#Someone will say 'lol as someone with ADHD I really relate to [thing that happened in the video]'

[choking-on-roses]

The amount of times you'll be relating an experience you had with ADHD and all the neurotypicals in a 5km radius are like "actually that has nothing to do with ADHD" like yeah I realize everyone forgets things from time to time but could you please shut up

[your-unfriendlyghost]

sodapop patrick curtis thoughts on my desk by the end of the week or ur DONE /j

How I feel about this character

  Uh like he’s perfect and should be my wife i think

  Nah but fr Soda’s one of my favorite characters ever. He’s sweet and all, but he’s so much more than that. Pony says he’s movie-star handsome, that he can go from gentle one minute to “blazing with anger” the next, that he gets drunk just on living, and understands everybody. Soda’s a Kerouac-style “mad one”- “mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes Awww!”

He’s a guy who’s sensitive but strong, a “bawl baby” who’s tough, he’s probably got ADHD and dyslexia, the school system failed him. His folks died and left him holding his brothers together by a thread. He’s pretty but not pretty enough for Sandy to stay. He might end up dying in Vietnam, and thank God that isn’t canon, but it’s still there. He’s happy to live life simply, behind a white picket fence with a wife and kids- hell, he’s thrilled to. But that’s not gonna happen, at least not for a while, because Soda is a tragedy. But he loves his brothers and his friends so much that he becomes a beacon of hope despite it all.

  I love Soda. Honestly, this barely scratches the surface of how I feel about him. I haven’t even touched on the adrenaline junkie stuff or the ways he’s sometimes so relatable to me that it hurts. 

All the people I ship romantically with this character

Steve, and sometimes Evie. 

  I’ve found I’m a friends-to-lovers enjoyer, so Stevepop scratches that part of my brain lol. To have someone who’s got your back through thick and thin, aware of your flaws but in spite of them- well, ain’t that the dream? The angst of it being the 60s makes it interesting to me too, because there’s a lot of ways to handle that. Man, when I first read the book I didn’t get the hype for them at all, but idk. It clicked. I get it now. 

  And then Steviepop is my roman empire lol. It’s all I love about Stevepop, but Evie adds even more complexity. I like her a lot and I love writing her, and I love writing her with characters who I also love. There is absolutely no canon anything to back this ship up. But dammit that’s the point of fandom.

  I will say though that I like exploring Soda’s dynamic with Sandy, but I don’t really ship them. I think the fact that Sandy left him (and I mean cheated on him, even if that can be read ambiguously) implies that there’s something about him that could be undesirable, romantically. I don’t mean cheating is good or that people deserve it, just that in this case, the idea that Soda’s an imperfect boyfriend adds layers to a character who is mostly just positives. We’ll never know Sandy’s POV on it, and I don’t think Soda will either. Sandypop to me will never have closure. That’s what makes it hurt so much. That’s what makes it relatable

My non-romantic OTP for this character

  I mean honestly? Steve. I know this isn’t really fair, since I like Stevepop and all, but idk, there’s no one else who I think it could be. 

  Steve’s a character who’s cocky and troubled and prone to assholeish-ness, but even he loves Soda. He knows about Sandy and gets angry on Soda’s behalf at Pony for mentioning her, which means Soda can tell him- angry, tough Steve Randle- about sensitive stuff. And Soda, who I think is a little in love with everyone he meets and could have anyone he wants, sees this bastard and sticks with him. He sees the parts of Steve that Pony can’t. Parts that make him worthy of being his best buddy.

It’s been said before, but no matter how you look at it, romantic or platonic, they’re each other’s person. I don’t think I could put anyone else in this slot.

My unpopular opinion about this character

 I have a few lol.

1- I see a lotta fics and takes where the whole “drunk on living” thing is a lie Soda feeds Ponyboy, and while I like that take, I do also think it’s totally possible and even plausible that Soda really doesn’t drink and Pony’s view of him (in that aspect) is right.

  I dunno, I mean, I know firsthand what it’s like to just get drunk on adrenaline/excitement. Adrenaline is a hell of a drug, and the rush from it is better than any other high I’ve had. Thrill rides make me act as stupid as someone drinking- when I’m excited, I lose all ability to filter thoughts or fight impulses. I’ve done all sorts of dumb moves- climbing onto tables, singing loudly without knowing or caring if it bothers people, play-fighting my buddies so hard we both get genuinely injured, standing up in a convertible going down the freeway... (This is obviously anecdotal and not real evidence or anything, but like, duh. This is an opinion piece lol.)

  I guess what I’m saying is that there’s a lot of interesting things that can still be done with a Soda who genuinely doesn’t drink. (Or at least not much.)

2- I love darker takes on Soda. I love when people dig into his addictive personality, his temper, his relationship with his looks/self image, all that stuff. I love his flaws, and I especially love when they co-exist with his earnest sweetness and genuine sensitivity. In a few of my fics, I’ve explored some slightly darker Sodas- Sodas who are impulsive, pent up, semi-narcissistic and occasionally manipulative. I haven’t delved deep into it or anything, and I usually keep his character wholesome, but I love it when other folks don’t. 

3- I actually really like the Vietnam War storyline. I mean it hurts, but it seems plausible. I hate the idea of him dying there, but I like exploring the idea of him being drafted. Hell, maybe he even enlisted. The military is known for being a good way to earn enough money to pull one’s family out of poverty, and this paired with the flawed ideas of masculinity and strength of the time lead to a really interesting version of Soda’s future.

  I’m real glad it isn’t canon though.

4- This isn’t technically unpopular but brown eyed Soda will always be canon to me. I like Rob Lowe’s Soda a lot but man….he coulda used brown contacts, yk? /hj lol

One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon.

Well I still think it’s a crime his emotional monologue got cut outta the original version of the film. Thank God for the full novel version, but man, still.

Woulda also have been cool to see him mentioned in That Was Then This is Now, but I get that SE Hinton wasn’t trying to make an Outsiders sequel really.

Idk, Soda served his purpose, I think. 

tl;dr- I love him

[eddsboxofdisectiontools]

On topic with my post about Edd mischaracterization, I'm taking a wack at Ed mischaracterization. I won't do Eddy... Only because BPS was the thing that explained it all. Everyone in the fandom already knows Eddy is just a victim of abuse and gaslighting.

I think the most common consensus is that Ed is stupid. That's pretty much what they imply in the show, via other character's comments. Except for Edd... Who wouldn't say that lol.

I don't think he's stupid. Not inherently... I'm not saying he has lots of book smarts, because he doesn't. We all know he doesn't. But I don't think he's genuinely stupid. I think that his mother prevents teachers from showing concern about his inability to learn, because if they found out how to teach him properly, he'd become more aware of her actions and may rebel. Obviously, any oppressive force who is taking control of another person doesn't want them to gain consciousness about what's happening to them. Especially not someone like Ed, who could OBLITERATE her.

I think he could be just as capable as Dee if they found what helps him learn. He is canonly ND (ADHD) but given the high comorbidity rates, he's probably autistic too. Come on, he's pretty fixated on monster media. This probably makes it impossible for him to learn in the ways that the students around him learn. Not only does he lose focus, but if he *can* focus, he tends to lose interest and space out anyways.

Notice how he can easily quote and memorize scenes from his monster comics and movies? That shows he IS capable of holding mass amounts of information. This is what Edd does all the time, except the information he typically holds is related to things like biology and psychology. When we measure IQ, we're measuring the POTENTIAL of a person's intelligence, not the current knowledge. As humans, we're programmed to be in a state of nonstop learning. There really is no such thing as knowing more in the sense we try to use, because intelligence can be more accurately measured by the ability to understand, retain, and utilize the information given, and how much information can be stored and utilized. People who could be comparable to Einstein if given the chance may end up never proving this to people due to growing up in an environment that shames education. The person is capable of learning complex topics, but the way they've been silenced causes it to become a hidden skill. Does that make sense? I hope it does.

I think this is what we see with Ed. He is very intelligent in the fields that he enjoys, such as animal care and monster media. I'm sure he'd know more than Edd does about animal care, and may teach a thing or two to him occasionally through his rambles. Ed lacks any effort towards his care and learning, so the topics he's willing to ingest are super limited. I believe that he can learn lots, and be considered intelligent. Maybe he'll forever remain aversive to topics like math and history... Is it really a bad thing? Yes, they are good things to know... But I think he could excel in his topics of preference in a way that would label him as a master of his field.

Knowing Edd, he's probably helping Ed with his learning issues. Edd shows an interest in psychology, which means he most likely understands the differences in people and how they can take in information. I'm sure he'd use this to see what gets him focused, what makes him learn. He'd possibly ingest stacks and stacks of information if he found what made him tick. It's hard to know exactly HOW he's intelligent, but I do believe he is. His non stop fourth wall breaks seem funny (and they are) but a part of that also implies that Ed has EXCEPTIONAL attention to detail. People who are considered intelligent have this. Perhaps his tendency to get distracted makes this harder to notice since he doesn't pick up what he can't focus on, but trust that he's about as aware of what's going on as Edd is implied to be. The difference between Ed and Edd is that Ed had been sheltered and shunned from learning like normal, and Edd had pretty much been FORCED into learning constantly by his parents, which led to the natural fixation on topics relating to education, as it was what was in his environment. I think Ed could go places if they found what helped him learn.

[kira-fluff]

haikyuu!! neurodivergent headcanons 💕

tw: several listed mental illnesses, some of these are solely off of vibes but most of them I have reasons lol note! I do not believe autism is a mental illness or something that is "wrong" with an individual, hence why the title is "neurodivergent" rather than "mental illness". just had to put that out there! to all my neurodivergent babies I love you! a/n: hello! as a neurodivergent like myself (depression, anxiety, ptsd, bulimia, etc etc) i thought it would be really cool to do an analysis on one of my biggest hobbies (psychological illnesses) and relate them to haikyuu characters! some of them have a deeper explanation because I feel so strongly about it.

attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADD/ADHD) BOKUTO, hinata, NISHINOYA, atsumu, lev

generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) sugawara, OIKAWA, asahi, yamaguchi, yachi, aone, akaashi, tendo

social anxiety disorder (SAD) asahi, KENMA

post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) oikawa

depression (MDD) oikawa, KENMA, kuroo, suna, matsukawa, tendo

autism sakusa, USHIJIMA, kageyama, kyotani, kenma

eating disorder(s) (AND, BND, BED) OIKAWA, KENMA

obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) oikawa

borderline personality disorder (BPD) daishou

insomnia kuroo, kenma, osamu

hypersomnia suna

analysis under the cut

it's pretty obvious that bokuto struggles the most to self-regulate, even to others, but I personally believe that oikawa struggles the most with his mental health.

like almost everyone in haikyuu, oikawa is obsessed with volleyball, but he takes it to a point of overexertion and taking his anger and frustration at his own inadequacies out on others.

