#+ delusions and compulsions surrounding the experiments that have been done on them

[eruukat]

:3c just realized i can give squall piercings......

[pseudoneiiric]

meta post: ocd, mysophobia, and a revelation on my part.

not to mention that a really important part of lili’s backstory is… her germaphobia. she has persistent delusions accompanied by visual hallucinations where she sees people as “parasites”, which visually manifests as them rotting or decomposing. because of that, she wears gloves all the time and is repulsed by physical touch. but when she meets c (whose real name is vincent) in person, she pretty much instantly goes for skin-to-skin contact with him, where she takes off her glove and holds his hand. and like, sure, that’s sweet, but that’s really not how mental illness… works. in the slightest. she doesn’t react at all when his hand touches hers, despite the fact that she has literally had panic attacks in canon from touching things without her gloves. and it gives off this implication that mental illness can be cured with romance somehow, and that’s a really bad take!

this feeds into fandom understanding that like, well, if lilian sees vincent as pure and allows him to touch her, then Obviously she’d let him kiss her, they could probably have sex, etc. and like… she’s canonically asexual though! and that brings us to the other implication, that asexuality is somehow… caused by something. like, there’s nothing in canon to state that lilian experiences sexual attraction (or even really romantic attraction, like i know etherane went off in heaven’s gate and did a lot of ship tease, but she never really outright says she’s crushing on anyone), but judging from the way etherane handled lilian’s gender identity, i have a sneaking suspicion that she established lilian’s asexuality with her mental illnesses specifically in mind. lilian’s autistic, germaphobic, has severe ocd, and she’s been sexually assaulted in the past. therefore, she must be asexual! that’s the sort of vibes i get from the game, and im not here for it.

— me, circa november 2020

the other day, i was writing a crossover ship fic for lilian when i ran into a problem. namely, the Touch Aversion problem. at first glance, the reasoning behind lilian’s touch aversion seems really simple: she hates germs and dirty things, so she wears gloves and washes her hands so frequently that they blister. since she has ocd and mysophobia, it makes sense for her to be obsessive about cleanliness and for her passive skill to be listed as cleaning. she doesn’t touch q84 in canon even in life-threatening situations, except for the very end, because she hates touching people. when anri kissed her, lilian was so grossed out that she imagined anri as a parasite. and when it comes to her taking off her glove and holding vincent’s hand... well, 

but upon replaying hello charlotte 3 and doing a little bit of digging with regards to the actual symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder and mysophobia, i realized something. and this “something” was a game-changer.

so let’s start off by defining some things. obsessive-compulsive disorder, shortened to ocd, has several diagnostic criteria, which you can read here if you’d like the full clinical definition. for the sake of length, though, i will only talk about the most important part to take away from the diagnostic criteria.

ocd is not a fear of germs. ocd is not a fear of germs. ocd. is. not. a fucking fear of germs. obsessions may involve cleanliness. compulsions may include wanting areas to be clean. it is entirely possible for ocd to be accompanied by mysophobia, but a fear of germs is not inherent to the diagnosis of ocd. what is inherent to the diagnosis of ocd is a repeated and pervasive series of intrusive thoughts which cause the person with ocd debilitating anxiety or distress, and a set of compulsions that the person with ocd performs in order to mitigate said anxiety. these compulsions do not need to correspond to the actual obsession. a lot of obsessions don’t. for example, your obsession could be around disliking cluttered environments, but your compulsion could be pacing a hallway fourteen times back and forth while mentally reciting the preamble to the american constitution. in some cases, the compulsion is related to the obsession but is generally considered excessive. remember that ocd is not characterized by a need for cleanliness and that it is instead characterized by ritualistic behaviour accompanied by obsessive thought patterns.

i also want to talk about this section in particular, taken from the website linked above:

D. The disturbance is not better explained by the symptoms of another mental disorder (e.g., excessive worries, as in generalized anxiety disorder; preoccupation with appearance, as in body dysmorphic disorder; difficulty discarding or parting with possessions, as in hoarding disorder; [ ... ] ritualized eating behavior, as in eating disorders; [ ... ] thought insertion or delusional preoccupations, as in schizophrenia spectrum and other psychotic disorders; or repetitive patterns of behavior, as in autism spectrum disorder).

Specify if:

With good or fair insight: The individual recognizes that obsessive-compulsive disorder beliefs are definitely or probably not true or that they may or may not be true.

With poor insight:  The individual thinks obsessive-compulsive disorder beliefs are probably true.

With absent insight/delusional beliefs: The individual is completely convinced that obsessive-compulsive disorder beliefs are true.

i want to let the record show that lilian has several of these disorders. while i don’t believe that this disqualifies her from having ocd, i do think it’s important to note that there is comorbidity between these disorders.

i included this section on inslght because i’m going to go into depth why i believe lilian has absent insight/delusional beliefs. but in order to talk about that, we need to figure out just what it is that lilian is obsessively thinking, what it is that’s causing her so much distress. if ocd doesn’t inherently involve a need for cleanliness, then could it be that lilian’s obsessions revolve around her mysophobia? after all, mysophobia is germaphobia, so maybe she’s just scared of germs, and that’s why she’s always washing her hands.

so, let’s talk about mysophobia. it isn’t listed under the dsm v on its own, but it does exist (albeit not by name) under the umbrella term specific phobia disorder. you can look that up yourself, but from the research i’ve done, i can fairly safely say this: mysophobia, more commonly referred to as germaphobia, is not a fear of germs for the sake of fearing germs. it is a fear of being contaminated, sick, or infected, whether it be through other people or through the environment. symptoms of mysophobia include but are not limited to obsessive handwashing, an extreme avoidance of places that are deemed unclean, and excessive planning to avoid contamination. this separates it from ocd in that ocd involves ritualistic behaviours (like handwashing) to ease anxiety, whereas mysophobia involves these ritualistic behaviours to actually make the area cleaner. to summarize, mysophobic actions are directly related to the fear of contracting an illness.

