#going unaddressed assuming the other will understand. and they do understand to an extent just not to their full potential

[ohitslen]

Knowing in my head that Vashwood would never work out if they were in a sentimental relationship adds a fundamental layer of delusional in my own personal VW experience

[kiefbowl]

I do kiiiind of understand where anon's frustration to an extent? Men are encouraged to do things for selfish reasons, while women are demonized for not being unfailingly selfless and accommodating.

Notice how rich men are praised more than rich women? Elon Musk is an innovative, hardworking genius while Taylor Swift is a selfish money hungry demon. There's far more pressure on female celebrities to remain humble and "give back", and they're often vilified if they don't. Not saying giving back is bad, but why aren't men expected to do the same?

I also noticed a pattern at my work where men want promotions because they want the extra pay and benefits while the women do it because they want to benefit the team. Again, not saying there's anything wrong with that at all, but it seems almost taboo for women to admit they want anything for themselves. Like, it's okay to go after that promotion because you want a bigger paycheck. Anyway, didn't mean for this to get long. It's just a dynamic I've noticed.

Sure, but this isn't unaddressed in feminist theory (from many different angles). If anon had wanted to ask honest questions and get my honest perspective, then I would have given them that. but they were just being goofy and antagonistic. they don't care.

plus, the selfishness of men doesn't prove the value of selfish behavior. Women being socialized into certain behaviors doesn't necessarily mean those behaviors are worthless to women. In fact, part of the socialization process of everyone is to create an idea or image or association with certain observable behaviors that are then assumed to be innate and objective when they are cultural. Nice is a good behavior, has lots of social benefits, can get you many things, and being nice is often an innate personality trait. But a woman being nice has cultural baggage attached to it that is not objective nor intrinsic to being nice or being a woman, but humans assume their cultural perspectives are observations of the objective and intrinsic. She's not just nice, she' nurturing. If she's not nice, it's not because that's just her human personality, no she's defectively acting against her womanly nature. Etc.

My advice to women en masse is to start prioritizing their happiness and health, and to be selfish when it's due, which many women assume is never, but frankly is often. You don't owe random strangers a whole lot in the day to day. My other advice is to be highly critical of men's behaviors, which are often not due or completely unsolicited, precisely because men feel entitled to every thought and whim they have. Like all things, nothing can be analyzed in a vacuum, because we don't live in a vacuum. If a woman needs to be appeasing to an abusive boyfriend until she can figure out how to escape him because she fears she'll die if she doesn't, I'm not interested in pulling apart each individual behavior of hers as either socialized or not, and feminine or not, not without the context of the larger situation she's in at least.

If anon wants to wear make up, no one is stopping her. If she wants to wear make up and also have random feminists she's identified online as needing to validate that choice, then she will get flack, because she isn't entitled to that.

[johns-prince]

Let's play the speculation game and say McLennon was real. Going with the common idea that Paul dumped John in India, wasn't the "let's all be friends, write together and go on double dates with our wives" angle Paul seemed to hope for completely delusional? Why would someone with John's issues stick around and celebrate Paul's happiness with someone else after being downgraded?

I have great respect for Paul's decision of not being John's nanny/handler for the rest of his life. But I've always been annoyed by his inability to let the man go for good. Paul, you've made your choice, my friend. Enough with the sad songs about not being called back or turning up on John's doorstep with a guitar when the he was spending time with his own family. People hate that but some things in the world really are black or white. You can't have it both ways.

Why speculate when we know it was and is real 

Alright so, let me try to unpack my thoughts cohesively get ya tinfoil hats on y’all;

If we go with the theory that during 1967, when Paul and John were practically living together and conjoined at the hip, taking LSD together and sharing those intense and intimate experiences that even Pau’s girlfriend Jane had become envious of— John had come to the realization of what he wanted, finally acknowledged it and came to accept it. 

So in India, John tried to confront Paul about their relationship and their “relationship,” and openly admit to Paul that he wanted more, that he was now willing to leave Cynthia and Julian for a life he truly wanted or desired, and that included Paul (but to what extent is what we debate I guess) 

And now that I’m thinking about it, we also know John was sort of beginning to spiral downward in 1968. It was obvious his marriage with Cynthia was at it’s end, and he didn’t want to work on it anymore. He was surrounding himself more with druggies, an unsavory crowd that Cynthia really didn’t approve of (Yoko was part of this crowd) and he was actively pulling away.  

I think John was realizing that, he just wasn’t happy. That, putting everything he had into becoming one of the most successful musicians in the world, to become bigger then Elvis Presley, didn’t make him happy. It didn’t fix what needed fixing in him, what needed addressing. He was still drowning despite it all. 

So you’ve got the trip to India, the boys going in hopes that perhaps the Maharishi Mahesh Yog and his spiritual teachings would somehow give a new perspective on things, produce the answer that would save the band (save John and Paul) from what appeared to be an inevitable downfall. But as we know, that isn’t what was needed. 

John and Paul needed to talk. The lack of consistent communication between them for years and years, and the fact John needed a therapist, he needed rehab. So did Paul, during the White Album era. 

I don’t believe Paul dumped John, but I do think John could have easily misconstrued Paul taking a step back and not willing to just go blindly, impulsively jumping off a theoretical cliff with him, as being rejected. We know Paul had to sort of take the position of ‘think before you leap’, to be more conscious of the actions and decisions he and the others decide to take, and how it would effect them as individuals, and especially them as a band (because frankly the others wouldn’t) and we know that John could be incredibly impulsive, only thought of the consequences after the fact. That, and who’s to say such a proposition and confrontation from John hadn’t scared Paul? Got him feeling those insecurities of his own crawling up. 

Paul wanted a traditional family, he wanted to have a wife and children. But Paul also wanted John, he wanted and loved Lennon-McCartney, and he didn’t think (or he’d hoped) him getting married and having a family would really change anything between them (because John got married and had a kid and they were still able to do go and do whatever they wanted together, so what was the difference—) that he could still keep what he had with John, that they could still stay together after The Beatles split. Get around to writing that musical, and grow old together still writing and making music, still creating together.

How I see it, is that Paul wanted to have his cake and eat it too.

Paul, being fine with keeping the status quo between them, it was safe and enough (right?), but John vehemently wasn’t fine with it anymore, and it wasn’t enough for him. Nothing was enough for him, as we know; John was a very all-or-nothing individual, and expected complete devotion and love from someone, because receiving less felt like rejection and abandonment was only around the corner. This way of feeling and thinking for John was only exasperated by the drugs, his alcoholism, and his spiraling mental health. 

Paul could have tried compromising with John, and John still could have taken that as a complete rejection of his feelings and what he wanted, and what he had hoped and thought Paul also wanted. 

I believe Paul probably didn’t even know himself what he had done wrong, or that he did anything wrong. I don’t think Paul believed he was downgrading John to anything either.

If only they had talked.

Then they returned from India, and the rest as we know it...

“To me, a summary is something like: “gifted, disturbed boy with tremendous amount of drive to outrun a bad childhood discovers love for music and creative soulmate(s) and gives everything he has to become the most famous musician in the world, hoping it will make him happy. He does, but it doesn’t, and people who don’t have his best interests separate him from his friends, his creation and creative spark, and ultimately himself. He’s too screwed up by addiction, mental illness, and unaddressed traumas to change things, so he retreats further into addiction and mental illness, wishing he could somehow regain his lost spark. He makes a few halfway steps toward doing so, but they’re not enough, and ultimately he is killed in front of his apartment building where, 24 hours later, his wife installs the man she had been sleeping with behind his back.”"

— Michael Bleicher, The Artist as a Dissipated Man: Fred Seaman’s “The Last Days of John Lennon.”

Right, so both John and Paul made their choices in life. Some choices and decisions that we as fans and outside observers might never be able to understand, or agree with.

But who’s to say Paul (and John), couldn’t, didn’t, or don’t regret those choices and decisions? 

I get what you’re saying, I understand. Why can’t Paul move on? He made his choices, why is it 40, 50 years later, that Paul can’t just let John go? Let sleeping dogs lie, all that.

Because Paul loved John, still loves John, to this day. 

Because, clearly Paul has some regrets. He regrets how things were handled during the Divorce. He regrets not hugging John enough. He regrets not telling John, when he had the chance and time, that he loved him (and without the help of alcohol) When you love someone so deeply, and suddenly, without warning, they’re taken from you and the world, you regret a lot, and you miss what could have been, the ‘What if’s.’ 

Paul said that what he and John were, were soulmates. I don’t know how it feels to lose a soulmate. I don’t know if I’ll ever get to know how it feels to get the opportunity to love and be around them. 

How awful do you think it is to meet your soulmate, but you cannot freely love them? Can’t just, be, with them? Not in just one way, bestmates, legendary partners, but, as everything that the word Soulmate brings along and includes with it? 

That God decided to have them be of the same sex, during a time where it was illegal to love and be with someone of the same sex, and could even be a potential death sentence to be assumed or thought of as a ‘queer.’ 

So, you take whatever you can with them. 

Then that isn’t enough. One grows restless, desperate for more. It can’t happen, not realistically, not without consequences of varying degrees. 

Strain, miscommunication to none. They communicate through a musical, artistic language which just isn’t enough. Drugs, alcohol, mental illness and emotional turmoil, it’s all too much. It breaks. Soulmates are still flawed human beings. 

You have people who work to purposefully pin them against each other. Parasites and piggybackers. 

A nasty divorce and breakup between two lovers that never were.

And then, after ten years, it’s happening. You two are talking again, things are tense and awkward still sometimes, but something’s changed. You’ve planned on reuniting, couldn’t do it this year, because the studio you wanted was booked. So you plan for after the New Year. 

Then, your soulmate is killed. Just, taken away from you, like nothing. Violently and suddenly. And all the possibilities... The time... Gone. Ripped away from both of you.

