#Same way I have a strange thing for writing people with disabilities actually-

[devouring-hive]

We do miss the particular way Doll-Sakuya was decaying before she finally broke. The complete unquestioning subservience forced upon her by Remilia, despite so desperately wanting to break free of it, was very compelling for Yami to write.

[cripplecharacters]

Does Your Scarred Character Have to Hate Themself?

[large text: Does Your Scarred Character Have to Hate Themself?]

(TLDR: no. literally no.)

A frequent topic that shows up around facial differences is the self-hatred, self-disgust, self-insert-negative-emotion that we must surely experience. I want to ask* writers without FDs - why? Why do you feel about us in such a way that that's the most common way of depicting us?

*- rhetorical question. I promise I know the answers, but I'm not sure if writers do.

It's frankly worrying to me. Is it really that common to assume that disabled people have this internal, never-ending hatred for themselves? The overwhelming majority of us don't. We hate inaccessibility, when people stare, or some symptoms when they get in the way, or how expensive being disabled is, but I find the concept of us being so completely disturbed by our own disabilities extremely strange. It’s “tragedy porn” intersecting “most basic ableism”.

“But trauma!”

[large text: “But trauma!”]

Trauma of what! People with facial differences don't have some sort of default trauma that we come with like it’s a factory setting. We are a group of people with tens of thousands of stories and experiences!

“Trauma of experiencing ableism/disfiguremisia” - that's better, at least this means something. If you're writing a story about this, please get a sensitivity reader with a facial difference. You can assume how we feel all you want, but in my experience these assumptions are often bizarre and unrealistic. Or just end up writing the same “disability so sad” sob story that everyone has seen a billion times. If you want to write about disfiguremisia, you need to understand the nuance and have more than just the basic level knowledge (which 99% of people don’t have either). If you can’t do that, don’t write about it. Simple as that.

“Trauma of the accident” - thankfully, the accident is an event and a facial difference is a disability. If you want to connect these two like they're one and the same, you're almost surely going to demonize disability. People with traumatic spinal cord injuries, acquired amputees, people with TBI, people with acquired facial differences - we participate in our communities, we have hobbies, we date, we play with our dogs. Disability isn't a death sentence. Media who make it feel like it is certainly don't help people who do suddenly become disabled, don't you think?

Here's a post by @blindbeta about blind characters becoming blind through trauma that’s better made than anything I could hope to write here. I heavily recommend giving it a read.

And, I can't stress this enough - most of us didn't have “the accident”, most of us are born like this! "Traumatic scars" isn't the only facial difference that exists, far from it, it's only one of thousands. It's 99% of our representation and "representation". If you want to make a character with FD - please consider that we aren't a monolith. Just like not all physical disabilities are "wheelchair user with paralysis", not all facial differences are "traumatic scar with somehow no nerve damage".

The overrepresentation of it is incredibly telling, and sometimes - or very frequently - feels like the writer doesn’t actually even want to deal with us. They want to use our disability as a way to cheap drama, moral metaphors, tragic backstories. Not to represent us as living people who are much more similar to you than you apparently think.

Now, I do have enough awareness to know that that's a big part of the appeal. “Horrific Thing #2456 happens” and boom, instant drama! Of course, it's a reasonable response that they would hide their disability for years, avoid talking about it in any way, and magically change their personality to be mean and reclusive, or at least be constantly soooo sad about how much it sucks to be disabled, right?

Do I really need to say that having your character becoming disabled be the worst thing ever is ableism 101? We have been talking about this for so long at this point. Writing about the process of adapting to a specific disability is better left to people who have actual experience in it.

To give an example that will hopefully resonate more with Tumblr users, I will use the fact that I'm also gay. It's not perfect by any means but probably much more familiar territory.

Imagine, let's say, a character. He's gay. The story he's in is supposedly progressive, certainly not trying to be homophobic. The character has experienced an incident, maybe an act of aggression or a hate crime, that happened because he’s gay, which was traumatic. Happens IRL, sure. So of course the character starts hating being gay. He talks about how gross and disgusting it is, he never lets anyone know that he could be “one of them”, certainly not take a stance against homophobia. You can't mention him without mentioning the accident, they're seemingly fused together. No gay love, joy, even basic happiness, he would actually choose to be straight in a heartbeat if given the option to and complains that he can't. This is shown as a neutral, obvious thing that a gay man would do, no one comments on it. He stays like this the whole time, unless there’s a plot twist in the last 10 pages where the world is now magically perfect ("we fixed discrimination, yay!"). This is the only LGBT character in the story.

Keep in mind that there are people similar to this in real life, living with extreme internalized homophobia.

Is this, in your opinion, realistic and thoughtful representation? How does it feel when written by a cishet writer, versus a gay writer who is recalling his experiences? Do you think that it's reasonable for the majority of media representation to be like this, or very close to it? How would it affect younger gay people who might already be uncomfortable with being queer? Are gay men the target audience, or are they not even considered as a group of people who read books? Is this helping or damaging the general public's idea of how it is to be gay? Why or why not?

The Masterpiece

[large text: The Masterpiece]

From 13 to 19 of May, we are celebrating Face Equality week (what a coincidence!). It’s important to me in general - and I wish it was more important to abled people, but I digress - especially its theme for this year.

“My Face is a Masterpiece”

Great statement, it represents the community well, I do enjoy how bold it is. Very cool stuff, I love the work our advocates are doing!

But why do I bring this up?

Well, to very non-subtly show that we aren’t a self-hating group of people. We are a community, a community saying “our faces are beautiful, look!”, we are saying “treat us equally, and do it now!”. Our activism isn’t about self-disgust. It’s about fighting your-disgust. 

Why can’t writers keep up? Why are you still stuck decades behind?

Is this the only reason I bring it up?

The Call to Celebration

[large text: The Call to Celebration]

FEI, the org behind organizing it, asks a very simple question (emphasis mine):

“Why do we so often see stories about facial difference as a ‘tragedy’, when they should be about triumph?” “Calling all artists, allies, creatives, galleries.  You can rewrite the story to bring about #FaceEquality and celebrate the unique artistry found in every face. Your participation this #FaceEqualityWeek will help to tell the real story, that there is a masterpiece in every face.”

Here. We are calling for you to stop. Directly from the biggest international advocacy alliance group that's out there. If you create, this is for you.

The last argument to not have your character with a facial difference hate themselves? Because we don’t want this. We are tired and frustrated. For me personally, I’m also offended by this kind of assumption. We aren’t tragedies or cheap entertainment for abled people to pity or be horrified by. We are people, and if you can’t internalize that, you have no reason to write about us.

For once, celebrate us. Happy Face Equality Week!

mod Sasza

[tavyliasin]

Disability Pride Essays - Lae'zel, Ableism, and More Neurodiversity

As we continue through Disability Pride Month, we reach the latest of the Origin characters to face my analysis microscope~

Lae’zel’s story is very much shaped by her upbringing. Her entire identity has been crafted by her people’s customs and culture, the Githyanki focus on strength and the need to win the fight against the Mindflayers taking precedence over absolutely everything else. But how does this tie into disability, you may be wondering? Well, we will be going over some heavier topics again today and in a fair amount of detail. The reliance on strength in a society to this degree can end up with ableism and eugenics, because in their single-minded pursuit of victory there is no room to care for the disabled in their community. We’re also going to take a look at some character traits from Lae’zel herself that some have mentioned feeling a connection to in terms of neurodiversity representation. So, with that in mind, let’s take a closer look at Lae’zel of Creche K’liir and what her story can tell us about disability and ableism in societal structures.

I just have to mention how odd it was that doing the GIF search for "Lae'zel" had so little of her and multiple Kermit the Frog GIFs instead...ok back to the essay

What is Lae’zel’s Disability?

Lae’zel herself can be representative of some features of how autism can present in people. She shows a preference for clear rules that can be followed and structures that are ordered and logical. She also struggles to adapt to a sudden change in those same structures, when rules change or things do not match up to what she believed them to be, it can be hard for her to accept that. This was actually one I hadn’t picked up on myself yet until talking with a couple of people whilst doing a little more research on her character and story for writing this very piece, and it’s really interesting to see. There is also the potential for her to be injured and receive a permanent stat debuff from the Zaithisk in Act 1. This can also represent a permanent disability from a medical procedure, potentially even mirroring some more traumatic and outdated “treatments” that are no longer in use, or even some that are still used today that cause significant harm and distress to autistic people. A lot more of what we’ll cover here is more about the society she was raised in and how this reflects her own views and attitudes, both towards herself and others.

How Do We See The Disability In The Game?

The autistic features mentioned in the previous section are more present in how Lae’zel is very single minded and certain about things, and how it takes a lot of evidence to persuade her that the systems she has trusted and relied upon for her entire life are not what she thought. Even with a lot of concern and evidence around the Zaithisk, it still takes multiple rounds of persuasion to get her to fight or leave the device before it does that long term damage if all the checks are failed and she stays inside. This same reliance on power structures and established rules and roles almost gets her killed again when we meet Vlaakith and face that particular truth. It’s a genuine struggle to accept that everything is not how it was supposed to be, that all those comfortable support structures are just…gone. It’s a lot for her to go through, and understandably it seems as if falling back on battle skills and strength bring Lae’zel the most comfort particularly in the beginning where she is living her worst nightmares - stuck in a strange land with the looming possibility of becoming everything she has fought against and feared since she was old enough to understand the world around her.   If we fail the Zaithisk checks and Lae’zel is hurt, we see that very clearly in the permanent debuff to her stats and abilities. There’s no undoing damage like that, and it will impact her for the rest of her life much in the way that an incident causing disability could.

