#and generally i avoid them for my own mental health

[thedeafprophet]

if i had known before playing it that evolution was one of those 'characters suffer horrendously and grotesequley with no good endings and everything is hopeless' type stories I would. not have played it lmao.

except i do like being a pirate.

[rainesol]

Idia and self-sabotage

Disclaimer: This post talks about Idia’s tendencies to be mean, nasty and otherwise generally unpleasant. This isn’t in order to bash his character, and everything comes from an objective standpoint. If you do not like people talking about this side to him, this is not your post. You scare me.

In my opinion, Idia (whether consciously or subconsciously) often sabotages his own chances at friendship with the other characters. It’s common knowledge that he’s regularly quite insulting to the other characters, which leads to him gaining a pretty poor reputation.

Idia tends to group the other students as ‘normies’ and that him being an outlier makes him unrelatable. But in reality, the only side of Idia most characters have seen is the side that throws snide comments their way, including calling them stupid. (A major example of Idia having a good time ruined by himself is his Suitor Suit vignette)

It’s important to mention that Idia has multiple mental health issues, including a severe anxiety disorder. One thing I rarely see mentioned though, is the fact that he may be isolating himself on purpose due to poor MH, trauma or otherwise.

In book six, Idia makes it clear to Ortho that he does not feel able to be a ‘hero’, or make any friends due to his bloodline. Speaking of Ortho, pre-book six Ortho was purely mechanical. Ortho pre-book six was programmed by Idia to do what was best for him. And yet, Ortho still pushed for him to make friends, despite being solely an ai at the time.

To give another example, here is a line from Idia’s Culinary Crucible card:

This can be interpreted as Cater learning from his experience pushing Idia into socialisation. Idia takes offence that Cater thinks he’s ‘into anything as long as it’s anime’. In my opinion, however, this isn’t exactly fair on Cater. It’s safe to assume that Idia has not told Cater his interests, and this is simply an attempt at being friendly and making Idia feel welcome. Despite their similarities, Idia pushes him away. (Though, neither are aware of these similarities)

To simplify, I believe Idia avoids building bonds with people for a few core reasons: The anxiety of being known, and by extension, judged, The trauma of being unable to make friends due to his destiny, and the fact that it is so much easier to hate the world if it feels like the world hates you.

[punksocks]

Warning Signs That You May Have A Toxic/Karmic Significant Other

Hey everyone, you may have seen my recent post about breaking up with my ex partner after 5.5 years. If not, I’ve been deep in reflection after ending this relationship. My reasons for ending it were that he refused to seek professional help to manage his anger which would come out in constant outbursts of violence (not physical ab*se but hitting walls, kicking furniture, scarring my dog, etc) and his mental health in general. After breaking things off I analyzed our relationship and all the red flags became crystal clear in hindsight. This blog is not only my emotional space to reflect, but also a place to give out advice to make sure you guys feel less alone in the world. So I’ve compiled a list of behaviors that made it clear that in hindsight the relationship was destine to be toxic and could not continue. It’s important to take lessons from painful experiences in order to continue to grow, and that’s what I hope I can help with by sharing my experiences here:

(TW Manipulation, Distressing Themes, Emotional Ab*se)

- They hate your intuition: (they work to make you doubt whatever means you have of self guidance. Whether that’s tarot/astrology, or spirituality in general, or therapy, or your simple gut feelings/reactions to things. They hate them because they know that they’ll be singled out at some point by them so they work to make you not believe in yourself through manipulation/gaslighting. My ex would constantly say the tarot is going to tell me to break up with him, but he never really changed he’d just belittle it and say I was getting weird about spirituality and he’d try to make me doubt myself or choose between the tarot and him. When I asked him to go to therapy he would also say that he was worried the therapist would tell him to break up with me-implying I was the problem. When I would ask him to go anyway he would find a way to avoid it- saying it’s too expensive, too hard to find, he doesn’t have time, etc)

-They constant give you advice that puts you in harm’s way: (My ex always told me I was too quick to cut off people that threw me under the bus and that I was paranoid. When I found out my former business partner was being shady and stealing from me, he told me to keep working with her. I said I had to take things over. He said I had no chance of covering the expenses on my own and that he wasn’t going to help me at all even though he was working a consistent 9-5. I rationalized this as putting too much pressure on him to support me through my apprenticeship over the previous few months, even though by the time we were having this discussion I had picked up a seasonal 9-5 to compensate for starting the business. I still felt guilty because I was asking him to cover the rent at home while I built this business up. I ended up wracking up debt over trying to cover everything myself and he was telling me I was going to fail every step of the way. When I didn’t fail and the business remained open over a year later, he said he had always believed in me every step of the way.)

- They rewrite history (that’s the other thing- when I broke up with him he said it was his idea to open the studio in the first place. This was a lie. A bold one at that. At the time I would have had to become self taught due to dealing with several egotistical mentors (wow thematic) and I looked for positions in other studios and there were none. My ex told me I should “pause” my goals. I told him I’ll open up my own space with another artist. He had a long talking down to me about how we couldn’t afford any of that, and how impossible it was, etc. But I went through with it anyway, effectively doing all the work on my own. He constantly told me what I was doing was crazy. But I made success out of it, thank God. Now my ex is trying to take credit for the whole thing as if I don’t remember what happened. Audacious.)

- Instead of having their own dreams they focus on wearing yours down (I have so many big dreams I want to accomplish and every other idea I shared with my ex was pushed back on or breadcrumbed. I wanted to live abroad, he’d say it’s too expensive but maybe he could find a way to make it work if I stopped putting so much pressure on him. I took over my own business, he told me I shouldn’t do it and should quit while I’m ahead. He would always try to counter every idea I had with a “logical reason” of why it wouldn’t work. He would try to control me by doubting me and in turn trying to get me to doubt myself. I never actually listened to him in hindsight, and when I pushed through successfully he would pretend to have been on my side the whole time.)

-They always compare you to their exes, in bold ways (My ex would always go out of his way to bring up his past relationships. The examples and instances were never appropriate. But one of the first worst early examples was when we were at a show. My friend’s band was playing. In the middle of the set he decided to look up his ex on social media. I was clearly uncomfortable but he continued. Then when we’re talking he brought up a nickname she used to call him that was inappropriate. When I was upset by this he threw a shirt (merch gifted to him by my friend’s band) in the booth almost hitting me with it and he stormed off. He made himself seem like the victim in a situation where he was trying to bait me into starting a public argument and yet made me soothe him afterward.)

- The betrayal of not ever being believed (early on this was another giant red flag in hindsight. I’m black and I tried to explain colorism to him, while I was having a bad experience with it. He’s white and should have been listening and understanding with open ears. Instead he tried to argue me down for being “mean” to light skinned black people. In the experience I was talking about how a mixed femme at work established a boundary with our white bosses to try to avoid racist harm. They let the femme do this without any pushback. I tried to establish the same boundary in the same meeting and those white bosses accused me of actively refusing to do my job. I told my ex this was colorist and that’s when he argued with me about this. He didn’t believe my experiences until he googled “the right articles”. When I brought this up in the future he would say he was just trying to see all black people as equal. It was a pretty disgusting defense.)

- Throwing insults in your face about past trauma (I told my ex about how emotionally abusive my mother was (wow there’s that pattern again) and he would throw this in my face and blame me or compare me to her at the slightest provocation in several arguments. When I was disrespected at work, he would blame me for misinterpreting things. Complaining about how I used him for money whenever I had asked him for help managing the business’ expenses. And so many deep cuts of things he should never said to me and names he shouldn’t have called me if he ever cared about me. He always wrote it off as me misremembering or him meaning it as something else or a distraction tactic of whataboutism -‘what about when you complained that I left dirty clothes on the floor?’ For example. All ways he tried to manipulate me from seeing this pattern of messed up behavior. Every argument he would make us talk in circles until I would have to give up from frustration and exhaustion.)

-They’re full of hot air, and if they seem like they aren’t they’re probably mirroring you (when I broke up with him I stopped hanging out with him pretty much immediately. Although I had to coordinate moving out still, I started keeping my head down to focus on my work. Essentially I had already moved on. I thought we had had deep discussions about the world and life but when I had less to say he had nothing to add. He would just keep filling up the air with anecdotes about nothing and commentary on anything just to keep crossing my boundaries and to try to force me to pay attention to him when it was clear I neither interested or comfortable doing so.)

- They try to force you to become as cynical and jaded as they are (I was never antagonistic per se, but when we were together I had unconsciously started looking/preparing for the worst in every scenario and every person I’d meet. Because of my ex’s toxic influence. Getting along with coworkers? They must be just “kissing up to you” according to him. Like that tv show most people are fond of? No way that has to be trash. Want to try something new? No there can’t be anything good about that. He was a very stuck person that refused to find the joy in almost anything. Unless it was too impressive to ignore —but even then he had to nitpick it apart. I would wonder why his compliments would feel so hollow- it was because he really had trouble seeing the good in anything. Like a day or two after we broke up I was already feeling lighter and more optimistic. When people were kind to me I embraced it easier and in turn every aspect of life got a little brighter. The contempt for others was palatable. Because he expected everyone to be ready to undercut him like he was ready to do to them.)

- Before you know it, they’ll have you romanticizing breadcrumbing behavior (I asked my ex to get on meds for his mental health and to find a therapist so many times over the course of 5 years. 4-5 months before I broke up with him he got on medication. Then after a peace period of a month or so, we were back in a cycle of petty arguments and he was saying the meds don’t work. He didn’t even try to go to therapy until I broke up with him. he got an appointment the next day because he “was trying to win me back” Essentially, he’d never work on himself or actually actively improve things. He’d always make one or two half steps to placate me then complain about how it was too hard and completely impossible to put the work in. Even with the therapy example, he wanted to display that he could make progress in order to win me back. Don’t worry, I had seen this tactic before and knew he would just fall back into toxicity. So, it didn’t work.)

- When you do leave they get cocky about how you’ll have nowhere to go (I leaned on my ex to support me when I became overwhelmed by figuring out my business on my own. I worked several temp jobs in addition to the business but it was stretching me thin. So I needed his help several times and only had so much saved up by the time I broke up with him. After begging me to take him back the entire night and pretending to be supportive, the next day he was scoffing and boasting about how “[he] didn’t even know what [I] was going to do.” He did this over everything from buying my own detergent-even though I always bought the detergent- to managing my bills on my own-even though I usually managed most of my bills on my own- until I finally was able to move out and leave him behind.)

- They never defend you and always make it seem like it’s your fault if you get attacked (My ex was always siding with abusive people and gaslighting me when I noticed that behavior. As many of you may know, my mom was a terror throughout my childhood. I confided in my ex about how much of an impact this had had on me. Before I went no contact with her we all got dinner when she came in town to see me. Despite all my warnings and preemptive begging to be supported through the difficulty of meeting with her my ex threw me under the bus immediately. He laughed at her jokes at my expense and didn’t stop her at all from singling me out. I shutdown in this moment and began to draw to cope- I’m neurodivergent so that’s one of the things I default to doing when I’m overwhelmed. They continued to make fun of me together and when I asked him why he didn’t have my back afterward, he blamed me for “not being friendly enough” and “not interacting with [my] mom enough”. This pattern of doubting and failing to help me would continue through our entire relationship.)

- They’ll have -self aware- moments that aren’t quite what they seem (I truly cannot count the number of times my ex would start an argument just to talk me in circles then try to get me to believe I was in the wrong too. It was truly maddening. He would always push to say he “understood” how we had gotten there. Then ramble on and on and on saying that I was attacking him and he was the victim of things. I asked him to do the dishes? I’m “criticizing [his] housework and putting too much pressure on [him]”. I ask him not to throw things when he’s upset? I’m “overly criticizing [him] and making [him] so anxious he can’t help but hit things”. And on and on and on it went. He would always tidy it up by saying he forgave me because we were “both wrong” and he just “would try to be better next time and [I] should too”.)

-They have underlying personality issues that need to be addressed (and when you bring a hint of these up, they lash out about how you’re attacking them and they throw personal attacks back at you because of their fragile ego. If you -somehow- get them to see a mental health professional you may find them lying about what feedback they got. After I broke up with him he said he’d go to anger management class and find a therapist “to win me back”- funny how it’s after you leave them and set the ultimate boundary they do the work to show you they can hypothetically change and it’s never one of the times you’ve begged before in the midst of madness. Before I moved out I overheard his therapy appointment and she asked about his bipolar diagnosis and he said he was just anxious despite the mood swings. When he came to me to tell me the good news of him finally going to therapy he left that out. When I asked if the therapist knew if he had another disorder he manipulated that. He said the therapist asked if it could be anything else but it was just a brief thought. He framed it that way instead of the consistent behavioral issue it was.)

