#Do the forms their injuries take + the facial features they damage have some kinda significance???

[hiddenfolk]

Also can someone smarter than me pls analyse the significance of all of the mouthwashing character's fates involving facial trauma in some way. Why do swansea, anya and curly all share the same left eye looking at you, and why is daisuke the only one to lose his left eye in death. Is it the fact that they directly see and/or judge jimmy for what he is while daisuke never has that realisation??? i cant quite put the pieces together.

[cyncerity]

Moth au pt 4!!

Sorry this took forever lmao

I kinda forgot about it for a bit there. End of the school year kinda messed with my head.

Tw: moths (do I even have to say that at this point), and swearing

The moths facial features and expression, they reminded him so much of...they... it looked just like...

“What the hell?”

Tommy heard Tubbo speak, but was in to much shock to comprehend it. He was hyperventilating as the hybrid seemed to observe him. He supposed some part of him should be relieved. After all, if Tubbo could tell Tommy looked weird, that would mean that Jack’s stupid potion didn’t do anything to affect how others saw him. But all he could see was a giant face and hands in his field of vision, teeth that could crush him and fingers as long as his wingspan that could smash him with no effort. The perimeters of Tommy’s vision blurred and darkened as the panic set on.

The giant fingers began to reach for him, and in a blind panic he pushed then away and stumbled back. “Get the fuck away, please stay bac-“

Tommy cut himself off, screaming in pain as he lost his balance and fell back on his injured wing. He quickly clamped his jaw shut to distract himself from the pain only to hear more screaming.

Confused, he looked up to see Tubbo across the room, paled and shaken.

“What the actual fuck...” the goat hybrid muttered, his breath support lost from screaming. “Did you just...did you just talk?!”

Tommy forgot about all of his pain for a second. He heard him, Tubbo heard him, Jack had been wrong, he could still be heard. Tommy jumped up, adrenaline pumping through him as he ran to the edge of the table, wing injury be damned, he was gonna talk, actually talk, to Tubbo.

He was finally gonna prove he was still human.

Tommy yelled out to Tubbo from the edge of the table as Tubbo looked on, terror eventually fading into confusion. Tommy continued to yell for what felt like hours but could logically only have been a few minutes before he noticed Tubbo had stopped moving. He stood still in the middle of the room, just a few feet away from the table, and just stared at Tommy. The moth hybrid eventually stopped yelling, the adrenaline wore off and the pain of his wing setting back in. If Tubbo had heard him, there’s no way he wouldn’t have said anything by now. So what went wrong? Why couldn’t he-

Tommy thoughts were frozen as Ranboo frantically scrambled down the ladder from the attic of the small cabin, looking extremely worried. “I heard a scream, are you alright Tubbo?”

“The moth just...It just talked, Boo, I swear, it fucking talked, and it... it sounded like him.” Tubbo stuttered, pointing at Tommy. Neither of them needed to clarify who the “him” was, there was only one “him” it could’ve been. The him who they’d been trying and failing to find for what seemed like forever. Ranboo looked at Tubbo for a second before heading over to the table, placing a hand on it and leaning slightly to look directly down at Tommy. Fuck, he forgot how tall Ranboo was normally, this just made it so much worse.

“So, can you talk...?” Ranboo asked questioningly. Tommy tried to get over himself as he started to yell to Ranboo as well. Tommy supposed if he were human, he would’ve looked like a madman, jumping around and screaming like his life depended on it. Still, though, Ranboo just laughed a bit at Tommy’s struggles as he looked back to Tubbo.

“Sorry Tubbo, I don’t hear anything. You should get to bed, maybe you’re hearing things. We’ve been looking for him for a while anyways, maybe your brain just wants to hear him badly enough that you think a moth can talk.”

Tommy’s heart shattered as he saw Ranboo turn away from him to continue talking to Ranboo, finally realizing who the “he” they meant was. Tubbo didn’t even know how close to finding Tommy he was. How didnt Ranboo hear him? Tubbo had heard him when he was at the desk? Why didn’t...

