#I think deemed problematic because I have a personality disorder | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

gaynoctgar · 5 years ago

Text

Prompto’s Brotherhood Arc is Fatphobic 2, Electric Boogaloo: Haley’s Back and She is Pissed

This essay is going to be an even deeper dive into the fatphobia that permeates Prompto’s character arc, and is going to handle the issue with more grace and nuance than I did the first time. This is also going to explore the effects the arc had on me as a player, and on other players who share my experiences. It is going to be very organized, long, and methodical (word count: ~5300). It’s a bit of a doozy, but it is something I feel it is very important. I have been wanting to elaborate on my previous Prompto essay for a long time, and for reasons I will detail below, I feel that I am ready to do this now.

Consider this a sequel to my earlier essay, and I will be referencing it throughout.

Stand back everyone; Haley’s about to get mean and personal.

Under the cut for safety and length, please avoid if the subject is triggering to you! Take care of yourselves!

Thank you all so, so much for hearing what I have to say.

TW: fatphobia, eating disorders (both in terms of Prompto and of the author)

Intro

All right everyone, buckle in. Last time I think I was a little bit too nice about this. Last time I think I let a little too much go. But I’m a full three years older now and I’ve seen a few more things. And now I think it’s time that I really just let loose and criticize the fuck out of Square for something they have consistently done wrong, and that is the way they have handled issues with weight in regards to one Prompto Argentum.

Many of you may know that Prompto is one of my favorite characters in anything ever. This very sideblog, in fact, used to be named for him (old url was promptoisbi). It’s because of this that I hate that he’s so consistently shit on by the narrative, but right now we are talking about the out-of-universe insidiousness of the fatphobia that completely permeates this story.

The first essay is right here but the TL;DR version of that is essentially “the way that Prompto’s weight loss in Brotherhood is portrayed as a moral and positive good and in fact necessary for him to be a protagonist is immensely fatphobic. Because the game refuses to problematize this, I am going to, and I’m going to contextualize that with my own experiences to help explain why this is so fucked.” At that time, I was recovering from long-term anorexia, and I think that permeated a lot of what I wrote. I don’t regret this, and I still think the essay is pretty solid. But I’m not a woman who won’t admit her own limitations, and one of mine at the time was that a lot of my fatphobia was internalized. Now that I am healing, now that I have talked to other people with experiences that mirror my own (notably @chubbyargentum), I think I am in a better place to articulate what upsets me.

The rest of the essay will be divided into six parts, themed as follows:

A redux of my central criticism in the first essay, that the narrative treats Prompto’s weight loss as a positive, moral good. In fact, it’s necessary for him to be seen as a protagonist.

Detailing that Prompto’s weight loss was directly motivated by another character, and this other character does not apologize to Prompto at all for his previous behavior. We are in fact supposed to believe that him saying what he said was a good thing.

Evidence that Prompto still legitimately has an eating disorder from his trauma. This goes unexamined by the story, and in fact seems to be actively encouraged by other characters, notably Ignis and Noct. This isn’t to bash the characters, but the way they are written.

Points 1 and 3 combined produce a genuinely triggering experience for players like me; this is where I detail some of my own history with weight and eating problems.

Anticipating pushback, I propose two alternative scenarios that avoid the problems outlined in parts 1-4: one where Prompto doesn’t lose weight, and one where he does but it’s handled a lot more sensitively.

A personal look at what (and who) actually motivated me to do a Part 2 to my essay.

Followed by a TL;DR conclusion if you want to jump right to the heart of things. I know this is a long essay, and I don’t apologize, but I do want to make it accessible to those who might have a harder time reading something so long.

Time to knock down these points, one by one:

Part 1: Equating Weight Loss to Morality

Prompto’s episode in Brotherhood, “Dogged Runner,” serves as our introduction both to Prompto as a character, and pulls double-duty to show us how he becomes involved in the life of a prince. Gladio and Ignis’ episodes did not have to do this double work because they are in Noct’s life by occupation, but Prompto, being a commoner, needs this introduction. Unfortunately, this episode is not twice as long to handle the double workload it gave itself, and the plot clearly suffers for it. For those who don’t remember, Prompto seems to be a child who more or less raises himself--a shy boy who is in the same grade as Noctis. He is quite obviously overweight, and the episode in fact chooses to focus the bulk of its attention on that rather than how he met Noctis (this will be explored in Part 2, below). This is what I take issue with.

Due to....an encounter, we’ll call it, with his royal classmate, Prompto becomes motivated to “improve himself to become someone worthy of a prince,” as described in Episode Prompto. Right off the bat, this description is implying that in order to be worthy of Noctis’ companionship--even independently of Noctis’ own actions, which will be problematized in the next section--he must be different than the way he is.

This...doesn’t make sense. We already saw that Prompto was a kind and generous soul, if rather shy. He took in “Tiny” of his own accord; he fixed her up and fed her and made sure she was healthy, solely out of the goodness of his heart. What else could this literal child need to “improve” about himself to make friends with Noctis? Well...the episode focuses on this in a way I would almost argue is objectifying. We see in excruciating detail how this literal child (I feel the need to mention again that Prompto is 12 years old and doesn’t seem to have consistent parents) approaches the world with a black-and-white mentality….that is, he seems to focus exclusively on eating salads and running an excessive amount (we’ll get to this more in Part 3). Further objectification occurs when we are shown repeatedly that a minor is taking “progress shots” of himself in his underwear.

A bit of a tangent, but the way that last one is drawn...y’all did remember Prompto was 14/15 at that time, right? Extra H points for Square, right there.

So yeah, once all of this happens, Prompto is finally deemed by the narrative to be acceptable enough to enter the life of a prince. Basically, if you’re fat, get a goddamn eating disorder and you can be a protagonist!

And I’m actually gonna take a second right now to address the more common, and generous, interpretation/criticism I am anticipating. I know what SE was trying to do here. They were trying to show us that Prompto’s “self-esteem” was the problem. That he needed to gain more confidence, and losing the weight didn’t actually solve that problem. I know this is the intent because the hotel scene exists. But...answer me this. Why is losing weight treated as an analogue for Prompto’s internal character growth? Why is losing weight an analogue for literally anything? If the issue was Prompto’s insecurity and shyness, there are a dozen other ways to show that. I can think of one right now: maybe have Noctis try to make friends and Prompto runs away because he gets nervous and tongue-tied and that’s the source of their lingering awkwardness. There you go, much better episode.

Part 2: Noctis is a dick

And I say this as a Noct stan. Y’all know I love him. With all my heart, I do. But...I don’t think he starts the game as a good person, in this respect at least. I do think he becomes one. And I think that his growth and maturation over the course of the game is absolutely a treat to watch.

I’m gonna immediately qualify this by saying I do not think Noct is a dick on purpose. Noctis is, in fact, unfailingly kind in most situations and this is one of his greater strengths. I just think he is just as much a victim of internalized fatphobia as Prompto is, despite not having the experience of being fat. I think two things contribute to this: biases that went unchecked by any of his caretakers, and genuine social difficulty brought about by his upbringing.

But now it’s time to get to….the incident. The reason these two know each other. After Prompto takes care of Pryna, she runs to deliver her letter to Noctis and eventually returns to Luna, as was her original mission. Luna, noticing Prompto’s name on a bandana tied around Pryna’s leg, tasks Gentiana to help her find this kind soul so she can thank him. Luna does, and Prompto receives a letter that soon becomes his prized possession. The princess operated on the assumption that Prompto and Noctis were friends, seeing as Prompto encountered Pryna, and asked that he remain “ever at [Noctis’] side.” Prompto takes these words to heart, and resolves to introduce himself to his royal classmate.

Here’s where the problems begin. We know that Prompto is shy because we have seen him before. He kinda kept to himself, away from the other kids, content to take his pictures. To Square’s credit, I was really expecting Prompto to be a target of bullying because of his weight and he wasn’t….yet. This actually makes his interaction with Noctis a lot worse, however. We all know what happens next: Prompto does try to introduce himself to the loner prince (who, by his own admission later, was also kinda shy), and he happens to trip. Noct goes to help him out because he’s kind at heart, and a confused Prompto thinks that Noctis means that he wants to see the camera. Noct is baffled and says something along the lines of “I meant you, dummy!” and goes to help Prompto up.

Honestly, end the scene here. They become friends because Noct is unexpectedly kind to someone he didn’t even know, and that sticks with Prompto, and they’re childhood best friends. Right? RIGHT?

If Square had had a modicum of decency, yes, this would have been how the scene closed. But then Noct had to open his fucking mouth. When trying to help Prompto up, he remarks that the poor boy is “heavy,” something that quickly and immediately impacts Prompto. Noct, also being 12, seems none the wiser and jovially heads off to meet Ignis. But Prompto? Prompto is….affected by this. He decides then and there that he has to not be heavy anymore if he wants to be Noct’s friend.

“But Haley!” I can hear y’all saying, “Isn’t it Prompto’s fault for internalizing a harmless comment in such a way? Why are you so angry at Noct because Prompto took it too seriously?” Or alternatively “Noctis was also a child, he didn’t mean it!!”

Well, it’s all about how the narrative treats the situation. I mentioned this before in Part 1, but the reason I’m mad at both Noctis and Square is because the narrative treats him as though he is in the right at all times. If the issue really was with Prompto as a character, then we wouldn’t have been shown his journey in such excruciating detail. We wouldn’t have been subjected to the downright harmful avenues he goes down in pursuit of this goal (see Part 3 for elaboration). We would have just seen Prompto trying to work on becoming more outgoing--maybe talking to his neighbors more often, for example.

One small scene in particular gets me here: we do see Noct return to the place where they met and he seems to be baffled by the fact that Prompto will not talk to him. We in fact know this to be the case because in the hotel scene, Noct explicitly says Prompto “should have said something sooner” in terms of starting their friendship. Now, this pisses me off for two reasons:

That this wasn’t addressed in Brotherhood itself. We see that Noct kinda wants to approach Prom again but doesn’t seem to know how. If we are assuming he messed up on accident, this would have been a great time for Ignis to tell him so, maybe motivate Noct to apologize.

That Prompto doesn’t immediately call Noct out for this line, or say something along the lines of “Well you kinda straight up insulted me when we first met.”

So, because neither of these scenarios is the case, I have to assume that Square wants us to think that Noct was correct to insult Prompto, and that him losing the weight is a good thing, in a narrative sense.

Finally, it’s straight up out-of-character for Noct to be this way. Not the misspeaking part, that is perfectly in-character. It’s the fact that this bias of his goes unchecked by Ignis or Gladio, and he is never made to apologize for hurting another person’s feelings. Part of growing up is realizing that sometimes your actions can hurt other people, even if you don’t intend for them to. The fact that the intent wasn’t there doesn’t mean the hurt wasn’t real. Since Square is so convinced that Noct needed to “mature” in this story...I am immensely disappointed that the opportunity wasn’t taken here for him to learn. And even more disappointed because I am pretty sure this is intentional. Every single one of Square’s fat characters is used as a side character or comic relief. In order for Prompto to be a protagonist, he had to lose weight, and to have Noctis--the central protagonist--be the character to directly motivate that is a slap in the face.

Part 3: Don’t Recover, Buddy!/ It’s actually good that you have “obesophobia”

So I know I put the trigger warning at the top of this, but I’m doing it again, because now I’m gonna talk about eating disorders. So this is your last chance to back out if that stuff is legitimately triggering, which I understand.

I’m gonna say it right now: Prompto has anorexia

[several people are typing…. .jpg]

I don’t think this is subtle, and I do think this is intentional, so let me break it down. Prompto exhibits a lot of the symptoms, and yes I am speaking from personal experience. He’s exhibited all of these from the moment Noct made that comment when they were kids, and, notably, only from that point on (hence why I wrote Part 2 the way that I did):

Prompto has an obsession with fixing meals. He’ll be the one that helps Ignis the most often. In Prompto’s case, this is a sign that he loves preparing the food, not so much partaking: classic hiding of symptoms. There is also the fact that most of the salads are his favorite meals, which yes, is a deliberate callback, but I don’t think it’s a good one.

