#I do study this professionally

[lizzyscribbles]

Okay but can we talk about the amount of electrolytes (sodium specifically) that Bakugo must need to consume to exist??

Weird thing to fixate on, I know, blame my degree, but think about this: His quirk relies on his ability to sweat, which means the more he sweats the more he can use it. The main thing you lose when you sweat is water and sodium, the longer you sweat, the more those leave your body, that's common sense. Sodium helps you retain water and maintain the fluid balance inside and outside your body, which is why you see it hanging out with water so much and why it's such an important electrolyte that gets lost easily. Yes, technically, you also lose magnesium and potassium, but you lose less of those in sweat than sodium.

Most people don't actually need to supplement electrolytes, even those who exercise regularly, (this is excluding those with illnesses, just considering the average person here), you can get what you need from plain water. Even some athletes don't necessarily need to, it tends to depend heavily on how long you exercise, which is why you see people who do ultramarathons or ironmans downing them. There's ways to test whether or not you actually need them, but suffice it to say, more often than not, just drinking normal water is perfectly fine.

But Bakugo?? There's no way that boy doesn't burn through sodium like it's a fucking competition.

See, the key to whether or not electrolyte supplementation is needed is often found in how long you exercise for, as well as the environmental conditions. Say, if you're exercising outside in the spring for like, thirty minutes to an hours, just water is going to be all you need. Contrast that with a hero course student who likely exercises excessively, multiple times a day, every day, and has a quirk that relies on sweat. That is a recipe for ✨disaster✨ and you know what I don't see on his, or LITERALLY ANY OTHER HERO'S, costume??

A WATER BOTTLE.

I don't care if it ruins the aesthetic you're going for, dude, get a freaking water bottle and some little electrolyte packets before you pass out. How have any of these kids not thought of having some form of water on them while hero-ing?? Like y'all gonna be out on patrol for HOURS without any source of hydration? What a great way to die!

Honestly though, how many times do you think Bakugo just keeled over as a kid? Like dehydration can be a sneaky little shit, and with a quirk like that I'm sure they became besties.

Honestly, I wonder if he does actually carry electrolyte drinks and packets around with him because of that. Like, Izuku had to drag his ass back home too many times while they were out playing as kids and he got tired of it so he spent forever researching different electrolyte brands and sleuthing out which had the best water to sodium to sugar ratio (because you do want some sugar in your electrolyte drinks, the sodium uses it as a quick transport to get where it needs to go) for optimal rehydration. And now he's like, hyperaware of the symptoms and anytime his classmates look even a tiny bit like they might be dehydrated he just storms up and starts throwing electrolytes at their face like:

"DRINK YOUR WATER YOU IDIOTS, DO YOU WANT SURVIVE THE FUCKING LEAGUE OF VILLAINS JUST TO DIE OF DEHYDRATION?? THAT'S FUCKING PATHETIC. SIT DOWN AND DRINK THAT BEFORE YOU PASS OUT, DUMBASS."

All while violently shaking a water bottle with the electrolyte powder to shove down their throat.

Aggressive love, yk? At least he's trying.

[hoofpeet]

do u have any ti[ps for coloring n rendering? ur art is so scrumptious whenever i look at it i wanna lick it like icecream :3

Do a million billion photo studies... And whenever you like the colors of a photo rip the palette and break it down into darks/mids/lights --> Do some coloring experiments with those basic colors to see what looks nice

[malacandrax]

[gomzdrawfr]

having a keyboard going clicliclicliclicalcalcalcalcalclclalcalcl does boost my productivity

[tosteur-gluteal]

Again, gouache painting I made to relax

[starbuck]

realizing that i’m a smart and capable person who can do anything i put my mind to has been very healing for me, but it’s also a bit chaotic because i now realize how many specialized skills i find interesting and would probably be very good at if i dedicated enough time to it… what if i committed myself to recreationally studying the law… and bird genetics…

[birdyverdie]

Was in class and we were talking about whether theology/philosophy should be a part of the conversation with medicine and I really wanted to attack the girls behind me who said so many callous comments under their breath yet didn't even participate in the conversation.

