#about my own life experiences including trauma sometimes like if its relevant? like its not venting but its just fucking conversation??

[cavaliersecondary]

genuinely so fucking tired of the 'conversation' around 'trauma dumping'. none of you know how to use that word AND none of you motherfuckers understand what boundaries are. like yes if theres a pattern of someone or multiple people throwing heavy and triggering shit on you unprompted then theres an issue and they need to redirect their behavior, but so do you!! you need to communicate if you are uncomfortable and/or do not have the capacity to discuss things!!! YOU.

[nahalism]

Have you ever beaten yourself down or felt defected because you couldn’t uphold a routine?

I am going through something like this now. I see people around me who, of course to varying degrees (but some excell in) getting their diet, sleep schedule, studying/working, exercising routine in check, having a plan. And whenever i try, for the love of me, i just cannot uphold it. I can’t be consistent, my brain just doesn’t work like this but i keep hearing that it has improved peoples’ lives so much, developing a routine and sticking to it. And i know me not having one is probably not in my favor (studying whenever i have the ”inspiration” to because otherwise my brain just shuts off no matter how i try to trick myself instead of regularly and smooth sailing through assignments as a result) can’t go to sleep and wake up at the same time every day INCLUDING WEEKENDS can’t eat regularly. So i try to improve myself and chase this but all it does is reflect to me that i am just not able to and it makes me feel even worse about myself. And i personally know people who ARE able to do all of that and i can see it pays off in so many ways, in their life. My thoughts get in the way, my feelings get in the way and they make me pretty much not functional for periods of time and i am not sure if these people experience the exact same „wall” and they consistently push through it or if maybe my wall is just a big higher and stronger than theirs sometimes. I feel like my brain is against me, truly. (Probably relevant to mention that i do have some mental problems overall which could be affecting all i mentioned and the way i function, it still feels so defeating to me)

such a long message, i am sorry. i hope you are love lately x

hey beautiful <3. my reply will be equally as long if not longer so no need to be sorry :)

yes. lol just, yes. ive been through the exact same feelings that you describe and even though i struggle less now, i struggle less only as a consequence of my ability to be kinder and more tolerant of myself, not because ive magically changed into someone different. — ill try to explain what i did to help but ill be honest, theres only ever been one solution for me which is to do the work. its hard, its lonely, no one comes to help, or to save you, they even stop pretend ing to care. people will try to support you, but despite best intentions may fall short or lack the capacity to give you what you actually need. so you have to be the one. you have to carry yourself over the finish line, often at the cost losing things, people and parts of yourself that you think you love and cant do without (its soul wrenching but worth the initial discomfort, i promise). every breakthrough is hard earned and often doesnt even feel like the cherry on the top that its supposed to be. so the only way to find the will to keep going is to enjoy the challenge of the journey and learn to love what choosing to 'carry your own cross' is developing in you.

1) the first thing i had to do was make that cross worth carrying for myself. not because id been told to do it, had to do it, or because 'self care' is important, but because I was priority enough to myself that i found the willpower to see it though. to make that possible i had to understand why i was my number one priority, and then make my actions reflect that. it sounds heroic but it looked like excavating my soul, saying no to anything i didnt want to do, and anything i did out of obligation. that included essays, exams, my job, friends, family. maybe that sounds extreme but i realised that all those things meant nothing if the person who was meant to be showing up for them didnt want to be alive/was in anyway unhealthy, or was so dysfunctional that they showed up as a semi sane version of themselves. my whole personality was a trauma response, and even despite the trauma i had to look at what i was doing to create the circumstances i was unhappy with. going from responding unconsciously to consciously choosing my actions was brutal. all of this sounds empowering but it often looks and feels shambolic & looks like being a fuck up. i literally appeared to the outside world like someone who had gone off the edge and was failing at life. for context, making the choices im talking about led to me retaking a year at uni, being a ghost to everyone and everything in my life, having panic attacks every night because despite feeling like i was doing the right thing i had no evidence it would work and no idea how id make it out & all this lasted for way after i graduated so people were looking at me crazy :). HOWEVER, its also how i learned to draw, how i restored my relationship with myself, how i found the passion and excitement to work toward a goals i had set (not the ones set for me). i also became confident for the first time in my life. like actualll self esteem and self knowledge. i hated being seen or perceived due to things id been through, and still struggle with that now tbh. so when i look at the fuller version of myself im embodying today, the multiple ways ive put myself outside of my comfort zone, (and the versions of me i know are to come) i know that the first steps began with following my gut and taking that initial leap of faith that honoured the truth of who i felt myself to be, not the pattern id been following/living in.

2) that first step is important cause when what you do what matters to you, you gain a different willpower (aka passion) that fuels what you do and why you do it. i spent my whole childhood with e.d's and unable to consistently work out/find working out pleasurable. however once i built a relationship with myself and understood what a body was and why it deserved my respect, working out stopped being about the pressure to be a fine babe, and about desiring mobility, full function of my vehicle and longterm health. i say that to say, sometimes its not that your undisciplined, but that your trying hard at the wrong things. (an undisciplined or inconsistent person doesn't keep trying at things despite failing time and time again...). another way to look at it is — a goat is not meant to be a sheep, nor a sheep a goat. theres nothing wrong with being either, but you have to know which you are. (this takes us back to point one: are the things you put pressure on yourself to do/be/accomplish, authentic to you or are you imposing them of yourself because of pressure/expectation/superficial reasons). if its the later, you cannot wait till you have the answers to change the direction your moving in. you have to pivot, take the next step in the direction that feels purposeful and deeply honest to you, and trust that even though you cant see the whole path, the next step will be revealed as you continue to walk forward. the mental illness doesnt go away, but it fades as your tolerance increases. its not meant to be easy, if you can remember that then you'll be okay.

3) you dont have to do it perfectly. you just have to do it. over time, ive had routines w/ varying success. my overarching interests, goals/priorities are the same, but they fluctuate which means i can struggle with consistency and seeing things through (not cause i dont want to be consistent but i feel like i change so rapidly as a person that i almost forget why i set certain goals for myself and why building the routine/proficiency in skill was important to me in the first place). in this sense, its hard to accomplish a goal if you dont relate to the version of yourself you were when you set it. so part one to this point is, i have to use my quirks to my advantage. i know that i tend to cycle through my interests every 3 months ish. so, i set goals that can be accomplished in 3 month cycles rather than over the course of a year. in doing that i achieve small steps toward the larger, more diverse vision of my life i have for myself, meaning i could have one goal - lets say financial freedom - and 3 projects over the course of 9 months that feed into that goal. this works for me because i know i can sustain deep focus over the course of those three months and so will accomplish what ive set out to do. — but whats key for you, is that you find out what works for you. if you start to embrace your needs and what makes you different, you can also embrace the ways it makes you and your approach unique and innovative. rather than a hinderance or a source of 'why cant i be like/function like everyone else'. ——— that leads on to the second part, which is learning to carry the good with the bad. e.g. — whilst the way i fluctuate makes me multifaceted, it also means that one month im focused on art (my style) & reading, the next i might be on philosophy and writing, right before i get back to gardening and portrait practice, then cycle back to learning languages or an instrument. that level of commitment to multiple disciplines means what could take me 3 months to accomplish if i had a single minded focus, gets dragged out into a year long affair. lmty, its almost as frustrating to make slow progress as it is not to progress at all. so sometimes i feel like ive come so far only to have achieved the bare minimum. ive had to learn to appreciate that slow and steady approach (rather than chasing immediate perfection which leads to burn out) and be grateful for the fact that even though its taking long, at least im moving in the right direction. eventually ill learn the skill of expediting each of my processes, but right now this is where im at. extending that kind of grace and mercy to yourself is the biggest part of this all. because if i know im not good at structure, and im specifically struggling with it at this moment, maybe i dont need to hyper-fixate on having a morning routine right now. maybe for the next few months, its not about doing yoga the moment i wake up (even if i know thats best for me) maybe i just need to do yoga at 'unspecified time today'. maybe i dont need to sleep at 10pm. i can actually start work at 10pm, and go to sleep at 6 am. as long as i do yoga, as long as i go to sleep, as long i *insert task*, that is enough for right now. infact more than enough, its a victory. so, work on your own schedule and embrace it. trust that you've set goals and failed before but that you are still here and still committed to getting it right next time, which means you are a trustworthy person who can rely on themselves to show up for themselves. the more you practice not giving up, the smaller the gap between your ability to take action, which means the greater your ability to develop the skill of routine. perhaps not a conventional routine, but routine just means habit. over the course of your life, you are building the habit of not giving up. or of consistently coming back to & developing skills you wanna build. that is the desired outcome, not the structure of how you achieve that, but the fact that you have achieved some form of taking action consistently.

last thing i want to leave you with is the way i see and feel you. you could have asked me anything, you could have asked me nothing at all, but you chose to ask me about how to improve your situation. in that sense, your words have betrayed what your will and your desire is. the things we desire today, dictate the person we become tomorrow, and so i know without a doubt that its not a matter of if, but a matter of when you achieve these routines, their outcomes (& so much more, you cant even imagine whats on the other side). <3. it takes a very special kind of grit and resilience to fail and to try again. you inspire me and remind me of the qualities that make humans truly beautiful, truly necessary and truly precious. so dont give up, dont go under. none of this is meant to break you, just pull out what is inevitable to who you are and what you are meant to be. it is going to be hard, but you are not alone even when you are alone, and when you make it out the other end you become a testimony for others, (& evidence that they arent alone either). keep fighting, i believe in you, sending big love & a big hug xx-xx

[girl4music]

“Earlier in this video I claimed that Majora’s Mask is a perfect commentary on trauma. And while Link’s healing journey through Termina is one reason for making this claim, what really makes Majora’s Mask stand out is the contrast between how Link and the Skull Kid respond to their traumas. Whereas Link’s actions throughout Majora’s Mask demonstrate the healthy and necessary aspects of trauma recovery, Skull Kid’s actions illustrate how not to cope with trauma if we want to live a life worth living. For this reason, Dr. Herman’s three-phase model of recovery is no longer relevant. So when speaking about the Skull Kid I will reference another psychological model. This one from the realm of conflict resolution. The Circle of Aggression and Reconciliation created by Olga Bacharova. This diagram illustrates not only how one can move from aggression to reconciliation but also how one can get trapped in aggression for, potentially, ever. Bacharova notes that the inner cycle of the diagram demonstrates how natural human responses to harm may move people from being victims to becoming aggressors, and Skull Kid perfectly personifies this movement from victim to villain. You see, Skull Kid’s friends The Giants have left him behind and Skull Kid feels abandoned. This abandonment leads to intense pain and eventually anger. To use Bacharova’s words: “anger has a legitimate yet irrational nature”. To use my own words, even justified anger has a will of its own. No matter how righteous our rage may be, if we allow anger to control our lives forever, it will inevitably cause more pain and suffering. But let’s be honest. Anger is useful. If we are sad we generally lay down, cry or collapse. But if we are angry we tend to take action. Anger gives us energy to move, to make change. And if we are fresh off the heels of a traumatizing event, anger can feel like the only emotion that might keep us going when we would otherwise want to break down. And so it is easy to imagine that Skull Kid would indulge his anger to give himself some relief. Some sense of power and agency against his backdrop of loss. Whereas Link regains his sense of self by healing the pain of others, Skull Kid regains his sense of self by partaking in petty acts of anger and revenge. Unfortunately anger is seductive and addictive. Because of its energy and its usefulness anger can be easily justified and easily abused. And this is the trap that Skull Kid finds himself within throughout Majora’s Mask. With every crime or transgression he commits he assures himself that it’s okay because he is a victim. The more he reassures himself of his righteousness, the more bold and destructive his behaviour becomes. And Skull Kid isn’t just angry with The Giants. He’s angry with the entire world. And this is pretty common. As Bacharova notes; “sometimes anger is directed towards outsiders who are unable to prevent the loss or even towards others who did not experience a similar loss”. I.E. the whole world is seen as hostile.