Prompto runs a genuinely stupid amount. I think that exercise is well and good--I’m something of an exercise buff myself--but it’s the way that Prompto does it, to the point of exhaustion, that is a problem.

Despite being borderline underweight, Prompto legitimately still seems to think that he is still fat. This is supported by his reactions to multiple dialogues, which I’ll get to in a second, and the “obesophobia” thing on his character profile which….yeah I shouldn’t even have to explain that one. Prompto is legitimately afraid that he will gain weight--specifically, that he will be fat again.

The fact that according to that same profile, Prompto’s photography habit started when he took progress photos of himself!! So he’s also got some legit body dysmorphia going on.

These are the ones that are most obvious to me, anyway.

“Now okay, Haley,” y’all are furiously typing, “so what that Prompto has anorexia? That’s a relatable character flaw!”

Well….one, no it isn’t. A disorder of any kind is not a character flaw. I’d be willing to let that slide if the following were not also true: other characters seem to reinforce these behaviors of Prompto’s, and I am looking directly at Ignis and Noct. Let’s start with Ignis. I’m sure we have all gotten the random dialogue of

Prompto: All right, let’s hit up the Crow’s Nest! Ignis, for no fucking reason: If you wish to put on weight? Certainly. Prompto, defeated: Yeah, I know…

Every time I get this dialogue I want to yell and also want the option to kick Ignis out of the party. Also the fact that no one steps up on Prompto’s behalf (notably, you know, his goddamn best friend!!) is a bit of an Issue too. Another one involves Ignis, but I have only gotten it once, so I can’t remember it exactly, but Ignis says something to the effect that he can make “whatever [Prompto] wants” for dinner and Prompto says “Yeah, it’s the wanting that’s the problem.” That’s...that’s horrifying and y’all should be concerned for your friend.

To turn my attention back to Noct, objectively the most important person to Prompto, we need go no further than “Why is your face so fat?” in selfies.

This one legitimately made me mad. Prompto panics and retaliates with “What?? I’m not fat!!” (notably, he said “I” and not “my face,” which is a bit of a slip), and Noctis is supposed to be his best friend. I was somewhat okay with Noct being passive in the earlier incidents, because maybe he wanted to spare Prompto the group drama that would ensue, but Noct directly engaging in it actively pissed me off. I also want to say this isn’t me bashing on the characters in the slightest, I am simply calling attention to the way they are written. Because they are not called out by anyone else, because this behavior is treated as acceptable, I have to assume the narrative wants me to agree with them.

The only conclusion I can gather from this is that not only are the bros aware of Prompto’s disorder, but they actively encourage it. Which would only further Prompto’s assumption that they only will love and accept him if he looks a certain way. No wonder the poor kid was so freaked out about his barcode!

Part 4: This shit is triggering to players

The subtitle for this section should be “Haley talks about how deeply “Dogged Runner” affected her in a PTSD kind of way” because that’s what I’m going to be doing. Second trigger warning for eating disorders and weight talk, because that’s what this is gonna be. This also is not going to be nice. I have strong language for Square:

Here’s where I come clean about why this issue matters so fucking much to me, and why I am now freely and openly saying “fuck you” to Square every chance I get. When I first saw Brotherhood, I was at a stage in my life where I was not coping well with my body image. I had my first brush with anorexia in high school, but it was coming back because I was in a new place, and I felt like that was the only thing in my life that I could control. So I had been eating less and falling back into the habit, except...this time I had my support system. So I thought. I went into the anime wanting to learn more about the characters I had come to love, and I walked out of it thoroughly triggered and horrified that Square would stoop to such shoddy, lazy, and harmful storytelling.

I had...a moment, here. I won’t detail the breakdown too much but I was genuinely not okay. To see behaviors that I had ferociously clawed my way out of, and was violently resisting once more, portrayed not only as not unhealthy, but as desirable for people like me...it genuinely felt personal. And, I imagine I wasn’t the only player who felt that way. In fact, because I have talked to other people like me, I know this is the case.

Let me take you on a trip, for a moment. Humor me. Imagine you’re in your early 20s, and you’ve put a lot of ugly, horrible coping methods behind you. Imagine your best friend in the entire world, @nonbinary-recipehs, recommends this game they are playing, and you play it together and start to consume its media. Imagine the horror and dread that settles on the both of you watching this episode, which rings so similarly to the times you passed out from lack of food, from over-exercising, from over-straining yourself to be this idealized version of thinness. Imagine seeing that the outcome of this episode isn’t Prompto getting the support he needs from his friends, but that the narrative legitimizes his suffering. In fact, this brutal suffering and rapid loss of weight was necessary to justify this character’s relevance to the narrative! Imagine how that must make you feel. Maybe those coping methods that were so horrible actually weren’t. It worked for Prompto, maybe it’ll work for you!!

Perhaps that little thought experiment will help you understand what this whole situation can feel like to players like me, to people who have struggled with internalized fatphobia and with eating disorders, who have been called heavy, who have been made to feel as though their worth is in their thinness. Fuck you, Square. Fuck you for not having an ounce of consideration for how this might possibly look. Fuck you for not considering people like me as complete people. Fuck you for making me watch a character I love suffer, not to tragedy, but to an illness that could have been avoided if anyone had shown him even an ounce of respect or care or decency or decorum--

…

I did warn y’all I was angry, this time.

Part 5: Two Alternative Scenarios that would Avoid All This

“So Haley,” you’re saying, somehow having read past the rant in the previous section, “if Square did it so horribly, how would you have done it?”

That, my dear reader, is an excellent question. In fact, I’ve got two solutions, which I will explain and elaborate upon below:

The first is rather simple: Prompto doesn’t actually lose the weight and becomes a canonical fat character. Absolutely nothing else would change about the story or Prompto’s character except for the following:

Noctis would become curious as to why this new friend of his was avoiding him. He then has the opportunity to open up to Ignis or Gladio and reflect on what he said, and realize that he actually hurt Prompto’s feelings. This motivates him to apologize, and the two become Actual Childhood Friends.

Prompto just Has This Body Type Now and nobody says dick about it, that’s just the Way He Looks

You could explore internalized fatphobia I suppose but I don’t actually trust Square to do this sensitively. You know who I do trust? Liam ( @chubbyargentum ), who writes the Nighttime Sunshine AU and fic.

All of the previously mentioned fatphobic comments are completely removed because all the bros love and support him.

Prompto isn’t the comic relief because of his size, he just happens to be both. Yes, there is a difference, and no, I am not going to derail the essay by explaining that.

Prompto would still absolutely kick ass, take names, shoot people, love chocobos...all the shit he does in canon. But now, you have a character who didn’t have to be completely humiliated to get to this point. Now you just...have a guy who happens to be friends with the prince, because he is kind and caring.

But okay, let’s take another approach. Let’s say Prompto does still lose weight. How, then, do we accomplish this without being fatphobic or debasing Prompto’s character like canon did?

That leads me to solution 2: Prompto does lose weight, but it’s incidental. Let me explain what I mean here:

Let’s have a situation in which the apology does still happen as I outlined in the first solution. Childhood friends is a thing.

As such, Prompto becomes...increasingly curious at all the cool training Noct does.

Noct is….embarrassed about this, I think. Because Prompto doesn’t like Understand What It All Means...and they’re still pretty young. Noct doesn’t want him to understand.

But Prompto? He wants to be able to Do Cool Shit, especially if it means defending his best bro who also happens to be the prince. And he doesn’t want Noct to do any of this alone. He asks to train with Noct, no special treatment (except for like the fact that he legit can’t do magic).

Gladio...allows this, begrudgingly. Then, permanently, when he notices Noct tries harder as a result of showing off.

Prompto starts to learn how to take care of himself from Gladio, and from Ignis, who has...gathered that Prompto doesn’t exactly have parents, and becomes invested in helping him learn how to cook healthy meals for himself. Who knows? Maybe the healthy eating will rub off on Noct!

The result is that, over time, Prompto does lose some weight...and starts to bulk up as Puberty Happens. However. This is all incidental. Prompto never set out to lose weight because he hated himself or felt unworthy, like in canon. He set out to become strong and train with his best bro. This is absolutely critical.

With this solution, Prompto does lose weight, but doesn’t become the borderline underweight young man with an eating disorder we all know and love. Instead, he’s been brought up around healthier traditions, which makes him immensely more suited for the role of Crownsguard when that time comes. In fact, he might have entered it at age 18 just like Gladio and Ignis did, despite Noct’s protests. Another thing I like about this solution is that it shows how Prompto is friends with Ignis and Gladio; how those relationships developed independently of Noctis, and why these four really are the family unit the game wants me to think they are.

And with these two solutions, I believe I have laid out some much stronger backstories for our beloved boy that avoid all of the...unfortunate implications of his canon backstory. I only wish that Square had thought about their implications just a little bit more, and done Prompto some true justice.

Part 6: What motivated this essay, and the power of shared experience

This isn’t really a proper conclusion, that’ll be in TL;DR, but I would be remiss to not include what actually motivated me to write this massive essay, and also share it with all of you. The sharing part, I think, is super critical. When you inhabit marginalized identities, and in this case I specifically mean having a fat body, it can be...difficult to share and discuss your experiences. Harder, still, to be public about them, and to criticize media that perpetuates these harmful ideas. But here I am, doing that. Here’s why that is.

About a month ago, I met @chubbyargentum, who is called Liam. I was cruising through the promptis tag, as you do, and found his Nighttime Sunshine AU, and his blog is filled with excellent art for it as well. The premise of this AU, on its face, is very simple: it’s a story where Prompto and Noctis did not actually become friends in high school, and two very important things are different: Prompto is still fat, and Noctis is a closeted trans man. While I can’t speak to the trans experience, I can indeed speak to the experience of inhabiting a fat body. And this AU….spoke to me. I don’t want to spoil too much but there is a rather emotional scene that just...confronts everything I wanted Square to confront about this that they never did. He approaches the topic with so much sensitivity and nuance, something that is so rarely seen in fandom.

I’ve talked with Liam every day since, and my brain has consistently been enlarged. A lot of things I let slide before...felt so egregious to me that I had to say them. I’ve been confronting my own internalized prejudices towards certain kinds of bodies all the time, and I am learning every day. He’s become a very dear friend of mine, and I care deeply about him.

This also came at I guess you could say the “first climax” of my journey with weight loss, which I had never had success with despite the trauma I described in Part 4. I’ve lost...a significant amount of weight since March, and I think the reason I’ve had so much success is 1) the support of my friends (notably @nonbinary-recipehs, @pocket-prompto, and @chubbyargentum), and 2) not feeling like I hated myself anymore. I approached it as a journey to become more strong, not less fat. As I outlined in Part 4...Prompto’s Brotherhood episode and character backstory were and are legitimately triggering to me, and, I imagine, to many others. Liam had the confidence to put the content in the world that he wished to see, and this essay is helping me do the same.

Having other people who share your marginalized experiences and validate them...well, I’m sure many of you know. It’s a feeling like no other. And I’ve never really had this feeling explicitly about the experience of being fat until now. Now, I understand that my anger is in fact, righteous. And I am not afraid to say so. The power of shared experience motivated this essay and, in fact, everything that I do on this blog. I have come away from this AU with the bravery to say aloud what I have always known to be true.

So thank you, Liam. Thank you, big brain group. And thank you, readers, for listening to an experience that may or may not mirror your own, and for opening up your heart enough to hear the roughly 5000 words before this point. Thank you for making the effort to understand, and the effort to learn and grow.

TL;DR

I did promise to provide an easily digestible version of the…(checks word count) ~5000 words before this point, so here we go. The central thesis of this essay is something like “the way Prompto’s weight loss arc was portrayed in Brotherhood is horrendously fatphobic for a number of reasons.” I then broke it down into six major pieces: the first four being the fact that weight loss is treated as moral by the narrative, the uncharacteristically dickish actions of Noctis, the fact that Prompto’s disorder is encouraged by other characters, and the out-of-universe triggering effects the story has. In the fifth piece, I outlined two alternative scenarios: one where Prompto doesn’t lose weight at all and remains fat, and one where he does lose weight but healthily so and fleshes out his character. In the final piece, I explained the motivation behind writing this essay, namely interacting with other fat fans like @chubbyargentum. I explained all of these points in great detail, being careful to stress that my issue with this isn’t any of the individual characters, but the bias that motivates the writing.