Height. Ranboo was taller than Tubbo. Tommy was small and Tubbo had been closer, so he heard him better. All Tommy had to do was get close enough. He immediately tried to fly up to one of their ears, but fell back down immediately. Fuck, right, the damaged wing. Tubbo seemed to notice his flailing though, as he cut Ranboo off mid sentence and pointed at Tommy.

“Aw, what happened to your wing, little guy?” Ranboo cooed at him. Fuck, Tommy hated this. When he got back to normal size he’d punch Ranboo for babying him.

“Michael got his hooves him for a bit, I think he’ll be fine, though. But it’s not like we can release him back into the wild with a busted wing, he’d be eaten pretty quick.” Tubbo replied, making Tommy let out a breath of relief. He at least got to stay in the warm house, he didn’t know what he’d do if he had to survive the mobs in the middle of the night. And Tubbo called him a “he” since the first time they saw him like this. He was so, so close to figuring it out-

Tommy’s train of thought was cut off as a cage slammed around him. He screamed and banged on the walls of the lantern that he had just been enclosed in as the enderman hybrid lifted it higher and hung it from a chain on the ceiling.

“There, that should keep it safe then. Michael can’t reach it here.” Ranboo said, turning to his platonic husband. “Just, please, promise me you’ll get some sleep.”

Tubbo just nodded and smiled slightly at Ranboo as he went upstairs, leaving Tubbo unknowingly alone with Tommy. Tommy pressed himself against the latern to better see Tubbo, who was looking back up at him.

Tubbo sighed. “I suppose we should get you something to eat then, huh? Jack probably wasn’t feeding you much, knowing him.” Tubbo rummaged around a nearby chest for a minute before realizing he didn’t know what moths ate, so he settled on picking up some hay and bread. He walked over to the lantern that held the moth and after struggling to get it off the chain (god why did he have to pick such a tall husband), he held close to his face again just to see if Ranboo was right. Maybe he was just going crazy. There’s no way that this random moth looks like Tommy...right?

But as he leaned close to the cage, he saw the same thing. A humanoid insect staring at him as it banged on the glass in front it...him? Tubbo wasn’t sure anymore. He opened the glass holding the moth-boy-whatever it was to place some food down for it as it suddenly jumped out.

—————————

Tommy jumped out of the lantern, scrambling over Tubbo’s hand and landing on his shoulder as he cupped his hands around his mouth.

“TUBBO ITS ME IM HERE YOU’RE NOT CRAZY!!” He screamed into the goat hybrids ear, causing the giant to flinch at the sudden volume with no warning. Tommy was suddenly grabbed off the shoulder and pulled in front of Tubbo’s face, which looked back at him with a mixture of confusion and awe.

—————————

‘There’s no way’, Tubbo thought. He had thought it sounded like him, even looked like him, but it couldn’t be him, could it? The moth seemed to go still once he grabbed him, maybe from shock, maybe waiting for some sort of response, Tubbo couldn’t tell. He looked the smal hybrid over again before speaking, barely above a whisper.

“...Tommy?”

The moth hybrid’s antennas perked and wings lifted, and Tubbo was close enough to see relief forming on his face and tears threatening to pour from his eyes;

“Hey big man.”

———————————————————————

Pt. 4!! I hope it was worth the wait!

Btw, always open to asks and suggestions about where to take the story from here!

[werevulvi]

You know how often I ask myself, why can't I just be normal? It's quite a lot. I wanna talk about something I've never told anyone before, aside from a few strangers online. I've suppressed this my whole life, since childhood. I've acted with anger towards others with the same thing as me, told them how it's offensive and awful. Refused to allow myself to even think about my own urges and desires. It worked for a long time, until I wrote my book this summer, a fiction story about a couple who end up disabled from their dangerous work as assassins. My intentions were just... to try to give good representation and explore something I knew very little about.

So I did a lot of research into my characters' disabilities, and even briefly pretended to have those specific disabilities at home alone, just to get an idea of what it's like to manage daily life with them. It was just a writer's thing, just being a dedicated writer, I told myself, as I researched those disabilities far more in-depth than I did about assassins...

At one point, I would cover my eye with a makeshift eye patch, as one of my main character's loses an eye, and I... it brought forth what I had suppressed my whole life, and I can't suppress it anymore as a result of that. The bottled feelings have escaped and I can't put them back in again.