All of the characters in Majora’s Mask suffer but for some reason Skull Kid seems to believe that his suffering is unique. Somehow more important than the pain of everyone else. Anger has a way of doing that. This tendency understandably causes him to feel isolated and it also allows him to justify his destructive behaviours. These behaviours repel others including his only friends; Tatl and Tael which further isolates him. In other words, Skull Kid’s actions become a self-fulfilling prophecy. What he really wants is the sense of connection he lost when The Giants departed but his anger at their abandonment and his subsequent bad behaviour pushes everyone away. I have to be honest - I feel bad for the Skull Kid. Bacharova says that: “subconsciously, victims want to restore the sense of deep human connectedness destroyed by conflict. In order to make the wrongdoer understand the pain of the victim, he needs to experience a similar suffering. So as twisted as it may sound Skull Kid’s acts of terror are actually just unhealthy attempts to restore his sense of connection with others. He is lonely and afraid and he wants others to feel pain because he is in pain. And if everyone is in pain, maybe he won’t feel so lonely. Whereas Link connects with others by helping, Skull Kid connects with others by hurting. But of course, by trying to connect with others by hurting them Skull Kid experiences more rejection and more abandonment which causes him more pain and invokes more anger and aggression - so he just keeps cycling. This is why Bacharova’s diagram shows a potential for the cycle of aggression to cycle endlessly. It is very difficult, although not impossible, to escape the cycle of aggression once it has started. It is perfectly self-containing and perfectly self-replicating.

In my opinion, Skull Kid, or Majora, if you like, is the most terrifying villain in the Zelda franchise because his desires are so unquenchable. Whereas Ocarina Of Time’s Ganondorf is motivated by power, Majora is motivated by his own pain. If a villain is motivated by a power, we can negotiate with them by giving them power or taking it away. For example in Ocarina Of Time there are people who can stay on Ganondorf’s good side by playing into his vanity and treating him as their leader. In Majora’s Mask, there are no such characters. While there are some shady people who take advantage of the chaos left in Skull Kid’s wake, there are no characters who ally themselves with the Skull Kid. To have friends or allies would take away his feelings of abandonment and therefore his feelings of victimhood and therefore his anger and therefore his power. In this way Skull Kid can be seen as having no weaknesses because the more pain we inflict upon him, the more anger he feels, and the more anger he feels, the more powerful he becomes. So how can we possibly stop him?”

I always find Zelda games to be more significant and profound than most other single-player RPG games. It’s part of the reason it’s my favourite game series of all-time. The creators are always creating stories that allow the main protagonist (and the player as an extension) to find some type of psychological reward to their endeavours over a specifically physical one. I mean the two may and often do come and go together but it’s always the psychological reward that is the most compelling reason to play the games for me.

Majora’s Mask in particular leaves you only with the psychological reward for the most part. But - as you said - you really don’t pick this up about it immediately, if ever - it’s something that settles into you as you return to playing the game the older that you get. And I always prefer art/entertainment of any format that has the consumer grow with it in that they continue to find more and more meaning each time they engage with it rather than just have meaning for them in a specific place in time. Or just the once. In a sense Majora’s Mask is a timeless experience in an overall narrative that focuses specifically on time. The time it takes to do something, the time it takes to achieve a certain goal…. Only for it all to be undone when the clock strikes twelve three days later. And it is frustrating and it is debilitating. You feel like you aren’t doing enough even when you’ve expended every bit of energy you have left on your objectives. It ultimately doesn’t mean anything to get it done. To save the day. The physical reward does not do anything for you or for anyone really because it’s constantly taken from you when time resets itself.

But that is what it feels like to be locked inside trauma. It does feel like a cycle that never ends. And Majora’s Mask captures that experience accurately even for those who do not have internalized trauma. And it is a game that stands out in and of itself even within the franchise to which it belongs in and to. ‘The Legend Of Zelda’ is always a unique experience with each game you play because it almost always involves the human condition - which is always viewed and handled differently depending on the individual. But Majora’s Mask is a game that only feels fulfilling when you’ve forgotten that of which you think needs to be. When you’ve given up looking for an answer and just kept moving regardless of the reward or destination. It’s why I believe it’s not really a children’s game because in some ways it’s like playing a psychological horror game like any of the Silent Hills. It is frightening, it is traumatising, it is an unpleasant experience for the most part when playing the game.

And that’s precisely the point. The creators are asking you to feel something as you play it. Not to just simply play it. Because that’s an empty goal. There is no reason to even complete this game and you may never do so… I certainly never have. But I appreciate the attempt to get us to look inward and understand that completion is pretty meaningless when you’re psychologically stuck in a cycle that you can’t get out of. The only reward is the psychological one and you may never get it or you may always get it. It really depends on you as the player/engager of it.

All true art/entertainment creators seek more from its creation than to simply just be art/entertainment. But very few creators will take away any sense of satisfaction at all in anyone interacting with their creation in order to get that higher result or greater response from it. To leave a psychological impact. And the reason why is that people don’t like to be preached to. They don’t want to go that deep in. They want an escape from real life situations and circumstances such as trauma. They don’t want to literally purchase a reason to dive in and address it. And that’s their prerogative and right. However, for me, it will always mean so much more to me that way because the only reason I do interact/engage with art/entertainment - particularly of a visual format - is so that I can learn more about life and the human condition. Understand it’s difficulties and complexities. Study it’s vastness and variation in how it’s experienced by so many different people of so many different backgrounds and how it informs and influences them to see or think or feel a certain way.

That’s always interesting to me, fascinating even. But so many people prefer art/entertainment to be basic and straight-forward. Not complicated and layered. And again - there’s nothing wrong with that. Art/entertainment is a medium that should be useful or beneficial in many numbers of ways, however deep or shallow, but I’m just saying I prefer it to be the latter because the psychological reward is what I want most out of it. I want to be able to acknowledge and address my traumas, complexes or emotions, as well as come to be aware of and understand other peoples. I want the heavy, I want the hard, I want the heartache. Maybe it seems masochistic and tragic to others to want that in art/entertainment and that’s fair to say… but that’s just me. What can I say? I’m a glutton for pain so long as I get some kind of catharsis out of it. A good cry or a motivation to act or to FEEL SOMETHING. To learn and to evolve through it. To understand self and other just that little bit better because of it. I have no other such requirement out of it but to LEARN. Yes, that’s always the point for me.

Thanks for this analysis. I think you were spot on. Especially about Skull Kid. It is as I always say: hurt people hurt people. And the only healing we can possibly do when it comes to that case is within. As my favourite TV show of all-time ‘Xena: Warrior Princess’ has taught me: “there’s only one way to end the cycle of hatred and it’s through love and forgiveness”. And it’s not an easy thing to do at all. As awful as the things people with this kind of trauma do to us, we have to remind ourselves that everyone has a story and some understanding goes a long way despite how hurt we feel by their actions and choices. We don’t have to forgive them for their sake, as you pointed out. But we do owe it to ourselves to do this or we can’t heal from that cycle of hatred either. And hope - maybe in some way or form - they will change.

[grimmradiance]

Close to Me: How the Hollow Knight's Fighting Style Reflects Their Trauma (and the Radiance's as well)

So I've been trying to actually beat the Radiance, which means I've been fighting the Hollow Knight. A lot, as a matter of fact, since I'm beans at this game sometimes. I've also been thinking about @lost-kinn's meta about how fighting styles are how Vessels, especially the Little Knight, communicate.

In trying to apply this to the Hollow Knight, I've been coming to some very interesting conclusions, especially taken in context of...Everything Else in the lore, and Everything Else implicated in this by the psychology of it.

There's a lot to cover here, and it tracks through a LOT of different places, including trauma psychology, the relationship between chronic stress and lifespan health, and shape symbolism. Two warnings first:

One: this essay is gonna get heavy. It includes fine-grained discussion of the Hollow Knight's trauma, including discussions of the real-life machanics of psychological abuse, as well as the Extremely Concerning Implications of them harming themself during their boss fight. please read with caution and when you're in a safe emotional place to do so.

Two: This post is not a place for justifying the Pale King. If you read this essay in its entirety and still want to do that, please make your own post; my relationship to the Hollow Knight themself is deeply rooted in my own experiences, so in the context of this discussion I can't promise I won't take it personally.

With that out of the way, let's talk trauma and fighting styles:

We know that the Hollow Knight is trained to be a paragon of fighting skill, through the Pure Vessel fight, and this gives us a fantastic way to compare what they were like before they were made Government Assigned Radiance Jail, and after. Or, in other words, we're given the perfect opportunity to see what the Radiance is doing (i.e. context effects), and what Hollow is (i.e. what we can conclude is reliably consistent as a part of them). Listed here, for reference:

Hollow's attacks:

Three slashes

A dash slash

A Radiant Shade Soul, which launches a volley of Infection blobs in arcs

A Radiant Desolate Dive, which produces pillars of entwined Void and Light at random intervals

The Infection bursting out of them in random arcs, covering a significant amount of the aerial space of the arena

The Radiance ragdolling their body around trying to hit the Knight

Contact damage from them stabbing themself and falling over atop you

The Pure Vessel's attacks:

Three slashes

A dash slash

A Pure Shade Soul, which launches a volley of nails in straight lines

A Pure Desolate Dive, which produces nails at specific intervals

A Pure Focus, which causes circular explosions across most of the aerial space in the arena

Lashing out with a Void Arm (word choice intentional)

I've highlighted attacks from each battle that are different, since those are our points of interest here. In addition, both the Pure Vessel and Hollow are exceedingly fond of teleport-spamming in a way that is usually reserved for a specific group of bosses.

Another very important distinction between these two fights: the Pure Vessel doesn't scream. Well, they certainly try to, but no sound comes out. No voice to cry suffering, after all. All of these points have a lot to go into, so let's address them one at a time.

All That Remains: Theoretical Background On The Significance Of Constants

Making comparisons across time is important specifically because humans (and human-like bugs) change. Most personality traits aren't set in stone--they exist as an interaction of someone's internal tendencies, their experiences, and their environment. Speaking of those last two points, not all experiences and environments are created equally. Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs for short) are known to have lifelong implications for a child's health, both physically and mentally. These are events that are so stressful or stressful for so long that they exceed a child's ability to cope and become toxic stress (yes, that's the term in the literature, because it actively damages your organs). They compound, as well--the stress of one ACE makes it harder for a child to cope with another, especially if they overlap.