How Does This Reflect Real Life?

Autism has a lot of very different ways that it can present in people and in how they experience it. There are plenty of autistic people who might feel like Lae’zel and her story don’t represent their life in any way at all, but there are at least a few who might well pick up on those connections and find comfort in them. Some autistic people do feel, like Lae’zel, that having a rigid structure is beneficial to them. They prefer to know where they stand, what the rules are, because it is much easier to have things laid out in black and white than to try and decipher it from wider context or trying to read in to people’s reactions and hidden motivations. Part of this can present in being very trusting - it is easier to believe that a person is only saying something because it is true, than to try and see past any lies or read between the lines if there’s a difficulty in doing so from the neurodiversity. Similarly, having a routine can also be very comforting to some autistic people. They know where they are meant to be, what they’re meant to be doing, and why. Change can be distressing and take a more time to cope with, whether this is a change of surroundings (like finding yourself in a whole new world), a change in routine (going from daily battles that are expected to having far less solid plans that keep changing), or a change in the established rules/reality (finding out that long held beliefs and facts were never true). It can also be very difficult to accept that a figure that was admired - possibly to the point of fixation - is not at all what they were supposed to be. Losing that person to look up to can feel like a huge shaking of someone’s foundations, especially if they have built their whole life and goals around doing what that person expects of them. This could be a parallel to a parental figure for an autistic person who has always trusted them, followed the given rules, but then feels a betrayal or a change from the expectations of that parent, or even finds out that the parent they admired has done something they strongly disagree with. Similarly it could be an idol, someone they look up to, who equally does something unpleasant. Like, perhaps, a famous author who wrote books that became a hyperfixation turning out to be deeply bigoted against certain communities. Hmm. I’m sure I’ve heard of something like that somewhere… The rest of the parallels to real life will come more from the society and raising than from Lae’zel herself, as in some routes she shows a lot of ability to grow and change past those ideals and find her own path. Even if it still has some of those same structures, she can come to accept the changes in her own way.

Githyanki Society and Eugenics

This one is quite heavy, but it’s so important to touch on. Before Githyanki are even born, they are judged. If an egg takes too long to hatch, it’s deemed weak and discarded or left to die. There’s little room for any weakness at all in Githyanki society, because they need every member to become strong enough to fight and win against the mindflayers, but this also means that at any stage of life they can forfeit their lives. Even as children they are encouraged to fight - sometimes even to the death - to ensure the survivors are strong. Old age doesn’t bring a peaceful retirement either, there’s only fight after fight to look forward to, and the most relaxing job you might end up with in Githyanki society is becoming a tutor to the younger generations. Which is hardly a peaceful role to take. The entire reliance on strength is such a parallel to eugenics - the theory that those who are disabled or “flawed” are not worthy of surviving, that if you do not provide anything to society that you do not have a place within it. It goes without saying that it’s deeply ableist and completely flawed as a concept. It goes against how even prehistoric human society worked - there is strong evidence that we took care of our wounded, elderly, and disabled. Naturally a fantasy universe is different, and there are of course some humans now who advocate for eugenics like not allowing disabled children to even be born…but that is wrong on every level. There is worth to life beyond what we are able to contribute to society. We also see this in the use of the Zaithisk - the Githyanki are almost all of the complete belief that the device will help them, will cure them of the mindflayer parasite, but the reality is that their leaders were never looking for a cure. The device is a euthanasia machine designed to pull everything of use from their mind and soul before killing them. It’s brutal, but it is just another example of ableism and eugenics in action. It is more efficient to the Githyanki to destroy any perceived weakness than it is to try to help. We can, to a degree, look at it objectively - they are taking away a risk that could very well put far too many lives at risk. They’re in some ways isolating a terminally ill patient before they can become contagious or harmful to others. Perhaps, in some ways, using the Zaithisk to prevent Ceremorphosis is akin to something like rabies, which is incurable once the first visible symptoms appear and can lead to the patient becoming desperate or suffering psychological symptoms that lead them to harming others, so the only option is to isolate them and try to reduce their suffering until the inevitable. 

Strength and Attitudes To Disability

Reliance on strength, and a tenacity to keep fighting, can be very beneficial to a society and lifestyle that are focused on an endless war and surviving it. Being able to push past pain and use every last ounce of that strength and courage can be the difference between life and death in a battle…but not everything is a battle, and that same determination can be genuinely detrimental long term. We can see this with Lae’zel being determined to endure the Zaithisk, until (if not convinced otherwise) she is permanently injured by it. But the same tenacity can also be detrimental in other ways, too, particularly when disability is involved. A lot of chronically ill people will easily be able to tell you that whilst an otherwise healthy person might be able to “push past it” and keep doing things when injured or sick with something short term (like doing housework when they have flu, or trying to work when they have an injury causing pain), this cannot work long term. If the condition doesn’t have an end, you cannot keep pushing through it. You can’t just force yourself to get better or be able to do what your body is unable to. Even if you manage one day, you’re making it worse for the days that follow, which will reduce what you can do overall. The best thing most people can do to manage chronic conditions is to pace themselves, ensure they’re working with and around their symptoms rather than against them. There’s a difficulty there to accept any weakness within an individual in Githyanki society - you have to be at your best every day, in every fight, or you might not live to see the next. Pride, honour, and tenacity - they are admirable traits, but might not be compatible with disability.

What We Can Learn From Lae’zel’s Story

I feel like we see the real downsides and brutality of a society that values only strengths and supports eugenics. Even from not helping eggs that take too long to hatch, they’re losing what could be valuable members of society. It’s a difficult one for most of us in the privileged position to be sat here reading (or writing) this piece to compare to real life, given the very real dangers and war that the Githyanki face are quite far removed from our daily experiences, but it is important to recognise that eugenics and ableism are still quite prevalent in our society. This can even come down to some screenings, or selective genetic testing in advanced IVF procedures that eliminate the natural possibility for children to be born with certain conditions and disabilities. Whilst on the surface this might seem “logical” or even “kind” to wish for children to be “healthy” and abled, but that really devalues the lives of disabled people in our society. Disabled people who have found value and worth in their lives, some of whom have contributed immensely to our society. Granted, not all disabled people will be able to change the world or reach lofty goals, but that doesn’t make their lives any less worthy - plenty of abled people do not have a list of incredible achievements either and we don’t suggest that they should never have been given a chance at life in the first place. And that really is what's vital about speaking out during Disability Pride Month.

How we talk to and about disabled people and our society's attitudes to disability can have a huge impact on those lives. We need to recognise the worth in life beyond what each individual can contribute, and know that a society with compassion, support, and care for all of its members is better and stronger overall.

[nobleelfwarrior]

In response to This post.

I want to establish a few things before I go on.

people can be both oppressor and oppressed because their are different axes of oppression

witches, anthropologically speaking, are a cultural phenomenon where someone, frequently but not exclusively a woman, is blamed for causing misfortune/bad luck.

I am white, so I'm coming at this from a different perspective from the women in the video.

Now, with that out of the way, European women are oppressed on the basis of the sex. When the European witch trials were underway we have evidence that they were targeting

women who were in medicine so that male doctors could force their way into the field.

women who were outspoken or political

women who owned land

women who were "strange". We would now consider these women disabled, homeless, or chronically ill.

The werewolf trials targeted those same women.

This was a femicide and I think it is insensitive to say white women have no claim to a legacy of witchcraft. This is especially true, because, as I mentioned earlier, witches happen in many cultures. In some parts of Africa today there are witch accusations that result in children and women being stoned to death or fleeing their home and family. I know there are other examples in other cultures if you care to look into that. I didn't know about the magic hair beliefs mentioned in the video I linked, but that is also a good example. In the Salem witch trials one of the first women killed was a slave women of Barbados. It is unclear if she is black or indigenous, but the point that white women were not the only targets of witchcraft is true. Any woman could be targets of witchcraft unless she fell in line with what her society demanded of her. If she didn't, if she resisted, then there were multitudinous painful ways to kill her.

Having said all that, there is definitely a discussion to be had about women who claim to be the "daughters of witches you couldn't burn" while also attacking women like Amber Heard or JK Rowling for not falling in line like they "should". I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that these have been modern day witch trial. These women are blamed for all sorts of misfortunes and perceived wrongs because they didn't bow to men. Where stoning and crushing and hanging and burning are now outlawed, internet threats and canceling and doxxing have had to do for a symbolic execution. Also I consider it appropriation if a trans women were to say that.

The witch trials of Europe and the early Americas have been trivialized and appropriated by men. Salem, MA is a tourist destination with haunted tours. Former President Trump called the investigation against him a "witch hunt" despite ample evidence of actual wrong doing. People write stories about the witch who was hung and now haunts the town. The witches are actually magic in the stories, and evil, instead of what they really were: human women that didn't fit with a man's perfect narrative. Women wanting to put the focus back on the misogyny that perpetrated the genocide is not unreasonable.

I had ancestors in the early North American colonies. Those grandmothers of mine didn't live in Salem, but they would have heard. They would have been afraid. I hope they would have been afraid because they didn't want to become smaller and not because of magic, but I don't know. Looking back on the stories I have of those grandmothers, I know they weren't perfect. I know they were racist, just like all the white people then, and I know I'm not perfect either, but I'm trying, and I can see that they were like me: loud, passionate, angry, forces in their own right and if circumstances had been just a little bit different, they would have burned.