I can’t blame Paul for not letting go. I can’t say I’d ever be able to understand the sort of pain and heartbreak he experienced. He still goes through it! It’s still there. He’s just learned how to manage it a bit better. 

I’d say it’s more pathetic then it is annoying— and I don’t mean it in a way to insult Paul. I really don’t. Because John was just as pathetic when it came to his obvious obsession, desire, and love for Paul, too. 

Love, that kind of soul-deep love, it can make you pathetic and hopeless. And it’s not something you can just... let go for good. 

Wanting, or expecting Paul to let go of John for good... Firstly would be impossible, and secondly, how do you let go of a soulmate? John is a part of Paul, whether some like it or not. Can’t really have one without the other. 

Can’t have Lennon without McCartney, and vice-or-versa. Forever intertwined, are they.

[thebeauregardbros]

Can you tell me about Yakuza 0? I've never played it before and would like to read your thoughts on it.

YOOOOOOOOOOO LES FUKIN GO (thank u!!)

This review is spoiler-free!

Despite what you might assume a game about a bunch of tough muscley fighting dudes, the amount of moral philosophy in this game could rival a 3-part episode of Star Trek: TNG in terms of surprisingly deep and emotional thought. The struggles the protagonists go through has a huge emphasis on honor, keeping your word, taking responsibility for your actions, standing up to things you think are wrong and persevering no matter how much pain, suffering and threat you personally go through all in the name of trying to be a good person, and emphasizing that the mental fortitude to stand for your convictions is the true strength, not just brawn. Character development is absolutely fantastic and I feel like it’s impossible not to fall for these main characters by the end of the game, no matter how weird or even pigheaded they might seem to you at first.

(Trust me, moral philosophy is probably my biggest autistic hyper-fixation. They did this shit GOOD.)

Another major reason I really love Yakuza 0 is that it takes an unusual setting to the normal person - the incredibly political, dark, yet surprisingly realistic setting of organized bullies, criminals, and the uneducated brawn and bad-attitude baddies of the world and try to show them as worthy of more as humans like you and me than just trash that should not be seen or touched. The amount of humanitarian outlook on these people and the humanitarianism of our protagonists is absolutely heartwrenching and beautiful. Despite appearances, anyone can be a good person - this seems to be a major message in this story which I just find absolutely beautiful.

The yakuza definitely have different rules to their world, and that is one that’s built on violence over paperwork, especially when it comes to showing eachother the extent of their passion about something. I feel like it’s an excellent way of portraying the difficulties any normal person goes through with their mental health while struggling to do the right thing in a very direct and relatably painful way that anyone can understand.

The story deals with not only the importance of preserving life and protecting it with surprisingly pacifist ideologies, but the aesthetics in align with the idea that no matter how dark the world or your life feels, happiness is always an option.

Why you might love Yakuza 0 even if the plot doesn’t sound that interesting to you:

Tons of minigames - I think about 28~30 total. That includes 4 actual vintage SEGA arcade games! There’s also tons of gambling games like black jack and shogi, fishing, rhythm games, bowling, fighting tournaments, pool, darts, stock car racing, doll dressup.. It’s very hard not to find at least one you’ll like!

Tourism. Yakuza 0 has such an incredible amount of visual detail to every nook and cranny of every corner and unseen alleyway in the town maps that it feels just absolutely insane to me. The devs didn’t need to put in all this detail but they did. I could legit spend hours in first person mode just looking at everything. On top of that, every restaurant in town has a detailed menu describing each item despite the fact that all food items are just generic healing items. I think there’s even a bar where the bartender will go on a spiel talking about certain drinks after you order them. The atmosphere really makes you feel like you’re truly taking a vacation in another place. Great for when you’re longing to see new scenery while being stuck at home all the time during COVID.

The amount of optional side quests is absolutely insane. According to a wiki there’s a total of 100 side quests in all. If you’re a fan of JRPGs or a fan of completionism, completing them all gives you a ton of extra content and side-stories that can sometimes be just as gutwrenchingly wholesome or tragic as the main plot, or otherwise be great comic relief.

Speaking of comic relief, this game is notorious for it. The main plot can be incredibly serious and stressful and the devs know that can really wear down on the mental state of the player after awhile, so seeing Kiryu dance at a disco in the most lame awkward embarassing dad way possible, or see him pick up a phone in the most ridiculously over-dramatic way for no reason, or see Goro sing lovey-dovey pop songs is just something that will absolutely kill you with laughter and joy and give you a refreshed break you need to help you be able to keep continuing on.

Big fan of seiyuu (Japanese voice actors)? The karaoke bar lets you hear your protagonists’ gorgeous singing voice. You can even invite some side characters and hear their voices too!

NOW THE FAIR CRITICISMS:

Despite the plot having a huge emphasis on how important the morality is of not killing, fighting animations are often totally lethal. Goro canonically fights with a knife and a bat by the end of the game. Both characters can use guns, swords, poisoned knives, baseball bats and other lethal items as a weapon. One of Goro’s main fighting animations is snapping a dude’s neck. Kiryu threw a dude out of a high window. Kiryu shoots at dudes with a gun in a high speed chase at some point and none of these instances are ever addressed in canon plot as having blood on the hands of these characters - no matter what, the people hurt by these things seem to be able to stand up fine later on like nothing happened. Even the main characters can get shot by an actual gun 20 times in a row and shrug it off by shoving convenience store food down their throat. It’s super dumb but absolutely hilarious in it’s unaddressed B-Movie esque hypocritical nature and became a huge in-joke with the fandom. Despite these Goofy Video Game Logic instances, the main plot (specifically the cutscenes) are all extremely realistic and well done. Actual members of real-world Yakuza say the story is pretty accurate to reality.

One of the minor characters is obviously a trans woman but is misgendered constantly by other characters, including the protagonist (though this may be a translation problem), and is the only female character in the game you can fight and have to fight in order to unlock Kiryu’s endgame fighting style (though he remarks he only fights her because she looks like she can handle herself in a fight). She does end up joining up with you as an ally afterwards without changing anything about herself so that’s a positive, I guess? SEGA is aware of fans’ dislike for transphobia and have removed a lot of transphobic content from their re-releases of future Yakuza games, as well as shown the protagonist, Kiryu, as a huge LGBTQ+ ally.

-----------------

Things you might like or otherwise want to check out relating to the same story style of Yakuza 0 I personally highly recommend:

Kyou Kara Ore Wa!! (aka, "From Today, It's My Turn!!"): Absolutely hilarious gag comedy with surprisingly heartwrenching drama and incredibly lovable in-depth characters. It’s about highschool delinquents in the late 1980s (same era Yakuza 0 takes place!). The two main characters remind me a lot of the protagonists of Yakuza 0 in that one is very straight-laced and honorable while the other is more prone to dirty tricks but still does the right thing in the end. I personally recommend reading the manga above all because adaptations cut out a lot of details that I feel add a lot of depth to the characters, but the OVA anime is pretty good on it’s own and there’s a hilarious live action TV show adaptation if you like slapstick.

Rookies: A story about an impossibly determined formerly disgraced highschool teacher doing absolutely everything he can to be the best teacher he can be. Part of his journey is helping reform a group of delinquents who have self-sabotaged themselves into having their baseball team - the one thing they cared about - disbanded. The delinquents constantly fight the teacher off, believing him to just be another adult putting on airs instead of truly caring, while the teacher perseveres no matter what to prove them wrong. A manga and live action drama - both extremely good.

[what-the-fuck-is-anime]

This kid is so fucking strong. He know this is going to get him hit, but he tries to hold his father responsible in a world where nobody else has.

This post contains talk of medical abuse, mental illness, and forced hospitalization.

Sending her to the hospital...it was deliberate. His dad must have been so happy to have an excuse to send her to a hospital. Her one outburst of terrible violence will forever overpower any of her claims regarding her husband’s ongoing violent abuse and manipulation. The media will never believe her about the abuse. They will frame her as incoherent, violent, and hysterical. This was all written to be as deliberate and as evil as possible to emphasize the extent to which this child is trapped. His mother returns from the hospital, inevitably not having been believed. And now she never will be, and she knew it, and that was probably why she was trying to call her mom. To try to avoid having the stigma of mental illness. In Japan, the nail that sticks up gets hammered down. Mental illness stigma is much worse there, and the views surrounding mental illness are different than many other places in the world. And now whenever either of them act up, the second most physically powerful man on the planet gets to threaten them with forced hospitalization because the whole world knows his mom went to a psych hospital. He may even claim she caused whatever abuse she tries to get help for. The threat of forced hospitalization is an extremely common abuse tactic. He uses hospitals as a weapon. He uses getting help as a weapon. Now he can beat up his son as much as he wants, and he may never want to go to the hospital because that was the place that took mom, and he may not be able to make the distinction between general hospitals and psychiatric hospitals. “Hospital” was the bad place that mom was forced to go to. And when he came home from the ER, his mother was taken from him. He may suffer he may hide illness he may never speak up about pain because he seems to only be around 5 or 6

WARNING

The purpose of the following is to begin to attempt to begin understanding the plight of Todoroki’s mother in terms of Japanese culture and viewpoints. I researched and highlighted some specific aspects of mental illness and psychiatric care in Japan that may not have been considered or otherwise known by a foreign audience. Most of my sources are in English, and a huge number of them are scientific or otherwise academic in nature, so while they are in no way a one stop shop about Japanese culture so to speak, they are quick notes about what I found interesting and potentially relevant to the situation. The content below this point may be difficult to read, and although I included the warning at the top, this is the part where it may get more difficult beyond this point. If you are sensitive to reading medical abuse or stigma surrounding mental illness, I do not recommend reading further.