Some examples of ACEs? Being exposed to physical danger or the threat of physical danger, deprivation of normal social relationships with peers of a similar age, being forcibly seperated from family members, witnessing a loved one being hurt or killed, chronic illness in oneself or a family member, neglect of a child's emotional needs....

Poor fucking Holly. It's a miracle they didn't disintegrate under the pressure. The only other option is that they bent and adapted under that much stress--in other words, most of their personality has been forcibly reshaped by what they've gone through. Anyone who has up-close experience with parentification or complex child abuse already knows: this was by design. I'm not saying the intent was to traumatize the Pure Vessel past several points of no return, but the intent definitely was to reshape their personality for the purpose of being The Vessel. We only see them (the Pure Vessel) in battle after this process is mostly or entirely complete, but we do see them a few times beforehand. I'd like to draw attention to the Path of Pain cutscene right now.

I've seen people talking about the look the Vessel and the King share as a sign that TPK really does love his child. That might be true, but it's definitely not relevant when it comes to how abuse works. This is, in fact, exactly how the cycle of abuse uses affection as a tool. Long periods of abuse or neglect, smoothed over by small periods of affection that placate the survivor? That's textbook love bombing, the kind that forms stubborn trauma bonds and facilitates unhealthy dependency. Forgive me for not giving the Higher Being of knowledge and prescience the benefit of the doubt on that one. (/s)

Team Cherry knows about the importance of parallels and dissonance. There's a reason the music in the second phase of the Hollow Knight fight plays in the Path of Pain. There's a reason it cuts out the moment the battle with the Kingsmoulds is over, instead of at the room transition. There's a reason it doesn't cut out in the Black Egg. Actually, there's two potential reasons, which could also coexist: either little Hollow trusts the Pale King to keep them safe, even after the borderline torture that they were just subjected to, or big Hollow is so hypervigilant that they're in full functioning-through-trauma mode even while they're at death's door.

If you don't see how much the Pale King scarred his child at this point, I'm not sure we were playing the same game.

Walking the Straight Line: How the Pale King's Teachings Show In the Pure Vessel

The Pale King loves order and control. Everything about the White Palace and every decision we see him make implies this. Everything is spotless white walls and well-maintained gardens; the only signs of disorder are hidden away, either in his workshop or in The Pit™. This also reflects in the Pure Vessel's title--pure as in holy, but also pure as in without flaw. Considering the Nailsmith's emotional state after completing the Pure Nail, TPK's fate with his Perfect Controlled Kingdom, and the Godmaster ending as a whole, attaining perfection is not a good thing in any sense.

We know the Hollow Knight isn't perfect--that's the whole catalyst for the plot. But considering their upbringing and their fighting style as the Pure Vessel, their imperfections absolutely kill them emotionally. I'll spare the lecture on how perfectionism affects neurodivergent kids even more severely than neurotypical kids, if only to keep this post to a reasonable length (look up "twice-exceptional children" if you'd like to know the theory I'm glossing over in more depth). But, in essence, the deck is doubly stacked against them--they have a higher goal to reach, and far more obsctacles in their path, including their own emotional scars.

I've already discussed how Hollow isn't meant for this kind of stress in a physical sense in other posts. They're not prepared for it emotionally, either--the Pale King wants perfection, and they can't even stand up straight (every spoonie in the audience already knows how exhausting people's obsession with Standing Up Straight is). There's another page on their stack of emotional baggage, even BEFORE you consider that the Pure Vessel knows their perfection is what bought them a ticket out of the Abyss.

Bringing Teleportation To A Sword Fight: Where The Pure Vessel Reveals Their Fears

How else are they going to cope with that need for perfection, that need to prove themselves worthy of the reason their life was spared, by being flawless in any way they can? Being a mechanical, flawless fighter puts so much pressure on them, both literally (repetitive strain injuries fucking HURT) and figuratively--if you're predictable, the only sure way to win is to mop the floor with your opponents before they figure you out. Hell, that's the way most people play their first run of Hollow Knight, by throwing themselves at the bosses over and over until they figure out the patterns. That strategy is inherently going to fail against an opponent that's, say, an immortal higher being.

There's no way that the Vessel didn't figure this out, and yet none of their TPV specific attacks are positioned randomly--the nails are always evenly spaced, and the Focus explosions are always in a specific height region of the screen. That's clinging to survival strategies even when they become maladaptive in its purest form.

Another dip into psychological theory: let's talk about disorganized attachment. Attachment styles describe how someone's relationships to their main caregiver(s) influence their understanding on relationships in general. Disorganized attachment is a result of an upbringing of inherently unstable parent-child relationships, where there's no way of a child predicting whether an adult is going to be delighted to see them, ambivalent, upset, or otherwise. If my parent woke up some days saying "all right my child, time for the Infinite Buzzsaws Obstacle Course," I'd be the same way. In adulthood this manifests as an inability to form a stable sense of self-concept as well as concepts of others. Mission accomplished, TPK, there's no will to break if you broke it yourself.

This is where the fighting styles as communication comes in--Hollow needs to keep Ghost at a distance to fight, but also wants to be closer to their sibling (the only being who has a chance of understanding what they've been through), BUT also has a trauma-rooted fear of attaching to people, as their experiences with attachment are inherently unpredictable and dangerous. Hence, both the teleportation that doesn't seem to match their fighting style any more reliably than "aim at the thing attacking you" and the second attack unique to the Pure Vessel--they're quite literally lashing out in pain to push people away. There's a reason that attack is so reminiscent of the Thorns of Agony.

Of note is that Holly does seem to teleport like the bugs of the Soul Sanctum do (favoring the edges of a screen, rather than going wherever like Dream Warriors do), which makes sense--they're the most obvious answer to the question "how did they learn how to teleport, anyways?" However, Sanctum bugs have abilities designed to capitalize on this, like homing spells and slashes from above. I can only assume this means that someone saw Holly's proficiency with the nail and assumed it translated to other forms of combat, and didn't feel the need to give them at least a bit of a primer on how to make the best use of it. There's another tally for the Hollow Knight as an autism metaphor.

Trauma Bonds: How the Radiance Speaks Through Hollow

Now, we're back to the Black Egg, and two people stuck in the same sinking ship. The thing that makes this hurt so badly is that Holly and the Radiance are at complete cross purposes here, and yet they both want the same thing:

They both want out, no matter the cost. For the Radiance, this means forsaking the pacifistic nature of the moths and nuking Ghost personally.

For Hollow, this means forsaking the way they were raised and everything that was bludgeoned into their personality: the only way out is to fail, give up control, and trust that Ghost will do what needs to be done.

Imagine how much pain they're in to actually go for it. Going against a literal lifetime of conditioning is something that takes the average person years to even consider, let alone go through with. It's a form of learned helplessness--if you try to break free and fall, again and again, it actively discourages further attempts. Breaking through learned helplessness is an interesting process, because it generally involves re-establishing a sense of control by recalling previous events where the person was able to change their situation.

Which, as far as we know of, are nothing but traumatic memories for Hollow. It's very unlikely that they'd break through it on their own, but we know they have by the time we see the second phase of their fight. This is them at their most desperate: the same music as the Path of Pain, the way they let, or can't stop, the Radiance throw their body around, the way they actively try to let the Radiance out by stabbing themself.

You'd think that giving up and learned helplessness are inherently compatible, but when giving up both goes against your core personality, and involves your active participation, they're in direct opposition. So either Holly was able to process all their trauma by themself (which I doubt, judging by how much effort the player has to go through to even see Ghost's and Hollow's traumatic memories), or someone gave them a nudge or three in that direction.

Considering that there's been someone living in Holly's head who has a vested interest in them Not Doing Their Duty, I think we know who. And the thing is, I think we watch Hollow have this breakthrough during their battle. Imagine for the first time in decades, at least, you can move. You're in pain from being in the same position, probably hallucinating from sensory deprivation, with an infection sucking at what strength your body has left. And there's this little creature who looks ready to fight you, who seems to have let you go for that exact purpose.

And you look down, and both you and the Radiance recognize them from a place rooted deeper than consciousness, in the murky depths of trauma. You see the other Vessel who just as easily could have been you, and who looks so much stronger for not being you, for being an imperfect, willful creature. And the Radiance sees history threatening to repeat itself, another one of the Wyrm's cursed children seeking to lock her away once more.

What else do you do when you're triggered? You scream, and you go on instinct, and you retreat into your head. Those first blows, with the epic music? That's the Vessel the Pale King forged, the fighting machine that will endure unimaginable stress because it knows no other way. What snaps you back out of dissociation? Usually, either the passage of the triggering stimulus, or an even more relevant stimulus (severe pain from getting beaten up by a nail, for example).

The tragedy is this: we know this isn't a triumph. I think most of us went into that fight the first time, knowing we'd be putting the Hollow Knight out of their misery. The music turns tragic, Hollow screams, and then we see the Radiance and Hollow themself break through: the Radiance trying to fight Ghost directly with the resources she has, and Hollow trying to help her along.

For what it's worth, Hollow even had the right idea, when it came to letting themself rest while helping Ghost stop the madness their father started--they were just digging for the Radiance in the wrong place. The dynamic between the Radiance and the Hollow Knight is something I could write on for pages and pages, but this has gone on for long enough. Tune in next time, where I'll presumably talk about this same topic but in reverse with regards to the Radiance.

[madd-information]

Have you watched Kati Morton's new video about Maladaptive Daydreaming? What do you think about it?

[intro]

For years, I believed maladaptive daydreaming to be a form of dissociation, but it could also be added to the DSM as its own diagnosis, since it does have its own set of unique symptoms. Either way, at this time maladaptive daydreaming is not listed in the DSM as a diagnosable mental illness.

I was concerned because her last couple videos on the topic were very confusing to watch and seemed to conflate MD with the inner-worlds of DID.  It looks like she has done some more research on it and is going to make a more informed video. This is great and I deeply appreciate that she’s taking the time to do a proper dive into this. 

The closest diagnosis would be DPDR, or depersonalization derealization disorder. And this is the diagnosis given to those of us who struggle with dissociation. [explanation of DPDR]

Gonna need you to source that Katie, I’ve never heard an MD researcher say something like this.  When they talk about MD they call it a behavioral addiction with OCD features which is related to dissociative absorption (different from derealization and depersonalization, these two dissociative experiences are not particularly significant in MD, though they can happen.)

These experiences are extremely common. It's estimated that half of all adults have had at least one episode of DPDR. 50% of people. That is a huge amount of people.

Cool but not sure it’s at all relevant to the video topic. 

Also, it's important to mention that in 2016, four researchers put together the Maladaptive Daydreaming Scale, or MDS. This is a 14-item self-reported scale, meaning that you as the patient answers 14 questions based on your own maladaptive daydreaming experience.

It’s a 16 item scale now, it was changed very early on and has been 16 for years.  This is a very small and forgivable knitpick, just fyi. 

The MDS focuses on the content of our daydreams, how intense the urge to continue daydreaming is, and how much it impairs our ability to function in our lives, and the benefits and costs of our daydreaming. I am not personally familiar with this scale, nor have I used it in my practice, but I've linked the research article in the description if you wanna learn more about it.

A good description, and here’s that link again for anyone who wants to read about the finer details of this scale. 

