#not sure about what neurodivergence per se

[aqueerilys]

I think I have a different perspective on what Theo's personality is like compared to fanon. Like, I see fics where he's aggressive and super assertive, but I just can't see him like that??? To me he is so calm and indifferent. Like, he's sarcastic and a little shit (/affectionate), but he's also the kind of person who has a very "yeah I don't fucking care for this, I'll will just stand here on my own" personality

[commanderhorncleaver]

3, 5, 11, and 13 for the old man. (5 for the bastard old man if you're feeling up to it)

Ask Game

Gaius

3.Are they an outsider? Do they feel like one?

At this point in his life, Gaius is sort of over this--but specifically in regards to his life as commander and a soldier of Iron Legion, yes, he's very much an outsider, and even now that he is not commander and he is more active as a Centurion again.

During IBS (and after, when he ran for Imperator of Iron) it became increasingly notable for him that he was no longer a member of what he'd devoted a lot of his life to--and also that he wasn't sure he wanted to be a part of that. He's gone to great lengths to remedy some of the problems--reducing his time away, being more active as a Centurion. Opening Horn Gladium Outreach.

All of that aside, though, he's still regarded as something removed from the rest. He's well-regarded, yes, but he's still different.

5. How do they feel about their family? Chosen and/or biological?

Gaius has a complex relationship to his family, perhaps largely due to the natural happenings of charr family groups, but then also the unique circumstances he's experienced. It's pretty well known that he's sired a lot of cubs, but he doesn't actively go out of his way to be involved with most of them--at the same time, he does keep up with most of them, and he's generally proud of all of them. With his turn for becoming more (knowingly) paternal, he's found that he actually greatly enjoys parenthood. He loves his siblings Lucasta and Silas. Most of his conflict comes from his sire, and the siblings or cubs who are likewise very, erm, antagonistic. Oryen is the most prominent example, of course, but he simply doesn't know how to engage the issue. It's not that he can't kill his sire, but he struggles coming to terms with the desire to do so-- it's a dislike so intense, that often he just acknowledge any of his thoughts about him.

Until Oryen's in his face again.

11. Obligation or initiative, why do they do what they do? Is there something/someone specific that motivates them? (bonus: has their motivation changed over the years?)

Obligation and initiative are equally strong motivations for Gaius. For a long time, it was internal motivation that made him strive to work and improve and lead and be strong. By the time LWS4 comes and moves through IBS and into EoD, it's much more obligation.

Gaius hits a point of disdain towards what it means to be a legion charr that he doesn't quite recover from as much as he finds new meaning and cause to keep doing what he does: he wants those who come after him to enjoy a more bountiful and opportunistic life. He wants the Legions to experience what they can be outside of war.

It'd be an understatement of the century to say this is different from what it was before--his entire life prior to Personal Story was spent trying to be the Iron guy.

When his outlook of obligation to the charr returns to initiative and a desire to make things better, it's also a turn back from his low point of "nobody else cares enough, it's pointless" into "we have to improve, so I'm going to take those steps to try."

13. Is there anyone they'd like to be closer to than they are?

I noted before that Gaius adores his siblings Lucasta and Silas, and I think above all, they're who he wants to be closest to. He struggles with connecting with them for so many reasons: age, traumas, general neurodivergent tendencies. Lucasta in particular is someone he's tried to support a lot, and he feels he's failed in a lot of ways, but he hopes just being there helps when he can't do anything else.

Oryen

5. How do they feel about their family? Chosen and/or biological?

Like his beloved son, Oryen has a complex view of his family, and has no chosen family. In his specific case, his cubs--his brood, per se-- are an extension of him. They're all his, and their deeds are a reflection of him. This also extends to his grandcubs. He views Gaius and Lucasta and Silas and any others who've left his direct purview as "wayward" but within arm's reach. He allows them their independence, because that's the point of his experiment: what will they do now? He's overall intrigued by it all, even if by what he lets on, he's unimpressed at the best of times and actively disappointed at worst.

But they're his, no matter what.

[caitas-cooing]

I have decided to compile a list of Nikki's autistic and otherwise neurodivergent traits, because I can. This might take a bit but I am determined. I'm glad we have the thing that let's you look at the story of past events because the beach vacation event has quite a few of them

For the record I'm mostly going of Shining Nikki for this because it's what I have on my phone currently, but if you want to add some from other games then your are free to do so and I would appreciate it greatly

Let's start with beach vacation event stuff, original I was going to show pictures of the text, but that would take a lot of pictures and we can only do 10 on mobile, so I'll just summarize. There is several times where she mentions that when she was younger she would play by herself or with her sister Yoyo. She says she doesn't know why she struggled with making friends, but she says that maybe it's because she didn't want to bother people and sometimes she didn't mind being alone. There was also a kid who was alone instead of playing with the other kids, but he kept looking at them like he wanted to play but wasn't sure how to join. Nikki saying herself in the lonely child convinces the other kids to invite the boy to come play with them and then they all get to play together. I really liked that story because I was that kid a lot, and sometimes it was fine, but there were also times where I actually did want to play, but I wasn't sure how to ask and too scared about what would happen if they said no. Me and Nikki are the same there I guess. She also displays a lot of anxiety in general. She says she has ideas and dreams and she wants to chase after them, but she gets scared and thinks "let's not". She's scared of rollercoasters, she doesn't want to try spicy food, and she's afraid to touch the octopus because it looks slimy, which could be related to sensory issues (they are for me anyway). She convinces herself to try some of these things and she was able to do it because you were there. It's sweet. Seriously if you haven't read the events story for the beach event read them the whole thing is so wholesome.

Next I'm going to talk about voice lines that Nikki says when you use outfits or sets in the dressing room:

When you put on the dress wintermount academy Nikki says that she didn't have many close friends in highschool, reiterating what she says in the beach vacation event. When you put on the blooming magnolia set she says she used to feel lonely, but she isn't anymore because she has you. Cute

When you put on the dress garnet she says "what did you say? Louder!" And when you put in the hair accessory perfect machine she says "what did you say? I can't hear" this could be an issue with auditory processing or it could be that she had her ears damage when vulture exploded the train, because she does say that her ears are still ringing when you talk to her in her room when you finish that chapter. Could also be both 🤷🏻‍♀️

Nikki has issues with balance. If you put on the shoes floral path she'll say "tiptoe... Hmmm, isn't it beautiful without tiptoe too?" (For context these are ballet shoes). If you put on the shoes petite white bunny she'll say "I should have a sexy pose... Oops, gotta keep my balance first" I get it heels are hard. I love heels but they should have more flat shoes too.

When you put on the earrings pink heart seashell she'll say "I can't help but want to shake my head when I wear earrings" which is very stimmy behavior to me. The special accessory dimension travel has her say that she can't help but poke the buttons on the bag because it's shaped like a Gameboy.

