character feels any self loathing because of his sexuality, give us reasons why. Religion, family, culture, etc. Not just because he’s gay. I’ve seen this route being taken before, where a character has misguided angst because of being gay when they’re surrounded by supportive people. Just ask yourself, why would you hate being straight, unless it was instilled by outside sources?

There are other steps you might have to take, but these are important ones. Good luck, and thank you for having the courage to ask. Hopefully this helped!

#anon #lgbtq community #gay #writing #sorry for taking all day I really wanted to be thorough for you #and I had to consult the other gays

19 notes · View notes

janiedean · 7 years

Note

While i hate antis and their bullying everytime they shaming a fictional ship because i believe that "Fiction is not reality", I also agree that fiction can be a good role model for the real world for example : Diana's characterisation in Wonder Woman to show us more variety of strong woman character or Theon's PTSD scene to how us what REAL PSTD scene looks like (and we're mad when people keep saying that Theon just being coward in that scene). How should we balance the two, in your opinion?

okay, so, first thing, I think we need to make a basic distinction and state that fiction influences reality and people might be influenced by fiction do not mean the same thing whatsoever.

then we have to make another distinction ie there’s such a thing as massively consumed fiction and less consumed fiction/fandom and both are also different.

then we also have to state that one thing is emulating characters, one thing is finding them interesting or recognizing yourself in them.

last thing that instead is valid for everything, one thing is good things being represented in fiction, the other is bad things being represented in fiction.

let’s go from easier to hardest.

easier: massively consumed vs fandom. now, what people on tumblr fail to realize is that most of the planet doesn’t not give a fuck about fandom or engages with it. I mean, if you’re into it you would, but I know a bunch of people who are nerds/into fandom who don’t ship nor are into fanfic. fanfic/fanart/whatever influences people maybe on a fandom-level, but if you assume that people at large might start thinking incest is fine because thor/loki exists (which is a purely fanon thing) or because jaime/cersei exists (actual mainstream stuff but not as large as idk SW), you’re frankly deluding yourself because only thor/loki shippers give two fucks about thor/loki and not counting a few people I can think of, no one thinks jaime/cersei makes incest okay nor abusive relationships okay. thor/loki isn’t even represented in fiction, it’s fanfic, jaime/cersei is represented in fiction, but no one would think either thing makes banging your brother okay whether it’s dysfunctional (t/l) or just downright abusive (j/c). in that case assuming that if you’re into t/l or j/c you want to bang your brother is the bad case which assumes that whichever fiction in existence influences reality directly.

that said, no one is actually wanting to make a social justice point while having jc being a thing or t/l being dysfunctional. it’s dynamics that are interesting to explore.

wonder woman giving more variety to a strong female character instead is extremely mass-consumption media which would show a lot of people that different type (because a lot more people watch DC movies than GOT) then you show them differently and they might start thinking differently about strong female characters. or idk black kids seeing the new star wars and liking that there’s a black lead (same for the mcu and falcon/black panther) is also an extremely mass-consumption thing, because of course most people watch star wars and know what the hell star wars is. in that case you have fiction making a positive impact on reality (or maybe reflecting reality) but it’s also, like, reasonable. because sw-the-movies have impact and normalize that the leads in the story can also be not always white blonde men with blue eyes, but the star wars fandom - and I’m just talking about the part that produces fanfic/fanart and not about the people cosplaying stormtroopers and so on - influences shit. no one is going to make people think force-choking someone is going to be okay because k*ylux fic exists, same as no one thinks that killing a bunch of children is okay because anakin did it in the prequels and no one is ever gonna think you’re a psychopath because you stan k*ylo ren same as no one who watches star wars (IN GENERAL) sees kylo and thinks WOW HAVING SUCH A BAD VILLAIN WILL BE A BAD INFLUENCE TO CHILDREN, because a generation or two grew up thinking vader was cool but no one ever thought what vader did was right. I mean, people who don’t have issues distinguishing the two facts (and usually the people who do are radical SOMETHING, conservatives or antis or whatever) are entirely aware that reality lets itself being influenced by fiction to a certain degree when it’s about positive things, not for negative things at large.

now obviously you have exceptions like fifty shades of gray which is a bad fanfic that has turned mainstream (relatively) and so now there’s a bunch of people convinced that it’s real BDSM TM, but that’s because in society people don’t get educated about how abusive relationships work or toxic relationships work so they don’t recognize it in shitty fanfic turned mainstream, but that’s where you focus your efforts and educate people, you don’t say that since fifty shades is shit then you can’t write books or make movies about bdsm period, which is what the idiots seem to want.

