#But illness in fiction... is metaphorical

[panvani]

I think this is a very silly way to talk about fiction

[knowlesian]

cannibalism has that good “i cracked into your marrow so i could keep you forever in mine” gay energy and tbqh i love that for us

[astralriver]

Oh thats people claiming school shooters were closeted trans girls,, thats tumblr users associating trans womens pain with violence afflicted on others without care

[continuousmeowing]

(holding you at gunpoint) go watch adamandi right now.

[disproportionatelysculpting]

I am the God sent child,

born in a family's creed with a different view

on world than His or mine,

swinging on the lap of people who will never anew

sleeping in a house build on shaky grounds.

But I am the God sent child,

He took his time to make this world hostile for me

but He made sure to protect me from world's mischief

He carved me out of his heart and

packed all his sins in my soul

I am the God sent child,

He wanted to be pure, to be seen as holy

so I carry the weights,

walking on the path of destruction for myself

slowly.

I am the God sent child,

He pushed me down to suffer for his pain

But He forgot that what beats inside of me is his heart,

and his blood flows inside of my veins.

I am the God sent child,

And every time I fall, He feels the ache

every injury I carry, also gives Him pain

every maim on me, traces its way to Him.

I am the God sent child,

So every evening the angels paint the sky

for me, with my blood

And demons pay heed to my steps,

wanting me to become His dismay

But I am the God sent child,

Made of His heart full of sins, and Love

Every strain in my body is full of Hate

and infatuation for making this world my home

taking it's turn one by one

I am the God sent child,

warmth is the only thing I know to provide,

A shelter for strangers, A place to feel safe.

I carry His duties as crown on my head.

so, I am the God sent child

and world is my playground

And when my tears fall on the ground,

mother Earth dithers and clouds cries with me

when my voice dies down, the sky roars for me

when I need peace, the flowers bloom just for me

and Moon shines to soothe my soul

And every May fades into dust and August seeps in,

healing me a little bit, asking me to hold on

because I am the God sent child

when I screamed on sky 'why me?'

'I love you' He replied with a shaky voice

I nod to him with a forgiving smile

I had my moment of lucidity.

It is me, because I am the God sent child

His beloved creation, He used to be free

He made me from stardust so that

He could lean on me.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

"Why is it that every believer decides for themselves what's a metaphor, but when I say that it's all fiction, I'm out of line?"

[lesbianaelwen]

i Unfortunately haven't been able to be on here bc i've been so fucking busy but i Have been keeping up with d20 stuff and just. burrow's end is so good for me specifically

[violentdevotion]

.

[upperthird]

don't follow me if you rp and enjoy harry potter. i mean it. you can say you're anti-jkr all you like but you're still actively supporting her and what she produces and are giving her a platform. you are not innocent of her wrongs against trans people, jewish people, and poc by saying performative nonsense like you're "anti-jkr". you are just as unsafe to the people she targets as her herself if you support her, and outwardly give more power to what she produces. fuck off.

[ernmark]

It's descriptive because that's a lot of how it feels when I emerge from a bad episode of deep depression.

Which is part of why I feel a lot of people miss the point of this post-- I know that characters like Sans Undertale and Homura Akemi are neck deep in the depressive part of a time loop, but their story largely ends when the loop does.

We don't get to see the recovery part. We don't get to see them learning to get up and live with the new reality they're in. It just ends.

But the longer you're in it, the more alien and impossible it seems that you'd ever come out the other side. This is your life now, and it's going to be your life forever, and if it ever ends there won't be anything that comes after. Roll credits.

(And when you're in it, watching those credits roll feels too much like a different kind of fade to black.)

I want to see what comes after.

I want there to be an after. And I want it to be hard and frustrating, because it is. But I want it to be worth it. I want to be able to look forward to something that will happen next year/next month/next week/tomorrow, and have it actually come.

I love time loop stories. Really, I do.

But I'd love to see a story about what happens after you emerge from the time loop.

When, after months or years of repetition, you have to learn how to live with a choice you can't redo tomorrow.

When you meet someone new for the first time and have to figure out how to navigate this brand new conversation.

When you reach for the same day's clothes and realize that you can't wear them because they got dirty. Your laundry, your dishes, your body, your teeth, all the tasks that reset with the loop are suddenly stacking up and you need to set aside time to do them.

When you reach that first weekend and your schedule radically shifts and you don't know what to do with yourself, which is terrifying but also exhilarating in ways you can't explain.

When you casually drop facts learned from those books you spent a dozen loops reading, and you realize you retained something worth keeping.