I am the daughter of witches they couldn't kill, and so are you.

[anniefebruary]

also bats eyes reptilian blink style. 2 & 5 😈

now these i shall answer while stimming bc i care SO BAD abt these wips. not to say idc abt the other ones but these are near and dear to my heartttt

#2 is a power rangers au of stranger things and its the lore bible for the au that i plan to write fics based off of bc im back in my power rangers hyperfixation era (dare i even say special intrest because. i kept my power rangers knowledge from childhood to this day feel free to ask my opinions)

#5 is fic based on the 2012 movie Chronicle thats SO good and kingsley vanweezer for sure put me on i definitely reccomend watching it

posting snippets under the cut but. does a little dance

#2

The best scientific minds of the time came together to create a type of mobile armor that allows for the wearer to have more of an edge in combat. More agile, more focused, more resistant. Rumors are that the primary creator based each on positive traits when the team behind the devices assumed the users would be young adults. This gimmick wasn’t well known, but as the testing of the devices progressed, having a mindset that matched each device benefitted the user in more of a psychological manner than physical. However, the colors of each device and armor were made to simply keep track of agents and what they possessed. Each device contained a tracker to find the others if they were lost. 

The first agent found was assigned the first device, Red, once he exhibited exceptional abilities in both powers and combat. Therefore, Red was associated with leadership, and Agent One, Henry Creel, was destined to be at the head of the task force along with seven other members. More than seven people were found with strange powers, and the unfortunate motivation for training as many as they could find was for…security, in case the other agents were to be inadequate in combat to the point of, for lack of better phrasing, death. But the agents were trained to avoid that at all costs. Perhaps they were trained too hard.

When Agent Eight, Kali Prasad, escaped, she stole the Purple device to aid her. Of course, since her abilities were tied to altering perception, she took the one colloquially referred to as “Mind” and disabled its tracker. Authorities are still searching for it, but in the meantime, all evidence of her and the stolen device were wiped from the data kept by Hawkins Lab, just to cover their tracks. Training became harder, security became stricter, and Agent One was integrated into said security. 

This was a grave mistake.

#5

Andrew's eyes scanned Steve's face, then flickered his eyes to the ground. "Stop looking at me like that." 

"Like what?" Steve moved his hands back to his sides, but kept the same proximity.

"Like...that." He wanted to say like that sunset we watched, all bright and blinding. Pure radiance. Like I'm worth looking at. 

Steve lowered his brows and head, trying to catch Andrew's eyes. "Do you not...like me looking at you?" he asked cautiously.

Andrew looked up into soft brown eyes. Ever since they'd gone in that cave, he's felt more connected to Matt and Steve. Not in the bonding time way, but in the actual mental link. The more they hung out, the more he could feel the subtle ebb and flow of their feelings; it created a fun feedback loop when they were giddy, but overusing powers had them all reaching for napkins. Right now was no different. Steve was so vulnerable, so earnest that Andrew could feel the slight spike in anxiety in his chest (or was that his own?) yet the cautious adoration in his eyes.

[heartshapedcreaturefromcriptoon]

Like, literally all of them? Go fuck yourself?

"Less representation than Gravity Falls..."

So...

I guess all of the crippled queer kids are just going to have to be okay with Tyrone (strangely appropriative and fetishistic name for the disfigured clone of your 13 y/o white boy character) happily exclaiming something like how he's apparently "Better Off Dead!" when he gets a soda poured on him and destroyed, huh? Oh Wait! I forgot.. That was Paper-Jam Dipper!

Nope. I think crippled queer kids would much rather appreciate Toby and Minty being there just fine. After all, I think that it must be the first time we've ever seen any visible wheelchair users in a Queer Coded Disney Show since Kim Possible. Let alone this queer coded and let alone twice. And they're two separate characters existing at the same time and their presence doesn't even revolve around teaching anyone anything! They're just ALLOWED to EXIST!

Didn't see anything like this in Grabbity Balls though, did see a stereotypical man-ish little girl with a big, deep man-ish voice be implied to have "something wrong with her" by an adult authority figure character who's voiced by the same straight, white, openly anti-black Canadian man that you all have been heralding as the ultimate alley for your fictional LGBTQ+ Cartoon Characters' rights, for some reason.

At least the Star Crew tried to give us this:

Which in my opinion was a bit more forwarded and impactful than some dude bro frat boy "love guru" type character just wearing a bunch of symbols and ornaments around his neck, even if they both didn't get through the censors ... You all know this is way more explicit than that.

Speaking of in your face and explicit Queer Coding:

Golly gee... I wonder why such cute and beefy but shy Little Leather Monster Complete with his own Harness and what appears to be a Gimp Mask just had to be regulated to the back?! So funny how Daron Nefcy literally said Disabled Rights, Trans Rights, and Leather/Kinkster Rights while Alex Hirsch only said Eugenics, "Trans Rights" (if you can pass to him, if he can pronounce your name, and you don't say "bae" ) and of course, let's not forget Cops at Pride, despite how little they could apparently both get away with... :)

... But of course, the last and most important Queer Reading to me in Star vs. :

The whole idea of being forced to be with someone you don't love to the point where you have to take a Secret Lover and elope with them and preserve your own sanity because you're a"Bad Girl" who likes a lot of dirty, kinky things to the point where your own voice actress is herself an open kinkster who likes dirty kinky things and that shows through her fun performance, as well as the canonical writings of this kinky character.

And we're not even getting into all of the WAM and Food Fetish stuff in Star vs. The Forces of Evil but it's there, and it's 'glorious'

And after the show is over ,like the actual Queen of Darkness you are, you gotta go sue your old washed up has-been rock star ex boyfriend for misusing the forces of what he says is kink to abuse you ... Because kink is great actually and he's just evil.

Anyway, Esmé Bianco is amazing.

Don't even get me started on Meteora and the blatant disrespect. Especially after Jessica Walter's passing.

I'm writing this post because I'm just ... So fucking sick of people shitting all over the wonderful representation that Star vs. was able to even achieve in favor of praising Alex Hirsch, every time... When in reality, Star vs. The Forces of Evil has overall better representation and overt, and, as some have even said, both in out the show, literally abject Queerness in it than Hirsch will ever have in whichever eye y'all tried to put the eye-patch on your sexy twink Bill Ciphers only to have Hirsch shit on all that and immediately "fix it" by redesigning it as some disfigured ablest caricature before literally switching over to yet another anti-black one.

Dana broke up with Hirsch for a reason: He's a jerk!

If you think that Daron didn't do a "queer enough" narrative with Star vs. despite it being so by it's nature since day one, despite that being already being promised by it's very nature in it's influence being Sailor Moon and Scott Pilgrim, and if you read the Book of Spells even and still say shit like: "I don't see how Star vs. is QUEER????"

Then like, I'm sorry you can't look a little deeper to find that queerness already everywhere in the narrative all around you and if you actually think that Alex Hirsch ever did Representation TM better than Daron Nefcy, all I can say is that I'm sorry you're like a misogynist with shit taste in men and I'm so glad Dana Terrace is free from her shitty boyfriends shadow now at least.

Saying something even more petty about this because I'm gay: A giant, "Size Shifting", People Eating, Purple Pussy Monster who spends his time in mostly just booty shorts, his Chocolate Fountain Jumping Wife who orgasms when she eats candy and left her arranged marriage so that could have more orgasms, and their Giantess, Purple Pussy Monster of a daughter who sucks the souls out of people and spent most of her life as the Milfier than her own Mom, Terrifying Headmistress of a reform school, where she sucked the life of her own students in a Bathory-uqse fashion, before blowing up her cyborg simp, with his own heart, then probably being able to use the severed arm of her Lizard Cyborg Ex Boyfriend as a make-shift dildo to get a final wank in before ultimately experiencing a growth spurt, losing her mind, and killing everyone ... Will always be more Queer in their very nature, than a floating stale dorito in a top hat and two "gay" cops that are designed to be classicist, racist stereotypes for the sake of the unspoken running "joke" that they could even get along, ever were...

And again... If you're an adult and 'Star Vs.' still isn't enough for you... Then maybe you should STOP looking to cartoons and Disney for your ideal representation and make your own...

I'm done.

[miss-saytr]

You’re a strange specimen of a person.

During a period of time, I wanted to feel your lips against mine as you mispronounced hard English words in your daffodil-coated accent. A week after that, I wanted to punch you in the stomach for making such insensitive assumptions about me. We still talk nonstop and you tell me about something that saved you and I tell you about something that broke me.

I don’t think I ever understood “love-hate relationship” like I do now with you. You’re a bitch at times and you own it, having your own ground on things you are sure you won’t change your mind about. I feel like you’re a princess in a castle who ran away from home, and you have no one to tell you that you’re pretty so you start to believe the harsh things you tell yourself because no one is there to ground you in reality. Like, God damnit, why won’t you just take a compliment instead of insisting you’re such a bad person?

I think the way you write is beautiful and I want to help you grow that. You should consider publishing a fantasy book about children who have no mothers so they find themselves as a family and rescue other children in their position. I think the way you make me see people in a different perspective makes me realize that I can take a deep breath and not be so anxious. I could feel you write yourself into that story you made. I could feel you hug this version of the person who saved your life somewhere in the world when I was just born.