Not really a sign of anything per se, but there are quite a few item lines that involve her singing. The hair accessory guiding star has her sing "twinkle twinkle little star, on my hair and there you are". The headwear floating ducks has her singing the first part of the 5 little ducks song, and the handheld item magician's wand has her starting a song about a magic wand, after which she stops and laughs saying she can't help it. Very relatable to me

The handheld item light hand fan has her talk about how she tried to learn embroidery, but gave up because she had trouble organizing the spools of thread. This tells me she wants things to be organized but had trouble actually keeping things that way, which is really relatable to me. Comorbid autism and ADHD struggles

Okay I'm gonna post more of this tomorrow, I've had it in my drafts all day and I want people to see it now, so you get like a portion of this. Mostly I just want to talk about blorbo from my app

[cassyapper]

Hey! Sorry to bother you, but I stumbled across you initial analysis of the lovers arc and was wondering if you ever published that vid you were working on for it? I tried looking for it but yk how tumblr search functions can be. I love your analyses and really wanted to hear your fleshed out thoughts since that arc turns me into a pile of goo when I think about all the implications it has the SDC's relationships, especially Jotaro and Kakyoin's.

it's not a bother at all, no worries anon!

one: i'm so glad you enjoyed the analysis! i'm honestly surprised the post is still going around but it makes me really happy cause jotaro and kakyoin mean a lot to me even almost a year later and im happy to help spread the "why" on that (-: ugh god lovers arc so good and im so glad others agree and enjoyed <3

two: AHM YES....THE VIDEO...so technically the lovers arc portion of it has been done for months now but the project has kinda evolved into being an analysis of their dynamic the entire part and how they were close in a neurodivergent/what-could-be-could've-been way. it's kinda becoming my love letter to them and their dynamic 😭 embarrassing. i've been working on it passively for the past several months, but I'm sure one day I'll get impatient with myself and wrap it up. I'm not sure when that day will be per se, but don't be fooled, I'm def still working on it! thank you so much for the interest <3

[kyliafanfiction]

Hello! How are you? Kind of random but I somehow stumbled across an older post of yours about your head canon sexualities for BtVS and AtS characters, and I was wondering if they still held or if they had changed over the years? A lot of them made sense to me but perceptions can shift over time so I was curious if you still felt the same.

Okay, so 1) If you're going to respond to a specific post of mine, I would appreciate you including links or Post #s or something. In this case, I do remember making a big sexuality masterpost and mostly what was on it, but I can't find the post in question despite spending the last few hours looking for it on and off between customers. So if I didn't remember that post fairly well, you'd be SOL in getting an answer to your question.

2). No They haven't. Because the canon hasn't changed. My views on the characters orientations in that sense is "this is what I interpret to be the case in the canon" (except in the case of Amy, more or less). I don't do headcanons like a lot of people on tumblr do, where they'll just throw sexualities, gender identities and neurodivergencies they like at characters they like just because. (This is... not entirely fair, but really, sure how it looks like sometimes).

This isn't to say I don't sometimes go 'oh, there's an interesting prospect for a story' when it involves say, Buffy and Tara as a ship. I've read a few interesting looking Buffy/Tara fics, despite reading Buffy as straight. Hell, I even read Xander/Tara fic despite Tara being super duper gay in canon. Most don't work for me, but they arent all bad per se. I've even written oneshots or the like for Buffy and Cordelia as a ship, despite thinking both are straight.

I've even written longer works that do this. One is just shameless smut and isn't meant to be taken too seriously (The Nymph's Kiss) in which both Buffy and Cordelia are bi for the purposes of the fic I want to do there. Another (Next Year's Girl) has Cordelia be bi because I wanted to write a fic where Xander got bodyswapped with Faith and then stuck in her body, but I'm also a diehard Xandelia shipper so. (I also have three other fics in partial stages of planning that feature Xandelia as a ship but with a Bi Cordelia because Xander is genderbent in some form. This is a premise I quite like, when done right, and have for a long time, I've only relatively recently been willing to actually write it because I've reached the 'fuck it, write the idfic' stage)

But ultimately I still think Cordelia's canon orientation, the orientation of the character that we see on the screen, is heterosexual. When we're talking about the baseline, canon, common to us all Cordelia, I think she's straight. Same with Buffy. Same with Xander (though I'm unlikely to write a fic where Xander likes guys because I'm just not generally interested in m/m fic)

In the context of specific fics or Aus or Whatever, then yeah, go crazy and I'm never gonna dictate other people's HCs, but I tend to go with what's onscreen or what's justifiable from the provided evidence and work from there (and I tend to be conservative - small c, not in a political sense - with how much I read into things, whereas some people will read a lot into things. Generally, if a character doesn't show any specific signs they're not straight, I assume they are)

So no. They haven't changed. And why would they? Canon is still what it is.

[the80srewinders]

oh for sure !! I'm not saying tiktok isn't godawful (it is lol, so much misinfo), I just don't think the idea of it being banned is something to be celebrated :p

I don't know if we think it should be celebrated per se. It wouldn't be good for everyone, theres people on TikTok who truly use it to educate people on mental health and neurodivergence. There's people who truly use it to entertain in a family friendly way (those Vine-like comedy videos.) But unfortunately TikTok has contributed to more misinformation about DID than any other social media site we've seen (minus systemscringe on reddit, which ironically uses TikTok as why "most people are faking DID.") That last sentence alone shows the damage its done. Really TikTok should only be banned if they cant get their act together and ban misinformation accounts, not just mental health misinformation accounts but other misinformation accounts as well. I know TikTok has some good sides and being banned would be bittersweet. We just hold anger and avoidance toward it because of what its turned out to be. Thanks for the asks tho this is actually something we've always wanted to post about in such detail and just get off our chest.

[waterfall-ambience]

information on damien vexx's non-existent childhood and infancy ('what if they realised he was 'alive' much earlier? how would that have gone?'). some of this will never be relevant, it's equivalent to headcanons, but i had fun thinking about it regardless:

older than avery, though not by much. im not sure how it works out specifically considering both of them were grown in vats, but damien has the vibes of someone who was born a few weeks premature. little guy.

captain luna quickly takes responsibility, and the gods are a bit obsessed with watching him be a father at 200+ years old. he has some experience dealing with infants but he himself never had children.

the perpetua key is kept FAR AWAY from the kids. luna is NOT risking anything.

there is a photo of damien and avery as newborns that everyone talks about, mostly because they find the size difference between them to be amusing.

luna and minerva both turn up to meetings swaddling their children, especially after they were just born. they end up trading parenting tips.

damien is a bit of a fussy baby. he cries often and sounds like a small cat. he doesn't like the bottle but they really don't have any other options because hey, clones.

avery, on the other hand, is much calmer and more quiet. he doesn't cry or babble as much.

damien learns to talk slightly early (+ with a lisp), though his more 'diplomatic' behaviours are from mimicking captain luna rather than anything else. uses 'tetu' for 'thank you'. one time luna sang along to a lullaby they had on CD damien told him 'dada, lets just listen' ('dad, shut up').

damien is not a difficult toddler, per se, but he can come across as a bit of a brat/priss/what have you (though it's hardly intentional). years later, avery notes that as a child damien always seemed to be in some state of discomfort.