okay, kids, what have we learned?

though ocd can be accompanied by mysophobia, the two of them are not synonymous. ocd is a pattern of obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviours designed to ease anxiety surrounding those thoughts.

there are lots of comorbidities present with ocd and other disorders lilian has, such as autism spectrum disorder, body dysmorphic disorder, eating disorders, and psychotic disorders.

mysophobia is more accurately defined as being afraid of being infected or contaminated. mysophobic compulsions relate directly to the desire to eliminate contaminants, rather than being a self-soothing action to reduce anxiety.

now that we’ve laid the groundwork for analyzing lilian’s behaviour, let’s dive into canon. what can we say about lilian’s anxious preoccupations? what excessive planning does she undergo to avoid contact with germs? and, most importantly, why is she perfectly fine with holding vincent’s hand? (it’s still bad writing, but i found an explanation that makes it better)

the most obvious sign of both ocd and mysophobia present in canon is lilian’s intense preoccupation with handwashing. we only see this happen once, in hello charlotte 2.

i’ve removed some sections for the sake of length, but here are some revealing lines from lilian:

My fellow students smashed my head into a worm soup.

I can’t [stop washing my hands]. I’ve washed off [most] of the soup, but I still feel dirtied.

In fact, everything I touch feels contaminated. I can’t just shake off the feeling of disgust.

between ocd and mysophobia, this reaction seems very solidly linked to the latter. lilian’s head was dunked into soup, and she felt disgusted and contaminated, so she began to obsessively wash the soup away. the only other place where handwashing is mentioned is in lilian’s mind exhibition in hello charlotte 3.

in this poem, lilian attributes her handwashing to her ocd, where she writes, “wash and repeat! it’s not enough!” she doesn’t state in this poem if she does this to reduce the possibility of getting sick or if she does this as a compulsive ritual. both interpretations are plausible, given the vague statement “it’s not enough!”. perhaps it’s not enough because she still feels contaminated, or it’s not enough because she has not been rid of the anxiety caused by her intrusive thoughts. maybe it’s a little bit of both.

however, excessive handwashing does not a disorder make. sure, lilian washes her hands until they blister, but why? what is she trying to avoid? in the example in hello charlotte 2, she’s washing off soup. this is a direct response to an uncomfortable situation and not to an anxious preoccupation. in her poem, she offers no hint as to what is causing her so much anxiety that she needs to wash her hands compulsively. and once you start to pick through her behaviour in search of a thread of obsessive thinking, it starts to become clear that there might not be one.

the truth is, lilian’s actions in canon are generally inconsistent given the definitions listed above. her touch aversion is implied to be caused by her mysophobia, but she has no real plan for avoiding touch besides wearing gloves, which she ditches anyway when touching vincent. in heaven’s gate, it’s implied to be more of an aromantic or asexual thing. (i say aromantic because the scene was a little weird about not dividing the line between romantic and sexual attraction, so even though lilian’s canonically asexual, the scene was actually talking about kissing and dating and might have just been a ploy to get nonconsensual kissing in because that’s apparently mandatory in like every game anri appears in.) but that doesn’t make much sense either, considering that platonic and otherwise non-sexual touch is also off-limits.

we return to the intense, excessive and obsessive nature of both ocd and mysophobia. passing fears of contamination or infection don’t classify as mysophobia, and vague and isolated anxieties don’t classify as ocd. the individual has to be intensely preoccupied by these thoughts. however, in canon, lilian is generally not preoccupied with getting sick or dirty until it actually happens to her. her goal in life is to become a doctor, a profession that involves repeated and close contact with infectious diseases. she also takes care of her bedridden mother, which in many cases involves helping the individual with their personal hygiene. her mother is the reason why she wants to become a doctor in the first place, and since anri knows about this dream, it’s fairly safe to assume that this is lilian’s own dream, not scarlett’s. however, in hello charlotte 3, when q84 is wounded, she asks lilian to treat her wounds, and lilian’s response is as follows:

this is further reinforced when q84 is decomposing after having used her wish, and umbrella man states that lilian is fighting the urge to vomit. however, in the infirmary scene, lilian is quite comfortable with being physically close to q84, even when there is a possibility for skin contact. note how charlotte’s hair (which has the possibility of carrying bacteria, skin flakes, etc.) is close to lilian’s face, but how lilian seems quite content, even relaxed.

this is stressful! what is the truth?

on top of that, we know for a fact that, despite being mysophobic, lilian has no issue (at least in hello charlotte 2) with using public bathrooms at school, something that is generally a huge obstacle for people struggling with mysophobia. in true realm, this is never addressed, which lends credence to the idea that she simply doesn’t worry about the transmission of germs in shared spaces like bathrooms, nor is she worried at all about using anri’s smartphone to take blackmail pictures when screens are generally a hotbed of germs. we could say that she makes such liberal use of her gloves that she doesn’t even think about the germs living on them (unlikely), but then she’d likely have a panic attack when she does things like touch her face, which she does in at least one of her sprites.

in fact, the only thought she has about cleanliness in true realm flashbacks is in one of the final ones. she thinks the following: “we lie on the floor for a long time. i briefly wonder if it’s properly vacuumed.” this is, like, a normal thought. i can’t stress enough how normal this thought is and how quickly this thought passes. i cannot stress enough how little she cares about the cleanliness of this floor.

so, like, what gives? why does lilian wear gloves? why does she say she’s squeamish in false realm or want to throw up when holding charlotte? and most importantly, how is she mysophobic when she doesn’t seem to fear germs at all?

the answer fucking blew my mind, folks. are you ready? here it is.