I really think oikawa's relationship between he and kageyama and he and ushijima are the ones that show how bad his anxiety is

ushijima and kageyama both don't understand the emotions oikawa is feeling which could be written off as them not understanding their talents, but I think it's something more

to me, I feel it is blatantly obvious that ushijima is autistic. he just so frequently seems to be unable to read the emotions of others or takes things literally when it's something else intended. I'm not autistic, though, so autistic community, let me know your thoughts!

bokuto and hinata both have an insane amount of energy, but struggle to be successful in school. sports works for both of them because their focus is constantly needed to be diverted or "all over the place" that it helps them be great players

kuroo is one of those other characters that I feel like I'm reaching to say he has mental health struggles but to me it just comes off in vibes. first of all, any kid with divorced parents should be in therapy so I feel there's definitely some struggles there.

I think kuroo is the type that hides his struggles and pretends they aren't happening. he puts a lot of pressure on himself to be the best at everything he does, and so he feels he doesn't have time to deal with the emotions that leave him feeling empty

kenma was someone I immediately felt was autistic. he has so many key factors like an obsession/hyperfocus on his hobbies and trouble socializing (social anxiety).

kenma has some of the strongest evidence toward my beliefs, specifically in this quote: "I'm not good with people, and I don't want to interact with them. and yet, I'm very concerned about what others think of me." like, tell me that doesn't radiate autistic/SAD vibes!!!!

idk what it is, like inadequacies or what but I genuinely believe oikawa has some kind of trauma. like he's definitely carrying something that so heavily effected him that it controls the choices he makes in life

I don't have much evidence that suna has depression, it's just a vibe because of his mannerisms and what he says. I think it's the kind where it's well-managed, but it shows up in physical symptoms like apathy more than anything.

atsumu gives ADHD vibes solely because of like how all over the place he is and how he can't always seem to properly get out what he's trying to say lol

sakusa is one that to me could be seen as "done with your bullshit" but I think he also hates crowds (like me, I mean who doesn't) and struggles socially probably because of anxiety or autism. not sure!

basing daishou off of vibes, too, because if I'm being honest all I've seen in the show is him having hostile relationships or being on-off with them, though its certain I could be reading too much into it, but that's the fun of headcanons.

do you agree with what I wrote? I would love to hear your thoughts!

[monstersinthecosmos]

Okay I don’t want this to be like an obnoxious millennial assumption because I’m positive that every generation has things like this, but the way autism and ADHD was treated for us in the 90’s and how it affects adult diagnoses is like, imo, so integral to our coming of age and the stories we tell and the way we’ve gotten to know ourselves, even the way it relates to our job market and economy and how we operate inside it, and especially the way a pandemic uncovered it for so many people and exposed the cracks and revealed that we were all just barely functioning and held together with popsicle sticks and anyway

I say that because maybe it’s the un-diagnosed 90’s child in me but I feel particularly emotional about Keith’s arc in learning that he’s part Galra, and the way even the creators said they made him sort of prickly because of his biology, and I just !! Think so much about Keith’s neurotype as a part Galra!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Cause something about being diagnosed later in life is like, looking back at all the other ways you tried to handle yourself, all the missteps, maybe even misdiagnoses. Like, how many times did you try to treat ANXIETY without realizing you didn’t have an anxiety disorder, you just can’t deal with your family blaring the TV from the next room? How many times were you told you were lazy, or lying, when you didn’t know what executive dysfunction is? 

Keith is such a lovely rich character because his prickliness is EARNED—we know what happened to him, we know he’s traumatized, we know he’s been treated poorly by many people in his life. We know that he grew up thinking that he’d been abandoned by one of the people who should’ve loved him the most, in the whole world. He even questions that in his vlog—he makes the connection that he has trouble with people because of his mom. 

But I just wonder like, how much of it is just his biology. Not understanding the body he’s in, being completely ignorant of one whole half of his culture. Had he ever mutated before the TBP fight? Did it take him by surprise, did it frighten him? ((* This is head canon territory LMAO there’s no way to really know—like, is he able to do this because he just spent so much time with Krolia, or does Shiro going That’s the Keith I remember mean they used to have really primal sex that turned his eyes yellow? Lol)) 

Like when we talk about even the most broad generic terms of saying someone is neurodivergent, we don't even need to put a real life label on Keith. Like he's literally not human! Of course his brain looks different! Of course he functions differently! And I wonder how much is nature v nurture -- if he knew the truth about his mom, if his dad had lived, if he'd been allowed a normal childhood, would he still have been a weird kid?

Cause like, even seeing the way Shiro is able to get through to him, we see ways that he allowed for thrill seeking, and he didn't judge Keith for stealing his car. It reminds me of like, what we know now about asking children to sit still in school, and how perhaps some children would do better with standing desks. Shiro wants him to behave and succeed, and doesn't judge him for being a car thief, and gets through to him by bringing him cliff diving. And it just feels like this clue, you know, that nothing is wrong with Keith, he's just living in a weird place where people don't get him.

It’s just really special to me, because there’s so many pieces in the sequence of events of Keith’s character arc, and I know I’ve said this a handful of times now, but I really sincerely believe it’s the only thing the show really nailed. Accepting himself during the BOM Trial -> MOMENTS later learning something very important about his biology -> spending time with Krolia -> coming back to pilot Black when he’s READY and WANTS to (unlike the first time, when he resisted) -> becoming a pragmatic strong leader by the end.

Gosh idk. 

I don’t really have anywhere to go with this, it’s just something I was thinking about today and it gets me real emotional. Like, Keith must have had these moments, re-evaluating who he’d been before he’d known, finally understanding why he was Like That, and it’s so healing to imagine him accepting his past self and forgiving it because he understands now. 

[dissociacrip]

this turned into a long adhd rant whoopsie

it really does suck how people seem to downplay autism and adhd now lol. autism has been reduced to people who can mask and have low support needs and adhd hasn't really changed from its status as a joke.

i don't talk about adhd much but it probably gets in the way of me being able to function just as much, if not more than autism does (in my personal situation) when it comes to mental disability. not showering enough. not cooking. not cleaning my living space properly. forgetting to brush my teeth. dishes sitting in the sink for so long they start getting moldy. only being able to maybe do 1-3 tasks a day maximum because my brain can't organize itself enough to do more than that. difficulty committing to things and being consistent in overarching ways. being late to things a lot. highly impaired verbal recall so i forget things people say to me, forget verbal instructions, etc. on top of the other acutely stressful situations that come with memory and regulating my attention span (e.g. locking my keys in my car or locking myself out of my house when i have a very limited support network to remediate those situations.)

my meds barely touch this stuff for me and i'm not especially inclined to increase the dosage after bordering on psychosis when i was taking 40mg of vyvanse. i've just become so accustomed to living the way that i do (because my case is pretty bad afaik) so i can't just will myself to be another way. any efforts i make to change or be more organized and routine and consistent end up getting dashed away because i just cannot do it lol. my shit just doesn't work. adhd is a massive barrier between me and being a functioning person or being able to take care of myself. i'm pretty sure would still be a "gross" and unpalatable disabled person even if my muscles worked and i didn't have POTS/etc. that also get in the way of my hygiene and the cleanliness of my living space.

that doesn't even go into how other people react to it. a good chunk of physical and verbal abuse i faced from my family as a child was related to my adhd symptoms. i was diagnosed at a young age but my parents "forgot" it happened and it was never addressed otherwise. i got constantly called disgusting for my hygiene problems and was threatened with violence over it (on top of the times where i was actually getting assaulted.) people take my impaired verbal recall and lack of impulse control irt accidentally cutting people off or interrupting them personally, accusing me of not caring enough when it's something that is extremely difficult to be aware of or manage when adhd is a condition that distinctly involves impaired awareness of your own behavior.

so when i see shit like "just set alarms" or anything else that amounts to "you're not trying hard enough" or adhd not very much being a disability, especially when it's coming from other people w/ adhd, it kinda makes me wanna stab things with knives.

sure, it's not the worst condition ever, but just like most other disabilities, the way it affects everyone who is it is different and some are gonna be able to manage it better than others. sure, there a lot of really fucking annoying people (usually able-bodied) w/ adhd on social media that have large platforms and who very often profit from or encourage liberal pop psych bullshit when it comes to adhd, but it's still very much a disability. it can affect hygiene. it can affect employment or otherwise means of earning an income. it can affect our social lives and whether we have a support system. it can affect whether someone can keep their house from getting infested with bugs or mold. it is very much something that causes dysfunction in ways that aren't nearly as cutesy as the little comics you might see on instagram are drawn.

just remember that.

[tippertot]

one of your most recent posts reminded me to say, I love your interpretation of gabbro so much !! it’s so refreshing to see someone write them as more than just “haha funny zooted alien lol” (nothing against people who have that headcanon but it’s just so much more meaningful to me to have a character whose brain just works a bit differently than others! it doesn’t have to mean they’re high all the time lol) especially since I see a lot of myself in them and the way you write them

(this isn’t really an ask so no pressure to respond lol, i just wanted to get this out since they’re definitely one of my favorite characters - in the game and in your fic ::)

thank you! i actually do enjoy zooted Gabbro interpretations when it explores a version of Gabbro who uses drugs as a form of extreme escapism (what are you escaping from? what is this sloppy, red-eyed mask hiding? what happens if you no longer have access to this form of escapism? what could cause you to choose to deny yourself the drugs you've grown to rely on?). it can be used as a character-study tool similar to their meditation, but in a way that may be more relatable than meditation to the average reader

that being said, i have at least slightly more familiarity with neurodivergence than i do with self-medication, so that's the direction i went with! and it's been awesome hearing different people describe how they relate with the way Gabbro and other characters think. i don't feel qualified to diagnose my characters myself, but whenever people tell me how some of characters (Gabbro included!) remind them of their own experiences with autism or ADHD or things like that it makes me feel super warm and fuzzy, like i've managed to make these characters real enough that people can see themselves in. so thank you very much for sharing!

[nametakensff]

as someone who's rarely super horny, your posts about how quickly things excite you and how badly you need to... "take care of" yourself are both fascinating and hot... i hope this isn't creepy btw

Hey anon, not creepy at all! 🥰 I'm glad you get something out of those posts, I sometimes feel like I'm being too forthcoming with that kind of thing but then I remember this is an adult fetish space and allow myself to overshare lol

Some related rambling under the read more!