You didn’t have to be so vulnerable around me when you told me about your backstory. You could have kept that to yourself, but no, you used it as fuel to the fire to write so passionately that you forget how an English sentence should be structured. Sometimes I want to do the same thing back, but that’s when your bitch comes out and you have very different things to say about how I handle my depressive episodes in life. And after you’re done being a bitch you apologize to me that it happened and I didn’t deserve it as a person. I wish you could say that to yourself.

Maybe I’m being too judgmental and I just don’t understand or remember that your upbringing made you like this. Maybe I’m just not meant to try so hard to find a way to make you feel comfortable and or relate to you because you’re not from my generation. It’s strangely comfortable to have a friend more than a decade older than me like you. If we disagree on something, I don’t have to worry about you having a serious tantrum and breaking off contact over something minor. If I told you I was going to hurt myself tomorrow, you would spit on my face and call me stupid for even considering it, but then the next day I would catch you coming over and forcefully pull me away from that cliff, purring like a panther to get me to stop.

Maybe I do deserve the bitchy part sometimes. Maybe I do deserve the comforting part sometimes. I have a disability that makes it hard to communicate in the way that I’m actually thinking, so I spew nonsense. Hopefully I don’t use that as an excuse every time I say something awry. I just want to be honest, but the truth is both multiple things and yet nothing at all.

[winterandwords]

🌃 Bridge From Ashes Update: 11 January 2023 (with now traditional bonus doggo content)

Genre: Cyberpunk, neon-noir Audience: Adult Working title: Project Frequency Tags: #bridge from ashes and #project frequency More: WIP summary and tag list

📝 Status

Read through of latest draft complete Guess who actually managed not to look at her book AT ALL for a whole month between drafts for the first time ever? I really struggle with letting projects sit, so that's a huge deal for me. I've spent the last week reading through the most recent draft and it felt so different from times when I've gone back to a WIP after only a week or two. Not quite a reader's eye view, but almost.

✅ Next step

Line editing This is probably my favourite part of the writing process because I adore obsessing over details. I'm really looking forward to getting stuck into it this week.

💜 Feels

I got the fucking 'rona and it kicked the shit out of me. It's still kicking the shit out of me. I don't talk about health stuff much on here and I'm not going to start now, but this has impacted my writing so it's getting a mention. Covid heavily exacerbated a lot of chronic illness/disability crap, my baseline for absolutely everything has been obliterated, and the most irritating part is the cognitive impairment. I can handle my body being more useless than usual, but I'm kind of attached to being able to do things with my brain.

I've adapted to living with some cognitive impairment all the time anyway because of ongoing neurological shit, but covid has taken it to new levels and it's frustrating as hell. It took me a week to read a 71k draft of BFA. I wasn't casually looking at it here and there. This was big effort. I haven't been able to write anything new on either of my other WIPs and I've had to abandon the extremely flexible low-pressure schedule I'd created for the next few months of writing.

The only thing making this less annoying right now is that line editing is a slow close-up activity anyway, so even though I most likely won't be able to work on it the way I usually would, at least I shouldn't feel as held back as I might if I was doing something that usually moves faster.

✍ Snippet

Inside, he says, “This is your home?” and nudges an empty bottle with his foot into a pile of more empty bottles. “This is where I sleep.” I lock the door behind us and drop my coat on the couch. Suddenly I have no idea where to put myself and I’m acutely aware of the history of that coat. What it meant to him, what it meant to me then and what it means to me now. “Turn on the lights,” he says. “I’d rather not.” “I wasn’t asking.” In some ways, we’re still the same people we were the last time we saw each other. Our past together, as brief as it was, still lives in the way we speak to each other and there’s a strange comfort in how that hasn’t changed, even if so much else has. I tell the lights to come on. Cold eyes sweep across the room. “Apparently this is where you drink.” “I drink in other places too. This is the only place I sleep.”

👀 Bonus bits

Shadow being an absolute brat. I told her to stay in her nest (cleaning was going on and she'd been 'helping') and you can see the "Well, technically..." going on here, complete with too-cute-to-be-pissed-off-at face.

💜 Tag list

Thanks for your support and encouragement! Comment or message me to be added or removed.

@drabbleitout @ezestreet @i-can-even-burn-salad @kaiusvnoir @manathen @thegreatobsesso

[jankwritten]

You can say tsats has bad writing but you are purposely being obtuse when you say nothing from will’s narration shows how much he cares for nico. first of all why are you limiting attraction to just physical features? (and will does compliment on Nico’s features btw 🙄). will mainly compliments Nico by who he is as a person but is horrible because he didnt talk about nicos hair? And how was will there to “baby” and “heal” nico when the majority of the time they were in the underworld will was weak/suffering and NICO was the one having to help him?? Nico LITERALLY took care of Will more than vice versa. And when did Will ever say he is not comfortable around nico di Angelo?? WHAT?

1) I haven’t personally finished the book yet, so most of my interpretation on Will’s narration is from the people around me who have finished the book/made it further than I have. I’ve only made it through 1 of Will’s POV chapters. Could come out of this agreeing with you, though I don’t think I will.

2) I didn’t mean to say that Will’s narration makes it sound as if he doesn’t care about Nico AT ALL (if that is actually something I said). From what I’m hearing from those around me who have finished the book however, it often feels as if Will is insensitive to a lot of things about Nico, which is strange considering they’re a couple meant to be a year into their relationship. I didn’t say Will was horrible for not talking about Nico’s hair, I meant it’s strange that Will seems to constantly step on Nico’s toes and doesn’t seem to have a lot of care for Nico’s feelings with some of the things he says (which, I’d the book was going for that, then fine, but I don’t think it was)

3) Nico di Angelo should not be struggling this hard in the environments this book puts him in, even in the context of him struggling with his mental health and reliving his traumas. A specific example of this is how the demon who was cursing him and Will with nightmares when they first enter the underworld somehow manages to COMPLETELY render Nico useless during their fight, meanwhile Will randomly unlocks an ULTRA POWERFUL new ability that lowkey doesn’t make sense. Nico is an extraordinarily strong demigod who has proven time and time again he can hold his own against gods and titans, a demigod who doesn’t run away from a battle, and yet in TSATS, as far as I’ve seen, he’s not had that same Vibe.

4) the PJO series is based around the characters and their disabilities. For Nico’s powers and trauma to have been dialed ALL the way back to what it was in TSATS, it starts to feel like the narrative is purposely weakening Nico to make him seem more “damaged” and traumatized. That’s infantalizing.

Also - Will babying Nico can be seen in his reluctance to let Nico use his powers, as if he knows what’s better for Nico than Nico knows himself. When I say babying, I don’t mean “who is taking care of the other more”, I mean who is treating the other more like that person can’t take care of THEMSELF. And, from what I’m hearing from those I trust, Will (and largely the narrative itself) is CONSTANTLY making it seem as if Nico can’t take care of himself.

5) isn’t the literal whole premise of the book Will coming to terms with being uncomfortable in the underworld, which is a MASSIVE part of who Nico is? Isn’t the whole thing based around the idea of Will having to come to terms with the fact Nico has “darkness” in him, and that Will has some of that darkness too? Will is explicitly uncomfortable with parts of Nico that make up a big chunk of who he is. Like that’s a HUGE part of the book.

(Apologies if this is incoherent, I just woke up and am writing this on my phone. If I get further in the book and realize I’m wrong, 🤷 cool. However, from what I’m hearing, I don’t think I will be)

[magpies-gold]

I have both eyes and they're both technically functional but I still relate to a lot of this because I also have monocular vision. In my case, the problem is with my brain, actually. It can only process images from one eye at a time because of a defect when I was born that required surgical intervention. Even after the fix, my brain just never learned that I still had two eyes, so it has no capacity to combine the image data like normal people do. As a result, I have no depth perception and I have a dominant eye that I use 90% of the time.

I also have visual snow that's especially noticeable when I close my eyes and at night in the dark, but as there isn't a lot of research on visual snow, I'm not sure if that's related or coincidental. In case people want to know a bit more about life as a person with monocular vision in a two-eyeballs kind of situation: I have a weird trick that I can do that seems to astound folks with binocular vision: I can consciously switch eyes. It's like flexing a muscle and I can decide to use the left one or the right in the same way that I can choose to wave my left or right hand. Trying to use both at the same time just doesn't work, though. If I really try, there's just this pressure feeling in my head, like I'm trying to imagine a colour that doesn't exist, but I can't make the two work together at all. This is likely just a me thing but my non-dominant eye is much worse than my dominant eye, and its been getting worse over the course of my life. It's still useful, but extremely near-sighted, so much so that it alone is legally blind and makes my optometrist and all their staff wince. But I can read very, very tiny close-up writing with it, so it comes in handy when I'm doing things like reading. My dominant eye is a little near sighted but not much. It's pretty stable. Also probably just a me thing: I have one lazy eye, but it relates to the monocular vision. It's my dominant one. If I use the non-dominant eye, you can actually tell when I've switched to it because my dominant eye "switches off" and rolls a little bit up and out. It was worse when I was a kid (my mom saying "Meghan, are you looking at me?" was a common thing) but it still happens nowadays. My non-dominant eye isn't lazy, so when I'm looking around normally with my dominant eye you can't tell that there's anything different about me than your average Joe. It's a mostly invisible disability for me (and I still feel strange calling it a disability because it's just how I've always seen, and yet here I am making a list of complexities regarding my vision, so....) A final possibly-just-me thing is that I hold my pencil like a space alien and always have. The reasoning I've given since I was a kid was because of which eye I use, I wouldn't be able to see what the end of my pencil was doing if I were holding it "correctly", so I draw and write like this:

(Video here, if you want to see the rest of that: https://www.tumblr.com/magpies-gold/699322866172346368?source=share) Can confirm from the above that head-tilt is a thing when one has monocular vision, even with two eyes. Because of the head tilt, I also get people startling me on my non-dominant side a lot, possibly because with my "blind" side tilted back and away from what I'm looking at, they think I'll see them sooner since that eye is closer to looking behind me. Therefore they don't think they're sneaking up on me. That is, right up until they appear, as if by magic, in my field of vision and I go AAAA!