So...what now? Well, I’m not really sure. But this was something I really had to put into the world. I think it is important and necessary to speak up and criticize media that harms you. And you know what? Final Fantasy XV is still my favorite game. It is because I love it so much that I was motivated to write this, and by sharing it, I hope to contribute to a greater discussion about fatphobia in gaming, and in life.

#final fantasy xv #ffxv #tw fatphobia #tw eating disorders #prompto argentum #please be respectful with this one #i feel like this is an unpopular opinion #but it is incredibly necessary that i say this #because it is something i believe #and because I don't want square to continue to get away with it #thank you for read #haley.exe #haley writes ffxv #haley has opinions #i'm preparing for so much hate

63 notes · View notes

mordigen · 4 years ago

Text

I had not written anything in a minute, as I typically use this as my sounding board, or soap box, if you will....but I guess things just hadn't gotten under my skin lately to make me feel the need to sound off. Which is a beautiful thing, I suppose, even if writing is lacking.

Indeed it has been quite....quiet, quite harmonious within the circles I frequent. Which is unusual, especially as we've had a couple Holidays, which usually stirs all the controversy. And I know with my last 3 part post I noted I had much more to talk about....but I've forgotten them all. So, they must not have been that important, eh?

It has been nice.

But (as there's always a but) in this quiet time I noticed something else - something I am certainly not unfamiliar with, but have never talked about, or confronted at all really.

I find myself feeling drawn away - and no, not in the depressive sense, as I am also certainly not unfamiliar with, but in a way that I have a hard time defining.

It is melancholy in the sense that it feels like a deep seated yearning - but not in a bad way, by any means, as I feel like if those yearnings didn't come and go over time, then I wouldn't be wholly myself. They are a part of me - they are not a bad thing, even if bittersweet.

They ebb and flow, and sometimes recede completely - at other times consume me completely. Though they usually hit me without warning, they start gradually and I can feel the oncoming tide. And once they've run their course, they recede just as swiftly, and gently, as they've rushed upon me.

It has happened for as long as I can, lucidly, remember. Though putting an exact date or age to it is difficult, as childhood memories tend to mesh and bleed together over the years, it can easily be said adolescence, at least, so it has been quite some time. But I still haven't ever gotten used to them, or have figured out how to cope with them - mentally or emotionally, anyhow. They do not prevent me from functioning or living my life, but they do wreck my mental state in a way. Though, I'm not sure I want to figure out how to cope with that...

I have been told by various people, at various points in my life, that I suffer from various forms of a disassociative disorder. Knowing I have depression issues I have investigated....but, No. Just no - it's not right. In all the many ones I have done ample research in, it's just not right - that is not me, that is not what I am experiencing. That is not what is happening, the "symptoms", even if some appear similar superficially, are all wrong.

When I say I feel drawn away, I do not mean I feel *detached*. That is a very big distinction - I'm feeling pulled away, to somewhere or something else, I do not feel disconnected. You can feel a connection to multiple things at once - so to be pulled into a something or somewhere else doesn't mean I have to detach, or "disassociate" with the here and now. I don't. Perhaps it is a foreign thing to try to describe to someone who has never experienced it before, and yes it is a hard to find the right words to begin with to really explain it in depth - but it's not that I "disassociate". Stop calling it that.

It is this very reason why I have never talked about it in depth at all, because even the slightest mention of anything puts others on high-alert. I know they are only trying to help, but no - you are not listening, you are not understanding. The best, and simplest, way I can recount it is like prioritizing. This thing - it's always there. It's always in me, and sometimes it just needs it's time. It doesn't even come first, as I still put all the needs and wants and important bits of this finite world first and foremost, but it needs its time in the sun, too.

As a child, they would say I was "dreamy" or just had an active imagination - I would day dream frequently, locked up inside my own head. Though I loved to play, and read, and write, and draw, I didn't need those things to enjoy my time. I could lay around for hours, in my own thoughts, completely happy and content, drawn away, off on an adventure, listening to the silent things whisper when they think no one is listening. I would doze and nap, and sleep extra long through the night - not because I was bored, or tired, but just because it gave me time in my own head - in my 'dreamland', where all these other things happened that wouldn't - or couldn't - in the waking world. As a young child, these were always described as good things....as a teen, it's often described as having your "head in the clouds" - something that is not necessarily good or bad, potentially problematic if left unchecked, but still nonetheless endearing. But as an adult? Phh. Well. Something must be wrong with you.

You're expected to grow out of it, but I find in adulthood it hits harder, and comes heavier, than ever as a child. Possibly because as children we're given room to indulge...it's creative, imaginative, learning to be content with your own company is touted as idealistic means of coping skills and personal growth - until it isn't.

For an extended time of my adult years I was wrongfully persuaded that it was hormonal as others had noted I tended to feel this 'drawing' around my cycle. I do get more emotional, and boy does the fatigue hit hard - but that still didn't make sense to me as it didn't happen *every* time on my cycle, and there were plenty of times it happened not on my cycle at all. Well, it doesn't have to happen everytime for it to be related, and hormones fluctuate throughout the whole month, so you don't have to actually be physically bleeding for it to be cycle related. What a cop out. With that logic, anything and everything under the sun and moon can be "cycle related". Bonus points deducted for the fact that every person telling me this was also, in fact, a woman. Shame. Lazy medicine right there. Lazy womanhood right there. And that's not even a feminist statement - that's just a common sense statement. Oh, so is every possible problem you ever have because of your period, M'AM ? So stupid. Stupider, yet, is that I listened to them. But I did, and I followed their suggestions - none of them worked, but with each new wave I would think the next would be better and easier if I just stayed the course - ignoring the fact that nothing was inherently wrong, and that this was only deemed an "issue" as it was categorized as "abnormal" and therefore must be fixed.

What I have come to realize now is that all those incidents - people wanting to categorize me with mental disorders, emotional disorders, or hormonal imbalances - call came at I time when I was, in fact, disconnected with something : my spirituality. I didn't have any type of falling out, or disillusioned from anything I ever believed in. Life just simply got in the way, I had more important things to worry about and do, and much less time to do them all in, so you just let certain things go that are not as pressing. Looking back at it now, I think maybe that is why they pulled on me harder in those years. Perhaps it was something drawing back in... I'd like to believe so, anyhow. And that's why I was stupid enough to believe doctors, and counselors, about stupid things I knew were not right - because I wasn't listening to the other half. And of course, nothing the ever suggested ever made one bit of difference - because it's not what was happening to me. And truthfully, because nothing was ever wrong.

As life started to level out, I slowly started doing little things here and there with my beliefs, with my workings. Little things, but baby steps, right? You can't just get off the couch and run a marathon - you have to warm up those muscles, start exercising those parts that have atrophied, and retraining your skills. Same applies - baby steps. It grew slowly over a few years - the tidal waves kept their course, as they do, and I just sort of accepted it at face value. But then the pandemic hit, and the world shut down. And boy, did I have all the time in the world.....and I used it.

Over this last year what I have come to realize is that, firstly - I was absolutely not alone. But also that I wasn't really paying as much attention as I thought I was - or my attention was skewed , by 'professionals', to focus on the wrong things. There was much more a pattern than I had ever noticed. These waves didn't come out of nowhere - though once they were on me, I could feel the gradual build - but before they ever even tickled my feet there were signs, there were patterns. I'd have days of restless nights, strange dreams, then it would fold into die-hard sleep, with absolutely no dreams at all - but waking as if I hadn't slept a wink and had been working all through the night. I'd wake with aches and strains, sometimes even bruises. We'd joke that our mattress was beating us up at night - we even forked out decent money for a brand new one. It's fabulous, and it solved zero of my problems, though my husband now sleeps like a baby...

It's only after these restless, exhausting nights does the tide start to flow back in, and the dreamy, dozey longing set in. The ache for something I cannot put my finger on, and the willingness to relent and let it take me away, even for just a time, and indulge in that pulling out to sea. I let it take me now - I do not fight it, I do not endure it, I let it take me and draw me out. And this is what so many professionals call "disassociating" - but that's not right. That's not what's happening.

And this is not some great spiritual come to Jeesus moment I am preaching to any of you, or certainly not meaning to be, but just the simplicity of paying attention. We, as pagans, just have the driven, inherent understansung that there are many more forces, and much more out there than what you see on the surface. And I had forgotten. Though I've kept my mouth shut, I've taken note when the topics and discussions come up - tons of people were in my very shoes. But they had been paying attention all along. I had forgotten. Some of the stories thrown out there I can't always get behind. Some of them are just flat out - No. But there were many more that weren't - they talked of the moon. The conjunctions. Astral travel. Being spirited away in the night. The veils. The Oran Mór. I was so stupid, I had been so blind.

And then, this year of much more laxed time gave me the opportunity to actually listen. These tides... their pattern.

The restless nights always came with the moons - these tides, they always came around significant dates....days when the veils are thinning. And now, as I feel the sweeping tides begin to pull again - here we are. Bealtaine is on the horizon. And as I wrack my memories.... every time.

Every. Time.

What is happening to me exactly? I still do not know - is this the call of the Oran Mór? Are the veils pulling at something deep inside me? Are the Fae trying to steal me away, as so many are quick to warn... Is there danger in letting the tides take me? Is this some deeper part of me being drawn home, trying to jar me to pay closer attention to things I have left forgotten? Something in there makes me think of my brothers...

I don't know all these answers, but I can't ignore them now that I've taken the time to listen. What I do know is that, whatever they may be - I don't want these tides to leave me. And believing that doesn't give me a dissociative disorder.

#pagan #truth #madd mordi #mordigen #ethereal #mordi #veils #thinning veils #holidays #astral #mental health #pagan awareness #spirited away #spirituality #being pagan isn't a mental condition #spiritual beliefs aren't a mental disorder

3 notes · View notes

cuntess-carmilla · 4 years ago

Text

Update: I stopped taking psychiatric medication because they turned out to have only ever been of “help” because I have POTS/dysautonomia and one made my blood pressure rise (Wellbutrin) while the other kept it from going up too high (Lamotrigine).

Now that I’m taking meds that are for what I ACTUALLY do have (POTS/dysautonomia) not only do I not need the psychiatric meds, but they were throwing off everything else. I hate psychiatry so much. Can’t believe I turned out to be one of those people who had their physical illness mistreated as You’re Crazy for years haha. :) With that out of the way...

Some Many of my Opinions™ on psychiatry, as a psychiatrized person myself who does take medication, but hates the institutions of psychiatry and psychology, and thinks a large chunk of it is white pseudo-science:

A good amount of the issues that the psychiatric institution addresses ARE absolutely real and, as a society, people who’re afflicted by them should by all means receive help and support so they can live happier lives. I experience many of them and take medication to help myself, I obviously don’t think the difficult experiences people seek help for are made up.

At the same time, psychiatry and psychology as disciplines ARE made up (like every other discipline), making them not infallible or objective, AND they were built on eugenics, patriarchy, white supremacy and capitalist exploitation.

Those very real issues addressed by psychology/psychiatry aren’t actual literal pathologies. They don’t need to be literal tangible sicknesses in order to matter or be deserving of help and compassion. Your literal brain as a bodily organ is not physically “ill”, at least in most cases. It doesn’t need to be for your problems associated with an “ill mind” to be real and to matter. Remember, these disciplines were created at a time in history in which (white, male) doctors and theorists were obsessed with turning everything into a material, scientifically tangible subject that could be objectively measured with numbers and shit, hopefully medicalized or otherwise turned into “hard science”. That’s where ethnography came from. It’s called positivism, which is extremely dehumanizing, white supremacist and capitalist.

Psychology should be largely considered as much more of a metaphysical or philosophical discipline than as objective science, which is how most people perceive it to be. It’s mostly pure theory about emotions, thoughts, cognition, relationships and subjective experiences + perceptions -- which isn’t necessarily a bad thing on itself. It not being hard science doesn’t immediately delegitimize it. Get rid of the white capitalist idea that only (western, white) science and “objectivity” are real or of value. Actually, holding psychology to the standards of hard science turns it into pseudo-science, so... Yeah. I genuinely think we’d get so much further As A Society™ regarding psychology's potential to aid people who’re suffering if we treated it as more of a metaphysical or philosophical discipline than as some objective scientific truth.