This world is swarming with parasites. Tiny. Invisible. Tenacious. Once they outwit your immune system, they eat you from the inside. Use you as an incubator for their offspring. Control your mind and alter your personality. They keep reproducing, and reproducing, and reproducing, endlessly reproducing. Until every single person is consumed by the disease.

from this excerpt, we can glean the following:

the parasite lilian is describing is a disease that targets the immune system;

the parasite functions by controlling its host like a puppet and altering aspects of their personality, potentially causing them to act in a way that is uncharacteristic; and

the parasite’s goal is to reproduce and to eventually infect everyone in the world.

these are the very first lines in the very first flashback to true realm. an echoing of these very lines are found later, when lilian is saying them to q84. note that, according to etherane, it has been many, many years since these words have first been uttered. but lilian manages to quote them verbatim. given that she can recite these lines perfectly years after her death, it seems that this is a comforting mantra about the world’s truths. and from that, we can gather that repeating this mantra is one of her compulsions, alongside handwashing.

this is it. this is the root of lilian’s mysophobia. these lines accurately explain a pervasive delusion that manifests both in lilian’s thoughts and in her visual hallucinations. more accurately, it is the mantra that describes the “o” in lilian’s ocd and the illness that causes her mysophobia. the parasite is the disease she’s afraid of contracting, and that fear is the intrusive thought that brings her so much anxiety. i tried to compile a list of all the times lilian or someone modelled after her has mentioned contamination, a preoccupation with purity, a parasite, a tumour, rottenness, or anything relating to this core concept, but there was just... so much. the entire world of hello charlotte is based around parasites and mind control. the deus ex machina of this world is a parasite itself. all charlottes have the disease. this world is literally obsessed with the delusion lilian’s held her whole life.

and now that we’ve framed it like that... is it any wonder that this is the obsessive thought? something we’d previously assumed to be a persistent metaphor is actually an intense preoccupation. lilian’s inconsistent actions in canon make sense because she���s not worried about contracting a physical illness, but rather a mental one that’s linked to a persistent delusion of hers. throughout canon, we see no instances of lilian questioning this belief, leading her to be classified as having absent insight/delusional beliefs.

before i continue, i want to mention that the pitfall many hello charlotte fans fall into, and the one i myself have fallen into in the past, is assuming that lilian was always unable to touch others. though she wears gloves throughout the entirety of the true realm flashbacks, she was actually alright with making contact with others up until a specific point in her life. and, interestingly enough, it was not vincent's death that spurred on this change. a full three months pass between his death and the time when lilian's mental health took a nosedive. the critical moment of change involves the very last flashback: 531 days before the trial.

lilian and anri decide to run away together. however, lilian was actually planning a double suicide. upon learning this, anri grows agitated, punching lilian and pinning her down to the floor. it's at this point that lilian realizes anri's feelings for her. after anri kisses her, she becomes a parasite. when lilian gets home, she checks on mother and realizes that mother has become a parasite as well.

from this day onwards, lilian begins to see everyone in her life as a parasite. she says it herself: "That moment I realized. I could never touch a human being ever again." this is the start of her intense touch aversion and marks the beginning of the end of her life. it’s at this point that lilian becomes physically repulsed by everyone around her and the environment she exists in, and these feelings generally persist, albeit on a lesser scale, in false realm.

but what is the parasite? in true realm, the parasite is only described in lilian’s mantra, but there are several nuances to the definition that go unexplained. however, in false realm, parasites take a variety of forms. similarly to how scarlett and umbrella man are reflections of lilian’s inner self that take shape as their own entities within false realm, lilian’s definitions for what a parasite is also breaks off and takes shape into various different forms after her death. when we examine what parasites are in false realm, we can begin to understand what makes someone turn into a physical deformity in lilian’s eyes and why she’s so afraid of the parasite in the first place.

there are three kinds of deformities in false realm. there is the oracle (left), the bullies (upper-right), and the faceless (lower-right). these are not all official terms, but they’ll be the ones that i use going forward.

the oracle is the entity that most closely follows the original logic of the mantra — it is an entity that rapidly multiplies (either through a race like the pythias or organically through cell division as it does in hello charlotte 3) and forms a collective out of several individuals. hello charlotte 2 explains that unification of a civilization is an arduous and painful procedure involving the slow loss of individuality until the race completely submits to the will of the parasitic host. the oracle is, to summarize, an entity that can “control your mind and alter your personality”. the oracle is the only parasite that ever enters another’s body. the other two forms of parasites are never called parasites themselves, but show visible deformities that house tenants and other important characters do not.

the faceless visually signify a lack of importance. these people do not do anything special. in some cases, they appear as a literal amalgamate, showing a hive-mindedness even if they are not being controlled by the oracle. these individuals are usually treated neutrally, and are not generally considered “bad”. they are simply narratively unimportant. by contrast, bullies do have faces, but they are vastly distorted and exhibit bright colouring. i may talk a bit more in a future post about colour symbolism and how it plays into both lilian’s and q84′s mysophobias, but to briefly summarize: the presence of colour is considered a contaminant, whereas white is considered an absence of colour and therefore “pure”. therefore, the brightly-coloured bullies are contaminated. these individuals show corrupted behaviour. they hurt others for personal gain, and are generally considered irredeemable.

in true realm, however, we see no such stylistic distinction. however, though they are not represented visually, the parasites in true realm show the same patterns as the oracle, the bullies, and the faceless. .

now that we have determined what the parasite is, we can determine how the parasite spreads. as previously stated, the parasite does not spread through shared surfaces or skin contact, as normal viruses do. lilian herself seems to treat it like it's just chance, like the parasite just chose to infect people randomly. but there are some things that she says that lends credence to the idea that the parasite is discriminate. after all, though her delusional belief is that the parasite will attach itself to any host it comes into contact with, this delusional belief did come from somewhere. and after examining the process of contamination over the course of the two or so years we see of her life, i believe this belief stemmed from her black-and-white views on good and evil and her penchant to see life as a narrative.