- Usually they attract drama and chaos but blame you for it as their partner (He always kept his ex around in boundary crossing ways. In hindsight I wouldn’t be surprised if he had cheated in any way with any of them because of how murky he was about spending one on one time with them. They also will always encourage you to keep other toxic people in your life so they can keep flying under the radar/blaming the other toxic people when you feel drained/etc. When I decided to go no contact with my parents, he second guessed me. When I decided to go no contact with my friends that were harmful, he second guessed me. He went out of his way to call me paranoid and picky and every other name in the book he could. Even after I broke up with him he went out of his way to tell me I was paranoid and should quit tarot reading “because [he] knew it would turn [me] against [him] one day”. I told him his opinion meant less than nothing to me.)

- Whenever you set a boundary they try to undermine it and take it as an attack (When we met, all of my ex’s small circle of friends was made up of people he had dated or slept with. Once his friend, who had flirted with him multiple times, asked to stay in his apartment while she moved out of her place. He offered her his bed. She even had a boyfriend at the time but she went to my ex first. I told him this made me very uncomfortable. He screamed and yelled about how he’ll always choose his friends first and I have to understand that and that she didn’t want to sleep in his bed while he was in it. It was crazy but the whole time he called me dramatic and made me feel insane for being so uncomfortable with it.)

- They may often act out in public over the littlest things (my ex would get absolutely infuriated when there were lines in places. Insane right? Especially living in cities? with other people? And yet whenever we went out I’d have to prepare my mental for the possibility of him getting angry and breaking down because people were waiting ahead of him in line. In hindsight the entitlement he had was overwhelming in itself. The last time we went out to a movie -which was a whole scheduling fiasco in of itself with him during our entire relationship, he was obsessed with movies. I like movies but spending 6-9 hours in a theater? Every week? On top of hours of mandatory movie viewing at home? It was exhausting. He also made me pay for my own monthly movie pass even though it was his thing. Even in covid, although I’m immunocompromised I had to negotiate with him to wait to get vaccinated before he went back to the theater. And to wear a mask in the showings. He would huff and fuss about those small courtesies the entire time. Anyway the last movie we went out to see had a long line but we bought tickets ahead of time. He pitched a fit and kept storming off away from me and threatening to leave over the line. I kept following him foolishly, and coaxed him into staying. Of course there were enough seats and of course he enjoyed the movie. He apologized after for “getting overwhelmed by the line” but that shouldn’t have happened in the first place.)

- It’s all or nothing for them but breadcrumbs for you (I’ve always been clear that I have no plans of staying in the country I’m from. From the start I’ve understood I’m not meant to stay here. And yet I stayed in a city I hated so he could suddenly finish his associates degree. We moved back to my hometown but we lived in the most stressful neighborhood because he “wanted to be downtown with a pool.” He would always complain about every single idea I had to leave the country. I’m thinking about doing a language school or artist residency? He “did long distance with [his] ex who cheated and it would be too hard”. I want to study this language and go to this -easy-place for a visa? He “kept forgetting to study and had no idea how we would ever afford the move.” And on and on it went until I simply gave up on trying to get him to step up.)

- They twist everything to be about them even grief (my grandma was like a mother to me, so it hit me hard when she died. She even told me she was going and thanked me for my friendship at the end. It was still a very difficult period and I couldn’t accept it until it just happened. When I got the call and burst into tears my ex said “I’m so sorry… do you blame me because we stayed here for me to go to school and you couldn’t be home with her?” It hadn’t even been 20 minutes since I learned she was gone. The extent of his selfishness would shock me until I cut him off.)

- They make you bury things they don’t like about your self expression/goals (I’ll use a simple example. I love fairy lights. When we met I had fairy lights and my ex had no complaints. But when we moved in together they ‘would always bother him and give him headaches’. So I took out the lights. Then he got me a glowing lamp I wanted for my birthday but never allowed me to turn it on when we were in the room. I brought the lights I love to my work and my ex would complain about them there too. He’d say he didn’t know why he “just didn’t like spending time at the studio” and then use the lights as an excuse, and then hed complain all day about how exhausting it was to be there. He’d only offer to come to the studio more if I turned them off just for him. All this time later and all of a sudden I don’t have any lights I like up. This didn’t happen for everything, but there were a lot of little things he was so controlling about just to be authoritative about something I liked.)

- They hate it when you have positive things happen to you (and instead of seeing your success as a good thing they see it as you one upping them, so they often express jealousy and then disguise it as a joke. He would “joke” about how I was going to fail so often I lost count. When I had a great day there would always be a hint of disappointment in his voice. He would always undermine it in anyway he could. “Oh you made X amount that’s nice, but that’s not enough to cover the rent”. I got a lot of compliments on my outfits, so he’d say “no one ever compliments me”. Always something to bring me down and try to get me to focus on a worry.)

- They downplay your trauma (I’m a burn survivor. My dad burned me through hot water and neglect as a baby on around 20% of my body. For that and many other reasons I became sort of a local legend for my time in our local child protective services. In a city of well over a million people. Doctors thought I wouldn’t be able to walk again and it was a miracle when I did. My grandmother had to wrap my scars everyday, twice a day for 3-4 years afterwards. She would tell me the pain would make me cry random throughout the night until I went to kindergarten. All that to say, my scars had a BIG impact on my health and my life. When I told my ex about my insecurity he said “sorry that happened, but it’s not that big of a deal.” Crazily at 21 I took that as flattery. It was not, it was severely downplaying the trauma I went through because my ex didn’t care for that part of my life. I even remember thinking I should tag a post as a burn survivor and he said “isn’t that like advertising your burns, why warn people about it?”. I got better and embraced my scars all through my own healing but damn it was all severely fucked up.)

- They usually have a Fatal Flaw they try to make you contend with (My ex had explosive anger where he would hit something (a wall, the couch, his desk, etc) or throw things at any slight provocations, and he would disguise it as a reaction of low self esteem instead. I didn’t realize how bad the conditioning had got until I broke up with him and I wasn’t getting jumpy from him coming home anymore or my dog wasn’t hiding from him anymore. I was walking on eggshells all the time and I only knew it subconsciously. He would also curse at me and call me the meanest names from the smallest arguments, he would get belittling. It’s their signature style to make you feel small and to desensitize you to truly nightmarish behavior.)

- That’s the other thing- most people and sometimes animals can tell they’re off (I would always wonder why my ex never seemed to make a good impression on others. They could tell he was off from the start.)

- They start trying to love bomb you after you give up or when they sense you are finally giving up (I always asked my ex to pay more attention to my business/endeavors/art/etc when we were together, to respond to texts I sent him at work-within reason-, to give me some support or feedback. His replies were always blasé. “That’s nice.” Or “I will.” As soon as I broke up with him. He was complaining that he always missed texting me at work. Then he started getting more involved on my social media pages. Then for the first time in months he watched my story on Instagram completely unwelcomed and unprompted. It was how fake the performance of interest was that really struck me after everything.)

- They always ask for one more chance when you’ve given them at least a hundred chances (Evem when I broke up with him he kept saying “you cut off other people (for being toxic) but I never thought it would be me!” I feel like I’ve already put plenty of examples of this, so I’ll just say this points to the fact that at their base motivation they don’t really respect you or care about you. If someone actually cares about you, they’re going to go out of their way to make you comfortable, to care about your opinions and feedback, from the very start)

- Even when it’s over, they still always try to blame you for their bad behavior. (My ex painted himself as an introvert when he was in a relationship. I had always asked him to make -newer, healthier- friends and to make a social effort. Since the beginning. After we broke up he made an effort to go out to social events. After he went out one day he came back and said “I was such a girlfriend guy, I never went out and socialized!” In turn I said you’re not a girlfriend guy you never cared about what I had to say, if you were a girlfriend guy I wouldn’t have had to break up with you for literally never taking me into account. So that ended that.)

- When it’s over the relief hits you in waves (I didn’t even realize how much I was doing to cope with the hostility and boredom of the relationship until it was over. I stopped overeating, I actually lost my appetite for days. I went from taking edibles every week to not even craving the ones I had. I wasn’t the most indulgent but I was shocked by how immediately I was fine with going cold turkey. My time with myself became even more peaceful. Even before I moved out, I was more creative and productive. I felt the beauty and the optimism of all the little moments deep in my spirit and my glow was brighter than ever before. My ex kept turning to me in despair and asking “how can you be so okay with this??” I answered him indifferently because he wasn’t worth entertaining. But obviously my spirit had been restored, I wasn’t wasting love on anyone that didn’t deserve it anymore. My energy was finally all mine. And I had faith in God that everything would be alright. And it was.)

You slowly but surely realize that you were formed to be a victim of a narcissistic/antagonistic person due to being raised by narcissistic parents and in an environment full of enabling emotionally and verbally abusive behavior. When we met I was so vulnerable. I had moved to a new city on my own, I was in a financially precarious place. The city was The Worst for Black people (tm). I was so desperate for an ally, I caught an energy vampire instead. I’ve healed and learned a lot from this. To be much more deliberate about who I let into my life. To be unafraid of purging and moving on when someone shows you they’re incapable of growth. To not accept crumbs of affection and appreciation. To pour my love into myself first before I let anyone else do the same. So I write all this to say, it’s not your fault. It’s not your fault that some people are so corrupted to the core that they’d rather destroy you than heal themselves. So… forgive yourself for this experience. Forgive yourself for being a person that just loves and cares about others. That believes in cultivating a world full of warmth and compassion. Don’t let one (or a dozen- ugh the people I’ve had to move on from oml) toxic ass person ruin you and your compassion. I had to forgive myself for believing in a lot of disappointing, inept, bad people. But I won’t stop being kind and compassionate because of those losers. I’ll continue to shine my light on those who need it whenever I’m supposed to. I mean I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to rely on anyone again without fear of their self interest but one step at a time, I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.

Anyway, wish me luck on this fresh start. Buy a reading if you want to support me. But yeah, thanks for reading y’all.

[larothoughts]

anti-ship adjacent ships: liujiu and qijiu

so there's this weird thing that's happening in svsss of all fandoms that reminds me a lot of voltron's klance and sheith fiasco AKA the formation of what i like to call anti-ship adjacent ships

basically, when someone's favorite ship is more indicative of them being an anti-shipper of another ship.

i've had to start excluding liujiu in my ao3 searches because more often than not, the fics that come up are yqy-bashing and what?? this is svsss, right? mxtx's trashiest, most problematic, harem-bicycle-shen-yuan svsss? what is this moral outrage doing in my degenerate danmei fic space, and why are you mischaracterizing yqy just to make an excuse to hate on him??

i've had a few thoughts on the rising dichotomy of shen jiu sympathizers both validating sj's bad behavior and hating yqy for enabling the same behavior. and then shipping him with lqg because liujiu is 'less toxic.' As an old lady fanfic reader who's trawled through all the godforsaken dead dove ships of the old livejournal kink_meme, i'm writing these out because making sense of things helps me cope and i am too old for this shit

(this is actually more 'why anti-qijiu' word vomit than liujiu specific--it just so happens that so many liujiu fics are bizarrely anti-qijiu.)

narrative reasons for anti-yqy liujiu fic:

aka why an author finds it easier for the plot to bash qi-ge

accepting either romantic or platonic qijiu means trying to fix qijiu. this is hard. yqy and sj already have a proven history of failure, while sj and lqg (aka author's ideal white-knight love interest) would be the perfect do-over. making yqy a clear abusive villain sj must cut off ties with 'for his mental health' solves the problem without having to fix things. it frees the author to write what they thought qi-ge should have done to 'save shen jiu right.'

on the same note, liujiu have nearly no canon crumbs. the author can write them however they want without being constrained by their canon relationship.

why lqg over other possible ships? other than yqy, lqg is one of the few characters with any sort of previous relationship with sj. lqg is canonically hot, has strong (even if negative) feelings towards sj, and has no textual or subtextual canon ship (beyond a one-sided crush on shen yuan, with lbh getting in his way lol.) he is also the same generation as sj and thus avoids any age gap squicks like with sj's other ship partners (looking at you tlj)

yqy is the only person in cang qiong with higher authority than shen jiu. while other peak lords are antagonistic, all are ranked lower and can't get in liujiu's way the same way as yqy can as a sect leader. not even the old palace master has the same power because he's the head of a different sect. so if you really want to write a villain abusing their (implicit) power over shen jiu, yqy is the only one that fits the bill.

lbh, as sj's disciple, does not fit the same abuse of power trope even if he becomes an op demon lord. as for bingjiu, lbh's brand of diabolical stalkerish yandere is so over-the-top it's hard to equate him to any real relationship. it's easier to twist yqy's passivity to villainy because it's closer to reasonable human behavior.

if one is coming from the tgcf fandom, yue qingyuan is the closest junwu-adjacent character in terms of personality and rank (on the surface.) so it's easy to transfer any junwu hate to yqy by giving him all of junwu's worst traits and making him 'junwu-lite'

same thing as above but with mdzs and the lan xichen hate for his inaction regarding his own little meowmeow (jgy).

personal author-reasons for anti-yqy liujiu fic:

aka when the character himself doesn't matter

let's get a silly one out of the way: maybe the author only headcanons top shen jiu and most qijiu has sj being a bottom. lqg gives off better hot twinky bottom energy than submissive-but-still-tops yqy. this does not explain the anti-shipping though.

less silly: an author is projecting either themselves or other people in their real life onto their fic, and changing the character's personalities to match their real life projected counterparts (even if ooc). sj is a clear abuse-survivor insert, which shoe-horns other characters into roles that real people in the author's lives have. i think yqy is often seen as the insert for someone who 'could have helped but didn't.' there are many valid reasons why someone would be more mad at the person who averted their gaze rather than their actual abuser, but that doesn't change the fact that qijiu's relationship in canon is so much more complicated.