When it comes to maladaptive daydreaming, it isn't just feeling out of body or environment. We can create very intense and detailed daydreams with plots, characters, and very lifelike issues and storylines. Some people will get the plots for their daydreams from their real lives, while others can create a utopian place unlike their current experience.

Yep, decent overview of content, though content doesn’t matter that much.  Also, use of “we”.  Is Katie Morton an MDer or was this a creative choice?  I don’t know, just a passing thought. 

We can find ourselves staying in these daydreams for various amounts of time. And some of my patients have reported staying in them for hours. And many of you have let me know that you struggle to get out of them at all, spending days in this other life that we've created.

Yep, good overview, but more importantly she’s listening to her patients and the feedback of MDers in her audience.

...there are many causes for this, and the first I wanna address is trauma triggers. If we've experienced a trauma in our life, things that remind us of that time or situation can pull us into a flashback, cause us to dissociate, or in many cases push us into our maladaptive daydreams.

When our brain and the rest of our nervous system feels overwhelmed and unable to deal with what's going on in the moment, it can pull us out of our current situation through dissociation. I always talk about that, like our brain pulling the ripcord. And it can also utilize maladaptive daydreaming. It's a way to cope or get through an overwhelming situation when we don't have other skills to help calm our nervous system down. So we just rely on what we know, and that can be daydreaming or dissociating. It's almost like this coping skill protects us from having to feel traumatized again and so it takes us away, you know, drops us into a much safer and happier place.

Trauma is always talked about first when people do overviews of MD.  She’s not wrong but just to add more information;  about a quarter of MDers report trauma, the other 75(ish)% don’t.  It’s a significant number but trauma is not the only pathway to MD.  Sometimes people walk away from these videos feeling like “well, I don’t have any trauma, maybe I don’t really have MD”.  That’s not a comment on what Katie has presented, she does go into other things below, just adding on.

Another cause or trigger can be high levels of stress or anxiety. We can slowly feel ourselves become more and more overwhelmed until our brain pulls us out of our reality and into a new one, aka our maladaptive daydreams. In short, we can want to stay in these daydreams to feel better and safer, but it can get in the way of us functioning in our life.

Yep

[audience anecdotes]

...Which is why even the term maladaptive daydreaming is used. Maladaptive means it's not providing adequate or appropriate adjustment to the environment or situation. So the daydreaming is only holding off the bad things. It's not actually making anything better or helping us process any of the upset. It's really just a temporary check-out, which can be helpful sometimes, but if it's happening all the time or making it hard for us to focus at work, school, or with our friends and family, we should find other, better ways to cope.

Exactly.

Which moves us into how we can better cope so that we don't get sucked into our daydreams for hours, days, or even weeks. And first up is mindfulness. Now, I know that term is overused now and super annoying but in order for us to know when we even need to use other coping skills, we have to know when the daydreaming urges are happening. So often we aren't aware of what we were feeling or thinking until it's too late and we're already pulled into our daydream. And at that point it's more difficult or even impossible for us to pull ourselves out. Therefore, we have to start being more aware of what we're going through.

[continues explanation]

Perfection.

And so next is figuring out ways to calm our system down. This can take the form of a distraction technique like going for a walk or organizing a part of our home, coloring, watching a show, playing a video game, you name it. These calming things could also be more process-based, things like journaling or talking to your therapist or a friend about it, or even using an impulse log. [Continues with calming things]

Good examples, MD researchers specifically recommend keeping a log.

We're also going to have to find some coping skills that we can use when we're starting to feel overwhelmed and wanting to go back into the daydream. Maybe we hold an ice cube in our hands, clap our hands, count the number of things in the room that are blue, brown, black… whatever works for you, do it.

Good stuff. 

And it's okay for something not to work. We just have to try it to know and then move on to something else.

Important point to make, happy to see this. 

Once we have a few things that work, write them down in your phone or on a post-it note so that you can see it and be reminded when you need it. We will also need to come up with some ways to pull ourselves out of the daydream. And I know this is gonna be harder and we may even wanna call upon helpful and supportive people in our lives to assist us.

Good advise. 

We could, because it's our daydream, right, we could put a big door in our daydream and we can choose to go through it and pull ourselves out, or have people in the daydream that remind us of our real life and tell us to go back.

A good suggestion.  Q, on the Parallel Lives Podcast (I can’t remember which episode off the top of my head), did something like this by turning to his characters and saying “ok, take 5 guys, we’ll pick it up at xtime”, and many people have found that to be a clever and helpful method. 

Now, I know this is really, really hard… which rolls into my final tip, which is to work with a therapist to heal from the trauma or to learn how to better cope with the anxiety or stress we're feeling. Working to heal or process through the reason our maladaptive daydreaming exists in the first place will ensure that we don't need it anymore.

Absolutely seek professional support if you can. 

... if we heal the issue we're struggling to cope with, the urge to use those unhelpful coping skills will go away altogether.

[outro]

I think this last point will frighten a lot of MDers.  It’s probably the brevity of the video that didn’t allow her to really expand on this, and I certainly don’t want to put words into her mouth that she may not have intended.  Don’t be afraid of losing your MD.  “Curing” Maladaptive Daydreaming does not mean “I’ll never see my world again.”  You’ll always have the capacity to daydream like this, you were born this way, but it *doesn’t* have to be maladaptive. Like overeating, you will never not eat, you will fix your relationship with food. 

Good video overall, brief but accurate and includes the standard helpful advise. 

[one-abuse-survivor]

Um hi sorry to bother you

This might be an odd question, but what’s the difference between normal zoning out and dissociation?

I zone out a LOT. I enjoy daydreaming, and I will admit that sometimes I get too involved in my thoughts. Sometimes “coming back” from my thoughts (either daydream or just thinking) is like being yanked back into my body.

But over the past week, I ended up hanging out with some friends twice, and both times, I was asked if I was okay because of how much I zoned out, and on the second occasion, I was even asked if I was dissociating

But the thing is, especially during the second time, it was different then my normal zoning out. It was like I was stuck in my head, and I felt really panicked but did not know why. We were eating, and my appetite just vanished, and that on its own isn’t odd (I had eaten some cookies beforehand), but the thought of food was just “NO! DONTEATDONTEATDONTEAT!” and I could not stop hearing all my moms comments about my body and my eating habits in my head, and I felt so frantic for lack of a better word. And I just couldn’t stop thinking about my mom (who May or may not be emotionally abusive, not sure) and stuff she’s said in the past, and I was overcome by fear of going home even though I didn’t know why.

Like it was terrifying, even the thought of going home was so scary. I felt like i would explode from it. But I’m not sure if I was really “trapped” in the thoughts of what my mom said in the past, or if I wanted to just be a drama Queen (if I could’ve gotten out if I tried, but just didn’t try). And like, I was scared, but the actual thoughts of what my mom had done was disconnected from that fear?

I just couldn’t stop thinking about it. And I wanted to eat (it had been hours since lunch, and it was my favorite food), but it felt so wrong? And I just heard her saying not to eat, even though she’s never actually told me to not eat, but there was no emotional connection to those thoughts or the thoughts of the past, it’s like there was panic, but the panic was disconnected?

That’s happened only once before, and that was Mother’s Day; I couldn’t stop thinking about things my mom had said and done in the past and I was panicking, but the panic felt disconnected from the thoughts, and I couldn’t sit still because I felt like physically exploding (I ended up pacing for 3 hours until I calmed down). I later referred to it as a three hour thought spiral, but idk what it really was

And both times, there were physical stuff too, like felling shaky and having a hard time breathing, and looking back on the dinner incident (which was today), the whole thing feels so surreal.

Idk this whole thing is just scary, like I was asked 4 times at the dinner if I was ok, and half of those times were by people I didn’t even know (there were nine of us, I knew 3 of them). I was practically rocking back and forth and almost shaking (idk if I actually started shaking but I felt super shaky), and I was almost panting a few times. But I’m scared that I was just being dramatic; like what if I could have gotten out of the thinkinng but just didn’t?

I’m sorry this is so long, I’m really not sure if it’s a vent or an advice ask anymore

On the plus side though I got some hugs from my best friend (who was there) and I’m happy because I got HUGS and I don’t normally get hugs from people who aren’t my parents (and I don’t like hugging my mom). But hugs. Is it weird that I’m so happy to have gotten hugs? Idk.

Idk what any of this is, I’m barely wake as I type this, sorry

Hi! I think that's a very important question to ask.

When talking about dissociation, one thing my therapist told me is that dissociating is something everyone does from time to time. Things like zoning out or walking/driving a familiar road on "autopilot" are forms of dissociation everyone can experience, and they're not pathological or something to worry about. So there's no real difference between zoning out and dissociating. Zoning out is a form of dissociation, so you were dissociating when you were zoning out. See this Wikipedia quote:

Dissociation is commonly displayed on a continuum. In mild cases, dissociation can be regarded as a coping mechanism or defense mechanism in seeking to master, minimize or tolerate stress – including boredom or conflict. At the non-pathological end of the continuum, dissociation describes common events such as daydreaming.

However, dissociation can become a mechanism to cope with many stressful or overwhelming situations, and it can become pathological. I dissociated a lot during my own trauma and abuse, and I also find myself dissociating more than usual when I have bad physical pain days. I know of people who dissociate to cope with (and survive) depression. And I'm sure there are many other reasons it can become a survival strategy or interfere with someone's life.

What you went through sounds really scary to experience, and I'm so glad you got hugs from your friend. And I want you to know that no one deserves to go through something like this without help, nonnie. Zoning out might be a normal and universal experience, and there's nothing wrong with enjoying daydreaming, but it shouldn't be interfering with your life and causing you distress and taking control over your body and thoughts like that, and if it is, then you deserve help with it, regardless of whether or not it's something diagnosable or pathological.

You can't accidentally be a drama queen; you can't "not try enough" to not be affected by something that's already affecting you. There's no such thing as accidentally making up your own emotions, because all emotions become relevant and true to you and capable of affecting you the moment you experience them.

I can't tell you if your dissociation is due to something diagnosable, but I can tell you that struggling is in itself reason enough to seek help and resources that can help you handle it. Diagnoses exist to group common symptoms together and help treat them, but having the symptoms is in itself what makes you need and deserve help; not the diagnosis. So the fact you're feeling shaky, and panicky, and disconnected from your own emotions, and unable to zone back in without effort, and the fact that your thoughts are spiralling like that, and the fact this is getting in the way of you having fun with your friends—all these things already make you deserving of help and of being taken seriously by yourself and others, regardless of if there's a "valid enough" cause to justify it or if you tried your absolute hardest to manage it properly on your own or not.