now, moving on to point one: as stated above, *fiction* as a thing doesn’t influence reality or every kid who’s ever read HP would have committed suicide trying to fly off the window on a broom, which is a thing that we know doesn’t exist irl and cannot exist irl. and mainstream fiction can influence reality as much as we let it for positive things, because honest, who’s ever turned violent because of videogames? no one, but since we all have violent instincts buried somewhere maybe killing people in a videogame lets you blow off some steam and whatever because you know it’s fake. of course there’s the matter of age appropriate content, but if a parent lets a seven year old watch GOT or play GTA and then that kid is traumatized it’s their parents’ fault, not the fault of the media which was clearly labeled for adults. or I mean, I read/watched media that was above my age when I was ten but I was ready for it and my parents knew it, if I wasn’t they wouldn’t have let me.

also, on the ptsd angle: in the punisher there’s plenty of examples of realistic ptsd post-war, but I haven’t seen anyone yet say anything sensed on what was to me the most realistic and well done character in that sense (lewis wilson) because people kept on saying he was *white terrorist* and that the show didn’t excuse his action with *mental illness* without knowing that having ptsd post-combat is like, being mentally ill. that show was excellent rep in that sense, but have people in fandom caught up on it or understood it? meh. people outside it yes, and maybe some people on here, too, but not as many as I’d like. same goes for theon - WITHIN FANDOM because the ptsd thing was fairly understood OUTSIDE IT. which means that the real world is getting more sensitive to that narrative, tumblr isn’t. in that case, the real world is letting himself be influenced or touched by that narrative, tumblr isn’t. what do we know.

so, tldr for this part: fiction only influences X as far as you let it and people in general do know that if wrong thing is depicted in fiction it’s wrong. I mean, I never heard of anyone becoming a pedophile after watching or reading mysterious skin, which is a really fucking good movie which doesn’t romanticize the subject at all.��

now, about the last part ie personal identification/emulation: now, never mind that emulating a character is usually done by the time you’re ten and before then you pretend to be batman while playing with your friends but you know you’re not batman, and past five you do know that if superman can fly, you a regular human being can’t. the point is that fictional people are written by real people, so if they’re realistic and the writers write them well, they’ll be relatable, and if they’re relatable they might influence you as a person or make you find shit out about yourself that might change you, and in that sense it does influence reality somehow, or if you use it to cope with trauma then it surely helps you, but who you relate to isn’t what others might. we can say that we have basic level, representation level, using-it-to-cope level.

now I’m gonna go use myself as a template since I’ve for good and for bad have used fiction to cope with shit for my entire life, so. under the cut because this is long and the next part is all personal shit so people should have the right to scroll past it xD

basic level: when I was fifteen I was having a shit time, I read the dark tower, I ran into my Favorite Character Ever, the guy used shitty humor to deal with crap all the time, it was a tendency I already had and I went like ‘okay if it worked for him why didn’t it work for me’ and today I’m someone who deals with about anything by using shitty humor or joking about it and it’s helped me tremendously honestly, if I took everything too seriously I’d be a terrible person. also, that helped me with self-confidence to a point and blah blah blah it made my life tangentially better. but that was just, like, about me. and I didn’t certainly try to emulate the guy’s worst flaws, because that wasn’t the point. anyway, I found the guy relatable but I didn’t see him as, like, representation or anything.

representation level/slightly coping level: I read asoiaf when I was twenty-two. I am sad I didn’t before because when I ran into brienne I was slammed with a brick in the face that was saying OH HEY THAT’S SOMEONE WHO’S ACTUALLY LIKE YOU/HAD YOUR EXPERIENCES. I don’t just relate to brienne, I identify with brienne to a fairly bad degree, and I’m really sad I didn’t run into her before because I might have gathered a great deal of self-confidence from seeing that there was a main character somewhere who was ugly/seen as ugly by anyone else and still was an a+++ person who could do worthwhile things and was a viable love interest for Hot Guy. (idk if it shows when I write jb fic but it’s there, so.) did brienne change my life? not as much as she could have if I had read acok when it was released, but she did give me some hope that with GOT becoming mainstream not-conventionally-pretty women would get some mainstream rep, because sure af there wasn’t much when I grew up. if that happens? fiction did influence reality, but in the wonder woman/good kind. again, no one (me or anyone else) would want to be like brienne by GRABBING A SWORD AND KILLING PEOPLE, we’d rather probably just get confidence/inspired by what she does. because she’s a well-written character that entirely gets it.

except that a lot of asoiaf fans think that she’s boring or useless or see nothing in her. which is fine - it’s not their target I guess, but again, a character who’s extremely important to me means nothing to other people and certainly doesn’t influence them.

coping/potentially badwrong coping level: so, as a person I’m really not into badwrong/dysfunctional dynamics that don’t make people better. as such, I tend to ship healthy couples/dynamics where the two people make each other better.