Depth perception problems that I personally encounter: I don't drive so I don't have a lot to add there except that trying to learn scared me too much to proceed. I was not comfortable with how much slower my reaction time was on my left side or how I couldn't accurately judge where exactly objects in front of me were, so I gave it up in my teenage years in favour of a good pair of sneakers and a transit pass. But I will loudly say that going down stairs sucks. I am very opinionated on how much I love and appreciate when stairs have the bright yellow stripe at the edge, or some other marker to aim for. If stairs are all one uniform colour I am hesitant as hell putting my feet down because I can't tell how far a drop it is. I'm slow on descents on unfamiliar stairs and I desperately need the railing to hold on to. Going up stairs isn't bad because I have other visual cues to help me, and I'm much faster there. I also don't do well on really uneven terrain, like the rocky shores we have on beaches here. Watching my fiancé go hopping and skipping over rocks like a mountain goat gives me light wistful despair because I know if I tried that I would miscalculate almost immediately and break all my bones. My tactic is to get low and go slow if I have to cross anything where distances get tricky to guesstimate. I become a crab. I also have friends who know to slow down and will also let me hold their hand (bless). I do have peripheral vision ghosts on the non-dominant side even with two eyes. The most common thing I see is ghost cats. I'll see my cat jump up on a counter in my peripheral vision only to turn and find nothing there. Sometimes my brain will also suggest there might be a person walking in my peripheral vision. It's just overcompensating for what it has to fill in the blanks on. I can't catch things that are thrown at me except by sheer luck. Sports like baseball and badminton were brutal in high school and I got into many a verbal confrontation with my teacher while trying to explain that I had a very good reason to be afraid of the projectile coming for my face. I told him more than once to go close one eye and try it for himself and see what it's like. No peeking! I can't peek. Similarly, I can't fly a drone. I learned that very quickly when I accidentally flew Tim's full tilt into a wall. Oops. >> Drone was okay. I, on the other hand, was absolutely boggled by how I just could not tell where it was in space until boom, I'd crashed it. And that's because another thing is that I was personally born the way that I am, so I'm fully acclimated to it. I know nothing else, and I don't notice all the micro calculations that I do to translate my 2D view into 3D space so that I can move around in it. At least, I don't until I have a situation where the object I'm working with suddenly has no context, like a drone in mid-air, and then I suddenly notice my limitations. 3D movies largely don't work for me. They're basically just regular 2D movies involving stupid glasses. -shrug- Finally, video games with a lot of icons around the edges of the screen are a nightmare for me because I can't see all of my monitor at once. Again: slow as balls reaction time because I have to re-calibrate and turn my head a lot. The concept of a wide-screen monitors makes me go "Jesus, why?"

writing advice for characters with a missing eye: dear God does losing an eyes function fuck up your neck. Ever since mine crapped out I've been slowly and unconsciously shifting towards holding my head at an angle to put the good eye closer to the center. and human necks. are not meant to accommodate that sorta thing.

[darkdelilahdays]

[SYSTEM LOGIN]

Username: DarkDelilahDays Password: ********** >> Accessing Profile >>>> LOADING... >>>> LOADING... >>>> ERROR: Glitch detected... ACCESS GRANTED.

[WELCOME TO MY SYSTEM]

Name: Jax Age: 23 Status: throuple [bf+gf] Orientation: pan/ace ID: Creative, Queer, Chaotic

[SYSTEM PREFERENCES]

Likes: anime, rainy days, drawing + painting, living in creativity mode

Dislikes: the cold, people (mostly)

[SAFE ZONE ACTIVE] This is a safe space for LGBTQ+, POC, and Disabled communities. If you’re MAP/minor-attracted, LGBTQ+ phobic, racist, ableist, sexist, anti-stoner, anti-age regression, or just a sh*tty person, DO NOT INTERACT.

[USER FILE] >>> SYSTEM BIOGRAPHY

I’m trans and use art & writing as my main methods of expression. I’ve created this space to be a safe replacement for my old vent page. If you want to find my previous profile, check out @jax-does-life.

I use age regression to cope with anxiety, depression, and general mental health needs. If you need someone to vent to, I’m here. DMs are open (I may be slow, but I’m listening).

[KIN DATABASE]

Haruhi Fujioka (Ouran High School Host Club) – Adaptable, true to self

Chihiro (Danganronpa) – Gentle but strong

Kenma (Haikyuu) – Introverted strategist

Kirishima (BNHA) – Loyal, unbreakable

Eugene (Underworld Office) – Reflective, a bit haunted

Denki (BNHA) – Chaotic, electric energy

Nagisa & Karma (Assassination Classroom) – Compassionate, cunning

Envy (FMAB) – Complex, misunderstood

[VISITOR NOTICE] >>> System Notes

If you’re here to vibe, talk anime, vent, or get lost in some late-night rambling, welcome. This profile is dedicated to healing, honesty, and keeping the shadows at bay.

>>> Log Out? NO. On a more serious note, Starting Fresh:

It feels a little strange to be starting over. I still Have access to my other account if I really want, but its just… a dead account ya know? I haven't posted on it since 2022, I don't roleplay anymore because of the death of a friend, so the side profile is dead; a friend made me that account in 2015, nearly a decade ago. I'm emotionally attached to that account, but I think it's time to start fresh. I have changed as a person, I have changed as a poster, my online presence isn't like it once was. Most of the accounts I loved on my other page are also dead and gone, with hundreds of accounts with only maybe a handful active. There's just so much junk and trash on that account.

I haven't been on here in a long time… and frankly, Tumblr drags up some pretty shitty memories, but the app, Vent Express yourself, is being shut off on Monday, so I'm moving back here. Other socials don't allow me to vent and talk about the negative the way I want to, the way Tumblr and Vent allow me to. That and I prefer smaller communities over larger ones, and tumble is, well, let's face it, not many people's first choice in social media.

Im not sure how much I'll actually post on this account or how often I'll repost things, but hey, I'm back. I think I'm gonna use it as more of a blog that I write on and less of a blog I repost to. I kinda plan to post the same kinds of things I would on vent. Having said that if you're interested I also have an account to talk about my gorgeous beautiful stunning partners @writteninembers and will make more in the future probably

[cripplecharacters]

I want to write more disabled characters but my story takes place in the 60s… so far it hasn’t been an issue because the disabilities included would historically either be undiagnosed, kept secret, belong to characters already at the fringes of society, etc

I really want a specific character to have Down’s syndrome but it’s not the sort of story that would at all be benefited from the inclusion of an institution. For personal reasons, I don’t want to touch that. I’ve been writing him with just undiagnosed autism that’s left him socially outcast from his peers. The most extreme his ableism gets is being seen as the local weird girl (as he’s a closeted trans man)

The story is decently realistic for what the queer and intersex characters would experience, imagining doing the same for disability feels bad… at least, to the level of ableism someone with Down’s syndrome would experience. His parents are notably shitty, rich, and care more about their reputation than their kids so I don’t see a way he wouldn’t get that treatment.

Is there a way I can still write this or similar characters without delving into heavy ableism? What are your thoughts on historical stories that ignore or downplay historical ableism?

Thanks, @interroblog

Hello asker,

I'll start first with a small note: It's better to write Down Syndrome as opposed to the possessive Down's Syndrome, since John Langdon Down didn't have DS.

So, with this story there is one general concern:

It feels strange to depict period-accurate intersexism and transphobia and homophobia as core parts of the story, but downplaying ableism when it's as period-accurate as the other -isms. In this case, it can definitely feel like you're glossing over a very relevant part of history that would have been part of your story. Yes, queer and intersex people have faced some really difficult things and still do. But the same is true for disabled people. Ignoring this can feel revisionist.

If you're going for a very realistic story, but you don't want to write ableism at all, it is probably better to just skip the DS aspect. People with DS have faced some truly intense ableism throughout history (and they still do), as people who have intellectual disability and facial and physical differences, two things that lead to some pretty intense ableism from many, many people. It's fine to not do this if you're not comfortable writing ableism, but again, intense ableism was widespread and common.

However, if the only thing holding you back is institutionalization: Not every single person with Down Syndrome was institutionalized. Yes, it was very common, and would probably be thought about, suggested, and even encouraged. But not everyone institutionalized their children with DS, for various reasons.

If you want him to still have that type of parents, perhaps the reason they don't institutionalize him is in fact for the benefit of their reputation. Maybe they want to be seen as 'saintly' for raising a visibly disabled child or something – still shitty, still caring about their reputation more than their actual kids, like you intended; there is just a different outcome.

Now, to my personal thoughts on historical stories that ignore or downplay ableism, as someone who loves historical fiction: It depends on how historically accurate the story in general both is and aims to be. But I don't like stories that completely ignore ableism, especially the more realistic they aim to be. It feels like glossing over history. Even modern stories that completely ignore ableism I don't like. I still recognize that downplaying historical ableism can be a useful tool for authors, especially for disabled authors' own comfort. And, also, while ableism was very common in the past, it doesn't mean every disabled person ever always faced the worst possible ableism ever.