While many things are lost in translation in terms of cultural differences, it is my opinion that even slightly understanding some aspects of psychiatric care in Japan as well as the attitude towards mental illness are essential to understanding the struggle of Todoroki and his mother in context, and the power that his father holds over the two of them after sending her there. While there are many other important cultural differences that may change the impact of Todoroki’s backstory depending on who is interpreting it, the stark differences between Japanese psychiatric care compared to what I am familiar with as an American stuck out to me as something that is probably less likely to be known by the average anime viewer. I realized I had no perspective on what psychiatric care meant in Japan, so I decided to investigate.

Many sources include clarification for other claims that may appear unsourced, as well as often referencing certain aspects of Japanese culture that appear unsourced. The following is not a scientific paper, nor is it anywhere near a complete representation of psychiatric care in Japan, and should not be treated as anything more than an extremely casual anime essay that I spent a disproportionate amount of time on trying to research statistics in order to put the suffering of Todoroki’s mother into perspective, and the weight carried by a threat of forcible hospitalization in Japan, and give insight into what this may mean in terms of the source culture.

How long she was likely gone, what she may have experienced, and the transition from being physically controlled by her husband to being physically controlled within a hospital. I am not from Japan, most of my readers are not from Japan, so the ways in which we may be inclined to interpret the situation and its impact are entirely through the lenses of our own local cultures. My focus was mostly on facts and results from studies, which while easily citable, are again in no way a full picture of anything; I am not a good source for Japanese culture, this is not a good place to read about it fully, and if you try to use this as an educational resource well, uh, stop that. Beyond condemning a few specific practices, this is also not intended in any way to be a criticism of Japanese culture, but rather, a focus on a bunch of statistics and facts that I thought pertinent to this scene in My Hero Academia. Another important point here is the fact that there is an extremely limited number of English resources regarding Japanese psychiatric practices compared to ones entirely in Japanese, and not even the laws are officially translated, specifically the laws and reforms regarding mental health. One important thing I want to note is that given how nightmarish Todoroki’s situation seems altogether and how much effort is put into making it as bad as possible, I am inclined to believe that his mother’s experience in the hospital was also intended to be on the more negative, potentially leaning towards worst or at the very least worse-than-average spectrum of experiences. My speculation reflects that.

END WARNING

Todoroki’s mom was so scared, she knew she needed to seek help to the point she asked help from people who forced her into the situation, but now that he forcibly hospitalized her, now that she acted out, now that he framed her as this inherently and consistently horrible violent person, the hospital could justify doing whatever they want to her. Japan is one of the last places in the world that uses physical restraints in psychiatric hospitals, and they use them very frequently alongside heavy sedation and otherwise high doses of drugs. Violent patients and patients with histories of violence are treated much, much worse on average, and she entered the hospital directly after having attacked her son. There is, to some extent, fear of mental illness and the mentally ill in Japan, especially in terms of those with histories of violence.

Even though Todoroki’s mother knows just how much she has been hurt and how much danger she and her son are in from her husband, they evidently never believed her, or at least never got her out of there. They may have called any claims of abuse acting out, they may have called it more evidence of her violence or her trying to blame her own assumed tendency towards violence on her innocent virtuous husband, they may have called her hysterical and drugged her even more, maybe even until she stopped claiming her husband was violent and abusive. After all, he is a top hero and has immeasurable influence, he very well also could have bribed or charmed the doctors just like he did everyone else to disregard his abuse and silence her. The doctors may be led to believe that her claims of abuse were delusions, and that she was suffering from a delusion when she attacked her son, so the goal for their treatment may have actually been to explicitly end those “delusions” of abuse to avoid future violence.

Another example of how much power Todoroki’s dad has is how he managed to get her admitted to a psychiatric hospital in the time it took Todoroki to come home from the ER thanks to his political influence. Involuntary admission in Japan requires politician approval. Additionally, who would believe her that she was not the consistently violent one? She brutally attacked her child with boiling water, after all. Surely it must have been the result of her mental illness to accuse him of any abuse, as the trustworthy top hero may have even warned the doctors, so surely all she needed was more drugs until her alleged delusions subsided. She attacked her son due to a claim that she was traumatized by her husband’s abuse, which he surely denied. The fact that he sent her to a psychiatric hospital instead of jail could have been seen as an act of mercy, when it truly was just to ensure he could manipulate her as long as possible, and the fact that having his wife arrested would have been a worse hit on his reputation than having her sent to a hospital. Plus, being charged with a crime might give her the opportunity to have him investigated. Regardless of how her claims of abuse were handled, nothing was done. Now she is scarier to the public than the man who deserved to be locked up a long time ago.

In 2017, a New Zealand man died from a heart attack after being restrained for 10 days in a Japanese psychiatric hospital and developing deep vein thrombosis (DVT) due to the restraints. 10 days not being allowed to leave the bed, to the point a blood clot developed, went entirely unaddressed, and resulted in a heart attack. The average time spent in medical restraints in Japanese psychiatric hospitals is 96 days. Yes, 3 months. Almost everywhere else in the world, that figure is a few hours if any. The source of the average length of time spent in restraints seems to be entirely written in Japanese, and while I was unable to directly read that particular report, I verified that it has been cited by numerous advocacy groups and news sources, and I spent hours comparing it to general information regarding physical restraints in Japan. Deep vein thrombosis is common for restrained patients in Japan, and use of restraints is on the rise. In 2013, about 29% of all psychiatric patients in Japan were placed in restraints (10,299 patients out of a total of around 297,000). Violent patients are more likely to be restrained.  According to a 2014 study of a Tokyo hospital, over 11% of patients in restraints develop deep vein thrombosis. And that study was performed with patients wearing compression stockings and receiving regular injections of unfractionated heparin (UFH), both of which reduce the overall chance of a blood clot. Those precautions are not enforced across Japan and may be exclusive to this study. So without those precautions, the general rate of developing DVT from these restraints is likely much higher.

Japan has the highest ratio of psychiatric beds to population in the world. In Japan, hospitals are viewed as long-term care facilities, so while a psychiatric stay in America might be a few weeks, in Japan it can be years. In 2008, the average length of stay in a psychiatric hospital was 290 days. Involuntary admission is associated with an even longer length of stay, and involuntary admissions between April 2014 and March 2016 were about 35% of total admissions. There is no legal upward limit of involuntary hospitalization in Japan. Involuntary hospitalization is initiated by the prefectural governor, with no guaranteed timeline for psychiatric assessment. Japan has on average four times the average involuntary hospitalization rate as other OECD countries.

As a result of research into restraints in Japan, I found https://www.norestraint.org/ , a Japanese advocacy website aimed to improve psychiatric care and campaign for the end of restraints in Japanese psychiatric hospitals. With the help of Google Translate, the page describes how some people in charge of psychiatric associations in Japan believe doctors should be given guns, which are extremely illegal in Japan. It also gives a visual on some types of restraint used. Japan has high rates of high dose medication and forced sedation, electroconvulsive therapy, and isolation in these psychiatric facilities. “Megadosing” is abundant, in that patients are given heavy doses of medicine until they are no longer resistant or are otherwise considered quiet, partially to compensate for understaffing. There are commonly not enough workers in these facilities, and high doses of drugs are often used to make patients more compliant instead of hiring more workers. The psychiatric hospitals in Japan are also mostly privately owned. In researching these statistics, I encountered countless stories demonstrating the worst possible scenarios. These experiences are again not necessarily indicative of the average hospital stay in Japan, and these statistics only represent very specific aspects of medical procedure within Japanese psychiatric hospitals, and are in no way “complete” representations of an average stay or the attitudes of all psychiatric healthcare professionals. However, one thing that came up repeatedly is the idea that some aspects of an individual’s stay can be influenced at the request of the family, including requesting longer time spent in restraints and longer stays.

In Japan, the views regarding mental illness differ greatly from the western model, which likely contributes to the contrast between their physical and psychiatric healthcare. A survey published in 2006 comparing the outlook towards mental illness between Australia and Japan presented four stories describing individuals with major depression, major depression with suicidal thoughts, early schizophrenia, and chronic schizophrenia, and then asked the respondents several questions regarding them. These stories were translated multiple times between English and Japanese to ensure that the translations were accurate. When asked to describe what the individuals in the story were experiencing, the results illustrated a Japanese preference towards phrases like “emotional problems” compared to the Australian survey. This same survey also demonstrated just how heavily family and community are expected to participate in the caretaking of those with mental illness in Japan, with nearly 2-3x the Japanese respondents saying that the individuals in the examples given would be best helped by their families, with more emphasis on the individual recognizing their own problems compared to the Australian responses. In terms of professional help, while the Australian participants largely recommended seeing a general doctor, the Japanese participants pointed towards counselors and psychiatrists.

In terms of what would not be viewed as helpful for the individuals in the stories, there was a significant disparity between the countries. In terms of depression, 87.3% of Australian respondents believed that a general doctor would be helpful, compared to only 30.4% in Japan. 35.4% of Australians surveyed said that a pharmacist would be helpful for the individual with depression, while in Japan only 6.8% believed a pharmacist would be helpful, with 22-23.6% actually saying that pharmacists would be harmful compared to about 8.1-8.7% in Australia. These responses were similar across all four examples. Roughly thrice the Japanese respondents believed that tranquilizers were beneficial across all conditions compared to Australia. Australia showed a heavy preference towards vitamins, with over 50% believing vitamins being beneficial to the individual with depression. In terms of medications being harmful, Australia leaned heavily towards calling tranquilizers, sleeping pills, and antipsychotics as harmful while significantly less Japanese respondents (roughly half as much or less) thought their application could be harmful to the individuals in the stories.

There was significant doubt towards the abilities of the individuals in the stories to recover in the Japanese survey, for example, just 7.4% believed that the individual with depression could make a full recovery even with professional help, compared to 37.3% in Australia. The Japanese survey leaned heavily towards individuals with professional help making progress, but with relapse. While the results are over 10 years old and there has been much change in society since then, I personally just thought the numbers were really cool.