which is why I never was remotely interested in thor/loki as a thing in my entire life until two months ago - WAIT - and for all my time in the mcu I always felt a visceral dislike for loki I never really dwelt upon while at the same time whenever I saw thor bashing (ie he’s an idiot or he’s a bully or he doesn’t understand loki and the likes) I always felt a visceral distaste in my mouth like NO DON’T IT’S NOT LIKE THAT, but since it wasn’t even my favorite mcu franchise and thor isn’t my favorite mcu character I never, like, thought about it. I just went with the obvious ‘everyone likes loki because ANTAGONISTS which I don’t get and I get angry on thor’s behalf because he doesn’t deserve that shit’. all good until I watch ragnarok which is, like, COMPLETE CRACK ON A STICK AND NOT A SERIOUS MOVIE AT ALL and which probably did not mean to be a psychological textbook and at the end I’m like ‘fuck okay maybe I ship it a bit and now that loki’s done with the angst maybe I can tolerate him’, and then not long later or so I get hit with another ton of bricks in the face and realize that of course I always had that feeling, that was because thor and loki had the exact same dysfunctional dynamic I had with my former best friend of fourteen years that I haven’t talked to for at least seven years and which is like the root of 70% of the issues I have. all of them. and like, loki was like her except Much More Extra and on a larger scale, thor was me except Much More Extra and the more I think about it the more it just fits 100% and you don’t even wanna know how I’ve spent this last month, because I had no idea I spent six years with those feelings about that dynamic because of that, I had no idea I actually found thor that relatable on a visceral level and I still have Unresolved Issues with that person and I can’t solve them with them personally for reasons. if I actually end up writing them fanfic where I, uh, subtly address personal issues and it works, then that badwrong-ish fic has influenced me for the best (and says all that I realized it just when they reconciled, I didn’t let myself do it before). but like, that wouldn’t mean that I wanted to bang my ex-friend or that I suddenly approve of incest - because sure af I didn’t want to bang her and sure af I didn’t turn into PLEASE DO BANG YOUR SIBLINGS WHENEVER YOU WANT (ew no). that’s the damned difference. thor and loki banging in whatever fanfic won’t make anyone excuse incest and won’t influence anyone outside thor fandom on ao3 - hell, at most it’s going to influence me because if I do it I’m doing it to work through my issues. it doesn’t change reality at large.

like, fiction can be a model for something you want to see more of or you can find characters role models or relatable and it can present you a view of the world, but at the end of the day we all know that it’s not real and we only use it to filter reality and/or ourselves through it and it helps us doing it, which is why something that makes sense to me - ie that thor is extremely relatable - won’t make sense to someone who finds loki relatable for reasons I couldn’t even begin to imagine. maybe the same piece of fiction/media both influences us, but it influences us very differently because we see it through different lens. and the thing is that if you conflate the two things and start emulating characters past the age of four then you have a problem distinguishing the two things and you need to get over it/get help/whatever, because to everyone else it’s normal to see the world through fiction or part of it. if you do because I know people who think fiction is merely fiction and don’t understand the point of relating to a character in the first place.

so like tldr, fiction influences you as much as you let it and it’s something you use actively and that is there for everyone to interpret, but it can’t, just existing, influence anything especially because if no one reads it or watches it then it’s useless. and since most **problematic** stuff is consumed by people who actively look for it and know what they’re doing - again, no one reads tentacle porn on ao3 if they don’t like tentacle porn - you can’t say that by existing, incest fic or badwrong fic normalizes abuse, because it only does if you let it and if you don’t know what abuse is and you can’t recognize it for what it is. like, a piece of fiction doesn’t need to spell THIS IS WRONG for you to know that I dunno t/hramsay fanfic is not what you should want in a relationship, you have to know that, and that’s on you, not on something that’s not mass-consumption - because badwrong fic and stuff is usually written by badwrong fans for badwrong fans, not by hired disney writers for star wars movies that have to be good for children, adults, nerds and the mass audience at large.

you balance the two by knowing that badwrong stuff is wrong irl (and it’s not a stretch) and by looking at the world through the lenses of whatever not badwrong fiction you enjoy/like/relate to, which can also be badwrong of course (see the thor/loki rant above) but like the fact that it does it to us singularly doesn’t mean that all of a sudden THE ENTIRE WORLD IS INFLUENCED BY THE EXISTENCE OF FAKE THINGS.

nor that WE SHOULD PUT THAT MUCH IMPORTANCE on fake things, because one thing is all of the above, another is saying that a piece of media is trash because it doesn’t have the representation you want in it or thinking that since something exists in fiction then you won a social justice battle. again: fiction is a tool, it’s not the ending nor the beginning of anything. having more black people in media won’t be what stops black people go to jail in the US at a higher rate than white people for the same crimes, but it might help making people relate to someone who’s different and so normalize some stuff... if you watch/consume that media and choose to engage with it. (ie, brooklyn 99′s boss is a gay black man in a stable relationship with a white professor and it’s not what you usually see on tv and it will work for casual watchers, but I doubt someone who usually watches fox news then also watches b99 - you can’t win your wars through fiction, to convince the fox news watcher to not vote trump you have to talk to him and not show him a sitcom. and mind that this can be reversed ie all the anti-russian/islamic propaganda in the US which tends to normalize russians/muslims as The Bad Guy - it works along with other things, not just on its own) the key is in knowing that fiction is made by people and consumed by people and eventually begins and ends with the people who make it and consume it in whichever way, and not in thinking that it’s above us and is something divine that changes the world just by existing.