Basically: you, and other authors, can acknowledge historical ableism accurately without making it the main point and focus of the story. But if your focus is a story specifically about discrimination, which it seems like it is, it feels irresponsible to gloss over an extremely common and pervasive form of discrimination.

Hope this helps,

– mod sparrow

[felinedetached]

Fandom Ableism in the MCYT Community

[Edited 14 June 2021]

One thing I’ve noticed about the MCYT (Dream SMP, specifically) community on both Tumblr and Twitter is that when informed of things that are ableist, or harmful to ND people, a lot of people ignore the post/tweet, derail it or actively fight against it.

“I’m ND so I can’t be ableist” is a common statement, which is blatantly untrue. Even I’ve used ableist terms and phrases before, without realising they were harmful. So as a neurodivergent person, with autism, BPD, depression/anxiety, dyslexia, psychosis & brain damage*: here’s some common ableist things both CCs and fandom say almost constantly**.

*note that not every neurodivergent person will agree with me on these, but these are commonly ableist things people have previously talked about online, and/or have been discussed between me and other neurodivergent friends. No minority can ever speak for the entire group.

**note that a lot of these are common outside the MCYT community as well, and that some of these are just considered societally acceptable. This isn’t okay, but it explains why a lot of people don’t recognise jokes or comments like these are wrong, and it means that it’s not a direct moral failing of people that they don’t immediately or directly recognise these comments as wrong.

Now, let’s get into the things you might not have realised are potentially ableist:

1. Use of “Psychopath/Psycho/Sociopath/Schizo” and other demeaning terms for people with mental illnesses as insults, or to describe characters who are considered villainous. Psychopath/Psycho/Sociopath are already terms that people with ASPD dislike using, even not as an insult, but using these terms to describe people or characters who you disagree with or see as villainous only contributes to the villainisation of people with ASPD and other mental illnesses. Using c!Dream as an example: Dream as a character is not confirmed to have any of these mental illnesses. He is, however, commonly labeled as psychotic/psychopathic, incapable of any kind of compassion.

He is also a character that fandom largely insists that nobody is allowed to sympathise with. This is a huge issue, and has hurt a lot of people, especially people with low empathy, or mental illnesses that cause them to relate to some of c!Dream’s actions (e.g. pulling away from all his friends, desperately grasping at straws to gain control of situations etc). Insisting that these characters are characters it’s impossible to sympathise with, all while calling them psychotic/psychopathic/sociopathic, is extremely harmful, and I hope this post draws attention to that.

Here’s another post that talks about that.

2. Use of the term “freak”, in general. As an insult, “freak” has been typically used to insult neurodivergent people, people with visible physical disabilities (ex. “freakshow”, and the term was reportedly created with the intent of insulting people with physical disabilities), or people who display any kind of abnormal/atypical social behaviour/physical aspects — people who are usually ND people who lack a diagnosis or people with physical disabilities. Recent usage has come to mean “people who do things that hurt other people”, but this is harmful as well; using words like “freak” or “weirdo” which mean “socially atypical behaviour” to refer to people who are actually doing things that hurt other people conflates the two, and often has a side effect of hurting disabled people who see it.

3. Calling ND ccs like Technoblade monotone/emotionless. While the term “monotone” isn’t ableist in and of itself, the fact that it’s being used against a neurodivergent man who emotes in a different way to neurotypical people rubs a lot of ND people the wrong way. I’ve partially discussed this here, in a tweet responding to a person who said that c!Technoblade, quote, “has no human capabilities like emotion for example”. This, however, is not something contained to c!Technoblade — one of the most common jokes in this fandom is how rare it is to hear emotion in Technoblade’s voice.

The issue with that is that neurodivergent people almost universally agree that Technoblade emotes perfectly fine, and, in fact, emotes more freely and clearly than a lot of others do. Hence, calling him monotone perpetuates the idea of ND people as emotionless/less able to be hurt/less expressive, which often hurts us. It also contributes to the dehumanisation of ND people — related to how ND symptoms are most often seen in robots or monsters in shows — and is generally extremely harmful, on top of being untrue.

4. Related to point 3: the infantilisation of ND ccs like Tubbo and Dream, usually paired with assigning “caretakers” of their friends, like Tommy and George. This is about the posts that spread like “omg, Tommy helps Tubbo with his dyslexia, that’s so cute” or “omg George is so patient with Dream, I could never sit through that” on videos of Dream vocally stimming because of his ADHD. This is another post that talks about this, but I wanted to talk more about why this is harmful here.

4a) With Tubbo’s dyslexia, from someone with dyslexia, it isn’t harmful to correct his spelling and move on. Personally, I think this is helpful — others will think it’s condescending, because not all ND people are the same — but as the above linked post mentions, this is not what Tubbo’s twitch chat does. This is not what the comments say. It’s all things about how it’s “so cute” that Tubbo can’t spell, how Tommy/Ranboo are “so patient” with correcting him. This is rooted in the need to constantly watch over ND people while acting like we can't live our lives without someone having us under constant vigilance. It feels like savior-complex ableism, like people are trying so hard to not be ableist that they spin back around to hurting us instead. And it feels like we are being treated like children. Like we are lesser than, and need to be monitored/watched over.

4b) Similarly to what people do with Tubbo, the comments on posts about Dream’s vocal stimming are often full of people calling George “patient” for “dealing with it”, or claiming they “wouldn’t be able to handle it”. This is inherently ableist. They’re praising George for basic human decency towards ND people, and claiming in the same breath that they wouldn’t be able to do that themselves. And then there’s these.

These comments infantilise Dream — claiming he “wouldn’t be able to stop/calm down” without George’s help, implying he’d “spiral out of control” or claiming “everyone is now my child”. It’s all related to the infantilisation of ND people, and the belief that without help/a caretaker we cannot take care of ourselves.

5. The way people treat ccs who likely have undiagnosed neurodivergencies, like Wilbur. Wilbur has openly admitted on stream before that his parents considered getting him an autism diagnosis. He also openly admits on stream that he has habits he doesn’t understand why he does, and hyperfixates on things for months at a time and doesn’t know why. Posts like this have gone around Tumblr, in which Wilbur displays blatantly ND traits.

And fandom generally calls him weird for expressing those traits. This video where he talks about eating sand because he likes the texture? That’s an ND trait. This video where he talks about his irrational hatred for anteaters? While mostly a joke, irrational hatred of something when you can’t explain/understand/articulate why is also a common ND trait. He spends 20 minutes during a Philza stream info-dumping about self-sustaining ecosystems (sharing the photo, because I think it’s really cool) and fandom begins calling them “Wilbur’s weird jars”. It’s demeaning to people who infodump, and as a ND person who hyperfixates and infodumps it’s really upsetting to see. It’s also upsetting to see other ND traits being called “weird” or “freaky” & made out to be soley some funny joke for NT people to laugh at us about.

Additionally: It’s strange to me that people think it’s okay to make fun of ND traits just because they know that or perceive that the person they’re making fun of is NT. It’s still making fun of ND traits. It’s still insulting ND people. It’s still ableist as hell. Why is it okay just because the person is NT?

6. Implying that c!Ranboo’s enderwalking is inherently violent. Ranboo has shown us time and time again that the enderwalk state isn’t a violent state. That the enderwalk state isn’t a seperate version of c!Ranboo that does horrific things. Why, then, is it so common to imply that Ranboo would be violent and hurt people why he’s enderwalking?

It comes back to the perception of c!Ranboo as a character with “two halves”, or as a character with DID. Ranboo has made it clear that his character does not have DID, but this headcanon about his character persists, and it persists in a way that is directly harmful to people with DID — and to people who dissociate or sleepwalk. We do not commit horrific acts while we dissociate, while we’re sleepwalking, because the majority of the time we’re just checked out, our body is on autopilot. Insinuating that we do is harmful. Insinuating that Ranboo has “another half” that’s inherently violent or evil is harmful to people with DID. I’m not going to ask you to stop writing these headcanons etc, but please consider the effect you have on people before you do.

7. Related to point 6: the perception of c!Ranboo as “soft” and “cute” and/or perfectly moral because of his canonical anxiety. This is really harmful, and comes once again from the infantilisation of disorders like anxiety and depression. Ranboo has made clear time and time again that his character isn’t moral, and in fact is extremely inconsistent. He’s portrayed his character as inconsistent, as someone who hurts his friends unintentionally and often due to his want to please everyone, and yet he’s constantly seen as “soft/pure/the only moral one” because of his anxiety causing to have repeated and consistent spirals on-screen. These spirals are not healthy. They don’t indicate his “perfect morals” or make him more moral than anyone else on the SMP. Please stop infantilising people with anxiety, it’s really hurtful.

8. Implying that c!Technoblade is inherently a violent person because of his voices. I’ll admit here: my hallucinations are visual. I do not get auditory hallucinations, and I cannot speak for people who do. But many people have spoken out about this, and discussed how talking about Technoblade as an inherently violent character because of his voices is harmful, and a stereotype of people with schizophrenia.

Technoblade’s character is, in and of itself, inherently a stereotype (despite the fact that his chat are more likely to be a supernatural entity than a symptom of a disorder such as schizophrenia) in that the idea of “hearing voices that encourage violence” is a stereotype of people with schizophrenia. As an actual symptom, is a very uncommon one. More common auditory hallucinations for people with schizophrenia or psychosis are, reportedly, whispers or unrelated conversation. One of my friends hears screaming.

