#imagine being sociopathic and a empath can’t be me :’

[666666-r4cc00n-slut-666666]

To be honest, I should only have a bot following me. Fuck YALL humans, only THERIANS, otherkins, bots, and void creatures are allowed to be by my side at all cost. Y’all others will be killed, sacrificed, and be fucked by the holy devil

[feelingsfortheworld]

June 13th, 2023

Good morning. I’m so tired. I woke up at 3am AGAIN and I know this anxious knotting feeling all too well. I started a pilates challenge, which is nice. I have nightmares often. I am so terrified of losing people that I love. I just teared up watching a video about anger on Headspace because it’s true that as a black woman, anger is different. Anger needs to be monitored and stuffed away for fear of being “too emotional” or “dangerous.” The truth is, practically all of my strongest forms of anger are fueled by an even stronger, overwhelming depression or sadness. Yeah, I am pretty emotional. It scares me. My ex and I always said that we wish we could switch; she gets my emotional depth and I get her indifference. Because when you fucking think about it, who’s better off? The sociopathic manipulative serial dater? Or the lovesick obsessive empath? No. My capacity for emotion is my biggest weakness and biggest strength. A fatal flaw that turns me inside out. Yes, of course I despise her, and I hated the way she treated me, and the way she was able to remove herself from my social media accounts within a day of us cutting contact. But I don’t think I could even imagine what it must’ve been like. Cutting me out for good so easily. And the ironic part is that I obviously still am me, and harbor all of these emotions, and it makes me super cautious about doing anything like she did. I don’t want to get hurt; that’s where I need her heartlessness. I don’t want to hurt people; that’s where I use my empathy. But that’s not how it is, is it? No. Instead I suffer with being absolutely terrified of both hurting and getting hurt. Flashbacks. I’m just sitting here remembering 8th grade summer when her hair was short and we could talk for hours about anything. What the fuck. How? Why? She made me the happiest but she made me the saddest. And now she’s nothing but calories and Wellbutrin. Nighttime. There’s this one angle when I look up where I get a searing pain in the back of my neck, and it’s even worse than the usual neck and shoulder pain. I wish I could just stretch it out, but I’ve tried. Eh. Probably worse from stress or something. Everything wrong with me always goes back to my mental health, which does make sense, seeing as that’s my brain. I called my parents today. Normal. Happy. I was calm and didn’t say anything concerning. I passed the eating question, got praised for my commitment to exercise, and talked joyously about my job. It’s not like I’m hiding a debilitating depression from them, but what good would it do to worry them, especially when anything that would “help” would probably make me feel worse. God. I sound like a suicidal 12 year old again. Thinking, no, knowing that everyone was better off without me, even the people that brought me into this world. I’m just. Existing. I feel empty. But not really. Just a little hollower than usual. My stomach started hurting randomly two different times today. I thought it was the excess of coffee that was keeping me standing, and it probably was, at least partially. But I have this nagging feeling like when I felt randomly nauseous when I started talking to my ex again. Nothing was really wrong with me. Well, nothing I exactly wanted to hear. Learning that my loss of appetite and weight loss was chalked up to anxiety and some deranged empathy was just sad to me. That’s it? No underlying cause? No secret illness? No tapeworm eating me from the inside? No. My doctor said “if we can’t fix the mood, we can’t fix the food.” And I think I just sat there numbly, knowing that my mental state is and has always been my hardest medical obstacle. Fuck, it landed me in the ER. Gave me some scars. Mental trauma. Of all the things that could’ve been wrong with me, I dreaded hearing the answer that I think I already knew. You’re losing your grip again. 

[watchinghannibal]

Season 1 Episode 1

I said I would go back and start at the beginning, and here I am! After I wrote the first post, it was clear that this a live blog experience, meaning I think this is best consumed while watching or right after watching the Hannibal episode. Therefore, I’ll be putting in some timestamps so that people know where I am in the episode without me having to stop the flow of my commentary. I am watching on Netflix. Here we go!

My very first impression of this show, knowing nothing but that it was a crime show with a cannibal involved, was that I was about to get the displeasurable BBC Sherlock experience. There’s a popular video on YouTube that intricately explains what I mean (https://youtu.be/LkoGBOs5ecM), but the short version is that we have a detective who can magically solve crimes that the viewer could NEVER solve on their own. You see Will, looking at a crime scene, and rewinding it in his head - something that I admit could possibly be done with the visual evidence laid before him. But then...

2:04 “This is my design”. Will has not only visualized the crime but he now knows the “psychology” of the killer, simply by looking at the scene. There are certainly ways to deduce the generic mindset of a killer from a crime scene - a person stabbed 100 times is most likely a crime of passion - but to know that the killer wanted the man to watch his paralyzed wife bleed to death is just not possible. 

But this is a work of fiction, and I’m willing to put reality aside to believe that Will can do this. The story he creates in the first scene has logic, it’s not unreasonable. What comes next is what really appalled me and drove me to write this blog.

4:46 Big, mean FBIman comes in and asks where Will falls “on the spectrum”. Rude, to start. Will then describes a spectrum that goes from Asperger’s to narcissist/sociopath and declares himself autistic because he doesn’t like being social. However, in the next sentence, he says he has empathy and imagination. Okay, so now I know what I’m dealing with - a Psychodynamic BBC Sherlock, based on psuedopsychology and wikipedia-level psychyoanalyses. The writers, five minutes into the show, have displayed a massive misunderstanding of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), sociopathy, and personality psychology.

But that’s okay - psychopathology is an advanced and technical field. It makes sense that this American crime TV show doesn’t get it all right. I won’t forgive the mistakes they make because honestly I see this show as offensive to people with ASD, but again I’m watching fiction so I’m willing to continue watching and give my opinions about the psychology that comes up. 

11:32 Will finds the girl impaled by antlers in her own home. He chokes her in his little replay and this is when I started to become uncomfortable about how this show treats violence towards women. In the first scene, Will replayed the crime. This time, he just pounced and choked her. That’s not what happened to this girl - she was killed, impaled, and then placed back in her bed. So why did we see Will choking her?

14:05 Very good doggo scene. There are many good doggos in this scene. Good job to all involved.

15:28 I thought to myself, ooh is this gonna be a scary show? I’m into that. I think if this shows goes more towards horror, I’m more willing to allow all 

USE THE LADIES ROOM

to allow or at least tolerate the women choking shit. Quick note about sociopaths: sociopathy is a personality disorder in which the person is unable feel some or any emotions. They sometimes act in ways that harm others because they are unable to understand how their actions make others feel and further unable to empathize about others who are harmed. Not all sociopaths are bad people or do bad things. Some actively try to understand others and fit into society.

21:34 Will magically discovers the killer eats his victims and we are shown our first view of Hannibal eating a beautiful meal of dubious origins. I liked the imagery and contrast there. The gory forensic morgue, the mortifying realization of cannibalism, and then boom - a delicate and indulgent show of pleasure.

I actually really like Hanny and maybe it’s just ‘cause of Mads, but I’m sure I’ll figure out why I like him soon enough.

FIBman barges into Hanny’s perplexing and massive office. May I also note I hate FBIman. He has bad energy - he seems like the kind of person to call a psychologist a tree hugger.

26:18 Hanny analyzes Will in public. Again, so very rude. And might I add, against the code of therapists, the Goldwater Rule, to not make public psychological assumptions about people who did not ask for help.

28:26 Again I am questioning why I’m seeing a full naked woman impaled. I’m not against gore, but I guess since I’ve watched ahead a bit I just kinda know this pattern continues and it irks me. I promise I’m trying to turn off my angry scientist brain.

He loves women he LOVES them that’s why he eats them!! Love.

I can’t imagine lungs tasting good Hannibal. Or maybe he’s just a good cook. Damn the little smile Hanny gives to that tomato. Thank you Mads.

More SPOOKY visions, this time a feathery deer. Why does it have feathers? I guess that’s scarier? No, that... can’t be it. Is it because the call the killer a shrike? That might be it.

32:03 Are you reconstructing his fantasies? Oh Hanny please give me a full Freudian report on the shrike please. Oh he’s just gonna toy with Will, darn.

36:52 This made me want to keep watching the show. I mean I assumed Hannibal the Cannibal was a bad guy but this was a cool way to solidify the viewer’s suspicions. THEY KNOW!!!!!!!!!

Now Will rewinds a crime scene he was actually involved in. Hanny acts so chill he’s like, huh, would ya look at that? I also appreciate that Will legit looks like someone witnessing a horrible crime and panicking. Sometimes in crime or horror shows, the detective is like, yeah he ripped her insides out, just another Tuesday.

Big Bad FBIman is so fucking mad and Dr. Mom is like fuck you, you hurt my BOY! Those 2 really suck you guys. Will is not a child, Dr. Mom, and he did NOT ask for your help. Hanny has the balls to be holding this girl’s hand.

Okay guys, sorry this post was a bit less funny, but I wanted to articulate why this show is not good to me and why I feel like I can make fun of it without taking it seriously. I want this blog to be a chance to laugh and maybe learn a bit about real psychology. Thanks!

[astyle-alex]

Common Sense Meets the Autism Spectrum:

| a Parental Aide for ALL |

Last month was Autism Awareness Month, and in honor of that I've whipped up a little Parental Aide to help all grown-ups understand neuro-divergence a tiny bit better. I meant to post it here during the last week of April, but I forgot because of the craziness with Finals... But since Autism and neurodivergence doesn’t just magically go away at the end of April, here’s a little skim of it now:

I've recently been chatting with  a new consultation client / parent whose child has been recently diagnosed with Autism, and it got me thinking about the unfortunate nonsense surrounding the entire societal black hole of neuro-atypical / neuro-divergent presentations, especially in 'unusual' cases.

The first thing that needs to be said is IT'S A SPECTRUM, and it's honestly a comprehensive population spectrum, which means that EVERYONE IS ON IT.

Yes, say it with me: Everyone is on the Autism Spectrum.

From being perfectly, generically neuro-typical humans to rage-murder psychopaths to non-verbal, high-physical autistic kids to sociopathic con-artists. It's a SPECTRUM.

Accepting that is the first part of understanding it. And it's sometimes helpful to know in order for parents still in diagnosis shock to have something that reconnects them to their child.  If you've recently received  a diagnosis and you've dissociated at all, or know someone who is in that situation, knowing that the parents and the child involved are both still on the same spectrum, can help.

(It's a sense of cohesion and sameness that parents dream up for offspring, and can be problematic if over-done, which is why parents sometimes force their hobbies / goals onto children or react poorly to LGBTQ+ explorations / self-discoveries, both of which are fodder for plenty of other posts).

Once the spectrum is accepted, we can move on to understanding it better, and to diagnosing attributes of it that are affecting  our lives.  Knowing these attributes can help us navigate them, even in a capacity where the effect of them is not so severe that we call it a neurodivergence.

There's a stigma with mental illness, and autism is a trigger word regarding that, but it shouldn't be. We don't (as much, any more, at least) shame people who don't have clinical anxiety, but still exhibit crowd skittishness or phone distress or choice paralysis. And, honestly, mild autism frequently presents as anxiety, in our current popular understanding, as it's often limited to one or two aspects of life that provoke dramatic aversion responses where as actual, general anxiety is usually a more evenly distributed with lower-key hesitance / avoidance.  Mild autism also presents as ADD / ADHD (and in my opinion the ADD / ADHD diagnosis tools are essentially boiling things down to 'not a psychopath but probably autistic, but not like the autism in in the popular imagination').

We accommodate the small symptoms of both autism and anxiety, adjust what we can and power through what we can't.

That adjustment is a lot easier when we know the triggers for the distress.

Now, the scaling systems I'm about to share are not professional, not part of the DSM, and not a tool of formal diagnosis. Consult a licensed professional before taking any big steps, but take a look at these scaling systems to help start a conversation (even if it's only with yourself). I might have another post on adjustment strategies, because these don't really address the links between presents-as-anxiety and autism, but for now, we're just gonna look at how to start asking questions and how to wrap your brain around the biggest bit of the autism concept.

Again, none of this is a diagnosis or a practical guide on how to cope, but it is helpful to be generally informed enough to start recognizing issues / asking questions about what else might be affected by a given  place on a scale.

So, Autism is a spectrum, right?

Well, technically, it's multiple spectrums.

There are several sub-spectrums that layer over each other.

The crux of it, the most basic version specific to autism, is this:

Understands Emotion  --  vs  --  Does NOT Understand Emotion.