#long post for ts #long post #janie rants #the discourse TM #social justice calvinism #sorry I ranted #personal #i guess #randomlut #ask post

45 notes · View notes

sabraeal · 7 years

Text

i got tagged by @l0chn3ss....again, over a week ago....I’M CATCHING UP I PROMISE

1. How did you come up with your username and what does it mean?

I think I just have always used this username for internet things. I picked it back when I was working on a fic that involved a hierarchy of angels -- Sabraeal’s dominion is healing and illness. It seemed apropos, back when I was certain I was going to cure cancer with my biology degree

2. Which fanfic of yours has the most feedback? (bookmarks/favorites, follows/subscriptions, visitor hits, kudos)

In a move that surprises no one, Seven Suitors for Shirayuki on AO3.

On tumblr it is Were Hearts Not an Unknown Country

3. What is your FFnNet/AO3 profile icon, and why did you choose it?

It’s the same as my tumblr icon, and I love it. @heartamplifier made it for me and it is gorgeous

4. Do you have any regular/favourite commenters?

Besides @superhappybubbleslove and @claudeng80 on tumblr, I have a handful of semi=regular commenters on AO3 who I don’t know personally but would probably die for

5. Is there a fanfic that you keep going back to read again and again?

I feel like not one SPECIFICALLY. I have phases where I’m like, time to go hurt myself and read ISM’s fics, or like time to go read sarah’s regency fic and scream about how i want them to make out, or like let’s read the sexy alt timeline to Ever After again because I feel like lightly suffering. Sometimes I get in the mood for fics from other pairings I love and go read their greatest hits

6. How many stories are you subscribed to? How many do you have bookmarked?

I had 46 bookmarked and 7 stories subbed to

7. Which AU do you find yourself writing the most?

Modern AUs, for some reason, and when I’m lucky, fantasy/magic AUs

8. How many people are subscribed and bookmarked to you in total? (you can view this on the stats page)

57 user subscriptions, 345 fic subscriptions, 487 bookmarks

9. Is there something you’d like to write about but are afraid of people judging you for it? (Feeling brave? If so, share it!)

Not...overly? Though I just realized I might be signing myself up for shark dick, Shape of Water-esque smut and I just....don’t know how i feel about that turn in my life.

10. Is there anything you would like to be better at? Writing certain scenes or genres, replying to comments, updating better, etc.

I’d love to be able to focus more when I write. I have such little non-baby time to write, and I can have a real problem buckling down and getting stuff done. Thanks ADD, you’re a real peach/

11. Do you write rarepairs or popular ships more often?

Uhhhhh well, I guess popular ships, since Obiyuki EXPLODED since I started writing for it. But I do have some rare pair content coming up, so my time right now is split

12. How many stories have you posted on FFNet/AO3 to this day (finished and unfinished)?

I have 40 works, though some of those are collections of one-shots, so that’s anyone’s guess, honestly

13. How many stories do you have saved in/with your writing program?

I am not counting that, lord have mercy.

14. Do you write down story ideas, or just keep them in your head?

Write them down! As long as I’ve decided they’re gonna get written, everything gets written down (unless it’s SUPER short)

15. Have you ever co-authored a story?

NOT YET

16. How did you discover FFNet/AO3?

Oh children. Children. I’m over 30. I was THERE when that shit was made.

17. Do you consider yourself to be a popular or famous author in your fandom(s) on FFNet/AO3?

I’d say in terms of ANS, yes, but it’s a big fish, small pond situation. In terms of popular authors in bigger fandoms, I am a very, very small fish

18. Do you have a nickname or fandom name for your readers?

I....do not?

19. Was there an author who inspired or encouraged you to write?

Not...specifically? I was always really driven to write. In terms of fandom...I think I only was so determined to post Seven Suitors because I thought @infinitelystrangemachinex needed to be able to read more than 2 good fics that weren’t her own writing

20. What writing advice would you give to a beginning author?

Enjoy the process. If you’re only focused on telling the events, you’ll always be bored after you’ve outlined the story. Get pumped for showing off your skills.

You can’t improve in a vacuum. Talk out your plots with people. Let people edit your shit. Too many times people think they have to do it alone, and that’s how you stagnate as a writer.

Take writing advice from people you want to write like. Anon comments, random comments -- none of them matter, because you have no idea whether what these people want align with how you want to write. Listen to them, sure, decide if there’s something in it you can use, but -- this person could think Twilight was a good romance. Or Tolkein was good at character development. You don’t need their opinion.