Psychiatrists often are super ignorant of the actual way the medications they prescribe work or affect patients lmao. I had that almost ruin a whole semester at college because a shrink prescribed me meds that in combination she should’ve known would fuck me up. Not that much is known about how the human brain truly works compared to other human organs, you can’t expect psychiatric meds to be well tried and true. The research on psychiatric pharmacy is very lacking + biased in favor of pathologizing and controlling psychiatrized people, besides attempting to make the most profit under capitalism like any other capitalist industry, so of course they’re gonna prescribe you shit. Plus, like doctors of every other field, many psychiatrists arrogantly disregard the experiences, requests, questions and ideas of their patients, who’re the ones taking those meds.

Psychologists/therapists, just like psychiatrists, also disregard the experiences, requests, questions and ideas of their patients.

There’s such a strong element of power imbalance in how psychiatry and psychology function. The more a patient knows formal information about anything related to psychology/psychiatry, the more the shrink can get upset, distrustful and dismissive of them, saying they’re faking it, or telling them “not to do their jobs” when they so often do said jobs like shit anyway lmao no matter how thorough the research and understanding of the patient is.

Psychological and psychiatric diagnoses are just as made up as any other human construct (such as language, race, gender, etc). They’re not tangible realities as if shrinks had ran into a previously unknown objective fact of nature. In the realm of psychology, someone takes a bunch of traits and behaviors that by their observation they consider to be interconnected with one another, put them in the same bag, stick a label to said bag, and ask other psychologists if they agree with the bag being a thing. These considerations are heavily influenced by sociocultural bias. You can��t tell me it isn’t true that they’re made up and very subjective when “diagnoses” such as drapetomania, hysteria, homosexuality, gender identity disorder, etc, have been seriously considered at least by part of the psychiatric establishment of their times as legitimate mental disorders. Hell, some still consider being gay or trans to be mental disorders. Don’t get me started on "Oppositional Defiant Disorder”, that shit’s just evil.

A lot of the ideas spread by the psychiatric-psychological institution are legit pseudo-science that researches try time and time again to prove and end up coming with nothing, or they end up tweaking their own research or conclusions to maintain the established consensus that just so turns out to be very convenient to the people who make and sell psychiatric meds.

Many of the traits, emotions, thoughts, perceptions and behaviors that are pathologized by psychiatry and psychology aren’t inherently harmful. If they don’t make the patient or others suffer by their very nature (as opposed to like, homophobic parents “suffering” because their child is gay or a gay person suffering because of homophobia) then there’s no need to alter them. “Correcting” them is a measure of social control that crushes individuality and only attempts to mold people into obedient ~productive~ servants of capitalism. Much of psychiatric medical treatment (not just the diagnoses and therapies themselves) focuses on turning the patient into less of a social “burden”, than on their actual happiness. That’s why you have ADHD and autistic kids being given meds that turn them into zombies and that's been considered a good thing for DECADES. Like, why does the stimming of an autistic person or an “unusual” attachment to stuffed animals as an autistic adult have to be corrected? WHOMST does that harm? Nobody! But it makes allistics uncomfortable because allistics are fucking stupid and can’t mind their God damned business to save their lives like normal people do.

Even non-pharmaceutical treatments for psychiatrized conditions are or can be turned into measures of social control.

Maybe CBT wasn’t meant to be a tool to control people and shit, but it can be misused as such SO easily! It can go from being therapy to help individuals process inner pain and redirect harmful behaviors in positive ways, to being turned into training someone to react, feel and process abuse and oppression in ways that are convenient to the status quo.

Don’t get me fucking started on ABA as an inherently oppressive, abusive “treatment” for a psychiatrized condition that does nothing to actually better the lives of autistic people, instead punishing autistic traits, teaching autistic people to painfully repress said traits and ignore their needs, and seeking to appease allistics by prioritizing their convenience and subjective comfort.

Behaviors, emotions, perceptions or traits that on a man or white person would be considered a non-issue or given much more compassionate/less stigmatized diagnoses, are pathologized or given much more stigmatized diagnoses when it comes to female or racialized patients, which reaffirms psychiatry and psychology as subjective tools of social control.

While many of the traits, emotions, perceptions and behaviors of what are considered personality disorders are painful, harmful and real (and thus should be helped, with consent, not hammered down), literal personalities aren’t “ill”. They’re personalities. Pathologizing or medicalizing a fucking personality on itself is ridiculous. It is possible to address those problematic traits/behaviors/etc without saying that a fucking personality is “ill”. So much for “you’re not your disorder”.

What shrinks will deem as hallucinations or delusions can be subjective, and it definitely can be deemed as such out of white-centric cultural bias. Plenty of non-white cultures have considered different perceptions of reality as valid and worthy of respect for centuries, at times related to their sense of spirituality. Not to mention how psychiatry has deemed the real anxieties of oppressed people that they’re being followed, spied on, plotted against and all that, as hallucinations or delusions in order to discredit them.

Many patients are given medication to try to alleviate traits/behaviors/emotions that come from circumstance (poverty, ongoing abuse, trauma, oppression...) instead of addressing the root problems. While I 100% understand using medication as a palliative measure because, bitch, you can’t always fix those problems and you still have a life to live (the same way I take clotiazepam when the insensitivity of the allistics around me causes me sensory overload), this puts the burden of the person’s situation on their own body, as if their body was the essential source of a suffering that comes from outside forces they’re not responsible or in control of. This should ideally be addressed through material change in realities that can be individual (removing the person from an abusive situation, giving economic aid, giving proper treatment to an untreated chronic illness) or social (abolishing white supremacy, the patriarchy, capitalism, etc).

So many times when palliative medical treatments for suffering that comes from circumstances don’t work (BECAUSE THE PATIENT IS STILL TRAPPED IN SAID CIRCUMSTANCES, HELLO?) it’s blamed on a supposed defect of the patient’s body/brain rather than, like... You can give me as many anti-depressants as you want but I’m still gonna be miserable if I’m being abused or suffering from unending physical chronic pain lol. And then, instead of at least having the decency of recognizing the real source of the problem if your shrink can’t realistically fix it, they keep trying more and more different meds on you like you’re a fucking lab rat, keeping on blaming a made up defect you were “born” with. Imagine what that does to a person’s self-image! At least when I loathe my body for the chronic pain, chronic fatigue and more that my chronic illnesses give me, it IS actually true that it’s my body that has a defect that can’t be cured. Why convince a person in suffering due to anything, but especially when it’s due to outside conditions out of their control and your job is fucking supposed to be to help them be happier, that their pain refuses to respond to treatment because their BRAIN is so terribly defective? I don’t wish the hatred I hold for my objectively shitty body on anyone, and causing that to someone when it’s not even true...? Incredible.

Lots of genuine difficulties associated with psychiatric diagnoses are much better helped through accessibility and material considerations, or at least through teaching the patient pragmatic methods to better deal with those, than through pills. But guess what solution shrinks usually give you. Hint: it’s easier for them and they can charge you for it monthly.

Society™ medicalized emotions, bro... WE MEDICALIZED FEELINGS!!! WHAT THE FUCK!!

#antipsych

14 notes · View notes

thecloserkin · 5 years ago

Text

book review: Meg Rosoff, How I Live Now (2004)

Genre: Young Adult

Is it the main pairing: yes

Is it canon: yes

Is it explicit: no

Is it endgame: yes

Is it shippable: yes

Bottom line: It finally happened, I broke my own “no cousincest—in this house we turn the TABOO dial up to eleven” rule. In my defense this book is gobsmackingly good.

Lately I’ve been mulling on the difference between books about teenagers and books for teenagers. This one is the former, and a joy to reread as an adult. Our American heroine Daisy is sent across the pond to live with her British cousins; a war breaks out; details are scant but who cares about the war, she starts fucking one of the cousins. She describes it as “falling into sexual and emotional thrall” she said THRALL I am living for it. On a scale from “pure” to “problematic” this ship is almost all light and no darkness—what darkness menaces our protagonists emanates from outside the charmed circle of their big ol’ farmhouse and their sheepdogs and their goat:

The real truth is that the war didn’t have much to do with it except that it provided a perfect limbo in which two people who were too young and too related could start kissing without anything or anyone making us stop. There were no parents, no teachers, no schedules. There was no where to go and nothing to do that would remind us that this sort of thing didn’t happen in the Real World. There no longer was any Real World.

The notion of carving out an idyll where you & the object of your desire spend all day doing nothing but drink each other up? It’s attractive even for those of us conducting mundane relationships in the “real” world. Maybe especially for those of us in the real world, where we compartmentalize our relationships and no one person can fill every filament in our universe. Daisy’s cousins live a cloistered life in the countryside and within a week she’s saying stuff like “I felt like I’d belonged to this house for centuries.” Which is an awfully dramatic way of saying she never felt like she belonged in New York. She doesn’t just fall for Cousin Edmond; she falls for the whole telepathic dog-whispering cousinly clan and their big anarchist energy. When Daisy, an only child, says “I had about as much experience with sex and boyfriends as I did with brothers and sisters,” she is intentionally conflating romantic and familial relationships and I am 1000% here for it. Sure it’s technically cousincest but it feels claustrophobic and codependent and everything I want out of an incest ship.

Every step of Daisy’s obsessive infatuation is chronicled with agonizing tenderness:

I wondered if that’s the feeling you’re supposed to have when your cousin touches a totally innocent part of your anatomy that’s fully clothed.

that’s right it’s the thought and the intention and the pining behind the touch, not the bare fact of physical contact.

Things were so intense I was sure that other people could hear the hum coming off of us.

Imagine desire rising like mist from the surface of one’s skin. And the “other people” part of the equation is important, because it’s the sneaking around behind the other kids’ backs that gives urgency to their coupling:

we started sleeping most of the daylight hours so we could be awake at night when everyone else was in bed … Then we would sleep for a little while and eventually reappear and try to act normal

But what is “normal”? There are no adults and no rules; nothing is forbidden save that they themselves deem it so. What then explains Daisy’s conviction that this is “not a good idea”? Why shroud their affair in secrecy if the most powerful reaction they provoke from smol!cousin who learns about Daisy/Edmond is “Well I’m glad you love him because I do too”? That’s pretty anticlimactic given the lengths Daisy & Edmond have gone to be stealthy. It also emphasizes (in case we’ve forgotten that Daisy has both no siblings and no boyfriends) how romantic & familial attachments spring from a common source. I think what the text is getting at here is that it’s dangerous to put all your eggs in one basket the way Daisy puts all hers in Edmond. It’s dangerous and unhealthy to make one person your whole world, as we see later when Daisy comes to much grief. At no point, however, does she regret her decision.

we could try and try to get enough of each other but it was llike some witch’s curse where the more we tried to stop being hungry the more starving we got.

That’s a hard-hitting simile right there. The thing about curses in fairy tales is they don’t always do what they’re designed to do; frequently they accomplish different ends entirely. If we look at what Daisy’s insatiable hunger for Edmond is displacing we note that Daisy is no stranger to the feeling of constant, gnawing, unsatiated hunger because Daisy has an eating disorder. In her own words:

at first not wanting to get poisoned by my stepmother and how much it annoyed her and how after a while I discovered I liked the feeling of being hungry and the fact that it drove everyone stark raving mad and cost my father a fortune in shrinks and also it was something I was good at.

…which is just about the world’s most cogent account of eating disorders as quests for control & autonomy. By the end of the novel she no longer experiences hunger as “a punishment or a crime or a weapon or a mode of self-destruction” and that's something, anyway.

Y’all know I’m a big skimmer right? I mention this because I want you to take my full meaning when I say I read every single word of this (very short) novel. The syntax helped—most sentences are structured like so: “… and …. and … and then …” but it was engrossing af and I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone use Ironic Capitalization to such devastating effect. The stylistic choice to use zero dialogue brackets means Daisy’s thoughts and Edmond’s thoughts (Edmond’s a telepath) and external action and internal commentary all run together. I didn’t find this confusing btw I just found it extremely effective.