I think I have Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID.) There, I said it.

It's a very rare mental illness that makes you want to become disabled, usually in some very specific way. Most are males, and most desire amputation, but it can pertain to wanting blindness, deafness, or I guess, any conceivable disability. There's only been a few thousand reported cases, but it's also said to be a very secret disorder, so numbers are probably not accurate. It's very poorly researched, poorly understood, and still not recognized as an actual disorder. So you can't be diagnosed with it currently, and there are no set criteria for it. However, it will be in the upcoming ICD-11 (the International Classification of Diseases.) It will then also be re-named to Body Integrity Dysphoria (BID) as it's being recognized as a form of dysphoria, and as a neurological condition.

And now for the obligatory life story:

I don't remember when it started, but as a child, I'd say roughly age 5 or 7, I was obsessed with fictional characters that had a distinct scar over one eye, and either blind in that eye or entirely missing it. I would on occasion play around with a hand covering one eye, and wished I could have that for real. For a long time, I didn't know why I was so obsessed with that. If I was just admiring that kinda physical feature, or wanted it myself, or both. Throughout my teens and adulthood thus far, I've made a lot of drawings of people with only one eye, and scarred faces. I wrote another book back in 2013 with one of the main characters being a woman with a large scar across half her face. I've always been a little too fascinated with facial deformities, having only one eye, and facial assymmetry. And I've tried to express it with assymmetrical makeup looks (not made to look like I'm injured) throughout my teens and 20's.

So it's been with me for a very long time, even though I've tried super hard to suppress it, and tried to tell myself that I should just be happy to have a mostly abled body. But that wish/urge/whatever it is, has never gone away.

When I first heard of BIID, back in 2016 or so, I was angry, and thought of people with it as despicable. I was in deep denial of how much I could relate to them. Didn't want to think of that. But since learning more about the condition, and listening to others who have it, and learning it is actually a real condition... I guess that has helped me eventually come to this point that, well fuck... it me.

Up until recently, I thought it was just a self-harm desire, as I used to be a cutter, but now I understand that the self-harm was not the intention behind what I want with that, but merely the means to achieve it. Kinda like how I wanted to cut my own tits off before I had my double mastectomy. It wasn't about specifically wanting to injure my chest, but to not have tits anymore, and I much preferred the much safer way of doing it, through proper surgery. However, wanting half my face re-arranged is a little bit harder to achieve through elective surgery, even if surgeons were allowed to treat BIID through surgery. So I do not think my desire to get rid of my left eye and surrounding tissues is about wanting to harm myself. It's about wanting to have and live with the result of such an injury. Although I get that might be very unimaginable.

So then, have I ever made any attempts?

Yeah... I have. Once, I think it was when I was 22, I took a blade to my face, but chickened out, and ended up only making a very superficial cut on my cheek, which I was then extremely ashamed of. I didn't want for people to find out I had made it myself. Since then, I've stopped self-harming and have no desire to make a second attempt. I'm scared I'd fuck it up and cause damage I don't want, or... not enough damage. And I'm worried I'd be beyond myself with shame if I would take out my own eye and then other people would show sympathy for my injury, knowing I'd have caused it myself. I just kinda wish it would happen accidentally somehow.

So, to clarify, my BIID targets my left eye and left side of my face. Why left? Honestly because I'm deaf since birth on my left ear, so it would be extremely inconvenient to be deaf on one side and blind on the other. Much more manageable to have one side be blind-deaf and the other fully seeing and hearing. But at first it didn't matter to me so much which side of my face would be affected. I have no desire to become an amputee or fully blind. I also don't have a fetish for disabled people.

Would I date a disabled person?

Yes, but that's because some attractive people just so happen to be disabled, and I wouldn't think I'm particularly judgemental, not that I find their disabilities in and of themselves attractive.

I try to quell this desire, to lose an eye and half my face, by on occasion wearing an eye patch in secrecy. I know it can worsen my vision, but why on Earth would I mind that? It's kinda what I want. But my mom almost caught me wearing it today as she came by for a quick visit, and I have worn it at the grocery store, and out and about in my village. It feels so damn right, yet so fucking wrong...