21. Do you plot out your stories, or do you just figure it out as you go?

I always know where I’m going. Maybe not SOLIDLY, but I don’t start a fic where all I know is the beginning

22. Have you ever gotten a bad comment on a story? If so, what did you do?

HAHAH YEP. I deleted it. It’s one thing to have constructive criticism (whether it’s helpful or not), but this was basically “don’t think this is mindless hate...*two comments worth of mindless hate*”

23. Is there a certain type of scene that you have a hard time writing? (action, smut, etc..)

Anything with a lot of limbs

24. What story(s) are you working on now?

SO MANY. I have a Seven Suitor’s B-side, a Suzuri WFB fic, a stupidly huge mitsukiki mermaid AU, the next chapter of Merry & Bright, the next chapter of Sensitive Negotiations, and sometimes I even get to pick away at the second part of the Stripper!Shirayuki fic

25. Do you plan your next project(s) before you finish your current ongoing story(s)?

Yep. I like knowing where my focus will be (though I tend to work on multiple things at once)

26. Do you have a daily writing goal set for yourself?

I try to have fic-related goals, like -- I’ll finish this scene, i’ll get to this part -- and I try to have a few fics i get through in a day (between 2-4, usually). But I also only dedicate two 20-minute sprints to each fic per day (except on saturdays, which are for plowing through fics close to being finished)

27. Do you think you’ve improved as a writer since you first started?

DEFINITELY

28. What is your favorite story(s) that you’ve written?

Only looking at finished fics, probably either A Lion to Terrify the Wolves or Creatures of a Brief Season

29. What is your least favorite story(s) that you’ve written?

I don’t think there’s any specific fic i don’t like? Maybe something I wrote as a teeny tiny, that never saw the light of day.

30. Where do you see yourself (as a writer) in 5 years?

Hopefully published? We’ll see. Have to have time to work on original things, first.

31. What is the easiest thing about writing?

Dialogue

32. What is the hardest thing about writing?

Keeping track of all the details over a long period of time *deep sigh*

33. Why do you write?

I enjoy telling stories! I can’t imagine not doing it

for tagging.... @superhappybubbleslove, @infinitelystrangemachinex, @thelionshoarde, @claudeng80 @codango

#writing meme #i feel like i have to reiterate #my writing process is extremely targeted to overcoming my specific mental quirks #like i get bored working on the same thing all day every day #so i have to skip around #and i know my optimal working time is 20 minutes #so i work in 20 minute spurts with 10 minute breaks #it's taken me YEARS to get to this point #so if you're frustrated with not being able to write a lot #first work on doing every day #same time #and then start playing with different styles of working. pomodoros worked for me #but my husband can't stand them #you'll get there #just keep trying #and keep experimenting

5 notes · View notes

haunthearted · 7 years

Link

I wanted to recommend a very good website, especially to my trans, dysphoric or dissociative followers.

Gender Analysis is a very well researched, well-sourced website about the trans experience. I take whatever opportunities I can to write polite, good-faith, educational replies to people on Reddit who don't "get" trans things, and I always rely heavily on GA because whatever the topic, there will be an article filled with the original scientific papers rebutting transphobic viewpoints. It can also be useful for supporting conversations with parents/friends, because it has the primary research right there. For example, today I learnt that all the concept of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria ("my kid got a tumblr and now she says shes transgender because of peer pressure!") originated on three anti-trans websites, and despite its official-sounding name, has no research behind it. I knew that intellectually, but it's powerful to have the evidence clearly there for you.

Zinna Jones is one of the key writers there, and you may know her other work as she's been a prominent internet trans human for many years (how she has the courage and spoons for that, I will never know). One of her key experiences of gender dysphoria was depersonalisation: a weird, fuzzy, not-quite-thereness. On beginning hormones, it cleared up immediately: she had an "I didn't know what wrong felt like until I started feeling right" experience, as well you might if feeling oddly absent is your normal day-to-day experience. Because it wasn't a focus of how dysphoria was written about while she was coming up, she's done a lot of writing and research on it at Gender Analysis: describing what it felt like, researching comparable experiences in other trans narratives, and most recently trialing an anti-dissociative drug to see how it affected her.

Many of us come to ghosthood due to experiencing similar things to Jones - a not-quite-thereness, an oddness, a sense of timelessness and dislocation. Some of us very clearly associate it with trauma, a mental illness, or gender dysphoria; for others, it's just part of the fabric of life. I would like to recommend reading her posts on this particular topic to anyone who experiences something similar.

Now, if you relate to what she writes it doesn't mean you're transgender - don't panic - as varieties of depersonalisation can be a symptom of all sorts of other things - especially trauma and trauma-related conditions like BPD/CPTSD. But you might still find her descriptions useful.

On the other hand, if you are identifying as transgender and wondering if hormones are for you, you might find it validating or helpful.