Now there are varied layers of that, such as  'displayed' emotion (like in facial expressions), or 'tonal' emotion (like voice tones), or even  'conceptual' emotion (as in the basic cause / nature of emotionality).

Plenty of kids understand Tonal Emotion (hearing and recognizing the difference between Mum is angry and Mum is happy), but not Conceptual (this is called being young, and usually gets grown out of as kids actually experience {and label} more emotions, the process starts at age 3 or 4, but honestly continues for most of life). Or kids may be able to hear tonal changes and interpret them accurately, but they don't read faces well (this is either a significant indicator of some sort of disconnect or, can indicate that the facial expressions they have seen shift do not shift in a way that is consistent with tonal changes {like if a parent is angry and tries to hide it with a smile}.). Some kids can track the changes in tone and expression but can connect them to a concept (such as 'fear' which doesn't develop as a concept to children until about age 5~7, even in horror-story situations, like children in warzones, only get a really nuanced concept fear a year or two earlier).

The second BIG scale to assess things on is intro- or outro-spective, and it's a 2-for1:

- misunderstand -- VS -- understands OWN emotions  

--  vs  --

- misunderstand -- VS -- understands OTHERS' emotions

AND misunderstands or understands the CAUSES of emotions in self / others, and why those causes and interpretations may be different for various individuals (which requires understanding the concept of there even being varied individuals, a process that ).

This is the line between "I like it, so others DO" vs  "I like it, so others MIGHT", that is difficult for young children. Having a distinct sense of a separate self is actually a complicated psychology process, and it takes over a year for most infants to even recognize that they have a reflection. If understanding the self/others division stays extremely difficult passed age 7-ish, we maybe should look more closely. But at the same time, it's rarely before that 5~7 range when kids begin to understand that shopping for a birthday present for a friend involves thinking about what the friend would like, and not what the kid themselves like.

And there's still gonna be moments of grown-up fan-rage at why don't people ship my ship?,  but all we might wanna do is limit time on Reddit or Tumblr when in anxiety mode.

The final BIG spectrum used in understanding these autism specific neuro-disconnects is one that revolves around concern for the disconnect:

Does not fully understand all aspects of Emotion and CARES that they don't.

--  vs  --

Does not understand and does NOT CARE.

This disconnect leads to Performative Emotion, which means acting the part of emotional responses without a full understanding of all aspects of them. Sometimes this is good, as in exhibiting quiet displeasure even though I think this warrants screaming because, I don't wholly understand what I or others feel, but I do understand the appropriate  / expected response. It can also be very bad, as in someone who understands the emotional response to pretend to have when a pet dies and is aware that doing so can cover that the pet was killed intentionally by said someone.

The last relevant spectrum isn't one that most people find critical, but I think it's important to delineate this one from the caring aspect. The previous note is specifically about caring in regards to the subjects understanding of emotion--and exclusively their understanding of emotion.

It is not a measure of concern for other respects of life, that spectrum is:

Sympathy   --   vs   --   Empathy

Now, defining terms is important here.

- Sympathy = care for how others feel

- Empathy = understanding / comprehension of how others feel

Someone who self-refers as an 'Empath' is actually expressing a high sympathy response, as in, I understand your pain so well, I feel it myself. What they mean to say, is that they understand the feeling and its causes well, and they care so much that they cause themselves to experience it.

This is also the line between Sociopaths and Psychopaths, as most people know it. The truth is a lot more nuanced, but basically, a Sociopath often lacks Sympathy, but has Empathy, where a Psychopath most often lacks both.

A Sociopath understands that they have a disconnect, cares that they do, and hides it by performing the emotive responses they are aware are appropriate (for the most part, occasionally making some exceptions due to exhaustion with the performance, or a lack of genuine care allowing for selective exploitation--making them great sales people / CEO's / business people / lawyers / writers / con-artists / Sherlockian private detectives etc).

A Psychopath either doesn't understand they have a disconnect, doesn't care that they do, or both. They rarely perform emotions and therefore often draw people in who feel trapped and in need of counter culture. They make great cult leaders, but not much else (occasionally business people, but some of them are cult leaders by a pseudonym). They truly CANNOT conform, and that can be seductive / freeing to others, but they also cannot conceive of anyone who decides to follow them ever changing their mind or not experiencing exactly the same  emotions / emotive responses to stimuli as they do.

BOTH are considered extreme presentations of their respective trait.

People with both very high and very low sympathy get exhausted around others.

Because experience other's emotions or pretending to care about others' emotions is HARD. It's work and it's exhausting on both ends.

People with both very high and very low empathy get anxious in not being around others for prolonged periods.

High-Em usually worries over current states (ie, what if something happened to them or what if they hate me now), whereas Low-Em usually worries over reunions (did I forget something someone else would've remembered, birthday, holiday, or that I was gonna bring you something we discussed).

And, as always, Presentations vary. HUGELY.

But sometimes, being told you're looking at an abstract a picture  of a dog, helps you spot the dog in the ink squiggles.

'Normal' isn't a fixed point, it's a range within every single subject presenting mild deviations that come together to form an average in a single person, and are then averaged again across populations.

Such data can always be understood better. And better understandings allow better accommodations to be made.  

Therefore, a given person's place on any part of any one of these spectrums needs to be assessed and reassessed constantly.

Also, if you're interested in learning more / supporting Autism Advocacy, check out a few more resources, but for the love of god DO NOT give money to Autism Speaks. Take a looks at THIS and do some research of your own! ^_^

Again, this is just a vague baseline, and it doesn't address symptoms like Face Blindness (in ability to recognize people by faces) or stimming (self-stimulation or emotive overwhelm release) or even environmental sensitivity (extreme dislike / like of certain noises, colors, light levels / sources, tactile sensations). Even so, it might be informative enough to start getting a conversation started and it'll be helpful for me to refer back to this one while making other Spectrum related posts.

^_~

For more on what I’m getting up to (and for more timely updates), check me out on Patreon!

[linkspooky]

Oh! Top 5 Kimetsu no Yaiba characters?

I only have four characters I’d truly call faves from Kimetsu no Yaiba, but let’s go!

1. Doma - “Human emotions are nothing to me, like mere dreams…” 

Every time someone claims that Doma is the only demon without a tragic backstory I want to fight them. Apparently most people think that children who grow up in cults aren’t traumatized at all and grow into rational and well-adjusted adults. 

Doma is a character who shows no signs of empathy. However, he was a character who was never taught or shown any signs of empathy before. By the time he was an indpendenent adult he gave up on understanding it. Doma despises the cult, but it’s telling that he always stays there because it’s truly all he knows. He laughs at the people who come to the cult to distract themselves from the misfortunes of their life, but Doma too stays with the cult as a distraction for how empty and small his own life is. 

Doma really was too mature for a child, but also too immature as well. He was forced to grow up too fast because neither of his parents actively wanted to parent him. People act like he’s a born sociopath for being observant enough as a kid to notice that the all the adults who entered into his life were only there to use him. Kids are sharper than you expect, but also duller as well. Doma never realized that life was any different outside of his environment. He stayed in that childish mindset forever, and egocentric little kid who only saw himself first and foremost. That’s not the thinking of a sociopath, it’s the thinking of a child, children can’t imagine viewpoints other than their own because they haven’t developed empathy yet. 

There’s this assumption that people are either born good empathic people, or they’re not, but empathy is a quality that’s developed and learned. It was almost natural Doma became a demon by the end because not a single person in his life treated him as a human. Yet, despite reveling in being a monster Doma is still desperately searching for some meaning in his life too. He wants to have friends. He wants to feel the same way that other people. Even if it’s just a hollow imitation on his part, that was something in his lifetime but never got even up until the end. Doma’s this tragedy of empathy, because all he ever wanted was to feel the same way that everyone else did, to have the same connections they did, but because he was so isolated he only destroyed every small chance he did have at learning to empathize with another person. 

2. Shinobu -“Yes I’m angry, Tanjiro. I’ve always been angry.” 

I think Shinobu is interesting because she’s a bad person. I wish people would stop trying to paint her as a wholly good person who was loved by everyone around her. Shinobu’s character introduction is going out of her way to unnecessarily torture a demon for fun, and her attitude implies she has done this before. Torture is a universally bad thing, even if you’re doing it to a bad person. 

I’m not trying to moralize Shinobu. I think she’s much more interesting this way, as a fundamentally flawed person. A cracked vase that can never truly be full. Yes, Shinobu is loved by a lot of people, but she’s also fundamentally unable to receive that love. She’s stopped living a long time ago, part of her stopped when her aprents died, and she gave up when her sister died. If Kimetsu no Yaiba were a more morally complicated story, Shinobu existing for the sole purpose of revenge would not be treated as a good thing. It’s an empty way of living, and the only thing Shinobu can do to keep living is to cling to all of the ugly and negative emotions inside of her. 

The most interesting version of Shinobu is just rotten at her core, because she’s let the rot sink in and fester, because she doesn’t want to let go of her anger towards demons. It’s rare female characters are allowed to be filled with such ugly emotions, or allowed to express them in terrible ways. Shinobu plays games at being a healer, at being a person capable of nurturing like her older sister, but it’s just an empty imitation that falls flat. Shinobu at least in regards to herself doesn’t want to heal, she doesn’t want to get better, she wants to stay wounded forever so she can keep taking out her pain on the demons around her. 

I like to think that when she summoned up a hallucination of her sister in her final moments to encourage herself, that was entirely a fabrication on her part. Shinobu wanted to imagine her sister who once told her to just quit the Demon Corps and find a way to live and be happy was just as angry as she was. Shinobu’s delusion of Kanae is a sister that validates her and tells her that she has to be angry, that she has to stand up and fight again, that there’s strength in this. And that’s exactly it, Shinobu at her very core wants to be strong. She hates being powerless and weak. I think Shinobu is at her best when her anger isn’t righteous. She doesn’t want to protect others - she wants to feel strong. 

3. Iguro Obanai - “I want to defeat Muzan and die. I hope that will cleanse my corrupted blood. If we reincarnate as humans in a world without demons I will definitely tell you that I love you.” 

I like how Iguro is nasty, and unpleasant, and also mean to the main character for really petty reasons. Shinobu’s trauma is easier for a lot of people to swallow because she doesn’t show it, she just puts on a mask of being nice and people buy into that mask. Iguro even though he wears a physical mask over his mouth is less good at hiding his disfigurement. 

Iguro’s very traumatized and he acts that way. He’s anti-social. He’s withdrawn. He doesn’t get along well with others. He’s prone to violent outbursts. The scars left with Iguro are so deep they’re permanent. And I believe it’s because down to his core, Iguro believes himself to be a bad and selfish person for surviving while half of his family died, and thinking only of himself with his escape. 

It’s not really his cursed blood that Iguro wants to escape from, but rather his trauma. He can’t find a way to live with his truama or accept himself so he seeks some escape with it by suicidally charging into battle. And that’s another thing that speaks to the permanency of his scars. Iguro is deeply in love with one person, but he can’t admit, or accept that love because he views the current iteration of himself as so unlovable. 

He can neither give or receive love, and yet there’s some small part of Iguro that wants to heal. He wants to feel okay again. I think there is a part of Iguro that is very selfish. The way he acts towards Mitsuri isn’t really romantic, his protectiveness and jealousy are signs of entitlement. However, the thing is traumatized people do end up feeling entitled to happiness. Iguro’s so terrified of losing Mitsuri because she’s the one good thing in his life, and because of that he’s unable to love her in a healthy way. 

Even if Iguro’s given up on himself and decided that he’s poison, unlike Shinobu I see that there’s some part of Iguro that genuinely wants to heal. He wants to feel like a good person, he wants to find someway to continue living, its just he thinks it’s impossible for him to. Iguro’s desire to die and be reborn is so compelling that I actually want to see him live and be forced to deal with the prospect of his slow healing rather than getting his wish to be redeemed by death. 

4. Sanemi Shinazugawa - “My Nemi is the kindest…” 

Tanjiro as a character is kind in a way that’s easy to digest. When he’s angry it’s always righteous anger. His kindness never becomes a difficult. Tanjiro never does anything that’s difficult to swallow. That’s okay, but it’s also not that deep. 

Sanemi’s kindness and his anger are both a part of him. His cruelty does not detract from how kind he is, his kindness doesn’t excuse his cruelty. Sanemi is driven to act cruel, to be merciless, to be vicious not because he doesn’t care about people but he cares too much and the loss of almost everyone he’s loved in his life disfigures him permanently. 