I can go days without wanting to get off if I'm just not really in that frame of mind, but when I am...it's almost impossible to ignore arousal. It's like I get tunnel vision and I can't focus on anything else but how badly I need to have an orgasm. This fetish does not help - it's like an instant switch from nothing to full on soaking wet, sometimes 😮‍💨

It can be inconvenient as I'm sure I've stated before - I have masturbated in work bathrooms more than I would have liked, excused myself from social gatherings to sneak away for a moment, and when I was younger sometimes ended up late to things because I feel like when I get to a certain point I can't ignore it. Like if you looked over at me at work I'd be drumming my fingers on my desk, bouncing my leg etc. The only way to resolve that frustration is EXCESSIVE exercise or to bust a nut. The second is usually more viable and a lot more fun lol. Luckily I wfh now, which is great for so many reasons but also comes with the wonderful bonus that I can get myself off when I need to and can take my time and use toys

I usually need to get off multiple times to experience complete physical satisfaction and achieve emotional release that makes me feel nice and calm. My nervous system is allll over the place. A series of really good orgasms usually makes me cry and I love when that happens :') Endorphin overload! It would be nice to be someone who is either satisfied with one orgasm or who has intensely powerful ones consistently enough that they can be one and done. Sometimes having an orgasm just makes me hornier. How is that fair?! 😩

I...guess some could say I exhibit compulsive sexual behaviour or hypersexuality? but idk, really. If I do I'm not especially distressed by it apart from being irritable when I can't get any relief - but it's no different to getting frustrated in other ways, which is frequent when you're an autistic, adhd and ocd haver lmao

But yeah - I'll probably continue to make posts moaning and oversharing about my masturbation habits and endless horniness so. I hope you continue to find them hot and fascinating 💕

[canis-dentem]

how/when did you know you were a therian? like- when did you make the connection; how did you know you were caninekin specifically?

I’m tryna figure stuff out for myself and don’t know where to start. I don’t think I’m a therian, but I’ve always done some kind of animal-ish things (used to have the urge to hiss/snarl/snap when due to annoyance when I was younger, I have the urge to make creature noises pretty often, sometimes my mental image of myself when doing something feels more different, like. tall and elegant?? like sometimes when I turn my head I like. imagine/feel kind of a sloping neck and longer face/muzzle and limbs, canine-y (imagine a maned wolf/african wild dog/other canine) I don’t know how to explain it— but I’m not sure if the noises and biting are some kind of stimming due to my ADHD or not). I also heard the term “otherhearted” as having a deep connection with something, which. mmmmaybe me? so I’m gonna look into that.

anyways woah I rambled a lot more than I intended to but. yeah! I just wanna know what others’ experiences are like so I can see if mine relate to them lol

hi anon!!

tbh, i only awakened of around march of this year. i had never entered therian or otherkin circles, although i knew about it. one of my friends telling me star was a feline otherkin was what got me thinking like.... oh, that's a thing we can do? it happened to me with being trans, too, LOL--it didn't click for me that i could be something until someone close to me was.

what got me thinking was my brain kept saying "ugh i wanna be otherkin. that'd be so cool" and then i looked back on things i've done my whole life and like. oh that was a wolf thing. oh that's a dog thing. oh huh. it has been here. something that helped me when i was researching being autistic/having adhd was i kept a list of my symptoms as i noticed them, so i did that for being a therian. i have my little list of canine "symptoms" that i either notice myself doing or have remembered doing, some of which include feeling the urge to chew a lot, feeling longer canine teeth/wanting longer canine teeth, the urge to bare my teeth and growl when angry, always playing the worgen race in world of warcraft, among others. some of these (like baring my teeth/growling) were things i taught myself not to do bc "it wasn't normal." (i connect that to the 17 years of autism masking i did, so much so that i didn't know i was autistic and nobody around me did either.)

about stimming: me feeling the urge to chew is a stim. it is also connected to me being caninekin. it can be both!! stimming doesn't cancel out being a therian. plus, for me at least, i dont think i'd be otherkin if i wasnt autistic. you only mentioned adhd, not autism, but keep in mind that neurodivergency can and does often interact with alterhumanity.

i don't typically label my alterhumanity as spiritual (as in past-life) or phsycological, because honestly, i don't really care to know. i have it, and that's what matters to me. but being otherkin does overlap with my spirituality in the sense that i feel some yet unexplained connection with the woods. i always have. it makes sense to connect that to being otherkin, even if that's not the only explanation for it.

you can absolutely consider yourself otherhearted, if that makes sense for you! my suggestion? don't worry too much about the label. the word isn't actually super important. there's a big emphasis in this community on figuring out the specific type of animal you are, the specific type of otherkin (or -hearted etc) you are, where it comes from, etc. i don't think that's worth stressing yourself out about, not at all. if it works for you, it works for you--by all means, go ahead. if the process of finding a really specific 'type or word to call yourself brings you meaning and fulfills you, please do it!! i'm all for it. but if it stresses you out to figure out the finer details, let them go. it's okay. in my opinion, the biggest question is not "am i really a therian?" and instead, is, "does it make sense/bring me joy/fulfill me to connect myself to an animal?" if it does, move on from there.

good luck, anon! sending all my love to you. feel free to send any updates about your experience, if you wish to! i hope ur having a wonderful day <3

[third-arch]

Some Reasons Why Trafalgar Law is a Comfort Character of Mine!!

Aka me rambling about Law 🥳🥳

Some context

Trafalgar Law is a character that I’ve known about since I was a kid. A little over 10 years to be exact. I’d seen cosplays of him in anime conventions, his iconic polar white cap in anime shops, and his Jolly Roger everywhere.

Thanks to Aokkun’s artwork, I’ve also kinda known about Corazon, too!!

 I never saw too many photos of him nor understood his power or character too well. I just knew that he was kinda popular and he was from One Piece.

I didn’t really start really liking him until I started getting more One Piece YT shorts. 

I eventually did a One Piece Boyfriends Quiz for fun to see who I’d get. Law happened to be tied for third or fourth place. I did some more quizzes later on, and he always ended up consistently near the top (like top 3-4). So, I watched some videos on Law, and ended up seeing the Kid and Law vs. Big mom fight scene. Idr if it was that particular video, but I remember closing it thinking like woah, he’s cool. 

After spending time researching him, spending time watching the anime, and indulging in his character and a lot of fanworks, I realized just how much this character means to me.

So, here are some reasons that I really like him!!

One thing that I really like about him is his style and appearance. It’s alot like how I like to dress and the clothes he wears, his hair color, skin color, color palette just really make me happy. 

I like that he’s a doctor, since medicine is something that I want to be involved with in the future. I’ve been having alot of burnout lately since October, and felt like I’ve been losing the motivation for what I want to pursue. But, being able to relate to being young and already had some experience with medicine and being surrounded by supportive adults is cool (I’m referring to the novel and his family, not Doffy lol). 

I like his design, VA’s, and attacks, too!! He’s just super cool in general. He’s also cute!!🤍🌸

I like how nerdy he is and honestly just all of the fun facts about him. How he’s a Libra like me, his flower (Queen of the Night), his spirit animal(s), where he’s from, his hobbies (not so much the coin collection deal, my sister collects coins!! Idk if she still does it tho).

I just really like him as a character. His black cat personality is a dynamic that I like working with alot. Him also being a doctor, I have alot of medical issues that I could see him helping me with and recognizing early on. He’d be someone who would look out for me. I feel like we’d butt heads in the beginning, but he’d always try to be patient. 

This reason is also a bit random, but he reminds me of my mom alot. 

My mom is someone who was incredibly intelligent at a young age. She had a really high IQ and was even suggested to do something with Harvard. 

I’m not one to tell her story, but to sum it up, the way her and Law handled life are very similar. The way Law treats Luffy is also very cute to me. It’s funny seeing the high IQ black cat character x ADHD ball of sunshine together. 

 So, being able to understand his character and his motives was really easy. He’s a complicated character, but reading the novel helped me recognize that I’m understanding him well. 

He’s really fun to draw lol!! There’s not much else to say but yeah!! I like drawing him a lot.

He also just makes me feel confident. Being genderfluid, he really helps me express my masculine side. I love how he still likes cute things and sweet things.

He also has some weird habits that I relate to, one of them being the bread thing LOL. I always thought it was alittle weird, but I realized that I’m pretty picky about bread, too. 

I really like making HC’s for him and relating them to the people I know who remind me alot of Law. 

One thing that I don’t think about a lot are the people in our lives who did alot of damage to us. I don’t talk about it too often, but I can kinda relate to Law’s story with Doffy and Corazon. Like Law, I met someone (who really likes flamingos too lol) at a low point, and it really only became worse, until another individual showed up and helped us out. They showed us the good in life and loved us. That person happens to be my boyfriend!! 

It wasn’t an easy road, but, like Law, I started seeing the good in life, despite all of the bad luck I have. 

Writing No Surprises has really helped me indulge in him as a character and enjoy writing. He makes me really happy and will definitely hold a dear place in my heart. 

Anyways, I just wanted to ramble about it. I can’t wait to keep working on No Surprises!! I’m still editing and changing bits and pieces as I go along, but the ending and key details will be the same. 🌸🌸🌸

Regardless, I'm still finding more and more reasons to like him everyday, and it makes me super happy!! 🤍✨

[cat-collections-agency]

Kinda a syscovery story thingy?

Cw: anti endo mentions, fakeclaiming, mentions of delusions. Politics. This isn't a vent.

Had a mental breakdown in an agere server, got scared, pretty sure I was getting fake claimed by mods, then left out of fear. I was deeply afraid. I watched a lot of the 'fake disorder cringe' videos because my yt got flooded with them, was sorely confused but just wanted to understand more. We..surrounded ourselves with a lot of anti endos since all the agere, and other spaces we knew of were the case. And I was too scared to ask questions since I was so used to them being answered with: it's endo stay away or endos are bad.

I remember when we were first learning about systems. It was with an ex who was anti endo, they refused to explain things outside of anti endo values. I remember first questioning our singlethood. It was because of a dream we had that took place in a living room. Papyrus, jevil, spamton, Kris, Chara, and Berdly were all there. Talking about someone called 'bunny system.' Woke up confused, and distressed asked my ex about it before looking for the on tiktok and getting more confused when I couldn't find anything.

I chalked up that OG dream as a weird: lol my kins are just bugging me. I chalked up any thoughts into kins. It was until another sysmate appeared to a different ex(they were a lot nicer but still anti endo) who then brought it up to me that I finally started to somewhat accept things.

At the time we were helping run an agere server when a member and I became friends due to both being therians. They asked me privately if I was pro endo, and I responded with 'I don't really know much about systems and don't really have an opinion' (I should reiterate I was scared of systems especially endos) I got accepted into a pro endo otherkin server. it was so accepting. I never felt like I could be so open about our identity.

I stayed for a while until eventually leaving around the time IRL friends started to become major asses. Calling us names, claiming we liked genuinely gross shit, said we infantilized disorders like autism snd adhd whilst simontaniously saying we had those things. "You're trying so hard to be different." Delusional, Manic, saying they'd never actually wanna hang out with me to my fucking face. The worst part was in a gc I happened to be in and said something only to get told to 'shut up nazi lover.' reason? I liked countryhumans and hetalia at the time. (Yes my identity at the time revolved around Prussia at the time but fuck off.) I even got doxxed (not location.) In a server full of ppl who hated my guts. I feared they were going to dox my emails, address, some of these ppl went to the same school and I was terrified for my safety. I thought I'd get my ass beat over something I didn't understand/didn't even know was truly happening. Since none of those assholes told me anything.