How your memory gets weirdly good all of a sudden, despite not having all that repetition to fall back on, because suddenly every experience is fresh and new.

And when the seasons change, and your hair grows long enough that you want to cut it, and when you realize it's shocking because you didn't think you'd ever see something as incredible as the passage of time.

[annabelle--cane]

I guess the thing that makes me not so fond of Jon's addiction allegory is that it's only coherent to a certain extent? Like I think people sometimes forget that he's actively violating these people

anon, through no fault of your own you have accidentally hit upon my sleeper agent trigger phrase. I have layers of answers to this.

so first off, yeah, it's not a 1:1 direct metaphor, it's a soupy dream logic fantasy plot device with flavors of a lot of different things. there's quite a lot of addiction in there, there's some abuse of power, there's some cyclical nature of trauma, there's a dash of disability, there's a few notes of gendered violence, there's a good bit of just. violence violence and being kind of a motherfucker because goddammit it feels good to be an active agent about something in your life, even if it's just choosing to be a worse version of yourself than you strictly need to be. a lot of tma's worldbuilding is very allegorical, but apart from aspects of individual statements nothing really matches up quite 1:1 with a real world counterpart, and if more things did then it probably wouldn't be a fantasy show anymore.

secondly. okay to contextualize this answer a little bit I have a kind of hypothetical video essay project about vampirism and addiction that I like to spend a few hours thinking about every so often but am almost certainly never going to make because the full research burden required is a lot higher than I actually have the time to properly do. but because of that I've spent a lot of time sorting through why framing vampires as addicts really works for me in a way that it doesn't seem to for everyone, and I think a lot of my thoughts on that also apply to jon. there's going to be a bit of a detour here before we get back to talking about tma, but we'll get there, I prommy.

I've seen a lot of people take issue with various paranormal addiction allegories because, a lot of the time, the act that is meant to metaphorically represent the act of use itself is something that is directly and inherently harmful to others, e.g. drinking human blood, handing over power to your hedonistic Evil alter ego, holding the cursed amulet and going crazy going stupid, slurping trauma out of the head of some guy you ran into on a boat to norway, etc., and yeah, I do get that. substance use is not inherently harmful like that to anyone except sometimes the user themself, and addicts are not inherently fucked up and destructive people; those are dangerous stereotypes that often lead to the demonizing of a whole group of sick people.

here's the thing for me, though: those are definitely truths I want explored and represented when it comes to portrayals of non-allegorical actual addicts, but fantasy fiction isn't for showing the world as it is, it's for showing a subjective fun house mirror version of reality where certain aspects are minimized and magnified depending on how it feels to live through it. and yes, absolutely in real life drug use is not an inherently evil act and it does not make you an inherently evil person, but... doesn't it kind of feel like that? sort of? absolutely no one is living their best life nor on their best behavior while experiencing any kind of major mental illness episode, and when it comes to addiction you've got a very clear tangible symbol of when The Episode is happening that it feels like you have much more control over than when it comes to other illnesses. it's also a thing where people are a lot more likely to be openly angry and distrustful of you if they find out it's happening. so you mix together the ideas of "I know I get worse as a result of doing this one specific thing" + "I act less like myself when I'm using, it rearranges my priorities and I care less about hurting people because that's what happens when you're experiencing The Horrors" + "society at large/people directly around me are pretty quick to say that doing this is evil," and you get the subjective emotional result of "I hurt people by using and it makes me monstrous." I tend to respond to those kinds of paranormal allegories like they're just cutting out the middle man of those subjective fears. "using makes me monstrous" -> "using is monstrous."

anyway. jon archivist.

don't get me wrong, I totally understand if this aspect of metaphor doesn't gel for some people and they only like taking it exactly as far as the text explicitly makes them, but I really get a lot out of reading jon's connection to the fears as addiction precisely because he does genuinely awful things to people as a result of it. he's a person in a very bad physical and mental place with little to no support who is constantly being told by both allies and enemies that he's already a monster just by being alive, and he copes with that by secretly falling further and further into an compulsive act of consumption that skews his priorities and makes him care less about hurting people because at least sometimes getting to be the cause of pain makes him feel a little bit less powerless when he has to be the subject of pain the rest of the time. then he's found out and is made to stop, and he has to grapple not just with the physical toll of withdrawal but with knowing there is a not insignificant part of him that will excuse any act of malice if he knows he'll feel better afterwards.