I don't think it's weird at all to be happy you got hugs! I feel really happy and safe and comforted when I get hugs from people I trust too. Is there any chance you can ask your friend(s) to hug you more often? 😊

Sending a huge virtual hug your way, nonnie ❤️

[enavance]

hi i’m here to once again start a discussion / meta about a song that i relate to cherry.  on this episode,  we’re pulling apart falling in reverse’s popular monster.  some of the lyrics are hit or miss because you know obviously this is based on ronnie’s own experiences,  but some of the lyrics are really suited to cherry and i’ll bold the relevant lines as i go or omit things as needed.

also holy shit this is like over 1600 words,  not including the lyrics of course,  and  . . .  congratulations if u read this jkbdfbkvd

i wake up every morning with my head up in a daze i'm not sure if i should say this,  fuck,  i'll say it anyway everybody tries to tell me that i'm goin' through a phase i don't know if it's a phase,  i just wanna feel okay, yeah i battle with depression,  but the question still remains is this post-traumatic stressin' or am i suppressin' rage? and my doctor tries to tell me that i'm going through a phase yeah, it's not a fuckin' phase, i just wanna feel okay

okay,  yeah,  i struggle with this bullshit every day and it's probably 'cause my demons simultaneously rage it obliterates me,  disintegrates me,  annihilates me

cherry has always been hot  -  tempered since she was younger,  but now as she’s grown and grown into her role as the warrior of light and coupled with all of the things she has endured from the beginning of her journey to where she is now.  she lived a relatively peaceful life until imperial garlean forces invaded her village and uprooted her life and destroyed everything she once knew and forced her to make anew.  cherry struggles with severe depression and ptsd,  and much of that contributes to her trauma response and why she’s so quick to lash out in a form of a defense mechanism.

'cause i'm about to break down i'm searchin' for a way out i'm a liar,  i'm a cheater,  i'm a non-believer i'm a popular,  popular monster i break down falling into love now with falling apart i'm a popular,  popular monster

with everything cherry goes through,  it’s a wonder she hasn’t snapped completely yet,  but she has come so,  so,  so close so many times.  she is self  -  destructive in her coping methods,  whether intentionally or not.  sometimes she realizes and notices her harmful coping methods,  sometimes she doesn’t,  but her mindset is that if she’s not hurting anyone else,  it’s fine.

however,  what she doesn’t realize is that her distance and cold shouldering and keeping people at arms length is hurtful because people are just trying to be there for her,  but she won’t allow them to due to her debilitating fear of allowing anyone to come near her,  physically or emotionally,  and risk them forming an attachment to her and vice versa.

she doesn’t want someone to feel hurt or pain in losing her and having to mourn her.  cherry is a serial escapist in that she will disappear for months at a time and wander off looking for the most dangerous jobs,  not only because she needs the money and thrives off of the adrenaline and that she has an inherently reckless nature,  but it’s that deep  -  rooted self  -  destructiveness.

i think i'm going nowhere like a rat trapped in a maze every wall that i knock down is just a wall that i'll replace i'm in a race against myself,  i try to keep a steady pace how the fuck will i escape if i never close my case? oh my god,  i keep on stressin',  every second that i waste is another second sooner to a blessing i won't take

cherry doesn’t see herself as a hero.  to a degree,  she understands that it’s not her choice whether or not she is seen as a hero.  other people will call her one regardless based on her accomplishments and achievements and decorated contributions to the preservation of eorzea and the shard as a whole.  as vain as she is,  and as much as she boasts of her strength as a warrior,  which she takes quite a bit of pride in,  she’s surprisingly somewhat humble when it comes to being seen as a hero that people look to for light in the darkness and idolize.  she just sees nothing special in it because of how many people still die,  how many things are still lost and destroyed.  her own pessimism stops her from feeling positively towards any association with being a hero.  she doesn’t want to be celebrated or praised,  but she won’t be mad if someone compliments her skills and says she’s strong.

cherry is an extremely guarded person and this is something i discuss at length with her keeping extremely tall and thick walls up to protect herself and the people around her due to her life experiences and the trauma she has been through from before ARR to where she is now post  -  SHB.  she’s afraid of letting anyone in.  she’s afraid of caring about people,  despite the fact that she does because deep down she is caring and kind and soft and she just can’t help herself.  she tries to convince herself that she’s not as close to some people as she thinks,  but she is and it would kill her to lose anyone else.  and deep down,  cherry knows that it’s much the same for her friends as well,  that it’s too late,  that they do care about her and someone will be there to mourn and grieve her and she hates that.  this is why she flinches at softness,  any soft gesture or touch or kindness,  even more so when it comes to romantic avenues.  she will run and run and run until she’s sure you’ve given up on pursuing her.  much of this is also tied into the fact that caring about someone is a weakness to a fault because an enemy can sniff that out and use that against her.  they could take someone that she cares about and use them as leverage or kill them or hurt them to get to her and she is so deeply afraid of that most of all.

cherry refuses help constantly.  she shoulders everything and is the first to volunteer to do anything dangerous.  she makes her own recklessly stupid and dangerous plans and rushes in headfirst without much thought.  she is stubborn and will insist on doing everything herself,  even the most menial tasks.  she doesn’t want to look weak,  not that she is or that anyone even thinks that of her,  but she doesn’t want it to appear to anyone that she has any weaknesses because she doesn’t want them to be turned against her.  she refuses help that would otherwise be blessings to make her life easier.

okay,  motherfucker,  now you got my attention i need to change a couple things 'cause somethin' is missing and what if i were to lie?  tell you everything is fine every single fucking day i get closer to the grave i am terrified,  i fell asleep at the wheel again crashed my car just to feel again it obliterates me,  disintegrates me,  annihilates me

cherry is as honest as they come.  perhaps too honest,  sometimes.  however,  when it comes to her own wellbeing,  she will lie to fool others into thinking that she’s fine so that they don’t worry about her.  she doesn’t want to be worried or fussed over,  and most of all,  she doesn’t want to add to anyone else’s stress or make them waste their time with her.  cherry doesn’t take very good care of herself,  physically or emotionally or mentally.  she barrels into danger without thought,  is impulsive,  extremely reckless,  and she doesn’t talk about her feelings to anyone or discuss the traumatic events that happened to her with anyone.  i think the only people she may have opened up to are haurchefant,  maybe thancred on occasion,  ardbert because she’s fine talking to him because her logic is  “  who is he going to tell  ?  no one else can see him,  ”  maybe aymeric but never wholly in detail,  and maybe estinien.  cherry is terrified of opening up to people.  she doesn’t care if people see her as being awful or anything,  but she’s afraid of being seen as vulnerable and having all of those parts of her open and raw.

she’s not actively suicidal or anything or ever thinking about dying.  in fact,  she’s deathly afraid of dying because of the people who care about her and because the fate of the world rests on her shoulders.  she doesn’t want anyone to ever feel the pain she did losing her loved ones.  she doesn’t want them to mourn her.  she doesn’t want to risk the dying of this star just because there’s so much at stake and so many people and the world depending on her success and her being alive.

still,  despite that,  despite knowing that and that being an enormous fear of hers,  that doesn’t stop her from being reckless.  she is extremely self  -  destructive and impulsive and doesn’t think too much,  if at all,  before committing to something,  even if it’s an extremely bad idea.  she does do harmful and self  -  destructive things just to feel things,  hence her being somewhat of an adrenaline addict and chasing danger and diving headfirst into fights or battles and facing off with dangerous people,  even if outnumbered.  she revels in danger and the feeling of adrenaline rushes and actively being battered and bruised in a fight.  she probably would crash a car,  honestly,  just to feel something that is beyond the despondence and depression that she’s come to know post  -  shb.

yeah,  here we go again,  motherfucker,  oh we're sick and tired of wondering praying to a god that you don't believe you're searching for the truth in the lost and found so the question i ask is,  yeah,  where the fuck is your god now? 

and by the end of shb,  knowing the things that she knows of hydaelyn and zodiark,  she’s extremely jaded and even more pessimistic than she was to begin with.  in the beginning,  she didn’t know what she was coming into,  when joining the fray with the scions and learning of her own abilities with the echo and hydaelyn’s will and her involvement.  as time passes and hydaelyn’s absence becomes more noticeable,  she begins to feel abandoned,  and she wonders if hydaelyn is simply content to allow the shard to die and with it,  its people. 

even upon learning of the mother crystal’s weakness in strength,  learning the truth of everything,  the forming of the worlds and hydaelyn and zodiark being primals,  she begins to heavily distrust hydaelyn and wonders if everything had been a lie.  what else had hydaelyn hidden from her  ?  what else was a lie  ?  cherry has never been religious,  not really,  and she wonders if the gods are really out there.  hydaelyn certainly isn’t the god they all thought she was     —     she is a primal.  they have placed their faith and worship in a primal who disappeared and left them in darkness and silence.

cherry is left in a pretty fragile state come the end of shb.  she has lost so much more,  and she feels as though she managed to accomplish nothing despite everything that she has had a hand in doing.  there is always something else,  always something more,  and she feels as though it’s never going to end and she is exhausted.  she will never tire of helping people,  not truly,  but she feels such an emptiness within her and i really think that losing anyone else important to her,  specifically people like thancred,  the twins,  estinien,  aymeric,  she is really going to spiral harder than ever before and i really don’t know how cherry would come out of it in one piece.

[revlyncox]

Always Becoming

The changing of the seasons reminds us of the seasons and cycles of life. We are always becoming who we are. This was written by Rev. Lyn Cox for the Spring Festival at the Washington Ethical Society (4/18/2021) and references the story of Demeter and Persephone.

We are always becoming who we are. Two weeks ago, I spoke a little about what that means for us on a community level. And community is an important part of identity. As Kenyan-born philosopher John Mbiti wrote in African Religions and Philosophy (1975) with respect to the concept of Ubuntu: “I am because we are, and since we are, therefore I am.” We are always becoming, partly because the communities of which we are a part are always becoming.

Today, I’m going to talk a little about some of the experiences that move our process of becoming in new directions. These might be things that we think of as individual experiences, yet I think they are also communal, and I think the line between individual and communal might be fuzzier than some of us were led to believe. The experiences we’ll talk a little about today are things like grief, longing, rage, curiosity, hope, and love. We will keep exploring those things our whole lives, and I’ll need to be relatively brief today, because we want to make sure to have time to celebrate life with a Baby Naming ceremony after the regular Platform.

Grieving feels especially relevant today. In the WES community, we’re grieving for some of our members, and we are particularly heartbroken for our beloveds who have lost a loved one recently due to trauma. Nationally, we’re still reeling from the anti-Asian violence that claimed eight lives in Atlanta, and then that grief was compounded by the tone of the trial of Derek Chauvin and our renewed grief for George Floyd, and then that grief was compounded by the deaths of 20-year-old Daunte Wright and 13-year-old Adam Toledo at the hands of police, and then our grief was compounded again by the deaths of eight people at a FedEx facility in Indianapolis, four of them members of the Sikh faith. The grief can be overwhelming, especially for those among us who see a reflection of close friends or family or selves in those who have died.

Grief is part of what makes us who we are. By sharing that experience of grief in community, we can bear witness to the people and the hopes that have been lost. There are some who think grief needs to be hidden, that it’s unseemly to be so human in public. Yet when the losses are so profound, how else can we honor life except to cry out.

At the Revolutionary Love online conference this weekend, grief has been a big theme. Micky ScottBey Jones and Rabbi Sharon Brous had a conversation on Thursday on just this topic, and it’s been a continuing thread on some of the other panels I’ve been able to catch. Micky ScottBey Jones spoke about grief for her mother who died of COVID and grief over mass violence and grief over what’s been lost due to health disparities and racist systems, she said, “Grief opens up our imagination and bolsters our courage.”

I think what she was saying is that when we feel and express our mourning together, the seeming impossibility of continuing with life becomes possibility. Maybe not right away. Shock and numbness might come first. But, together, we have a collective capacity that transforms us, that makes it possible to gather the energy to return to life.