(it's easier to hate enablers instead of abusers, because hating abusers and inviting confrontation is dangerous. most of the time, enablers won't hurt you directly. they are the safer person to hate.)

an author thinks they could have saved sj better, that qi-ge had more than enough time to fix things and his failure not to do so must be punished by taking away his sj-simp-card and throwing him into the villain bin. this is similar to the phenomenon where an author hates the wife of canon anime couples b/c the author could clearly wife him better. and then writes a fic bashing said wife.

an author sees a messy relationship and equates messy with abusive. in reality many relationships can be messy but not abusive, messy but still fixable, but due to their personal experiences they see any attempt to do so as toxic. in this scenario yqy is often the abuser-insert and his ooc characterization takes after the author's own abuser.

specifically in fics where lqg has the personality of a cardboard cut-out: using liujiu to tell others they are still pro-ship, when in reality they dislike qijiu for their own reasons (and can't help but write it in their fic). it really reminds me of middle school lol like kids trying to find their identity by hating another identity. the whole 'ew pink is overrated, i hate preps which means i must be a nerdy rebel' and then two years later you realize you're not a nerdy rebel after all, you just based your entire identity on what you thought was the opposite of what you hated.

why i try not to read anti-qijiu liujiu fics:

aka write whatever you want, but sometimes i have to choose not to read

authors can write whatever they want. we're all doing this for free, so it's expected that a lot of fanfic have venting and some self-imposing onto a fictional character. i don't expect authors to NOT put themselves in their fic in some way. at the same time, however, i hope authors are self-aware enough to not bash another character just because that character reminds them of someone irl.

aka i get uncomfortable when i read a fic that has an author's obvious real-person insert. i'm not reading svsss fic anymore, i'm reading the author's version of punishing their abuser using fiction. i love transformative media that adds onto the canon! i love different interpretations even! but i'm here to read svsss? where are the svsss characters??

i'm not into character-bashing in general. i think the point of svsss and all of bingqiu's misunderstandings is the fact that good/evil is not a binary. sy spent the whole series fearing the 'evil' binghe despite the fact that post-abyss binghe was a complex person, causing a chain reaction of disaster. hell, shen jiu is the king of gray characters! he is a scum villain, evil and misunderstood, to be a sj-fan means to understand that no one is entirely good or evil. so it's even more cognitively dissonant when a pro-sj fic is so categorically anti-qijiu, as this often paints sj as good/misunderstood and yqy as bad.

(the only character-bashing i don't care about is the old palace master mxtx clearly wrote him to be bashed so throw him in a fire)

i don't mind liujiu actually, i think the dynamic has potential (see all the sj harem fic i've read lol) but qi-ge is such a big part of sj's character that vilifying/getting rid of him does sj a disservice too? sj has a shit ton of bad coping mechanisms, these aren't going to be magically fixed if yqy gets his limbs chopped off as 'just punishment' (??) for not stopping sj from abusing his own students (????)

in conclusion

there is no point to this rambling, and you don't need to agree with me on anything. these are just thoughts i had when trying to figure out why anti-ship adjacent ships even exist. the moral outrage is giving me war flashbacks of anti-sheith klance fans using their age gap as justification for their own ship, rather than liking klance for... being klance.

(I briefly considered going over all liujiu vs qijiu morality arguments, but if you're an sj fan i feel like morality arguments are pointless. he is an angry feral scum kitten who hits kids, no sj-fan has the moral high ground here.)

it's always unfortunate to see so much anti-shipping spilling into fandom, since by default most of us are living in the fringe minority anyway. further dividing us is just going to sink the whole ocean ala the death of livejournal and chinese ban on ao3. there's no point in ships if there ain't an ocean to sail in! aren't we all here because we are fans of these stories???

bonus

to make up for what must feel like a huge anti liujiu wall of text, here are some of my general thoughts on how their relationship would work. i'm more familiar with sj so most of these are from his pov.

while sj often has schemes upon schemes upon schemes, when it comes to anger/criticism/negativity, he's scathingly honest. lqg, a fellow honest asshole, is often on the same wavelength. once misunderstandings are cleared up and lqg realizes sj will do whatever it takes to protect big bro yqy (and thus the sect), they're able to work together as a ruthless team against cang qiong's enemies.

let's also assume fixing sj's emotional issues stops him from the worst of his scumminess aka whipping his disciples half to death.

teamwork -> enemies to lovers -> only one bed trope???

sj needs someone who will overtly believe in his goodness, and lqg, once he realizes the mistakes in his assumptions, is a loyal wall of support. unlike qi-ge who must always play diplomat, lqg blazes over all social cues. who cares if this looks bad on cang qiong, he'll throw down with anyone if his boo is insulted.

lqg is upfront and honest. there are no hidden plots for sj to be paranoid about in lqg, he's a Good Man through-and-through. if lqg has problems, he'll tell him. if he needs to apologize and sj tells him why, he'll do so. and if sj asks him a question, he'll always do his best to answer.

while lqg knows sj has trauma and a dark past, he will never truly understand what it was like. and that's exactly what sj wants. he likes how lqg knows him more as he is now in the present vs. someone who has lived through the same past. being with him is a reminder that he is now a powerful peak lord, not the starving street rat he once was.

for lqg, sj is like a complex puzzle box. an enigma so outside of his understanding of how the world works, he can't help but be drawn to it. he used to equate scheming with evil, but once he realizes much of sj's scheming was for the good of the sect, he lets himself be impressed by sj's intelligence. the fact that sj became a peak lord from nothing shows a certain type of strength-- and lqg has always appreciated strength.

a big roadblock in their relationship was sj's antagonism towards yqy (their sect leader whom lqg respects.) once qijiu reconcile (or sj stops being so disrespectful to yqy in public) lqg is better able to see him as an ally vs. an enemy.

sj rewards this loyalty by taking care of lqg's hidden enemies, because straightforward brutes are especially susceptible to devious snakes like that. sj would know. whether or not he tells lqg can go either way. he tells lqg if only to stop lqg from hearing it elsewhere and assuming the worst; or he doesn't tell lqg because he knows lqg trusts him and confusing his mind with schemes would just make him grumpy for not understanding.

...even if he's cute when he's grumpy.

[cripplecharacters]

Hiya!! I’ve got a couple of stories I’m currently working on and because I also draw a lot, I like making illustrations for the stories. One of my protagonists experiences psychosis, and occasionally suffers with hallucinations. When drawing hallucinations (or expressing other elements of psychosis), is there anything major to avoid doing? For reference, the main reference for how I was going to draw them was similar to how the show Arcane expresses psychosis, since I like the artistic direcrion of the show overall, and I’ve been only positive feedback on how Jinx’s mental health was portrayed.

Hi!

I think it depends on what kind of hallucinations she has. I personally liked the way Arcane did it, and I think it works both for Jinx as a character and the show in the aesthetic sense.

However, I think it could be cool to visually show that for a lot of people, hallucinations aren't “obvious”. They can be incredibly regular things or just be “kinda weird/out of place” rather than clearly impossible to onlookers (in this case, readers)

Someone could also have both - they could hallucinate a person who definitely isn't there (like Jinx seeing [characters who have died]) but also have some that are just... hard to differentiate as an actual hallucination (like seeing a regular dog being outside, appliances being on, sounds that make sense but aren't there, etc.). Arguably, if she has both, the second ones become much harder to spot in comparison.

Another thing is what kind of things she's hallucinating. For Jinx, they were distressing and related to traumatic events, so the whole experience is obviously intense and full of PTSD flashbacks. This makes sense for her as a character. I really liked the tense slow-motion that was used in some earlier scenes of her as a child and the exact opposite used for her older self with the quick cuts and incredibly rapid pace, because it really can be like either of these.

But then again: some people see things so boring that there's no emotional reaction. Sometimes people don't realize they're hallucinating because the hallucination in question is a stranger sitting on a bench you're walking next to in a perfectly normal fashion, or something else that you wouldn't pay attention to, hallucination or not. I know of people who look through their phone/camera lens at things they think might be hallucinations because they don't show up on photos, and they just want to make sure (I've done this with audio recordings before). Would someone like this experience psychosis the same way as Jinx, who is shown surrounded by neon sketches of beasts with giant sharp-teethed mouths barking at her? Possibly! But there's a big chance it's simply not as intense in the visual sense (it can still be incredibly stressful on the inside).

So to kinda answer the question, it depends on the above. What is her relationship with her hallucinations? Some people like theirs, hallucinations can be positive or neutral, even comforting. Is she used to them? Does she know that she's hallucinating? Why is she hallucinating exactly (flashback? stress? under the influence? no reason? fatigued?)? Does she have “regulars”? They don't have to be literally people that show up regularly, but things or just general themes that can be related to the person's life. You might have one set of hallucinations that appear as a result of X, and a different that shows up when Z happens (with Jinx, she hallucinates [dead characters] very realistically when general PTSD flashbacks happen, but much more abstractly when confronted in a stressful, overwhelming situation where she's panicking). Is she only hallucinating impossible things, regular events, something in-between, or all of the above? (As someone in the last category, I'd love to see that.) Are there sounds, tactile feeling, smell, taste? (I guess hard to convey visually on a drawing, but still something I'd love to see, delusional parasitosis is such a classic it has its own name)

It might make perfect sense for your character to experience her hallucinations in the same visual manner as Jinx, but they might also just look like another slice-of-life panel with nothing out of the ordinary, they may be just slightly “off” with the hallucinations sticking out like interactive objects in video games, or maybe the entire hallucination is just the sound of neighbors arguing upstairs. Which again: the latter options can be hard to do visually, but if you establish that place X looks like that and definitely doesn't have that object in there, and house Z definitely doesn't have a second floor, you can clue readers in a more subtle way that I think could also show that sometimes psychosis is easy to miss.

Psychosis is diverse, and I don't feel like I can't say that there are contents of it that “shouldn't be shown”. People absolutely hallucinate demons, ghosts, blood, or other “stereotypical” things; there is a kernel of truth in the “evil hallucinations” trope (though that's where the truth ends to be honest). For every person who tells you to not draw shadowy figures as an example of a hallucination, you will have two people who will tell you that it happened to them last week.

The thing I'd urge you to not do is much less concerned with actual hallucinations, and more with their context in their story and how they are portrayed.

The point is to not demonize it in narrative, and understand that the character isn't their hallucinations - they're not “subconscious desires” or proof of anything, they're not a sign of something supernatural happening, and they're not any kind of indicator of the person's morality or potentially being dangerous. And, I can't stress this enough, they aren't “predicting the future”. Don't use the psychosis as a Chehov's gun or other implication that the delusions are real for the sake of your psychotic readers.

Sorry for the non-answer answer but I hope it helps,

mod Sasza

[laylaplease]

Warnings — Dead dove - do not eat, psychologist!Anakin x reader, manipulation, coercion, captivity, blindfolding, tying up, drugging, loss of consciousness, both Anakin and reader are mentally ill, scissor play, undressing, dub-con, implied murder, hinted homicide, hinted torture, stalker behavior, implied APD, implied suicide, Stockholm syndrome? Generally a messed-up piece of work.