the end of tma is very explicit in the fact that the rules of its world are shaped by the subjective worst fears of those who live in it, it's "an exercise in unreliably reality" as jonny sims put it once, and I think that principle extends backwards in some ways to apply to the rest of the show. I don't think the fact that there are only entities of fear and not hope or love is meant to be a full commentary on the total nature of the real world, it's a reflection of what fear and suffering can make the world feel like. eric and melanie both go to really harsh extremes to extricate themselves from the fears and live peaceful lives, and in both cases something happens that foils their plans (getting murdered + the apocalypse, respectively), but I don't think the intended message is to say that is definitively how real life works, they are metaphors for the limits of individual agency in larger systems and represent two types of worst-case-scenarios. similarly, I don't think reading jon as an addict implies that addiction inherently involves violence or that the reactions of those around him were completely unjustified, it's just a subjective exploration of the kinds of fears that can come with addiction dialed up to 100.

[sualne]

carnis au accidental [???] but i was thinking about mimic luffy wanting to get closer and closer to law, and i'd been thinking since i've made the au about how he'd want to see law's scars (already various scenes on how it could happen, written notes and all, don't know which to pick), and then the fact that he knows there's something carnis still in him.

so i was thinking of another scene where he's inspecting the scars on his face and they both very close but it's not the scars he's really looking at, he's searching for that carnis leftover and says maybe mostly to himself "It's still inside you. That's just so unfair. Why, just why couldn't it have been me?"

And jokingly is thought: This is it folks, I broke the code, this is about bottom dysphoria!

But then! I thought again, the au is about feeling otherized, isolated and monstrous and wrong. i've already strongly considered the idea of luffy's death as a suicide metaphor. the mimic has been thinking about socially detransitioning because it keeps getting accosted by creeps and assholes and knows that luffy would've fought back most of the time but also knows it's much stronger now and doesn't want to get caught, he needs to lays low, it doesn't want to cause a scene, it has to go stealth.

law hates the idea because it's not enough that it killed luffy now it has to just go and erase that important part of him of as well but the mimic insist, he's still a man, he'll just fake being a girl to make it easier. but law doesn't understand because to him the mimic is faking being a man, it's faking being a person, it's faking being luffy.

the reason the mimic wants to lay low is because it doesn't want to get caught so it can stay with law and study him, understand him. law doesn't knows that, he's too freaked out by the fact that's it's a mimic! that it killed luffy and might possibly want to kill him too! but the mimic feels a kind of kinship with law because of that remaining carnis in him.

remains he got from nearly dying, from losing his family, from an attack to another carnis. and i thought, law is meant to be reminiscent of mimics. he had to regrow his face, he's (as always) autistic and doesn't always act as expected, he's also paranoid even when he happens to be right, he's traumatized to the point of psychosis, the encounter changed him. it was meant as a parallel to how ppl like to think murderers&co are all mentally ill because they can't possibly be Normal Like Them, they must be different, they must not be human, they're obviously monsters. but those victims, those who get to survive, the trauma change them, they can acquire all sort of neurodivergences, and when those same Normal People learn that a person has some kind of The Scary Disorder they think "Oh, you're a monster too! You'll (inevitably) hurt someone!" which lead back to being otherized ect.

there's also something about how law didn't just get scars from his near death experience but also what's essentially a disease.

and then back to the mimic, who recognize itself in him, in that disease, but it isn't quite right, it's not enough and it's also nothing alike at all and also he's kind of jealous? it makes no sense to the mimic itself but he can't stop thinking about law either.

it's also how a monster that's linked to what is theorized to be something close to a hivemind accidentally developing a sense of identity and facing some sort of existential crisis over the fact that it can't ever escape it's monstrous nature and doesn't want to either. and that sound like, very much like being trans and cracking your egg and realizing you're fucked cause that sure is knowledge to have about oneself and also it's in the fictional 90s of a op carnis au so good luck with that.

anyway that's a lot of words and im not sure how to phrase the rest it's just, this was supposed to be a casual au where i went "OHOHO look at the Tragedy" but i thought about it too long and now i feel like i've ended up with a millefeuilles of overlaying themes and im, i means sure. can't draw All that tho so what now.

[fenrisdefender]

Saw a very one-sided Sebastian take but not interested in the OP feeling targeted by my response so here’s my own post. These are just my opinions and thoughts, and I mean no ill will to anyone who likes the character or has their own perspective.

The way that Sebastian Vael talks to Fenris is racist af and weird (imo), he recommends turning in mages he considers friends to the Circle which is certain death and/or abuse for them (not even Fenris would do that), and people absolutely have every right to not like Sebastian without the implication that they didn’t pay attention to the game or aren’t smart enough to understand.