Sanemi is a little kid who hunted demons all on his own for years by letting them fight him until he bled. He always fights by intentionally harming himself, hence why he shows his scars at all time and makes no attempt to hide them. Sanemi as a person is damaged to his core, but he still retains that kindness because it’s a part of who he is. 

Sanemi is angry because he’s kind. He’s violent because he’s kind. He’s so afraid of losing others again, the only way he knows how to be with them is to protect others from afar. Sanemi thinks he can abuse his brother, but as long as he protects him from demons from a distance it will all be okay in the end. 

What I like about Sanemi’s narrative is that it wasn’t. His actions ended up hurting his brother far more than helping him, the more distance he put between them, the more Genya threw himself into harm to get his brother to acknowledge him. At the end everything Sanemi did to protect him amounted to nothing, and Sanemi is the one protected and comforted by his brother when he should have been the one taking care of him. I think the author rushed to the tragic ending rather than letting the characters developed to get there, but still there’s an interesting choice that Sanemi is the one to survive and not Genya. Sanemi who has always wanted to just go off and die somewhere eaten by a demon while his brother gets to live happily. Now Sanemi’s never going to fix things with that brother, and nothing he can do will make up for what he did to Genya. However, he still has to find a way to keep living for himself. Watching broken people trying to find a way to keep on living is the primary reason why I read fiction in the first place. 

[bellatrixobsessed1]

Azula Week: Day 3 - Nothing

Prompt: Friendship Pair: N/A Song: Krypteria - God I Need Someone

Summary: Azula feels as though it is impossible for her to make or keep friends.

Friendship means nothing to her. No, that is not true. It means many things to her.

Suffering, betrayal, and regret. Lost potential, eventual hatred, and shame. And she doesn’t want it. She doesn’t want any part of it. She’d rather be alone. She’d rather be alone but the isolation is tearing her apart.

Friendship. It takes trust, compassion, and understanding. Three things that she doesn’t and will never have. Because she is broken. Something in her is so terribly broken beyond repair and this thing keeps her from connecting and empathizing with people.

Sociopath. That’s what they call her. She is beginning to think that it is true. Why else would she struggle so terribly to talk to people. Struggle so terribly to find a friend. Struggle to muster up compassion, to think of someone other than herself.

She wishes that she were different; less cold, more approachable. She wishes that she were the likable sort. The kind of person that others wanted to comfort or, at the very least, feel sorry for. But they are as cold to her as she is to them and she doesn’t blame them.

She wishes that she could bring herself to admit that she has all of these wishes. But she doesn’t have that kind of courage. Her bravery is apparently limited to the battlefield and politics, just like her social skills.

Azula slumps to the floor of her room, thinking for the thousandth time that she is unsalvageable, wondering just what is wrong with her. What keeps her from understanding other people.

She doesn’t consider that it has something to do with how few struggles she has seen. Not until she completely unravels so deeply that she isn’t sure she’ll be able to claw her way out. On most days she is numb and more unfeeling than usual. To the point where her mother’s relentless chatter no longer phases her when the woman manifests upon the surface of a mirror or in the reflection of a pond.

She doesn’t consider that it has something to do with how little she had suffered in the past until she runs again. They make it so easy for her. They leave her so many opportunities. And finally she seizes one. She makes her way out of the institution and onto the streets.

They aren’t kind to her. They leave her starved and dirty, and twice as broken as before she had fled. And this time they don’t come for her. She realizes, with horror, that they truly don’t care for her. She has fled and been captured several times already, they simply don’t give a damn so long as the only one she hurts is herself.

Maybe that is what they had counted on. Maybe they are aware that she has two options; returning to the facility or testing her luck on the streets where no one will have anything to do with someone so obviously affiliated with the nearby institution.

Even if they do recognize her, she doesn’t mean anything at all to anyone. Her title is empty. She is empty.

She manages another several days, trying to prove to herself and to everyone that she can handle it. That she isn’t just some spoiled and pampered disgrace. That she can make a life for herself without her birth advantages. And in another several days, all she has proven is that she is a bigger failure than she had anticipated initially. The walk back to the institution is a special type of shame walk. She fears that they won’t take her back. No one will take her back.

But they do and she doesn’t plan to wander off again. Maybe that is exactly what they wanted. Granted, she has also decided that she doesn’t want to go home either. She doesn’t really have a place there anymore. She can’t function like everyone else.

.oOo.

Zirin slides a bowl of bland noodles to her. She takes it quietly in her hands and stares at it. “Another hard day?”

Azula looks up. Every day is hard, really.

“Yeah, I think that it’s one of those days. Everyone seems kind of moody today.” Zirin shrugs. “I think that it’s like a thing, ya know. Everyone gets wild at the same time.” She wriggles her fingers at the word wild.

Azula doesn’t feel particularly wild. She just feels sad. But at least she is feeling something. She forces herself to take a mouthful of noodles. Zirin had taken the liberty to fetch it for her, she might as well show some appreciation.

“Do they taste good?” Zirin asks. “And by good, I mean do they taste edible?”

“They’re fine.” She finally says.

“She talks!” Zirin declares loudly to her group of friends.

Though Azula can’t really blame her entirely. Zirin has been trying to strike up conversation with her for weeks now only to be met with silence. She isn’t sure why the girl is so persistent. “Occasionally.” She finally replies to the remark.

“I told you that today was one of the weird days.” Zirin jokes. “What made you decide to talk today?”

She shrugs. “Because I want to know why you are so interested in me.”

“I don’t know.” She admits. “I guess that it’s because you seem like you need someone to talk to.”

“Have you considered that there is a reason that nobody does?”

She ponders this. “Well why wouldn’t they?”

“Because I am a sociopath.” She replies nonchalantly.

Suddenly everyone is quiet again. She finishes her meal and retreats back to her isolation, glad that she hadn’t tried to get close to Zirin. That would have hurt..

.oOo.

She doesn’t see Zirin again until she finds her arguing with someone that she can’t see. Azula’s stomach lurches. She might as well be looking at herself. The girl is angry and distraught, a strange sight considering how chipper Zirin typically is.

Azula lingers at the end of the hallway for a moment, wondering if it is a good idea to approach her. She knows that she doesn’t like to be fussed with when she is speaking to her mother, she imagines that Zirin wouldn’t care for it either. Especially if she were to take her by surprise.

She waits until Zirin begins to calm to make her approach. The girl looks up, her eyes seem to pass right through her. For some reason this sinks Azula’s stomach. Her eyes look so far away and Azula’s belly flutters nervously. But that isn’t quite right… She isn’t particularly nervous. But the feeling isn’t pleasant.

For once it isn’t she who is chasing and speaking with phantoms. For once it isn’t she who is breaking. And yet she feels as though she might as well be.

“Zirin.” She greets, not entirely sure how to begin this conversation, not sure if she should. She has never gone out of her way to initiate conversation before. This is something of an impulse and she is already regretting it.

Zirin looks up before she has a chance to fully second guess and make her exit. “Azula?”

When Azula doesn’t reply any further she continues, “how much of that did you hear?”

Azula shrugs, “just the end, but I couldn’t tell what you were saying.”

Zirin rubs the back of her head. “That’s probably a good thing.” She adds an uncomfortable laugh. “Yeah, so, you caught me, I’m one of those types”

“Those types?”

“The ones who hear things.” She mutters.

She knows that this is a good time to mention that she is hear for the same reason, but she can’t seem to bring herself to do so. So she simply stares straight ahead, feeling terribly awkward.

“You think that it’s weird, don’t you? Everyone else does.”

Azula swallows. “Do you know why I’m here?”

“Because you’re a sociopath?”

It comes like a slap to the face and she feels as though her emotions may bubble over and leave her in tears again. The only thing that holds her together is the knowledge that she is the one who had mentioned it to Zirin.

“I’m here because I see things…” she trails off. Among other things, she adds to herself.

Zirin smiles. “It’s good to know that I’ll have someone who will understand.”

Azula tries to smile back, but it doesn’t quite work. It never quite works. It aids in her inability to connect. Her face falls again, “Don’t get your hopes up. I don’t empathize…”

Zirin tilts her head, “but you stopped here to talk to me?”

“Yes.” Azula confirms.

“Why?”

“Because…” she trials off trying to piece together her own reasoning. “I guess that it’s...because I’m always alone when it happens to me.”

“So you decided to talk to me because you know how it feels?”

“Something like that.” Azula replies quietly. That sounded about right.

“In other words, you are being empathetic?”

Azula takes a deep breath. “This might be the first time.”

Zirin snickers, some of that mischievous perkiness begins to show through again, “gee, I must be really special!”

.oOo.

Special doesn’t quite cover it. Zirin has come to mean quite a lot to Azula. Despite any protests, she seats herself by Azula at mealtimes and her friends usually come too. And for the first time, she doesn’t feel so isolated.

Sometimes they don’t talk. Sometimes they don’t even look at each other, but it is nice to have them there. To know that they are around. It is like having TyLee around again. But there is something different. Something...genuine. Zirin doesn’t linger around because Azula has made sure to carefully wrap her around her finger. In fact, Azula doesn’t do anything at all to try to make her come back. To force her to talk to her.

It is a rare day, one where Zirin comes to visit her dorm alone. It is a day as good as any to finally ask her why. Why she sticks around when Azula can offer her nothing useful at all.

Zirin fixes her with that big, goofy grin, “because I like you.”

“Why?” She pushes. “I need to know why.” They have nothing at all in common save for the thing that has landed them there.

Zirin seems to grow serious. “I just do. You don’t really talk much, but when you do it’s always fascinating. It’s also really nice to have someone to talk to about the hallucinations. You’re one of the only people who doesn’t look at me differently or like I’m dangerous.” She pauses. “Your my friend.”

“Friend…” Azula trails off. “I don’t think that I’ve ever had…”

Zirin takes her hand. “Well then I’m glad to be your first. I know that you’re going to make more of them, but until then, you have me and my girls?”

Azula doesn’t squeeze hands back but she doesn’t jerk hers away either. “Thank you.” She whispers. “I...I don’t want to be alone anymore.”

Zirin beams brightly at her, “you won’t be, I promise.”

[fierceawakening]

Against Emoathy Liveblog 20

“Empathy can also support broader moral principles. If someone were to slap me, it would be unpleasant, physically and psychologically. This in itself won’t make me realize that it’s wrong for me to slap other people. But if I feel empathy for those who are slapped—if I can appreciate that it feels to them the way it feels to me—this can help me arrive at a generalization: If the slapping is wrong when it happens to me, it might well be wrong when it happens to someone else.

In this way, empathy can help you appreciate that you are not special. It’s not only that I don’t want to be slapped, it’s also that he doesn’t want to be slapped, and she doesn’t want to be slapped, and so on. This can support the generalization that nobody wants to be slapped, which can in turn support a broader prohibition against slapping. In this regard, empathy and morality can be mutually reinforcing: The exercise of empathy makes us realize that we are not special after all, which supports the notion of impartial moral principles, which motivates us to continue to empathize with other people.”

Hey! My position! Sweet!

Laid out pretty well, though it is just Kant.

“This is how the magic works, how empathy can do good. But what are its actual effects in the real world? One way to try to answer this is to look at the relationship between how empathic and how moral a person is. Are empathic people morally better, on average, than less empathic people?”

Fuck yeah! Data, show me it!!

“But before getting to the findings, it’s worth noting that this is difficult research to do well. It’s hard to measure the good that people do, how moral they are. And it’s hard to measure how empathic people are.”

I hadn’t thought of that? Though I do feel like what some of my autistic interlocutors call lack of empathy sounds more like what I’d call lack of emotional intensity, which might be this very problem...

“In principle, there are a lot of ways to test where any individual lies on the continuum. These include subtle methods such as those described above, like assessing brain activation in the neural areas associated with empathy. But such methods are expensive and difficult. So most large-scale experiments assess empathy the same way that they assess narcissism or anxiety or open-mindedness or any of the other traits psychologists are interested in—they ask a series of questions.”

I’d honestly wonder about underreporting. I know for me some of the questions on questionnaires are very tough as I’m honestly not sure when I do and don’t Respons warmly as opposed to when i do and don’t HELP. Tests that measure how close I get or how much eye contact i make, or what my tone of voice is, measure neither how helpful I am nor how intensely I am feeling. I can and often do look away because I can’t handle facelookat but feel intensely.

Which I recall being one of the things the autistic community used to say in the oughts when the argument used to be not “we lack empathy and that’s ok” but rather was “nts only know what nt empathy looks like,” a thing I better understood.