(^^ was it the ambiguous neurodivergency? possibly. there's a story about him saying the same phrase over and over again for over an hour, though otherwise his 'developmental milestones' and forms of pretend play read as exceedingly normal, so luna never got him checked for anything back then.)

damien's presence in a lot of their home videos are marked by his coughing (diagnosed with asthma at age 3, has hygiene practices burned into his brain from then on but he still sounds like an ipad kid)

avery is more of an adventurous child. after the first couple of years he gets louder and starts talking a lot and he finds joy in tackling people (damien doesn't like it as much, and they both learn a valuable lesson about expressing boundaries and not playing too rough).

avery gets his hair cut into an asian bowl cut for the first time, and goes "i'm a boy!! :D " upon seeing himself in the mirror (damien reacts in a similar manner once he sees him). avery keeps his hair like this forever.

minerva learns that avery struggles with reading aloud so she makes him read to damien anyway (similar to how things are in canon)

in this turn of events, the kids are much more like siblings or cousins than anything else (and no future romantic interest here! definitely not!). they bicker a lot when they're small but once they hit 8-9~ years old, they're best friends.

they do A LOT of pretend play. in their adventure stories, avery likes being the hero and damien sometimes dabbles in being the person who has to be saved.

"you hit me!! (sobs)" "shh it's okay! you can hit me back!" "(sobbing continues)"

they cheat off each other's homework at one point and both get scolded.

avery's major point of insecurity is more focused on him being 'talentless' than because early on damien proves to be an adept magic user. the kid waits on a miracle like crazy.

damien's full name in this version of events is something along the lines of 'fabian augusto luna' (captain luna names him after augustin as a way of circumventing the possibility of him being 'brought back wrong')

[necropsittacus]

also can i just say its a really fucking bizarre experience to have like...on the occasions you ARE interacting with other kids your own age, they think you talk funny and inform you of such frequently enough that it becomes a source of anxiety, but then if you try to shift your speech to what you perceive as "like the normal kids" your Family then deems it weird and makes fun of you for it (and, additionally, theres some nasty internalized stuff about the way your family does it being More Educated going on), so after a certain point you have to either shift your pronunciations of certain things based on who youre talking to or just accept being weird. also i still refuse to say "aunt" until i know how the person im talking to says it

[draceempressa]

When I read the translations of the newest update of EP 6, the thing that comes to mind in me is when Rook tell Ortho how regretful he was that he didn't notice Vil's pain that led him to overblot. However....

Rook Hunt: I sometimes jump out of my skin when I dream about that day when Vil Overblotted.

Rook Hunt: I thought I was staring at him closer than a mirror, closer than his five million magical camera followers. 

Rook Hunt: I was standing next to him, watching him.

Rook Hunt: I don't know if his overblot could have been avoided if I had reached out to him.

Rook Hunt: To think that maybe we could have saved them would be a terrible conceit.

Rook Hunt: Vil’s anger, his despair, and his loneliness…and everyone else’s too.

Rook Hunt: I'm here so I can say, "I did all I could do."

Rook Hunt: Oh. Not for anyone else. For my own aesthetics.

I really wanna point this out. Rook, I know he ain't a perfect friend, and I know this time he's trying what he can for Vil, and he finally get to point out his mistake in not seeing Vil's pain and do something about it, I appreciate that. I'm fully aware now he isn't that fully perceptive enough to know what people are thinking. 

BUT, he has no right to say he did what he could do. He did all what he can do just now, but I can't say the same thing back in EP 5. Cause honestly, he never really did anything to get Vil to at least pacify his insecurities, he literally just standing there watching Vil get eaten by his insecurities yet he never done anything. It's just like how Trey tried to ignore Riddle's tyranny all cause he has a strained past with his parents. Rook understands Vil's desperation in wanting to outshine Neige but he seems to fail to realize that Vil's self doubts of his own beauty is eating him away and he did nothing to stop him. He only acted when Vil loses it and attempt to kill Neige. I know Rook said that even if he tried to stop him, he won't make a difference, well even if Vil will end up being stubborn, that's his choice, at least Rook tried. But Rook didn't try, he literally did NOTHING to stop Vil. Only at the end where they lose (when Rook voted for RSA) is when he console him. 

But hey, this is just a game. Vil overblotting will happen, with Rook or the others interfering or not. I'm glad Rook get to realize his mistake and try to make up for it, even if his shenanigans just to show how he cares for Vil is too hard to handle. Here's what I can say, 3 years isn't enough to know a person deep down. 

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

I'll say the keyword here.

Rook Hunt: Oh. Not for anyone else. For my own aesthetics.

Look here. this one here. This is the keyword to the situation. Aesthetic. Rook, first and foremost, before everything, is an art connoisseur. Like sure, his definition of art isn't just about the physical ones, it does include personality, per se, but he clearly is that neurodivergent art connoisseur who see beauty in everything and the want to appreciate everything as if they are an art, even if they are living being close to him, more like, if they are living person near him. My homie, who is an art student, said, it would be hard to try to understand Rook if you're not an art person, who see beauty in everything.

But i will rebuke one point here. It's not that Rook didn't get Vil, no. But getting back to his "art person as his whole personality" idea, he finds beauty in the idea of being killed by Vil. Or the idea of the unyielding Vil finally breaks. He finds the idea itself artistic, you see. Not that he doesn't get Vil, no, he does.

Sure, as you say he finally realized his mistake.but it wasn't "he didn't realize Vil was breaking" per se, no, because he would have. It was more about "my selfish taste in aesthetic, wanting to see more sides of Vil is doing more damages on him in the long run and I would rather save him now rather than sating my thirst (heh) for aesthetic, so I can enjoy more of his aesthetic later" Different than Trey's coddling of "he already suffered enough so I don't call know how to call him out without hurting him", Rook's mistake is more "oh this is beautiful too . not bad to see vil sometimes like this, let us savor the aes tad bit more" , in the audience/artist sense.

Not that he enjoys vil's suffering per se, but for him, vil's overblotting is simply another struggle Vil have faced everyday and it's not any less beautiful even if tad bit more surprising. It's why he didn't try to pacify Vil, because the man himself doesn't exactly want help and Rook knows that much. Rook watched from the sidelines is out of his own artist/audience instinct as much because he knows Vil himself doesn't really want people to get too close and coddle him.