Lynx showed up around that time and blocked our existence. Kni 100% chalked everything all of us to delusions, for a full year blood refused to engage with the things we liked. Especially UT since that was how we met those horrible ex friends. For a while we watched nothing but nature documentaries, while clinging to our rocky long distance relationship with the nicest ex we had even tho they were barely around. (They live in another continet) kni did hurt us a lot, and I totally understand why. He was carrying so much pain and believed we deserved to be punished for being shit.

eventually our IRL identity as Sonic appeared with a vengece and I showed up. The sheer menesfestation of the little sense of identity not related to being a horrible freak that was left. I did my best to make friends I kept at arms length, made sure we were close to the staff at our school. I made sure to maintain our grades, toom care of us so we wernt starving every single day. I took care of us since I was needed. Even made us a new discord account so we wernt terrified of long in and be met with nothing but harassment.

I joined pro endo servers such as Blue buddies and clung to them as our security blanket. Not as active in them as before but still. Didn't have any friends in those servers. I didn't care, we were with people who were more accepting and that's all that mattered.

I did make a friend eventually, and Lynx reached out to another system as a reply to a sourcecall (really wanted sourcemates.) Around this time we wanted a Tumblr that wasn't connected to fanfictions for a fandom we were no longer into, and to once again avoid talking about our plurality around antis/not on our og therian blog, so we made this account.

After making this blog I believe the first system we engaged with(aside from previous mentioned ones) was crystal cluster. I think it was 'ship art' i made 4 them, that kinda started our communications/lh. from then we branched off and started to accept ourselves more, and though we hide our plurality from anyone IRL we don't hide from it online.

IDC if the ppl on r/syscringe or r/fdc find our accounts. Idc if antis try to put me down and shame me for not hating our existence or the existence of any plurals that aren't solely traumagenic/expirences in the range of their acceptance. I'm done living in fear of what others think of me. I'm done worrying if I'm a bad person for supporting people whose lives are different dtom mine. I'm done hiding, I'm done being afraid of existence, of US.

You can hate me all you want. I do not fucking care. I love my sysmates, my insys partners, I love my friends. You cannot and will not change that part of me.

Also thank you crystal cluster for being the friend that's allowed us to finally fully be at peace with our existence.

Yes I'm still delusional btw.

[khajiit-journal]

Fredas, Morning Star 03, 2025

(Friday, January 01, 2025)

Dream interpretation first, as always.

I was friends with this family who ran this restaurant. For the first half that I remember, I was sulky and upset for having been scared and tormented by someone else entirely. But the rest, I was trying desperately to save the matriarch from a god-given illness, by performing a ritual and pleading with the gods. I woke up before I succeeded.

I... don't know what this means per se. I can make a few solid guesses, that the former part is due to the haunting I'm enduring. But the part about the god-given illness? I... really don't know.

— ☆ —

My new tools arrived today! Safaa (Rumi oracle), Aileas (Imbolc oracle), Bao (Mahjong), and Lilian (Sibilla oracle). I've done some test readings with them today, and also did some with Nadia (G-Witch).

I made sure to thank Hermaeus Mora for all of this. As always, I deeply appreciate the work It puts in for me and this part of my practice that I am utterly Feral about.

I opened some free reading slots for Nadia/G-Witch. Quite a few people took up slots which I'm really happy about, but I feel a bit bad I can't do it all same-day delivery, but then again, I need to be kinder to myself and not be a little butt to myself. I think as of writing this I'm done for the night, I'm physically tired and maybe a bit spiritually tired? I dunno, I'm not very good at listening to myself, but Hermaeus Mora and Lucifer both are asking me to at least take a break before returning to it. So I will. I'll heed them, maybe eat some dessert or something. Watch some stuff.

I am proud of myself for saying "Thank you for your patience!" instead of "Sorry for the wait!" on my reading posts end blurb. I know it's small, but it's kind language like that that I deserve.

I did some personal Mahjong readings and plan on roping some friends into receiving some. If I wasn't so shy I'd reach out and ask a mutual or two if they want some, at least the mutuals I properly interact with.

I also made a taglist for this blog, visible from here. I'll update it daily as I need to. I like having taglists. It's something that used to be more popular on Tumblr back in the early 2010s of its life, when I used it the first time, and I haven't quite let go of that aspect.

I wanna write some TES related posts or queue more stuff up for that blog, but I dunno what to do. Maybe "worship" posts. How to worship them, with a section on subtle worship. I got the idea from someone else, but I don't know how many ideas I'll have for actually worship, despite doing it every day of my life.

I just feel very strongly about TES. I have a post in queue about Azurah's triple aspect/triple form as Human, Mer, and Khajiit and how it looks like the depiction of the Triple Goddess and what that can mean for Her worship; and another about Clavicus Vile likely being based somewhat off of the Christian idea of Lucifer.

TES means a lot to me. The Gods in it mean a lot to me. I would give up so much for them, but they would never ask me to do anything like that. Well. to an extreme, I mean. They do ask me to give stuff up to them, just nothing... "so much".

I should work on finishing Clavicus Vile's quick start so I can post it. I don't have to worry about Akatosh's, but Meridia's day is the 13th, and Haki's day is coming up on the 24th. I know I can churn these out at the speed of light if I just focus, but with ADHD, it doesn't always happen, lol. Maybe I'm being too hard on myself...

Speaking of the 13th, I need to... focus more on the actual cleansing rituals and everything. I know everyone (my spirit guides) is telling me to chill, to not speedrun it, but... I. y'know. I like to get things done. I don't like having a to-do list.

And also, as an aside, I added something to my parents list for myself for groceries (that I can use otherwise) and turns out it's not at the store so it has to be ordered online. Which is really good I did that, because otherwise I wouldn't have been able to find it when I needed it for my spells, which I really wanna do The Big Shadow Realm One on the new moon this month. To start the year with January's new year energy and the energy of the new moon. I also don't want to wait to perform it even longer.

There's really not much else for me to say today. No spellwork done or anything, just messing with decks, as ya do. So... well, it's not goodnight, I won't be in bed for another hot minute, but g'night.

[wilsons-hotlittleprettyboymouth]

please mysterious internet person, HOW?? DO YOU PROGRESS FROM ACQUAINTANCES TO FRIENDS??? i’m perpetually stuck in acquaintance purgatory and it’s hell and i would really appreciate a little of advice ; w ;

Okay I’m going to try to explain this as best I can with this migraine lol, bear in mind that I’m disabled and no longer get out much but this has worked with various demographics from normie boomers in dive bars to people younger than me on university campus.

Don’t start off too strong. Get a gauge of someone’s communication style before you really dive in.

If they seem shy, engage them by purposefully including them in the conversation. But make sure it’s a give and take, if you just ask them a bunch of questions with no natural pauses, it’ll come off as intense and offputting.

If you get a sense of neurodivergence from them, they may bond by trauma dumping. You could make a lighthearted joke that sort of implies the things you usually assume people don’t want to hear and gauge their reaction to that. Like, some people will make a little joke about their parents sucking, or about their focus deficit with ADHD, and in the right situations the other person just totally opens up. It’s good to know what kind of conversations you can feel comfortable having with someone, but if they don’t respond well, back off and switch gears.

If they seen like the kind of person who’s sort of disinterested in making friends, or seems generally insincere or like someone you can’t relate to, you don’t have to put pressure on yourself to be friends just to have friends. “Beggars can’t be choosers” isn’t a real thing, if your personality doesn’t match up with someone else’s, don’t force it.

Relate the things they tell you to your own life if they’re positive or interesting, but relate them in a way that conveys your interest in what they just said. Like you’re amazed or happy for them! Uplift their accomplishments, even if they act like it’s not worth it, and use specific details to express why you think it’s great.

(Example: if someone made some accomplishment with their art, “I can’t even draw a stick figure” is a generic cop out, while “That’s so awesome! I’ve tried [xyz art form] before and there’s so much more to it than people think. You must’ve put in a LOT of work for this.” is more specific and conveys that you understand just why this is great.)

If they tell you something negative or upsetting, convey that you understand how awful that is to a degree. Do not say you know exactly what it’s like or just give a separate example of something horrible happening to you. Use specific examples of a piece of why what they said is awful, and convey it in a way that, once again, implies amazement at what this person is going through. Maybe even outrage on their behalf if they’ve been wronged or are angry at what happened.

(Example: if someone had to put their pet down, don’t go on a tangent about how a vet’s negligence once killed your dog. It’s more comforting and intimate to hear “I have a little dog who’s my world and I just can’t imagine. I know it’s gotta happen someday but I can’t even bring myself to think about it, yknow? I just try to give her the best life she can have while she’s here. I guess that’s the best any of us can do.” Most of the time people will end up showing you pics after this.)

Always be excited to see the person. Charm is a delicate balance of mimicry and sincerity, of intimacy and space. You can be happy to see them without commandeering their time, you can agree with parts of nearly anything they say without talking out of your ass.

Ultimately, people like to feel seen. If you work on your compassion to find some part of what they’re telling you that you can understand and sympathize with, then reaffirm that they have good reason to feel that way, they will feel supported, and you will actually like them more.

You will need to be brave and confident about your support. If you aren’t brave you’ll just sound insincere and people don’t connect with people who won’t try to connect with them. Or people who won’t even confidently say who they are. And I don’t blame them, if someone won’t even trust me enough to tell me anything about themselves, who am I even making friends with? And while I tend to be more understanding of the anxiety that leads people to be insecure and insincere, most people aren’t. In that case, you may literally be the only thing stopping yourself from making friends. People can’t like you if they don’t even get a chance.

So all in all, the main things you need to make friends are compassion, a willingness to see and understand others’, the skill of making other people feel important, and the bravery to actually show you have a defined personality. That’s really the bulk of it!

Sorry to have typed a whole essay on this lol but if anyone else has anything to add about this topic please do! This myth that being friends and socializing is so so so so hard and confusing has GOT to go. We are learning and growing here babes.

[canmom]

The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere 033-048

Previously: 000-012, spinoff post about entropy, 013-032, [all Flower posts]

Someone else died so it's time I write another one of these, eh?

Welcome back to my liveblog of The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere, a serial web novel by @lurinatftbn. Here I'll be covering the Profane Ambition and The Chosen Children arcs.

So, Flower.

No, not that flower...

A lot of crazy shit goes down in these chapters! We learn a good deal more about Su, including an impressively believable suicide attempt! Some of that juicy Umineko-style metafictional shit starts sneaking in, even coloured text. Scifi 9/11 happens. Fang is there! And also, on a rather more cosmic level...