But moving on!

“For one, it’s hard to tell whether you are measuring actual empathy as opposed to how much people see themselves or want others to see them as empathic. To put it crudely, some people who aren’t actually empathic might believe they are or want others to believe they are and answer accordingly.”

Community narcissism does seem to be a real thing (I doubted it a few days ago but Since have seen that it is in papers)

“Another problem is that these studies rarely factor out other aspects of individuals that might well correlate with high empathy, such as intelligence, self-control, and a broader compassionate worldview.”

What makes people have the compassionate worldview is my big question here. Mostly “is it a feature of personality or is it a reasoned conclusion or both.” Bc if it’s a feature of personality then even if it’s NOT empathy levels we might STILL not avoid “most sociopaths/narcissists are bad news,” which is the thing I’m being called bigoted for.

“The most popular measures include questions that are related to empathy in the sense of mirroring others’ feelings, but they also have questions that tap other capacities, such as kindness or compassion or interest in others.”

I’m not yet convinced you’re right but IF YOU ARE, this may be why I keep coming back to the idea empathy is an ingredient in these things. Because the tests that measure it as “do you want to help” which implies your empathy is higher I’d you answer yes.

“The Perspective Taking scale does involve some empathy-related items, but it also explores the presence of a certain open-minded attitude when it comes to disagreements. The items include: ● I believe that there are two sides to every question and try to look at them both. ● I try to look at everybody’s side of a disagreement before I make a decision. Again, one can score high on both of these items without being in the slightest bit empathic, not even in a cognitive empathy sense. Or one can score low on these items but be highly empathic in every other sense.”

Wait, how are these things not indicators of cognitive empathy? If I can imagine how the racist feels, I’m much less likely to decide he’s just crazy, and if I decide that, I’m much more likely to tell hi. He is wrong rather than punch him or do a callout. So I’m both kinder and more able to be calm.

“The last two scores—Empathic Concern and Personal Distress—are seen by many as reflecting the core of empathy. But these scales don’t adequately distinguish between feeling others’ pain and simply caring about other people. Items on the Empathic Concern scale, for instance, include: ● I am often quite touched by things that I see happen. ● Sometimes I don’t feel sorry for other people when they are having problems. (reverse coded: low score = high empathic concern) ● I care for my friends a great deal. ● I feel sad when I see a lonely stranger in a group. These certainly tap something morally relevant about a person. But it’s not necessarily how prone they are to feel empathy; rather, it’s how much they care about other people.”

Okay but you haven’t yet shown that empathy and caring are unrelated, when your interlocutors are asserting they’re not separable. I’m very interested in whether you give evidence they are, or just more weird thought experiments.

“The Personal Concern scale has deeper problems because it basically measures how likely you are to lose your cool in an emergency. Items include: ● When I see someone who badly needs help in an emergency, I go to pieces. ● In emergency situations, I feel apprehensive and ill-at-ease. ● I tend to lose control during emergencies. Now this might have something to do with empathy. Perhaps highly empathic people are more likely to get upset during a crisis. But the connection with empathy is uncertain, particularly since it’s not made clear that the emergencies have to do with the suffering of others. Someone might freak out when a sewer pipe bursts or when there’s a tornado coming down the road, but this has nothing to do with empathy—or with compassion or altruism or anything like that.”

YEEEEEES!!!

You find allies in strange places sometimes. This is exactly what I’d say to the people who claim high empathy is bad because it implies you lose your head in a crisis. If there’s data that shows a correlation cool but I’ve never been able to figure it it.

People have thus idea in their head I think that someone is either empathetic or rational and never both. I’m very interested in why that is.

[inanawesomewave]

SOCIOPATH WALKS INTO A THERAPIST’S OFFICE

I started therapy.

There’s a common myth that people with ASPD won’t seek therapy, or won’t respond to it, that we’re far too high and mighty, too deep into our own sense of power and control that we feel therapy would hamper our greatness somehow, or that we would sense a game afoot and the therapy would turn into a back and forth of tensions and manipulations and ultimately become an irresistible power play to the sociopath who has found a new thrill in analysing the analyser. At best, it’s assumed we’ll flippantly disregard all offers for help and remain ignorant and unwell. At worst, people imagine a kind of Tony Soprano/Dr Melfi scenario, the game of life on hard mode, the ultra-violent psychopath fucking with the resilient therapist’s head, what a thrill, how entertaining and devastating everything we involve ourselves in eventually becomes. And this thinking comes from the notion that antisocials do not suffer, and perhaps I’ve been guilty of assuming  this myself or at least projecting it outward. That’s the nature of my personality disorder: I’m afraid of admitting any kind of weakness. But the studies that have been done that measure an antisocial’s reaction to therapy have some flaws. First of all, the samples are always violent, offending psychopaths, incarcerated in prison, and they’re all men, and they’re all on the severe end of the scale. Secondly, studies are never done about a sociopath willingly seeking therapy, only a sociopath (or indeed psychopath) who has been ordered by court to attend therapy, so there’s a couple of glaring errors there — of course people who didn’t want to have therapy in the first place aren’t going to respond. Of course violent psychopaths who have no remorse, rather than some capability for remorse, won’t respond to therapy. They’re already in prison, they’ve already committed their crimes. You can see how there’d be very little to gain there. 
 So why did I seek therapy? 
Because I am constantly, unyieldingly fucking my own life up, and I’m doing it in a way that often feels uncontrollable to me. Everything is a constant battle between the self that I know and the dark night of myself, the part I know is there but can’t actually make out. All I know is it lurks down the dimly lit allies and leaps out of the dark corners of my psyche, and all of this presents itself as a nervy, fizzing, buzzing bandsaw of baseline level contempt, outrage, and a deep sense of something, maybe sadness, that I don’t know the name of, because if you’ve got ASPD you’ve most likely also got alexithymia as a symptom — that is, a subclinical inability to identify or describe your own emotions, a profound lack of emotional attachment to yourself. And it makes sense; if you can’t empathise with other people, you sure as shit can’t empathise with yourself. And there’s that word I use all the time — lack. Everything about ASPD, sociopathy, is defined by lack. The lack I feel the most is the lack of things that make me a warm-hearted, warm-blooded human being, and the kicker is, I lack the language to even begin to talk to myself about that. 
And that was all fine and well, way back when I had no ambitions, no familial obligation, no partner I really had to care about. If I’m honest, before marriage, I only really loved one person romantically, and he tended to my antisocial nature like he was leaving out trash for a local raccoon to come snatch. Never fetishising enough for me to lose interest, but always teetering on the edge of fascination and admiration, and whilst I thought I may have been happy then — I was just wilder. I had no barriers, and for a time, that was perfect. But that guy killed himself, when everyone thought he was happy, and whilst we had both moved on with our lives by the time he decided to end his, it could be that man was using me as a carte blanche for self-destruction; a drinking buddy gone wrong, my no-tomorrow, no-consequences way of living was normal to me, but for all the compassion and beauty and light he had within him, what I thought were similarities in our personalities, were actually symptoms of his suicidality. So really, what did he know? And what if I end up knowing it too?
 Now I’m settled and happy — externally, I’m happy. I’m married to the love of my life. We have a beautiful perfect baby son together. I’m back at university and I’m working toward a career in forensic psychology. I like the house we have. I live close to people I care about. I love my friends. But for some reason, my pervading, reigning emotions are only rage and fear. So I hauled my ass to therapy and I can tell you now, I’m not the only sociopath in the world who's done this, we’re just not supposed to talk about it. But I’ll let you in on this one, and hope I don’t get kicked out of the circle. 

 One thing you’ll have noticed with this blog and probably with the antisocials in your life is that we are in a constant state of over-examining and analysing our own processes. To borrow a hackneyed metaphor about psychopathy, we run like machines. But the machine has malware, incredibly hard to detect, but everything is bugging from the deepest recesses and nothing is really working, although the machine’s kind of running fine even if too hot, too glitchy, sometimes it blows up. We think we know everything that can be known about ourselves and this is probably a protective mechanism. I know most of us come from a lot of childhood neglect and abuse, so it makes sense we'd internalise that critical parental voice telling us we’re useless, worthless, unlovable, and turn it into a kind of, “aha! You’re wrong! I know EXACTLY what I am at all times and last I checked, I was none of those things” fuck you to our childhoods. What I didn’t realise, and maybe you’re the same, is that deep down, perhaps I feel useless, worthless, and unlovable, only I wouldn't know if that were the case, because I don't know the names of my feelings. 
 My therapist is a good guy. He’s well-dressed, friendly, and empathic in a way that gives me pause, sometimes intimidates me. Twice now I've had these eerie, uncanny moments where he’s said “but you didn't deserve that, you were a child”, and visibly winced with pain as I've matter-of-factly spoken about my early experiences. I didn’t hate it. I don’t know if I loved it. I something-ed it. At the very least, I noted that he’d done that, appreciatively. He’s taught me things about myself too, gross ugly things, like lifting up a rock and showing me all these wriggling, dirty bugs beneath: “See that weird creature with a million legs and no eyes? Those are your narcissistic tendencies. You do have them. You have a bit of a superiority complex and that's why you don't like to talk to other people. It’s because you don’t love yourself and you’re transferring that onto others. You hate other people because what if they end up being your mother? That’s why you’ve got to be superior and mighty but it doesn’t materially mean anything. Oh, and you see that fucking huge worm there? That’s your dismissive-avoidant attachment style. You don't know this but you keep yourself at a distance from love and intimacy because you're frightened of it and you think if you remove yourself from it you'll be safe from it. Weird, right? Oh, and this thing, not sure if it's a slug or what, that’s your perfectionism that you’ve told yourself all your life is one of your most beneficial traits, look at it there writhing into itself. What you don't know about this peculiar beast is that it's hurting you and everyone around you. It’s not “drive”, it’s not “a will to succeed”, it’s a boorish sense of pride and self-imposed notion that you can't stop, ever, in case you die. And you know you can work and work and improve and improve and you can get the grades and get better ones and create targets and hit them all, but it won’t make you love yourself. And you’re holding a negative view of others who don’t work as hard as you but you know what, unlike you, they’re happy”.
Okay, he didn't word it in those ways but this is a blog, I’m here to keep you entertained I don't know what my goal is. A better relationship to myself? Maybe. Other people? Let’s not go crazy, I’m hardly an altruist. But honestly? I’d rather die than give my son the kind of life where, in 30 years time, he’s sitting in a therapist’s office, lifting up the rock, recoiling at the ugly creatures. Especially if one of those creatures is: “ever since your mother died you’ve felt nothing but pain and self-blame”. 

I’d go on to tell you how I feel about  this, but there’s no words I know of. There’s probably a lot of them that exist, though. I’ll keep you updated. 


[chebleedsink]

Narcissus’ Shadow

Do you ever find yourself covering for someone just because you feel bad for them, just quietly keeping to the shadowlands that they create for you? Maybe because they’re not all bad all the time, and in fact they can wonderful when they want to be? Because generally speaking, they treat most everyone (aside from yourself) really well. Maybe because you know their damage and toxic behaviors started in childhood, where they couldn’t choose to walk away from it? Or maybe because you know how alone and awful they feel on the inside all the time? Maybe because you’re empathetic enough that you not only can imagine, but can physically, mentally, or emotionally feel what it’s like to be them?

I know I do. It’s become second nature to me. I tend to side with the villains and “bad guys” in movies often too, for the same reasons. Really horrible people that do really horrible things, usually weren’t born that way, and they often had really horrible things happen to them first. Reminding myself that they are the hero in their own story isn’t a far stretch at all. I am even pretty certain that if I was ever held hostage, there would be a real possibility that I would develop Stolkholm syndrome if I saw the slightest trace of humanity left in my captor. I always think, “if only someone would love them unconditionally and hold some space for them, just give them the opportunity to change, they might not be villains anymore.” I’m sure the odds would be in favor of that being true some of the time, but some people are so caught up in their roles they play, that they can’t even see themselves for their behavior. Some people can see it, but can’t or won’t change it. Many of them just blame outside causes, while refusing to take any kind of responsibility for fixing things. They don’t want to be fixed. It’s not their problem.