Trey is Riddle's friend, yes we know they are textbook osanajimi (childhood friends). But relationship between Rook and Vil are definitely not textbook friends, even if they ARE friends, they are more like relationship between the art and the artist (see also: pygmalion and galatea, those kind of stuff) .

Yes, all of this sounds so screwed up for a neurotypical, for our world' standard, and neither I will say Rook is right in letting Vil broke. I'm just here to explain his aesthetic, what he lives for , how he see things, and while he is wrong, not in the way you think he is.

[tired-boy-discursed]

I hope it’s ok to ask this — what even is endo discourse?? I followed a blog I thought was mainly about being queer + a neurodivergancy I have, and it turned out to mostly be system stuff. I know nothing about systems. What is this. Where am I.

Hello?

(Jk, I’m just very confused as a not system person, and idk if I should just avoid all of it or if it’s something I should learn about. Thank you, I hope this isn’t rude; I didn’t mean it to be lol)

Sjs

You aren't being rude and thanks for being chill in this ask!

So an Endo or and Endogenic is a Person or Collective(the nonmedical term I will be using, but it basically means system) who says that they are a Collective without trauma.

As such they are not technically a system (short for System of Dissociative Parts) as that would be claiming to have a major symptom of DID / OSDD / UDD and various other Trauma based Dissociative disorders.

Endo Discourse is really Nuanced and there's multiple "sides" per se. You have Pro Endos which is the side that say e does exist, some say that Endos are nondisorded, some say that Endos are a neurodiversity. But they all agree that Endos are Real, and that systemhood should be demedicalized (that's a longer topic but I can explain if you want)

Then there's Endo Neutrals / Syscourse Neutrals, and I'm not quite sure how to explain their side. From what I've seen it's kinda like "Endos might exist, they might not. I'll believe what these people say but I also think some systemhood should be medicalized"

Then there's Anti-Endos, you'd be surprised but some anti Endos actually think that Endos do exist they just aren't systems. They're something else. These people typically though believe that Endos do not exist, and that all systemhood should be medicalized.

[coldtomyflash]

I've seen your speech pattern analysis on Flash characters. I was wondering if you had any advice on how to create speech patterns for OC characters?

oh heck this is one of the coolest questions i’ve ever received.

i’m gonna try not to go overboard/overwhelming and just give a bit of advice, and then if you want more details please come back and follow up!

There’s a few things to think about up front with character voices / speech patterns. The biggest and most obvious is language and cultural background. The second is personality. The third is personal history. Fourth, briefly, is gender. And the final one I’d say is idiosyncrasies to avoid ‘same voice’.

Culture and Group Dynamics

Depending on the setting, there’s a decent chance you’ll be writing characters from different cultural backgrounds. Even if you’re focusing on a single culture, there will be subcultures. Even if you’re focusing on a single narrow group of people, there will be age and generational differences.

Think about where your character is from. If it’s a fantasy world, that’s still (and even more, in some ways) important. What country, what ethnicity, what mother tongue? Did they grow up urban or rural? High socio-economic status or working class? What sort of educational background and peer group did they have growing up (and presently) and how does that factor into their vocabulary and mannerisms, if at all.

All of these can influence how people talk. There are regional accents and different modes of speaking to signal your group membership. There is code-switching across groups, for those who have had to learn multiple linguistics codes to survive and thrive in society. 

How much slang does this group and therefor this character use? What references (modern, outddated, topical, etc) do the rely on? What kind of references (pop culture, music, academic, etc)? What colloquialisms and proverbs do they say? Are these the same or different to their characters, even within the same culture, subculture, or group, and is it because they’re from a different place/sub-group or because of their idiosyncrasies?

You can use these to help your reader get to know more about your character’s background without having to spell it all out directly. Speech patterns and style are a great way to show instead of tell when it comes to details that are hard to drop in organically in other ways.

An important caveat: don’t write a bilingual character who switches languages in speech unless you’re ready to do a bit of research on that. In AATJS I did an absolutely horrific job of this because I was thinking more about fronting the fact that character was Italian rather than thinking through how people actually talk, and it came out exotifying and embarrassing. It’s important to make sure that the way you use language to bring in a character’s cultural and/or ethnic background feels authentic and manifests is a way that respects that language and its users. You can write a character with a complex cultural history without using multiple languages if you’re unprepared to do research and talk to bilingual speakers.

Personality

Probably the most salient thing in a writer’s mind when they’re trying to write character voices: is this the funny character? the serious one? the brainy one? etc.

Don’t overuse stereotypes and archetypes for creating speech patterns (or characters in general) if you’re trying to make a rounded, 3-dimensional character. Instead, go about three levels deeper.

Think about whether they’re introverted or extraverted, whether they are neurotypical or neurodivergent, whether they are introspective enough to express their own emotions clearly or whether they stumble when asked why they did a particular thing or feel a particular way (most people don’t or can’t clearly articulate exactly why they did something or how they feel, and come at things a bit sideways to circle around their motives and interior realities when pressed to make them external and concretely verbal).

Is this character calm, is their voice soothing, do they speak slowly? Are they excitable and loud and is their speech free-flowing? Are they angry? Do they swear? Do they use references for humour or are they more into puns? Do they laugh at their own jokes? Do they talk with their hands?

This character has social anxiety: how does that manifest in her speech? Does she clam up and get very quiet when she gets nervous, or does she go rapidfire and a little too loud (does she process by turning in or by distracting herself by turning outward)? Does she get very careful and deliberate in choosing her words (is she a bit high-strung?)? Ask yourself which fits best with the other elements of her personality and what you want the reader to know/interpret about her. 

This character is incredibly smart and a bit awkward: how does that manifest in their speech? Do they tend to use 5-dollar words, or do they expend a lot of energy choosing their words more carefully (how considerate are they to their audience when speaking and does that influence their speech)? Do they stumble over their words and explaining things, or are they good at making points with clear language learned from a lifetime of tutoring and helping others?

This character is the bff, who tries hard to make sure everyone else is happy first: how does that manifest in his speech? How does he switch between his happy-mask versus his more authentic self, and what changes in tone, word-choice, and inflection come in when he does?

-

Personal History

I’m only drawing a distinction between this and personality (archetype, really) so that I can draw attention to ways to add simultaneously unique and shared layers to characters that are distinct but related to group dynamics.

Here’s sort of what I mean: the level of education of a mother (or primary caregiver) of an infant can determine that infant’s vocabulary size. While we can break down all the ‘why is that’ layers to this, the one I want to point is to the simple truth that the more education a person does, the more specialized language they end up learning over time. This doesn’t have to be formal education though -- the more you learn about something and the more you read and access new knowledges and perspective, the more and more words you learn, and then if you start using those words, they trickle down to those close to you.