the first outcropping of parasites in lilian’s life were likely the faceless. she seems much less perturbed by them, and seem to view them as simply background pieces. this may be because of her belief in “protagonist” characters. in false realm, q84 makes liberal use of the term “npcs”, though all charlottes seem to have a concept of other students being faceless and subservient to them. this is a tenuous connection, but i believe lilian shares a similar belief. she may consider others "narratively unimportant”; that is, lacking direction or initiative, or perhaps simply not making an impact. she prides herself on being an observer, but she is undeniably the self-hating protagonist of her story. she says that if there is an afterlife, she doesn’t want to be its protagonist. this implies that on some level, she’s considered herself the protagonist of her own life. it’s definitely plausible given lilian’s tendency to project negative traits on others for her to see herself as comparatively good or blameless. by placing her own negative traits onto scarlett, for example, lilian creates a shaky ideal self. in other words, she creates a somewhat worthy protagonist.

and worthiness is incredibly important to lilian. a strong recurring theme in hello charlotte is the notion of “goodness”, especially when it relates to being polite. for example, in hello charlotte 1, a door refuses to open for you if you don't say please, and will call you insolent. all charlottes strive to be a “good girl” because their mothers told them to. interestingly enough, this is also what lilith tells lilian in true realm. since all charlottes have this strict adherence to being a good girl, this must have been very impactful for lilian. being considered “good” must have been very important to her. and being considered “bad” must have been similarly devastating.

knowing that charlotte is lilian's self-insert oc makes things even clearer. charlotte embodies an extreme selflessness, wanting to sacrifice herself for the good of others at any cost. any desire she has to be saved is rapidly dismissed as selfish, and she repeatedly states that she doesn't want to be a burden. charlotte's character makes a clear statement: good people are not burdensome. good people have faith in humanity. good people believe in others, and they help others even if the other person doesn’t deserve it.

the delusion is lilian’s failsafe. it’s her way of ensuring that she could never consider herself a bad person or a burden. in creating the narrative of a contagious parasite infecting the world, lilian is protecting herself from personal responsibility, both in herself and in others. instead of maintaining her belief that some people are evil, which she would consider a Bad Belief to have, she believes that they have simply caught a contagious disease. the bad-person disease, if you will. and since that disease alters the mind and personality of its hosts, these people are not directly responsible for their actions. here, lilian is absolved of hating people who hurt others. now, like charlotte, she can simply wish for their recovery. because they aren’t choosing to hurt others. they’re being manipulated into it by an invisible, malicious, contagious puppeteer.

a similar logic is applied to those lilian finds burdensome. since good people, in her eyes, can make themselves a martyr no matter the circumstances, it would be considered very bad if lilian could not do the same. this is evidenced when mother turns into a parasite. in that scene, lilian thinks the following:

It'd be easier if my mom was a workaholic who was never home. It'd be easier if we hated each other. It'd be easier if I didn't remember the days when she was still full of energy. Who would want to admit [to] their parent giving up on life and slowly rotting in the bedroom? Who would admit to thinking of their only parent as a parasitic existence? After that day, nothing was the same anymore.

in this instance, the word “parasite” is used to describe a leech, someone who constantly takes and never gives back. and in using this word to describe them, lilian relegates them in her mind as bullies, because she can’t admit to feeling burdened.

we see this also in anri. it’s not the physical action of the kiss that turns anri into a parasite. it’s the realization that anri has always had ulterior motives, that anri expects something of lilian. and lilian, feeling burdened, projects her own guilt about her lack of reciprocation onto anri. even at the end of her life, when she’s in the ocean, she reveals that one of her greatest regrets is not being able to reciprocate anri’s feelings.

vincent, on the other hand, is a charming stranger. he never gives lilian any reason to suspect that he may have ulterior motives. he’s successful, driven, popular, and talented. in many ways, he’s everything lilian wants to be. and since she doesn’t meet him for a long time, she can imagine him to be simply “the blinding icon on her screen“. she can project anything she wants onto him, and she chooses to project hope onto him. with his politeness, his charm, his compliments, he appears to be the ideal human. like lilian, he has managed to avoid being infected by the parasite. lilian grows attached to this interpretation, just as she grows attached to the mutuality of her friendship with anri, and just as she grows attached to her love for her mother. lilian doesn’t want to think of these people as parasites. in vincent’s case, he dies before he ever gets the chance to burden her. rather, he leaves her with the guilt of not being able to follow him and a misplaced idolatry of him and his beliefs.

the parasite, being a visual representation of perceived evil intent, seems to be non-contagious in nature. this doesn’t change, though, that lilian believes it is contagious. she wants to spend time with people she has deemed good, and to avoid bullies. however, the simple act of feeling burdened is enough to make lilian believe that the parasite is spreading at a breakneck rate and that the world she lives in is becoming more and more contaminated. once she feels she’s lost her support system, the parasite begins to spread, and she begins to feel less and less inherently good. it’s clear that the people around her had a stabilizing effect on her. but once she feels abandoned, her unhealthy coping mechanisms begin to catch up to her. lilian describes herself as filthy by the end of her life, and it’s very likely that she feared becoming a parasite herself if she were to continue down the path she was on.

the last piece of the puzzle is this: what saved anri and mother for so long, and what saved vincent from becoming a parasite altogether? after all, anri is a perfect candidate for developing the parasite, and arguably, so is mother. both of them rely on lilian for different things, and anri actively engages in blackmail. it would be simple as well to see c as disingenuous or fake. but lilian doesn’t entertain any of those thoughts, either for a very long time or at all. why?