...it turns out entropy - the physical principle - is conscious. That's a whole thing.

Then Neferatuen dies.

So, let's take it from the top, stuff that jumped out at me in these sections.

Su flashbacks (cw lots of discussion of suicide!)

If it wasn't already evident, it seems clear by now that Su - the present Su - thinks of herself as having bodyjacked a person, and her goal across this whole affair is to set that right by visiting Samium the egomancer. To the point that she's willing to put just about everyone else in danger for the sake of that mission.

In various flashbacks, we start to get more of a picture here of how Su came to this suicide mission. In chapter 34, we see her growing close to an unnamed friend before she became an arcanist - a friend who found her on the beach during a bullying incident in a previous flashback and gave her a much needed dose of support and trust. It could be Ran, since she seems to fit into Su's life in a similar way? But the narration fairly conspicuously avoids naming this friend, and this friend does not aspire to become an arcanist.

In a later flashback in chapter 45, we see Su - post-arcanist - attempting suicide. Despite the extreme situation, she can't help being Su, going on fairly long digressions about architectural history to explain why she goes about the specific method she does. I found some passages of this, like where Su discusses how she imagines the aftermath of her suicide affecting people and how that affects her choice of method, quite relatable for the time when I was pretty deep in the suicidal ideation hole.

Maybe I should talk a bit about that actually. When I was at university - quite a lot deeper in the rationalist ideology, incidentally - I thought about suicide a lot (I never got so far as actually attempting, thanks in part to the kindness of friends who reached out to me and gave me a different context to exist in).

It's hard to say exactly why I was so convinced I should die, looking back. A lot of it was a sense of guilt, corruption, not deserving to exist? I was failing at uni due to undiagnosed adhd and had my mind full of very demanding social justice principles.

Anyway, I was still dimly aware that there were people like my parents who cared about me and would probably be sad if I died. And I also didn't want to inflict the traumatic event of finding a dead body on someone. So, I somehow convinced myself that it would be best if I were to just disappear. The method I dreamed up to achieve this would be to buy passage on a ferry to France overnight, and then jump off somewhere in the Channel. By the time anyone noticed, I'd likely already be dead. Though I still worried about the possibility that my corpse would wash ashore.

This is obviously completely and utterly bonkers in retrospect. Like, I really thought people would be less upset if they didn't have a body to say goodbye to? But uh, suicidal people aren't exactly in the most rational state of mind.

Suffice to say that when Su talks about the condition her body would be found in as a concern, even while disparaging it as a pointless concern for a suicide, it's kind of relatable lol.

I also appreciate the sheer awkwardness with which the actual attempt is depicted. Suicide is inherently kind of absurd as an operation. The scene ends a little comically - Su comes to the conclusion that she's selfish to want to die, falls off the branch by accident anyway, and then the branch breaks and she lives.

Ran is the one who meets her after the attempt. By this point she's clearly come to care about the current iteration of Su. But in Chapter 46 we learn that Ran is the one who reacted with a great deal of hostility when Su came clean about the whole situation to her, and did a lot to motivate Su's whole quest for self-annihilation.

"I still remember how you acted when we first met," I said, my face cracking into a strange, uneven smile, as I looked away and towards the ground. "When you called me a 'disgusting, perverse piece of filth.' I'd never seen anyone be so mad at me... And the next day, and gave me all those rules I needed to follow..." She didn't say anything. "I was really, really happy, you know? It was such a relief." My body felt like it was becoming very still. "That someone had finally noticed something was wrong. That someone knew how to fix it."

And now, we most explicitly see her getting cold feet...

"If it is what you want to do--" "Yes," I spoke, without even a moment of hesitation. "...then I'm happy," she said, after a moment. "If you really mean that, and it doesn't hurt you, then it's good." It's difficult to completely express how much that was the opposite of what I wanted to hear. The words were like acid poured down my throat. My gut ached with furious revulsion, like it'd been punched by a grown man. "That's disgusting," I said. "Sorry," she said. The word came out stiff, but there was no guilt in it. No shame. shame, it was more like a meeting point between exhaustion and relief. It made it even worse.

And from Ran's point of view... she's spent years with current!Su. Far longer than original!Su. It really seems like she hasn't properly confronted her feelings about this quest.

That said, there's something kinda off about this, isn't there? If we think of them as separate identities, it's not like current!Su asked to be implanted in original!Su's body - and even if current!Ran has been able to better assimilate to her body's memories, she'd be guilty of the exact same crime as Su, just a bit luckier. If anyone could be 'blamed', it would be the doctor. Su's situation would be tragic, but calling her a 'perverse piece of filth'?

Also in this arc we get a flashback of a different sort, in an epistolary format. This comes with a visit from the Playwright and Director to assure us that we can reasonably assume this is a genuine and correctly attributed letter, but we can't necessarily trust that the character writing it will tell the truth. In this case, the doctor who oversaw Su's ascension writes to a friend about Su's failure to assimilate, noting that some third party clearly interfered with the ceremony, and covered their tracks pretty well. (Of course he could just be covering his ass, if he was involved).

The only outstanding hypothesis at this point is that Su's grandfather tried to implant his own identity onto Su, but it didn't 'take' properly. This would explain some other things in this section - we'll come to that later. However, it also seems... unsatisfying, in that the way Su talks about her grandfather really doesn't come across like she's got access to his memories or anything like that.

There's other Weird Shit going on with Su, anyway. Towards the end of this section, Su sees something like a beaked human, hanging out in the ocean, and immediately passes out, skipping a significant chunk of time. Although there's signs that at least one other person has seen this entity, I have no goddamn clue what is going on with that.

Zeno

We get introduced to another couple members of the Order! These two have got the spicier transhuman stuff going on with them.

The first is Zeno, who - it turns out! - has discovered a means to puppetteer multiple bodies, though they retain one 'main' body, it's not a shared consciousness type situation. When we meet them, they're using a girl's body - Su has some gender hangups lol, and refers to Zeno with 'she' or 'he' pronouns depending on embodiment. I'm gonna go with 'they'. Zeno is brusque and overwhelmingly condescending, and seems to be convinced Su is somehow playing the fool by acting like a student who doesn't know what the hell is going on. This is fairly strong support for the idea that Zeno believes Su 'should be' her grandfather in a new body. If not that, then definitely she should know more than she does.

Anyway, Zeno says a bunch of grandiose shit about how they're about to create the Great Work or something.

"Utsushikome of Fusai," she said, her tone suddenly very soft. "Immortality is the least of it. There is a power which sleeps here that will remake the world. That will fold mankind as iron in a furnace, and usher in an age of glory. That will grant our species unfathomable and beautiful dignity, and liberate us from this decomposing corpse of a brane."

Exactly how this will be accomplished they do not condescend to say, because apparently all will be revealed shortly. But, out of a sense of loyalty, they give Su her grandfather's macguffin key to open... something, that will give her the right to benefit from whatever it is they're doing.

I appreciate that Su does her best to try and get some answers from someone determined to spout mysterious bullshit. Zeno is, nevertheless, not forthcoming. Su hates this - both being given shit to do with her granddad, and also Zeno's whole fufufu I'm an evil wizard doing schemes shtick.

So that's one element...

Balthazar again

Before meeting Zeno, Su runs into Balthazar again. For reasons that are inexplicable to her, she feels driven to treat him with hostility and suspicion. She drills him on the exact circumstances of what happened after the prosognostic event, where she thought he'd said 'I kept my promise'. After she pushes too far, Balthazar says...

"Dying Gods, you really are an unfair person, aren't you?" He said, ignoring my question and narrowing his eyes. " Right to the bitter end." My frown turned to confusion. "'Unfair person?'" Bitter end? "I don't like to think of myself as the resentful type," he said, now not seeming to be looking at me at all, "but I have to admit, I can't help but feel a little cheated. To struggle for such a long time, just to be saddled with a role like this, and left to-- Well, to be given to choice to either suck it up, or make the situation even worse. And to not even be allowed a few moments of catharsis as a consolation prize... It's cruel. There's no other word for it."

Then he calls Su 'Shiko', an abbreviation of her name which provokes a severely negative physical reaction in her - she almost vomits. At this point we probably think of the fact that the blacked-out name of Su's grandfather is also five letters.

Balthazar claims not to know something but be operating from context clues. What that implies, not clear. He clearly knows more about the situation than he's letting on. ... OK, unfortunately I think I glimpsed a spoiler suggesting he's aware of the time loop, so I can't claim to have organically guessed that idea, but it would make sense. In that case, maybe his 'promise' was to put himself at risk by causing the prosognostic event, allowing the 'control' scenario to play out correctly?

Still, even if he's aware of the loop, it leaves all kinds of questions about what his deal is. Like why this guy and nobody else?

'So much for your country, I guess'

In chapter 38, Su is helping her classmate Seth carry out a bribe to get Sacnicte not to dob him in for fighting, supposedly. This serves as a chance to introduce us to the existence of the fortified security centre, which has surveillance feeds on most of the facility.

Let's talk a little bit about computers!

We also learn that, in the absence of regular electromagnetism, computers 'logic engines' communicate with each other in this world through a 'logic bridge' which involves yet more Tower of Asphodel iron wonkiness. We have 'false iron' and 'true iron'; false iron can be converted into true iron by the connection to the Tower, which can be initiated by the proximity to a human. True iron can talk to true iron.

The upshot is that computers can't talk to each other unless there's a nearby human at both ends, or the Power is involved, and the power can't operate without human intervention, so it's hard to build automated systems in this world.

The other funky aspect is that, by law, the only type of remote computer connection allowed is basically fully immersive VR, because the old world might have collapsed because kids always be on their damn phones.

Iron had enabled people to communicate in radically unconventional ways, which was perceived to have furthered dehumanization and diminished common empathy. As a result, the law was that remote communication was only permitted if it sensually emulated reality, like what was happening in front of us.

This seems like it would be a very helpful plot point if they ever made a film adaptation of this book lol.

Anyway, Su and Seth take the opportunity to tune in to the parade back home while they're doing the bribe. Of course someone sets it up the bomb.

The kids have a little chat about terrorism - Kam holds forth in her usual way about how deplorable terrorism is, much to everyone's frustration, because nobody exactly is in favour of terrorisms here. Bardiya gives us the 'yes the terrorists are morally responsible but this probably happened because the government fucked everything' angle. Ptolema gives us the 'what if it was a false flag' angle.

Ezekiel

Ezekiel deigns to show up onscreen around here. It turns out there's a reason everyone avoided him so far: he's a colossal cunt who's super fantasy-racist towards people from the other planes, and also regular-racist to people from like, literally any other country. He gets away with it because he's able to put a sock in it somewhat in front of the teachers and also good at magic. I think racists call this 'hiding your power level', but I don't think 'being racist' is some kind of cool chuuni superpower.