Word count — 3k

Notes — A small project for my friend. Not something I'd normally write, but I took it as a challenge. Not exactly smut, but it's hinted & characters make out. Make sure to read the warning list and be mindful. Wrote it in a different point of view to make it as gender neutral as possible. NOT PROOFREAD.

After seven visits and a night of consideration, I've come to the conclusion that Doctor Skywalker wasn't the correct mental health specialist for me. And it wasn't because he was bad at his job, no, quite the opposite. Anakin Skywalker was an attractive male in his forties. He never shared details about his personal life, and despite that, he managed to create an impression of a person I've known for months, if not years, of my life.

Anakin scared me. Not intentionally, of course. It was what he's supposed to do — pick up the details of me, the patterns of my brain, my movements, and my involuntary fidgeting. He was a modern mind reader, and I couldn't help but wonder if he's aware of every thought I've had when he sat in front of me, with his legs crossed, glasses hanging on the very tip of his nose, a linen button-up with the last button left free. Could he hear what my inner voice was saying during those stolen stares? The gentle tapping of a fountain pen on his notebook told me he could.

He wasn't the only one digging for specifics, though. His purposeful, secretive behavior made me want to figure him out. As if he were my medical project and not the other way around. I knew that it wasn’t ethical; part of his job was to keep the outside world, including his own, off his patients' brains to avoid influencing them. But I needed to know more. Anakin Skywalker was my psychologist, and I was utterly and entirely obsessed with him. Maybe that's exactly why I should stay in therapy. For one reason or another.

It was Tuesday morning, and I woke up especially early for my supposedly last appointment. I wanted to take a longer way to his office and connect all the pieces of private information my ill brain gathered and processed about Anakin. There were plenty of assumptions, facts I couldn’t know for sure, and guesses about his life that were possibly altered by whatever’s been lurking in my brain. However, I loved the image. In my head, Anakin was divorced. The absence of an expensive stone on his ring finger forced me to come to that conclusion. A glimpse of his phone wallpaper portraying two toddlers told me he was a father of two — a boy and a girl with the same gentle but intense stare he wore. The bundle of keys on his office desk told me the kind of car he drove, how many locks his house had, a keychain of his assumed favorite hockey team hinted at what he enjoys doing in his free time. Oh, and he was a smoker, that’s for sure. You could never miss the smell. No matter how many mints he swallowed before my visits or the scent of soap he used to wash his smoke-stained fingers, the cigarette trace was always obvious. But I didn’t mind it, not one bit. His natural smell mixing with the dirt of an addiction on someone who’s supposed to be an example of a perfect intellectual man was like knowing his dirty secret — it was arousing.

I came fifteen minutes early. My doctor worked on the third floor of a five-story commercial building; it was an environment I deemed to be perfectly suitable for a man such as Anakin. Modern architecture surrounded by enough green to not appear like a dystopian haven. And it was an excellent choice for a psychologist office, initially. Personally, however, I thought it was too perfect. Everything surrounding Anakin was a bit too perfect, from the way he carried himself to the choice of his work spot — it always rubbed it in for me that there are people doing okay, people who aren’t chained with the issues of their own heads, uncaged, people who can enjoy that perfect organic modernist dream.

I was going to spend the punctual sixteen minutes outside on a bench before stepping inside and greeting the doctor with a new wave of depression to discolor some of his lively world; after all, that’s what he’s signed up for. I sat down comfortably, not too far from the main entrance, admiring the surrounding park while judging parents chattering around while their strollers were left unattended near the children’s playground. It was enjoyable to see and possibly figure out the mindset of all the strangers and passersby. I felt like my own kind of psychologist, but I never had any intentions to help the people I marked as dysfunctional in one way or another. I lacked some empathy, yes, but that only made my life easier; I wasn’t as attached to problems that weren’t my own, and I could analyze people without their lives influencing mine. My doctor’s fairytale was unfortunately disturbed by the raspy voice greeting me.

“Good morning. You’re early.” Anakin greeted me with a welcoming yet slightly surprised tone. “I’m glad.” 

The coffee in his hand told me otherwise; I could only assume though, but he probably expected to spend a good ten minutes alone in his office, enjoying the morning with a hot latte and with no bothering from his patients before his workday even started.

“Good morning.” I nod too nonchalantly for my own liking. It was obvious I was forcing the tone, and if someone is to pick on such a small detail — it’s him.

“Let’s go; I don’t mind starting early.” He smiles, and I can once again can tell what a liar he is.

I follow him inside a white-lit lobby area, where he’s greeted by a few people he’s familiar with. He walks with masculine confidence, and I find myself feeling so disgustingly small beside him, small and insignificant. I wonder if he’s ever aware of the effect his demeanor has on people. It pisses me off and excites me further. It’s a case of mental masochism, and I’m a pathetic victim.

After a few second elevator ride, spiced with his initiated small talk, we enter the office. He offers to make me a cup of tea, giving me a choice of peppermint and lavender. I was about to decline when I reminded myself that it was my last time here and that I had never drunk lavender tea before. So I agree, encouraging him to be generous with sugar.

“Can I assume you being oddly early to come means an improvement in your mood?” He asks as he brews my beverage. It’s almost as if he’s not even working yet, not taking notes and analyzing me, but I know it’s just a facade to make me feel more comfortable.

“Perhaps. More so that I don’t think I’ll be visiting anymore.” I confess and go along with his play.

“Can I ask why?” His broad back turns from me, and I’m greeted with his handsome face. There was no hint of confusion or surprise; you would think he'd expected me to say that.

I shrug my shoulders, following his hands as he stirs my tea and pushes a delicate porcelain cup forward. His voice is nice, but I would much rather stare at him than watch his miserable attempts to help me.

“I don’t think therapy is necessary. Not anymore, at least.” I take a sip of a hot lavender drink, my hands taking the cup involuntary to avoid speaking further. The brim touches my lips, and I hiss in pain from the burning liquid. I swear he chuckles at me.

“I would like to continue seeing you.” He crosses his legs and leans back in his chair. The gaze he’s fixed on me, mixed with the weird silence after he stops asking questions, is making my insides squirm with anxiety. It’s never like that around him.

“You see, y/n, you are an interesting case…” Anakin pushes his glasses up with his index finger, rocking his chair slightly. “You’re an obsessive stalker.” He blurts out as a wide grin spreads across his face. “And I dislike misbehaving patients.” His face is becoming more blurry as we speak, and I feel myself sinking into the velvet cushion of an armchair.

Fucking lavender tea...

I couldn’t tell if I was out for days or mere minutes, but I’m pretty sure if the familiar smell of cigarettes hadn't reached my nostrils, I’d still be asleep. I opened my eyes only to be met with a dark cloth concealing my sight. I know I’m still in Anakin’s office because the sensation under my restrained wrists is of the same velvet chair. I remained still, in hopes of figuring out what’s going on. Only one thing was clear: I shouldn’t have came today yet alone drank tea. That's a gut feeling for you. The blindfold is weak around my eyes, and I guess it’s less for hiding the view and more for intimidating me. Good job, doctor.

“Oh?” Anakin gasps mockingly. “You’re up early, little bird.” He’s standing behind me; one of his hands snakes up my neck, fingers twisting into my hair. “Good.” He tightens the cloth around my eyes.

“There’s something about you. You’re as annoying as you’re pretty, and I can’t decide if I want to keep you as my little pet or get rid of you and mask it as the tragedy of a weak-minded person.”

I can sense him walk away and then make his way back into his chair in front of me. I sat up straight, settling my head towards him to show how little his words were frightening me. My mind’s been playing games on me since I can remember myself, and a mere human couldn’t scare me with ropes and threats when my own head was a prison of torture most of my life.

“I urge you to make that decision now before your next patient finds us in this roleplay of yours.” I tug the restraints on my hands.

Anakin laughs; I can hear him light a cigarette.

“Yeah?” He pauses, probably taking a puff. “You’re stupid. You don’t think you should be scared?”

I know I should be; in fact, I am not mentally ill enough to be oblivious to how messed up my situation actually is. But I’m not scared, and that scares me way more than being held hostage by my own psychologist.

“So what then, doc? Don’t keep me waiting.”

I can feel Anakin rise from his seat and slowly make his way to stand in front of me. I can’t see him, but as he towers over me, I lift my head up. There is that sense of feeling small again. Maybe it’s less about his confidence and more about how twisted his mind is to lure in people like that.

“Do you think I haven’t noticed? You… Digging through me, trying to figure me out... Watching me. You’re sick.” He grabs my chin. ”You’re sick, and it pisses me off.”

“So you decided to tie me up?”

He sighs, and I’m pretty sure he’s fed up with my poor sense of judgment.

“No, I decided to tear up your dignity piece by piece to show you who’s the real maniac between the two of us.” He yanks the blindfold off my face, and I can’t help but wonder if the initial purpose of it was to do just that. It's as if he’s planned every single second of our sick encounter.

His piercing deep blue eyes star into mine intensely, filled with overwhelming emotions of visible hatred and lust, and I am no longer sure if I want to scream into his face or bite his lips off in an intense session of kissing. I want to make him bleed through both pain and pleasure. Can he tell what I think this time too, or is he sane enough to be unaware of the disturbing thoughts spiraling in my scrambled brain?

“Don’t look at me like that.” He says it with a disgusted tone.

“Do you not enjoy my stare, doctor?"

I don’t know why I said that. I don’t know why my tongue moved in such a seductive manner when I spoke to him. Maybe it was the fruit of his manipulation, making me feel safe, making me trust him, and then turning me into a mindless vessel that craves his approval. Or maybe my problems dive deeper into my body, and it’s just who I am. Maybe sickness excites me.

Whatever the reasoning, it seemed to amuse him. Though I still couldn’t read if his amusement was based on hatred for that twisted attraction he obviously felt towards me, part of me wished it was later.

“You’re a masochist.”

“And you’re a sadist.”

Anakin raises his eyebrow. “So you agree?”

We were both right, but I wasn’t just going to sign up for him hurting me. Or at least not this easily. As I wonder how this is going to go, he leaves the room.

I like to think he’s keeping me because he finds me desirable. It doesn’t exactly make the whole captive situation better, but hell, it’s satisfying when you’re entertaining enough for a man such as Anakin to consider not murdering you instantly. For other eyes, it would make his image less perfect, but to me, he’s becoming better by a second.

Anakin comes back with a pair of metal scissors in his hand. He towers over me again, this time raising my chin with a cold blade.

“You’re not letting go of that stare, are you, darlin’?” He bites his lip, looking down at me.

The stinging blade traces down my neck, sliding over my right collarbone. The thicker skin he reaches, the more pressure he’s applying, yet he's not breaking the flesh, only leaving a red, tingling line. It drags over my clothed shoulder and down the sleeve of my shirt. He does it slowly, not breaking eye contact, as if he’s done it a thousand times before. I question if I am as special as I thought I was.

“You have no idea what I am going to do to you.” He leans down to whisper as he hooks the cutting edge under the cuff and cuts into it.

A cold sensation sends shivers up my arm when he lets the two blades rip through the material all the way up to the neckline, leaving my left limb completely free of clothing. The dust particles tickle my nose, causing a sharp inhale, which he mistakes for fear.

“Scared?”

Not a chance. It’s better than just undressing me; it gives a sense of foreplay, whether before sex or murder. He repeats the same process on my other sleeve.

“You like playing with your food?”

Anakin grins widely. I think he’s liking me more and more. "Oh, how I’ll enjoy devouring you, my sweet dessert."

He drops down to his knees, placing his hands on my thighs to keep them apart and give him more access to be closer to me. He cuts into the hemline of my shirt and rips it across the middle, parting it and exposing even more of me for his eyes to eat. He doesn’t stop there and digs the point of the scissors into my chin, causing a painful sting. I look into his eyes, clouded with darkness, biting my teeth together to avoid hissing from the ache.

“Mouth.” He says that, and my lips part involuntary, as if he had control of my own body.

He slides the scissors fully into me, leaving only the rings hanging out.

“Bite.”

I clench my teeth against the metal to prevent myself from choking. Anakin looks at me proudly, as if saying how good I am for listening to his orders. He grabs the waistband of my pants and commands again.

“Hips.”