I’m painfully aware that conditions like Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Borderline Personality Disorder, Bipolar Disorder, (and less commonly Psychopathy, and Sociopathy), at any point of their wide spectrums, wreak havoc in peoples lives, affecting not just the person suffering with them, but often everyone that comes in contact with them. Alongside generalized anxiety and depressive disorders, these extremely destructive personality disorders like NPD and BPD are taking the spotlight. Dare I say that our society currently supports and encourages the traits, behaviors, characteristics, and tendencies that are indicators of these disorders? Some people have figured out how to put these behaviors to good use, and they use them to unapologetically advocate for animal welfare, or starving children, environmental issues or other human right’s issues. Unfortunately though, that is probably the exception to the rule, and even when directing their attention at these just causes, they are still trampling the people that get in their way underfoot without a second thought.

So many people are either suffering from these disorders directly or indirectly, and so much mental and emotional damage is caused because of them. Someone with several of these traits wouldn’t even have to be considered disordered or even on the spectrum, (and they certainly don’t need to have been clinically diagnosed), in order to hurt the people around them. They are just as toxic in their own way. To know that highly empathetic people have turned into these people due to emotional numbing after feeling too many extreme emotions, as well as knowing people who were previously abused by this same type of person also become these people, is truly heart-breaking. It’s such a cruel cycle to see.

I know all of this, I know mental illness is not the mentally ill’s fault, I know it’s not fair to blame their damage on themselves, but I also know that many of these same people have been given opportunities to better themselves and they often choose not to. Again, with these types of disorders, those who are inflicted with them often can’t or won’t acknowledge that they need help, nor will they acknowledge the damage they cause. They very rarely see therapists for these particular issues, because to them, they aren’t their issues. Some of them can’t even feel bad about the things they do (due to a lack of empathy), even though they may have learned to act like they do. Some of them see reality completely backwards, where they honestly believe that everything they do to others, is actually what’s being done to them. Some of them are so good at fooling even themselves, and they have adapted so well to hiding, that they believe they are the empaths being abused in their various relationships. Empaths feel other peoples’ emotions, whereas narcissists, sociopaths, and psychopaths fake other peoples’ emotions. Sometimes it’s near impossible to tell the difference.

Aside from complete avoidance, how do you even begin to deal with these types of people in a healthy or productive way? Even worse, some of those people are just dipping a toe in and out of the spectrums of those disorders, and you can still see some hope for them. Hope that the switch won’t flip all the way, that they won’t be completely lost to it. Hope that they’ll come back around, or that meds and therapy could help. That hope is miserable. It destroys more people than the disorders themselves ever could. But for some of us, if there’s hope, we’ll still put ourselves in front of the train in the hope that we can help, in the hope that we can all be saved. Too often though, we are just hit by the train, and surviving and recovering from that train-wreck is a long and painful journey. Some of us never recover.

Even after spending the last 5 years cutting these types of people out of my life, there are some I can’t escape. It’s just not an option. So, to maintain the “peace”, I find myself still covering for them. I find myself treading water in the wake of their explosive fits and moods, just concentrating on the damage control to follow and on not drowning. And I am so tired of it, I hate it, I am done with it. It doesn't fix anything, and I'm pretty sure it always just perpetuates more problems than it solves, yet I still do it all the time.

Why? Why continue covering up their bad behavior behind the scenes? Why bite my tongue? Because I don't want to upset anyone, and they're already having a hard time, and if I don't have anything nice to say..., and it wouldn't make a difference anyway (-in fact it just causes more problems), and we have mutual friends, and they monitor my Facebook posts and have actually told me not to air my dirty laundry on social media (even though they do so regularly), besides, they’re not really that bad all the time, the list goes on.

I was so angry and upset the other night and I wanted nothing more than to vent on fb, mostly because writing is how I work through things, and because there are always a few people online to commiserate with who have gone through similar experiences, but once again, I didn't, because of all of the above reasons.

The next morning I thought I'd have calmed down a bit, but I hadn't. My brain was literally screaming at me to stop covering for him. Because it's not fair. And I know that. And I've literally put up with it for a decade. That's a long time to put myself on the quiet chair for someone else's sake. Two days later, and my brain won’t let it go.

I have spent years trying to be a better person, always improving myself, working through my baggage so I don’t have to keep carrying it around, generally just trying to be a decent human being really. My brain is demanding that I break this pattern of sweeping other people’s trash under my rug. And I really want to, but I still feel like I shouldn’t. I’ve been well-trained.

Honestly, I just wish I didn't always feel so bad for them, like I'd be kicking a downed horse if I ever called them out. But what do you do when the horse is always down? And when they’re actually up, between minute moments of calmness, they're extremely reactive and aggressively defensive, they’re kicking and biting you or things around you, they’re shitting everywhere, they’re loud, they’re stomping mud through the house, breaking things, leaving the barn door open, always threatening to run away, and you're afraid that anything you say to them, any way you say it, whether he's calm or otherwise, might set him off or upset him even more causing an even worse tantrum. You’re stuck in close proximity, but could you just avoid the horse? Maybe that way you'd feel less tempted to kick it? Oh, but wait... avoiding the horse just upsets the horse too?

Even worse, what do you do when those people have spent so much time convincing other people that they aren't like that at all? When they've convinced you that you're the only reason they behave like that? When they've actually convinced you that you're the one behaving that way, not them? When they claim to be the emotionally fragile one that you keep attacking?

Gaslighting is no joke, and even if you know it's happening, it's so easy to get sucked back into. It's like quicksand. The harder you fight against it, the more you panic when it's being flung at you, the deeper it pulls you in. I've learned the best reaction is to not react, and to stay calm, but that is not easy to do when your brain is screaming "Oh my gods! He's doing it again!!! Panic!!! Fight or Run!!!!.....Wait, maybe it is me and I am really the abusive crazy one!?!? No!!! Fight Back!!! Explain to him how he's twisting everything around!!!! Maybe it is my fault, I never should have said anything…Did I really do those things?.. But that’s what I was just saying…. Maybe I just don’t remember…" Before you know it, it's sucked you back under, because there's no point in arguing with someone who knows exactly how to gaslight you. You will never win that fight.

Fatigue is setting in. I’m exhausted with this person, with these people. I am tired of watching them say one thing, while they are actually doing the total opposite. I'm so tired of watching them play the victim and the pity me cards on social media, when behind the scenes it's so obvious that even though they are mostly responsible for their own suffering, they have zero self-accountability. I'm tired of double standards, especially the one where they expect to be thanked and appreciated for every single thing they do, every time they do it, even though they don't do the same, and in fact they rarely even notice (and certainly don't acknowledge) even half of the things that someone else does.

I am beyond tired of these people bragging about their greatness, and how much they do for other people, when it's all just for show and personal gain under the guise of philanthropy. I'm tired of them complaining about how hard they have it when they have been given so many handouts in life, especially when they've literally shoved other people out of the way to get where they are. I’m tired of their sense of entitlement that they claim to not have.

I am tired of the type of people who constantly make other people feel like an inconvenience, especially when it's their turn to repay a favor or a debt, or to hold up their end of a bargain or partnership. Especially, when they willingly made a deal or agreed to something (which they most likely never expected to be held accountable for.) I’m tired of people who talk over or belittle other people as an attempt to publicly shame or dominate them. I’m tired of them always stepping into the spotlight when it’s someone else’s turn.

I'm tired of people who try to hold others hostage with power-plays, and by manipulating emotions. I'm tired of damaged people getting away with damaging other people just because they're damaged. I'm tired of inconsiderate people. I'm tired of hypocrites.  I'm tired of constantly volatile, hyper-defensive people who don't take responsibility for anything. I'm tired of people who try to shift the blame from themselves to everyone or anyone else they possibly can.

I'm tired of cleaning up other people's messes, literally and metaphorically, of all types, shapes and sizes. Even more than the actual "cleaning" part, I'm tired of being expected to do the job. I’m just as tired of expecting myself to do the job. I’m tired of people doing a half-assed job because the “job” isn’t their choice of what they want to do, and I’m tired of people putting in the least amount of effort possible. I’m tired of people who have no clue how to be a team-player.

I'm tired of people who give or do things for others as a way to put people in debt to them, or to be able to take credit for their successes later on. I am tired of "those" people who say, "but you don't see things from my side", or "you never listen to me". You know, the ones that when they say that, it's such a pile of crap and it's painfully obvious that they only see their own side of anything. The same people may be able to repeat back exactly what you said, but they didn't "hear" a word of it. I'm tired of talking to and fighting with brick walls.

I'm really, really tired of the people who use "I'm sorry" angrily, as a way to excuse their behavior, shift the blame, to clear their own conscience and to justify them doing the same thing over again for an unlimited amount of times. I'm tired of two-faced people. And I am so tired of people who claim to be the world's victim, when they're really the ones victimizing people. I'm tired of the people who accuse others of doing exactly what they themselves are doing.

I'm tired of keeping it to myself for someone else's sake. I'm tired of not bitching about it. I'm tired of keeping other people's ugly sides hidden, and I'm tired of keeping their images polished for some nonsensical reason.

You want to act high and mighty and tell me not to do something you just did (the 10x's worse, extreme version of) the day before?

Fuck you.

You want to tell me your shitty behavior is my fault?

Fuck you.

You want to act like you're so misunderstood, down-trodden, wounded and abused by me, when I was the one that excused and put up with your toxicity, abuse, and neglect for years.

Fuck you.

You want to try to poke me where it hurts, salt the wounds repeatedly, then try to cover it back up with sugar, just because you can?

Fuck you.

I'm tired. And I'm done. Just because someone does good things too, does not mean that you should put up with their shit. Just because you love someone as a person, doesn’t mean you have to let them hurt you. Just because you still feel some sort of hope for someone’s well-being, doesn’t make it your job to protect or help save them. Being a victim, being under too much stress, being mentally unwell is not a justified reason to pass the abuse. When it comes to physical abuse, these things are much more obvious, but emotional and mental abuse are equally damaging, you just can’t see the marks left on the outside.

I cannot wait until this page in my life turns to a fresh leaf, where I can just breathe again. Where I have space and where I can put some distance between myself and the things that hurt me the most. I know growth is painful, but I’m ready to take my hand off of the remnants of this fire. Although I often hate myself for the decisions that led to my situation, I count my blessings that I was at least able to remove myself from the pits of the original blaze, even if I did I let it burn me for way too long. I was left with so many scars, but I turned those scars into red-flags and memorials for life-lessons learned. I don’t ever want to forget those warning signs.

I currently have an amazing, loving, kind, considerate and self-aware partner in my life, the kind of person that I started thinking didn’t really exist. They’re not perfect, (no one is), but they don’t pretend to be, and they hold themselves accountable, and they do the work. Not only have they set a new standard in my life, but they have given me a whole new type of hope to focus on; the hope that I will continue to rise above my ingrained patterns of constantly choosing toxic people to surround myself with, and that I can make better choices, without feeling guilty about not sacrificing myself to save someone else.

My brain is still grumbling that I’m still covering. That I didn’t even mention who I was talking about or the details of the last argument, or the things he said, or the toxic things he does on a daily basis, or the way he really acts when no one else is around. Perhaps I’ll save that for another post. I feel that the vagueness of this post may just be more useful for anyone reading that may have needed to read this today.

If you’ve read this far, I’m assuming you probably can relate. You’ve probably felt these stingers once, or twice, perhaps more times than you’d like to count. You might be trapped at the moment, without a clear path to escape, but when the time comes, as soon as the opportunity arises, don’t think twice about getting out. Don’t feel bad. Don’t feel guilty. Don’t feel like you’ve failed. Don’t convince yourself that maybe you should just try one more time, because you probably shouldn’t. Don’t cover for them if you don’t have to, or if it’s safe not to. You owe it to yourself.

Don’t believe them when they tell you it’s all your fault, and that if you would just behave differently things would be better. Don’t believe them when they say they’ll change. These types of people rarely change without meds and therapy, and if you already feel tired, or done, or you’ve been covering longer than you’d like to admit, chances are the jokes on you. Don’t believe them when they say it’s all in your head. Don’t believe anything they tell you to try to convince you that there isn’t anything wrong with them, or if they argue there is something wrong with them that you just need to accept because it’s not going to change.  If they repeat your argument back to you as their own response, if you hear your own words or emotions being turned around and parroted back, or being used completely out of context, run my friend, run and don’t look back.

Should we still hold space for these people? Afterall, they are just human beings, right? They are just as deserving of love and acceptance as anyone else, even if they are toxic, even if they can’t love or accept us. I think we should hold space, and we should still love them unconditionally as human beings, however, we should hold their space as far away from ourselves as possible, and we should love them from great distances. My heart still bleeds for them, I can’t imagine what an awful existence many of them live, and I still wish I could help, but I’m so much wiser now. I know better. And every day, I get a little braver. One day, I’ll stop covering.  