Hamilcar

Hamilcar is the last member of the Order that we meet. He's got a bit of a techpriest sorta vibe. His general deal is 'golemancy', meaning in this case an approach of replacing human body parts with interchangeable parts and standard interfaces rather than growing perfectly biomimetic organs with biomancy. Fittingly, he is himself a big old robed cyborg, with a breathing apparatus over his mouth and a metal eye. Definitely feels like he missed his calling as a minor JRPG antagonist.

the cute bit with the books

There's a really good scene in chapter 39 where Ran talks books with Yantho, the younger member of the servants/aspirants who talks with a tablet.

Ran talks, at first with Su, at some length about a fantasy novel about dragons. It is quite a thought-out premise in fact...

Ran shrugged. "When you read enough of this shit, all the gimmicks are basically just window dressing. What's important is imagery. Plate armor, big old-fashioned Rhunbardic castles, swords, fantasy creatures... That's what makes something typical." She yawned. "But anyway, in the actual plot, dragons have almost been hunted to extinction, which is causing a crisis since human civilization uses them for everything. They decide to start farming them instead, but the dragons always tear themselves apart rather than letting themselves be captured, and if they just steal the eggs, they die before hatching without their mother."

They talk about whether the premise - in which a special girl is made into a human dragon hybrid to breed dragons - is overly fetishistic before Ran renders her judgement...

She shrugged. "It's average. As far as I can tell, it's going for a bunch of high-minded themes about transhumanism, the cycle of hatred and violence, and society exploiting the bodies of women… But the actual delivery is pretty muddled, and falls apart amidst a bunch of stuff the author obviously only stuck in because they pressed some personal button. Also, there's a romance plot at the center of the narrative that's really pissing me off."

I like this because it's really funny to talk about the kind of book that you're reading inside the book like this. A lot of the time when fictional characters read books, it's very different books.

I sorta suspect that this is about a trunk novel that Lurina wrote? It's so specific! But maybe she's just really good at cooking up a plausibly interesting fantasy novel on the fly.

Yantho joins in and there's a whole convo about the book series. (Su angsts about how she can't really connect in the same way.) It's definitely kind of indulgent but in a way that, contra Ran's take on 'pressing personal buttons', I quite enjoy.

Fang

Finally in chapter 42 the much-delayed conclave begins and we get to see what everyone's little science projects are! Also Fang shows up.

We were already told a bit about Fang - they're a massive prodigy and also nonbinary - but what we didn't realise is that they are incredibly casual about everything. Very much 'TTRPG player who isn't getting into character' energy. They also act like they're gonna improvise their project at the very last minute.

I thought the earlier discussion of Fang implied there is some kind of recognised nonbinary identity in this world, but it seems to be less of that and more that Fang is really good at playing genderfuck. Here's how Su puts it:

It wasn't as though Fang even really asked people to refer to them in gender neutral terms, not that I would have really had a problem with it if they did-- Although that certainly didn't stop Kam and a few others from being varying degrees of shitty and passive-aggressive over the issue, as you saw back when we were grouping up outside the Aetherbridge. Rather, they just implied their feelings by presenting themselves in a way that was genuinely ambiguous. It's a delicate thing to try to put into words and probably even foolish to think about, but it really was difficult to tell what the... Makeup of their body was, uh, physically. They always wore clothes loose around the chest. They were tall, but not widely built. Their face was soft, but not small. They didn't have any facial hair, but their eyebrows were lower and thicker than you'd normally expect from a woman, and while their voice was pretty husky, it was more resonant and melodic than you'd hear from a man. Like Ran and I, Fang was Saoic - though from the Arcanocracy instead of the League - and a lot of foreigners in our extended social circle would say things like, 'oh, they're Saoic, so of course it's hard to tell!' which, aside from being vaguely offensive, was also extremely irritating, since I didn't feel like that had anything to do with it.

Su goes on for a few more paragraphs about how we parse gender and shit.

It's funny to me because... I'm someone who apparently reads a bit ambiguously in terms of gender. In my experience, people decide fairly arbitrarily what gender they think you are, and if something comes to change that impression (for me, usually my voice), they 'correct' themselves. If they're more caught up on trans shit they might ask pronouns or whatever. It's rare for someone to decide that they can't figure it out -and if they do they might be incredibly rude about it like demanding to know my gender or loudly talking about whether I'm a boy or a girl.

Fang apparently deliberately cultivates a nonbinary perception, undermining peoples' assumptions, but keeps subtle with it and doesn't actually ask anyone to use they/them. That's a hell of a fine line to walk lol.

Fang's prodigal talent also has an air of cheating to it. After some remarks from Su about how most 'prodigies' just happen to peak sooner than most (she puts an evopsych spin on this because Su is a bit too much of a lesswronger for her own good still), but aren't lifelong special talents, Su describes how Fang stood apart in schoolwork:

That wasn't how it went for them. They would come into class, sit down, and just write. Nonstop, without pausing even a second for thought. And the work was brilliant! Perfectly voiced, cited, and comprehensive to the point that it put even the wordiest of Kamrusepa's stuff to shame! And they just did it, like they were transcribing directly from the voice of God.

Certainly can't help but get the feeling that Fang might also be in on the time loop, or perhaps an even longer loop? Or maybe they have had their mind overwritten with someone as we're suspecting happened to Su? Or receiving some kind of 'external' information? Definitely seems like there's more to this than just 'Fang is good at academia'.

Anyway, they are super casual about showing up late for this all important conclave. Su's deja-vu feeling manifests into a highly specific prediction...

Fang will withdraw an item that looks like a sheathed blade, but covered in small pieces of strange, silver-white machinery. As soon as the inner circle sees it, they will react with shock and panic. Someone - in 87% of scenarios, Zeno, but sometimes Hamilcar, Anna or even Linos - will demand what they're doing with it and where they got it. Fang will explain that they were entrusted with the task of completing it by a departed member of the order, though they won't say who. Later, I will learn this was my grandfather, but that won't be until half way through the night. After this, the conclave will demand they hand the item over, but Fang will only do this under the condition they stall the conference until they've led everyone down to the sublevel to reveal its purpose. Kamrusepa will get upset and refuse to go. We'll travel to an elevator that goes deeper in the facility, and... And then...

This prediction does not exactly pan out, but we don't actually get to see what Fang's project is, because Hamilcar suddenly intervenes and sends everyone outside.

Some other shit happens before that though!

Ophelia's presentation is the main one to be narrated in detail. She's invented an external artificial liver which is kind of like a slug creature, and does a demo on herself, in which it pokes tentacles in to intercept heir failing liver. I feel like this thing is a Chekhov's gun. Also I am big into Ophelia's whole 'I will do this gross experiment on myself' thing. That's the spirit.

The witch's ultimatum

We get the equivalent of Beatrice's letter. In this case, someone hacks Kam's logic bridge during her presentation, giving a religiously inflected denouncement and ultimatum on behalf of an unnamed goddess. The message commands them to do some occult shit.

First, you shall lay this fel sanctum to waste, taking nothing with you as you abandon it save the clothes on your back! Second, you shall fall to your knees and prostrate yourself before Her glory from the break of dawn to high noon! Third, you shall make the traditional sacrifice of a black bull in the evening light, along with the proper rites! Do this, and turn your miserable lives towards virtue and godliness, and you may yet be afforded forgiveness."

If not, they'll all be killed one by one. We don't have a specific recipe for the killings as Beatrice's revival ritual in Umineko, but it's definitely a Beatricey vibe.

Su, who is one of the only two people who actually knows someone has been murdered (besides, presumably, the murderer!), has more misgivings than the rest, who broadly laugh it off.

There's also a moment of bathos at the end...

Then, the voice exhaled, and the head of the figure shifted to the side, jarringly shifting to casual, chipper tone. "That was pretty good! I really gave it my all, I think--"

Given that the Playwright later claims to have had a cameo, I'm inclined to think it's her 'playing' this ultimatum-giver? Though what that means for the 'integrity' of the scenario I'm not sure!

And then things get crazy

During this recess, Neferuaten comes out to chat with Su and Ran and Ptolema. Ran decides to take the chance to grill her on the real purpose of the facility, because most of what we've been told about it doesn't add up. It probably isn't underwater on the next lower plane. She concludes that the real reason for building a bunch of underwater domes here is something hidden in the caves underneath.

Neferuaten's answer is... to go on a long metaphysical tangent. So it turns out that before making this new universe, the humans in the 'timeless' space of the Tower of Asphodel made some observations of the 'depressed' physics of the post-collapse universe they'd left (seems like the commenters suggesting false vacuum collapse were probably right on the money). They essentially had to wait out the entire heat death of the universe before making a new one (presumably taking no subjective time). So they left some kind of monitoring devices in there creating effectively a complete record of the entire history of the old universe. It's considered a niche interest.

Someone called Saahdia made a study of this data and discovered patterns.

"Of course, I'm simplifying something very complex. One thing I hope you've learned by this point is that, in all forms of scholarly inquiry, nothing is ever clear cut. There were many false positives, and natural occurrences mistaken for something more. But the further she invesigated, the more she found anomalies which could not be easily explained. And the more those anomalies, too, began to form a recognizable pattern." She smiled distantly. "Just not one you usually see in interstellar physics. And then she reported that to Ubar, who ordered an investigation of the corresponding interplanar data--" (...) "What she started to suspect," Neferuaten explained. "was that, though in a form impossibly alien to human beings, entropy is conscious."

This is like... lmao crank shit but it's fine, it's a scifi story, we can have a little conscious entropy as a treat.

Still, it's time to talk physics a bit.

Seems that post I wrote about entropy is going to be very relevant huh. As discussed previously, entropy is a fairly unintuitive quantity that measures how large-scale averaged out models of a system relate to fully specifying every single one of its degrees of freedom.

The 'thermodynamic arrow of time' says that, in the direction we define to be increasing time, entropy always increases. This is justified by a statistical argument: when you have a huge enough number of particles ergodically exploring the states of a system, there are so vastly many more ways for entropy to increase than for it to not increase that the chance of it not increasing is infinitesimal. (This simple argument is considerably complicated by the issue of CPT symmetry, which says the laws of physics work the same way if you run time backwards. That would be too long a tangent for this blog post about a book.)

In thermodynamics, entropy is one of a number of state variables that describe a system. In classical thermodynamics, you form differential equations, relating changes in entropy to changes in other quantities such as internal energy, temperature, volume etc.

So what is entropy? Well, it's not some kind of cosmic processor that is monitoring the micro-level physics of everything. It's a statistical property that crops up in complicated evolving systems.

In our world, that is. In Su's world, entropy is some kind of god. So that's neat.