the answer is simple. the people that lilian loves are less likely to be infected by the parasite. even if they are infected, she is kinder to them. after anri says she’ll leave lilian, after her confession and her subsequent contamination, lilian lets anri cuddle her. she even hugs anri tightly before they part, and keeps in contact with her until... well, just before she commits suicide. despite the relationship between lilian and her mother being one-sided, lilian holds onto pleasant memories of her mother because she doesn’t want to believe that she could feel burdened. and lilian is so attached to her love for c that she doesn’t see anything wrong with him.

all of this is to say that lilian’s touch aversion does not stem from physical cleanliness, but rather her perception of the other’s purity. this means that she’s not only willing to touch others if she deems them a “good person”, but that she is actively okay with it. this is evidenced even in false realm, where she is alright with exchanging casual moments of intimacy with charlotte and q84, such as in the “take my hand” scene and in the infirmary scene. since she loves these individuals, she sees them as inherently better people than she would if she viewed them objectively. this is a game-changer when it comes to touch-aversion. with respect to the charles/vincent ships where lilian’s okay with kissing... that’s a different story. even though saliva may not trigger her mysophobia, we’ve seen on multiple occasions both in canon and in heaven’s gate that lilian is indifferent to mouth-kissing at best. however, she is definitely comfortable with some displays of physical affection with those she cares for, and is generally willing to excuse much more when it comes to those she loves.

thank you for reading this post in its entirety! i did not expect it to get this long, so if you got to the end, i just want you to know i love and appreciate you SO much

[snarkeater]

A fine thing

Being surrounded by normal people and doing normal things can occasionally make Tarn weird.

Just one left, Tarn notes with satisfaction, taking inventory of the short list of new messages on his personal communication device.  Almost everyone’s through and back on board, even Tesarus, who, for obvious reasons, usually takes longest. 

Not bad at all.

Ahead, the waiting area is bustling with customers and staff alike; tuning out the cacophony of mixed voices coming from the crowd and the crackling public address system overhead, Tarn stows his phone and picks a path to the row of seats closest to him.  Square in his sights, a few meters across from him, is a trio of empty seats flanked by a couple of bedraggled bots unattractively wearing the day's work on their faces; without a second thought, Tarn makes a bee line for it, weaving through packs of meandering minibots and flocks of over-buffed flyers with a degree of agility and speed better suited to field maneuvers than weekend civilianism, and takes the center seat.

The mech to his right seems to have an opinion about his seat choice – he gives Tarn a side-eyed look when he sits down and collects his limbs tighter to his frame – but Tarn is unmoved.  He's got another fifteen minutes, tops, left in this place before he can free himself of all the ancillary annoyances around the core experience for what he hopes is the next little while, and this poor bastard isn't going to further sour what left's of it for him.

Just deal with it, for frag's sake, Tarn thinks and – pointedly – leans back, lifting a leg to cross his ankle over his knee, mostly blocking the seat to his left, and stretching out an arm over the back of the empty seat to his right, claws just barely grazing the opinionated mech's shoulder.

It's a dick move – he knows it is, even if he chooses to continue to stare forward steadily and not acknowledge it whatsoever – but there's just something about this place that rubs him the wrong way.

The team comes here regularly – everyone does: it's the best place in-system to get a wash and proper detailing done, and it's surprisingly affordable, as a bonus.  The problem with that, of course, is that it's extremely busy – all the time – and that popularity comes with certain inconveniences that Tarn finds particularly irritating, even in short bursts.

It's loud, it's messy, it's chaotic, and it has this...overwhelming sense of the mundane about it that pulls a string in Tarn's spark that's been badly out of tune for some time.

He can feel it now, for instance, as he idly scans the next group of bots that exit the doors to the wash racks and fixates on a particular individual among the lot.  A handsome speedster with great posture and a noble look; free of any personal hang-ups that might make doing the same difficult for other people, Tarn makes deliberate eye contact as the mech walks out into the waiting area.  As is often the case when Tarn does this, the other party experiences a moment of confusion; to the speedster's credit, though, it's not so evident on him as it typically is on most others – as a result, Tarn's not entirely sure whether or not the mech recognizes him as the leader of the DJD, and instead of growing panic on the stranger's face, Tarn only detects casual curiosity.

It looks quite good on him, Tarn decides.

The speedster looks away before Tarn does, turning left and eventually taking a seat in the gallery of chairs on the other end of the room – presumably to wait for someone still inside.

Tarn waits exactly one minute, watching others walk by without really seeing them, and then looks across the way, easily locating the seated speedster through the moving curtain of mechs.  The fellow is reading a slim datapad, noble features even nobler in profile.  

As Tarn watches him, considering, he allows himself a brief fantasy in which he isn't Tarn, but, rather, some other mech.  In this fantasy, he imagines himself as he might've been, under different circumstances and had he made different choices earlier on in his life – a fellow like that speedster, he gauges by the look of him, with a normal job and a normal life. A fellow who comes to this place to get cleaned up and fixed up and doesn't pay half a month's wages for it because his scrapes and nicks are just common wear and tear, not industrial-grade damage.  He imagines what it would be like to have normal problems – maybe he'd need credits, or he'd suffer from existential angst, or he'd be plagued by loneliness. Maybe, Tarn muses, plucking the dissonant chord in his spark, it'd be all of those things.  Or none of them.

Regardless of the details, it would definitely be a simpler existence than his current one, and maybe there's something in that...?

Across the rows of seats, the speedster looks up from his datapad and casts a glance in Tarn's direction. Catching Tarn's eye, he offers up a tentative but genuine smile.

It's instantly clear to Tarn that the bot has no idea who he is, and the wave of cognitive dissonance caused by that fact assaults Tarn with enough intensity as to make him feel physically ill.

A simple life, perhaps, but...

This time, it's Tarn who looks away first.  Suddenly, the floor is much interesting than the stranger, or anything else around him.  It stays the most interesting thing for a while.