Let's tackle this question as well: Do I feel like an ass towards disabled people?

Yes and no. Thing is, I'm already disabled myself. I'm not an abled person to begin with. I live on permanent sickness compensation, classified unable to work, for life, with little to no chance at improvement, due to my autism and adhd. I have the energy levels of an old cellphone that drops to 2% battery ten minutes after being fully charged every time. And I hate it. I hate that there's so much in life that I'll probably never be able to do. So disability, is already part of my life, and always has been. So why then would I want to become more disabled, instead of less? Well, yeah that is what I want...

I've faced a shit ton of ableism since childhood, and I actually think that's why I got BIID. Because my actual disability is invisible and not taken seriously in society. And I think that's what I deep down want: to just have my disability be visible and taken seriously. Physical disabilities are taken more seriously. I've even heard that straight from the mouths of people who have both mental and physical disabilities. How often have I not been called lazy for something I've been literally unable to do, just because I "look" capable? How often do I get to hear I "don't seem autistic?" How often do I get told that autism is not even a disability, but merely a personality trait and being socially awkward? How often do I get told I would be able to work if I just tried harder? All. The. Fucking. Time.

I think that's why, ever since I was a child, I've wanted to have a physical disability, which is fully visible, and cannot be ignored. And what's more visible than the face? We interact with it the most. Because I don't really want to be less capable or lose a lot of movement, I just want for my already disabled existence to be visibly disabled.

So that's a big reason for why I think I have BIID. Which is to say, I don't feel like I'm being an ass towards disabled people, because I'm already disabled to begin with, merely wishing I was more disabled and in a more visible way. Had I been abled to begin with, I think that would have been different, but even abled people with BIID don't choose to have this condition. I read a quote from a person with BIID, who got the amputation he wanted, and he said basically that he didn't know what's worse, having BIID or being disabled. I can relate to that. And I think that is the irony here, that simply having BIID is like being disabled in and of itself already.

That said, however, I do understand why disabled people would be greatly offended, angry, or otherwise insulted, by people with BIID. Honestly I cannot understand why they would not be. I'm greatly offended by people who say they wish they were autistic! And I'm offended at myself for wishing I had a facial deformity and only one eye. Why do I want this!? I keep trying to shake sense into myself. It's what's causing my shame and wishing I could just be normal. No disabilities, and no wish for disabilities I don't have. That'd be great.

There is one more aspect I also feel the need to tackle: Transabled.

BIID has recently been rather often labeled as "transabled" in the same vein as "transracial" (wanting to be another race) and transgender. As a transsexual, this comparison is of course something that I have not missed. I'm painfully aware. This is how I see it, alright: Although I do feel like my body integrity dysphoria is incredibly similar to my sex dysphoria, I feel like it would be extremely rude and tone deaf to identify as for example vision impaired, deaf or an amputee, without actually having those disabilities. And I do not know if anyone actually does this. As far as I've seen, some people with BIID may pretend to have the disability they want (like with me walking around with an eye patch despite having no medical need for it) but they don't lie about it, or they try hard to avoid ending up in a situation where they'd feel pressured to lie. So I dunno how much validity there even is in anyone with BIID genuinely identifying as transabled. But regardless of that, I think it's absolutely abhorrent to identify as disabled in ways you are not. And I'd never tell anyone that I'm missing an eye when I do not.

So, I really do not like the term "transabled" and much prefer the BIID and BID terms. I do not like BIID being conflated with being transgender, although I want to very carefully say that the two conditions are so incredibly similar, that... I think that's another big reason I ended up with both. That I've always felt a strong disconnect from my body, which has merely expressed itself in a wide array of ways, ranging from sex dysphoria to body integrity dysphoria, dissociation and even having previously identified as otherkin. I don't think that's a coincidence at all. But then what caused all of that? I don't think there is a simple answer, but a multitude of reasons, and it may even connect with my autism as well as my trauma.

So, I'd say most likely it's caused by a cocktail of neurological and social issues. I was just clearly meant to be a broken person, making the most of my life with the sucky cards I was dealt, and on good days... I guess I'm kinda okay with that. At least it's not boring. Let's end on that not super tragic note. Feel free to ask me anything, if you’ve got any questions.