(and because the world is horrible, there's no small chance that trans people are also traumatised. There's a great pair of posts that I'm sure you've already read, "That was dysphoria?" - but also her follow up, in which she re-experiences some of those symptoms as a depression.)

Finally, a recent post series explored an anti-depersonalisation drug, which you might be interested in exploring as an option for yourself. I had no idea there was such a thing!

In short, I was re-reading the archives this morning, and it occurred to me that a great many followers here might appreciate or find these posts useful. Make of them what you will, and best wishes to you all x

A tonne more thoughts after the cut:

This isn't meant to be "a trans blog", so I'm not going to focus on this too often. But certainly for me, Jones' posts really spoke to me and my experiences. I think there's a real danger in underselling how weird gender dysphoria feels. One sort of expects or assumes gender dysphoria is "I hate my breasts because I am a man"; there isn't so much written about how it can be "I'm tired, I don't really care, everything seems hollow and false, but I can't imagine life being any different because it's what I've always known, and it's not clearly anything to do with gender". That's been my experience - and it's incredibly hard to spot. I've been through six diagnoses since I was a teen (OCD, depression, anxiety, BPD, ADHD, autism), because while I've always been clearly unwell, it's hard to pinpoint gender dysphoria when it just manifests as brainweird, especially when that brainweird is you normal, as it was for Jones. For example, I've never really recognised my own face in the mirror. Weird, but whatever. When I was considering hormones last year, I decided to take up weightlifting as part of my experimentation process. It would allow me to see how I felt about developing a more masculine body, in a controlled way, and as someone who *hates* exercise, it would also be a useful test of commitment: was I dysphoric enough to motivate me to go to the gym? Because if not, I probably was not dysphoric enough to transition either. Well, I went three times a week and followed the correct food recommendations for building muscle until I could no longer afford either; and then it happened. I looked in the mirror and it was like a visceral, immediate shock of recognition. And now I can't unsee it. Every time I look in the mirror, my brain immediately pings back "nice Robert Plant vibe you got there man", which is ridiculous; no one else on the planet would see me and think that. But that very small amount of muscle, and slightly-more-masculine-shoulder/arm-profile, was enough to make my brain recognise itself for the first time.

Sometimes you don't understand what "wrong" feels like until you have "right" to compare it to.

(I think those of us with early experience of abuse might also relate to that; the way that being loved and respected by a good person later in life can be both shocking, and bring on a period of processing and heavy reflection because it illustrates how very wrongly you were treated before. Even if you know it intellectually, just the experience can be profound. Certainly, I've got a few experiences of not-being-taken-advantage-of which were absolutely shattering, like I was being taught how to love myself for the first time.)

And as you might expect, I'm also feeling very reluctant to pursue transition. This sort of nebulous dysphoria is, well - . I envy very much the "I knew I was trans from the moment I hit puberty because I hated the gender I was living in" people, who clearly see gender as their problem. It's very hard to contemplate something as life-changing as transition when its motivated by an increasing certainty that the only cure for my incurable mental ill is a different hormone balance, and as many days I have where I ask myself why I didn't transition 5 years ago already, I have others where I know I'll have to be dragged kicking and screaming through the process as my last resort.

Like, a few years ago I was at a "Even if I am transgender, I think I'd rather live as a woman [for reasons]" point; and now I'm at a "I would still rather live as a woman, but I am desperate to have enough disposable income to buy a really nice set of towels and maybe transition would make me well enough to not only work, but have a real career, and maybe I could buy a car, and go on holiday, and start buying tailored clothes instead of charity shop, and maybe redecorate my house in faux-Victorian style, and I really don't care if everybody hates me and I no longer have a coherently cisgender body, I would do anything to be able to afford unusual cheeses and teas rather than subsisting on stew" point. It sounds so shallow, but there it is; because so many of the problems I have don't feel dysphoria-related, because I'm only understanding them as dysphoria-related because nothing else has made an impact, my focus is increasingly on the little things in life I want to achieve, and maybe could achieve if my brainweird was fixed. I'm now fairly sure that if/when I do transition physically, I'll continue to recognise myself more, and realise how much of an impact physical dysphoria was having.

But it's what I know. And like Hamlet says, easier to bear the struggles we know than fly to others that we know not of.

Sidenote:

Intermittently, you'll see approaches which try to set up trans or mentally ill people as enemies to otherkin people, like the two experiences cannot co-exist, or like otherkin people ought to take the fall for the way transphobic use them as an anti-trans "gotcha". I personally find this very frustrating: I prefer approaches which are open, rather than closed off. Many/most of my followers here are either trans, mentally ill, have trauma, experience dysphoria or some other unspecified bodyweird/brainweird. In real life, I have four otherkin/therian/furry friends - and they too all meet that description. {There are also many otherkin who see their history as spiritual or religious, who aren't trans/mentally ill/traumatised, or who don't really know the source of their experiences - all of which is also OK!}.