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

Daisy and Edmond are separated at about the one-third mark and she spends the remainder of the book trying to get back to him, traversing a war-torn countryside with Edmond’s smol!sister and his dog in tow (since Daisy is a city girl who can’t even read a compass, maybe it’s more accurate to say smol!cousin + dog have Daisy in tow):

I guess the difference between Gin and me is that when Gin got shut in the barn she thought Edmond didn’t love her anymore but because I could feel Edmond out there somewhere always loving me I didn’t have to howl all night.

The parallel between Edmond’s girl and Edmond’s dog is not an idle one. There’s consistent strain of anticapitalist sentiment that runs through this book, that comes out most strongly in the relationships between Daisy’s cousins and their animals. Some military junta appropriates the farmhouse and displaces Daisy, her cousins, and the menagerie of animals that depend on them—that’s how Edmond and Daisy become separated, they’re “relocated.” The army is hierarchal and in wartime, the army is in charge. By contrast, Daisy’s cousins model a nonhierarchical kind of relationship with their animals, a relationship based on reciprocal obligations rather than dominating other people. “At times,” professes Daisy, “I thought I was more animal than human.” In other words, human beings live under an absolutely barbaric system, and it’s often more “humane” to behave like animals. It’s Edmond’s sheepdog who proves key to Daisy’s successful escape. City girl Daisy still can’t wrap her head around it:

one of the things I most dislike about nature, namely that the rules are not at all precise. Like when Piper says I’m pretty sure that mushrooms aren’t poisonous.

But nature’s strength lies precisely in the fuzziness of its rules! It encourages interdependence & reliance on others, rather than trying to go it alone as an atomized individual. So surviving on the run actually forces one to prioritize community (however you define it) over individual, which has salutary effects on Daisy, who reports “Somewhere along the way I’d lost the will not to eat.” She’s defeated her eating disorder, that’s good news. Unfortunately, Edmond and Daisy are not even reunited before she’s expelled from England and shipped back to America for Reasons. Dw she comes back! As soon as the borders reopen she comes back:

The soldier had stamped my passport FAMILY in heavy black capital letters and I checked it now for reassurance because I liked how fierce the word looked.

Very powerful passage but now for the ending. Let’s not talk about that ending. I don’t know why I called this a good book I am still incredulous we got THAT ending after everything we went through brb I’m suing Meg Rosoff for emotional damages

#book review #how i live now

24 notes · View notes

aion-rsa · 4 years ago

Text

Ghost Adventures Checks into the Cecil Hotel: Zak Bagans on Investigating the Crime Landmark

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

In Stephen King’s novel The Shining, the Overlook Hotel is an expansive structure with a dark past, located in the remote Rocky Mountains. Despite its opulent beginnings, the hotel becomes a place where brutal murders occur, madness sets in, ghosts lurk, and evil itself is a permanent occupant.

Relocate King’s Overlook to Downtown Los Angeles’ Skid Row, and you have its closest real-world equivalent: the Cecil Hotel. The hotel’s checkered history, and lore involving curses and ghosts, has made it a dark tourism landmark situated at the crossroads of true crime and paranormal fascination. But despite lots of interest on the internet, the Cecil, since rebranded as Stay on Main Hotel, has never officially permitted cameras inside for a paranormal investigation.

Until now. Enter Zak Bagans.

(Disclaimer: I have previously worked with Zak Bagans on television shows, and currently appear as an expert on the Travel Channel series Paranormal Caught on Camera.)

Executive producer and star of Ghost Adventures, the long-running paranormal reality series on Travel Channel, Bagans leads his team of investigators on an exploration of a location he calls “spectacularly frightening” in Ghost Adventures: Cecil Hotel, a two-hour special streaming exclusively on the new Discovery+ service.

For fans of the ghost-TV genre, Ghost Adventures: Cecil Hotel boasts evidence of scratches, disembodied voices, light anomalies, a faucet seemingly turned on by an invisible force, and more. But regardless of one’s personal beliefs about the unexplained, the special lives up to its hype of a “first time ever” examination of the infamous hotel.

Bagans tells Den of Geek the special is also a culmination of a decade-long pursuit that began “before Elisa even died.”

The “Elisa” that Bagans refers to is Elisa Lam, a 21-year-old Canadian student with a kind, sarcastic sense of humor who loved fashion and Harry Potter; she frequently blogged observations about guys she liked, figuring out a place in the world, as well as her own insecurities and mental health struggles. Lam was a daughter and sister, and a real person on a journey of self-discovery before her life ended too soon, and she made the Cecil internet famous.

While on a solo trip to California in 2013, she went missing and died while staying at the hotel. An elevator surveillance video showed the young woman acting erratically as she pushed buttons, paced in and out of the elevator, and even appeared to be hiding from someone. Her body was discovered in a rooftop water tank weeks after she disappeared. Despite her death being ruled accidental, with her bipolar disorder deemed a contributing factor, questions remained as to how Lam could have gained access to the roof or closed the lid to the tank from within.

But before that two-and-half minute viral video made Lam a popular topic for podcasts — and before American Horror Story: Hotel drew inspiration from the landmark’s past — the Cecil’s reputation was more tied to tragedy than travel despite its beginnings in 1924 as an LA destination, complete with a grandiose lobby.

Multiple suicides took place at the Cecil as well as infanticide and the unsolved murder of Goldie Osgood in 1964. Elizabeth Short, aka the Black Dahlia, was reportedly seen in the hotel bar in the days leading up to her murder in 1947, and two serial killers are known to have stayed there – including Richard Ramirez, who committed a murder spree in the 1980s, and the investigation of whom is the focus of the Netflix documentary series Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer.

“I knew the history of Richard Ramirez there, and the deaths, and knew it was a big creepy building,” Bagans says.

Although prior attempts to gain permission to film there had been rejected, he thinks maybe the COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing shutdowns convinced the hotel’s owners to allow it because of the location fee paid by production. “Or maybe they had things happening to themselves and had enough of it,” Bagans says.

Either way, Cecil fits neatly into Bagans’ pursuits, and it comes as no surprise that the hotel has long been on his bucket list. He has a fascination with the darker sides of this world — as well as the next. When not investigating the paranormal on television, he collects and exhibits haunted dolls and possessed possessions, along with “murderabilia” from serial killers, such as drawings by Ramirez.

“I collect his things. I have his death row TV, his sketches, his clothing,” says Bagans before adding, “I study these people.” Bagans says he even visited the Concordia cemetery in El Paso, Texas, where Ramirez “got started” and was said to practice satanic rituals.

As a result, Bagans believes that Ramirez was engaged in a “top-tier possession” with the horrors he was committing ultimately in the devil’s name. Bagans doesn’t give a pass to the murderer but does theorize that the serial killer was generating more negative energy and entities at the hotel.

Saying he believes the Cecil is “saturated with dark energies,” he thinks Ramirez’s satanic rituals added an evil residue to the building. Interestingly, however, Bagans also thinks there’s something supernatural about the grounds upon which the building stands.

Though he references The Shining, he says he also thinks of the Cecil like the vampire-infested strip club in From Dusk Till Dawn. In the final shot of the film, it’s revealed the club sits atop an Aztec temple. Bagans equates the hotel to this, saying it’s part of some ancient “machine.”

“I’ve been to a lot of places throughout the world, but when you walk through the doors of the Cecil Hotel, you know there are other doorways to other worlds,” he says. “If we were to see deeper dimensionally, you would see all these other doors and rooms, and I believe it goes way down into the earth and draws a lot of energy through the earth. It is then magnified by the dark energy and criminal activity of Skid Row, and amplified by the rituals [serial killer] Jack Unterweger and Richard Ramirez did.”

For the Discovery+ special, Bagans says he wanted to be delicate when discussing the circumstances of Lam’s death. He references the hotel’s history of suicide, and murder attributed to temporary insanity, and believes malevolent energies fed off her mental illness and influenced her.

It is admittedly a problematic theory for skeptics and non-believers of the paranormal, but Bagans — like many with lingering questions about Lam’s strange death — looks to her past behavior as telling. Lam had previously disappeared and required treatment but wasn’t known to have suicidal ideations. There were no unusual drugs detected in her system and the initial cause of death was deemed inconclusive.

“It didn’t make sense she was having a manic episode,” he says. “From my research, no one was able to say she had had a manic episode this bad before. If she was having an episode and acting that bad, how could she have taken such a calculated journey to end up in that water tank under that manic sense?”

While Bagans strives not to diminish Lam’s death, he says, “that building has the power to mess with your mind.” During the investigation he says teammate Aaron Goodwin was overcome with feelings of rage, and that his interviewees, including a crime scene photographer, were so disturbed they often needed to leave the hotel.

“You don’t know what you’re feeling there. There’s too many spirits, too much energy.”

Indeed, during the course of the special, the Ghost Adventures crew believe they encounter several spirits, including those of Lam, Ramirez, Osgood, and more.

For Bagans, investigating Cecil, or even conducting interviews about it, only serves to charge the battery of this machine. But, quoting his favorite film, 1992’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, he says, “there is much to be learned from beasts.” Bagans is seeking to understand the unknown despite the risks.

Whether or not viewers of Ghost Adventures: Cecil Hotel choose to share his paranormal theories about the building — or simply view it as a strange nexus of true crime — Bagans says there is no denying its inescapable reputation.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

“You can renovate it, change the name, or paint it a different color, but you’re never going to erase the darkness of the Cecil Hotel.”

Ghost Adventures: Cecil Hotel is available to stream on Discovery+.

Subscribe to Den of Geek magazine for FREE right here!

(function() { var qs,js,q,s,d=document, gi=d.getElementById, ce=d.createElement, gt=d.getElementsByTagName, id="typef_orm", b="https://embed.typeform.com/"; if(!gi.call(d,id)) { js=ce.call(d,"script"); js.id=id; js.src=b+"embed.js"; q=gt.call(d,"script")[0]; q.parentNode.insertBefore(js,q) } })()

The post Ghost Adventures Checks into the Cecil Hotel: Zak Bagans on Investigating the Crime Landmark appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/2KEBW7b

#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

1 note · View note

arcticdementor · 4 years ago

Link

But this is not the only threat that incoming students face. Universities are front and centre of the new culture war and the dominant culture in the humanities and arts is soaked in an anxiety-ridden politics of negation. It is a world with which I am all too familiar, from many years’ involvement in the far-left, which — stripped of materialist analysis and class content — increasingly finds its base in the university. I had come to see those years as misspent but essentially inconsequential and a little embarrassing.

What is remarkable is not that I found these politics wanting — most who move through these scenes eventually do — but that, shorn of their economics, they now appear culturally hegemonic and unassailable. Today these politics represent what Wesley Yang described as the “successor ideology”, the default politics of a new elite coming of age, and this language is the currency of the professional managerial class in the English-speaking world. They do not seem so inconsequential anymore.

I spent my teenage years immersed in Marxist and anarchist circles and literature, at protests and occupations, squats and reading groups. I would listen to ageing Cockneys give talks on class interest and exploitation in the backrooms of dusty pubs. It may not have been much, but it did at least feel like we could lay claim to the heritage of a genuine radicalism.

…

Some blame academics for the radicalisation of students, but in truth self-selecting mechanisms ensured many of us arrived pre-radicalised, and from there it spread memetically, not didactically. The internet was a far bigger radicaliser than Left-wing academics. The handful of academics involved with the political scene were outliers and most were political liberals.

The next three years played out predictably. The organiser of a gay night was denounced for playing a song by Katy Perry because another song of hers was deemed problematic. A rare working class boy had his Union Jack flag stolen and set on fire during a commemoration for the Queen, while students (many of whom from one elite international school in Geneva) denounced him as a racist. We queued round the block for Judith Butler and we tried, sometimes successfully, to get others blocked from public platforms altogether.

Rumours would circulate about people who were “problematic”, often socially awkward men whose problem was that they interrupted people. Talks on sex work and the radical possibilities of kink proliferated. One of my more sordid memories is of person after person taking turns at a public assembly to declare themselves “disabled”, presumably by nature of their mental disorder, and therefore oppressed. A good friend was condemned in a public blog by his ex for the crime of suggesting that her new activist friends might not have been making her very happy.