More recently, a 2013 paper attempted to summarize the results of 19 papers regarding mental illness stigma in Japan published since 2001. Chronic schizophrenia was singled out as being viewed as especially dangerous in Japan, largely due to fear of violence, despite not many people being able to accurately identify it in practice. Medication for mental illness was generally poorly understood, with relatively few believing in the effectiveness of antidepressants as a whole. Friends and family were most commonly considered helpful, followed by counselors. Fear of schizophrenia in Japan was prevalent across multiple studies and statistics. Overall, Japan had more stigma than Australia and Taiwan, but less than China. The analysis mentioned that in Japan, personality is more commonly seen as a cause of mental illness than circumstance and biological factors. The findings suggested that the chronic institutionalization of those with mental illness may play a role in the stigma of mental illness, in that more frequent contact with and education about mental illness is associated with better outcomes in regards to acceptance.

Mental illness is commonly thought of in Japan as something that cannot be recovered from. Meaning, someone who has been labeled with a mental illness may never be viewed the same by society. This stigma played a role in why Todoroki’s mother took so long to seek out help, and why she waited until it got so bad to reach out. Mental illness is often seen as a loss of self-control, families are expected to care for mentally ill individuals, and there is a resistance to seeking out professional help beyond counselors. This plays a factor in why sending her to a hospital was an act of abuse on the part of Todoroki’s father within the context of Japanese culture. Although attacking Todoroki with boiling water was an extreme act of violence, general expectations are to discuss within the family how to address mental illness before seeking out a professional, or to at least look into a counselor, both which should have happened long ago. The process is not necessarily the same after an assault, but again, the family discussion should have happened a long time ago.

Todoroki’s mother reached out to her own family for help with what she was experiencing even though they were the ones that gave her to him for the sole purpose of bearing powerful children and were aware of the ongoing abuse for a while. They put her there. They did not get her out of there despite his constant physical abuse, either. She spoke about the situation on the phone as if they already knew. And evidently they also never backed up her claims of her husband actively hurting her and her son, since Todoroki never mentioned him getting investigated or them splitting up afterwards. She tried to seek mental counsel from a group of people who sold her for her Quirk as a readily available womb, because regardless of how they treated her, family is still expected to help. In that same sense, Todoroki’s father was supposed to attempt to help as well. Which would essentially involve telling him to stop being abusive, because it was evidently the trauma from his abuse that eventually led to the outburst. Obviously he did not want to do that. He wanted to punish her for acting out. Out of the frying pan and into the fire. Had he truly done this as an act of kindness, he would have changed. He did not, because he is an abusive shithead. As mentioned above, involuntary hospitalization requires authorization from local politicians, so the fact that he is a top hero plays an enormous role in exactly how easily and quickly he managed to get his wife committed. He could easily have her held longer, or re-committed should she ever act out again or even try to seek out help.

In terms of what contributed to the outburst, there are a ton of potential factors. For one thing, we saw Todoroki’s father shove his mother to the ground, leading the audience to believe there is a significant history of violence against her, as well as hints given by Todoroki’s description of his father being given access to his mother. Women in violent domestic abuse situations are extremely prone to having traumatic brain injuries. Experiencing domestic violence also makes someone more likely to develop mental illness in general. In terms of potential PTSD, the absolute inability to get away from her abuser due to how physically powerful and influential he is probably played a role in the severity of the attack. Her family was well aware of the abuse she experienced. She could have already been drugged, she could have already been on medication and experiencing side effects, there are not a lot of details thus far. But there are two things we know about Todoroki’s father for certain: he is one of the most powerful people in the world and has access to whatever resources he wants, and he is a raging abusive asshole. Regardless of the specifics here of what she experienced, the abuse evidently continued after her attack. Otherwise, this would have been considered an event in Todoroki’s life and not his backstory.

The impact of being forced into a psychiatric hospital is not the same in America and Japan, and the culture surrounding mental illness is much different as well.

I do not want to begin to elaborate how traumatic medical abuse is, and I will not pretend like America or any other part of the world is in any way free from it either, but the impact of the hospitalization may be lost in translation depending on the locale of the viewer.

Hospitals are supposed to help people. Police are supposed to help people. Heroes are supposed to help people. They have all failed this kid and he is absolutely trapped. He went to the hospital and returned to find his mother taken from him, leaving him with an angry father and presumably nobody to protect him. Todoroki was forced to grow up viewing “heroes” as people who hurt, as one of the most successful heroes in the world was personally dedicated to make his life hell. To that end, he may have even found himself occasionally cheering for villains, just to find refuge in a fantasy where someone can protect him from his father. His father had political influence, and because politicians are the ones responsible for permitting involuntary hospitalization in Japan, he had the power to send away his family at will if they ever tried to speak up. Even in a society of superpowers, even in a society with magic, the world still fails to protect children. It enables abusers. It did not even bother to consider that people who love violence might be attracted to the job of being a hero, to express their love for violence and to be able to legally hurt or kill people. UA has absolutely no resources to identify abusive heroes, they do nothing about outwardly violent students. They do nothing to guide them, they do nothing to support them. I bet anything nobody is going to take note of all this talk of rejecting his father and do anything either despite it being a huge red flag. All Might straight up asked his old buddy how his student’s home life was, and the response was basically that he was being abused and that the kid wanted out. And nothing happened.

He knows.

And All Might was allegedly the only person in the world stronger than Todoroki’s father, and allegedly the best hero in the world. At some point, Todoroki may have even cheered for All Might, hoping that the man his father viewed as a threat and so desperately wanted to overpower could one day help himself and his mother defeat the villain in their own lives. But that help never came.

This world is an absolute nightmare. Abusive childhood with added superpowers for the abusers and no consequences. People without superpowers are treated horribly. People with mental illness are still treated horribly. They never believed that poor woman, and even if they did, they never followed through to protect a CHILD.

Todoroki spent his childhood being abused by someone beloved by the world and ignored by every institution that was supposed to help him. The man that so many around the world were so excited to meet was the same man that he desperately wanted to escape from. He watched the world praise a man who went home and abused his family. He was forced to watch his mother suffer similarly, and was even attacked by her as a result from her trauma. Instead of this being a wakeup call for his father, he tightened the reins and punished her for not more readily accepting his abuse. Todoroki knew he had to become stronger, but he wanted to do everything he could to never become like his horrifying father. He struggled to make bonds with others, and where his peers chose teamwork, he opted for independence.

And Todoroki finally managed to reach out to his seemingly empathetic and understanding classmate to break the news to him that one of the top heroes that he probably was a fan of prior is a terrible, terrible person. He vents, revealing just to what extent he is trapped and suffering. While he does not detail the specifics such as in the flashbacks, he paints a pretty blatant picture of a very abusive home life without much hope to escape. He admits to the ways in which he tries to cope with his trauma and avoid becoming like his father, while still trying to become strong enough to physically protect himself and his mother, and what does Midoriya say, on international television for all to hear?

REJECTING YOUR FATHER MAKES YOU A JACKASS AND YOUR TRAUMA IS AN INSULT TO EVERYONE AROUND YOU

FUCK OFF

[saferincages]

(you might say we are encouraged to love)

I received an ask requesting I make this response its own post in full (which of course I don’t mind doing!) so here it is:

An anon in the original post asked why, “Anakin/Vader is seen as interesting for women,” and that could be a bit of a loaded question, but I think there’s a definite rationale behind it. The way it was phrased made me think of a post I saw which addressed the fundamental split between Anakin and Vader as seen by certain audiences, why Anakin is treated by many derisively because there’s an element of the “heroine’s journey” that happens in relation to his arc and the struggles he goes through. It’s here and it’s really interesting in its entirety. “The constant barrage of degradation and trauma and unfairness of a system that benefits at your expense and refuses to validate you for it. And some of that he might have been able to reconcile by “growing up,” the same way a lot of us learn to come to terms with social fuckery, but Anakin doesn’t get the space to do that. He gets a giant bundle of unaddressed trauma and psychological issues and handed a kind of ambiguous destiny about needing to save the entire universe.” <- Imagine the burden of that, and they put it on a child and then give him zero structure to cope with it.

I’m also going to add this comment from that post because I think it’s worthwhile to note: if someone makes you angry and you show anger with your very own face you are weak, you have lost face, you have shown yourself vain and driven by a selfish, animal, irrational, feminine urge to defend yourself; but if you show anger without a face, if you show it unpersonally (the less it’s connected to direct accusation or a specific ill), especially in order to execute a role, then you suddenly appear to be the one in the position of strength, because you can no longer be directly accused of selfishness. The more you can cloak anger in the guise of necessity, the more you meet the societal expectation to be dispassionate, rational, always controlled - the more justification and legitimacy and power to you, even though this mode of anger is often more destructive than the first. This dynamic, assuming it exists as I’ve hypothesized it, is why I think Anakin codes as feminine to many, while Vader appeals to a certain masculine ideal.

