#he's not some caricature of awfulness and neither is cs!dream

[elytrafemme]

i mightve sent smth like this already. can't remember tbh. but like. cough syrup is prolly the first fic i've read with a psychotic character who isn't just. written weirdly? like. idk how to explain it. cs!ranboo just seems. so human?? which was and still is really comforting. bc i read cough syrup a bit after i kinda. started coming to terms with the fact that i'm prolly. psychotic to some extent. and like. i'm just some lanky dude who shops off the hot topic clearance rack. and cs!ranboo's like that too. and. idk. where i was going with this. but yeah. thank u for cough syrup it makes me feel human

it was around chapter 8 or 9, i think, when i had talked to my therapist about some issues i was having and she told me it could have been stress induced illusions. that later snow-balled rapidly into depression-linked psychosis, and then into just psychosis, since y'know, i started writing cough syrup in the tail-end of my psychotic break early 2021. took me a lot longer to realize that's what that had been, though.

and y'know i had intended to make cs!ranboo struggle with psychosis at some capacity, since that just fit c!ranboo's character, but it became a lot more personal to me at that point. cs!ranboo was the only place i felt i could talk about these delusions and all this shit i was dealing with, and in all the times i was sobbing because i had lost so much to this perceived failure of my mind, i thought that maybe i could write this character who has the same issues as me, getting a chance to be happy. to find people that love him, who will stay by him, who he could find some kind of stabilizing and lasting peace with.

in a lot of ways, though i bitch now about having to write his chapters, cs!ranboo was my way of coping with a lot of things i was going through. and you know i was actually scared of posting it at a certain point, because it feels so fucking vulnerable. you don't really see a lot of psychotic characters in media that aren't stereotyped, oftentimes written by non psychotic people following a checklist and inevitably messing up somewhere because they're being careless and then find themselves creating this caricature. i don't ever claim that my writing is perfect or good or without flaws, but at the very least my portrayals are genuine in some sense, that i'm using experience and research and both combined to guide it.

i think one of the best things to ever come out of cough syrup is people finding comfort in the characters. so many people found solidarity with cs!tubbo from the beginning, and that grew into projecting things onto him that i'm happy to accept because hell they're not just my characters, they're characters i'm sharing with you all. but what gets me is how many people find comfort in cs!ranboo, like you, because i was so worried about casting that light on everything and am so glad now that i did it.

it's incredibly fucking important to me that the characters i write feel like people. cs!tubbo isn't just an addict, he's a teen who likes checking on NASA's annual halloween-themed posters and who only gets extremely competitive when playing Wii sports games and creates all these associations in his head and fucking sucks at making paper cranes but does them anyway as a love language. cs!tommy isn't just an abuse victim, he's a teen who's favorite color is red and half his clothes are like that and he knows all the cool parks and shops in town and he loves walking around and finding more places and he likes superheroes and animal crossing.

and cs!ranboo isn't just his psychosis, he's a teen that likes baking but hates having to bake cupcakes and will complain about that, and he likes taking photos of other people and hanging onto them for a while, and he likes the idea of falling in love but is a little clumsy with it, and he has a questionable fashion sense but it makes him feel comfortable, and he likes english class but hates chemistry

and all i hope to do is show that (1) these characters' lives are affected by their struggles, but it's not all they are as people (2) you are deserving of love and WILL be loved no matter what you struggle through (3) if you connect to any of the cast, hi i love you you're going to make it you're going to be happy.

sorry for the long tangent. i just - this ask made me feel really happy. because hearing this, that people can find some connection with cough syrup? it's all i've ever wanted. if i hear that then i have a reason to keep writing it, i have a reason to fight through annoying ass chapters and the whole lot of it.

wishing you the best anon. thank you for sharing this with me.