I would always prefer to take a holistic and compassionate approach to the way experiences can overlap, rather than a combatative/competitive/polarised one; any hostile or fightin' talk messages/replies will be ignored, blocked or deleted as appropriate, because that's not a value I have for my online space. Although I'm open to discussing or exploring it, so please don't hold back if you want to talk about your experiences in good faith.

In short, there is a fairly significant overlap between people who come to identify as transgender/dysphoric/mentally ill, and those who come to identify as otherkin, or who might temporarily identify with one of those experiences while figuring things out - and this post is for them. Politics makes things sound so simple and clean-cut, but people are messy and complex, and I'd much rather help individuals navigate and explore their experiences - even if they are contradictory, or don't support my political goals. Trying to figure out brainweird and bodyweird is challenging enough, without making people tread on eggshells during the process.

#ghostly self care #queer spectrality #ghostkin

4 notes · View notes

whitelippedviper · 7 years

Text

Pop Comics #4: Saga #46. Come Mush with Me

This article originally appeared on my patreon, which you can subscribe to for as little as one dollar a month. As a patreon subscriber you get to see these and other articles sometimes weeks before everyone else. Subscribe now.

It’s a new week in me writing about a popular comic from last week. For the purposes of this column I am defining popular as top ten on Comixology’s weekly list. This week I’m tackling one of the most popular books in all of comics, and last week’s most popular comic overall: Saga #46. Saga #46 is written by Brian K. Vaughn with art by Fiona Staples, with lettering/design work by Fonografiks.

The last Saga comic I read was the first issue. I might have made it to the second issue. But I really only remember that I read the first issue. I only mention this because it’s a context that like with a lot of these monthly comics speaks to that I’m really reading a lot of them from a more mechanical place than someone who has really taken the time to become invested in the work and the characters, and I’m admitting that is to my detriment in terms of giving a complete critical sense of the thing.

Saga #46 starts with some guy with a TV head freeing a horned girl that’s tied up with a tentacle from a lynching being executed by two horse people, and this non horse cowboy dude. TV dude frees Horn girl, and she’s like “I didn’t even WANT you to save me” for some reason. And then we cut to a horned dude with his pregnant but unconscious non horned wife and kid. They are in some field outside a house, where this giant multi-titted fox doctor runs a kind of planned parenthood clinic. Horned dude is very pro-life, so he and the fox have a discussion about abortion with no real resolution. The whole thing is kind of setup like the Fox, who calls herself an Endwife, is going to kill the wife. But that doesn't happen in this issue. I don’t know why these people are in this field or how they just happened to come to this particular house at this exact moment--but hey that’s what happens when you jump right in on issue 46 of a comic.

While horned dude is arguing with Fox doctor about abortion, upstairs the kid is singing her imaginary friend into non-existence for some reason. And then meanwhile the TV Dude and the horned girl are getting drunk and arguing about dumb shit, so they of course want to fuck, and the last page of the book is just a page of them “shockingly” kissing. One of the interesting things to me reading this issue of Saga is that Fiona Staples has been drawing this one book for about 5 years. Which I know is a thing that happens a lot in comics, but it’s interesting to see how her art has changed from the first issue aka the last time I saw her art not on a cover.

This is an image from Saga #1:

Here’s one from Saga #46:

It might be hard to tell from my shitty phone pic of the second image, but if you look at the chins in both images you can see it. Her style has cleaned up quite a bit since the first issue. Her lines are a lot smoother now, and there are a lot fewer of them. Which is fine. But one of the issues that is constant in Staples style is she makes these soft kind of smudgy backgrounds that really hamper your ability to like visualize the world Saga takes place in. And it makes sense that she is that kind of artist, because her strengths are in her forms. She’s really good at facial expressions and body language. Her characters are pretty good actors. People like that don’t per se need to be fussing with backgrounds that much because they can evoke so much dramatically with the acting. Like a great example is a lot of Guido Crepax comics. Which have no backgrounds generally, but rather focus on body language and whatever mechanisms are interacting directly with the body. As a reader, with an artist like that, you can totally fill in the backgrounds with your own imagination. The issue here though is this is a sci-fi setting, being done by a writer who doesn’t seem to have a lot of aptitude for building a coherent space narratively, so the weight of the setting is put so much on Staples, and it goes against what she is most effective at as an artist.

And then her ability to make these trashy character designs for Saga into something that at least looks like it belongs on the body it belongs on comes from this same family of artistic predilections. I mean each individual creature in Saga looks like you just put different body parts into a blender and then drew what came out. Even down to the clothes people wear. The fashion is all over the place. Horned girl in this is wearing like this asymmetrical cut dress with boots and leggings, and then the TV guy is wearing a suit with huge tails, and then the family later in the comic just look like standard comic clothes from like the background of a Spider-man comic. And then the like horse people wear western cowboy clothes. And then the fox doctor doesn't wear any clothes?