Basically, the gist of it is that the emotional turmoil, the trauma, the way he’s exploited for his talents or what he can provide others, the way his agency is stripped repeatedly from him again and again tends to not be the way “male” hero journeys are told. It’s feminine coding (unfortunately) for those themes to be explored. For those emotions to be plumbed and portrayed with a substantive sense of sorrow and helplessness in the central male hero - it is not the “macho” standard. Why they thought they’d get a macho, unyielding masculine power trip from Anakin Skywalker remains a mystery to me, this is the same series where its original hero, Luke (who is his son! of course there were going to be essential parallels and contrasts between them), purposefully throws his weapon away and refuses to fight, and is characterized by his capacity for intrinsic compassion rather than any outer physical strength (even Han is much less of a “macho” guy than dudebros tend to make him out to be - not only because he’s unmistakably the person in distress who has to be rescued from capture in ROTJ, he has a lot of interesting facets that break down that ‘scoundrel’ stereotype, but I digress other than to say I love the OT, and the subtle distinctions in Luke, Leia, and Han that make them break the molds of expectation). SW fundamentally rejected toxic masculinity and the suppression of emotions from its inception, Luke’s loving triumph and role as redeemer only happens because he refuses to listen when he’s told to give up on his friends or on his belief that there’s good in his father, his softness is his ultimate strength. Anakin was never going to be some epitome of tough masculinity, and George Lucas knew exactly what he was doing crafting him in that way. The audiences who wanted Bad Seed Anakin from the beginning didn’t know how to reconcile this sensitive, kind-hearted, exceedingly bright kid, with their spawn of the Dark Side notions, and I think, unfortunately, far too many then either rejected him completely or refused to understand what the central points in his characterization are about.

The fact that this narratively would have made no sense (if Anakin had been “born bad,” then there would have been no miraculously surviving glimpse of light for Luke to save - I’ve said this before, but imagine how profoundly essential to his true self that goodness had to be for it to even exist any more at that point, after all he’d suffered, after all he’d done. the OT tells us more than once what a good man Anakin Skywalker was, it’s part of what makes the father reveal as powerful as it is - if we hadn’t heard the fragments of stories about Luke’s father, it wouldn’t be nearly as shocking, but we KNOW he was a hero, an admirable man, a good friend). I can’t fathom how tricky telling the prequels had to have been to that extent - the audience knows what will happen in the end, it’s a foregone conclusion, we know he will fall, we know Vader will be created, we know the Empire will rise (though that would have happened even if Anakin had remained in the light, which is a whole other discussion). So the question became, who is this person? What influenced him? What shaped his destiny? And that ended up being a far more complex and morally fraught and stirringly emotional story than just “badass Jedi becomes badass Sith lord.”

That talented, highly intelligent boy is taken in by the Jedi after he has already developed independent thought and very intricate emotional dimension - the argument that he’s “too old” to be trained is because he’s not malleable enough to be indoctrinated the way Jedi usually treat the children they take. They may blame this on his attachment to Shmi, but she’s not the problem (if anything, had they not been so unfeeling and rigid, and had they freed her and allowed her to at least stay in contact with her son while he was training because it was a special case - they’re the ones who stick that “Chosen One” mantle on him, you’re telling me they couldn’t make an exception? but no, because they put that weight on him and then never help him carry it and constantly undermine it and question and mistrust him - Anakin would have been stronger in his training, and he would never have fallen to the Dark Side at all. There are so many moments, over and over, where his fall could have been averted, and everyone fails him to the bitter end, when he fails himself). 

And so he is traumatized, due to years of abuse and difficulties as a slave, due to having to leave his mother behind because the Jedi would not free her, due to being told to repress his emotions over and over again when he is, at his core, an intuitive and perceptively empathetic person (he wants to uphold that central tenet of his training - “compassion, which I would define as unconditional love, is central to a Jedi’s life”), yet he’s made to feel he is broken/wrong/constantly insufficient. He’s wounded by abandonment issues and lack of validation and the human connection/affection he craved, and he develops an (understandable) angry streak, he’s socially awkward due to the specific constraints/isolation of a Jedi’s life and due to the fact that they tried to stamp out what made him uniquely himself, which makes him continually conflicted with a never-ending pulse of anxiety (see absolutely ANY moment where he breaks down emotionally, and you’ll see him say something to the effect of “I’m a Jedi, I know I’m better than than this,” “I’m a Jedi, I’m not supposed to want [whatever very basic human thing he wants, because they make him feel like he can’t even ask for or accept scraps of decency]” - they fracture his sense of his own humanity, Padme tries to validate those feelings but that Code is a constant stumbling block in his mind). He is troubled by fear and the constant press of grief (I would argue he has PTSD at the very least), and all around he’s met by mistrust and sabotage. 

Male heroes shouldn’t be treated as infallible in their own narratives (none of them are that, as no character of whatever gender/origin is, as none of us are), but at the very least we usually see them treated with respect by others. Anakin often gets no such luxury. He’s treated the way we frequently see women treated, and that treatment comes from the same rotten core - the idea that emotions are weak, that expressing them makes you lesser, that crying is a sign of deficiency, that fragility of any kind cannot be tolerated. Anakin is even the hopeless romantic in this situation - Padme, while gracious and warmhearted, is much more pragmatic and tries to reason her way out of her blossoming love for him until she’s of the belief that it doesn’t matter anyway because they’re about to die, and she wants him to know the truth before they do. (I’d also like to note that the closest people to him all speak their love aloud when they’re at the point of death - Shmi when he finds her bound and tortured with the Tuskens, Padme in the Arena, Obi-Wan watching him burn on Mustafar, and how unbearably sad is that? even though his mother had said it before, even though he got to hear it many times again from Padme - and it’s her last entreaty to him - we shouldn’t be pushed to the brink of death to express it). Anakin is the one gazing at her dreamily and tearing up about it and professing earnest, dramatic love in front of the fireplace (idc what anyone says about the dialogue, the way he expresses himself is entirely sincere, it’s the rawness of that sincerity that I think makes people uncomfortable bc it’s unexpected), she’s the one who talks about living in reality. She, too, has been taught to guard and temper her emotions from her time as a child queen and the years she’s spent navigating the murky political waters of the Senate, but she’s become adept at it, unlike Anakin. If anything, they’re the only person the other has with whom they can be truly genuine and unafraid of exposing the recesses of their hearts, they’re the only safe place the other has, it’s no wonder they give themselves over to that, and the fact that they do is beautiful, it’s not wrong (which I have more cohesive thoughts on here and it was the underlying thesis of my heart poured into the super long playlist for them too /linking all the things). They see the joy and spirit in the other that no one else ever sees, and they make a home there.

Anakin becomes an esteemed general not only because he’s awesome in battle and strong in the Force and a gifted pilot and a skilled leader (all of which are true), but because he shows those around him respect, and great care. So, yet again, there’s a subversion of what might have been expected. No one is expendable to him. He views the Clone troops as individual human beings. He mourns their losses (many of the Jedi, with their no attachments rhetoric, allow the Clones to be used without much hesitation or thought for their status as sentient beings born and bred and programmed to die in war, but Anakin was a slave. He comprehends their status more than anyone else could). Anakin is a celebrated hero to the public, and in private is being chewed up by fear and uncertainty. Anakin is devoted to and completely in love with his wife, but has to keep it a secret. Anakin still craves freedom that even being a Jedi has not afforded him, because of their rigor. Anakin still desperately has to scrape for even the bare minimum of approval from the authority figures around him - even his closest mentor and friend, Obi-Wan, while they are irrevocably bonded and care for each other in a myriad of important ways, often doesn’t understand him and dismisses his feelings, refuses to advocate for/stand up for him when he needs it, or tells him to calm down. I’m surprised they never tell him he’s being hysterical when he gets upset, but the connotation of being told to “calm down” when angry or sorrowful or frustrated is something most women can identify with all too well. His desperate desire to protect Padme as everything begins to curl and smoke and turn to ash around him has a very clear nurturing aspect to it underneath the layers of terror and frustration and building paranoia - all he really wants is to be able to protect and care for his family, all he hopes is to save them and have a life with them away from all the war and the political in-fighting and the stifling Order. He’d quit right that second but he needs help due to his nightmares, and no one is willing to give it to him. (Except, ostensibly, Palpatine, who has been grooming him and deftly manipulating him and warping his perceptions since he was a child, all under the guise of magnanimous, almost paternal, care. Palpatine is brilliant in his machinations, perfectly cunning in his evil. He knows exactly how to slip in and break people, and he plays Anakin to the furthest extreme. I’m not saying Anakin doesn’t have choices, he does, and he makes the worst possible ones, but Palpatine pulls the strings in a way that makes him feel that he has no agency - and in truth, he does have very little agency throughout every step of his arc, marrying Padme and loving her in spite of the rules is one of the only independent choices he ever makes that isn’t an order, a demand, a fulfilling of duty - and Palpatine poises himself as the answer to all the problems, if Anakin does as he’s told. He’s been hard-wired to take orders for too long. He is so damaged by this point, and so distrusting - Hayden said something once about how Anakin is still very naive in ROTS, even after what he’s been through in the war, he’s still so young and unknowing about many things, and then his naivete is shattered by complete and utter disillusionment, and that shock is terrible and incomprehensible for him, so he clings to the one source of power he’s given, and it’s catastrophic). He is haunted by grief and impeded by fear of loss, and it drags him into an abyss. We watch all of this happen with bated breath, we see everyone fail him, we see every moment where he could have been helped, we see every path he could take if only he had the ability to stand up for himself and had been given the tools to cope with his psychological and emotional baggage, we see that he very nearly turns back, up until the death knell at the end. We know it’s coming from the moment they land on Tatooine and meet him and decide to make him a Jedi. We know, and we still hope for it to turn out differently. We know, and it still breaks our hearts.