At first, there was a rush — the feeling of belonging to a community, particularly one defined so clearly against an other, gave meaning and purpose to life. Taking part in “action”, the more covert the better, strengthened this sense of conspiracy. But over time the world darkened and lost colour. Our intellectual world shrunk and everything was subjected to the same dreary analysis. Real conversation became impossible, replaced with irony, intersectional bromides and endless talk of mental illness.

The college was a bucket of crabs and happiness itself suspect, a mark of privilege, as with the rugby lads who had the audacity to actually enjoy themselves. When there was laughter it was heavy and jarring, filled with irony and bitterness, never light or free. The elitism of the university discounted even appreciation of the beauty of its buildings or the surrounding countryside, although by then we were probably too far gone to notice. Though we were aware of our enormous privilege we contrived to see our time at Cambridge as some grim fate foisted upon us.

…

Few have described this process as well as Philip Roth in American Pastoral. The lifelessness of it all and the impossibility of any lightness or dialogue, as he put it: “The monotonous chant of the indoctrinated, ideologically armored from head to foot — the monotonous, spellbound chant of those whose turbulence can be caged only within the suffocating straitjacket of the most supercoherent of dreams. What was missing from her unstuttered words was not the sanctity of life — missing was the sound of life.”

Roth wrote of the manipulative potential of compassion, the only recognised virtue: “There may not be much subtlety in it, she may not yet be its best spokesman, but there is some thought behind it, there’s certainly a lot of emotion behind it, there’s a lot of compassion behind it…” On top of this there was the moral certainty that erases any concern about means. “Rita was no longer an ordinary wavering mortal, let alone a novice in life, but a creature in clandestine harmony with the brutal way of the world, entitled, in the name of historical justice, to be just as sinister as the capitalist oppressor Swede Levov.”

…

Social theorist Mark Fisher described from first-hand experience the manipulation of this scene as a Vampire Castle which “feeds on the energy and anxieties and vulnerabilities of young students, but most of all it lives by converting the suffering of particular groups — the more marginal, the better — into academic capital. The most lauded figures in the Vampire Castle are those who have spotted a new market in suffering — those who can find a group more oppressed and subjugated than any previously exploited will find themselves promoted through the ranks very quickly.” The Vampire Castle recruits on the promise of community and self-healing. The reality is an ouroboros of emotional manipulation, stripped of the political and of all that makes life interesting and worthwhile.

…

Undergraduate wastefulness, self-absorption and misery are nothing new, but the form they took presaged what was to come. In another age, we would have been conservatives — frightened of the outside world, haunted by anxiety and guilt, unafraid to speak or think freely. But instead, the politics of my old friends set the national agenda.

We would have laughed at the idea we formed an elite and we certainly didn’t act like one. But we were the vanguard for a movement that has swept the English-speaking world in the subsequent decade. We still professed to be fighting the old powers — patriarchy, white supremacism, the nuclear family, colonialism, the university itself. But in truth we represented what Christopher Lasch called psychological man, “the final product of bourgeois individualism,” and were being trained in elite formation for the therapeutic age just as surely as our forerunners had been for the previous, paternal age.

#unherd #tobias phibbs #read the whole thing

2 notes · View notes

the-stars-in-sapphos-eyes · 6 years ago

Text

An open letter to one Ms. Taylor Alison Swift (@taylorswift - swifties please reblog!)

So I’m writing this because I genuinely get the sense that Taylor cares a lot about her fans and wants to be the best version of herself possible - there’s obviously been a lot of drama in past years and, without reopening that wound, she dealt with it really well and seems like a very sincere and compassionate woman. She’s clearly demonstrated that she values her fans’ voices and wants to make her music and performances welcoming and safe for everyone. All in all, this gal has as much of my support as anyone can, given my cynical nature. It also helps that I’m autistic and she was my SpIn (special interest; it’s an autistic thing where we’re basically just wholly obsessed with a certain thing for a period of time) for years when I was younger, and also was the first (and only, for a long time) American artist who’s music I was allowed to listen to.

Okay, long-winded backstory aside, I’d like to point something out.

I love ME! Super catchy, super fun, super I-don’t-give-a-fuck-if-you-think-i’m-cringey-i’m-having-fun! That last point is also super important to me as an autistic person (yes I keep mentioning that I’m autistic for a reason), because neurotypical people tend to find us cringe-y when we are really enthusiastic about things that may seem trivial to others. So, imagine: I’m listening to the boisterous snare drums of the opening (another plus because I’m in marching band) and the silky sweet and infectiously gleeful vocals of Taylor Swift come in, serenade me about wholesome love over big brassy chords (...I play a brass instrument!). I’m ready to BOP to this.

Then I get hit with ableism and a slur. I’m only writing this whole think because I am 100% sure Taylor has no idea that the word “ps*cho” is a slur and that “lame” has origins in mocking disabled people. At this point, they’ve become colloquial in their use and no one really gives them a second thought, even if they are vaguely aware of their problematic histories. Except, of course, for disabled people who are still targeted by them.

I didn’t know ps*cho was a slur until about a year ago, so let me give a brief explanation. Ps*cho is a shortening of ps*chopath, which is closely related to so*iopath, and this explanation really applies to all of them. The words are used to refer to people who have low to no compassion to the point of being violent and aggressively anti-social. This is a stereotype of people with cluster b or personality disorders. Actual people with personality disorders can have trouble with empathy (which is different from compassion) and socializing, but there’s a disgusting and pervasive stereotype that this makes them dangerous and threatening, when in actuality they are far more likely to be victims of violence and abuse than perpetrators.

I don’t think “lame” needs much of an explanation, but I will remind all of us that it began as a way to describe disabled people who don’t have full use or control of their bodies, which was always viewed as a negative thing to begin with. Disabled people have always been devalued and dehumanized. But the word has now evolved to have a purely negative meaning that describes anything that neurotypical and able-bodied people deem below them. Surprise, they view us disabled people as below them, too! Another point arises in the music video: when Brendon Urie (whom I also love) sings about “lame guys” we see a bunch of men floating around on umbrellas and, although I’m not sure if it was intentional, a lot of them look like they’re trying to be creepy and predatory, which is a hugely pervasive stereotype of neurodivergent men. For more on that, look up why neckbeard is an ableist term.

Okay, do you guys remember 2006? I don’t because I was four, but remember a little song called “Picture to Burn”? With lyrics “so you can tell your friends that I’m obsessive and crazy/that’s fine I’ll tell mine you’re gay”? (side note, cr*zy is also pretty offensive and also has ableist roots). Remember how Taylor re-released it with a changed lyric so that the song wouldn’t be homophobic? That was way back when it was totally cool to be homophobic, but this teenage girl still realized she could do better, and she did. Obviously, it’s not really applause-worthy to be a decent human being, but that still gave me a lot of hope. (Oh have I mentioned I’m gay? I am).

So now I have hope that this will reach Taylor. She’s active on tumblr which is super cool, honestly. We stan that. I know she cares about the message her music sends, and I know that if she sees this she will do what she can to change the fact that a lot of her disabled fans feel really uncomfortable listening to this song. We know she doesn’t mean any harm, but it’s still being done. And thankfully, it’s not a hard lyric to change! I’ve thought of a few acceptable alternatives for myself when I’m singing the song in my head, so I’m sure such a stellar songwriter isn’t going to have any problems coming up with an even better lyric to put in.

Just to highlight the problem, I’m going to include a few links of others who have raised this same concern:

https://twitter.com/jackdrat/status/1126213531378995200

https://themighty.com/2019/04/taylor-swift-brendon-urie-me-lame-psycho/

Okay, so all that being said! I know there are also tons of disabled swifties on this site, as well as abled ones who genuinely care about us! So I would really appreciate it if you guys reblogged this and/or tagged @taylorswift, because I know that she’s going to take action if she sees this, but she probably won’t unless we really circulate it.

5 notes · View notes

scarletwitching · 7 years ago

Note

I know you would probably hate this, but, what do you think makes House of M popular? How this comic cloud people's judgement? How it affect new readers/casual fans's views? What are the factors that draw people in and fixed their impression? Just some observation, some people seem to enjoy the touchy family "feels", some may just like heroes snapping(like it's so cool), and sometimes it's Power Parade(it's deemed disrepctful to say she is less powerful than someone else).

It’s popular(ish) in mainstream fandom because its effects lasted a very long time, which makes it seem important, and because it’s a mash-up of a couple of enormously popular and beloved storylines, Dark Phoenix Saga and Infinity Gauntlet, set in a then-new alternate universe. It’s two old things smashed together and combined with a new thing.

That’s the short answer. The long answer is… long, and it’s actually about the underlying reasons people are okay with some offensive stuff (because that’s what I wanted to talk about). I’m putting this under a cut so that, when people who don’t agree with me inevitably read it, I can link them to this.

There really is a country song for everything.

It maybe goes without saying, but this is a House of M post so it mentions, however briefly, the usual HOM-related subject matter: ableism, infertility, people on the internet glorifying genocide.

Everyone likes things that have somewhat unsavory elements or unfortunate implications. With superheroes, the whole thing is – forgive me – problematic. You can find meaning and value in parts of it, but something is rotten at the core. One of the uncomfortable aspects of speculative fiction fandoms is how terrible things become normalized. Because we’re only talking about fiction. That makes it okay, right? It’s tempting to parrot these notions of “good” queens and “rightful” kings or to go along with the canon logic that justifies violence and ignores the sovereignty of nations that aren’t the US.

I bring up that last one because, in modern superhero fandom, buying into the canon logic often means defending US imperialism under the guise of defending a specific character or story. There’s always a justification for it in-universe, so the way it relates to the real world becomes some extraneous detail that only a jerk would mention.

It’s the Thermian Argument. It doesn’t matter what the underlying message or consequences, however (un)intentional, are. It matters that I like Thing and any problems you find with Thing are the result of you not focusing on very specific details that make it “make sense” in the story. Remember the old Tumblr adage that you can like problematic things so long as you acknowledge the problems? I would just say you can like whatever so long as you don’t bury your head in the sand and scream, “It’s fine! You just didn’t pay attention to the story!!”

What I’m saying is that there’s a lot of justifying how bad literally every part of the story is by saying it all “makes sense” and so all criticisms are invalid. If a person is traumatized, it just makes sense that they would [waves at the entire story] do that. It’s very sad when your imaginary kids die, y’know?

The people who like House of M tend to cite its fetishizing gaze on women’s mental illness as a feature and not a bug. The fault in that argument is that, as far as I’ve seen, none of the people making this argument have Schizophrenia. Or Schizoaffective Disorder. Or any personal experience with psychosis whatsoever. At the very least, the vast majority of them don’t, so they’re not part of the group being misrepresented.

The issue of what is “good” mental illness representation is complex. Sometimes, people who are struggling or have struggled relate to characters who lash out or do destructive things. People can find solace in imperfect places. Everyone’s just trying to get by in this hellscape, and if a comic made you feel understood or just plain better in some way, that’s a good thing. But It’s a very “I got mine” argument to focus on that and ignore how those stories might affect others. You can’t reclaim something that wasn’t insulting you in the first place. I find the claim that there’s something universal about Sad Wanda Crying unconvincing given how emblematic HOM is of media representations of psychosis. If you’re not always being portrayed as a serial killer, the weight of this story will easily fly over your head.

Then there’s the not-small matter that the people being insulted – really, specifically insulted – by HOM are groups that aren’t a big part of public discourse. The severely mentally ill and people with fertility issues. Not that those are on equal footing, but they both have a certain invisibility and the idea that something might be hurtful to them is treated as a joke. Reproductive issues are intensely personal, and most people want to keep them private. There is a lot wrong with media representations of infertility, but if talking about it means opening up about your experiences, it’s no wonder people don’t want to or are only willing to in a receptive space.

Also, I suspect a lot of people didn’t read the X-Men stories that came after and are viewing this entirely from Wanda’s perspective. There’s something narcissistic about sad, sad, sad characters being sad about their sad, sad, sad life. It invites the audience to focus on that one person’s struggles – often as a stand-in for their own problems – and ignore everything else going on. This is one of the critiques of “manpain” storylines. There’s a layer of self-involvement built in. Killed a bunch of people? But they were sad! Sad, sad, sad! We’ve all got problems, man. The world breaks everyone. Not everyone kills Hawkeye two different times.