I lift myself up, and before I know it, I’m almost entirely naked, tied to a chair, with scissors digging into the back of my throat. And I don’t think ever in my life I’ve been this turned on by a mere thought of being hurt.

He stands up, grabbing the tool out of my mouth and yanking it out without any consideration. With trembling hands, he starts cutting the ropes off my wrists.

“I’m about to die from the feelings you make me feel.” He groans.

Once my hands are free, I clash into him like an animal freed from a cage who’s been deprived of meat. His lips lash onto mine, and his arms grab my thighs and lift me up against him. He’s kissing me, and my body’s burning with sickness and desire. Anakin carries me to his desk, sweeping all the papers and stationary on the ground with a loud, crashing sound, breaking whatever’s fragile and unlucky enough to interfere with our twisted fantasy.

Anakin’s teeth graze the skin on my neck as he throws me to lay on the wooden tabletop. He digs his teeth into my flesh, making me gasp. He’s marking my body with deep red bruises, and I wonder if it’s to hurt me, taste me, or make me see the sars. I’m pretty sure all three things are happening at the same time, though.

He pulls away for a second just to force his tongue into my mouth. And I kiss him. I crave him. I want to make him feel weak for not killing me; I want to make him feel vulnerable for giving into his desires, but the only one who’s feeling small is me. Just like every other time. I keep kissing him, tasting his spit in my mouth as it smears over my chin from how hungrily he’s working. And he keeps devouring me. He keeps devouring me, and I can’t force myself to stop him.

[findmeinthefallair]

An Uncommonly Discussed Trauma Symptom

Disclaimer: This is in no way a substitute for therapy: it’s only psychoeducation. Please consult a therapist and/or hotline and get the help you need if you are experiencing mental health difficulties, especially if experiencing distress or issues that feel unmanageable.

Warnings: Mentions and discussion of suicidal ideation, death, abuse and violence.

Special thanks to @ashanimus and @childlikegoblinqueen

Ever heard of "the sense of a foreshortened future"?

If you have suffered trauma over a sustained and long enough period of time, you may find that you can't imagine yourself living long. You can't see yourself reaching milestones, because it hardly makes sense to your mind that you can go on for that long...given how much you have felt like you've escaped danger, given just how many close calls you have had in life.

Yet the sense of a foreshortened future is a separate thing from suicidality.

If you have both of those together though, it really isn't fun because they may feed one another in a cycle, in the way that symptoms under the same mental health condition have the potential to do the same.

It isn't a desire for pain to end (which is what suicidality is), more so a generated expectation that takes root, and a framework which a survivor tries to fit their experiences into, with the goal to get things to make as much sense as can be. Because it's often the easier thing to devise a simple formula, to feel certainty and to manage one's expectations: rather than embrace the grey areas of uncertainty about how life will turn out.

It's almost as if this feeling of a foreshortened future is in a tug-of-war match between what appears to be solid reasoning, and a person's natural survival instinct along with the hunger for a meaningful life.

This symptom isn't on the *official* criteria for a psychiatrist or clinical psychologist to make any diagnoses, it is not listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5) or International Classification of Diseases, 10th Revision (ICD-10). But informally it is sometimes categorized as an avoidance symptom under both PTSD and Complex PTSD, and also under longer-term depression.

(however, I think it can extend to other conditions. The key criteria is it emerges from repeatedly experiencing horrible things until it makes sense in one's head to expect themselves not to last much longer)

If you hop onto Google Scholar to find proper research about it, the findings are very scarce because it's hard to define it, empirically measure it and quantify it in the first place.

Again, it's not the same as suicidal ideation because a foreshortened-future view is an expectation, while the latter is about a desire.

I wasn't taught about this symptom in any training and supervision before becoming a licensed therapist, nor did any of my own therapists bring it up as psychoeducation when I saw them. It was only through online articles on informal websites that I stumbled upon the phrase and it all clicked for my long-term experiences.

But I feel it is good knowledge for anyone providing psychotherapy to bear in mind.

In The Owl House, the grimwalker lore weaved into Hunter's arc, can shockingly be linked with this symptom, symbolically and thematically.

But the show's age rating means it would likely be too dark for the writing team to explicitly incorporate it into Hunter's dialogue.

Hunter was a lamb marked for the slaughter early on.

He has questioned his survival and ability to thrive.

The following article on Psychology Today describes Belos's long-term influence on Hunter pretty well and provides info that strengthens the points I'm making in this whole post:

Link

It's bad enough that before Hunter and Luz found Belos's mindscape, he struggled with the fear of failure to the extent that there was already the raging inner battle between his primal survival instinct and the already knackered part of him that sought eternal rest from his suffering (showing up as suicidal thoughts):

Fast forward a number of episodes...and we see the looming horrors in Hollow Mind that culminated in Hunter's discovery of what his predecessors went through:

followed by permanent rejection by his parental figure:

The power held by a foreshortened-future view, and its potential to isolate you - to make you feel like you're invisible, or a ghost - can be strong.

What Hunter said to Gus in the following screencaps sums up what it feels like pretty well:

In the context of having an abuser, it emerges from the negative beliefs they impose on you. It gets tricky if those beliefs are internalized, and which may remain internalized even after you get to safety and away from said abuser. Internalized until they become what you expect of your life.

It's about those thoughts which you know in your rational mind are lies, but you feel their apparent truth. They go more silent when you practice self-care but they return to try and reel you in again, and to a degree, they succeed in getting you to believe them all over again, before you renounce them once more.

Being in the C-PTSD Club along with Hunter, I personally experience the feeling of a foreshortened future as a voice deep down which almost always says that life feels too long and it therefore feels absolutely weird, like it doesn't make sense. Life feels too long, contrary to that commonly heard cheesy quote, "Life is too short to blah blah blah".

When I reached milestone birthdays like my 21st, it was confusing and made me irritable, feeling an itch deep down that I could not scratch.

The voice asks me why the heck I'm still around when it apparently doesn't make sense. It's a pervading feeling which can be pretty annoying, though I have it far enough in the background that it's like noise instead of being a source of distress.

It's not the easiest thing to explain this, but Hunter may have confusing thoughts creeping into his head like "Caleb didn't last long, why would I?" whereby such thoughts have a strange feel to them. They aren't exactly hard rules, nor are they distant enough that they can be easily brushed aside. Brain hurty, emotions spooky.

After the horror of this night:

I can definitely see Hunter wrestling with this symptom from time to time. No doubt. It was a major loss of autonomy and control that would significantly aggravate what was already brewing deep down.

I'm doubtful that the crew even established this on purpose (unless they actually consulted trauma experts and/or experienced mental health practitioners), but...this one symptom ties in with grimwalker lore so perfectly...it's hella fascinating that all Hunter's predecessors' lives (including Caleb's) were cut short. Prematurely.

They came with an expiry date set by their abuser: something very characteristic of this foreshortened future feeling, though not unique to survivors of abusive home environments (e.g. if you experienced natural disasters over many years, yet had a loving family, you could also feel like you may not live long). And Hunter's experience of seeing the grimwalker graveyard in Hollow Mind is a shockingly visceral and visual metaphor to symbolize a concept like this, which matches perfectly with his symptomology as a Complex PTSD survivor.

The battle for inner peace has a high price: it is ongoing, and extends beyond him being physically free from Belos. Because Hunter can't just trim away the Belos-related memories from his earliest years and formative years. He can't forget, but he can choose to give those memories less attention, and choose not to let them take the steering wheel in the long-term.

In my opinion, the possession scenes don't just portray the physical experience of an abuser returning to try regaining control or restoring the status quo of having the survivor in their grasp.

The scenes also represent the abuser's imprint upon the survivor that lasts beyond the duration for which Belos is present in Hunter's life. Belos is the kind of abuser that is so insidious that he knows he could leave some marks that outlast his directly physical presence, in the event that he meets his own end. He would have definitely thought about this. Leaving the kind of grisly reminders that won't ever technically fade away (not to be confused with how they can certainly "fade further into the background" via therapy, new positive experiences and the support of loved ones).

For example, the patterns of the permanent scars on Hunter look so much like the patterns on Philip's own face and body. When possessed, the markings were dark green, later faded to the colour of scar tissue once Belos leaves his body.

As we all know, it's hella sad to imagine Hunter having to look at himself in mirrors throughout the rest of his life. It was awful enough that he had the haircut-related panic attack.

If we tie all that back to the symptom of a foreshortened-future view: Hunter might be left with a spooky nebulous feeling (that will alternate between coming back to haunt him, and subsiding) that he too has some expiry date that is different from how the people around him naturally and confidently expect to live a substantially long life. As a cult survivor with C-PTSD, Hunter can't afford the luxury of those natural expectations.

I don't mean that he might plan a day in the future to end his own life, not at all. But he may have a strange ghostly expectation of how long more he has till his life may come to an end, and he wouldn't be sure of how this subconscious expectation came about.

The darker days of navigating the confusing mess of his complex trauma may feel like exhaustion from paddling and swimming to keep your head above water to breathe.

Speaking of water and drowning, plus the theme of sinking down vs. rising back up above the water surface...the fact that Camila jumped in to bring him back up, his friends helped to pull him out, and Flapjack passes new life to him...this is also some crazy powerful symbolism for surviving complex trauma.

Falling back on a support network, your "tribe", that won't abandon you.

My other Hunter analyses (link) go into more detail about his support network and why he needs it.

I was talking to a friend about all this: she has relevant lived experience and mentioned that poor Hunter would reach a milestone birthday and perhaps cry at least a bit on that day, maybe even during the birthday party: out of sheer confusion. The confusion would be silently screaming "But...this doesn't...make sense?". And he might feel confusing waves of darker emotions along with a strange sense of joy.

He may make a decision to start a family with Willow, and a confused questioning voice will bother him now and then with "How are you still here, doing this and living to see this?".

(...also, when is his birthday...? Is it documented in some Emperor's Coven records that they will find..? Even the mere concept of having a birthday is messed up for him to think about, given the purpose behind his creation)

Complex trauma changes its survivors' relationships with the world, not just with people, and this can even apply to their relationships with things like joy and how joy is experienced.

Flapjack's absence would have bred survivor's guilt. It might translate into Hunter questioning whether he is worth the love and effort his friends put in for him. This feeling could emerge at random moments over the years in his life.

Visually, I feel that these two frames - the lighting (which I'd say is unique among all his scenes because they are parts of his arc that stand out so much), his pose, his expression - somehow capture the experience of how complex trauma is chronic and long-term:

The currently most known C-PTSD memoir out there, What My Bones Know by journalist Stephanie Foo, has some content that I feel matches nicely with what Hunter is experiencing in the two separate scenes above.

The author describes something she calls "the dread" (if you get the book, it's first mentioned on page 51). I would call it the amalgamation of multiple things such as shame, the fear of impending harm, self-doubt where you question whether you did something wrong, fearing that someone hates you, etc.

And basically, good lord my poor boy in the first screenshot..with that expression of suspecting what he thought was Belos's presence in the room: something about it fits the book author's words, feeling like she was "on the precipice of fucking everything up".

That's certainly something that would cross Hunter's mind multiple times as he processes the worst night of his life. That he could have done something to prevent all that.

With so much pre-existing worry that his friends and family might actually hate him, the possession scenes and Flapjack's death would definitely shake his foundation and I'm sure he isn't past this kind of ingrained thought pattern at all:

Second, the book author calls C-PTSD a shapeshifting "beast" (page 316). And when she fights it, she must use a different strategy depending on what form it takes, and that it will keep coming back from time to time in another form. Which is why there is a particular exhaustion one feels from having to adapt to each battle.

For Hunter, the second screencap of him fighting Belos's coercion in a direct physical manner is the first of many battles he has to win in his mind, even after Belos is gone for good. Outlasting whatever invisible assailant is trying to get him, as he faces inevitable episodes of being retraumatized in the future: these are called emotional flashbacks (one of the symptoms of C-PTSD).

Being a survivor of complex trauma who experiences a weird sense of time via a foreshortened-future view, can feel like being on the outside looking in.

But! To end this meta on a hopeful note, I should reiterate something from my most recent long meta about Retraumatization vs. Self-Soothing, the first part of Hunter's important speech in Thanks to Them touches on wild magic and palisman. Wild magic represents freedom, while palismen (quoting the Bat Queen) represent close bonds in relationships, emotion, and conviction.

Applying this to how we can navigate the swampy waters of a foreshortened-future view, Hunter can use his newfound freedom and sense of agency to create the story he'd like to tell about his life. It is pretty much impossible to avoid bringing beliefs from our young formative years into adulthood. But expectations (which have a direct link with emotions we end up feeling) of ourselves and of life can be altered over time, so they become less rigid and instead more open to new possibilities.