"Ready?"

Tarn's helm snaps up, optics lifting from a spot on the floor to gaze up at the mech standing above him expectantly.  It's Kaon, the last of his crew to exit the facility and his ticket out of this place. The screwed-up expression on Kaon's face reminds Tarn that it's loud, and immediately he feels a strong compulsion to leave the noise – of all descriptions – behind.  He gets to his feet at once, but before he can act on the impulse to go, something draws his attention and stills his mind, firmly pulling him from the grip of his errant thoughts:

Freshly-cleaned and shining like the rest of him, the golden Decepticon emblem on Kaon's collar seems especially bright under the poor light.

Looking to make a stabilizing connection, Tarn reaches up to touch it.

Yes, he concludes, eyeing the thing and using it as a fulcrum to set all the pieces back in their proper places in his mind and in his spark, forcibly dispelling the dissonance – yes, he could have chosen an easier life, but nothing easy, he knows all to well, is worthwhile.  So it would've been a wasted life.

Tarn's optics flick upwards, to Kaon's face.  

The problem with people, in Tarn’s opinion, is that they aren't ever satisfied with what they have – it's that loose bit that makes it easy to manipulate them, that makes them vulnerable to corruption and ruin.  Ambition is good, as is the desire to improve, but those things are different than the thing that Tarn's describing; the thing Tarn's describing doesn't drive people, it's what makes them stand still, or spin in circles. It's a form of rot.

But Tarn knows better than to let that rot take hold; this place – it has that power, if Tarn allows it to work its insidious tendrils into his spark – but he won't let it. Those foolish delusions hold no sway over him because he knows that what he has...

Calm now, Tarn's claws fall away from the emblem; he gives Kaon a nod.  "Ready."  He tells him.  Kaon wastes no time leading them out.

What he has is a damn fine thing.

[noahfence1d]

We, as the viewing audience, are drawn to celebrities and famous people in ways we are not even aware. Within the lives of the celebrated lie the hopes and dreams of the rest of us.

As sitting ducks, if you will, or sitting persons, our minds are like sponges for incoming data and information, because the mind by its very nature is curious. If not for that, it would be difficult to survive. So the mind, and the brain activity that comprises what we have come to consider as “the mind,” rapidly assesses, absorbs, and decides most things in milliseconds. With the process so swift, oftentimes we haven’t a clue as to why we decide what we decide when we decide it. Our minds are swept away by deluded assumptions, as we bet all we have on our “rightness” when, in fact, in that very instance we are wrong. I know because I have been guilty of it countless times myself. Therefore, our minds, so to speak, often have minds of their own.

There is research pointing to the extent to which the viewing public is hijacked, unawares, into to the deluded thinking that comes with celebrity dynamics. From hours of viewing our favorite TV shows, listening to our favorite podcast, or following our favorite social media star, we have made decisions and taken for fact many un-factual things. After repeatedly tuning into the reality TV show of the time: from Survivor, to Lost, to the Biggest Loser, to the coast-to-coast Housewives shows, to the new Celebrity Apprentice, our brains are bathed in this unreal “reality look-alike” genre. Water cooler fare is now consumed with the minutia of the unreality, from Kim & Kanye to our favorite “housewife” to [fill in the latest bachelor & bachelorette here].

In the context of worshiping celebrities in ways that find us blind-sighted, there is actual research on the topic. In my doctoral dissertation on the psychology of fame and celebrity, I examined much of it. The following are some quotes and paraphrased sections of my research analysis, and its underlying query into the relationship between celebrity and the rest of us. My operating question was:

To what extent ... do celebrities carry the hopes and aspirations of the society that celebrates them? And what is at stake for the celebrity if the public over-identifies with his or her pop icon image? In order to understand the celebrity’s being-in-the-world within the experience of being famous, it is important to look at both sides of the celebrity/fan relationship, because it is ultimately through fan appraisal that celebrity is defined.

Researchers Horton & Wohl first described this media oriented one-way relationship between the celebrity and a “fan” in 1956, as a parasocial relationship. In 1987, Rubin & McHugh defined parasocial relationships as “...a type of intimate, friend-like relationship that occurs between a mediated persona and a viewer. ...As time goes on, predictability about the character is increased. The character is reliable. The fan is loyal.” The research shows that parasocial relationships are encouraged by several factors: (1) degree of reality approximation of the persona and the media, (2) frequency and consistency of appearance by the persona, (3) stylized behavior and conversational manner of the persona, and (4) effective use of the formal features of television. According Rubin, Perse, & Powell‘s 1985 study, Loneliness, Parasocial Interaction, and Local Television News Viewing, “these factors work together to make the persona a predictable, nonthreatening, and, hence, perfect role partner for the viewer.”

By examining celebrity as a cultural linchpin within a growing global fascination with fame, being famous, and those who are famous, we can better understand a dynamic that plays out at an unconscious level, controlling our thoughts and behaviors in ways it would be best to become aware. Are we choosing opinions and and worldviews with at least some degree of personal agency, or are we absorbing messages flooding into our consciousness and embedded in unconscious drives derived from external media sources, each faction aligned with its own seeds of propaganda (to further their own causes and missions), strategies of disinformation (to deflect attention away from actual intelligent analysis), to that which hypes and ballyhoos the particular “brand” in question (with motivational undertones that seek out personal, corporate, and institutional advancement and fiscal growth at all costs), with the results, oftentimes, of humanity be damned?

I remember in college reading the book Subliminal Seduction, which spoke to the way advertisers and others seek to sneak triggers into our subconscious mind chatter so that, on autopilot, we act out buying behaviors that bring us into their purchasing tents. This sort of manipulation of perceived needs underwrites the advertising industry, and in some sense, capitalism itself, which in its present form cannot exist without consumers to buy products which generate the capital and churn the markets, profits, and growth. We become unwitting “fans” of the products we consume, and create parasocial relationships with the celebrity barkers and salespeople who tout the product’s exceptionalism.