Like shut the fuck up!!! If you can't speak out loud to this (very chill) classroom then don't say antitheistic bullshit and giggle like hyenas afterward

[subsequentibis]

i've had this thing for a little while where i'm like. fuck! a lot of the artists i look up to have really thin, precise lineart. i need to start using thinner lines so i can get the accuracy and detail and realistic, correct anatomy, and it makes you have to get better at colors because the color has to carry the piece more when the lines give them more space between, and it's made me a lot more critical with my work because i instinctively go for big thick linework, and my usual strokes look sloppy and disconnected when i use thin lines.

and then i realized it was also making me miserable and not want to work on anything, which was really getting in the way of doing art in the first place. so i cranked that brush size back up and it just feels good and easy and flowing again, and like. yknow. there's working towards improvement and then there's stalling yourself out because you're too focused on arbitrary measures. i think i'm gonna be happy with my thick lines for a bit.

[losver07]

"Sirius," I hear, and return to the room, where I left Remus alone, with the apparently simple task of taking his clothes off.

"What is it?" I ask, leaning into the doorframe.

"My boot... 's not comin' off."

He's plastered. And, even so, with a mess for hair, a face decorated with lipstick smudges from my lips, and a stupid smile, the litres of Vodka he's downed don't seem to matter.

"I see," I nod, taking in the image of him. If my mind were a gallery, it'd be filled to the brim with pictures of his eyes and lips and hands, with the morning sun shining on his hair right after we'd woken up in the same bed and got to see each other, his boots meeting my platforms under the dinner table, and his handwriting on a paper tucked behind my phone case, I love you, Pads on blue ink. "Have you tried untying them?"

"Ah," he opens his eyes, suddenly illuminated. "No. Wait."

"I will."

I always will.

[cosmogyros]

That moment when you have to let people be wrong about you because correcting them would make you seem like an unbearable show-off

I was at a bookstore with a friend the other day and I was looking at a book in German that I was interested in buying, but then I saw that it was a translation and had originally been written in French

I commented idly to my friend "Sometimes I don't buy a book because it's a translation and I always prefer to read in the original language when possible" and she said in an agreeing-with-me way, "Yeah it would make more sense to read it in English"

and I realized she assumed I meant English when I said "original language"

but I couldn't bring myself to say "Yeah, or French or Dutch or Spanish or Italian or Portuguese or one of the other languages I read..." because like. who says that kind of thing.

[scriptfails]

Finally ordering all my college equipment and I'm so nervous but so happy and also pretending this isn't an excuse to buy a bunch of things I've been yearning after for years

[non-un-topo]

Lol not to brag but I was meeting with the assistant of the grad program I want to apply for and she pulled up my transcript and yelled "HOLY SHIT!"

[idontmindifuforgetme]

I think there’s something to be said for the fact that I used to dread presentations when I was younger but now plan to go out of my way to sign myself up for them so I can improve my public speaking. Me from not even two years ago would’ve never. But now ?? The more the merrier let me at them

[beguilingcorpse]

What are your thoughts on Muir's approach to plurality in TLT? I'm in therapy for DID and something I realized lately is that this book series has been instrumental in me understanding and accepting myself (and in explaining my relationship with my alters to others who have read the book).

Especially with the Paul thing. Especially with Pyrrha and G1deon after the latter's death. Especially with Nona feeling brand-new and still at the mercy of everyone's expectations of Harrow. It's not a 1:1 but I could seriously write essays about the two-people-in-one-body phenomenon you see so often in these books.