He has an inquisitive mind which is a big plus point in understanding the impact of what he has been through, and I have full faith that he'll do just fine in that regard because of the courage we have seen in him.

Among the hobbies he explores in the future, flyer derby will be one example of an excellent outlet for him because of its physicality: trauma and grief are not only emotional battlegrounds but also highly physical ones. The body is also very much involved e.g. feeling the lead-like weight of depressive moods in one's body, feeling the physical tension of hypervigilance, etc.

It's fantastic that he has Luz, Willow, Gus and company, he will have a very meaningful career, and he'll have everyone else in his large found family.

His story...his heart...his resilience and vitality...it's all truly inspirational.

We might learn even more about the grimwalkers in the finale and that would undoubtedly prompt me to do a shorter Part 2 on top of this meta.

[tree-obsession]

2.2 SPOILERS!! PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK

this is a small lore discussion! mostly speculation and theories- i have not seen leaks about 2.3 plot yet, but i have seen a couple about boothill's character stories, so please keep that in mind!

trigger for mentions of suicide(aventurine) and mega corps(the ipc)

we have to talk about the ending cutscene with aventurine and boothill more! i'll start with my fav parts that no one really has brought up yet:

Aventurine intimidating Boothill after mentioning the guards are out- Boothill sounded so offput and hasty while reassuring him they were just knocked out, and we have to talk about aventurine himself just being intimidating more honestly his glare actually did kind of scare me.

Boothill pointing a gun at aventurine was. well. i'm sorry i did actually laugh at that. boothill i think you should research your targets a bit more honestly that guy is NOT afraid of guns. he fully walked into the nihility and pointed at least one gun at himself, and just got out of his own meticulously-planned suicide. threats of death won't work, sorry. also he has good reason to hate oswaldo schneider as well- threats didn't even have to be used, probably! he would kill him too, probably(revenge arc go go go!!)

the convo between aven and jade was. yeah. why he's betting his life again, i don't know (maybe sarcasm? or it was really just banter?) but it does seem like the two of them aren't super close at all, at least from what little i could gather. also if diamond hurts aventurine the entire fandom will kick his ass, emanator or no, so he better be prepared for that too lol. also, it was a pretty common theory aventurine would leave the ipc after exiting nihility, since acheron presumably broke his ties- i wonder why he went back? perhaps he had no plans as to where to go, or he has some ulterior motive?

how did he get out of nihility so unscathed? (for context, i haven't gotten aven's text messages yet, but i'm aware of some of their contents since they've been floating around w/out spoiler tags. the messages are mentioned a bit here if you wanna avoid spoilering!) i know argenti got him out, but 1) why was argenti there, or where did he even find him? and 2) that seems so random- both argenti and jade confirmed it, but plot-wise what's even the point of argenti pulling him out? also argenti said he was in a "woeful state" when he got out, and apparently the stonehearts are willing to give aven a break (which i'm assuming is major, since stonehearts are super important and have a lot of responsibility, plus he just destroyed a cornerstone) so him already being back on his feet when we see the phone call is a bit weird right away. he doesn't even sound sick, and ratio or any other doctor is nowhere in sight! (message spoilers start here) i'm aware the aventurine cornerstone was fully shattered/destroyed while protecting him from nihility- was he really in there for who-knows-how-long without any protection at all? he's apparently having nightmares and the ipc needed to call in a doctor of chaos to treat him, which is concerning considering his mental health and general will to live were extremely low even before walking into the nihility. like he genuinely has some of the worst will to live i've ever seen in a character or human being- walking through the nihility should have utterly destroyed him mentally and physically, but it didn't. 2.3 HAS to give us a whole lotta context, especially with nihility lore (my favorite aeon, i may be biased) and more about the ipc!

anyway, thank you for reading this poorly formatted, stream-of-consciousness word vomit about 2.2's aventurine lore. hope you liked it! drop ur thoughts in replies and reblogs plz they give me life(although i will be very busy next few weeks, so please don't be offended if you want a reply and don't get it, im so sorry!)

2.2 was peak- a bit slow, but the story was some of the best, if not the best stuff hoyo has given us in terms of writing quality. so great! i cried for sure, and that boss battle was just everything- especially the music. robin my lesbian queen if i didn't have to pull for firefly i would get your lightcone for sure...

see you all next time! thx for sticking around (:

[cardboardheartss]

Short PAC : What would BTS members think of you?

⚠️DISCLAIMER! TAROT CARDS ARE NOT 100% ACCURATE! TAKE EVERYTHING WITH A GRAIN OF SALT! IF MY INTERPRETATIONS ARE INCORRECT FEEL FREE TO CORRECT ME!⚠️

remember to take a deep breath, and think about which pile you feel most connected to before you pick a pile to read!

(Please don’t forget to like, reblog and follow! It will be much appreciated!📦)

Pile 1 : GMA Performance

Pile 2 : HHYLT Era

Pile 1 : GMA Performance

Overall energy : Strength, KnoP & The Fool

The BTS members think you’re really cool! They LOVE your vibes overall! In their eyes you seem like a very strong, patient and hardworking! They also think you have a pretty tough demeanor too! You may have a tough demeanor, but they also think you’re a bit naive and really carefree too! You give off “YOLO” vibes to them!

RM : 2oP

RM thinks you’re a very busy but skillful person. He thinks you manage wayy too many responsibilities and struggle to just and rest at times. If he could give you any advice, he’d want you to slow down for a little bit and just rest to avoid overworking yourself.

Jin : 10oS

Jin views you as a person who’s sad? He thinks you’re quite melodramatic. You may have had experienced some sort of loss and he can tell that it has affected you a lot. He would want to encourage you to keep going!

SUGA : QoP

SUGA sees you as a family oriented person. Thinks you’re also down to earth, smart, warm-hearted, and you’re also devoted to your loved ones and people around you in general! Overall… it’s really positive thoughts!!!

J-Hope : Wheel of Fortune

You give off, “go with the flow” vibes to jhope! He sees you as a lucky person, who’s is literally protected by the universe! He thinks you’re also really kind, you’re like his twin lol! Once again! Positive vibes!

Jimin : The Hermit

Jimin thinks you’re spiritual. He views you to also be an introvert too, who is also detail oriented. Jimin could also think you’re probably a teacher, given off by your calm demeanor with many wise words to say.

V : The Tower

I believe for V, he may meet 2 different types of pile 2! One of them being a person who he thinks has a strong aura and you literally pave the way, and go against society’s norms. The other type of pile 2 he’ll meet, is the one who he thinks loves to stir up drama for no reason and sees you as a person who thrives in unnecessary drama as well!

Jungkook : The Chariot

Jungkook sees you as a focused person, whom wants to achieve their dreams! He believes you are a hardworking person too. But he may see you as an intense person, who doesn’t want to be played with, so he will avoid getting into any trouble with you!

Pile 2 : HHYLT era

Overall energy : 5oS, 8oP & AoC

The members think you’re very competitive whom likes to stand out , and will not be bothered if you lose friends/family to want to achieve their goals! They think you’re also a perfectionist who’s also very emotional because you wear your heart on your sleeve lol!

RM : 8oS

He may think you’re very stubborn. He thinks you don’t know your way around this thing called life, and you often times victimize yourself.

Jin : The Chariot rx

He thinks you’re not a force to be reckoned with, he might even be too scared to tell a simple joke! You seem really aggressive in his eye!

J-Hope : 2oP

He will see you as a very busy person. He may think you have many jobs or sources of income. For you to rest because it will be too much work for your own mental and physical health.

SUGA : 2oS rx

He views indecisive. In his eyes. He sees as a type of person who would sit for an hour, deciding what to eat for dinner that same night. Apart from you being indecisive he does believe that you’re able to understand other peoples opinions and see both sides of the story.

Jimin : The Empress rx

Jimin thinks you lack creativity. he thinks you worry too much, mainly about work. He also thinks he have body image issues, and that you have a strong connection with Mother Nature, if he could give you any tip and advice he would want you to love yourself specifically your body, because of a very naturally beautiful body, no matter what shape or size .

V : AoP rx

V would think you’re over spender, and he thinks you cannot plan your future properly. You seem to go with the flow, but that doesn’t help you in anyway whatsoever. if we could give you any tip, he would want you to stop planning properly and to stop over spending your money because you’ll never know if your salary will increase or decrease.

Jungkook : 7oP

Jungkook sees you as very hard-working. He thinks you’re good at making a long term career path/investment! He appreciates all the hardwork and can see you doing excellent things in the present and future!

Thank you for reading!📦

(21/01/2024)

[sitp-recs]

hey there! wondering if you know of any good fics that are demi (or ace)? I read so many amazing fics but sometimes everything being super sexualised is a bit much (no hate !!! just looking for something a bit different atm) really struggling to see myself represented in mainstream media and just life in general rn so was hoping there’s be something out there! thanks <3

Sending love your way dear anon 🤍🖤💜 I’m not ace myself but totally agree and would love to see broader representation in fic. I do have some recs for you, you’re probably already familiar with Little Deaths but I’m including it because it’s one of my favorite fics and a must read imo. I also have a reclist for non-sexual intimacy in case you’re interested :)

Cake is Ace by @bafflinghaze (G, 2.6k)

As part of a dare, Harry and Draco get locked in a cupboard together. Harry swears that it isn’t what it looks like!

Let Me Count the Ways by @thebooktopus (E, 3.5k)

Intimacy comes in many forms. Draco wants to explore them all with Harry.

Ferrety Little Mouths and How to Snog with Them by @fluxweeed (M, 5k)

“I don’t think the size of your mouth has much to do with how good at kissing you are. People with ferrety little mouths can be good snoggers too.” “You’re clearly an expert. You’ll have to teach me.”

Cake, Please by leontina (T, 9k)

Harry is struggling with mental health issues, and Draco is struggling with his sexuality. They both feel alone and broken, until Harry hires Draco as a portrait painter.

Glowing by @cavendishbutterfly (T, 10k)

Harry's lived alone and vampiric in his cottage for ages, until a long-lived Draco Malfoy suddenly shows up to answer an advertisement Harry had practically forgotten he'd put in the Prophet. Cue soft blood drinking, quiet nights of reading and crocheting, and Harry thinking that maybe--just maybe--he might not be so alone anymore.

Infuse With Affection, Enchant With Love by @bafflinghaze (T, 16k)

It starts with Draco making protective pendants for himself, his parents, and his friends, after the war. Something that would watch their backs—and their fronts—as people spat on them in the streets and hexed them in the alleyways. Draco gets better at it, does a course on it, and takes enough commissions for charmed jewellery that he eventually opens his own shop.

Be It Sunny Days Or Stormy Nights by @bafflinghaze (T, 16k)

Harry and Draco are good friends: Harry annoys Draco and Draco insults him back. But slowly, Harry starts to realise just how important Draco is in his life and discovers that relationships need not follow strict lines.

Passion Cake by @icmezzo (T, 19k)

It’s all about desire. (Harry orders a magically enhanced cake from a chic London bakery, and from there it all goes to hell in a cake tin. Also, will someone please tell Harry what Passion Cake is?)

Cake co. by toutcequonveut (T, 21k)

Draco is the ace of cakes! Or: the story of how Draco Malfoy goes from war criminal to baker incredible, makes some unexpected friendships, and learns more about himself along the way. A journey of growth told through cake.

Little Deaths and How to Avoid Them (or Draco Malfoy's Guide to Stop Dying and Start Living Instead) by nerakrose and dustmouth (T, 96k)

Malfoy is way too interested in coroner reports for somebody who's definitely not looking for ways to die, Harry wants to be friends with him, and Ginny wants to break up with Harry.

