#i’m going to be consuming every bit of sonic content i can this year holy shir

[bluebelledmoon]

sonic prime is a TEN OUTTA TEN HOLY SHIT

[shadowofthelamp]

I’ve been meaning to write this for a few weeks, but haven’t really had the chance, and figure I might as well do it now. Writing out things about how and why I relate to/like characters is something that’s always helped me when creating my own projects, both character-based fanfiction and original stuff because it shakes out what appeals to me and why.

Anyways, this is a specific analysis of why IZ matters to me, a lot. Strap in y’all, you’re getting context. 1500 words of it. Warnings for uh.... bullying, mental illness, that whole shebang. If you could like if you read I’d appreciate it.

It’s a bit difficult to detangle exactly how you felt years ago, especially when you had undiagnosed mental illness at the time. The concrete details are this: I found IZ when I was about 11/12 years old, because some kids in my class wore Gir shirts a lot. (Thanks, guys, for being polite and explaining it to me when I asked about them!)

Something about it just clicked. The only fandom I’d been involved in before that point was Sonic, and then, it was pretty one-sided: I would consume content, but only occasionally made any of my own, and I never talked to anyone. It mattered to me sure, probably almost as much as IZ did, but for different reasons that aren’t really relevant here.

To set the scene: I was 12, bullied, depressed because of said being bullied, anxious for the same reason, and the only friends I had were all just the losers nobody else would talk to. One regularly physically pushed me around and bit me and I took it because everyone else thought I was a weirdo freak, and the other two were mostly just her friends and tolerated me. (Sidenote: Turns out she had mental stuff of her own, but geez, she needed to be helped because it was never a secret she was hurting me.)

Teachers were somewhat torn on me most of the time, because I was clearly very smart and participated in class often, but had a trigger temper that other students used to bully me, and often the teacher’s response was to blame both of us if someone riled me up to the point of snapping back. I still have problems with trusting any authority figures with any problems because of this.

I was also taught to not trust people who are being nice to me, because again, I was desperate for social interaction that wasn’t Bitey the One Friend, and that was used to pretend to compliment or talk to me and then laugh behind my back about it. I’m still seriously working through this one. I probably should talk to someone about it, honestly.

So, uh. Yeah, with that as a guideline, it’s not really a surprise I latched on to IZ. Dib was the smart yet neurotic one that was desperate to prove himself to adults that never listened, and Zim was loud and aggressive and everyone seemed to hate him even as he stumbled through everything, never really realizing just how broken he was. I’d never seen characters like that before, and I especially related to Dib.

The setting also was something I hadn’t really seen before, and it got to me in a way I can’t fully explain. It was dirty and angry and stupid and sad and felt the way I did. This was how the world came across to me at the time, as something broken and unfair, with everyone in power either willfully ignoring me yelling that something was wrong, that either everything around me was broken or I was.

I joke constantly about Dib’s Birthday, the first IZ fic I ever wrote. I’m probably never going to reread it and it’s going to rot unfinished on ffnet until the servers crash, but I found a doc where I went through the first two chapters before dying of Old Writing-Itis, and... honestly, from what I do remember? It was using the characters specifically to work through this stuff that I didn’t have any other outlet for at the time. I had a brother who knew/cared so little about me that years later he told me he never knew I ever had any problems despite the fact that I was by 14, before I started getting meds and therapy, somewhat suicidal. (The bullying had eased as I’d forced myself to blend into the background and no one cared about me anymore, but the ‘no friends and depression’ hadn’t.)

And this is where we get to the shipping stuff. ‘The world is terrible and our brains are fucked and kinda broken but at least I have you, someone who understands me’ honest to god was a lifeline at that point to me, and I don’t think anything else could have delivered it quite like Za/Dr did. I don’t doubt a lot of the fics were people channeling stuff, same way I was. I’ve noticed that, much like Yugioh, this is a fandom with a lot of people that have Stuff Going On they put in, because mental illness is a theme in the show, as little as it’s thoughtfully explored. Sort of a ‘well, we’ve got the blocks, let’s take it and use it to build our own catharsis.’

I’ve also noticed I tend to keep them the age I am- when I was about 13, they were show-aged. The one I found from when I was 14, I made Dib 14/15. And I’ve expressed I kind of regret not making Dib in AiP match my age now- 20, going on 21.

I feel like I’m exaggerating a little, and maybe I am since this is my experiences told through the funhouse mirror of fractured memory, but I also talked to myself. Like, a fair amount. Out loud. I could go entire days without talking to any other students unless I was forced to, because no one would ever talk to me first or respond if I tried, so I was sort of in a ‘why even bother?’ mode by freshman year. Everyone knew me, and already was afraid of or weirded out by me because of how often I was in and out of the principal’s office. 

(The biggest chunk of the bullying, besides name-calling and the other typical stuff, was riling me up and then getting me in trouble for snapping back. It was the same people over and over, so it took less and less to get me angry over time, so by fourth or fifth grade I was going off over seemingly nothing, but really, it was just piling a bunch of sticks on top of every other thing that had already been hurled at me, so I looked like rigged dynamite but they never looked who was lighting the matches.)

JTHM was pretty important to me for similar reasons as IZ, although that was more catharsis, the idea of just being able to get rid of people who were hurting me. I’ve said before the ‘I wish someone would just turn me off and... fix me’ panel was another one of those ‘holy shit someone else knows this feeling’ moments.

Things finally started turning around for me at about 15 when I just broke down crying at a family event and my mom pulled me aside and I was sent to therapy and got medication. Long story short, it worked, and I’m mostly better on the depression front.

Bringing this back around to IZ, it’s been kind of incredible to come back and have the fandom be- well, honestly, I can’t ever remember it being this active. I was terrified to interact directly in a way that wasn’t reading things and pushing my own content out into the void, not talking to anyone one on one. By 13, I was better about it, and soon before 14 was when I made my tumblr and started actually talking to people. I recently stumbled across age discourse from that time through tumblr’s ‘more posts like this’ function and it kind of surprised me, but I guess it’s always been there.

I’ve said before that when I remove the rose-colored glasses, my experiences weren’t always great. FC hate was something that kept me from making ocs until just a few years ago, and shipping hate was often homophobia-related. But death threats and shit were not as common, nor was the rigid 'if you like this you’re a terrible person’.

I’m just gonna end this with saying yeah, without this series I may not have had the feeling of being genuinely understood or the outlet I needed for a bunch of shit going on at the time, so IZ is really really important to me and people who shit on a ship that helped me a lot because of something that the creator said nearly 20 years after the fact can eat my ass.