[yourwakingnightmares]

Theo Raeken: A Character Study (Part 1): Theo’s Childhood

So obviously there’s a lot of different interpretations, view points, and theories surrounding our (or at least my) favorite Chimera. Was he always bad? Did the Dread Doctors brainwash him? Did he really shove his sister into the freezing river to drown? Why was he so desperate for a pack, only to kill them off one-by-one? What’s his deal with Liam, anyways?

Well... While I’m sure y’all have different opinions, I’m here to offer mine. 

Let’s start at the beginning, shall we?

Based off what we see, we can come to a few logical conclusions based off actual cannon. Namely, three instances of Theo’s childhood that we either see, or hear about. Firstly... Whether or not Theo pushed Tara, he definitely watched her freeze, doing nothing to help. Secondly, we see a young Theo, lying on a table, as the Dread Doctors start cutting into him -while he’s fully awake. Thirdly, he tells Stiles, “I was nine years old, I also believed that a guy in a red suit came down the chimney to deliver presents. So when three people in leather masks showed up and said that my sister wanted me to have her heart, I believed them too.”

From these three things, we can determine a few things, and speculate on a few more.

For the first part, we have to delve a little deeper into child development, so please bear with me for a minute. 

At the age of nine, personality is just starting to form -children are just starting to understand the concept of ‘empathy’, i.e., that other people have feelings too. Because, at the end of the day, up until  the ages of 8-10, children are basically small sociopaths, with no impulse control (due to a still-developing prefrontal cortex). It’s at this point that all the lessons that mom and dad have been trying to teach start to cement; when kids finally start to understand why they can’t take things from others. Up until this point, parents act as the child’s conscience and impulse control for them -logic, for children, at this stage, equals out to ‘I want the cookie, the cookie is there, I’m taking the cookie’. It’s parents who step in, and say, “No, you can’t, we’re having dinner soon.” The child doesn’t understand, seeing nothing beyond the instant gratification; they want it, so they should have it; the parental figures teaches them that this is wrong, helping to develop that empathetic response. It’s at the ages of 8-10, that the child starts to take mom or dad’s lessons to heart, which helps determine their empathetic response, which in turn, helps regulate their impulse control.

We can clearly see, as Theo sits, watching his sister freeze to death, calling his name, that his sense of empathy is either warped, or underdeveloped (not non-existent though; we see him capable of some sort of empathy later). This could be due to a number of factors, but the most likely, given the evidence, is simply that he wasn’t taught empathy. That his parents either neglected to teach him to empathize with others, or that -through systematic abuse -taught that a person’s own gratification means more than someone else’s feelings (the parental figure didn’t care about his feelings, only their own).

Next, let’s discuss the ‘surgery’ that turned Theo into a genetic Chimera. Because this one scene could mean a multitude of things, and is one of the best scenes to dissect to figure out Theo’s behavior.

We see a nine year old Theo, awake and aware, as the Dread Doctors cut Tara’s heart out, and then start cutting into him, and he just watches. No panicking, no screaming; it goes without saying that this would most certainly not be a nine year old’s normal response to creepy men in gas masks, hissing and clicking as they cut apart his sister, and then start cutting into him.. This could mean one of three things.

The first is that the Dread Doctors had already convinced Theo they were ‘helping’ him, or that he had already spent enough time around them to not be afraid of them, and to trust them at least to a certain extent. How long would it take to convince a child not to be afraid of the ‘monsters’? A few weeks? Six months? A year? Either way, this explanation would require that they had spent a significant amount of time ‘grooming’ Theo before that moment, and that his parents somehow missed this, and that Theo never told anyone.

The second option is that Theo’s fear response was far different than most children his age, and that could happen a number of different ways. Physically abusive parents could do this, for the same reason a horrifically traumatic event could. Over time, the body becomes numb to fear; you can look up the fear response, how the brain produces adrenaline that creates the ‘flight or fight’ mentality, and how eventually, the brain simply numbs itself to keep the adrenaline from destroying the body (evolutionary survival trait). So, for this option, it would involve a nine year old Theo having experienced such trauma, or fear, that it would essentially handicap the normal fear response for his survival.

And the last option is that Theo knew his fear meant nothing; that being afraid, kicking and screaming, throwing fits, etc., would accomplish absolutely nothing, and there was no point in it. We see this often times in cases where a child has been emotionally neglected; in essence, they’re taught that their responses to external or internal stimuli don’t matter; literally that no one cares how they feel about an event, or situation, that whatever it is, isn’t going to change no matter their opinion or feelings on the matter. As with ‘dampening’ the fear response, this isn’t a quick process, but one that would take years of conditioning.

Alright, last point guys (for this part anyways). Theo’s response to Stiles, talking about him ‘believing a guy in a red suit came down the chimney’, and that’s why he believed the Dread Doctors. As with the empathetic response, the ages of 8-10 is the standard age when kids start to realize -if there’s no adult interference prior -that there’s no such thing as Santa, and the Easter Bunny, and all that good jazz. They’re becoming aware enough of the world, and their place in it, that they no longer believe in magic, when reality starts to overtake imagination.

Let’s presume that Theo was telling the truth about still believing in Santa at the age of nine. Sure, he could have just been a late bloomer, developmentally stunted. Or, as we often times see in children growing up in neglectful or abusive homes, Theo held on to a fantasy; that he withdrew into himself, because the real world sucked. Living in your head is better than reality, so you hold onto childish, or improbable ideas and ideals longer than what would be considered ‘socially acceptable’.

Most kids, by that age, understand not to trust strangers -especially creepy looking strangers in masks who (it can be presumed) only come around when nobody else is there. Again, they’re becoming more self-aware at this age, so the typical response to three creepy folks showing up in masks and saying, “Hey kid, we want you to shove your sister into a river and let her freeze, because she wants you to have her heart!” would be to run for the nearest adult.

Theo, however, either believes them entirely, doesn’t care if Tara actually wanted him to have her heart or not (see Part 2 for more on Theo and Tara’s relationship), or that he didn’t have anyone to run to.

All of this, when taken together, and viewed as a whole, paints a fairly bleak picture of Theo’s early childhood; whether his parents simply didn’t give a damn about him (emotionally/physically neglectful), or they were outright abusive being the most rational conclusion to come to -at least, based off of his childhood behaviors.

Part 2 Theo And Tara

Part 3 Theo and the Dread Doctors

[cummunication]

Breaking Up (is hard to do)

Breaking up is hard to do. That’s not just some cliche catch phrase but it’s the truth. Breakups have always been the absolute worst for me. I’ve had a few but there’s only been one that was extremely difficult. The rest haven’t been a walk in the park but easier, rather. I have deep abandonment wounds so I not only loathe being abandoned but abandoning people. My worst fear is losing a loved one; probably because I lost my father at a young age and being adopted. Grief is a scary emotion which I try to avoid like the plague. This has left me to stay in situations a lot longer than is healthy. I was unhappy, yet due to my grief phobia, I would stay because it was better than losing someone. Anyone who’s gone through a breakup can understand how painful it can be. It’s not the post breakup which irks me but actually pulling off the band aid. You see, I’ve never been broken up with, so I can’t fully comprehend what it’s like. I’ve had breakups where it was mutual to go our separate ways but only after I initiated it. Yet I can empathize with anyone who has had a broken heart. It’s not just the person who is left that’s prone to heartbreak; I’ve been subjected to pain while doing the breaking up. After a breakup, strong feelings can linger for your lost love. We might put them on a pedestal, only to remember the good times which makes us miss them. There’s nothing wrong or shameful about writing a list of all their flaws in order to make yourself feel better. There’s no one size fits all solution to getting over someone. There is no perfect formula on how to break up but there are general guidelines on how to make it smoother. Most people generally need time, self-reflection, distraction, venting and good chocolate to heal. Don’t let anyone (especially yourself) tell you how fast you should be back on the market or forgetting about your ex. I cried every day for almost a year after my ex and I split. This was the person I wanted to marry, and my fantasy had been ruined. I felt I should have forgotten him or found someone new after a month passed. I figured he was over it and it put that much more pressure on me to let things go. I had to understand this was my first love and we were together for quite some time. Not to mention the relationship was tumultuous and dysfunctional so it made separating much harder. It wasn’t reasonable to set unrealistic expectations on myself. The length of recovery from a breakup can take anywhere from a few weeks to a few years. It is different for everybody and the circumstances of the relationship. It also matters how much effort you do or do not put into bettering yourself in order to move past your ex. Here are some tips when it comes to getting over or ending things with that someone… 1. Don’t only imagine the worst possible outcome; consider realistic possibilities as well. AKA, try not to catastrophize. We make things much harder in our heads then they actually are. Stay in the present and try not to worry about the future or dwell on the past. Learning mindfulness techniques can be helpful here. 2. Minimize the “if only” about the breakup and notice when you are having ruminating thoughts about the relationship. Write them down or take an artistic outlet to express your feelings. 3. Unplug from your ex; this means totally disconnecting from their social media and other forms of communication. AKA, don’t be a stalker and try to accept that it’s over. 4. Engage in new activities to restore your sense of self. We tend to lose ourselves in relationships since we invest so much time, energy and resources into another. Now is your chance to find yourself again and enjoy a little “me time” which we all deserve. Get back in touch with yourself and tend to your needs. If we jump right back into the dating scene, we can make the same mistakes we did in our last relationship and feel like we’re living a lie. Not to mention forcing feelings is never fun and nobody wants to be a rebound. 5. Be open to feedback, even if it’s difficult to receive. Recognize people want to help you. Be honest with friends and family about what’s going on. Also be honest with yourself and consider therapy. Nowadays, we don’t even need to leave our house for counseling so try not to make excuses about it being too much money or taking up too much time. It’s one hour of your day and most therapists accept insurance or work on sliding scales. Breakups can be pretty awful whether you are initiating or receiving the bad news. Remind yourself you are in control; this is your life and you have to do what’s best for you and vice versa. If you aren’t a sociopath, you are conscious of others feelings and most of us don’t like hurting people. Nobody is immune to the intense, negative emotions that come along with a breakup. We are (to an extent), forced to stop loving someone whom we shared our life with. If you are considering breaking up with someone, I suggest making a list of [their] pros and cons. I have done this in the past and when I saw how much longer the “reasons to leave” side was versus “reasons to stay”, I had to be truthful with myself. Just know that whether you just got dumped or did the dumping, you are important. You matter and just because things didn’t work out with someone doesn’t mean they wont with someone else. There are millions of people in this world and things are bound to not workout with a handful. That also means they are bound to workout with at least one. In the meantime, give yourself the love and respect you are missing and deserve.

[knightofbalance-13]

Your headcanon/delusion is not the intended character

http://dudeblade.tumblr.com/post/176603257231/taiyang-does-not-fill-his-intended-character

Yeah Dudeblade, pretty sure this means ‘Taiyang doesn’t act like my headcanon ergo that’s wrong.’

Yang only laughed at Taiyang’s arm joke so that he wouldn’t look like a fucking asshole because she’s nice and forgiving like that, it had NOTHING to do with him being right or not. It had NOTHING to do with the notion that that was how they functioned. It had NOTHING to do with whether or not it was funny. 

Proof.

Proof.

And Proof.

Because I can bring up how Yang treated Ruby in Volume 1 with her abandoning Ruby right at Beacon in order to force her to socialize, RUby talking to Jaune in Volume 1 and telling him that he can’t be a failure or a mistake because he’s a leader now and Qrow...anytime he opens his mouth, like his entire appearance in Volume 3. And that shows that 3 out of 4 family members deal with stuff like this the EXACT same way so why would it be ANY different with Taiyang?

Taiyang wasn’t right. He lost empathetic skills when Summer died.

It wasn’t how their relationship functioned. Yang didn’t fire back with something equally as scathing, and she had to take a moment to process what he said.

It wasn’t funny. Who the fuck asked for that? Who in the audience asked for that joke?

A. Dudeblade, that would require you to understand the concept of empathy. And considering I have proof of you saying that troll blogs deserve to be raped for trolling about FICTIONAL CHARACTERS (https://web.archive.org/save/http://araniladin.tumblr.com/post/176539964626/i-really-hope-the-incel-who-keeps-making-blogs): You clearly DON’T understand the concept. Even IF you did, Taiyang showed empathy both BEFORE and AFTER the joke (Episode 3 in giving Yang space as well as the new arm and Episode 4 where he told her that her experience doesn’t need to define her.)