[am-i-the-asshole-official]

aita for waiting until after opening gifts to confront my grandmother?

my (25f) mum (50f) experienced a severe psychotic mental break last winter. i ended up living with her and my siblings (seven, all younger than me) for the better part of 2023 to help take care of the house and kids AND support my mum financially, and only moved back out into my own place in november along with my partner, my 19yo sister, and my sister’s gf.

during my mum’s breakdown, my maternal grandmother completely took my mother’s side against me even in the midst of her delusions, disagreed with me when i tried to get her into a more intensive therapy program, and generally refused to acknowledge my role as a caretaker for my mum AND my siblings. when i told her i was worried about my siblings mental health and well-being after watching this happen to my mum, she spun my words and then told my my mum that i thought she was a danger to her kids, something i never said. it hurt a lot and seriously damaged our relationship, and she never apologized to me for it.

now, the holidays have finally rolled around, much to my dread. i avoid celebrating family holidays as much as i can, since after a childhood full of trauma, i’m not fond of them. our little household have planned a small winter solstice celebration for the four of us and a few other siblings who can attend, and that’s basically enough holiday for me. but my grandmother wanted to hold an extended family dinner, and invited me and my partner specifically. i decided i’d go. i also knew she’d be getting both of us gifts, so i got her something in return.

the day before, however, i found out some really horrible information about other family members - without going into detail, it involved sexual abuse, and the abuser has been allowed to attend all of our family get togethers despite my grandmother knowing what he’d done. i was horrified, and i blame my grandmother for allowing him to attend functions where my young siblings will be. i’m not the best at handling conflict, so i froze up significantly and was not sure how to approach this. the abuser had already left the holiday dinner when i arrived, which is good, because i probably would’ve started a verbal-and-maybe-violent altercation with him. (it wouldn’t be the first time. again, i’m not the best at handling conflict. i’m in therapy about it.) instead, i was awkward and uncomfortable the whole dinner, and at the end of it when it was just me and my grandmother, i snapped at her. i think all the built up frustration ive had towards her since last year combined with this just exploded out, and i accused her of refusing to consider my siblings’ well-being our entire lives and prioritising her own kids instead, even when they’re the ones endangering us. she cried, i yelled that i would never be attending one of her family dinners again, and finally i stormed out and left with my partner.

after i got home, i had calmed down a bit and saw the gifts she’d gotten for me and my partner, and that’s the only time i’ve felt guilty about this. should i return the gifts she got me? was it wrong for me to wait until AFTER i’d opened our gifts to yell at her? maybe i shouldn’t have gone to the dinner at all.

What are these acronyms?

[fixing-bad-posts]

I looked around and didn't see anything about this on your blog but I apologize if I missed it.

I was wondering, what does doing the work behind this blog...feel like? I guess what I'm asking is if it does anything to you. Like, I had a thought. For a flash, I imagined you as Butters from South Park in that episode where he is tasked with filtering out all the negative comments on Cartman's social media. It ended up really messing with Butters, what with him having to see all that negativity.

You're definitely not being affected to that extreme, I assume, but I wonder if you would have anything to say about the process of finding these negative posts and reading them several times to edit them. Has it exposed you to unpleasantness that you wouldn't have otherwise seen? Or is there perhaps a kind of catharsis in editing such filth?

I'm making a lot of assumptions here. Maybe I'm also asking about your process. I just think what you're doing is neat and would love to hear about your experience with it.

Thanks for reading and I hope you have plenty of reasons to feel joy <3

oh boy, i love talking about myself haha—so thank you for giving me an excuse to do so! i have answered similar questions in the past, though never at length. every once in a while, someone pops into the inbox to ask about my mental health (which, rest assured, is just fine—i don’t put this blog’s operation above anything; it’s honestly pretty low on my list of life-priorities), and it’s always quite sweet. having a mob of strangers following one’s sideblog has its perks: one being that sometimes parasociality results in some well wishes, kind thoughts, and general goodwill. which is very nice, and probably an unearned vanity-boost for my ego.

what does the work behind this blog feel like? in turns: mundane, challenging, vindicating, annoying, amusing… and probably other things that i’m forgetting. most of the work i do on this blog is actually me procrastinating! i am a certified adult with a job™, and i’m definitely guilty of slacking off at work sometimes to queue posts submissions from my inbox, which is more fun than like… proofreading financial documents and making spreadsheets. other times, i’m sitting in a café with my partner, and allegedly i’m “writing” fanfiction. but, uh, if you know any writers, you know that sometimes “writing” means, ‘looking at a blinking cursor’. so it’s in those moments that i open up tumblr and start writing image descriptions and adding tags to prep posts for my queue. that’s mainly when the blog feels mundane.

something that i think helps me avoid negative doomscroll-spirals is that i don’t actively seek out bad posts for this blog. being a citizen of the internet delivers fodder to me naturally. that, and running a semi-popular sideblog on tumblr. when i see a bad post in the wild, that’s when the feeling is annoying/challenging. challenging, because ever since starting this sideblog, hateful posts don’t feel as vicious to me. once i see them, they stop being posts and turn into word-puzzles. and i love word puzzles!

solving the word puzzle is amusing for me, as is getting to look at my resulting “blackout poem.” it makes me laugh, it stretches my brain. when i started, i used to have to read a post several times to find the ‘good post within the bad post’ so to speak. these days, i’m so used to it, i barely read the bad posts more than a handful of times. but as i was saying to my partner, one of the reasons i love found poetry (erasure poetry, and cut-up poetry) is that it uses the same part of my brain that loves scrabble (the board game). then, of course, it's vindicating to see my posts get so many notes, sometimes surpassing the original bad post. that's more of my own vanity, i'm sure.

as for the last part of your message: yes, i have plenty of reasons to feel joy. i work with people who respect me, i live walking distance from a bubble tea café, and have friends and family whom i love. i have the good fortune to be safely out as a queer person. i’m a fanbinder. i’m currently working on a long fanfiction which is getting some very nice comments on ao3. and i’ve recently decided to become a poet (like, for real).

i must admit, i’m fascinated by how you imagine me. i often wonder how i am perceived, especially because i keep many cards close to my chest here on my sideblog.

anyhow, thank you for this excuse to ramble about myself and the process of running this blog. i hope you also have plenty of reasons to feel joy 💛

[pointandshooter]

Seven Years.

My tumblr blog is seven years old this month. Seven years is a long time in a person’s life and an eternity on social media. The photography community has changed quite a bit here since 2016 . Many photographers have left Tumblr for other platforms with more potential views, worries about work being stolen, censorship, or just the fear of missing out. Others have just moved on from photography or social media in general. I can understand that. It might actually be healthy to reevaluate and change what one is doing in life every seven years. I used to be passionate about music, hoping to make a living playing guitar in my band. And then, for about 14 years I was an avid cyclist, riding over 150 miles every week. Nowadays, I don’t ride my bike anymore, although it would be very beneficial to both my physical and mental health; and I haven’t touched my guitar in several years. I sometimes miss playing and still have dreams at night where I am back on stage with my band. During all of those years I never thought about taking up photography. When I visited art galleries, I never bothered looking at photo exhibits. One day, in the Autumn of 2015, something clicked in my brain, and here I am today - just as passionate about photography as I once was about the guitar and cycling. Maybe in the coming years my interest and passion will change again, but for now I am happy to keep taking photos and post them on Tumblr.

Every year, on this blog’s anniversary, I like to give thanks. 

First, I give thanks to Tumblr for still being here. It is still free, but I pay the subscription fee to give back something, and to avoid the manscaping ads. Tumblr has made some positive changes in the past year and I have seen a few photographers return to the platform. I hope the platform can afford to keep going for a few more years.

I would then like to thank all of my followers, real and bot. For the real followers, I appreciate every like, reblog, tag, and comment. I find it encouraging and it helps lift my spirits. Some of you have been following me for years. I appreciate your endurance. As for the bots - who knows? With the advancements in AI maybe the bots will some day become sentient beings, creating their own AI generated text, images, and memes. 

I want to thank all of the wonderful photographers who share their work here. You are an inspiration. Something I love about Tumblr is the variety of photos I find here and the willingness of photographers to experiment. There doesn’t seem to be the drive to be popular here, and the photos are not as homogenous as might be found on other platforms. 

Praise be and blessed are all of the hard-working curators who tirelessly reblog our photos. You help put our photos on so many dashboards that would not normallly find us. I am also grateful for those curators who find classic and contemporary fine art photos from other sources and post them on their blogs. As I have said in the past, I feel these blogs are providing me with a free education in photography appreciation. My home library expands every month with photo books of photographers that I first discovered on Tumblr.

Lastly, I want to thank my team members on ISU: Nur and Lina, who are also my team members on Lensblr, along with Tom. You have become good friends over the years. Although we have never met, and may not ever, it is good know you. I hope we can continue as team members for a while yet.

I hope everyone has a good creative year, and find stimulating challenges along the way.

Love you all,

David

[thenightfolknetwork]

Due to a combination of bad genes and bad luck, I suffer from various physical and mental difficulties and pains. Technically I count as disabled, but the term has never felt right for me; it doesn't FEEL like the problem is in my body and brain, even though I know it is, it feels more like the world rearranges itself to be just a bit harder for me than for other people. This isn't something I've talked about much, it's always seemed like it would be horribly rude, plus I have more important issues to work on with my therapist than "how much a particular word does or does not match how I parse my subjective experience".

Then I came across an expression, and for the first time, something felt like it fit. "Cursed by a wizard". It's not that I lose energy quickly, it's that I've been cursed with fatigue; to give one example. I know it's not literally true. Even aside from my diagnoses and symptoms and treatments, a year or so back I got screened as part of a workplace health and safety initiative, and no curses. Still, it's not like the language we use is literally true all of the time; expressions exist for a reason.

You know how it is, whenever you find something cool and new, you want to share it with everyone. Nobody else cared as much as I did, of course, but general reactions were polite, "I'm glad you've found something that works for you". Except for one person, who immediately got a Look on her face -- the kind you get when a foreigner says a word they don't know is a slur over here, or when someone bad-mouths a person they don't realize is nearby -- and changed the subject.

I'm not going to change how I think about myself. "Cursed by a wizard" is a useful mental framework. However, my question is whether it should stay solely within my own mind. I'm worried now that it might be insensitive to people who've actually been cursed, or to wizards.

Thank you for getting in touch, reader. I have one small point to make regarding the start of your letter, particularly regarding the word “disabled”.

To be clear, you are absolutely entitled to your own personal relationship with the term, and I don't mean to suggest that you need to adopt it if you don't feel it reflects your experience. However, I don't agree that “the problem” is in your body and brain. It is, as you say, in the way the world is arranged to make life that much more difficult for you.

A framing I have seen from some disability activists is to speak of themselves as disabled by society, rather than by their condition. They don't consider disability to be a trait in and of itself, but a condition put upon them by an ableist society.

I don't know if this framing is a helpful one for you personally, and as I said, I don't wish to tell you how you “ought” to describe yourself. But I wanted to mention it as a possible alternative way of thinking, in case it proves useful to you.

But that, I know, was not the point of your letter. Unfortunately, reader, I don't have a clear cut answer for you. People who have been cursed are not a uniform group – neither their experiences, nor the way they speak about those experiences, are identical.

The fact is, yes, some people will be offended by your use of “the wizard's curse” to describe your experiences. Others will find it an expressive, even entertaining way of viewing your situation.

You also run the risk that some people will simply not understand the metaphorical nature of your statement, so please be prepared for those well-meaning folk who hear this and immediately start recommending salt baths and smoke cleanses.

I can reassure you that this is not a term that carries any particular historical reason to avoid its usage – it isn't comparable to such out-dated idioms as referring to public outcry as a “witch hunt” or the use of the phrase “Frankenstein's monster” when speaking of a messy, difficult situation, and implicitly associating reanimation with negativity and failure.

Instead, it is rather like the English language use of the word “slimy” to mean “dishonest” or “morally corrupt”. Certainly some people see the usage as offensive, but it isn't actually rooted in any specific anti-liminal sentiment and those voices are the minority.

In fact, some people argue that it is more offensive to assume “slimy” must somehow be associated with people of viscosity. But I think we are getting rather into the weeds of what is, to be honest, a largely online debate with very little real-world application.

In short, reader, it is up to you how you proceed. You need to decide for yourself whether you're comfortable with the ambiguity of your language and with the diverse ways you may be interpreted.

There are rarely any clear cut answers on the topic of language, and it may be that your feelings on the matter change over time. But the fact remains that only you can decide how best to describe yourself, and only you have the power to make this decision.

[For more creaturely advice, check out Monstrous Agonies on your podcast platform of choice, or visit monstrousproductions.org for more info]

[madd-information]

I'm not sure if this is the right place to rant about madd, if not you can ignore this! I just feel so stuck and I wish madd could be recognized as a serious mental illness instead of being brushed off, over generalized, or laughed at. even mental health professionals laugh it off.

I'm 18 years old and have lost my teen years up till now to maladaptive day dreaming. it's ruined my school life, and will continue to ruin my adult life. it's all i do and i can't really control it. I'll do it without thinking. nothing in real life feels real, but everything in my day dreams feels more real.