I tire of the fandom sentiment that the only reason you don’t like a character is because you misunderstand them.

I dislike Sebastian Vael because he diminishes the trauma of a former elf slave, tries to manipulate Fenris into religion by pressing on his most vulnerable metaphorical wounds, dismisses the DEATH of an elven child and racial trauma, does not respect his own mage friends (who frankly saved his life) enough to consider their freedom warranted, and literally can’t understand why Hawke - A PERSON WHO HAS LOST SO MANY THEY LOVE TO DEATH - won’t execute (murder) their former friend after a betrayal (Anders)…

…to the point that he tries to declare WAR on Kirkwall in the following game?? Hawke isn’t even in Kirkwall anymore at that point!

I don’t have any issues with people who like the guy. Like who you want to like; it’s fiction and liking a character has no effect on me.

But I tire of the idea that disliking a character someone else likes is due to lapse in judgment or discernment.

People are allowed to dislike characters. Especially given how allegorical the Chantry is to Western colonial Christianity/the Catholic Church.

[sayeonlee]

why not without therapy :[

[toringo]

out of curiosity why do u ship jimmy & curly?

not dissing on the ship at all, just wondering

i don’t personally understand why anyone would ship it so wanted your thoughts to understand it

your art styles rlly cool btw ✨

So! I am just fascinated by their toxic, codependent friendship and love to bring it to the absolute worst highs. You can do so much with them; so much drama; so much jealousy and anger and angst! And the fact, that things could get better if they actually talked and held each other accountable! The fact, that they clearly care for each other so much, but Jimmy still resents and envies Curly, while Curly looks down on him.

The fact, that Curly would choose him over everyone else, consequences and morals be damned, and that Jimmy would keep him alive against his will as long as he keeps breathing? I'm just very ill about them. Oh and the whole weirdly sexual cannibalism thing that's partially a metaphor for what happened to Anya... Overall, they're just weird about each other. And they're bad people. I like that in fictional characters. And also.

I'm gay. And men hot... AND THANK YOU!!! Very happy you like it :^)

[bunnybunbun0]

Paul Atreides x fem reader where she suffers from chronic pain flare-ups and he takes care of her? I've been suffering from chronic pain for about a year now, and I'd love nothing more than a fluffy fic of getting taken care of by one of my favorite Timothée characters (if this request makes you uncomfortable, I understand, just an idea! ♡)

anon,i am so sorry about your condition,hope you feel better soon,rooting for you and know im here for everything you may need! hope this piece of fiction help ease you a litle bit!

warnings: Paul Atreides X fem!reader,fluff,mentions of pain,chronic illnes,husband Paul,pain being referred to as a curse (its up to you if it means metaphorically or literally),

A deep sigh escapes your lips when the unforgiven sun of Arrakis goes down,bringing in the serenity of the cold dark now adorning the sky. Nighsts were the worse for you,when your joints and limbs feel heavier than ever,the sorenes creeps up onto your figure like a vengeful ghost,yet what pains you the most is the concerned look on your husbands face.

His slim hands ease their way gently onto your waist,as if youre made of thin crystal,before easing you onto your shared bed,you shut your eyes tight,holding back the tears prickling the corners of your eyes.

Paul raises his hands to yor face,gently wiping the tears on yor face.

"shall i run a warm bath for you my lady? i can call upon a servant to brew you some tea,the spices mighthelp rid your disconfort"

His worry was as clear and palpable as his love for you,worth fighting the pain for. Amongsts the the aches of yor curse,you raise your pain ridded arms to cup his cheeck in a much welcome touch,unconciously the raven haired boy leans in to our warm touch.

"All i need is you my lord...your tenderness shall ease the weight of my curse" the twinkle of his eye mades your shuddering breaths a bit more tolerable,and less shalloow "lay with me my lord,let our love show the shining stars we re not so easily defeated"

The love filled atmosphere envelops you in a haze,the screaming of your loins,the fire of your bones,none of it would be enough to get you to give up on your husband,you would rule alongside with him and nothing could stop you.

Coldness fill the once warm spot where you stroked pauls cheeck as he slipped from your touch gently.

" i shall retrieve you a warm tea,and a special root to chew on,youll recover my love,ill care for you to my dying breath"

His soft lips meet yours in such a gentle manner that for a moment nothing else sways yor memory,not the aches of yor cursed body,not the worry of a kingdom with an illed grace,all that matters is paul,and by his touch,by his care,you shall be healed.

soprry its short,i hurried it out during a family function lol