This is particularly true in spec fic where every backstory is a trauma conga line. Your fave may have suffered, but realistically, so did everyone else.

Redemption arcs can have that air of narcissism too. Woe is me, I have done bad. If they get really self-obsessed, you get The Very Worst Kind of Story, the one where the villain is someone who has been wronged by the “redeemed” character and they want revenge. It’s a way of appearing to confront the damage done while actually minimizing it and discrediting the victims. Protagonist-centered morality to the extreme. Only Good Victims™ matter, and therefore, the redemption seeker is exonerated. All charges dropped on account of the victim turned out to be a jerk!

(That’s not what this post is about. I watched a movie the other day that had this problem, and it gave me a lot of feelings. It was Power Rangers. Leave me alone.)

Getting back to what I said at the beginning, the thing that bothers me isn’t so much that people like something I don’t like. I agree with Grant Morrison’s assessment that HOM is lukewarm at best, but I can still see why someone might like it. The bigger problem is how people like quote-unquote problematic things.

Which is to say oh my god, you guys have to stop acting like genocide is cool and badass. Finding a story valuable is one thing. Claiming that Wanda is so awesome because she can warp reality and wipe out all the mutants and “when will your fave” is another thing entirely. It is not okay to brag about genocide. Ever.

EVER.

Not even when you’re talking about fiction.

I know that saying a character is more powerful is the unquestioned trump card of comics fandom, but 1) that’s iffy in the first place and 2) it’s especially bad in this case. I used to think of the “my fave is more powerful than yours” dick-measuring contest solely as an expression of Boys Club thinking, something juvenile that celebrates physical strength above all else. But there is something more insidious to this logic. Saying that having more power – by which you mean a greater ability to commit acts of violence and hurt others – is the same thing as having more value is disturbing logic. The way that superhero comics equate power with goodness is part of why they’re considered fascist. Every time you indulge this fantasy that having more power makes something better, that power is virtue, the spectral form of Alan Moore appears and hurls copies of Watchmen at your head.

Buying into this furthers one of the worst messages in the genre. I’m not saying anyone who argues over which character is more powerful is a fascist, but this logic should not go unexamined. Why does it matter so much which character is the better at inflicting harm than all the other harm inflicters? You can use the cheap argument that they’re heroes and they’re doing good, but superheroes are, to a worrying degree, used as avatars of the US military. They’re only unblemished, pure-hearted Social Justice Warriors™ if you don’t pay attention to any stories featuring them.

And when you’re not just arguing that being powerful is better, but that the act of committing genocide is a key part of that superiority?? That’s beyond disturbing. How can people not notice how terrible that sounds? Outside of the narrative and the twisted reasoning of superhero comics, what are you really saying when you say that? Might makes right is questionable enough, but when the expression of “might” is ethnic cleansing?

Someone, please explain the thinking that leads to these posts. I’m lost in a flurry of question marks. What compels a person to declare, openly, that what’s cool about Wanda is that she got rid of all the mutants? How does someone conclude that glorifying genocide is okay because it’s a fantasy genocide? Why do thousands of people reblog these horrifying posts?

Why?

WHYWHYWHY?

On second thought, don’t explain it to me. I don’t want to know.

#anonymous #answered #house of m #meta #comics meta #written by me

63 notes · View notes

rdclsuperfoods · 4 years ago

Link

We’re in the midst of a global pandemic and national political upheaval unlike anything we’ve seen in the past 150 years. Still, wellness influencers, major news outlets, and even the CDC are finding plenty of time to fret about dieting and weight gain. In response, anti-diet nutritionists, therapists, and activists have taken to social media to point out that a too tight grip on your eating habits can cause anxiety and unhealthy patterns that leave you frustrated and physically uncomfortable.

I agree. In April I wrote about how quarantine-induced worries linked to food and exercise can backfire, and why a more relaxed approach to food leads to better health. However, this is easier said than done. Our relationship with weight and diets is complex, and it can be tough to distinguish a healthy habit from an unhealthy one. If you’re working toward a healthier mindset about food, a good first step is to identify your own food rules and then challenge them.

A food rule is any kind of black-and-white thinking about food. Some might be holdovers from a specific diet you’ve tried in the past, like the idea that you should avoid carbs, or that there’s a static number of calories you should eat in a day. Others are extreme versions of generally sound advice, like the idea that you must only eat whole foods, or that sugar and processed goods are explicitly off-limits.

Some of these ideas are grounded in evidence, but there’s a critical difference between food rules and healthy eating habits. The latter are flexible: you prioritize nutritious ingredients but don’t agonize over what to eat and aren’t stressed if you go a day without vegetables or finish a meal feeling overly full. Food rules are rigid: you have strict parameters around how you should eat, and feel guilty or anxious (or like you need to compensate) when you don’t eat according to that plan. “Following food rules can be physically, mentally, and socially exhausting, which impacts overall quality of life,” says Taylor Chan, a dietitian and certified personal trainer. Here are six new anti-rules to learn in the new year.

There Are No Bad Foods

Morality has long snuck into the way we talk and think about eating. Look at the way that various foods are marketed: something low in calories, sugar, and fat might be labeled “guilt-free.” High-sugar, high-fat, and high-calorie foods are deemed “sinfully delicious,” an indulgence to feel a little ashamed of. It might seem normal to think of certain foods as good or bad, seeing as how moralizing eating patterns is a natural product of our culture’s fixation on healthy living. But that doesn’t mean it’s helpful, says Chan.

If a certain food is deemed inherently bad, and eating it is bad behavior, it isn’t a huge leap to think you’re a bad person for eating that way. Food quickly becomes a source of stress and shame, rather than nourishment and pleasure. Dalina Soto, an anti-diet dietitian, expertly called out the problem in an Instagram post: you aren’t a horrible person with no self-control because you ate some ice cream; you just ate something delicious because you wanted it. Thinking of it this way makes it easier to let go and move on. The point isn’t that ice cream is nutrient packed or that it should be the cornerstone of your diet—those wouldn’t be accurate or helpful, either! It’s that there’s never a reason to feel guilty about eating, no matter the nutritional value of the food.

Forget About Clean Eating

Clean eating is such a common phrase that it might not raise an eyebrow, but it’s problematic, too. It implies that other foods and ways of eating are dirty, which falls into the same moralizing trap mentioned above. Plus, there’s no real definition of what “clean” means. “People start developing arbitrary rules about their food, which leads to restrictive and unhealthy food patterns,” says Heather Caplan, a dietitian who specializes in intuitive eating and sports nutrition.

There’s evidence to back this up. A 2020 cross-sectional survey of 1,266 young adults published in the journal Nutrients found that over half the participants had heard of clean eating and thought of it as healthy, but that their definitions of clean were all over the place. The researchers pointed out that while clean eating is often portrayed as healthy, it is often linked with disordered eating. It’s a dichotomous way of thinking, “characterized by extreme ‘all bad’ or ‘all good’ views toward food,” the paper states. Additionally, someone can use clean eating to mask behaviors like severe calorie restriction, claiming that they’re avoiding various foods for health reasons when in fact they may have an underlying eating disorder or disordered-eating behaviors. The researchers also found clean eating to be associated with nutritional deficiencies, since restrictive behavior can go undetected and unchecked for so long.

If you want to eat healthfully, a better approach is to prioritize nutrient-dense foods—fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, seeds, legumes, healthy oils, and lean proteins—without vowing to only eat these foods. It’s a flexible and realistic approach that won’t have you constantly questioning whether certain foods are clean enough or not.

Stop Tracking Your Intake

Religiously counting calories or macros (carbs, fat, and protein) probably isn’t going to have the effect you want it to. One 2013 review of 25 existing studies published in Frontiers in Psychology found that restricted eating habits rarely led to weight loss and, in fact, often corresponded with weight gain.

There’s no consensus on why exactly this happens, but a 2015 article in the International Journal of Obesity explains that the body is designed to protect against weight loss. Restriction-induced weight loss precipitates physiological adaptations, including fewer calories burned overall, less fat oxidation (converting stored fat to energy), a decrease in the fullness-signaling hormone leptin, and an increase in the hunger-signaling hormone ghrelin. Even if someone who has lost weight successfully manages to override their hunger signals, their metabolism may still be slower than before, making it increasingly harder to keep burning fat. This might be why many dieters don’t see the results they want from calorie counting.

Soto instead encourages an intuitive eating approach: eat what you want, when you want it. Our bodies know to seek out the variety of nutrients that they need to function, and proponents of intuitive eating explain that paying close attention to your cravings will naturally lead to a nutritious diet. When it comes to gauging how much food your body requires, it’s far easier to eat until you’re satisfied than it is to count and track calories.

Don’t Demonize Macronutrients

Popular as the keto diet may be, there’s no evidence that a low-carb diet is any healthier than one that includes a balance of all macronutrients. The same goes for low-fat diets. A 2020 review of 121 previously conducted, randomized controlled trials published in The British Medical Journal found that none of the diets limiting certain macronutrients like carbs or fats are any more effective at improving health than a regular, varied diet.

Still, it’s common to demonize certain carbs or fats, even if you aren’t on a particular diet. Maybe you pass on the bread basket because you don’t want to eat too many carbs, or always use nonstick cooking spray instead of oil because you’re wary of adding too much fat to a meal. Soto says this isn’t necessary. All three macronutrients play an important role in health and function. The Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommend getting anywhere from 45 to 65 percent of your calories from carbs, 10 to 35 percent from protein, and 20 to 35 percent from fat. There’s a lot of wiggle room there. Most people’s intake already falls within these ranges, so striking the perfect balance of macros day after day isn’t something you should overthink.

You Don’t Need to Burn Anything Off

Food is more than just a source of energy, Chan says. “We eat food for so many reasons, and it’s important to honor those,” she says. “We connect with our culture through food, we connect with others over a good meal, and we eat for pleasure and nostalgia, all of which supports overall well-being.” But the idea that you must earn food with a grueling workout is still pervasive.

Trying to compensate with exercise when you feel you’ve eaten too much can have a significant negative impact on your quality of life, Chan says. At worst, it sets into motion a cycle of overeating, compensating, and overeating again. Instead of beating yourself up, or trying to atone for eating more than feels comfortable, just let your body do its thing and digest. You’ll feel fine again soon, and chances are you’ll feel less hungry later on.

Yes, there’s nuance here. Food still fuels movement, and there’s nothing wrong with adjusting your intake accordingly when you’re training. The important thing is to not be too rigid or punish yourself for eating too much. A strict calories-in, calories-out approach to fueling isn’t very effective anyway. There’s strong evidence refuting the popular idea that eating 3,500 calories leads to one pound of weight gain, and equally strong evidence that fitness trackers are notoriously terrible at measuring the actual number of calories burned during a workout.