Naturally all the characters raise similar objections. Here's how Su describes known physics in her future:

"Um…" I said, hesitating as I was put on the spot despite the superficial simplicity of the question. "Well, as far as we know, the Timeless Realm, which contains all fundamental matter, has always existed - along with the 10 conventional dimensional forces, which intersect and overlap with each other around the matter. Some of those intersections were asymmetrical, creating instability and the 11th special dimensional force, time. The process of those intersections breaking down created the phenomena we describe as energy and mass, which at some point led to the first planes. Ours in particular came about when a large amount of energy was discharged from from somewhere else in the inter-dimensional landscape, and--"

We should probably talk a bit about dimensions here. A spatial dimension is basically an direction that something can vary, orthogonal to the other directions. e.g. to reach every point in a 3D space you need at least three non-coplanar basis vectors to add up. In a higher dimensional space, there are more directions to go in.

Mathematics has been describing higher dimensional geometry for centuries. This made its way back to physics around the turn of the 20th century. You had special relativity, which mixes space and time depending on your velocity, defining a 4D 'spacetime'. You also had formulations like Lagrangian mechanics which reformulated Newton's mechanics into a more abstract model of 'state variables', with as many as you'd need to solve your problem.

Much later in the 20th century, attempts to create a unified model of quantum field theory and gravity started observing that their theory could be really mathematically elegant if you added a bunch of extra spacetime dimensions. The problem was that we can't observe these dimensions - we can't move along them and they don't have any observable effect on shit like gravity. A solution for this issue is to say that all these extra space dimensions might loop back on themselves over an incredibly tiny scale. Supersymmetric string theory supposes that there would be 10 dimensions (the 4 regular spacetime ones + 6 extra ones which are all twisted up in something called a Calabi-Yau manifold), other theories add more.

I should say here that, despite decades of research effort and increasingly gigantic particle accelerators, we have found zero evidence for supersymmetry, which makes things dicey for string theory - a body of theoretical work that was already hard to meaningfully test in the first place. So '10 spacetime dimensions' is far from proven physics.

While I'm at it, since it's come up, a brane is basically a hypersurface of some dimension, that propagates through a higher-dimensional space. It's a generalisation of notions like 'particle' (point moving through spacetime) and 'string' (line moving through spacetime). String theory uses this mathematical construct heavily - notably, within string theory our universe could be a specific type of brane with various strings attached to it in a way that allows it to produce quantum mechanics from the way the strings and branes interact.

So, in Flower, the 'planes' seem to have been identified with the physics concept of 'brane'. In practice they function more like the classical fantasy notion of 'planes of existence', other worlds that you can travel to where the rules are different.

Now, let's go back to Su's summary. I don't really get what she means by 'dimensional forces' here, particularly when she describes time as a 'force'. The 'process of those intersections breaking down' is probably a way of describing the Higgs mechanism and spontaneous symmetry breaking. The 'large amount of energy' is presumably a reference to the Big Bang (the hot dense state at the beginning of our universe), coupled with the idea that the energy came from 'somewhere else'. Further, Su seems to be suggesting that they exist in a brane cosmology, in which our universe is a brane in a higher-dimensional space, and there could be other universes.

Su's description is kinda muddled tbh - it feels like the interpolation of someone who reads popular science magazines rather than a physicist.

Anyway, here's how Su defines entropy:

"But we do know what entropy is," I insisted. "It's just an emergent quality of energy in some planes in which gravity is exceeded by motion in terms of potential force, without anything else to taper it. You taught me that countless times yourself."

This seems somewhat odd to me - I'm not entirely sure why gravity would enter into it. I think it might have to do with conflating the thermodynamic arrow of time (the 'direction' along which entropy increases) and the cosmological arrow of time (the 'direction' in which the universe expands), since the expansion of the universe is determined by the balance of matter and energy in the universe.

'Emergent quality of energy' is somewhat accurate. Entropy could be more aptly said to be an emergent quality of any model that treats matter in the aggregate, abstracting over details. An atom in a gas interacting with other atoms has no concept of entropy in its dynamics. If you were able to perfectly track and simulate every single particle, you would not need entropy.

Since it's so contextually defined, it's rather difficult to describe entropy as a kind of entity that could be afforded a will. Neferuaten's response is to play the allegory of the cave card, something which Ran calls her on:

"This is the second time in the past five minutes that you've basically repackaged the allegory of the cave and presented it as your own concept," Ran said flatly. "Just putting that out there."

Kind of love this line.

However, despite the characters grilling Neferatuen on an idea which Su correctly calls 'closer to mysticism than natural philosophy', the fact that this is given so much time in the narrative seems to fairly strongly suggest that, as far as this story is concerned, entropy is a conscious entity or process or something.

Presumably, whatever the Order are about to try to do, they're going to change how entropy behaves so that it 'wants' to keep humans alive indefinitely. Somehow this is going to involve the Everblossom. I will say, that is a proper scale of magnum opus for a setting like this.

Neferuaten is honestly pretty up front about all this. She's like 'yep we're playing with fire and probably courting an x-risk*, but don't worry, we know what we're doing'.

"I'm just trying to be upfront, miss Rheeds," Neferuaten said. "I'm happy to be known as hypocritical, selfish, or even foolish, but the one thing that makes my stomach churn is the idea of miss Hoa-Trinh, and of course you and Utsuhikome, walking away from this conversation with the impression that we're all megalomaniacs without any degree of mindfulness of we're doing. It has been, if nothing else, among my foremost goals to promote self-awareness among the administration of this organization."

As upfront as she might be trying to be, she lapses back into the cryptic bullshit and refuses to explain much more about how the Order came to this mysterious location beyond 'there is an Ironworker thing here' that they can use to observe and interact with entropy, I guess.

Anyway, all of this ends with Neferuaten declaring that as long as she lives, no danger will come to Su et al. Signing her own death warrant with those words.

Neferuaten dies

So then Su sees the beaky thing and blacks out. When she comes to, she tries to figure out what she saw - about this point we also get another visit from the Playwright, who explains that Su can't have her perceptions messed with until we are shown the mechanism that would do it - and then Lilith shows up and drags her to go find help. The warning bell is going off. Su goes to shut it off. And we get... our second death!!

Su also learns that as far as other characters were concerned, she seemed mostly normal. It seems therefore that she's suffered amnesia rather than actually being unconscious. Maybe her alter took over? Or maybe her visit to Samium didn't take as well as she hoped?

We also get some new rules, including coloured text. Red text (actually a darker red, but this is the only one I have on here) is used to describe Su finding a corpse that is absolutely definitely the corpse of that specific person, ruling out misidentifications, subsitutes etc. whoops, I misremembered that part! the only guarantee we get is that they're human remains and dead, but not whose human remains they are. (so this could be someone else who died and then, say, post-mortem transformed to look like neferatuen).

We also get to have new POVs, starting with an academic guy from an early chapter who seems to know more than he was letting on. These segments begin with a letter in purple text if we're supposed to treat them as reliable.

Considering Su blacked out for most of the relevant period, I'm not sure if we're supposed to really be able to solve any of the 'dunnit' questions at this point. What we know is that someone killed Neferuaten and stuffed her body in the bell. Why? Well we have a 'witch narrative' (the members of the Order will be killed one by one if they don't do ritual blah), and we also have reasons to suspect there could be conflict within the order. The thing is nobody has an alibi at this point - about the only people it's unlikely to be are Lilith (who was probably near Su) and Linos (who is established as unable to climb the stairs of the belltower, though then again these are all flying wizards here).

We also learn about a thing called the Allagiypnou Process, which reduces how much you have to sleep at the risk of potential personality changes. Every member of the Order except Linos has had it.

So not much to say just yet. I liked Neferuaten. But we already know it's a time loop story, so I'm sure she'll be back in a future loop.

The Playwright and the Director and final mysteries

The story is getting increasingly frequent interruptions from the Playwright and the Director, adding an increasingly metafictional dimension to this. This is not really surprising if you're an Umineko-head, but it does seem to be causing a certain amount of consternation in the comments.

I definitely suspect there is more to these characters than merely a cutesy way to inform us of the rules of the Fair Play mystery we're allegedly supposed to be solving. There are obvious questions like - who is the audience? What is the connection of the characters to the situation? If this is all being orchestrated, to what end?

Given the earlier declaration that entropy is sentient, I wonder if this is some kind of anthropomorphised representation of the 'will' of entropy? But that seems kinda cheap.

Anyway, we end with another set of reveals - Nindar, the academic back at the uni which they all left behind, is clearly in on whatever conspiracy is afoot here, and had a hand in bringing Fang and their mysterious object with the goal of changing the mission of the Order.

And also apparently the boys' group didn't even go up the space elevator.

So like what does that imply?? Are all the boys replaced with imposters? If the boys didn't go up the lift, but made their way to the Sanctuary by some other means, why do they all seem to remember going up the space elevator and following a similar route to the girls?

I honestly have no idea at this point. Feels like way too many unknowns to reason deductively about.

In conclusion

Sure are a lot of balls in the air right now. I'm fascinated to see where they might land.

Maybe let's make a list of like, known mysteries?

the big one: what skulduggery happened with Su's ascension that made it go so badly wrong? why did Ran react so badly to knowing that Su can't assimilate? what did Su's grandfather have to do with it?

who knocked out Yantho and ruined his roast?

whodunnit #1: who killed the cook, and why?

who hacked Kam's phone with the ultimatum, and why?

what happened between Su blacking out from seeing Beaky, and waking up in bed in the evening? (what did Samium do to her?)

whodunnit #2: who killed Neferatuen? why? when?

what crazy Great Work are the Order plotting? how's the Everblossom involved?

what's under the Sanctuary that's so big and important?

how did the Order come to the Sanctuary? there's clearly a story there.

who is Su's unnamed friend from the beach in the flashbacks?

what are the Playwright and the Director playing at? (are they secretly Gog-Agog?)

what does Balthazar know?

what's Fang hiding?

who's Beaky?

what does the terrorist attack have to do with the Conclave?

There's probably more I'm forgetting right now.

Not sure how many of these - if any! - we're supposed to be able to infer at this point in the narrative, but it's definitely a spicy brew!

I expect the bodies are going to hit the floor pretty quickly from this point, but who knows... we're still quite early on in this affair.

...phew, these writeups are a bit of a project. I've gotten everything down now I think, so I can finally let myself read the next chapter.