i should say up front that i am by no means a professional and that i do not have a dissociative identity disorder. but based on what i know about the lived experiences of folks with DID it seems like muir put a lot of care into depicting plurality and situations that are analogous to the real phenomenon of living with alters. i agree that i doubt anything is really intended to be a 1-to-1 match-up (as in, i don’t think muir set out to write a story ABOUT living with DID) but she’s spoken before about her own personal experience with psychiatric disorders and how that’s echoed in harrowhark, and i think that she recognized how much people with DID would relate to her characters and it seems clear to me that she really put the research into making sure that the experiences were accurate. the memory loss, switching, navigating a host body as a new alter, and paul’s ‘integrating’ especially seem like they were written with care and compassion in mind and it’s very refreshing to see media that treats DID as a lived experience that real people navigate as opposed to the common way that it’s treated in pop culture (i.e. split) which just sensationalizes and stigmatizes it

[consolecadet]

Still thinking about that basket weaving post. It is so hard for me to justify spending money on hobbies, or on learning a skill that won't "pay for itself". I really like trying all sorts of new crafts and art media, and I do sometimes, but if it's even slightly expensive I get really in my head about it -- and it absolutely comes from people in my life (parents mainly) (father mainly) talking about how people who studied "impractical" topics were throwing huge amounts of money away to inevitably fail to create a successful career out of them.

Anyway, these days I mostly make art out of trash. Probably unrelated.

[serpentinegraphite]

...re: your tags on the WFA Jason crowbar incident -- might one be directed to your referenced essay?

Since it's been a min, here's the DC meta post this ask is referencing.

I thought it was on my blog, but I haven't been able to find the essay in the weeks since this ask came in? It might have been a tag rant more than the proper essay I thought I had posted. Or I might have been thinking of a broader and more general essay on the current trauma in fanfic portrayal, which I have definitely posted on this blog somewhere and in several friends' inboxes.

The gist of the essay is that a) fandom as a whole has a tendency to treat panic attacks/flashbacks as the Only and Right Way to experience trauma, even though that's by far not universal and b) will apply this even to characters who have canon trauma and show specific trauma reactions!

With Jason Todd in WFA having a Crowbar Sound Flashback, it's a perfect microcosm of both! The problem, therefore, isn't necessarily WFA being Uniquely Terrible and Inaccurate; WFA just exclusively plays with a lot of softball, fandom-popular tropes, so it remains popular even and especially with people who aren't super familiar with the canon. And because WFA thrives on softball, popular tropes, of course it's going to pick up on the Best Way To Write Trauma.

The essence of the problem is actually the way trauma symptoms in fanfic are homogenized to the most palatable, most sympathetic reaction guaranteed to woobify even the most hardened crime lords and war criminals: a panic attack. But not ANY panic attack! Specifically the hyperventilating on the floor, curled up in a ball kind of panic attacks! (Characters who lash out in anger when they're scared? Characters who shout mean things? Not anymore! Now they're hyperventilating on the floor and they need tender care and possibly a hug.) The momentary full helplessness is integral to creating a miniature h/c journey for the characters (panic –> helplessness –> rescue –> bonding).

Panic attacks actually have a pretty wide range of symptoms! Sometimes they're focused more on derealization reactions or heart racing (loads of people irl end up in the ER thinking they're having a heart attack, when it's actually a panic attack).

This specific portrayal of trauma as panic attacks is, I think, most egregious with characters who would actually fucking die if they had this exact trauma response. E.g., Jason Todd, who infamously both commits crimes and fights them. If he has a panic attack at every scum bag who waves a crow bar at him, he's probably getting beaten to death with a crowbar again. If even one of his regular criminal contacts or enemies catches wind that he has a crowbar panic attack weakness, he's dead! And this could be played for drama in this kind of fanfic, but it never is. (Because drama isn't the point, quick and dirty h/c is.)

Distilling his trauma about dying into panic attacks dismisses his entire history and canon trauma response (rage and vengeance and trying a completely different tactic from Batman to better the city of Gotham when the Red Hood is being a good guy and not just being a crime lord for profit). Here is a solid discussion on how Jason reacts to his own death (I'm new here and this essay is already long lol, I'm not citing whole comics runs or anything myself), with a great addendum from Ragnarok-hound in the tags on the Doylist reasons for why the canon goes over Jason's death again and again anyway.