Rabbi Sharon Brous responded that “public grief is an act of rebellion against the world as it is, because we are not willing to forget.” Brous noted that there are deep roots in her Jewish faith drawn from collective experiences of trauma, grief, truth-telling, and adaptation. From the transformation of Judaism from a Temple-focused culture to a diaspora culture, to survival through various pogroms, Brous remembered that there is grief woven into everything, but that doesn’t stop the existence of life and joy.

Jones went on to observe that we cycle through mourning, lamentation, truth-telling, and rebuilding. All of those things are part of the continuance of life, the re-imagining of life. We learn and we teach truth in the process of public grief. We figure out together what happens next in adapting and rebuilding because of how we form and strengthen relationships in the process of public grief.

Grief is part of who we are, it is part of our process of becoming. Grief is not all of who we are in the long run, though it might feel like our whole world in some moments. This is something that we might overlook about the story of Demeter and Persephone. Demeter’s public grief and rage, and the way her mourning brings the entire economy of her mythological world to a halt, feels true. A story where life eventually goes on -- radically different from what had come before, but it goes on -- that feels true. Persephone being called to comfort and lead the souls of the underworld, but not knowing what to say to them until she got in touch with her own grief, that feels true.

Our story this morning is about grief, but it’s not only about grief. It’s also about re-orienting ourselves and our communities. It’s about the power of love to find a solution that subverted rules of division. It’s about entering into a new way of being, even when we don’t know what that new way is going to look like in its fullness.

Grief is one thing that urges the characters in the story to continue with the process of becoming, but it’s not the only thing. Beauty and longing are also forces in the story. In some versions, Hades takes Persephone to the underworld without her consent, yet even in those versions, she finds beauty in roots and jewels and pomegranate seeds; even in those versions, she is transformed into a queen. In the version I shared this morning, Persephone chooses to follow beauty and curiosity. She continues on her journey through uncertainty. If we can stay with this version of the story for a moment, it leads me to wonder what calls us forward to become the people we can become with authenticity and ethical values.

Curiosity seems to be a powerful force for becoming. Sometimes we try things, not knowing what will happen next. That’s been what a lot of the last year has been like. Moving together through the next year will be more experimentation. We will try some things, and then try some more things. Let’s travel on that journey together in the spirit of adventure and curiosity rather than perfectionism. My hope is that our curiosity will involve open hearts as well as open minds, Let’s be curious about how the people around us are feeling, what’s lifting us up, and how we can show up for one another.

Beauty is another thing that calls us forward, and I’m grateful for the beauty of spring that is providing some comfort and counterpoint in these difficult days. For me, the progression of snowdrops to daffodils to cherry blossoms to strawberry blossoms has helped me to keep track of the days, to remember that there is a past and a future, and that more growth is ahead. The music offered today is yet more beauty, more reason to remember that we are better together, more inspiration to find centering and peace. Perhaps some of us are hanging on, awaiting the possibility of encountering the beauty of a loved one’s face in person, or the beauty of art, or the beauty of a home-grown tomato. Beauty is something that can call us forward, can motivate us to continue becoming the people we could be.

One more thing that feels relevant right now about the journey of becoming is the role of building relationships, both strengthening current relationships and being open to new ones. Last night, one of the panels of the online Revolutionary Love Conference was about Lessons Learned in Ferguson, convened by my colleague James Croft from the Ethical Society of St. Louis and three of his local St. Louis interfaith colleagues about how their community came together after the murder of Michael Brown. Koach Baruch (KB) Frazier, a Jewish activist and drummer, and the Rev. Dietra Wise Baker both spoke about moments when music brought together activists with different viewpoints and who had been through harrowing circumstances, and how their ability to come together was built on the hospitality of leaders in the interfaith community. Making a place of sanctuary in their buildings, being invited into each other’s homes, being concerned with each other’s wellbeing, all of those things made it possible to organize for change and make meaning. Rev. Erin Counihan on the same panel talked about being brand new at her congregation, and deciding to show up for an interfaith meeting, even though she didn’t know what her role would be or what the plan was or what might happen. She talked about confronting her whiteness, including the attachment to certainty that goes with whiteness, and emphasizing relationships over plans. KB Frazier added that people had to unlearn their perceptions of others with different identities and from different communities, because all people have dignity and it is important to leave stereotypes at the door when everyone is together in striving for liberation. James said that whenever nonsense is going on in St. Louis, there is already a community of people who are trained, supercharged, and ready to respond together. Something in Ferguson, something in the larger St. Louis community, something all over the world, was and is ready for change. And the way it was and is going to change, is (at least in part) about relationships.

All of this reminded me of the Washington Ethical Society and our relationship with the Washington Interfaith Network (WIN). Something that is different about building power in a coalition like WIN than working with other organizations on a particular issue is the place of relationships. There are encounters where it doesn’t seem like there is a plan, or it’s not clear what our individual roles might be, or where our preferred way to do things might not prevail. Staying in relationship anyway matters. Power is built not only in the victories, not only in the visible parts of the protests, not only in the legislative visits, but also in the trust that grows from people who show up for each other in the absence of certainty. Power is built around drum circles and kitchen tables and solving mundane problems. We as individuals and as a community are always becoming, our community of communities is always becoming, DC and its environs and all of our neighborhoods are always becoming because we are drawn forward by relationships.

The power to care for one another effectively works the same way. We have some current and recent examples of people taking care of each other within the WES community, but it’s not new. There has not been a moment since I arrived when we didn’t have a meal train or a check-in plan or greeting cards going out to someone. Grief and struggle are facts. But we don’t have to face them alone. Put aside conflict and tension and gossip and arguments about the right way to do things or the right words to use. Take care of each other and let other people take care of you. Being in a values-centered community can bring out the best because we want to be our best for each other, not because of patronizing efforts to teach or reform others. Love is what makes the whole thing work.

People are always changing. Communities are always changing. There are things we can pay attention to, things we can nurture, that move us toward becoming who we could be, who we hope to be. We pay attention to the communal experience of grief, because feeling the reality of that grief leads us to human connection, truth-telling, and the drive for a re-imagined future. We pay attention to curiosity, which leads us to be courageous when we don’t know what might happen next. We pay attention to beauty. Beauty helps us to find peace and meaning, and energizes us for the journey onward. We pay attention to relationships, because who we are always has a context. We may not be able to control the changes that accompany loss, risk, and the onward progression of seasons, but we don’t have to go through those changes alone.

We are always becoming who we are. May we join together with others in such a way that we grow into the best version of who we could be, authentically and fully ourselves while still true to our values and ready to be part of a re-imagined future.

May it be so.

[aion-rsa]

How Ted Lasso Sneakily Crafted its Empire Strikes Back Season

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This article contains Ted Lasso spoilers through season 2 episode 8.

Perhaps you’ve heard, but Apple TV+ series Ted Lasso was the subject of some dreaded Discourse recently. 

Since the Internet is infinite and we privileged few in the media have nothing but time, a handful of features came out weeks ago essentially questioning what Ted Lasso season 2 was even all about. Many of these features were well-written, well-argued, and fair, but when filtered through Twitter’s anti-nuance machine (i.e. Twitter itself), every feature boiled down to the same reductive take: Ted Lasso season 2 doesn’t have a conflict. 

In some respects, this take was the inevitable reaction to the metanarrative surrounding Ted Lasso in the first place. Despite drawing its inspiration from a series of somewhat cynical NBC Sports Premier League commercials, the first season of Ted Lasso was all about the transformative power of kindness. 

Or at least that’s what we critics declared it to be. And I don’t blame us. Awash in a flood of screeners about antiheroes, dystopias, and the end of the world, the simple kindness of Ted Lasso seemed revolutionary. They made a TV show about a guy who is…nice? They can do that? But the inherent goodness of its lead character was always Ted Lasso’s elevator pitch, not its thesis. 

There’s been a darkness at the center of Ted Lasso since its very first moment, when an American man got on a flight to London in a doomed attempt to save his marriage. And, as season 2’s brilliant eighth episode rolls around, it’s become clear that that darkness is what the show has really been “about” this whole time. 

Season 2 episode 8 “Man City” (the title is referring to AFC Richmond’s FA Cup match against opponent Manchester City but also stealthily reveals that this installment will be all about men and their respective traumas) is quite simply the best episode of Ted Lasso yet. It also might be the best episode of television this year. Near the episode’s end, right before AFC Richmond plays a crucial FA Cup match against the mighty Manchester City, coach Ted Lasso (Jason Sudeikis) finally comes clean with his coaching staff. He’s been suffering from panic attacks of late. His assistant coaches hear him, accept him, and then head off to the pitch where Man City absolutely obliterates their team.

Man City destroys AFC Richmond. They annihilate them. Embarrass them. Stuff them into a locker and steal their lunch money. The final score is 4-0 but it might as well be 400-0. The coaching staff is rattled but the players are hit even harder. Richmond’s star striker and former Man City player Jamie Tartt (Phil Dunster) is forced to endure watching his scumbag father cheer for his hometown team from the Wembley Stadium stands at the expense of his son. 

After the game, Jamie’s father, James (Kieran O’Brien), enters the locker room where he drunkenly accosts him for being a loser and demands that Jamie grant access to the Wembley Stadium pitch for him and his scumbag friends to run around on. When Jamie refuses, his father pushes him, so Jamie reflexively punches him right in the face. James is dragged out of the locker room by Coach Beard (Brendan Hunt), leading a stunned and traumatized Jamie Tartt standing in the middle of the room, as if in a spotlight of pure pain, surrounded by teammates too afraid to even approach him. And then something amazing happens…

Here’s the dirty secret about television: there’s a lot of it. Due to the sheer number of TV shows released each year, even the best of them are destined to become little more than memories long-term. Sometimes all you can ask from multiple episodes and seasons of television is to provide you with one moment, one line, or one warm feeling to carry with you into the future. I don’t know how much I’ll remember from Ted Lasso 30-40 years from now when I’m immobile and reclined in my floating entertainment unit, Wall-E style. But I know I’ll at least remember the moment that Roy hugs Jamie.

The great Roy Kent (Brett Goldstein) – a character so disconnected from his own emotions that some fans are convinced he’s CGI – embraces the one person in the world he is least likely to embrace. As Roy and Jamie wordlessly hug, it’s hard to tell which man is more shocked by the moment. Ultimately, however, it might be Ted Lasso himself who is hit hardest. Shortly after seeing Roy play father to the younger Jamie, Ted quickly exits the locker room and calls sports psychologist Dr. Sharon Fieldstone (Sarah Niles) on his Apple TV+-apporved iPhone. 

“My father killed himself when I was 16. That happened. To me and to my mom,” Ted says, weeping. 

And that, my friends, is what Ted Lasso is all about. Pain. And dads. But mostly pain. 

None of us can say that Ted Lasso didn’t warn us it was coming. To go back to the discourse of it all real quick – I don’t blame anyone for not picking up on the direction that this show was so clearly heading in. Ted Lasso is, first and foremost, a sitcom. The beauty of sitcoms is that you welcome them into your home to watch at your own pace and your own terms. If having Ted Lasso on in the background so you can occasionally see the handsome mustache man who smiles while you fold your laundry is the way you’ve chosen to engage with the show, then great! Just know that season 2 has been operating on a deeper level this whole time as well.