[young-royals-confessions]

sorry for the long confession but i’m passionate about this and i think it’s important to talk about:

there is absolute nothing ableist about disliking or even hating sara. hating a character who happens to be neurodivergent is NOT the same as hating a character because they are neurodivergent.

yes, there are people who have projected their prejudices onto sara since season 1 because she is a neurodivergent female character. HOWEVER, there are also many many people who hate/dislike her because her actions are horrid.

and yes, autism and adhd affect personality and a person’s perceptions of the world (social cues and behavior, etc.) but they are not excuses. sara fucked up. she fell in love with a man who uploaded pornography of her 16 year old brother and then proceeded to warn said man of her brother going to the police to get justice. she fucking sucks (in my personal opinion).

she did bad things. it is not ableist to say that and dislike her for that. we can all acknowledge that she is neurodivergent and understand the basis for her actions and thought processes, but that doesn’t mean people are required to like her or turn a blind eye to her actions. autism and adhd are not get out of jail free cards for super shitty behavior.

and as someone who is autistic, i can understand people being upset that the only known neurodivergent character in the main cast is a very dislikeable person. i understand the criticisms that this may continue and further some people’s negative perception of neurodivergence. AND i can understand and even kind of relate to the protectiveness some of us may have over her. before season 2, i felt the same way. i defended her and held hope that that one scene at the end of season 1 was a fluke lol. but then season 2 happened and i just couldn’t continue defending her because i was basing it entirely on my own protectiveness of her character. she was representation for me and i hated that i was losing my ability to see myself in her.

and i think we should continue having this kind of conversation for more positive representation in not only queer media but all kinds of media for nd characters. this is important and it saddens me that i don’t feel a connection to sara anymore. but i also want to call to attention that excusing sara’s behavior with her neurodivergent diagnoses also doesn’t reflect good on neurodivergence in general. saying that her actions are the direct result of her autism/adhd and therefore cannot be criticized simply isn’t the best defense at all cause that can easily be turned into more hate on us by neurotypicals.

at the end of the day, sara is an understandably complex character with many layers. she is neurodivergent and for some viewers that may result in them sympathizing and relating to her more. while others may understand and appreciate those nuances but still find themselves heavily disliking her. whereas other viewers may project their biases on her and be hateful for the very fact that she is autistic and has adhd (these are the ableists). it is possible and even valid to critique nd characters as long as you remain conscious of the language you use and your own reasoning for disliking them. i often times look inward at myself to make sure that my dislike for sara isn’t coming from internalized ableism because i never want to contribute to the hatred of nd people in this world by projecting onto her. it’s healthy to do that so you avoid becoming part of the problem. but it’s not healthy to label every critique of her as ableism because then you’re misusing such an important identifier.

in summary, hold yourself responsible for the way you think about characters like sara. whether you’re expressing your dislike for them OR defending them, listen to the words you’re saying and look inward to see what it really is you’re trying to say (whether good or bad)

.

[monstersinthecosmos]

Hi!! I would love to hear your thoughts about Marius' experience of captivity and how this affects his relationship with Armand. You alluded to this in Gallows Bird and I think that's a super interesting thread to pull

[ Let me drop these two fics real quick to get it out of the way for reference sorry if this is obnoxious LOL but Gallows Bird (Marius/Armand) and The Lotus Eater (Armand/Daniel) !! ]

Asdgahsdk oh boy

I have so many deep nuanced feelings about Marius de Romanus so be patient with me while I try to sketch this all out, I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHERE TO START!

So one thing I want to mention off the bat, which is not necessarily canon VC but is relevant to my fics and how I write, is that I process a lot of ND/ADHD stuff when I write, and this goes way back before I even knew I had ADHD. So even going back to like my earlier VC fics from like 5-6 years ago, I think I was constantly inserting traits of myself into my fics and trying to process them in the way that I thought they were just character flaws at the time. AND LIKE this is also relevant because I wrote Gallows Bird to be directly correlating to my Devil’s Minion fics. For example, in The Lotus Eater, one of my huge emotional cornerstones in that fic/me talking about my own perceived character flaws, was the “he had been careless with this boy” theme. And I repeated that in Gallows Bird on purpose to link them lol. So that example is like, I was really inspired by like how ADHD can ruin things on accident; like you don’t take care of something, miss a deadline, break something by being careless even though you DO CARE. At the time when I wrote The Lotus Eater I had no idea about ADHD so I just thought it was like this bad part of my personality that I was really struggling with. I am more forgiving of that now.

And I connect this also to Marius in Gallows Bird because like, something I really struggled with as a person is like the ND/ADHD impulse to like RELATE TO PEOPLE when they’re trying to talk, like bringing up my own experience as a way to say “Something like this happened to me too so I can empathize with you”, which is always well intentioned! And I’ve seen so much convo from ND folks that struggle with this because NT folks tend to misunderstand it as changing the subject/being narcissistic/whatever.

Anyway!!!!!!!!! Sorry for that preamble but I’m saying that like, I kind of approach writing Marius as a mix of canon & projection, because yknow it’s my fuckin story and I feel like it lol but I think like the fun of fanfic and what makes people’s styles unique and interesting is our mix of perspectives and personalities and like how we choose to fill in the blanks in canon or interpret characters, right?

Canon Marius makes a few comments when he meets Armand about how like, this is someone who is as bruised and damaged as he is, and someone who can heal him, and he feels their souls understand each other. And Canon Marius is like, arrogant enough (by his own admission!) to see the absolute HORRIFIC trauma the Armand went through and go “Oh yeah I had horrific trauma too.”

How do we compare Armand’s trauma to Marius’s trauma? Idk. No one can answer that because we all respond to trauma differently. So I think to some extent there’s some headcanon territory here of how everyone interprets Marius, and do we believe him that his trauma was SO SEVERE that it IS on par with what’s happened to Armand? Or do we believe what he went through isn’t so bad/was 1500 years ago and he’s being obnoxious by comparing the two because he should be healed by now?

I’d also ask like, to what extent is neither true/is it not that fucking deep, like is Marius simply saying “wow this looks really bad, I want to know him for centuries so he has time to grow and heal”; like perhaps Marius at this point sees his captivity & murder as this awful thing that happened to him 1500 years ago and maybe it feels sort of disconnected.

BUT I DON’T KNOW, the thing about Marius is that he’s so fucking stoic! Like I know I’ve brought it up a couple times recently but it’s because I was reading some Marcus Aurelius to put in Gallows Bird lol so using that to like fill in some blanks with Marius, he reads like someone who is constantly trying to rationalize away his own emotions. And like! IDK! Maybe beliefs about psychology are always a phases or temporary until we learn more, but reading him in 2023 I just call bullshit on that! It doesn’t work that way! So who’s to say that his 1500 year old trauma isn’t actually still very close to the surface, and who’s to say he can’t be easily retraumatized whenever it comes up because he’s never meaningfully recovered?

AND LIKE FOR PEOPLE WHO HAVE EXPERIENCED TRAUMA THE AFTERMATH IS SO OFTEN ABOUT JUST FINDING CONTROL OVER WHATEVER YOU CAN, NO MATTER HOW USELESS OR UNHEALTHY IT IS. And that's also the sort of central thesis of Gallows Bird; giving Armand a space to process his trauma where he's in control. And for Marius it's just really sad how often he tries to control his own personality, his own feelings, his own mask, the way people perceive him, and it's such a struggle for him that it always eventually collapses.

I want to pause here for a second too and bring up a couple old posts I’ve written so I’m not repeating myself too much LOL but let’s also consider:

Trauma Hole Theory and if vampires are stuck forever within the trauma of their turning

Marius & Armand’s equal-opposite religious trauma

Marius’s struggle with feeling emotion

I think if we start dissecting ANY vampire in VC we’ll see thematic ways that their turning has traumatized them forever, between the violence/trauma around the act itself but also whatever ways they’ve been frozen as their mortal selves. Lestat is a perpetually insecure 20 year old who can’t emotionally regulate and must prove himself to everybody, Louis is someone who didn’t want to live at all and was given eternal life rather than death, Armand is deeply wounded and fucked up but is having like 2 years of relative peace and safety. And Marius is like, older, has lived life, knows what he’s losing and gaining, and has his entire worldview shattered after spending a year resenting religious zealots only to find out that everything they believed was true.

So I bring all these points up because I don’t think there’s a simple answer or a direct correlation here. Marius recognizes that they’ve each suffered a trauma, but he hasn’t really dealt with his own in a meaningful way, therefore he is not equipped to help Armand deal with his either.

I constantly go back to when Marius hits him after they come back from Kiev and I think this really hammers it home for me—Marius is someone who wants to strangle all of his emotions into submission, and he’s really trying to believe that it’s a matter of willpower to simply NOT FEEL THINGS. So much of Marcus Aurelius is about this! AND IN SOME WAYS LIKE, YEAH THIS IS MAYBE AN ANCIENT VERSION OF CBT??? Like we do CBT to patiently teach ourselves to think differently, but it’s obviously not as easy as simply shutting your emotions off or bullying yourself out of feeling any. And he’s trying SO SO hard to be this way, and it doesn’t work, so it’s not going to work on Armand either!

And like it’s not Marius simply being a dickhead, simply being abusive; I do think he’s really trying, but he’s fucking lost! HE HAS LIVED LIES! And god it just really hurts to see him as someone who struggles with this shit and who lies to himself about it, LIKE WHO HASN’T BEEN THERE? How many of us who struggle with mental health haven’t had those moments like, those tiny glimpses seeing behind the veil and being honest with yourself, but being so fucking powerless and not knowing what to do with it.

I know I’ve personally had moments of realization like “I am going to be like this forever” and it’s SO defeating, and imagining that sentiment for someone who will LIVE FOREVER just hurts me so bad!

We see this trope in media sometimes—certainly it’s based in real life!—of parents projecting onto children, trying to correct mistakes by breaking a cycle, but which only serves to treat their child like an extension of themselves and not a whole individual. So I think of that, too—Marius seeing himself in someone who was also abducted, and even though he also plans to turn Armand, he wants it to be beautiful and gentle! (He even changes his mind about it several times before he does it in a panic because Armand is dying! {this is heavily referenced in Gallows Bird because he realizes he's fucked Armand up to much to let him live anyway.} ) He also is sorta trying to fake it till he makes it with all this emotional stuff; like even though he KNOWS he can’t simply shut emotions off, he’s still trying to teach Armand to. And going back to Marius being a lil arrogant, I think sometimes he does project himself onto other people, or treat people better if they remind him of himself. So like, projecting some wounded version of himself onto Armand to try to rescue, vs risking it all for Lestat a few centuries later because someone who reminds him of himself actually WANTS to be rescued.

The IRONY too that like he spends his whole time in captivity as a skeptic, not believing that there is a God in the Grove, and for that entity to turn out to be a vampire!!! Marius presenting HIMSELF as a god-figure to Armand, but trying to be safe and friendly about it! I don’t know man I’m really fucking hsdkjgladsghkjl upset right now lol

And after all that like, not really knowing what exactly happened to Armand to indoctrinate him into the cult, just knowing that he’s thriving with them, that he gave it all up to be their leader, is such a betrayal of everything and so traumatizing!

Gosh.

Anyway.

I DON’T’ KNOW WHERE TO START I DON’T KNOW WHERE TO END, THINKING ABOUT THIS FUCKS ME UP I HOPE THIS ANSWERS YOUR QUESTION LOL