I don’t want to make blanket statements about typical male viewers vs. typical female viewers, that’s too dismissive of a stance to take, but on a seemingly wider scale, I don’t think many of the former (especially the ones who were either older fans or who were teenagers themselves at the time) were as interested in political nuance and a tale of abiding love and a young man burdened with more than should ever have been put on his shoulders. Since the question was basically “why does he appeal to women,” (and not just cishet women) I imagine that the answer to that varies greatly depending on any one perceptive outlook, but has a similar core in each case of us wishing we could help change the outcome, even though we know we can’t, and of wanting to understand his actions and his pain, wanting to see his positive choices and his goodness validated, wanting to see him learn healthy strategies, wanting to see his love flourish, wanting to see him freed from the shackles he drags with him, from childhood to Jedi to Vader. The crush of the standards of society and expectation on him may speak to many. He is never liberated (until his final moments of free breath). His choices are either taken or horrifically tainted. His voice is drowned out by those more powerful around him. His talents and intelligence go largely unrecognized. His good, expansive heart is treated like a hindrance. The depth of his empathy and love is underestimated - and that, in the end, is important, because that underestimation, ending with Palpatine, becomes the Dark Side’s ultimate downfall and undoing. Vader may literally pick up an electric Palpatine and throw him down a reactor shaft, but that physical action is the final answer to a much more complete emotional and spiritual journey. He throws him down and the chains go with the slave master, and for the first time, certainly since before he lost Padme, his heart is unfettered, his love is reciprocated, and he is offered a true voice, a moment of his true self, a sliver of forgiveness, before being embraced again by the transcendence of the light. It is his act of rebellion, it is his own personal revolution, his final blow in the war. The entirety of the arc hinges upon him in that moment, Luke has been valorous and immeasurably valuable, but he’s done all he can do - the final choice is Anakin’s (and it’s such an interesting case because where else have we ever been able to fear and appreciate a villain, and then totally transform and re-contextualize him?). He is in that moment, indeed, the Chosen One.

All these facets are fascinating to watch unfold if you’re willing to be open-minded and heartfelt and sympathetic to the journey, if you’re willing to dig into the complex depth of his pathos.

I remember seeing AOTC as a teenager, and my love was Padme, she was where I was invested, I identified with her, I loved her kindness and her bravery and her sense of honor and justice, I loved that her femininity did not in any way diminish her and was an asset, I loved that, while she takes charge and has the fortitude to rush headlong to the rescue, while she can fight and tote a gun and blast a droid army as well as anyone, her superpowers are her intellect and her giving heart and gentle spirit. I totally get why Anakin holds onto the thread of hope she gives to him for all of those years, and why he falls in love with her as he does, but since I felt a lot of the story through her eyes, I understood why she was drawn to and fell in love with him, too. He’s dynamic and a bit reckless, he’s courageous, but he’s vulnerable and needs support, he’s deeply troubled but also radiantly ebullient at times (the scene in the meadow where she’s so touched by the carefree joy he exhibits, how it delights her and takes her aback, because she’s almost forgotten what it is to feel that, she’s almost forgotten other people could, and here he is, warm and teasing and spirited), he is often guileless, especially with her, he’s fervent and loving in a way she’s never seen or experienced, and that love is given with abandon to her. Who…wouldn’t fall in love with that? It’s a gravitational pull. AOTC impacted me in certain other personal ways as well, I was trying to understand some nascent hollows of grief (Anakin losing his mother as he does was very affecting and heartwrenching for me, at the time I’d lost my grandfather to whom I was quite close, and I’m also really close to my own mom, so his woe had an echo to me), but that vision that I specifically had of their love, the way I interpreted it (which I may not have had words for at the time, but I certainly had the emotional response) was a dear and formative thing.

I talked about this here, but to rephrase/reiterate, by the time ROTS came out, my life had shifted completely on its axis. I was still young, but my much dreamier teenage self was being beaten down and consumed by illness, and I was angry. Anger is not a natural emotion for me (guilt and self-blame tend to be where I bury anger), and I really didn’t know what to do with it. Everything felt unfair and uncertain, like there was no ground at all to stand on. I hurt all the time, literally and figuratively, I was in constant pain. I was lonely and frightened and sleep deprived and often had nightmares (this is still kind of true lol, as is the physical pain part). Padme was still my heart and touchstone - as she remains so to this day in this story - but suddenly I understood Anakin in a much more profound way, one I’ve held onto because he’s important to me and I love him. I felt his rage, his anguish, his desire to do something, anything, to somehow change or influence the situation, to rectify his nightmares, to cling to whatever might make a difference, might save him from being drowned in the dark and from losing everything that made him who he was as a person. Seeing him try and knowing he would fail was devastating, but also…relatable, in an abstract way (obviously not the violent parts, but thematically, I felt some measure of what it was to scramble up a foundation that is disappearing beneath you, that your expectations and dreams of what your life would be can vanish in disintegrating increments). All I wanted was for someone to help rescue him, because all I wanted was for someone to help rescue me. All I wanted was the hope that things could turn around - and there is hope in ROTS, despite the unending terror and tragedy, it’s never entirely gone, because Star Wars exists as a universe with the blazing stars of hope and love ever ignited at its center - but still, it was a very personally rooted emotional exploration for me, and I only started to deal with my own floundering anger when I saw how it might consume the true and loving and softer parts of me if I didn’t hold it back. (A few years later, I went through this again in an even worse way, and the source of that rage and despair was someone I cared for, and once I got through the worst bleak ugliness of it, there were a couple of stories I returned to in an attempt to gain newfound solace and comprehension, and Anakin and Padme were in there. My compassionate, hopeful heart was being torn by that fury, and I clawed my way back up from the brink of it because I knew I could die, not even necessarily figuratively, it was…a bad time, if I didn’t find my way out. Anakin’s story is a tragedy and a fable and a kind of warning - we should not deny or suppress our emotions or our authenticity, but we also cannot let it destroy us - and then ultimately his lesson is restorative, too, that we never lose the essential part of our souls, that we must allow ourselves to feel. Balance indeed). 

As consistent and transparent as my love for Padme has always been, my Anakin emotions are actually so close and personal that I intentionally avoided ever exposing them for actual years, it’s like…basically in the past month that I’ve ever been truly honest about it on Tumblr, because exposing that felt like too much, but I don’t really care about keeping it quiet any more, and that’s very cathartic. 

I myself am an incredibly emotional person, and I don’t believe that Anakin’s emotions are negative qualities, which I meant to underscore. In fact, his open emotions are an exquisite part of him, and it’s the Jedi who are wrong for trying to stamp that out, when his emotional abilities are part of what define him in his inherent goodness and his intellect and strength. He has an undying heart. For he and Luke both to stand as male heroes who represent such depth of feeling is really special, and vital to the story. Anakin is the most acutely human character in many respects, in his foibles and his inner strengths, in his losses and his longings and his ultimate return to his true self - that’s why we feel for him, that’s why we ache and fear for him, that’s why we rejoice for him in the end.

Other people could speak to the Vader part of it much better than I can, Vader’s an amazing and very interesting villain (the fact that, as Vader, Anakin is much more adhered to the Jedi code and way of thinking than he ever was as an actual Jedi, for example - he has an order to him, he is much more dispassionate, he is very adamant about the power of the Force - is endlessly intriguing, because he’s such a contradiction). I use this term for a different character, but I’m going to apply it here - Anakin is a poem of opposites. He is a center that can serve as either sun or black hole. He is a manifestation of love and light and heroism, he is a figure of imposing power and cold rage. He’s the meadow and the volcano. The question then becomes, how expansive are we? When we’re filled with the contradicting aspects of ourselves, how do we make them whole without falling apart? When we do fail, can we ever do anything to fix it? And the answers again will vary by individual, but to my mind - we’re infinite, and thus infinitely capable of, at any point, embracing our light, even if we’ve forgotten to have faith in it, and while we may not be able to fix every mistake or right every wrong, we can make a better choice and alter the path. The smallest of our actions can ripple and extend and are more incandescent than we know. That’s what he does, against all expectation. In the end, he is an archetype not only of a hero (be that fallen or chosen or divine), but of a wayward traveler come home, a heart rekindled, a soul set free to emerge victorious in the transcendent light.

In the final resonance of that story for me personally, I love him for being a representation of that journey, that no matter how long it takes to get there, how arduous it is - that things we lose can be found again, that with the decided act of compassion, pure, redemptive love can be held onto, that the light persists and that, even when it flickers most dimly, refuses to be extinguished, and can at any point illuminate not only ourselves, but can shine brightly enough to match the stars in the universe.

I hope this is at all cogent, here’s a gif for your patience ♥

[lets-get-fictional]

HEY LOVE (i hope your sitting because this will be a rollercoaster) I was thinking about writing a story about a boy going on like a culture exchange thing and living at a girl's house, the only thing is he only knows basic english so i was just wondering how i would go about it? like how would i be able to convey his thoughts and actions and even the dialogue (the girl will also be learning his native language) i hope this makes sense ;-;

HELLO DARLING

Writing Characters with Language Barriers

I’m assuming that as your story progresses, your characters will learn enough of each other’s language to communicate a little better – but until then, you can make use of…

Body Language

Body language is the obvious first answer to writing without deep dialogue.  When two people with a language barrier try to communicate, there’s a mental process – scrambling to think of a way to describe something, trying out a few words, then resorting to hand gestures and using objects.  There are two types of body language:

Conscious body language – which the two characters may use to communicate with each other when words fail them.  This kind of body language includes facial expressions, hand gestures (some informal sign language?), physical displays of affection (platonic or romantic), or using/pointing at inanimate objects to convey their meaning.  Remember that the more tired or distracted your characters are, the more difficult it will be to remember words or phrases in each other’s languages – so they’ll be more dependent on physical signals and tone of voice.

Subconscious body language – which all characters use, but often goes unnoticed.  When your characters are communication without words, however, they will be more aware of each other’s small tics – their accidental facial expressions, nervous body itches, affectionate stares, frustrated jaw-grinding, and the alike.  When writing from the POV of Character A, allow them to examine Character B’s eyebrow twitches, falling gazes, and face scratching.

Here is a book I recommend for expanding your body language terminology.

Actions (speak louder than words)

If your characters struggle to explain concepts more complex than eating or sleeping, or emotions deeper than happy or sad, it’s doubtful that waving their hands will help them very much.  Instead, there may be opportunities to cut dialogue out of the equation – Character A knows they won’t be able to explain a concept, so they… show rather than tell.  This will result in a few things:

Gestures – Think about it: when a person is in love with someone and they don’t know how to say it, they tend toward romantic gestures instead.  This is the same for two people who don’t know how to verbally express complex emotions – like growing friendship, thanks, guilt, sympathy, etc.  Gifts, songs, games, special meals, and cards can help to express emotion or explain foreign holidays/concepts.