Let’s take things all the way back to the beginning – back to before season 2 even began. You’ve likely heard the old philosophical thought experiment “if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” Well Jason Sudeikis’s interviews leading up the season 2 premiere beg an equally as interesting hypothetical “how many times can one man mention The Empire Strikes Back before someone notices??”

Sudeikis referred to Ted Lasso season 2 as the show’s “Empire Strikes Back” multiple times before the premiere including in his local Kansas City Star and his technically local USA Today. The show even explicitly mentions the second Star Wars film in this season’s first episode when Richmond general manager Higgins (Jeremy Swyft) tells Ted that his kids are watching the trilogy for the first time. Sudeikis (who co-created and produces the show) and showrunner Bill Lawrence clearly want us to take the idea that Ted Lasso season 2 is The Empire Strikes Back seriously. And why would that be? 

Think of how ESB differs from its two Star Wars siblings in the original trilogy. This is the story that features arguably the series most iconic moment when Luke Skywalker discovers his dad is a dick on a literal universal level. It also has the only unambiguously downer ending of any original trilogy Star Wars film. Luke is thoroughly defeated in this installment. Having one’s hand chopped off by their father and barely escaping with their life is definitely the Star Wars version of a 4-0 defeat. 

The Empire Strikes Back can safely be boiled down into two concepts: 

Dads are complicated.

Everything sucks.

When viewed through those two conceptual prisms, so much of Ted Lasso season 2 begins to make more sense.

Episode 1 opens with the death of a dog and then leads into a classic Ted Lasso speech that could serve as this season’s mission statemetn. After recounting the story of how he cared for his sick neighbor’s dog, Ted concludes with: “It’s funny to think about the things in your life that can make you cry knowing that they existed then become the same thing that can make you cry knowing that they’re now gone. Those things come into our lives to help us get from one place to a better one.”

Things like…a father who you didn’t have nearly enough time with? Following episode 1 (and following just about every episode this season), Bill Lawrence took to Twitter to assuage viewers’ fears about a lack of central conflict this season. He had this to say about Ted’s big speech.

Look, Merrill. It was thought out, but the speech he gives after (Written by Jason himself – I loved it) is the core of the season, but we knew some people might bum out.

— Bill Lawrence (@VDOOZER) July 27, 2021

Sorry, truly. Ted’s speech after (which I love, but am obviously biased) is a big part of the season. But it sounds like you had a crappy thing happen recently.

— Bill Lawrence (@VDOOZER) July 28, 2021

It’s not. But Ted’s speech has big relevance. Stick around!

— Bill Lawrence (@VDOOZER) July 26, 2021

He also had this to say about dads.

Effin Dads, man. Love mine so, but he’s struggling a bit.

— Bill Lawrence (@VDOOZER) July 27, 2021

“Effin dads” and our complicated relationships with them are all over Ted Lasso season 2. In the very next episode, Sam Obisanya (Toheeb Jimoh) tells Ted “You know, my father says that every time you’re on TV, he’s very happy that I’m here. That I’m in safe hands with you.”

Ted smiles at this bit of info but not as warmly as you might expect. Because to Ted, a dad isn’t a reassuring presence but rather someone you love who will just leave when you need him the most. That’s why he’s been trying to be the perfect father figure this whole time. That’s why he did something as extreme as leaving his family behind in Kansas while he heads off to London. If giving his wife space was the only way to preserve the family and remain a good dad, then he was going to give her a whole ocean of space.

Moreover, Ted hasn’t just been trying to serve as a father figure to his son this whole time but to everyone else as well. Sam’s comment to Ted reminds him that not everyone has a good dad, which encourages him to bring Jamie into the fold in the first place.

As time goes on, however, the stress of being the consummate father to everyone in his orbit begins to wear on Ted. Throughout the entirety of this season, Ted Lasso appears to be trying to be Ted Lasso just a bit too hard. His energy levels are too high. His jokes go on too long. The same life lessons that worked last year aren’t working this year. AFC Richmond opens with an embarrassing streak of draws before Jamie’s immense talents set things straight.

It all culminates in this season’s sixth episode when Ted has his second panic attack in as many years. This time it’s in public during an important game. The experience sends Ted running through the concourse of the stadium until he somehow ends up in the dark on Dr. Fieldstone’s couch, instinctively, like a wounded animal. 

It’s certainly no coincidence that this panic attack occurs on the same day that Ted received a call from his son’s school asking him to pick him up, not realizing that he’s an ocean away. In that moment, Ted can’t help but remember what it’s like to be left behind by his own father and subconsciously wonder if he’s doing the same. 

Though the shallow waters of Ted Lasso season 2 may have appeared consequence free for half its run, beneath the surface was a tidal wave of conflict. Just because the conflict wasn’t taking place between a happy-go-lucky football coach and a villainous owner doesn’t mean it wasn’t there.

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Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin is terrible at meeting deadlines but great at writing. According to him (and William Faulkner, from whom he borrows the quote), the only conflict worth writing about is that of the human heart with itself. That’s something that The Empire Strikes Back understood. And it’s something that Ted Lasso season 2 does as well.

The post How Ted Lasso Sneakily Crafted its Empire Strikes Back Season appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[just-jammin]

Relighting

Word Count: 2024

Summary: The obscure yet infamous game of Sburb has probably caused some trauma & all-around bad times within the Chaos Family.

Their resident Protector can tell you all about it, and about how this predicament can be solved...

So. It’s been a while.

Not in the sense that I haven’t spoken to anyone in a while, just that I haven’t written a journal since... yeah, it wasn’t that long since I did that, but my point still stands.

Look, this whole Sburb thing is crazy ever since I first knew about it, but this is just outright ludicrous. The world-ending meteor shower, trying to process the abstract concepts & lore within the game, witnessing death itself... it’s not my cup of tea when it comes to first-hand experiences.

All of this reminds me of... something. It reminds me of a story that I’ve heard once while participating Mass, in a Homily. I can’t help it but think that it’s so much similar to our situation as of now.

How? I’ll tell it here.

>> —^— <<

In a dark, quiet room, there were four Candles.

Peace, Faith, Love, & Hope.

These four elements are very important to the story, as it is related to the people’s thoughts & actions. The Peace within the group, the Faith of triumph & joy, the unconditional Love for each other, and the Hope fueling our will to go on & go forth.

It’s all present in this session, as the Chaos Family. Even though we never formally met each other until the game started, and somehow one of us was accidentally sucked into it, we still have some camaraderie with each other.

And that’s when things started falling apart.

>> —^— <<

While talking to each other, the Candles noticed that Peace was melting.

You see, we never had proper Peace. We’re all about Chaos, right? But this is our kind of Peace; knowing that everyone is having fun & laughing along to our antics is our kind of Peace. It means that every single member is getting to know each other more.

Yet somehow, when we entered the Medium, things got serious. When I thought setting up a Zoom call tutorial thing for the extremely confused members was a mess, I didn’t expect our problems to be worse when we got our own Planets.

Don’t get me wrong, all of our Sprites did say that our Planets’ purpose was to strengthen ourselves. But all I could feel was insecurity. Scared of moving forward. And I bet the others felt that too.

Basically, our first impressions of our planets are outright Hell.

I think this is why fights started breaking out whenever we talked to each other. Whether it was a memo in Pesterchum (which we had to download), or just meeting up in one of the Planets, arguments are thrown here & there. Unfortunately, it escalated to rowdy fistfights that we had to have a hard time to let them struggle & break it up.

To be fair, sometimes I was in those fights. It was... rough.

Needless to say, this was a different kind of Chaos. It wasn’t the one we’re used to, nor the one that brings people together. It was the kind of Chaos that tears relationships apart and basically destroys everyone, inside & out.

When Peace had been standing in its final moments, it cried out, “Oh, what’s the use of me being here?! Everybody has been making a fool of themselves by causing nonsensical conflict!

“That’s it! I’m done here!”

There’s no Peace in there. Not anymore.

Its light flickers out.

>> —^— <<

There were three left.

And it had been for days.

Until one time, while the Candles were talking, they noticed that Faith was melting.

Faith. It’s hard to say when it was there in the first place.

I mean, to be fair, a lot of things are difficult to see in this Family, or the rest of Tumblr, actually. (Heh... I miss Tumblr...) But Faith comes in small things, like the friendships of others. And even full-on relationships. Little things like that can let us keep on believing that we can do better for ourselves.

That was... unfortunate.

Although entering the Medium was a win for all of us, there were also some losses for a handful of us.

It included our friends outside the Chaos Family. And even some of them in the Family.

Almost everyone not participating in our session is dead.

Dead. Gone forever.

It was a hard one to take in. Some of our real-life family relatives in our houses are still alive, but our Tumblr friends impacted some of us the most. People were crying. Like real tears.

And for some reason, I didn’t.

Almost all of my friends are here, my brother is here, and honestly, I didn’t have much back on Earth. Sure, my parents and relatives are gone, so that’s... depressing. But I can cope with them here. They’re the reason why I’m thriving.

The others? Not so much.

Faith had shouted while getting weakened, “Look, my own Faith is dwindling too, y’know?! They’re moping around in their own disbelief!

“I’m out!”

I guess I’m the only one who had more of it. But only by a smidge.

Its smoke wafts away in the dark.

>> —^— <<

And then there were two.

Unfortunately, Love was next to melt.

Ah, Love. This one is somewhat different from the story I’m telling than the source material.

You see, our Family’s Love never dwindled. We all still care for each other, no matter what happens to any of us. Through thick & thin, we helped each other to get ourselves up & going.

Heck, some of them got together romantically. Not that I’m too envious of them, but to be honest, they’re really cute with each other. A handful of them loved those outside of the Family, but you know what happened...

It’s just that we talked to each other less over time, either because of the missions we were given or because we just didn’t feel like talking to each other. It’s ok, I do respect their reasons, whether good or bad.

However, it just made me more concerned. I bet the others feel the same about that, but I think it’s been taking over my brain recently. I even tried talking about it to the closest people I know in the Family. No responses were made.

It doesn’t help that I have to literally build my way up, going through a complicated labyrinth of temperature-changing caverns filled with walking & talking thorny devils that hate me so much they shoot blood from their eyes at me.

Not to mention that I only have my annoying older brother with me, who only set my issue aside when I tried telling him. It sucks.

So no, our Love never dwindled.

It just became more isolated.

And yet, Love sobbed out, “Come on! Why am I not strong enough for them?! I thought I can keep all of them together!

“I can’t take this anymore!”

It just... feels like before. Numb all over.

Hehe, shit. I’m too familiar with that...

Love’s warmth faded away soon.

>> —^— <<

Only one was left standing.

The Candle of Hope.

Hope...

Well, that’s the only one that’s actually relevant to our session, huh?

It’s one of the main Aspects of Sburb, so of course it’s relevant! According to my Sprite, Hope is the embodiment of all positive emotions & beliefs, including Hope itself. It’s a pretty nice Aspect, in my opinion.

Anyway, Hope’s the one that got us through all our shit. Yes, even the very bad times. It’s basically a lifesaver for the Chaos Family and the rest of Tumblr. It can be distributed in many ways, from simple things like compliments, to posts like those ‘One Note a Day’ ones and a bunch of others like that.