So.

What’s your character’s educational background? Is it the same as their friends who you are also writing? Is the same as their family’s? How does this character’s family influence their speech? Are they formal, informal, warm, authoritative? 

If you’re writing siblings, they’ll have some shared things! But also some very different ones! Me and my sister talk nothing alike in terms of vocabulary, but a lot alike in terms of mannerisms whenever we spend a bit of time together!

If your characters grew up around each other, they’ll have a lot of the same references. People from the same cities or regions will have things specific to that region, either due to sub-culture effects or because of local references. 

The city of Calgary, Canada for instance has the Plus15 which are a connected pedway system between the buildings in downtown, so named because they are 15feet above the ground. Drive 3 hours north to the city of Edmonton, and you have an underground pedway just called the pedways, no special name. Go a few provinces east to Toronto and their underground pedway system downtown is called PATH. These are all known to locals and part of the vernacular, but are opaque to people outside those cities. And the whole idea of them is probably opaque to people who aren’t from super cold cities that don’t require building-connecting pedway systems for pedestrians to get around high-density areas like downtown (or university campuses) without going out into the cold. 

Friends, families, and groups are like that too. In-jokes, shared histories, speaking in references. What are your characters’ relationships to each other and how does that history influence the way they approach talking to each other?

-

Gender

I don’t want to spend too much time on this one because ugh, gender. What even is it?

But like it or not, it has an impact on our speech patterns. There are cultural and societal norms in how men and women are likely to speak, and breaking those norms will be noticed regardless of whether you’re trans, enby, queer, or not. There are norms that people who are queer may fall into as well, sometimes without even noticing at first. A lot of these aren’t about word choice per se but instead about mannerisms and tone and body language, but some overlap or are specific to language.

Speaking in broad generalizations here, women use more emotional language and tend to speak with more hesitancies/qualifications. So more “i think, i feel” and less “it is”. More conversations that front emotions and dig deeper into those, with longer sentences to explain in detail. The obvious caveat is that personality matters more (i.e., is this a person who likes to talk about their emotions in detail or not) but it is something to consider because there will be general but subtle differences that you can use to help further distinguish your characters’ voices. 

Sidenote: this can also be exacerbated by different cultural backgrounds and languages (a simple example is Japanese which has different words for “I” depending on your gender as well as your personality, familiarity with the other persons in the conversation, and situational appropriateness, so interesting ways that gender and social expectations intersect in language).

Anyway this isn’t typically a huge problem except that I’ve found that a lot of writers have a tendency to overgeneralize the speech patterns that fit with their ascribed gender due to early-life socialization, or conversely to overgeneralize patterns that fit with their gender identity (when not cis) either due to heavily identifying with their gender identity’s speech model (or sometimes possibly due to a knee-jerk sort of backlash). I say this as an enby who both struggles with it and notices it and tries to edit and correct for it. 

I could get into all sorts of examples of ways this can lead to voice issues, but in general i think the point here is to make sure you’re writing any given character in view of that character’s personality and history, with gender only as a modifier for how some of these might come out in subtle ways but which can be important to help tell us about your character (and if you’re writing queer characters, it’s all the more important to consider how their relationship with gender and socialization might impact which speech models and styles they identify more with).

-

Idiosyncrasies

So, you’ve got a character. You’ve got their personality and history down. You know how they manifest in their speech. And you’re still getting some ‘same voice’ issues.

People really are unique snowflakes. Let that be reflected in their speech.

This person uses contractions differently than that one. This one says “ain’t” and that one says “isn’t.”

This person makes Simpsons references and that one doesn’t like Simpsons, and makes Brooklyn Nine Nine references instead. That other one doesn’t use referential humour much at all. This one loves old movies and hasn’t seen any of the new stuff so they make references all the time but no one ever notices.

This one loves the word “excoriate” and that one doesn’t even know what it means because what the hell, who uses the word excoriate?

This one talks about food a lot, it overlaps with their interests. This one uses metaphors. This one grunts in response. This one exclaims. This one says “like” and that one hates it. That one refers to themselves in third person. This other one uses reflective language an usual amount (e.g., “love me some candy”). This other one keeps misusing the word inconceivable and that one speaks almost without contractions but still comes off as more charming and humorous while correcting him.

I have an aunt who says “girl” or “girlfriend” a fuck-ton and she has been my whole life and I don’t know why because none of her sisters do, but she does and it annoys me so much the way she says it. I swear a lot when I’m feeling casual despite never ever doing it in a professional or even slightly-less-than-relaxed space, so the idiosyncrasy of comfort levels has a massive impact on my vocabulary in ways which, I promise, almost no one who meets me first in a professional space expect.

Let your characters be individuals and try to make them as unique as possible without overdoing it, or over-relying on a single verbal tendency or habit. 

-

And ... that’s all I’ve got for now. Completely failed at being concise. I meant to give like 2-3 bullet points or examples for each, not paragraphs, but here we are. That’s one of my verbal tendencies: long flowing verbosity :)

Hope this helps! 

[random-thought-depository]

One thing I definitely had on the brain writing this post is... when I get around to actually writing that The Sisters of Dorley/Glow, Worm crossover fanfic, I think probably the hardest thing about doing so will be imitating the original author's narrative voice. For starters there's the fact I'll have to learn British spelling, but it's more than that. That person writes very differently from me. I tried writing a small bit of rough draft of the fanfic I had in mind a while back, as an experiment, and it came out very jarringly not being at all like the original story stylistically. That is definitely something I'll have to work on!

I think what I'll probably do is try my best to write characters I read as neurotypical in their style and then write characters I read as kinda-sorta cousin-y to me kind of neurodivergent in my own natural style, to create a sense of different characters having different internal mental voices and processing the world in different ways. This will correspond probably not perfectly but pretty heavily to "characters from the original story get their internal point of view sections written in my best facsimile of the original author's writing style, OCs get their internal point of view sections written in my style, the more they're noted as visibly neurodivergent the more I lean into things that are 'weird' about the way I write while writing their internal point of view sections."

I mean, I'm not sure if "neurotypical" is quite the right word here, cause I think transness itself is probably a neurodivergence, and it definitely will be in this setting, but, I mean, like, neurotypical aside from that.

Like, yeah, I'm not sure this is exactly correct, but when I try to articulate how their writing style is different from mine a phrase that pops into my mind is "they have neurotypical writing." My impressions are:

It's very workmanlike. I don't mean that as an insult, it's in a sense very elegantly functional. It doesn't draw much attention to itself, it gets out of the way and serves as an efficient mechanism for telling the reader what's happening and how people are interacting. It uses very ordinary "how regular people talk" vocabulary and phrasing and sentence structure. It's kind of efficiently terse; it moves quickly and smoothly. And there's differences in the way we treat physicality/the body that I find interesting.