Assumptions – When Character A knows that they won’t be able to explain something to Character B, they may engage in preemptive behavior – foregoing conversation and skipping right to handling things.  Instead of asking B if they know what a cheeseburger is and if they’d like to try it, they may just order one for them anyway.  This can sometimes result in secrets, too – knowing that Character B won’t understand why they offended someone at the party, A might lie and say nothing was wrong.  These secrets may be intended to spare the other person or to take advantage of the other person.

Leaps of Faith – When all else fails and two characters just can’t understand each other, they make take a leap of faith and trust each other implicitly.  They give up on trying to understand each other’s words and instead trust intentions.  This is where verbal communication ends and actions begin.

Dialogue

And lastly, there is a way of handling dialogue, even when your characters’ mutual vocabularies are limited.  My advice would be to, as non-condescendingly as possible, think of complex thoughts in terms of how you would explain them to a child.  This isn’t a slam on your characters’ intelligence – but children do have limited vocabularies, so this is a good reference.  If there are words a small child doesn’t understand, you may explain it with smaller words – or if you don’t have enough small words, you may include gestures or noises.

For instance: the odds are, your foreign speaker will mainly know action words and conventional phrases (like “thank you” and “good morning”), as well as things like night and day, breakfast and dinner, cat and dog – things you might learn from experience, or a language class.  So when your English-speaker wants to explain a term like “hangover”, they may have to use “drink” and put a hand to their head symbolizing a headache.  This is easily communicable, but not directly.

The goal here, though, is not to over-explain or belittle the non-native speaker, on either side.  If Character A does make Character B feel embarrassed or unintelligent, Character B shouldn’t let this go unaddressed.  Otherwise, this can feel like a slap in the face to readers of Character B’s race/culture.  The best way to learn what words a foreign speaker should know is to try taking beginner’s (or even advanced, depending on the extent of the character’s learning) classes in a foreign language.  Take note of the kinds of words and phrases you learn first – for example, in my Spanish class, I first learned things like, “Where are you from?” and, “I ate soup for dinner.”  I learned numbers 1-20 and the days of the week, and how to ask where the bathroom was.  I probably wouldn’t be able to understand the answer to that without hand motions, or probably half of the words in your response, but hell, I knew that phrase!

In summary: decide how extensive your character’s second language is, then use the words they know + sounds and motions to communicate.

That’s what comes to mind right now, but I’m sure there’s much more I’ve yet to cover.  If any of my followers has anything to add (maybe from experience?) be sure to jump in!

Thanks again, anon, and happy writing :)

If you need advice on general writing or fanfiction, you should maybe ask me!

[southparkcoven]

Craig Tucker

Mun Information

NAME: Harvey

AGE: 22

PRONOUNS: he/him

TIMEZONE: CST (Central Standard Time)

RP EXPERIENCE: going on 10 years

ACTIVITY LEVEL: i work full-time overnight, but have access to my phone during work hours. starting classes in the spring

OTP/NOTP: i’m not even picky. i like cryle a lot, but anything else with craig idm

DISCORD: harvey#3357

ANYTHING ELSE: i’d like to think i’m pretty laidback and chill.

  Muse Information

NAME: Craig Tucker

AGE: 17

GENDER: Cis-male

SEXUALITY: Gay

BIRTHDAY: January 25th, 2000 (Aquarius)

OCCUPATION: Student, Cashier at the retro diner off of main st

SPECIES: Witch

POWER: Clairvoyance/Divination

CHARACTER APPEARANCE:

FACECLAIM: Matthew Bell [ x ] [ x ]

Craig Tucker stands at a whopping six-foot-two, weighing about 150 pounds. He participates in track and field during the spring, therefore retaining a rather lean physique on top of his lengthy legs. If given a body type label, he would be considered on the bridge between ectomorph and mesomorph. His hair is a soft black color, kept in a taper-fade cut with a loose side-part, and he has brown-green hazel eyes. He had his nose broken once in middle school from horsing around on a longboard, and a few scars littered on his arms and knees from childhood rough housing, falling off of bikes, etc.

  CHARACTER HISTORY:

Craig’s clairvoyance has actually been something he’s been able to tap into since he was a young child, however he found the capability rather unsettling after he vividly predicted the death of their first family dog ���  to which they haven’t had a dog since – at the age of four. He never told anyone about the things he’d seen, not even his parents, therefore it became fairly easy to start pushing his divination to the background in attempt to ignore it. It never really left, but this resulted in his premonitions becoming much less intense. He’d prefer it be a lot more dull, anyways. However… after the incident in Peru, the Pandemic, Craig’s capability became revitalized and he was back at the first square he’d been avoiding all these years. Regardless, he still kept this matter private, not caring to share any of his visions, no matter who it involved. It wasn’t everyone’s business how much he knew, how much he knew that little blonde girl in kindergarten –what was her name?– was going to walk in front of that bus without looking. She was going to die, squashed flat in front of the entire school. And so she did. It’s now high school, the divination won’t leave, and Craig has already resigned to his fate –much to this utter dismay. While he’s at it, he might as well try to figure out how to control the damned thing as to prevent it from being a continuous nuisance. He really has nothing to go off of in order to get things under control, so all he can do is make it up as he goes. It’s a work in progress.

  1) Craig was taken to inpatient over in Denver for a good two months during a severe episode of depression he experienced the middle of his sophomore year. He’s since been diagnosed with a mood disorder and has refused to see any doctors following. The situation caused him distress about his own mental health internally, but he’s really afraid of finding out what’s actually going on with him. But, since he internalizes a lot of his emotions, the unaddressed stress had caused his clairvoyance to heighten –especially in the form of nightmares or viewing only negative outcomes. Craig became more reclusive during this time, growing apart from all of his friends and family. Because of his reluctance to talk about his issues, everyone just assumed it was part of the depression he was struggling with. It took that full year for things to finally go back to how they had been before the episode, and for Craig to get back to his usual self again. The incident should have taught him that shadowing his emotions is dangerous not only for his mental health but also for his already haywire ESP. 2) Dating Tweek for about five years before they both mutually called things off really helped Craig mature in a more positive light. He’s learned a great deal about how to handle more hectic and stressful situations, being emotionally supportive ( to the closest extent he’s capable of being, Craig struggles with empathy ), listening and understanding, etc. The two of them ended up mutually breaking things off, not ending on a sour note in the slightest, and Craig believes that’s due a lot in part by their willingness to understand one another throughout.

  As far as social life, Craig remains within the same group of friends he’s been around since elementary school. There’s not much room to roam around anyways. He’s stuck more to himself over the years, however, withdrawing but not alienating. He’s usually seen hanging around Tweek, Kyle, Kenny, or his cousin Red. His family life remains pretty uneventful. The common parental arguments here and there, a threat of divorce once or twice… maybe three times. Craig tries to ignore most of that bullshit, keeping an eye on his sister throughout these trying times. It doesn’t appear to him that his parents will separate anytime soon, and likely won’t until his sister is out of high school at least. If not, then they’re shitty parents for putting that on her.

  CHARACTER PERSONALITY

POSITIVE TRAITS: Pragmatic, Candid, Inquisitive, Capable Leader, Rational.

NEGATIVE TRAITS: Cynical, Stubborn, Apathetic, Cold, Reckless.

MBTI: INTP

TYPE ENNAEGRAM: 5w4 (548)

ALIGNMENT: Chaotic Neutral

Once a hot-headed kid who wouldn’t back down from a good fight, Craig Tucker has mellowed out starting in fifth grade onward. His relationship with Tweek really aided in his maturity throughout middle school, helping him become more intune with other people on top of knowing some of their immediate futures ( that was already intimate enough ). Craig has retained a lot of his apathetic and cynical demeanor regardless, still blunt and rational. The one thing that’s been revving inside of him since high school is his sense of adventure. Unlike in his childhood, Craig Tucker desires to go out and do something nonsensical, something extraordinary. It wasn’t until after his brief period of hospitalization that he became restless, maybe anxious to break from the ordinary. He retains a deep interest for space, the unknown, even the paranormal, ironic to his otherwise cynical and realistic demeanor. There’s somewhat of a rift between two sides of Craig and he’s almost fed up with it.

*SEE ABOVE FOR POWERS

  ROLEPLAY SAMPLE:

        Weekend shifts were the worst shifts because everyone else gets these days off and swamp to cute places like the retro diner off of Main Street. It’s only five after lunch hour and Craig already wishes he was locked dead in the freezer until next shift came to check. The place was full of families and teens as per usual at a time like this. One group of girls hadn’t even ordered anything the whole half hour they’d been sitting there, only then realizing that these tables weren’t waited at. Another family of four ordered, what felt like all of the menu, and complained three separate times about it taking more than fifteen minutes for their entire order to be served.

        Craig was tired, just like he was every single time lunch hour rolled around without fail. The bags under his eyes were never more prevalent as he stood there at the cash register, monotonously reciting his customer service role. His ultra obvious enthusiasm is a real kicker with the guests, they really love to watch a deadpan kid tap a touchscreen and swipe their cards. He’s a sight to behold.

        Speaking of sights to behold… a hot second of a break settles in as everyone in the building has placed their order and no longer require Craig’s immediate assistance. Rubbing the heel of his hand into one of his eyes, the dark-haired teen glances off to the right, free eye settling on a small kid with an open cup in his hands. And before he can even blink, a vivid series of pictures plays out in front of his eyes. The kid appears to be running with the cup in his hands, soda sloshing around violently as he does so, only to spill some of the sticky liquid on the floor in front of him. Unsurprisingly, it looks like the kid slips and falls straight onto his front, mouth banging into the floor with an ugly slapping noise. Craig already knows this ends in him having a mess of coke and red to clean up.