Many years ago former music writer, now Winchester University senior psychology lecturer, David Giles decided to conduct research on the parasocial aspects of celebrity relationships after observing the lifestyle of musicians he interviewed. While he was attending a concert in Switzerland to interview “a very minor pop band who were never going to make it big,” he reports realizing that “all bands in the music business were surrounded by sycophants.” Most all celebrities are.

A sycophant, as described by the Merriam Webster dictionary is “a person who praises powerful people in order to get their approval.” And charismatic celebrities can make sycophants from even the most grounded of us, who will throw away all self-respect and exhibit “fawning” behavior when in the presence of a famous person. The problem begins when fans over identify with celebrities. Film director Martin Scorsese describes the mind-hijacking dynamic of parasocial adoration in The King of Comedy, his meditation on the sublime absurdity of the fan-star relationship in which abject allegiance to a fantasy figure is played out in real life. In the movie, out of a sense of fame-lust, a couple of obsessed fans (Robert De Niro and Sandra Bernhard) kidnap their favorite TV star (Jerry Lewis). Scorsese described how he sees the fan’s out-of-whack attachment to celebrities:

You really get to love them. They don’t know you. But you love them. But you love, I think, what you imagine they are. You put more into the person to a certain extent than they may even be giving out on the screen, because they represent a dream. You lose yourself in those people. Finally when you do “satisfy the request of a fan,” after saying a few things—after [they] say, “I really loved your last film. I thought you were great. You really meant a lot to me.” Well, like what’s next? Ultimately what do they want? What do they want from you?

In a study investigating levels of what is called “Celebrity Worship” in the general public, a full 1/3 of the population was found to suffer from what the authors describe as “borderline-pathological” levels of “Celebrity Worship Syndrome,” evidencing a preoccupation with a favorite celebrity.

In the 2003 study, researchers Maltby, Houran & McCutcheon defined the phenomenon as a three-tiered parasocial relationship hierarchy between fans and celebrities, with an “Absorption-Addiction” model to explain the etiology of Celebrity Worship Syndrome:

According to this model, a compromised identity structure in some individuals facilitates psychological absorption with a celebrity in an attempt to establish an identity and a sense of fulfillment. The dynamics of the motivational forces driving this absorption might in turn take on an addictive component, leading to more extreme (and perhaps delusional) behaviors to sustain the individual’s satisfaction with the parasocial relationship. Several studies based on the Celebrity Attitude Scale ... are consistent with this proposed model and suggest that there are three increasingly more extreme sets of attitudes and behaviors associated with celebrity worship.

The questionnaire sheds light on the depths of the parasocial relationship, as the three levels of absorption move from a low level of Entertainment-social, defined through survey answers such as, “My friends and I like to discuss what my favorite celebrity has done,” to the intermediate level, characterized by Intense-personal feelings, defined by responses like, “I consider my favorite celebrity to be my soul mate,” and “I have frequent thoughts about my celebrity, even when I don’t want to,” to the Borderline-pathological level, reflected in answers like, “If someone gave me several thousand dollars (pounds) to do with as I please, I would consider spending it on a personal possession (like a napkin or paper plate) once used by my favorite celebrity,” and “If I were lucky enough to meet my favorite celebrity, and he/she asked me to do something illegal as a favor I would probably do it.”

Interestingly, in their 2002 investigation,

McCutcheon, Lange & Houran

conclude that in both pathological and nonpathological forms of Celebrity Worship, the deeper levels reflect an attempt to soothe an “empty self”:

Addiction [to celebrities] has likewise been conceptualized as a search for a solid identity and social role ... and compulsive and obsessional elements are noted at advanced stages of addiction ... Thus, while absorption can partially account for the vividness of delusions related to dissociative experience ... the progression along our hierarchy of celebrity worship might reflect increases in the thresholds of the need and capacity of psychological absorption. In other words, worshippers might develop a “tolerance” to behaviors that initially satisfied their need for absorption. As a result, celebrity worshippers must progressively evidence stronger dissociative behaviors in order to feel adequately connected to the celebrity.

In fact, the study’s author James Houran told Katie Couric on the Today Show in 2003 that there is no refuge from celebrity influence:

We’re not just a media saturated society but an entertainment saturated society, and so we turn to these celebrities for all aspects of our life. Now these figures are larger than life. Celebrities just don’t sell us products anymore; it’s not just for entertainment. But now you start seeing entertainment being part of mainstream media, mainstream news shows. You can’t get away from it. We are bombarded by it wherever we look.

Celebrities, rather than being authentic and freely expressing human beings, are actually images that are framed, groomed, packaged and highly produced solely for the purpose of dissemination through mass media onto our living room television sets, and through the Internet to our device screens. As audience members, we are spoon fed these images, more or less helpless to what we see, hear, and feel. For example, in 2000, researchers Auter & Palmgreen found that “there was a positive relationship between television viewing level and parasocial interaction in adolescents.” While the level was less than they thought, the researchers believe the more a person views a celebrity, the more invested in a parasocial relationship the fan may become.

In the place of role models and examples of altruistic heroism, we search for solutions to our problems by living through forms of media escapism, and the celebrities who rise up from it. Even as far back as 1983, author Barbara Goldsmith wrote in a New York Times Magazine piece titled, The Meaning of Celebrity that:

Image is essential to the celebrity because the public judges him by what it sees—his public posture as distinguished from his private person. Entertainers are particularly adept at perfecting their images, learning to refine the nuances of personality. Indeed, the words “celebrity” and “personality” have become interchangeable in our language.