B. No...Instead, she fired back later with a WORSE insult with INTENT to hurt. (https://youtu.be/GaB62PeuFwM?t=7m21s) Oh but that’s okay because...bias.

C. The fandom disagrees since THEY were making WORSE jokes about her arm ever SINCE she lost it.

Taiyang was an asshole. Not only that, but he wasn’t being a father. He was being an armchair critic. All he did was say stuff like “Your semblance won’t win you every fight.”- Yeah. We know that. You want to know something that the audience knows that Tai doesn’t?- Yang only deliberately took hits to fuel her semblance one time up to that point. That was the team vs. Paladin fight. So I guess Tai saw a few of Yang’s fights, and then decided that it wasn’t his fault that she was so ‘over-reliant’ on her semblance, despite the fact that he was her teacher. Oh no. That would make him the one at fault.

No Dudeblade-

YOU’RE the armchair critic.

See, thing is: Taiyang is a FULL FLEDGED HUNTSMEN. Meaning he’s been in more fights than Yang could imagine. Meaning he would know a thing or two about fighting, definitely more than her and surely more than you. But instead no, you say that the Huntsmen of at least 18 years doesn’t know how to fight nor that Yang, someone with a NOTED reckless streak, wouldn’t just ignore her training in a brash rage.

Every time I look back to that shitty arc, I find more and more things about Tai that irritate me.

Yeah and how many of those actually happened and how many are you being delusional?

And every time I do, I start to think to myself “Maybe Tai drove Raven away because he was so insufferable, and hardly took responsibility for himself.” 

This sounds like a ‘He made me abuse him!’ excuse. We KNOW Raven didn’t leave because of that. But you’re portraying it that anyway both out of sexism and an insane desire to shove Summer Rose’s character into Raven’s body.

Considering that this is Mr. Leave my kids alone because I need to work, it’s starting to feel like a distinct possibility.

So providing for your family? Not okay.

But emotionally manipulating your daughter and threatening her life while gaslighting her about her actual family? Perfectly acceptable.

See what I mean here?

Best case scenario though: He’s just out of touch with everything… Because my insult to him is correct. Maybe he did lose some ability to empathize with others when Summer died. 

A. Your tone is contradictory, going from definitive to ambiguous.

B. Your only example does more to make Yang look sociopathic than Taiyang.

And C. You don’t UNDERSTAND the concept of empathy.

Worst case scenario: He’s like Raven, and he hates having to accept responsibility for himself. Considering that despite him saying that he wants to go out and look for Ruby, he opts to stay behind to tend to his garden, this is a possibility.

Or what probably happened: Taiyang is depressed and having him around would do more harm than good and the cast is too fucking big as is you idiot.

Goddammit, I had high hopes for Tai. I was hoping that he’d be more of a father and less of a critic. I was hoping that he’d be more of a father and less of an unsympathetic teacher. 

Thing is Dudeblade-

He’s precisely that. Taiyang IS a father. You use TWO instances to paint him like this instead of EVERY instance of his appearance.

Why? Because you project yourself onto Yang. You’ve admitted as much in the past. And likewise, you project your mother onto Taiyang and thus what you see is just an easy target to vent out your frustrations out onto.

Point is: You’re being delusional.

It was obvious that his intended character was to be a caring father, but freaking Ghira fills that role better than him. And Ghira’s doing double duty since he also has to be the encouraging mentor figure to Blake.

So is Taiyang.

And to Ruby as well.

And without someone to help him.

So he’s pulling...octuple duty?

Considering that Raven abandoned Yang, it’s starting to get harder to determine who is more at fault for Yang’s issues. Raven or Tai.

Raven, 100%. Taiyang has done some damage yes but Raven has done so much horrible shit to her own kid that her being Adam’s mom actually makes a fuckton of sense.

Like… the reason why I rag more on Tai than I do Jacques is because Tai was made out to be a nice dad figure. While Jacques was made out to be an asshole from the start. Jacques fills the role of being an abusive dad. Tai does not fill the role of caring father that well. It’s fun to hate Jacques. It’s not fun to hate Tai. But there’s so little to like about him, and so much to be critical towards him for.

No, you do it because you have some sort of reverse Oedipus complex. Also bias for Raven.

Because that is where this falls apart. You CONSTANTLY try to portray Raven as what TAIYANG is and act like this is at all feasible in canon.

The worst part is that the narrative seems to believe Tai to be in the right. Similar to how it wanted jaune to be portrayed as being in the right for starting the fight in volume 5- That stuff’s for another post, many apologies.

... Jaune was in the wrong you idiot.

Hopefully, Volume 6 can fix him. Because so far, he fails to fill the caring father role that he should have. He fills the armchair critic role well though. So if you want to say that’s his character instead, you’re welcome to it.

Because then I’d stop being so critical of him. Because at least then, he’d fill the role of his character.

But his intended role wasn’t to be an armchair critic. It was to be a caring father. Which he utterly failed at doing.

Bull fucking shit.

You said you would stop bitching at RT about representation when they delievered and yet you still harp on about it.

He DOES fit that role, you just deny anything to support that role.

And when someone actually DOES act like an armchair critic when Raven has the galls to bash Yang for being scared, you completely ignore it.

This is like saying, “i’ll leave you alone if you jump through X hoops” and X is just the number of hoops you already jumped through +1.

Everyone knows you won’t stop.

Only thing to do is to mock you for it.

[taylors-writing]

A Letter from the Evil Men

          We are narcissists, sociopaths, and psychopaths. Most of us are men and we prey on women, although we can be women too. We present ourselves as funny, charming people to our partners who are our victims.

          Our partners are often empaths and/or people who have a mental illness, such as a mood disorder. Our favorite victims are empaths and mentally ill because as an empath, they will care about us deeply and want to make us happy, so it will be easy for us to manipulate them. When we begin name calling, lying, and making false accusations, they will easily forgive us after we apologize, saying we “just had a bad day.” Then we act extremely nice for a few days, telling our victims how amazing they are, how much we love them, how we couldn’t live without them, and we might even give them a gift to show our love and tell them it won’t happen again. This flatters our victims with mental illnesses because they believe they are unlovable and have low self-esteem, but we just showed them that someone does love them. It’s not true though because we’re not capable of loving.

          After a few good days, we begin the verbal abuse again. We repeat the cycle of verbal abuse and then being nice over and over. The times we are nice become rarer and rarer. The accusations we make grow more serious and more bizarre. We yell at and threaten our victims and when they begin confronting us about our behavior, we state “I never said that,” “that never happened,” “you were drunk, you don’t know what happened,” “you’re crazy; you’re imaging things,” “but you just make me so mad,” and “I love you, but when you…you make me have to …” We do this so much that our victims begin to believe they deserve the awful way we treat them because they are somehow at fault. They might believe they really are imagining things and that the bad things we said and did never really happened.

          Some of us go on to hit, kick, or shove our victims. We might not leave a mark the first time, so we’ll say, “at least I didn’t leave a bruise.” They might then be convinced that they are overreacting and that it’s not that bad, so they’ll forgive you. The next time though, they have black eyes, so you don’t let them leave the house.

          When they try to leave us, we threaten to hurt them again. We tell them to be good and listen, like they are a child, or it will be worse the next time. We threaten to hurt the pets or the kids and say we will take all their money and their car. They end up losing their job since we don’t let them leave the house. We don’t let them have a phone or computer, or any other way to communicate with anyone, so they can’t leave us. We hit, we kick, we run over our victims with vehicles, we strangle them, we break their bones, and sometimes we kill them.

          We should be locked in prison with no food, no clothes, no blankets, and no bathrooms so we lay on the ground cold, starving, and in our own piss and shit until we die. In reality though, a lot of us, if we get punished at all, will only get probation or a few months in jail at most. When we do get jail or prison time, we are kept in a special area specifically for those charged with domestic violence because other inmates will beat our asses if they find out what we did and apparently someone thinks we deserve to be protected from having what we did to others done to us.

[aslaton8-blog]

Focus Please

I don’t really follow a whole lot of news because I am too empathic and sensitive and passionate and unable to do anything about it right now. But every once in a while I catch wind of some things. I heard that Kim Kardashian posted about how poor people need to get off “their lazy asses and get to work.” But when I went to look it up all she said was that women need to work harder. Now she is getting blasted all over social media for it. First and foremost, I am not condoning what she said because I don’t believe in blanket statements. I believe in situational awareness. This is not a post about “poor Kim Kardashian” because I don’t feel sorry for her like that. What I do feel sorry for is this societal disconnect. Kim was raised privileged for sure but what does that even mean? I grew up rich too. It was not fun. People were always calling me a snob because I had money (even though I am not a snob and am one of the more humble people you will ever meet) and we were always getting hit up for money because of other people’s drug addictions and time wasting. I was pressured to live up to a certain image and maintain it. Do you think that is easy?

Both sides of this coin suck. The only people who I have ever met who are truly happy are people who are living in the middle. The Middle Class. We should all strive to be like that. Not needing too much but not being so poor you can’t enjoy life. I recall a time where I thought poor people needed to work harder. But that was my sociopath father teaching me how to be a narcissist. But I grew up and realized it is not “poor” people who need to work harder. It is not “women” who need to work harder. It is humanity as a whole who needs to work harder on connecting with each other and not making things out to be worse than they are. Have you ever watched Kim’s show? She is the most stable out of ALL of them if that tells you anything at all. Count your blessings. She could be a pedophile that harms little kids. But your blowing her up for having a disconnected opinion. Last I checked, if I had a disconnected opinion about someone, I wouldn’t be getting blown up by the worlds social media and be blasted in public for it. Do you even know what that kind of pressure is like? I can only imagine and even imagining it is scary. She is actually living it. So if blasting people on social media was going to work, don’t you think it would have worked already? Learn to love each other, stop blasting each other. Focus on the people who REALLY deserve it, like pedophiles. Blast THEIR asses please cuz we can’t hear you!!!!

[ghoultyrant]

Azula: Sympathetic Monster?...

(Cross-posted to Vigaroe)

I was really jarred by how the end portion of Avatar: The Last Airbender handled Azula.

For most of the series, Azula's characterization was very consistent: she was someone whose relationship to socioemotional considerations was that those are a weakness other people have. Azula and Zuko shared parents, but their respective relationships illustrated this dynamic through contrast:

For Zuko, his mother was a warm and loving parent, and when she disappeared this was a bit of trauma that seems to have permanently changed how he interacted with the world. His father was someone he respected and wanted to impress, and even after he was permanently scarred by the man he still seemed to desire to gain Ozai's respect. These relationships mattered to him on a deep and inescapable level, and even his relationship to Azula built on this idea: though virtually every interaction we see between the two is one where Azula makes Zuko miserable, when she first showed up in the show and acted like a caring sibling, he wanted such a scenario to be real desperately enough that instead of being suspicious on the basis of her past behavior he actually bought this inexplicable change completely up until an officer made the mistake of referring to Zuko and Iroh as prisoners.

Zuko can't stop craving positive familial relationships even when there's a persistent pattern of open and deliberate abuse.

Azula, meanwhile, is abhorrent to her mother and doesn't seem terribly bothered by this idea. Her father's unpleasant treatment of her brother is something to smile about, or even help arrange to happen. Zuko's suffering is a game, not something to be bothered by, because she doesn't care about him. She doesn't seem to care about any of them, or indeed about anyone at all except perhaps herself -and that's more assumed than actually illustrated.

This extends much further than just their immediate familial relationships. Azula's 'friends' are minions she coerces/terrorizes into working for her. Zuko starts the series with no peer-type friends that we ever see unless you count the edge case of Mai, but with a sister who treats emotions and social connections as a weakness to be picked on it would be pretty amazing if he did have any friends.

This is a very consistent point of contrast between the two characters, one that tells us a lot about Azula's character, and it's a character that's pretty difficult for most people to sympathize with. She's the kind of character that often gets labeled a psychopath or sociopath, and which is often treated as unambiguously an evil so dark that the audience is not intended to feel even slightly bad if justice comes in the form of a gruesome death or the like.

... and then the end of the series tries to tell us Azula wants the love of her parents. That she tormented Zuko because their mother always loved him and not her, and she couldn't understand why. That she did everything she did because she desperately wanted her father's approval, so much so that when he leaves her behind to go be Phoenix King this is pretty much the last straw for her sanity. That she actually did care about her friends, and tormented and terrorized them because... she thought making them fear her would do a better job of ensuring loyalty than making them love her?...