It's interesting, because I've seen notes in Glow, Worm and things on the author's Twitter about her being a chronic pain sufferer; she says right in the introduction of Glow, Worm "I also may or may not be exorcising some of my demons, as a woman with chronic pain, through Viv," but to me most her characters read as, like, really healthy-coded (I wonder if it's the product of a deliberate effort to write normal people from someone who knows their experience is not typical).

Like, I'm thinking of this post that's floating around that's like "friendly reminder that the average person's normal pain level is zero" and my reaction to that is "sounds fake but OK, guess I'm an unfortunate outlier." And I think about my impressions of how The Sisters of Dorley and Glow, Worm treats the body, and I'm like "oh, it's describing the internal experiences of people who have a normal pain level of zero! That's how you relate to physicality if that's your lived experience!" And, like, Viv feels like an exception that proves the rule here, like she and Jill feel like the only people with hurty uncooperative bodies in a cast otherwise full of people who have smoothly functioning mostly pain-free bodies (in Dorley, the only person who comes across as having that sort of body issues is Aaron - it's briefly mentioned that he has a damaged arm). Probably most fiction reads like this and I just don't notice it much like 99.99% of the time, but it's really noticeable here because embodiment and the vulnerability of the body is so extremely relevant to Dorley.

And it's not necessarily about pain per se, it's more like, if you have a smoothly functioning body with a normal pain level of zero and there's nothing hard to deal with going on in it, you aren't stimulated to think so much about the fact that you're fragile and an animal and made out of meat, you experience your body as in a way unobtrusive. And, like, it's not that everyone there has an unproblematic relationship with their bodies, of course Gemma and like just about everyone in Dorley are going to have some kind of complicated and fraught feelings about their bodies, but they're mostly about the social body, the ways other people react to their bodies, whether they think their bodies are beautiful or not. And the idea of damage/injury to bodies definitely shows up (Bea's and Maria's old scars, Dorley's whole... thing), but it's past damage, it's... not really the same thing as what Viv has or what I wrote Annaliese's and Ruth's human selves as having.

And, like, one thing I've been mentally pulling on a little here that I think shows this is the way Elle is originally portrayed vs. the basically an OC I've extrapolated out from her canon portrayal. Like, thinking about what I said about there being a lot of parallels between the way I'm writing her and Brett Devereaux's analysis of Saruman...

One parallel I didn't mention there is one I see specifically with movie Saruman. One thing I like about Christopher Lee's performance is he really gives me a sense that Saruman enjoys the experience of having power; that he really enjoys the experience of telling the Uruk Hai what to do and having them act subservient to him and talking about the powerful creatures and powerful army he controls. And I'm absolutely writing Elle as having that. It's more hidden with her, but she absolutely likes power in that way. 100% she's the sort of self-aware where when she watches the LOTR movies her reaction to watching this scene is "Inshallah, basically me in ten or twenty or thirty years, and I think I'm going to have about as much fun with it as he's having."

And she's personally a very physically strong and resilient person with superpowers, so this extends to her own body. She absolutely loves the fact that she is strong and resilient even by vampire standards. Like, there is a reason her elevator pitch for vampirization is smashing up a concrete pillar with her fists, stabbing herself in the stomach and letting the other person watch the wound heal in like five minutes while she calmly stands there, encouraging them to dig their fingers around in the wound to confirm that it's real while being like "this doesn't hurt much for me, my pain threshold is set at a level appropriate for my physical resilience," and then when that show's over telling the other person "as a vampire you will be about as strong and resilient as I am."

And this is very much a reaction to past vulnerability, she remembers being human and being both socially and physically weak even among humans and being abused because of that and those are not good memories for her, she enjoys being strong and having power like this because it comforts her, she associates that kind of power with safety. Like, yeah, that's definitely a subtext I intended for that bit with Grandmother, she intensely did not like that moment of physical vulnerability.

And obviously this is all my invention and extrapolation cause canon keeps her portrayal as totally compatible with her just being a weird human, but, like, it's interesting to compare this with how her power is portrayed in the original story, where her power looks like this:

"Bea’s had a long time to perfect her womanhood, to understand it, to claim it and inhabit it, but Elle Lambert has a way of making her feel like an ingénue. Her heels announce her presence, crisply clicking on the flagstones outside, and by the time she reaches the kitchen doors, Barb — another one of Maria’s circle, who adopted the rather old-fashioned name Barbara with an enthusiasm entirely familiar to Bea; God only knows what Grandmother and the sponsors call her, but it’s unlikely to be anything like as wholesome — has already stepped smartly forward to let her in, as if she’s royalty, and the abused girls of Dorley her retinue. Elle steps elegantly through the door and smiles at the girl, inspiring in Barb a blush Bea thinks could probably cook an egg, and passes to her a shopping bag.

“Gifts for the girls,” Elle says to her, and Barb rushes back to the women standing by the wall, who all look equal parts delighted and scandalised.

“Thank you, ma’am,” Barb says, as the other girls rifle through and pull out tops, skirts, shoes. She performs an exaggerated curtsey, which earns her a glare from Frankie that no-one bar Bea seems to notice.

“Please call me Elle.”

Elle steps forward and deposits a portable hard drive on the kitchen table. She’s short — shorter than Bea and the younger Dorley graduates; shorter even than Grandmother and most of her people, too — but she commands the room effortlessly, with a manner that belies her twenty-five years and which Bea, despite being over a decade her senior, has been trying to emulate since the day they met. She’s pale and subtly made-up, and her rich, thick waves of dark hair break on the shoulders of a suit worth enough, in Bea’s judgement, to feed a family of four for a year. The only woman in the room who doesn’t look dowdy in comparison is Maria, who has today assembled with unexpected skill an elegant outfit from the meagre scraps allowed the girls; Grandmother’s coterie, already given to a particularly English variety of rural tweed anti-fashion, look positively antique." - The Sisters of Dorley, Chapter 16.

And, like, there's totally connective tissue! I very much see her enjoying that sort of power in a Saruman-like way too. And, like, "as if she’s royalty, and the abused girls of Dorley her retinue" - absolutely not a long stretch at all from that to relating to the graduate school girls in something like the way Saruman relates to the Uruk Hai, and yeah very on-brand if her equivalent of the "you will taste manflesh!" stuff involves this sort of small kindnesses.

But, you know...

There's definitely a difference in the way I and the original author approach her embodiment in a way that I think goes beyond me making the vampire thing explicit.