I avoid hanging out with people. i've closed myself off from hanging out with friends. I make up excuses as to why I can't hangout, i cancel last minute. it's gotten to the point where I'm just straight up lying to them. I need at least 5 hours alone at night to day dream and listen to music. I have a chronic illness that is irritated from pacing so much, but i just can't seem to stop. it's even the first thing I do when I wake up in the morning, it's the last thing I do before bed. I've seen so many people ask why people with madd would want to get rid of it, but it's destroying my life.

i want it gone, but I also don't know who I would be or what I would do without it? my best friends are in my head. I created them, i have 4 amazing friends and since I made them up, they have every quality i need in a friend, and I can be "myself" (or who i wish I was) in my head with them. I love them so much it hurts. I've bawled my eyes out thinking about how I'll never feel their touch, hear their voice, smell their scent, all while neglecting my own friends. it's ruining my life, and I want it gone, but I need it to survive. I will also never be as pretty, talented, smart, and funny as I am in my day dreams.

If i got rid of my paras, I'm getting rid of a major part of myself. getting rid of them would cause the same pain as a real person leaving me or dying, I know it sounds dramatic but I feel like anyone who has it this bad can relate. I would grieve them the rest of my life. I can't imagine living the rest of my life either having madd, or grieving the loss of my best friends (that. aren't. even. real.). i don't really know the point of this rant, you don't have to post it or respond at all, I just needed a place to scream. even while typing this I took breaks just to fucking day dream. I barely graduated high school and I don't know how I'm going to function in society if i'm constantly dissociated and day dreaming. if you have any tips or resources or could point me in the right direction, that would be amazing but once again don't feel pressured to respond. I'm sorry if this wasn't the right place to rant!!

.

[findmeinthefallair]

A Bit of Mental Health 101 with Hunter: Analyses by a Therapist

Disclaimer: This is in no way a substitute for therapy: it's only psychoeducation. Please consult a therapist and/or hotline and get the help you need if you are experiencing mental health difficulties, especially if experiencing distress or issues that feel unmanageable.

Warnings: themes such as abuse and trauma ahead.

I thought to share some pieces of info from a few counselling theories and general mental info, which are way easier to grasp when I tie them to specific Hunter scenes. These might lead you to some realizations about yourself or someone else, which you could then bring up with a therapist if you like.

1. Survival Stances/Communication Stances: You might spot these in yourself or those around you. They are responses to stress and anxiety when you interact with other people. There are 5 in total; the first 4 are indicators of low self-worth and are where our childhood wounds are; the last one means you are healthily able to be present with difficult emotions and respond with relative calmness and clear thinking. Each one involves whether or not you are acknowledging three things: yourself (Self), the people you're interacting with (Other), and viewing the situation clearly (Context). The stances come from a theory called Satir Transformational Systemic Therapy (STST), or the Satir Model, invented by Virginia Satir who earned the title of "Mother of Family Therapy".

Placating:

It disregards Self, but recognizes Other and Context. You may blame yourself for something that isn't your fault at all. This is very common, especially with many parents in society who fail to acknowledge their child's pain, and who raise parentified children. As you can imagine, the way Belos raised Hunter would make the poor kid quite a Placater.

Blaming:

The opposite of Placating. Disregards the Other, but recognizes Self and Context. Definitely rare in Hunter, but being raised in the toxic environment of the castle and holding a high rank would've contributed to these tendencies. Maybe the closest thing would be him defensively snapping at Alador as shown above. What he could've chosen to do instead was calmly persuade Alador that he was in fact, not eager to return to Belos and why, independent of what Alador might think. But to do that in a calm manner would've been tough since the Day of Unity affected everyone.

Super-Reasonable:

Disregards Self and Other, only paying attention to Context. Also very common in my experience because we as a whole are a emotions-adverse, grief-adverse and find-quick-solutions/resolve-inconveniences-quickly sort of society. Emotions aren't often given the space they need to be experienced. In the screenshot above, Hunter is emotionally detaching from the validity of his own betrayal-related pain (disregarding Self), saying Gus is foolish and that his points aren't valid (disregarding Other), and trying to use pure cold logic to intellectualize why there's no point of paying attention to what they actually need in their dynamic.

Irrelevant:

The opposite of Super-Reasonable. It disregards all three areas, and people in this category are usually the class clowns or jokester types. Their stress response is to try and lighten the mood in the room quickly with something off-topic so that they don't need to feel anxiety. I haven't noticed it in obvious ways in Hunter, but when he quickly cuts Luz off from potentially mentioning that he's a grimwalker above, trying to put on a big smile and act all jolly/positive...it's the closest he's gotten. It would become an issue if repeated jokester behavior to avoid what needs addressing, is not benefitting his relationships with people who are actually trustworthy.

Leveling:

The healthy stance out of all 5. You are a Leveler if you can be calm, firm and understanding of the current situation, and (the following is to minimize defensive reactions from the other party) respectful of both your views and other people's views, when in conflict with others. However, obviously you should never remain in a conflict if it gets actually dangerous for yourself. (Obviously I would tell anyone to run from Belos! He is physically dangerous, not just emotionally, and we know he won't listen to reason. In the above situation, poor Hunter was in a crazy life-threatening situation)

Two important notes: - Placaters and Blamers may unhealthily attract one another in romantic relationships, friendships, family dynamics, work relationships. I'm not too sure about Super-Reasonable and Irrelevant people attracting one another, though. - However, we can have all of these 5 in ourselves, e.g. you can be either a Placater or Blamer in different situations.

2. Self-Leadership: Draws from the Internal Family Systems (IFS) theory. When we are in touch with what this theory refers to us our Self, it's the best version of us, and you could also say it's your true self. It is split into 8 parts which mean it's often conveniently called The 8C's of Self-Leadership. I guess when you are able to access all 8 of them, you are at a point of self-actualization. I like how it's nicely split up so you can work on whichever areas you feel might need to discuss, with a therapist.

In Hunter's case, you can spot improvements in mental health when he gets in touch with these qualities (man, thank you Dana, directors, writers, storyboarders, animators of the show..the fact that I can easily find which frames to use shows how much quality the writing and visuals have):

Clarity

Calmness

Compassion

Connectedness

Courage

Confidence

Curiosity

Creativity

3. Psychological Flexibility

A pretty neat theory called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) has the above title as its main goal. (The person behind this theory wrote a book called The Happiness Trap, that goes into why we have unnecessary additional stress by expecting/pressuring ourselves to be happy all the time: instead of the better option of embracing the downs in life too, not just the ups... the book is free if you find it on PDFDrive dot com..)

ACT places plenty of importance on the specific words we use when having our own self-dialogue, which forms what we think of ourselves etc. If a therapist uses the ACT route, they hope to guide their clients towards the three pillars of ACT: being Open, Centered, and Engaged. Each pillar splits into two areas...so it's a total of six aspects of psychological flexibility which I'll list below:

Pillar 1: "Open"

A) Acceptance (its negative opposite is Experiential Avoidance) The simplest way one might break down this one is it's about embracing your demons, not judging them: the parts of you that you wish weren't there e.g. the parts that feel like a burden, any private experience you've had that you never wanted. When I think of this, these precise frames of Hollow Mind and Thanks to Them came into my head:

This concept operates on the belief that any emotion (like, especially what Hunter will feel when he looks back on the above memories) wants to be seen and is welcomed, like a guest. Even if the scarier, more unruly guests are welcomed and not turned away (which sometimes cannot be done alone: you may need the safety of the therapy room or trusted loved ones), it offers the best chance that they'll soften and become less unpleasant over time.

B) Cognitive Defusion This process is to help us not be fused with the content of our unpleasant thoughts, but to instead just notice that the process of thinking is happening in ourselves (see the difference?). This doesn't mean such thoughts are not allowed or not valid, though. A great analogy to explain how getting consumed by such thoughts and feelings is: if you hold out your hands close enough in front of your face or completely cover your eyes with them, you can't see the rest of your surroundings. If you spread them out and move them further from your face, you can see the rest of the room. Defusion techniques help you get more unstuck from discomfort and remind you of e.g. you are not your thoughts and therefore not fused with them forever, and other things exist outside of them. Very important if Hunter ever has experiences like this again, so that his moments of being inevitably triggered are less intense and their duration is shortened significantly:

It'll make the ride of being sucked into terrible distress e.g. future nightmares and potentially vivid trauma reminders, a less bumpy one.

Pillar 2: "Centered"

C) Contacting the Present Connecting with the present moment, based on this theory, is to restore control. Having awareness of your senses and being able to be grounded. Instead of being caught up in rumination about the past or future. There are certainly times where the right thing to do is reflect on the past or plan for the future, but during periods where being present would serve us better, that's the time to use this skill. Hunter was already incorporating this below, grounding himself by pacing back and forth. He was in an actually dangerous situation with immediate threats, as a literal survival mechanism for a crisis, so it was on a more extreme scale than us applying in it our everyday modern life:

(my personal method is having the right kind of music in my earphones to keep me totally present)

D) Self-as-Context (its negative opposite is Self-as-Content) Involves being in touch with something called your Observing Self. An easy way to explain this is, imagine you are a big sky: containing clouds that represent your thoughts and emotions. It can certainly feel like you're caught up in a cloud if a particularly tough emotion arises, but practicing this, whereby you become aware you're the big container with these separate smaller things inside, may help. An example of applying this is your therapist guiding you to say to yourself, "I am having the thought...that I am a failure" and to internalize that statement. This kind of detachment can be helpful because it could lead on to further positive reframing, and reinforcing that reframing, as you heal more.

Intuitively I think Hunter could be in this mode (though he wouldn't be able to put a name to it without a therapist telling him) when he started to feel better after reaching out to Willow. Having a good needed cry, he was less fused with excruciating grief:

Pillar 3: "Engaged"

E) Values (negative opposite: Lack of Direction) You get to choose what values matter to you. They go deeper than goals you want to achieve, they are qualities you want to align your life with, for life to be meaningful. One value that will certainly matter to Hunter a lot is based on this:

Kindness/Gentleness. Making sure others are cared for and protected.

F) Committed Action (negative opposite: Inaction/Being Stuck) Taking action to live out the values you choose. Pretty straightforward:

4. Aspects of Grief (especially, but not limited to, Acute Grief):

Searching Behavior

Perfectly normal especially in early grief, even though the griever may think they're going crazy. You may catch glimpses of a lost loved one, or reminders of whatever you have lost, on the bus or at the grocery store, in dreams or in other places. Your brain will be thinking thoughts like "Is that them?"..."That's them! It has to be!"..."All that didn't really happen, did it?" because it can be so painful to lose a relationship (not limited to just literal people. It could be a home or job, etc) that you have to still believe on some level that it hasn't been lost. Such numbing and denial is to provide mental cushioning for your mind, or else it would be overwhelmed. This behavior should decrease over time, but there shouldn't be any expectation of it totally vanishing.

Linking Objects

Objects that are reminders of a lost loved one, and/or which belonged to them, to help the griever feel close to the lost loved one. Usually it's too painful in early grief days to have a high awareness of such objects. Maybe there are other objects that Hunter would want to keep, which Flapjack used or perched on often. And if Hunter wishes, he can create new linking objects from scratch as well, to keep remembering.

5. Self-Interruption A concept I love from the theory of Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT). Because one of the seven therapists I've tried taught me about this, it was one of the first few milestones in my own recovery.

Notice that this boi switched quickly from being puzzled about something he wasn't even entirely sure was negative, to bounce back and point out what went fine. While he later said "I miss knowing who I'm supposed to be" which was great, there is plenty of room for him to lean into the agency he has had since Camila first welcomed him into her home. I think we self-interrupt pretty often. Self-interrupting means we restrict ourselves from expressing what we feel, we self-censor and disown the important parts of us that have natural emotional responses towards e.g. being treated unfairly. Society's emphasis on staying positive and not being a burden likely reinforces this, and I'm sure Belos disregarded and invalidated his emotions enough that he'd feel he isn't allowed to complain about most things.

A healthy upbringing would mean the freedom to express your needs and desires. It's also perfectly fine and even necessary for Hunter to reflect on positive memories he's had. I'd say it only becomes an issue if he keeps doing stuff like below and if he is cut off from recognizing his own emotional needs:

(which I don't think he'll continue doing as much: he seems to be quite on track towards healthily exploring what he has been through).

So yeah. This got on the lengthy side but I hope it was informative! Which parts stood out to you the most? Feel free to comment and share your own thoughts~