The whole thing is bizarre. In the first place, it's irreconcilable with literally everything about her character prior to this interpretation being invented. In the second place, the story is actively undermining it as it's introducing the concept: we get a flashback showing that Azula was a horrible little monster all the way into early childhood, and also get flashbacks implying that Ozai was actually a pretty okay father prior to his wife being taken away from him -and these flashbacks are happening after the series has started trying to sell us on the idea that Azula wasn't born evil. The first flashback I'm referring to directly undermines this idea by depicting Azula being a monster for no clear motive in early childhood: the second undermines it indirectly, by making it so you can't explain L'il Azula's awful behavior as being a product of her desire to chase her father's approval, since it goes back to before he was modeling/encouraging awful behavior.

More than the actual plothole/narrative plausibility angle, though, what bothers me most is... a thing that needs a bit more grounding.

So let's get to that.

One of the major background elements of Avatar is being humanizing and sympathetic. Our first 'antagonist' is Zuko, and though he's on the 'bad guy' side the show quickly lets us know what is motivating Zuko and makes it clear he's a figure deserving of sympathy and potentially even pity. He's not simply the enemy who we must defeat/foil/evade/etc, but a person who has good and reasonable reasons for his own actions, and it's just unfortunate they place him at odds with the protagonists.

Zuko is the strongest example of this, but especially in the first season it's fairly typical for entities to start out framed in a manner that suggests straightforward 'bad guy-ness' and then the story reveals that it's not as straightforward as that, or is entirely untrue. A rampaging spirit monster assaulting innocent villagers for no obvious reason turns out to be hurting and angry because of real metaphysical harm done to them, and once they are made to understand that things will get better and that the people they've kidnapped weren't behind it the rampage stops and the kidnapped people are returned. An insane and hostile king turns out to be an old friend playing tricks. Etc.

Unfortunately, the writers seem to have struggled to hold to this consistently. This humanizing, sympathetic approach to people is applied to a fair amount of entities, but... not to everyone, and even the people it gets applied to it gets caveats. With the semi-exception of Zuko's sympathetic backstory not showing up until the episode after the two pilot episodes, generally a hostile character is either revealed to be sympathetic before the episode they were introduced in ends, or the story never tries to humanize them. Zhao is a straightforward gloryhound villain whose karmic death is treated as wholly deserved, and no attempt is ever made to follow up on any possible tragedy in his death. We never meet any of his loved ones, let alone see them being heartbroken by his death. We never see him have any friends, or at least not any friends who aren't themselves treated as fairly one-dimensionally villainous. The one-off Fire Nation officers running prisons in the Earth Kingdom and the like are generally one-dimensional villains we're pretty much supposed to view as deserving a righteous punching. When we meet the Dai Li and their master, the whole thing is an Orwellian nightmare that's never suggested to have a sympathetic reason for existing, and which deliberately keeps its own king out of the loop on important matters because... it's a sinister Orwellian organization, that's just what you do if you're an evil power behind the throne.

Azula and, to a lesser extent, Ozai, end up suffering because the writers seem to have spent most of the story running on Villain Tropes Logic, and only later on remembered that this is supposed to be a narrative in which everyone is a person deserving of humane and sympathetic treatment. Ozai's handling is plausible enough, but this is more due to the fact that while Ozai's influence has been made apparent all the way back to the third episode of the series, Ozai himself has been a largely undefined shadow figure, motives and goals inscrutable enough you could drape just about anything over what we see and end up with something plausible.

Azula doesn't benefit from this murkiness. She's had a strong and consistent character that has been developed consistently and clearly on-screen over a notable number of episodes, and attempting to rework her into being a Terrible But Sympathetic Person is like building a house in a swamp and then when you realize you're not happy living in a swamp you... change the wallpaper.

This is obviously bad practice in the first place, but there's also a subtle dehumanizing element to this attempt to humanize Azula, and that is the thing I'm uncomfortable with. In effect, the story's handling tells us that the Azula we knew is not someone who it's okay to view with sympathy, or treat humanely or with empathy. It has to invent a new version of Azula who, instead of being essentially exempt from the usual socioemotional experience, is actually deeply tied into it and just being awful as part of that.

This is frustrating, because the Azula we knew could be treated in a humane and empathic manner. Just because Azula doesn't really value these kinds of connections and experiences doesn't mean she's inherently destined to be a monster where the only acceptable response is to put her out of everyone else's misery. A different environment could have shaped Azula differently -it's likely that she'd always have had a streak of pragmatism or ruthlessness to her, given what we see, but it's easy to imagine how Ursa could have made more of an attempt to understand why her daughter was eg torturing small animals for fun and then adjusted how she handled Azula's upbringing. The Azula we got has a backstory that paints her as almost feral, with a father who's barely present, a mother that doesn't really want to have anything to do with her, and no evidence of any replacement parental figures to shape Azula into thinking about the world differently.

If you take a girl who isn't all that interested in social connections in the first place, give her tremendous latitude and power simply because of who her parents are, and then never allow her to experience anything like a partnership to see the benefits it brings and understand what is necessary to reap those benefits, is it really a surprise when she ends up viewing the world through a lens that makes human relationships a weakness? She got all the power she could want without ever having to befriend anyone, and she got to see her father become a broken man when her mother was taken away, not to mention see how wimpy Zuko was as a child coddled by their mother.

This is easy to use as a base to keep Azula's awful canon behavior while framing her as a human being we should try to empathize and understand. Restructuring her motives into being pretty much the exact opposite of her entire character up to this point is unnecessary, a bit disheartening, and while the show could potentially have tried to make some 'No So Different' point about Azula and Zuko it... didn't. There's kind of an interesting point that the show is consistent about having them both be Sympathetic Evil when it's framing them as seeking the approval of their father, but it gets lost in just dismissing Azula as crazy where Zuko's behavior was treated as completely sane when he was doing pretty much literally the exact same thing.

It's a frustrating finish to one of the series' strongest characters.

[calliecat93]

ST: The Next Generation S3 Watchthrough Episodes 18-21

Allegiance: So we have Picard whisked away while minding his own business and ends up somewhere with three other people while a copy of him is hanging out on the Enterprise. Don’t you just hate when that happens? It was alright. The concept is an interesting one, a race of hive0mind aliens kidnap people to see how they interact in a bubble while they leave a fake on the Enterprise to see if the crew will keep following Picard. Naturally the crew turns on the fake when he gets out of hand and Riker taking a stand was freakin’ badass, so glad that no one’s a mindless officer who will follow blindly. While the aliens don’t hurt anyone, they DID still kidnap and endanger a lot of people, so Picard telling them offat the end is justified. The whole episode hinges on Patrick Stewart’s acting ability as both the real and fake Picard, and to the shock of no one, he knocks it out of the park. They could make him act as a tree and he’d somehow make it into a worthwhile performance. Picard’s certainly not my favorite character, while S3 has had him grow on me the rest of the cast are more appealing to me and as far as overall captians go, TOS Kirk just had a better balance of serious and laid-back for me… he’s topping AOS Kirk though. Also… I know it was witht he fake Picard, but why are we starting the Picard/Crusher ship tease again? They had dropped it since Crusher came back and Picard seems even more married to his job than Kirk was, so… why are we doing this? But ah well. Still, it’s a strong episode for Picard as he shows his natural leadership and Patrick Stewart is having fun as the fake especially when we get to the song number XD It’s a nice episode about authority and when to follow (regular Picard is a reasonable leader who knows how to deal with various individuals to get the job done with the least amount of damage possible) and when to not (when the authority is outright leading you and others to certain death with no regard for those lives). In other words, don’t live in a hive mind. and don’t imprison people no matter if you intend no harm 3/5.

Captain’s Holiday: And speaking of Picard! I guess a requirement for Starfleet Captian is ‘be an utter workaholic who cannot and will not understand the concept of taking a Shore Leave’ and that hasn’t changed since Kirk’s time. Hell, Crusher pulls the same trick Spock did to get Kirk to take one… albeit Picard picks up on it much quicker than Kirk did and he doens’t end up on a planet that causes illusions that involve an annoying classmate, an old crush, and believing that his CMO/best friend got killed via a knight lance… boy Shore Leave was a trip, huh? I love how the entire ship was in on the scheme to get Picard to take the vacation, Riker’s smugness over it is freakin’ amazing. So Picard goes to Risa… and ends up tangled in utter insanity involving a weapon hidden on the planet, the Ferengi, two beings from the future, and a pretty woman adventurer. Guess the other Starfleet Captin requirement is ‘be prepared for your vacation to be derailed even when it doens’t involve Starfleet business because you’re just cursed now, sorry!’ This was fun! I like seeing Picard get to break from his stuffy Captain persona and get to go full-on adventurer and clearly having the time of his life doing so, it fits him really well~! Vash was also really fun and why we haven’t gotten an ST spinoff that would essentially be Indiana Jones in Space after this I’ll never know. It’s kinda nice to just have an episode like this with no complex morality or political/social themes, it’s just a fun adventure to let Picard let loose and the setting is a nice change of pace from the Enterprise. 3/5.

Tin Man: Tam’s inability to stop hearing most everyone’s thoughts which leaves him unhinged gives me major Mao from Code Geass vibes… well, except less sociopathic/stalkerish. I mean imagine being born a telepath/empath with all those senses turned on and being unable to shut them off and thus are overwhelmed by everyone’s thoughts/emotions all around you… yeah I think that the man has every reason to be out of it. I almost wanna say this kinda feels like an allegory for mental illness/schizophrenia, but given that this was in the 90’s when we weren’t that great at understanding that and my own lack of knowledge on those topics, I’m reluctant to say that with certainty. So we have him an an intelligent ship (the tititular Tin Man) drven to despair due to it’s fallen crew and in the end they essentially merge into one being… yeah it’s as wild as it sounds. Oh and they have to deal with Romulans… again. Also not quite sure what happened at the end, but hey it’s an ending. So it was fine. Not really anything else to say on this one. 3/5.

Hollow Pursuits: So we meet Lieutenant Barclay, a nervous, timid man who is constantly late, frustrates his superiors due to his demeanor/insufficiency, isn’t really fitting in, and he vents it out via living out his fantasies on the Holodeck. It’s… oddly relatable. Now mind you I’d probably be as squicked out as Troi was if someone had a hologram of me acting all intimate with them, but hey it’s not like he’s forcing it on the actual Troi. Riker comes off as an asshole though… though him, Troi, and Geordi seeing themselves in the holodeck was funny XD. It’s understandable why Geordi and the others are frustrated with him.. but like Data points out, name-calling behind his back is pretty mean and maybe if they tried to be more understanding and reached out, maybe it would help Barclay. As someone with major social anxiety and poor social skills in general, I could relate to how Barclay felt and it was nice to see an episode focusing on what would otherwise be a nameless nobody in the background. There are more people on the ship than the main group, several of whom they’re the superiors over, so it’s nice to also see Geordi struggling as a superior to a subordinate that he’s having issues with. When Guinan pointed out that maybe Barclay’s late and nervous because everyone acts like they don’t want to be around him or talk to him… damn, that articulates exactly what I felt. Also, you’d think that the Holodeck would… you know, make it so one can’t walk in on someone’s privacy unless it’s an emergency. Just saying. But yeah for an episode in the ’90s, while it doens’t specifically bring up social anxiety or mental illness that one could associate with Barclay and the Holodeck sequences might be more… concerning in a modern light, it does have the message on treating those feeling withdrawn, nervous, and struggling with those kinds of things respectfully and to reach out to them with understanding and openness, not to dismiss or demean them. It’s a lesson I wish that was more clear in the ’90s, it might have helped me with my problems… ah well! 3.5/5.

Alright, we’ve got five episodes of the season left. So here’s how we’re going to go from here. Tomorrow will be 22-25, which I read the title for one and it’s gotten me super excited~! Then we have the finale… which is one part of a two-parter with Part 2 being the beginning of S4. I’ve been thinking of how to deal with this in the watchthrough since I consider parter episodes essentialy the same episode but divided up. What I decided is that on the wtchthrough post I’ll review both parts in one post, give the rating for both as seperate episodes, and then give a rating for them together. When I do the Top 5 Favorite/Least Favorite Episodes of S3 post, it will be counted as one episode if it makes the list and this will be the same for all the other two-part episodes at least for now. After I do the S3 finale/S4 premiere I’m gonna take a break until Monday, and then I hope to go through S4-7 without any stops. So here���s hoping that all goes according to plan.