But the issue is with the implication that c!Technoblade is “driven to violence” by the voices. Canonically, he has dealt with the “bloodlust” of chat by grinding withers. He’s perfectly capable of being peaceful, even with “voices pushing for violence”, and he’s perfectly capable of being violent without the “voices” influence. It’s the connotations and the history that fandom has in demonising and villainising c!Technoblade for even having the “voices” in the first place, and acting having them makes him inherently violent and unstable. There’s precedent for that already in society, and it’s not okay to perpetuate it.

[Edit: as of 22/05/2021, I do experience auditory hallucinations, and I can confirm that I am not any more violent, and the voices I hear don’t push me to violence. The clearest one just said ‘click’ in my ear.]

9. Jokes about brain damage and the use of “brainrot” as a term. I made a post about how common jokes about brain damage are here, and I would like to reiterate bits of it.

Jokes like these are really really normalized in modern society. I’m sure a lot of you didn’t even register it as wrong, and that isn’t a moral failing! It’s a norm in society, and that means the majority of people arent going to register it as something hurtful, because it’s said so often. But it does still hurt. The idea of using a disability as an insult is really harmful and it feels dehumanizing, like our disability makes us lesser, something that should be laughed at.

“Brainrot” as a term originated in Skyrim, as a disease that literally rotted your brain. However, as a term, it has very similar connotations to “brain damaged” and has been used in similarly joking and insulting ways. It’s something that feels really off to me and other neurodivergent people to see used by neurotypical people. It even sometimes feels uncomfortable when used by neurodivergent people, even if it’s used in positive ways. I know quite a few people who have removed it from their vocab completely because of the connotations, and I have personally done the same. Once again, I am just asking you to please consider your words before you use them.

10. Calling c!Wilbur during his Pogtopia Arc “Vilbur”. Yes, he was a villain. Yes, he hurt people. But c!Wilbur during the Pogtopia Arc only has one major difference from c!Wilbur during the L’Manburg Arc: a visible depiction of mental illness, specifically paranoia and psychosis. Treating him as a seperate person and calling that seperate person “Vilbur” comes across as extremely hurtful, and contributes to the villainisation of mentally ill people. His mental illness does not excuse him from hurting people, but calling c!Wilbur “Vilbur” upsets a lot of us, because wether or not it’s intended, it feels reductive, hurtful, and insulting.

If you got to the end of this post, thank you so much for reading. I hope that this helped you recognise things that you might not have known were ableist, and that you consider what I’ve said here. I also know that I haven’t addressed everything ableist that’s spread through the MCYT fandom community, so if you’re ND and have something you’d like to add, please feel free.

[monstercollection]

I want to talk about some of my feelings about John Seward. I tried writing a post about it before and deleted it after giving it some more thought, but I’m going to try again.

Background: I’ve worked in group homes with people with various combinations of neurodivergence, mental illness and disability for 10 years and am ND, disabled and mentally ill myself.

CW: Modern Institutions, institutionalization of Autistic people, abuse of disabled children mentioned briefly.

Seward as autistic is a really hard headcannon for me to grapple with because autistic people have been institutionalized at high rates for as long as asylums existed.

Is it possible an autistic guy with fewer needs could run an asylum that likely held at least some autistic people who are high needs/have behaviors? Sure, I guess but we never see Seward doing anything but perpetrate the problems in that system.

This is not going to be the first time we see him go out of his way to trigger and escalate Renfield. I’m not going to give any major spoilers here, but this isn’t an isolated incident.

It’s also hard for me to grapple with “compared to the practices of the time, he’s progressive,” because these were not just the standards of his time. These are standards that have stretched right through the present day. This is stuff that still goes on.

I’ve been in direct care for 10 years and I work for an agency that formed when whistleblowers started opening about about what was going on in Massachusetts’ institutions in the 80s. A lot of these whistleblowers and people who formerly worked in institutions now the company and they have shared some absolute horror stories about things that were standard practices.

I teach self-advocacy curriculum that focuses on the history of the disability rights movement and we talk about this a lot. We go into the history of institutions and the people I’m educating are always shocked to hear just how recent this stuff is. It’s all within their lifetime.

We still have the Judge Rottenberg center in MA that uses things like electric shock adversives to punish autistic kids (and the most horrific thing is that many of these kids’ own parents have gone to court to defend that practice).

This is my third time reading through Dracula. And I’m not going to expect people who haven’t read the book to take my word for why you shouldn’t like Seward or why he is bad or any of that. You’re along for the ride and you get to enjoy these characters however you want. You aren’t problematic or bad for having your own take, you’re just doing your own literary interpretation and that’s cool.

But I’m always going to empathize more with the actual disabled and mentally ill patients (esp, here Renfield) in the institution than I am the asylum guy. This includes people (again, like Renfield in this book) with challenging behaviors or the rare few who have physical aggression (this is the population I worked with in group homes for years and they are no less deserving of proper, compassionate care, dignity and autonomy than anyone else).

But I like… I can’t help but wonder what the Seward fans would think about the practices at the now shuttered Danvers State Mental Hospital (where some of my coworkers came from and where several of the individuals we serve once lived) or even the notorious Willowbrook Institutions. Those were “the standards of the 1980s”.

I don’t mean that in an accusatory way. Most people straight up do not know about this stuff. I just think it shifts the perspective to know the history of all this is a lot more recent . But I also think it’s strange that we would judge people in the 1980s a lot more harshly than they would people doing the exact same thing in the 1890s, and we might want to examine why that is.

We expect things in the Victorian Era to be bad because we have the idea that time is a steady march toward progress and that people in the past were always more ignorant than we are, so we kind of hand wave things. That breaks down when we actually look at our recent history.

The disabled and mentally ill people of the Victorian Era knew just how horrible life in asylums were. Restrictive environments where you had no personal autonomy, no consent of consent, where adversives were used on the regular (and I haven’t even touched on conversion therapy and the roles institutions played there) —these environments were hell. When you say “people didn’t understand back then,” that’s not true. Disabled and mentally ill people knew. It was just a matter of people not listening.

And that was not just true back then. It’s true today.

So yeah, I come at Seward with a lot of biases. I’m writing a book right now with him as the secondary villain so clearly I do not love the guy.

I respect everyone’s right to head-cannon what they want and make him your eeby-deeby and all. This is a fun internet book club and we’re all just here to have a good time.

But I just kind of had to respond to some of those takes because I think a lot of them come from a place of little understanding of the role of institutions played in the struggle for disability rights, especially for autistic people and I think it’s an important part of the conversation.

Edit:

I wanted to clarify something because it is coming up in people’s responses to this. “Seward is Autistic” is absolutely a valid take and I’m not saying it isn’t possible for an autistic guy to run an asylum, or that it would automatically mean he couldn’t be ableist if he did.

My personal discomfort with that head cannon is that I don’t really like storylines where a marginalized person is blamed for their oppression of their group (ex: the homophone is secretly gay). This is purely down to personal preference.

I think a lot of autistic, anxious and general ND people are claiming him as one of their own because he is presented as one of the stories heroes and they like seeing themselves in that. And that’s kind of the point of fandom.

Everybody’s going to filter him through the lens of their own experiences. This is just mine.

[gerrydelano]

Recently I've been thinking about writing a fic where a character is very suddenly injured and becomes disabled (something with the knee most likely), and I was wondering if you had any tips on how to write this respectfully. I have a cognitive disability and some minor physical stuff, but nothing to the same degree as what I want to write, and you always handle disability very well in your writing. (I'm thinking around the same injury severity as Jon's in tsp)

hey hey! first off, sorry this took a couple days, it's - surprise - the disabilities LOL. second, ahhh! i have a strangely warm feeling about this ask, so i'm happy to help however i can.

there's actually not too much to say! i've already written a big long meta about incorporating disability into writing, but i don't know how much of that one answers your questions, so i'll give an updated rundown on some more thoughts i know i've had pretty recently, too! you unlocked a really happy infodump, i actually love this topic so much and am very passionate about it so i'm excited to share!

the first question you should always ask yourself is "for whose sake are you telling this story?" ren talked about that concept in an ask about writing abuse dynamics, but the concept still stands. if you're telling the story of somebody else, you have to first ask yourself Why you think you should, what good is going to come of it, and be conscious of internal biases that may creep through it if you're not careful.

examine your work for trends or subconscious intention of writing disability for angst/whump purposes, so that someone else can cuddle the poor baby who got hurt and make them all better. one of the tag replies on this recent post talks about it some from the perspective of disabled people who see it in media, and how frustrating that can be! it's really painful sometimes, to see something that you live with and cannot take off at will be used as fuel to either get somebody off (really happens), or push the idea that love will cure you if you're lucky enough to find someone who doesn't mind that you're sick or hurt.

that is 100% bullshit! love and support are MASSIVELY important components to any healing process, yes, but it is Not a cure-all and should never be treated as the answer to any of this. someone approving of or loving you despite What You Lack is not romantic, it's not healthy, it's not okay to push. that's the top thing i'd warn you away from, personally.

also, don't get super graphic about the injury, necessarily? you say you were thinking maybe the severity of jon's knee injury in TSP, which is a pretty standard dislocation where most of the damage came from compression of nerves and tendons when it got stuck out of place. i honestly was scared of going too hard on that one even just by saying he could see the misalignment through his pants! that's my own nerves, but i can say looking back it wasn't actually that bad all things considered and you should be safe describing the most obvious sensory details if it comes up.