The effect of all of that is that you don’t really get much of a sense of culture or like “this is what this world is like because people dress that way”--like Star Wars, for example, takes place across so many planets but there are kind of basic style points that the series coheres around and then the differences just delineate that “oh this is a desert planet, this is a forest planet” ect. So without that kind of coherency in the character design you spend a lot of time on a Saga page scrambling for a foothold, and usually you could skate on this kind of fashion if the backgrounds were there to say “oh this is where we are at” but they aren’t. So the flaw of the incoherent designs is only amplified because they are the only defined thing to look at on a page. So the effect is a mushy undefined sci-fi experience that looks as ill defined in issue one as issue 46, and that’s coupled with the scripting conventions which cram in all kinds of anachronistic political concerns from present day earth USA. Like in this one issue we get an abortion debate and an argument about romance novels? And there are cowboys talking with a shitty southern accent? Huh? But I digress. My point about Staples art was that in cleaning up her line and going more minimalist, she’s stripped her work of the element that was propping up everything else. That rawer dirtier line, and those thick scattered ink brush strokes gave her work a POV, a focus. Like I said, her strength is the form(just look at her cover work), so those lines being the only thing with edge on the page gave her figures more force than they have in this later issue. Back with the older more jagged style her backgrounds still faded into nothing mush, but that was fine because you had shit on the bodies that you were focused on. It was interesting to look at those lines and those brush strokes. You didn’t NEED backgrounds. But you can’t not have backgrounds, AND draw your forms in a clean smooth style AND expect to carry a writer who is all over the map(even though obviously no one cares since she and the book win every award they go up for--so why not simply things I guess? You get paid either way--so from a practical drawing 50 issues of a thing point of view I think it makes a lot of sense--but it is quite cynical toward the reader I think).

Which this was my general reason I never got into Saga to begin with: I just couldn’t find the anchor point. As a sci-fi world this is like sub-serenity, which is also something I hated. There’s something cynical to Saga in that it feels like it’s just a cut and paste of things people liked on tumblr five years ago, and it just keeps going refusing to die, at this point I guess carried on by it’s own momentum because I would imagine if you’ve read 45 issues of Saga, you are going to read 145 really easily. But I don’t get why people aren’t asking for more. Like Twin Peaks ended the other day, and I’m pretty sure I follow everyone who was watching the show. Like Lynch made something truly great and amazing. And...nobody watched it or gave a shit. I get that that’s a thing that has always been that way. And will always be that way. But so, comics are this niche nerd thing, which has as its flag standards things like Dune, Star Trek or Star Wars--how is milquetoast space opera skating so easily? I’d have thought that if there was one genre that comics really exercised discernment on it would be space opera sci-fi.

And not only is Saga skating, it’s winning every award it can. To most people in comics, they would say this book is a testament to the possibilities of the medium. And I don’t know if that’s a taste thing in terms of I don’t have the right taste for comics(and I get it on both sides, it's like every year the Eisners and the Ignatz awards have a competition to see who can give more trophies to shit I give less of a fuck about), or if the people saying those things have just never read the things I have and if they had they’d feel differently? I think it’s the former, because I feel like if I made the biggest Saga fan read Queen Emeraldas they’d not understand why I like it.

Am I doing it wrong? I bet the average Saga fan is much happier about life than I am. Like it must be really cool to live in a reality where the things you like are award winning and wildly popular. That must be insanely validating. Which none of this is to say I hate Saga. Or maybe I do. I don’t know. I just feel nothing towards it. And it’s a testament to its success that despite feeling nothing about it, the book is such a force in comics, that I still ended up writing about it.

And I mean, how great would it be to love a book like this and get so much out of it? And I'd have so many people eager to talk about it. I wish I loved it or I wish I hated it. But I don't. Also this is a lame kiss to take up a whole page for:

Like I get that a kiss between someone with a mouth and a screen is difficult, but that is actually something that should be an opportunity to draw something pretty terrific, particularly for the last dramatic page of a book. The scale is also not saying anything. We are caught between love in a giant fantastic world, and great love in a mundane place if that makes sense. If you zoom in more the focus can be more the mechanics of the kiss. If you zoom way out, it’s like this dramatic camera spinning moment on top of a mountain. But at this shot it’s uncommitted I think, and I think with the characters centered in the frame so much as well it’s just not very dramatic for such a moment that is I think supposed to be dramatic. Instead of being the truth of what this moment means for these two characters, I think it lands more like the idea of the idea of a kiss between these two ideas. A cliche. It’s especially disappointing because as you can see going through Staples cover work, and hell most of her interiors, something like this should be a real playing into a real strength. But I think the mushiness of the decision making of scale screws it up. The only way this page hits with you is if you have as a reader really bought into the idea of it happening enough to carry the image in your mind. But that shouldn’t be enough, and I think it’s worth asking for more.

And this is a lame thing to write:

#My Writing #Sarah Horrocks #Saga #pop comics

38 notes · View notes