As a result, she described a society that:

...encourages us to manufacture our fantasies while simultaneously destroying our former role models and ripping away the guideposts of the past. The result is that we have created synthetic celebrities whom we worship, however briefly, because they vicariously act out our noblest or basest desires.

Unknowingly, through our bonding and parasocial relationships with various celebrities, perhaps we are seeking something that is Freudian, after all, casting us in our own psyches as abandoned children, fearful and buffeted by existential and emotional vagaries that rise up, and leave us raw, exposed and vulnerable in a world where regardless of how diligently we strive, we discover how little control we actually have over our life’s path.

As suggested by sociologist Ernest van den Haag in Goldsmith’s article, the blind worshiping of celebrity, in the end, in all its forms, may amount to nothing more than our basic, hungering and continuing need for authority figures, like our parents.

[sarahburness]

Why I Was Addicted to Attention, Lies, and Drama

I’ve done a lot of things for attention that I’m not proud of. I’ve created drama. I’ve bragged. I’ve exaggerated. I’ve hurt people. I’ve hurt myself. I’ve lied and lied and lied.

No one wants to be labeled as an “attention seeker.” When people say, “She’s just doing it for attention,” they don’t mean it as a compliment. I knew this. And I knew that people said these things about me.

And still, I couldn’t stop.

I spend a lot of time around animals, especially cats. It’s easy to see which ones have experienced starvation. They have constant anxiety about food. They meow and meow when it’s feeding time. They scarf their portions down without breathing. If the bowl is left full, they’ll eat whatever’s there—even if it’s a week’s worth of food!

I was that cat with attention. I could never get enough.

But compulsive behaviors aren’t about what we’re consuming. Attention seeking isn’t about attention. Food addiction isn’t about food. Really, it’s about control.

When you’ve been starved of something, you develop a fear of losing it. You begin to cling to every morsel of what you’re desperately afraid to live without. Survival mode.

That’s what it was like for me: constant survival mode. I felt like, at any moment, I was going to be abandoned, left alone, forgotten. I fought to be noticed. Fought to be heard. Fought to be “loved.”

But despite my constant attention-seeking efforts, I never got what I truly wanted. I never felt loved for exactly who I was because I never showed her to anyone! I showed the world the person I thought it wanted to see, and I used other people as characters in my personal drama.

So that is the biggest irony: because I was so desperately hungry for love, I couldn’t have it. Because I so deeply craved attention, I repelled people away from me. Then, these experiences reaffirmed my biggest fear: there wasn’t enough. I wasn’t enough. So I’d grasp more, cling more, lie more.

Too often, people talk about attention seeking like it’s a character flaw. I see it as an addiction.

When we’re trying to fill a love-sized hole, it doesn’t matter what we’re trying to stuff into it: drugs, money, alcohol, approval, sex. If it’s not love, it won’t truly satisfy us. We’ll keep wanting more and more.

My journey of healing my attention-seeking patterns has been long and painful. One of the most painful things has been realizing that most people weren’t reacting to me the way I thought they were.

I used to brag loudly in public, imagining people around me admiring and envying me. Now, I realize that most of them were either ignoring me or annoyed by my antics.

I used to stretch every accomplishment, imagining people respecting me. If it was two, I’d say five. If it was 100, I’d say 300. If it was one minute, I’d say an hour. Now, I realize that most people either didn’t believe me or used my lies to reinforce their own insecurities.

I used to make a tragedy out of every pain and a drama out of every inconvenience, imagining people pitying me. Now, I know that most people either felt stuck in the cloud of toxicity that surrounded me (because of their own unhealed traumas), or they avoided that cloud like the plague.

The world, I’ve discovered, isn’t quite the place I thought it was.

I was so busy talking and talking, lying and lying, that I never sat down just to listen. And that is what helped me heal: looking within myself, looking around me, and embracing reality.

Attention seeking, for me, was a kind of self-protection. On my journey of healing myself, I’ve found that self-love and self-protection aren’t the same thing. I had to remove my armor and my mask. I had to face the truth.

Beneath my defense mechanisms, I found a fragile, wounded part of me that was traumatized by childhood experiences—by emotional starvation. But this part of me wasn’t fragile because of the wounds I incurred as a kid. It was fragile because I tried to protect it.

After I got hurt, I tried to hide myself away. I tried to create an elaborate fantasy world to protect myself from rejection and abandonment. I piled layers and layers of bandages on top of my wounds, but wounds need air to heal. I tried to keep myself safe, but I ended up suffocating myself instead.

I wasn’t lying and creating drama “just for attention.” I was doing it to survive. I was grasping for scraps of approval to replace my desperate hunger for real love, for authenticity, for happiness.

On the outside, it seemed like I wanted other people’s attention. That’s what I thought I needed too. But what I really needed was to pay attention—to be able to just exist in each moment without struggling. To be able to look at myself without running away. To look at people without being afraid of them. To have peace of mind.

Maybe you know someone who’s stuck in these patterns. Maybe that someone is you. However this applies to you, I hope to communicate one important thing: attention seeking is a symptom of a bigger cause.

It’s not something to be dismissed. It’s also not something to be judged and criticized. It’s something to be accepted, understood, unraveled, and forgiven.

Healing these patterns takes time. Every step along the way, it’s been difficult for me to invite reality to replace my delusions. It’s been hard to allow myself to be raw and open instead of trying to protect myself from pain.

But this healing journey has also allowed me to enjoy real affection: from myself and from others. And that has been worth all the hard work.

About Vironika Tugaleva

Like every human being, Vironika Tugaleva is an ever-changing mystery. At the time of writing this, she was a life coach, digital nomad, and award-winning author of two books (The Love Mindset and The Art of Talking to Yourself). She spent her days writing, dancing, singing, running, doing yoga, going on adventures, and having long conversations. But that was then. Who knows what she’s doing now? Keep up at www.vironika.org.

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