it's the grieving period after that matters most, i think. handling that with care is important, which means being honest without going too far, OR sanitizing it to a saintly degree.

when you get hurt like this, you DO grieve the things you used to be capable of that you might not be anymore. it's an adjustment! it's changing the way you live your life. even if you somehow managed to undo every ounce of internalized ableism you can and don't devalue yourself because of it, the limitations WILL be frustrating and at times painful. missing opportunities, needing accommodation that may or may not even be accessible, new hoops to jump through with doctors or transportation or seating at shows or events, all of that can weigh you down.

example: i had to bring my rollator to a wedding recently, which is a walker with wheels and a seat (which is very annoying to get on planes, might i add.) it wasn't my family! but i had to sit in the front row on the very edge, next to the bride's 86 year old grandfather who was Also sitting on his walker. being only 25 and already thinking that some people there might be looking at me sideways for needing the same accommodations as an 86 year old man, that i was making a "big deal" out of it just by being there, was something i had to work through in my head and get used to. it was a beautiful wedding! and not a single soul was unkind to me. but the little comparisons you make in your head when it's you, when you feel like you're being scrutinized, DO matter and exist.

so, consider what changes your character has to make to their life! what mobility aids might they use? cane, crutches, walker, rollator, wheelchair. how often? in what circumstances?

a lot of people who use mobility/stability aids are partial users! many of them can stand or walk or shuffle short distances, or even moderate ones, but keep their mobility aids nearby for emergency or precautionary purposes. i personally keep my rollator in my car for when i go to unfamiliar places when i'm not sure if i'll be able to sit down on short notice, but i don't need it around the house or on small errands to places i frequent enough to feel confident in. recently, i haven't even been taking it out at all! and i'm about to have spine surgery in two weeks. you have good days and bad days.

more examples: my latest chapter of PBR had a lot of focus on jon and adelard's respective disabilities and how strenuous activity pushed them to and past certain limits, which impacted the "action" scenes quite a bit!

that's something a lot of writers do feel worried about when they consider giving their characters a disability. some will even erase or lighten up the limitations they've previously established for convenience so that their character can get through an action scene that they technically shouldn't. of course you want your character to at least SURVIVE! so, find another way to get them through it that doesn't involve magically being healed for about an hour while shit is hitting the fan.

like i said in that older disability post, i was worried about this with gerry, too! and guess what? he's DEFINITELY going to be a partial wheelchair user by the 4th out of 7 fics, and more or less permanently by the very end of the story. i feel comfortable spoiling that because i'm not shy about the things he's dealing with and quite frankly, i'm excited to get to the point where he finally gets it because i just think he's EARNED it for christ's sake. it will make his life so much easier, even if running might not be feasible anymore.

in that last chapter, jon and adelard have to go down the stairs because there is no lift in the institute. elias not having a lift there has been a problem of the ableism variety since the first installment, that everyone is aware of and feels powerless to change. jon used to willingly have a routine where he'd go up to the library every day before work as a "substitute" for the PT he hasn't been doing in years, but since moving to the basement, that's like two extra flights, so he can't do it as often. and that's just everyday stuff!

with this? he's in a lot of pain by the end, he's going to need to be on bed rest for a while to just recuperate from the strain he put himself through by running up and down the stairs (counts) about 6 consecutive times in less than an hour. he's exhausted, and the only reason he pushed himself was because lives were literally on the line and adelard was even less equipped to handle the same work as him, being older and relatively new to functioning with a prosthetic leg.

so, sure! he DID it. but does that mean he could do it Every Day just because he did it Once? that he could do it without Consequence? hell no. not for a second!

the key word here IS "consequences." yes, disabled people often DO find themselves in situations where they have to push themselves past what they feel secure doing, and maybe they CAN get home in one piece, but that just means the aftermath is going to play an important role in what comes next. sometimes you'll need to be in bed for days on end to recover from something like that, or something even less severe than the above example. i know i have, before. depends on the injury, the disability, the strain.

the point is, if you need your disabled character to go beyond what they should be doing, make sure you take care of them afterwards; either by Literally having them physically recuperate, or by acknowledging the problems that come with not being able to, and making sure you respect that they cannot go on like that forever. eventually there WILL be a crash, and it can either be handled with awareness and intent in-story, or it will sneak up on them later and bite them in the patootie. eventually, your body forces you to rest.

the other thing is that this stuff doesn't just happen once. with a chronic disability, it's always a risk. be mindful of that as you plan out the situations they're going to get into! actually incorporating these things into the narrative will honestly make it feel more real than just brushing it aside so that things go "smoothly." people who experience these things themselves will appreciate it a lot more than wish fulfilment, in my experience.

now, you say you have minor physical stuff, and i'm not going to make assumptions about YOU when i say that often times, we downplay our own experiences because we think we can't possibly have it "as bad" as other people, so i'm pretty willing to give you even more express support.

writing about these things can often be an avenue towards realizing, "oh, wait. i DO actually feel this, and it's not really, uh. something i should sit on." i know that writing characters with EDS before i even realized i had it was a part of me eventually seeing a doctor, and i actually got it put on paper recently. shock of all shocks! it resonated with me for a reason.

if you're drawn to disability narratives in a way that feels far more personal than how some people are drawn to them for the torture porn (and you clearly know the difference, given that you're asking how to write it respectfully) then it's worth sitting with yourself and really assessing how you feel about your body and what things maybe shouldn't be so hard for you to do.

definitely refer back to the first meta i linked up there for some slightly more formal tips on how to frame things when you start tying them in, but i think you're already on the right track with being respectful! realism is respectful, and so is drawing lines between that realism and being overly graphic. listening to disabled people and taking them seriously is essential, and you're already doing that. giving disabled characters a support network is fabulous and you should do it, but don't infantilize them or Cure Them With Love.

and don't think TOO deep on it! you can psych yourself doing that, it's really easy to let the fear of messing up keep us from even trying. i think a knee injury like you describe is NOT a super inflammatory topic to be tackling, and you should be absolutely fine imo. a lot of people write characters getting brutally and supernaturally injured all the time and don't pay NEAR enough attention to the lasting effect some of those wounds might have in the long run, so the fact that you're taking so much care with something more ordinary and common is a good sign that you're going to navigate well going forward.

best of luck! thank you again for the patience, and for asking :'-)

[justaduckarts]

A Look At Next Year

I know that we are literally only halfway through December, but I will be travelling for the holidays to see my family, so I wanted to go ahead and get this sort of technical type post out of the way.

Here you will find details about plans for next year’s projects! 

This includes: Upload schedules, goals, and projects I plan to start next year! :)

Long Post Ahead

Current Projects

Dirty Night Clowns: Uploads every Sunday and Wednesday, chapters generally avg at 4k words (but can be as long as 10k if that’s what the pacing demands). 

One Who Holds A Star (Star Holder AU): Plan to upload at least once a week, I’m thinking Tuesday or Thursday... Maybe Friday. Word count goal? As long as it’s at least 1k we’re gravy. (But we should try for 2-3k)

Help! I’m Trapped In a Fanfiction: This will continue to upload sporadically, as I have to be in a certain mood to write the silly stuff. No word count goal, this project is just something to make myself (and others) laugh.

Project Goals: 

Finish DNC before the summer. Assuming the story doesn’t shift dramatically, I suspect it will end up being right around 50 Chapters. 

Finish Star Holder. I can’t imagine it will take the WHOLE YEAR to write the story. It will probably be pretty long, but I think we can do it. 

Figure out where the hell H!ITIAF! is going...

New Projects: 

Outlining some projects in my drafts/WIPS that I would like to start sharing next year! 

Project: Personal Care Unit: This is an idea I have for a series of shorter fics all set in the same universe. A Personal Care Unit (hereafter referred to as PCU) is an animatronic designated to care for one who needs care. This can be anything from a little extra help around the house to aiding people with disabilities etc. etc. 

Glass Walls and Study Samples: This story actually has 20 chapters already drafted that I wrote in like August but I hit a wall and I want to heavily revise the story before I begin sharing. Here’s the concept: You know how people often write fanfics where the DCAs are strange creatures that Y/N discovers or is studying? Well, what if Y/N was a little space explorer? What if they went to a planet they’d been told had no sentient life? What if that planet DID have sentient life? What if YOU were the strange creature captured for study? What if you fell in love with the scientists that were studying you anyway? :) (This story might contain spice, I’m on the fence)

Pluto Initiative: This is actually something I’ve got a few pages outlined for already. It’s my hope to eventually make a short comic that introduces my DCA OC Pluto! The comic would explore her story as an animatronic learning about things like friendship, love, and what makes a person good or bad. I won’t give away too much, but I will say that the story isn’t a romance and I actually don’t ship Pluto with the boys. Her character arc is very important to me and I hope to portray it well. This comic will probably have some horror elements. :) 

Miscellaneous Goals:

Try to draw one thing a week! This can be related to any of my projects.

Oh my gosh please learn to pace yourself :) 

Finish sewing that Sunny Plush. 

Start the Moom plush :) 

Get caught back up on my fanfic bookmarks so I can shower all my moots and favorite writers with love <3 

Make more fanart for all the incredible AUs and fanfics I’ve read. 

Find people who will just yell with me about the DCA boys (and possibly their OCs and mine) 

Participate in an art/writing event! 

I think that just about covers everything that I have cooking or hope to accomplish. It’s going to be a year. I look forward to next year! Thank you guys so much for all your support and I hope you’ll stick with me for even more in the future!