[cruelfeline]

(1/2) the people saying you're neurodivergent are... well, they're not wrong, per se, but they don't have the information needed to be as sure of themselves as they are. you can't diagnose someone with autism or adhd based on a bunch of stuff they said on the internet. you just can't. like, you could have autism or adhd, but that isn’t for random people on the internet to decide. tumblr is weird, because

(2/2) there’s awareness of ableism and mental illness and other nd conditions, but in an almost… fetishizing, identity-politics sort of way that mirrors their past obsession with gay men. like, as soon as people on tumblr have half an ounce of understanding about a disorder, they’ll just announce that their favorite characters and other real-life tumblr users have it, even if that isn’t true. but when someone who *actually* has it shows ugly symptoms, they’re still shunned. in this essay i will

So, anon, I appreciate your viewpoint and know you are trying to provide helpful information, but I will stop you at any sort of assumption that the people talking to me about this are in the business of fetishization or identity politics or what-have-you. While I know that that sort of thing exists, I don’t feel like it is relevant in this case.

I have massive respect for many of the people who have offered their opinions and resources and support whenever this topic comes up, and I know that a good number of them are ND themselves. They have been highly supportive and very kind, and I don’t get any sense that they have untoward motives, or are playing weird tumblr games, or anything of the sort.

Honestly, the only reason this keeps coming up is because I have difficulty identifying myself as anything concrete without a doctor patting me on the head and telling me it’s okay; until that happens, I will feel the need to state that I’m not ND whenever making a post involving any discussion of ND traits or what-have-you (for disclaimer purposes). And, inevitably, when I do that, someone ends up expressing their surprise because apparently, I come across as ND. apparently the level of Hordak is Very High It’s happened enough separate times, with no prompting, that I don’t really know what to think about it, but I certainly don’t feel that there’s any ulterior motive to it. Just people’s honest reaction.

And when it does happen (or when I make a remark that people find... um... psychologically concerning?), people with what they feel are similar experiences come over and try to convey what they’ve gone through and how that may or may not be useful to me. 

Again: I have a certain amount of trust in a number of people who talk to me on here. Maybe not every random anon I get, but certainly various mutuals and followers whom I’m more familiar with. I don’t mind their input and am quite thankful for it.

[enbyboiwonder]

My theory about the referenced third Shinjou brother (whom I’m calling Souma, spelled with 瀧 [waterfall]—to go with the 柊 [holly olive] and 涼 [cool breeze] in Touma’s and Ryouma’s names respectively, both thematically and pronunciation-wise—and the same 真 [truth] as in his brothers’) is that he’s Touma’s twin.

He can’t be older because when you have a child but can’t take care of them (and if Souma and Touma are different ages, then the younger was probably unplanned), you give up the one who was just born, not the one who’s already a year or two old. It would fit with Touma’s being unaware of his existence, but it makes the least sense.

It’s possible he could be younger, then, since their mother says that the one she wanted to keep was Souma. I’m pretty sure you have to be 6 or older to be diagnosed with autism (although, that’s in the U.S.; idk how or if things are different in Japan), but I don’t know how young signs of neurodivergence become apparent, but for Touma to not remember Souma, to not be aware of his existence, he had to have been pretty young, no more than a couple years old, when Souma was born. (Though, well, I don’t think it actually matters whether she knew Touma was different at the time, but more on that in a bit.) It’s certainly not unlikely that Souma’s younger, but I think it’s more likely that they’re twins.

I don’t know if they’re identical (Souma’s definitely also autistic) or fraternal (Souma may or may not also be autistic), but, frankly, it doesn’t matter. Identical twins, particularly when raised together, are extremely similar since they share the same DNA as well as many of the same formative experiences, so it may seem like it would matter, but this is about idealization. This is about their mother idealizing the son she couldn’t have.

I firmly believe that a big part of why their mother hates Touma is that he’s autistic. But they were so young when she gave up Souma that she couldn’t have known then that Touma was different. It’s a case of her idealizing the unknown. At the time, they could only take care of one more child, but she gave birth to twins but she still wanted one and so they had to choose one to give up for adoption, and now, years later, she looks at Touma, who’s different from other children—and from the neurotypical Ryouma—and causes her so much trouble because she doesn’t know how (nor does she want) to deal with him, and thinks, “Ah, things would be different if only I’d kept Souma instead. I wish I had given up Touma back then.” It could be that Souma’s also autistic, and he ended up in a supportive household and he’s more well-adjusted than Touma because he’s actually getting the help and support he needs, and if she met him now it would only reaffirm her wish that she’d kept him instead. But if she had, then it would be the same thing with him, and now she’d be thinking, “Ah, things would be different if only I’d kept Touma instead. I wish I had given up Souma back then.” Because when you get down to it, it’s not really that she wants Souma, it’s that she doesn’t want an autistic child.

But ah, yes, I did say that him being autistic was only “a big part” of why she hates him, not all of it. That’s because what she really wants is a second Ryouma, and Touma’s autism is the most obvious difference between them, the biggest way Touma doesn’t live up to her ideal image of him. If he weren’t, or if Souma isn’t and she’d kept him like she thinks she wishes, I don’t know that it would be “better” per se, but the abuse would look a little different. With how much she’s always comparing him to Ryouma, Souma’s situation would be like Tsubasa’s with his father and older brothers. All three brothers are good at soccer, but since his brothers did it first, Tsubasa being as good as them isn’t good enough for their father. In the same vein, Ryouma is the favored child, and Touma/Souma is living in his shadow, so nothing he does is never going to be good enough for their mother (autistic or not). Souma might not be the autistic child of a parent who views any sign of neurodivergence as undesirable and something to be punished—even as something that he’s doing on purpose specifically to spite her—but he’d still have to deal with never being seen as good enough by a parent who has a specific image of who she wants her child to be and won’t let him be anything else.

[neighbourskid]

Dave? Dave.

It's been quite a bit since I've written anything here, huh? Well, I guess as it has been for pretty much everyone, life has been kinda strange for a while now. Despite vaccine roll-outs and continually changing safety regulations, there's still a global pandemic on, and everyone is trying to navigate this reality the best they can. For once, we are all, generally speaking, in the same boat now (sure, there are huge differences between countries because capitalism fucking sucks and rich greedy humans are once again proof that things need to change asap, but overall, we all have to deal with this pandemic).

But I don't actually want to talk about the pandemic, it just exists as a frame of what I do wanna talk about.

As I have mentioned before, when the pandemic hit, I was in the last semester of my undergrad studies and writing my Bachelor thesis. Or that's what I was supposed to do, anyway. I did do a lot of reading for it, early in the first lockdown after university closed and we were all attending from home. I was lucky, I had no classes, I only had like three scheduled meetings to check in on progress of the thesis, but otherwise I was free of zoom calls and attempting to attend university digitally. So I read.

After a while, reading became taking a book with me into the sun, glancing at one or two pages, and then just napping for most of the day, and spending my evenings either playing video games or watching some tv show or movie. At some point, I felt like now was the perfect time to rewatch all fifteen seasons of CRIMINAL MINDS, so I did that, instead of writing my thesis. I still occasionally read, but most of the days I just felt exhausted and unmotivated so I stayed in bed and binged my crime show.