The problem further stems from everyone learning panic attack symptoms from a combination of personal experience (which for the AO3 crowd in the shippy tags does not as often include people with uh combat or crime experience) and actual mental health web resources, so any panic attack scene reads like it was written by someone between high school and college age checking off a list of psych textbook panic attack symptoms. So it makes sense why they would go with the thing that is easiest to write for them and stick with the approved symptoms they know will garner the most sympathy from the audience and, importantly, other characters in the scene. E.g., to return to bullying WFA's portrayal, having Bruce arrive to tell Jason everything will be okay and fix everything.

(I think ymmv more on Bruce portrayals, depending on Your Preferred Batman, whether that's the corresponding era of comics with Red Hood, the animated series, or some campy/classic live action Batman portrayal, but one thing that is pretty consistent in every Batman media is that he's not fucking great at feelings, so even with a generous reading, WFA simplifies a lot of fraught history between Jason and Bruce here. Further, I could write an entire second essay on how bystanders in fanfic always have the perfect response, to either use the right therapy speak and handle a panic attack perfectly or hug the person to help them calm down or what have you, but this is long enough as it is. To be brief, though: sometimes, especially in a situation like Jason and Bruce's, it's perfectly normal to see someone panicking and then also panic and fuck things up even worse! It's also common to feel frustrated or tired of seeing someone panic over the same thing! Like I know fanfic and WFA are wish fulfillment, but like. There's a lot of nuance and basic trauma understanding missing here.)

And that brings us to another point, which is that PTSD triggers don't necessarily manifest as anxiety disorders and textbook panic attacks. I mean, this feels obvious, but there are a lot of ways to experience PTSD! and that's the thing about Jason Todd! He has trauma, not an anxiety disorder! While panic attacks as the default and most common trauma reaction are very common in fanfic, it's not like even the top most common trauma trigger reaction? And it's weird that it's everywhere like this. Trigger responses have a wiiiiide range, e.g., nightmares, lashing out (the Netflix Jessica Jones show was especially good at this actually! Billy Hargrove on Stranger Things is a fucking perfect example too), dissociation (The Raven Cycle books do a great job with this, and then the fanfic forgets that it happened entirely), or simply activating one's fight or flight instinct (and we've seen with Jason, it's often a fight instinct!). There are probably also loads of Batman comics exemplifying each of these variations, but a) as stated I'm new here, I don't have comprehensive citations for every character (yet) and b) I really want to illustrate how fanfic specifically keeps sticking to one particular portrayal in a way that most canons don't.

Jason Todd can be easily written as having a Specific Traumatic Incident (dying hideously via crowbar) or having complex PTSD (little daily bullshit! you can do an entire deep dive on complex PTSD resulting from poverty, homelessness, and regular repeated exposure to violence as a child e.g. by being Robin, which is not even getting into the stuff you can gather from popular hc/later retcons about his mom's drug use or how his dad's working for Two Face and getting sent to prison might have affected him; another example it's a common hc that he's straight edge because of what drugs may or may not have done to his mom depending on the canon you're working with, but I don't see a lot of people writing him with the corresponding control issues that often pair with that). There are a lot of options is what I'm saying.

WFA choosing to double down on the sound of a crowbar scraping (when also like he's the one using a crowbar for actual mechanic things in this scene, he's probably used to a variety of metal scraping sounds, okay I'm nitpicking here again) over any of the more complex trauma under his belt is very lazy writing. They're distilling his entire history to one specific sound that causes a very targeted panic response, which I know. Is the format. That's how WFA works, it's not supposed to be deep, but this is again, a pattern I keep seeing again and again in fanfiction (to bully another fandom: Stranger Things fans insisting that Steve Harrington is afraid of his own swimming pool when the canon strongly contradicts that; he's swim team captain for 3 years running after this AND that's actually Nancy's trauma reaction, not Steve's).

Again, the problem isn't necessarily specifically with WFA or people who enjoy it or with h/c. But, yeah, the crowbar scraping sounds panic attack is a huge disservice to Jason's character, and it's like a ubiquitous pattern of writing trauma in recent years.