        All of this imagery plays moments before the kid actually does do a sprint forward, spilling his drink in the process, only to slip and slam his face into the hard floor. And, as promised, there’s blood to clean up. Just wonderful.

       With a very, very deep sigh to drown out the shrieks of the child on the ground, Craig Tucker leaves his spot at the front counter in order to retrieve the mop and bucket. Hey, at least he saw it coming.

[thefabulousfulcrum]

Why Americans Don't Treat Fatal Gun Negligence as a Crime

via New Republic

 BY AMANDA GAILEY

Kasey Wilson lives in rural Missouri. He is in his mid-twenties, married with children, and runs his own lawn care business. On October 28, 2013, as his kids played in the front yard with four-year-old Zoie Dougan, the daughter of a visiting friend, Wilson borrowed a rifle from next door, went into his backyard, closed one eye, and shot across the lawn toward a pile of trash. He didn’t realize he had shot Zoie in the head until he heard screaming. By the time she arrived at the hospital by airlift she was dead, and her mother had already asked the police to go easy on her friend. “It was an accident,” deputies report her saying.

Police who interrogated Wilson noted the recklessness that led to Dougan's death. Even if children had not been playing outside, Wilson had fired his gun toward a highway. “If a vehicle or pedestrian were to walk or drive up [redacted road name] they could be seriously injured or killed by his carelessness,” wrote one officer in his report. Yet Wilson was never prosecuted for the shooting. Christian County prosecutor Amy Fite went so far as to redact his name from documents. Because he faced no charges, nothing prevents Wilson from owning guns. The legal system, treating Dougan’s death as a pure accident, holds no further consequences for Wilson.

Every year many gun owners, like Wilson, unintentionally cause death and injury yet face no legal consequences. In criminal and civil courts, the legal system often fails to hold negligent gun owners accountable for such harm. Gun Violence Archive, a non-profit effort that combs through more than a thousand media sources to collect information about gun violence, has verified more than 1,500 accidental shooting incidents in 2014. Data on the legal outcomes of these shootings is sketchy, but many cases of unprosecuted unintentional shootings are available—dozens from the first two months of 2014 alone remain unprosecuted.

The past decade has seen legal measures to prevent gun negligence systematically dismantled. The 2005 Protection of Legal Commerce in Arms Act statutorily inoculated gun manufacturers and dealers from most claims of negligence in gun deaths. This is even more dangerous than it may first sound. Many people unfamiliar with guns assume that they are designed with simple safeguards against unintentional shootings, but this is not always the case. Glock handguns, for example, have no external safety: If a round is chambered and the trigger is squeezed, the gun fires. As Aaron Walsh, a criminal defense attorney in Augusta, Georgia, put it, “With any other product in the world there would be no Glock company because they would be sued out of existence. You don’t have a safety? That can’t be right.” 

Because the firearms industry enjoys exceptions from normal liability, more of the burden for preventing negligence falls to gun owners. Until recently, responsible gun ownership has to some extent been enforced through gatekeeping: State laws limit who can own guns and carry them in public. But advocates for expanded gun rights have been shifting away from an older gun lobby talking point—that we should stop passing new gun control laws and simply enforce the laws we already have—and toward a strategy of dismantling existing legal safeguards. The push for “constitutional carry”—gun carrying by anyone, anywhere, with no licensing required under the pretense that this is a right granted by the Constitution—has radically loosened restrictions on who can own guns and where they may carry them. In several states people may now carry guns on college campuses. In Michigan, guns may be carried openly at K-12 schools. In Iowa, a resident may not be denied a permit to carry a gun in public based on the fact that he or she is blind. In Georgia and other states, guns may be carried in churches and bars. In six states, resident adults may carry concealed handguns with no licensing or training required. Pediatricians in Florida are legally prohibited from asking new parents if they have guns in the home.

With preventative measures falling apart, punishment seems the only remaining legal recourse for enforcing responsibility with guns. But we are not responding to negligence, even egregious negligence, as one might expect. Unintentional shootings frequently go unprosecuted because they don’t always clearly rise to the level of crimes, explained Pete Theodocion, a criminal defense attorney in Augusta, Georgia. “If we are going to take away a person’s liberty and put a person in a cage, we typically require that person to have the mindset of ‘I’m going to do harm now’ as opposed to just acting like a dumbass,” he said.

Yet some of these cases are appalling. A man in Washington practiced drawing a loaded handgun and unintentionally shot and killed his girlfriend’s daughter. A man in Florida twirled a handgun on his finger and killed a pregnant woman. A man in New Mexico handed a loaded rifle to his six-year-old daughter, who unintentionally shot her sister in the neck. None of these gun owners was prosecuted. The district attorney in the New Mexico case told the Farmington Times, “The father did not follow basic and universally accepted firearm safety rules” but “the problem is that the standard for criminal negligence is higher.”

In 2012 Moises Zambrana was trying to sell a firearm at a church in Florida. He took two men into a storage room to show them the gun, which was loaded. He unintentionally fired it, sending a bullet through the wall and striking the 20-year-old daughter of the pastor in the head. Hannah Kelley died of her injuries, but Zambrana, who had a concealed carry permit, faced no charges. He now works as an armed security guard. Without legal intervention, nothing prohibits a negligent shooter from continuing to carry guns in public. Wilson’s and Zambrana’s cases show the reluctance of some prosecutors to pursue charges against shooters who were negligent, and they seem similarly reluctant to prosecute gun owners who allow an unauthorized person, such as a child, to access a gun.

In civil law, negligence is a category of tort, or cause of harm to someone else. Crimes, on the other hand, typically require criminal intent. There are exceptions: The law has designated some kinds of unintentional harm as crimes���for example, child neglect, which society understands is a significant harm to the state that the law should forcefully deter. Specific statutes define child neglect, so prosecutors feel mandated to pursue charges against negligent parents. Few statutes define gun negligence, though, leaving more discretion to district attorneys. Where district attorneys or judges are elected, the gun lobby and local attitudes toward guns can affect whether the state wants to claim that leaving a loaded gun lying around deviates from normal, responsible behavior. “Remember, the prosecutor is elected,” said Korey Reiman, a criminal defense attorney in Lincoln, Nebraska. “If he starts ringing up people who accidentally shoot their buddy hunting, he isn’t going to be prosecuting long.”

Gun negligence cases do not fare much better in civil courts. Such cases may seem best suited to civil cases, but civil judgments do not rescind the gun rights of negligent shooters. Also, in many unintentional shootings, the only people who could claim damages would be the gun owner himself or his family—when a preschooler gets hold of a parent’s unsecured gun and kills his sibling, the negligent parent would need to sue himself. With no criminal or civil recourse, these avoidable deaths go unaddressed by the justice system.

When a surviving family member does sue a negligent gun owner for the death of a child or spouse, their lawsuits often fail. Andrew McClurg, a law professor at the University of Memphis, has written extensively on what he sees as a “right to be negligent” that has arisen from the failure of courts to hold negligent gun owners accountable. McClurg sees these rulings as flagrant violations of tort principles that result from strange mistakes in reasoning about risk—judges have ruled in favor of negligent gun owners because specific chains of events were unforeseeable.

For example, in Strever v. Cline, the Montana Supreme Court decided that a gun owner who left a loaded handgun in an unlocked truck parked on a public street was not liable for the death of a boy killed with the gun. Four boys rummaged through the truck, left, then returned to look for things to steal. One of them found the handgun, waved it around, and unintentionally killed another boy. The court decided that it was impossible to foresee that the boys would make two trips to the truck or that one of them would wave the gun around, and so decided the gun owner was not at fault. But those details are incidental, says McClurg—we don’t need to foresee such specifics, we only need to foresee the risk of the shooting. Leaving a loaded gun in an unlocked, unattended truck is negligent because someone such as a child might access it and harm someone, and that risk of harm is exactly what panned out.

Findings in other civil cases against negligent gun owners suggest that political sensibilities motivate some decisions by the court. In one case McClurg examined, a gun owner kept a loaded handgun next to a tray of change in his bedroom, which he allowed his teenage daughter to raid for spending money. Sometimes she did this with her boyfriend; eventually, the boyfriend took the gun and used it to rob and murder a man who was leaving a restaurant. The victim’s family sued the girl’s father for leaving a loaded gun lying around where he knew minors could access it. The court declined to hold him liable, saying it was “not persuaded that society is prepared to extend the duties of gun owners that far.” This reasoning was not based on principles of liability, but on what the court thought the implications would be for gun ownership in America.

Indeed, political squeamishness about defining responsible gun ownership drives our failure to hold negligent gun owners accountable. It leads to statutes that protect recklessness among manufacturers and sellers, enables legislation that encourages gun proliferation, and shackles a legal system that ends up seeming more concerned about running afoul of the firearms lobby and its adherents than in protecting the public.

So what can we do? I asked McClurg. “That's the million-dollar question,” he said. “The law already supports liability, so it would require a change in our mindset.”

If we want to see criminal charges more consistently brought against negligent gun owners, more specific legislation is in order. Don Kleine, the attorney for Douglas County, Nebraska, explained, “The way we file a charge is based on the laws the legislature passes. If we want to charge something, we have to have a statute somewhere. If the legislature would enact something to give us some guidance, to say, ‘This is something we feel is so inappropriate that we’re going to have a law that says that if somebody doesn’t put their gun away the right way or leaves it accessible to a child without the proper safeguards on it, then that’s a crime,’ then that would certainly help us—we have to have a law to enforce.”

Otherwise, he explained, it remains a civil issue. Without a statute, there’s no crime. With politicians as timid as prosecutors, we won’t be seeing those statutes anytime soon.