Be Mindful and Flexible

“Ditching food rules opens the door for nutritious foods, not so nutritious foods, and everything in between to be enjoyed,” Chan says. The goal isn’t to give up on good nutrition but to make it less stressful and more sustainable. If your intention is to feel your best, be mindful of how different foods affect your mood and energy levels. Use that to guide what you choose to eat, instead of sticking to black-and-white rules that set you up for failure.

via Outside Magazine: Nutrition

#IFTTT #Outside Magazine: Nutrition

0 notes

whitebookposts · 3 years ago

Text

One of the things I really hate about the "people interpret things however they want" is that people often forget what the word "interpretation" means. the word "interpretation" is used solely for things that are not CANON or CONCREATE. For example, Sky's lore, due to its vagueness, is up for interpretation. The elder's ages are up for interpretation, simply because TGC never confirmed what their ages are, except for the fact that they are very ancient. The spirit's personality and relations are up to interpretation, because other than the two Valley Elders, we don't have any familial relationship confirmed. Is the king and the prince the same person is also up to interpretation, simply because of how little there is about him. But the thing is - Lamed wearing a hijab is NOT up to interpretation, simply because it was CONFIRMED BY A DEVELOPER TO BE A HIJAB. IT IS CANON. You can't say that a thing, confirmed by the developers, is "up to interpretation". It's like saying that the fact that the earth is round is up to interpritation. Moreover, don't you think that a white, Chiristian woman deliberately choosing to interpret a feature that is an important thing to a minority group differently is a bit concerning? Don't you feel that the person that did it feels too entitled over others culture and religion? I said it before and I'll say it again: your right for "drawing whatever you want" and "interperet things howver you want" ends at other's right to be respected and represented. Another thing is that most people here lack the context behind the person that started all of this. Was this a random person, me and my friends would in fact, see it as a simple mistake, and would gladly ask them to change it politely (though, even with Kuroi, we stayed respectful and calm all the way throuh). The problem is, that it's not Kuroi's first time doing problematic things. I really don't want to dwelve into details, but Kuroi has a long, long history of drawing and doing problematic stuff, like (tw: mention of abuse, dehumanization of people with DID, fatphobia): using physical and verbal abuse as a comedic relief in her comics, using the trope of "the evil alter ego" which is a harmful trope to people with personality disorders, using the "a character ate a whole cake and now feel bad because they are going to get fat" trope which is fatphobic. Whenever she was rightfully and, I repeat, POLITELY critisized about this, she would start guiltripping everyone around her so that people would pity her, and use her autism as a shield to cover for herself. MOROVER, she has a history of harassing a minor, namedropping people that blocked her, suicide baiting her followers (which mostly are minors), guilt tripping said minors in her discord server, posting nsfw on her main twitter account that was followed by a bunch of minors. So with that in mind, you can agree that my friends (I wasn't really a part of this as I was asleep + was going through a surgery at the time) had a reason to react. Even if it is an "au", don't you think it's a bit concerning how the only things Kuroi changes in her au are things that are deemed "not attractive" by societal standards? like slimming down fat characters, getting rid of baldness and age sighns, and now getting rid of Lamed's hijab. don't you think it's just a tiny bit (/sarcasm) starnge? When you are doing an au, you must change everything. If she would have done an au in which she changed the culture\religion of the characters, she should have done so to everyone. But she didn't. she changed only the things that are mostly deemed unattractive by christian white people. So I'm very sorry, but it's very hard for me to take "this is an au" argument seriously.

sorry bout the shitshow i got a little mad lmao

also as a reminder: if youre gonna make your personal interpretation of characters do NOT erase features that code them as poc/non-christian bc thats an asshole move and it probably says something about how you view those features

#sky: cotl #discourse #important #sky: the more you know

168 notes · View notes

willowlark369 · 7 years ago

Text

Survival is Imperative

This post discusses a concept which is controversial and features a great deal of disturbing information. There is a great deal of torture and misused (abused) medical procedures/practices discussed. Yet what I feel may be most problematic for most people to digest is that the concept I will be laying out will challenge the idea that an individual’s agency is a hard set dichotomy where one either has it completely or they have been stripped of it entirely.

I’m not treating this as a proper essay or academic paper. I’ve taken several levels of courses in the fields of Psychology, Sociology, and Anthropology along with specialty diversity courses. I’m pulling a lot of concepts from that academic work, and since I am not making a paper to present, I will not be citing the dual-minors-worth of knowledge that led me to the conclusions I am sharing. I apologize if this upsets you. I know that Tumblr is such a bastion of academic learning that this must be absolutely shocking. (Was that too sarcastic? OFW.)

Reader discretion is advised after the Read More break.

Let’s get the hard part out of the way:

Steve Rogers is wrong about Bucky Barnes, and he’s only showing disrespect by making his claims about Barnes’ innocence of the crimes of the Winter Soldier. Whenever Steve Rogers talks about the Winter Soldier as a separate entity from Bucky Barnes, he is ignoring the trauma of the man he claims as his friend.

Still with me? Haven’t skipped down to the bottom to post nasty comments?

Good. Now I will lay out the why for you.

Everyone has heard of Ivan Pavlov or more likely, Pavlov’s experiments with conditioned responses in dogs. He rang a bell before giving his dogs a treat and eventually all he had to do to get the dogs to salivate was ring the bell, regardless of the presence of a treat. This basic concept is actually the idea behind Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) where a person works on identifying their own conditioned responses and work to disable them (and/or redirect them, depending on the goals set by the patient).

Yeah, that’s right, folks. Conditioning is something which can be done to humans. How do we know? Because Dr. John Watson--the less fun one, apparently--and his lovely graduate hostage assistant Rosalie Rayner figured out how to create phobias in an otherwise healthy child, and that was apparently really inspiring to a great many people including the Mother of Behavioral Therapy Mary Clover Jones. Dr. Watson’s paper on the experiment came out in the early part of 1920.

For those of you playing the home game, that’s almost a decade and a half before a certain sniper took his tumble off a train in the Alps. In terms of science, that’s a really long time.

It’s long enough for the science branch of a certain religious cult to start working on a device to make it easier. This device’s purpose was understood to be memory suppression. This effect was achievable through what could be loosely described as Electrical Shock Therapy (EST). Pass enough current through the synapses and they don’t connect so good, at least for a little while.

It also hurts like a motherfucker, which is also what makes EST so useful for the treatment of behavioral disorders. I’m using the term disorder here in its most antiquated definition. Some of the disorders treated with early versions of EST were ‘hysteria’, masturbation, book-reading (in women), and refusal to marry (again, in women). Treatment was given until the patient stopped showing the problematic behavior.

It also works as a deterrent for not showing desired behavior, where the patient is given treatment for not doing what the doctor wanted. Other behavior modifying treatments are isolation, withholding of food/drink, other pain delivery systems... really, there’s a lot of manipulation techniques out there, in the real world. A lot of them can be unquestionably considered torture, but some are just simply psychological. Repeat something in a calm, reasonable tone of voice enough times, and a person begins to believe it. Show kindness to someone whose world is narrowed into nothing more than bright spots of pain and they will want to believe you, even knowing that you are the source of the pain.

Eventually, inevitably, reward does not need to be kindness, does not need to be pleasurable or unquestionably positive. It just needs to be a cessation of pain, maybe even just a lessening if given enough time. Given enough time, a knowledgeable individual can create conditional responses for any number of things, especially once the subject begins to show willingness to adapt.

That’s what we humans are good at, you know. We adapt to our environments, even if doing so might compromise firmly held ideals and principles. Instinctively, we seek to survive and to that end, nothing becomes taboo. It’s easy to stand outside of a situation and say “I’ll never do that” but historically speaking, yeah, you probably would. If the situation called for it, if it were bad enough, if the options were laid out the right way and every other path was blocked--if you knew that everyone had to think you were dead and there was no hope of rescue.

See, Sgt. James “Bucky” Barnes fell from a train traveling through the Alps. They thought he was dead, even without recovering a body. There was no hope for the SSR to come to the rescue, no reason to believe the punk was going to show up once again to save him from the pain, the hunger, the cold. He was alone in enemy hands, undergoing torture as they sought to shape him into what they wanted him to become: a willing participant in their plans capable of taking care of any problem they needed cleaned up.

He was alone and without hope, but Bucky still fought them for over twenty years before they deemed him controlled enough, conditioned enough, to begin using. The problem with conditioning is that the associations need to be maintained routinely or else they fade. So, despite being usable, Barnes would still have been routinely and methodologically tortured in order to preserve that willingness to obey without hesitation or question.

Sgt. Barnes spent over seventy years as a prisoner of war. Sgt. Barnes managed to survive over seventy years in the control of a known terrorist organization by learning when to fight and when to acquiesce to the demands of his captors. Sgt. Barnes learned how to disassociate from emotional responses which only served to slow down action and become better at the behavior Hydra wanted from him.

Sgt. Barnes became the Fist of Hydra in order to survive an untenable situation. He is the Winter Soldier and he willingly completed all missions given to him. Because his entire existence relied upon pleasing his handlers and if there is one thing that humans are good at, it is survival.

Survival is imperative.

However, while there is no question about innocence in this case, the responsibility is also not in question. Sgt. Barnes is not innocent but he is also not responsible. The responsibility shift is two-fold: military chain of command and ability to consent without duress.

Military chain of command creates a buffer of sorts for military personnel who are following directives from those higher in their direct chain of command. There is bleed-over of this buffer into similarly martial organization such as the FBI, CIA, and police. Pretty much, if an organization is authorized to use force against others, then there’s a chain of command exemption to responsibility. Hesitation or refusal to follow the chain of command is actually considered a negative trait that can limit promotions and career duration. Entry programs (such as Basic for the Armed Forces) are specifically designed to create a mentality where the knee-jerk reaction is to follow the commands of a recognized superior. Of course, under normal circumstances, most individuals will not mindlessly follow orders if they go completely contrary to social mores such as harming traditional noncombatants (women, children, the sick, the elderly) or seem really questionable (blow up this bomb while standing beside it; poison this well; execute the ally standing next to you).

Which brings me to the second fold: ability to consent without duress.

In case y’all haven’t heard, no means no. (Yeah, I’m fucking going there. Buckle up, readers. This is a crash course in Consent 110.) Straight up, body autonomy is sacrosanct. The only person allowed to make your body do things is you. You are the only one who gets to choose what your body does, even if that choice is to let someone else make your body do things. Anything else is a violation of your body autonomy.

However, it must be recognized that there are times when saying no is not really an option, for whatever reason, and even saying yes is done due to circumstances which negate the expressed permission. Why? Because it’s not really consent when there’s a threat or manipulation involved, when the choice is between doing the thing or dying (or being harmed or someone else being harmed/killed). That creates duress, which negates consent even while willingness to participate continues.

Analogy time: think of any sex act you want. Maybe it’s your favorite; maybe you’ve done it hundreds of times and you’re damn good at it. The only difference is that you don’t want to do it this time with this partner. Now imagine that partner holding a gun to your head, telling you that they will shoot you if you don’t do it. You do that thing and manage to live. You did that thing, and nothing really changes that. However, it was not consensual.

You are not innocent but you are also not responsible.

Ultimately, what you are left with at end of the day is a PoW who did everything necessary to survive, including a lot of horrible things that affected others. I think this is really fucking important to note: Sgt. Barnes is a survivor. He did things, made choices, which clearly haunt him in order to ensure that survival.

He did those things because Sgt. Barnes became the Winter Soldier to survive.

Steve Rogers continuously invalidates that. Steve Rogers makes himself unavailable as a recovery support person because he refuses to acknowledge the trauma and guilt that would accompany such actions. I’m sure that his intentions are to be helpful and comforting. Steve Rogers once went on a suicide mission for Sgt. Barnes and later decided letting the guy beat him to a pulp was a good idea when the alternative was fighting him. Never doubt that Steve Rogers loves Bucky Barnes and that it is unconditional.

However, harm is not measured by intention. It is measured by effect.

Invalidating a survivor of violence? Not cool. Insisting that “it wasn’t really you” to someone who had essentially been raped? Also not cool.

And you know what effect that has? It makes the survivor unable to comfortably open up to you. Especially if disagreement with an authority figure was a past cause for corrective behavioral modification. Logic may say the punishment won’t happen but emotionally? Essentially, you are removed from the support team, and this is after you have created a situation in which the survivor is unable to remain in their previous safe place.

So, in summation, Bucky Barnes is the Winter Soldier due to being a PoW willing to do what it took to survive, but his blast-from-the-past best friend doesn’t acknowledge any of that which is hella hurtful and dismissive, regardless of said friend’s intentions. It interferes with the possibility of recovery which is inherently harmful to someone who has already been through so much and sets up the continuation of the conditioned behaviors, furthering the trauma in a way that is quite possibly worse than the outright violence of before.

Because Bucky Barnes will not stand up for himself. Resistance has been conditioned out of him. And now the person hurting him is a trusted individual declaring that he just wants to help.

Please respect the survival of Sgt. James Barnes by acknowledging his trauma, even if it makes you uncomfortable. Survivors do not have to make you comfortable with what it took to gain that status. Survivors do not owe you a picturesque view of their trauma.

Survival itself is the only imperative.

#MCU #Meta #Bucky Barnes #Winter Soldier #Steve Rogers #Trauma #Torture #Conditioning #PoW Survival #Trauma Recover #discussion of consent

5 notes · View notes