As the deadline for the thesis started approaching, and the time I had left fell under a month, a switch in my brain seemed to be activated and, oh, hello, suddenly there was a certain drive there for that thesis again. Which lasted exactly until an email from university dinged into my inbox a few days later, informing me that I would get another month for my thesis, due to the pandemic. And away that motivation and drive went, immediately.

Not much later I had a session with the therapist I was seeing at the time, because of the hormone treatment I had started early that same year. I had talked to him about my concern that I might have ADHD before because I didn't feel like there was anything we needed to talk about related to my transition, so I brought it up again here. I told him how my thesis was going -- or rather, how it wasn't going at all -- and finally, as I told him about some of the issues I experienced while trying to do work for it, he acknowledged that I may indeed have some attention regulation issues. He prescribed me medication to try out, and -- wonder oh wonder -- suddenly I was writing my thesis. I ended up finishing it on time (even though a week before I had a moment of "all of this is garbage, I will never pass, I should start the whole thing from scratch") and got a decent grade for it, too. I've been on those meds since.

Over the last, I don't know how many years, I've always known that there was something a bit wonky about my brain. There were always these things that seemed to come so easy to other people, and try as I might, I just couldn't make them happen. I, presumably, had a lot of neurotypical friends. I also have friends with depression, BPD, anxiety disorders and other neurodivergencies. I have family members with autism. I know my mom suspected I might be on that spectrum as well.

Reading up on many of those things I never felt like any of them described what I was experiencing. There were certain traits, sure, but mostly there was a lack of what I actually did experience in most of them. Even ADHD, when reading about the "required" issues and traits, doing those self-diagnosing questionnaires, I just never saw what I felt represented. And then I started reading about what people with diagnosed ADHD had to say about how they experience things. I ignored the more medical or clinical information, and just looked for people talking about how they navigate their lives with ADHD. And then all of a sudden it was, oh, yeah this, this is relatable. This is where my brain's at.

Suddenly it made sense that caffeine didn't do nothing for me, that a nice, warm cup of coffee put me right to sleep. It made sense how, after only a month, suddenly a well beloved hobby or tv show was suddenly of no interest whatsoever. Staring at the wall for three hours instead of doing a simple task. Drawing in class so that I could pay attention to what is being said. The inability to remember much of my life before 6th grade. Having to bounce my leg so I could read a simple text. Needing to visually break a book down into chapters with colourful post-its to keep me from being overwhelmed by the length of the book. And so many other things. Suddenly, there was a reason for that.

I've always liked doing personality quizzes. Or doing stuff related to my zodiac sign even if I don't believe in astrology per se. Finding out what my Enneagram number is. Or my Myers-Briggs type. Not because I think those things define me or describe me to a T, but because they give me a vocabulary. They give me options. I love answering a bunch of questions and then getting a wall of text telling me This Is Who You Are and then I get to pick out what is accurate and what isn't. It gives me words to describe who I am that I didn't have before.

And it is the same thing with posts or videos of people with ADHD. It gives me a vocabulary for the things I experience and it lets me express those things in a way I wasn't able to before. Before, I was like, doing things that my brain doesn't want to do, feels like running headfirst into a wall because there is no way above, around, or underneath it. There is no door, no ladder, no tunnel, no nothing. There is only running headfirst into it until maybe, hopefully, it cracks. Preferably before my head does. But that is exhausting and most of the time, I prefer to not get through the wall at all, if what it takes is going headfirst through it. Now, I know that what that is, is a dopamine deficiency. The task that needs doing, the task that this wall is, doesn't give my brain enough dopamine. There is no satisfaction, there is nothing to gain from that task, so the brain isn't interested.

One of the things that I recently discovered and helps me a lot in this quest of figuring out how my brain works, is this guy Connor on tiktok, who also has ADHD. His videos are both hilarious and informative. And also incredibly relatable. They might be silly haha funny videos on the dear old internet, but I walk away from most of them going, oh! oh that makes sense, good to know.

He occasionally talks about how ADHD is completely misnamed and how Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder does not actually accurately describe what exactly people with ADHD lack. In one of his videos, he calls it DAVE instead. It's silly, and sounds a bit dumb, but I kinda like it. Dave. Dopamine Attention Variability Executive-Disfunction. Dave. I like Dave.

Y'know, I don't mind having ADHD. Presumably, I've lived with it my whole life so far. And it's annoying as shit some of the time. Especially when things need to get done and they just won't. But I don't mind that, especially now that I know that this is what it is. I've always feared that if I finally do go to a therapist and try to figure out what my brain is up to, they'll just tell me that I'm fine and there's nothing to worry about. And at first, my therapist did say I was psychologically unremarkable. But I guess if you've lived like this your whole life and nobody has really picked up on it, even a therapist doesn't notice (it's called masking, I've learned, thanks Connor).

But knowing is good. Knowing means I can learn things that help. I can take medication when needed. And, looking at the grades I'm currently getting in my graduate studies? Hells yeah, taking that medication and knowing how to deal with certain aspects of my brain helps a lot. It is incredibly funny to me that the best grades I have gotten in my entire academic career have been achieved in my Master's studies during a global pandemic. There is currently an actual real possibility that I may graduate summa cum laude. In my MA. That is insane!

Anyway, I am avoiding tasks by writing this right now. Oh, the irony. I'm gonna try and do those tasks now. Y'all take care. Cheers!

[sergeantsporks]

6 and 19 for the ask game pls!

6: have you ever made a playlist about something you were writing as an elaborate means to procrastinate when you could have been actually writing and if yes drop a link, son

No :'( The closest I've ever gotten is when I was writing Can't Make Me and went "Hey, Fade Away by Breaking Benjamin fits this :D"

19: what’s something neat you’ve learned while doing research for something you were writing? also, how much do you worry about doing research in general?

OH I HAVE LEARNED SO MUCH :D

Miscellaneous Knowledge of Mine:

- A wide range of neurodivergencies, disabilities, and trauma responses

- How to Splint a Broken Wrist

- How to care for frostbite

- How to wrap your wrist/knuckles for a fight

- How to relocate a dislocated shoulder

- A probably-suspicious amount about date-r*pe drugs, tranquilizers, medication, and drugs in general

- B l o o d l o s s

Now that you've asked, of course I can't recall any. You know. Specific facts. But sometimes people say stuff that just. Triggers the sleeper agent information in my head and BAM, I am spouting info that no one ever wanted to know. I actually really, really like doing research over stuff for writing, it's one of my favorite parts, so I don't "worry" over it, per se, but I do a hell of a lot of it to make sure I get all of the facts before actual writing

Thanks for the ask :D