But this, this is what I thought we were lacking the most at the time.

By that time, a little girl came running inside the dark room.

She noticed the other three Candles, melted & burnt out.

“Peace? Faith? Love?” she tried to call out.

I... didn’t think it was there when we started the session, nor when the fights started to break out. Not even when... when my friends started struggling with themselves.

Heck, some of them wanted to let their lives go to get to God Tier... or for worse intentions...

Shit, everything sucked.

The girl started tearing up, calling the other Candles repeatedly.

“Why?!” she finally sobbed. “Why aren’t you still burning?! You’re supposed to stay till the end, right?!”

At least, that’s what I thought... before, uh, that happened.

You see, it was one day while I was struggling to find my way through the Land of Rumors and Elements when someone stood in a distance away from me. When I tried to process who it was, they somehow got to me in quick speeds & punched my glasses off of me.

I was at a disadvantage by then. I tried to use my two knives (alchemized ones; they looked cool & they were more fit for fighting) to get them, but my eyesight is pretty crap. I missed my slashes so many times.

Then I felt them getting one of the knives, and it turned into what was basically a very inconvenient sword-fight. It went on for a long time, trying to injure free spots before getting parried repeatedly.

I then noticed a sharp pain on my right side.

When I turned my head towards the feeling, my right arm was on the ground.

Bleeding. Aching. Hurting.

Fading.

I faced the person one last time, and I only see a silhouette. On their head is a mint-colored circle with three wisp-like appendages... a symbol...

The next thing I knew, I was lying on stone. I was... weak. And tired.

On my side was my Sprite, a golden retriever with water buffalo horns & a fedora. She had a mournful look on her face.

I closed my own eyes & took a deep breath when I realized.

I was dying.

“RIGHT?!?!”

She cried out before falling to the ground, practically drowning in her own tears.

Then I felt as numb as I could ever be.

>> —^— <<

Then she heard a voice.

It said, “Worry not, child. I’m still here.”

She looked up to see the remaining Candle in the room.

“Why should I not worry, then?” the girl questioned.

It replied, “I can relight the others if you truly acknowledge my presence.”

She perked up at the response she was given. Crawling closer towards the Candle, she followed up with, “And why is that?”

A soft chuckle came out from it.

“Well... isn’t my name Hope?”

>> —^— <<

I didn’t expect to feel a burst of cool air from where my arm was cut off. At least, I didn’t expect it to be the first thing I felt since I died.

Then I felt something on my back, pushing me up & up until I recognized it as floating in the air. Little by little, my senses came back to normal. The numbness had subsided, replaced with what I think was... power.

My lungs breathed air again; I can make sounds; I can see, smell, hear, feel...

I’m human again. Alive. Awake.

Unfortunately, living again came with having to deal with pain. Remnants of the aching on my right arm arrived, so naturally, I let my left hand clench where it hurt. There was a scar on where I was touching, but I can unusually feel the rest of my arm...

Yep, I got my arm back. Nice, I guess. Let’s set that aside for now.

One other detail I noticed was that I was wearing a mostly yellow outfit: a sleeveless shirt, some leggings, and dark green boots, along with long fingerless gloves. I then took a look at a puddle to see that my reflection has a superhero-like mask on my face.

I did not know how the fuck they got on me.

Yet one thing’s for sure: I’ve ascended and went to God Tier.

And my role?

I relight our Family’s bond & trust with the help of Hope.

With shining eyes, the girl picked the Candle up and lighted the other three.

Peace, Faith, & Love.

All together, alight again, in the dark room.

>> —^— <<

I am the Rogue of Hope, the one who distributes Hope to others.

[stillness-in-green]

The Weight of a Name

Some meta on Shigaraki, Kotaro, All For One, and the Japanese adoption system.  

So, I was thinking the other day about Shigaraki, family names, and the illustration of power that is All For One wresting Shigaraki from the Shimura family into his own.  To wit: I had occasionally wondered about Kotaro's resentment of his mother; about whether his adoptive parents, whoever they were, were cruel or distant with him, or whether he was so deeply wounded by his perceived abandonment that no arrangement would have been happy or supportive enough to lessen his trauma.  Also, why in heaven's name wasn't his name changed?  If Nana was concerned that All For One might hurt him to get at her, why wasn't the simplest and most basic aspect of his identity, his family name, altered?  Upon further reflection, though, I remembered some of what I've read about family law in Japan and came to a realization: I don't think Kotaro was adopted.  This has significant implications for both his own upbringing and the statement All For One makes in “adopting” Tenko.  

While adoption numbers look high in Japan--the second-highest in the world--in reality, over 90% of adoptions in the country are adult adoptions of men in their 20s-30s, usually for the purposes of inheriting businesses.  Foster care is rare now and was once even rarer; the majority of children in the care of Japanese child services grow up in overcrowded, understaffed institutions, and scant few of these children are even eligible to be adopted due to family law stating that putting a child in an orphanage does not equate to surrendering one's parental rights.  Often, children are placed in orphanages due to the parents' financial difficulty or history with abuse, with the possibility that they might come back for those children when they get their lives back on track--though in reality, this is quite rare.  

Why are these ties kept so strong?  Well, it goes back to family ties and bloodlines, and the ways in which modern Japanese society is built around those things on some very, very bedrock levels.  In the West, we have individual documents for our major life events, but in Japan, since the 1870s, there has been the koseki.  

The koseki is a family registry--one is entered into one's parents' registry at birth, with all information about the family's births, deaths, marriages, divorces and adoptions being kept in the same place.  The registry for a given family is maintained for two generations, with children typically only beginning their own family registries when and if they marry--sometimes not even bothering until they have a child!  The koseki--theirs and each of their parents'--will also have references to one another, allowing a diligent person to track a family line and its major events back for generations by simply following the paperwork.  Being recorded in a koseki is the primary indicator of Japanese citizenship.  "Family" as recorded in the koseki governs inheritance rights, and in turn carries expectations about children looking after their parents in the latter's old age.  While in recent years, limits have been placed on who can access koseki, as recently as 2008, anyone who was even curious about someone else's koseki could walk into the relevant government office and ask to see it for only a basic fee.  This contributes to enormous privacy concerns and societal pressure to not do anything that would "sully" the family koseki, as doing so could not impact just peoples' views of you, but of everyone else in your family.  (cite)

The whole schema for the koseki assumes a heterosexual, nuclear family dynamic, with a predictable difficulty in forcing that framework fit outlying cases--single parents, international or same-gender marriages, divorce, surrogacy arrangements, gender changes, and--most relevant to this discussion--adoption.  Because of the perceived sanctity of the koseki, adoption of children for purposes other than inheritance remains vanishingly rare--combine that with the rarity of parents who give up their children ever returning for them, and what you have are too many children in too few facilities, a recipe for misery.  Children in Japanese orphanages are often considered--by both people in society at large and even the children themselves--as "unwanted."  Studies about children who grew up in such institutions suggest they lag behind the rest of their age group in development and in school, that they have little experience in forming long-term bonds with others; "many struggle with basic interpersonal skills like empathy and regulating their emotional state."  Adults who come out of such institutions often fail to finish school or seek higher education and wind up working low-paying jobs or relying on government assistance. (cite, but also see: Bubaigawara Jin)  

While Kotaro--if he was raised in an orphanage--clearly overcame the odds very admirably regarding his schooling and employment, he equally clearly came out of the experience still nursing emotional scars and ill-equipped to deal with children of his own.  This glacial societal resistance to mucking with family records probably also explains why his name was never changed--if he was never adopted by another family, there would be no other koseki to register him to, and Japan doesn't have a witness protection program.  

What all of this illustrates to me--along with shedding some light on what Kotaro's childhood post-Nana was probably like--is what exactly is being communicated by All For One's adoption and subsequent renaming of Shimura Tenko.  Kotaro was leashed to the Shimura name all his life, even after his mother gave him up, even after she died.  He could never escape his status as "an unwanted child"; anyone who wanted to look him up could do so (including, very possibly, All For One himself, depending on how much of Shigaraki's backstory you think was orchestrated from the beginning).  

By contrast, Tenko is severed cleanly from the Shimura family name, given another name not listed on any koseki (at least not one updated within the last two hundred years).  He's cut out of the Shimura family entirely, adopted at a young age by a man who wants him, a man with such utter disregard for societal systems and values that he's able to just take the child he wants, difficulties with adoptions and names and family registers be damned.  In a stroke, at his whim, the unyielding weight of Shimura is nullified, and instead, Tenko becomes Shigaraki Tomura, a child who doesn't exist anywhere.  Not recorded on a koseki, he is thus without family or nationality, his Quirk unrecorded, his date of birth unknown.  There is nowhere any proof of his existence.  All told, it's a pretty profound statement about the lengths All For One is willing (and happy) to go to in stamping out all traces of the One For All bearers' legacies.

(...And yet, perversely, Shigaraki also kind of fits the model for Japanese adoption--All For One explicitly intends him to be a successor, after all.  In that light, you could say that he was adopted into the Shigaraki family to inherit the family business.  I have to imagine that All For One thought this was pretty funny, though probably no one else agrees with him.)  

A note: The stats and info I reference above are relevant to modern-day Japan and, of course, My Hero Academia isn't set in modern-day Japan, not quite.  It's set in Japan 200-300-odd years in the future, with the caveat that the development of super-powers and the resulting massive social upheaval stunted societal and technological growth  such that the setting still looks mostly like modern-day Japan, only with super-powers.  That being the case, do we assume that the ongoing updates to the koseki system had already been made as of the emergence of Quirks, enduring through the plot as we know it, or do we assume that changes to the system were made on a roughly even time-scale as in modern times--e.g. did employers stop being able to ask for a copy of one's koseki in 1974 or merely "forty-five years ago"?  

Given the chaos that was wrought by the appearance of Quirks, the alleged lawless periods, as well as the existence of a mandatory Quirk registry and the phenomenon of "Quirk marriages," I am disinclined to believe that the problems represented by the koseki have been addressed much at all since early-2000s Japan.  If anything, the conservative influences in the Japanese government that are so resistant to legislating changes to how the koseki functions today would probably have even more reason to push back against those changes if faced with Sudden Super-Powers.  My Hero Academia is intended to speak to a modern Japanese audience--the issues facing its villains, in particular, are reflective of real problems people face in Japan--and thus, to me at least, it's counterintuitive not to interpret the series' characters with that modern Japanese context in mind.  Who is Horikoshi writing for, and what in his society is he trying to comment on?  With that lens in place, I think the koseki is exactly as much a problem in MHA's world as it is our own--possibly even moreso.

[finelythreadedsky]

“we can tell that women participated in the formation of their culture’s folklore because women’s trauma is embedded in it” i want to learn more about this!! Are there any journals, articles, authors, and/or books that you’d recommend reading that explore this idea in more detail?

unfortunately almost all my thoughts about this come from just reading a lot of ancient literature and listening to a lot of folk ballads and pointing out things i think are cool.

i have come across some relevant stuff in my research for my paper on the weaving women of ovid’s metamorphoses, BUT these sources tend to be ones that claim to be able to tell something about the oral culture out of which a particular written work arose, which i find highly questionable. 

with ovid in particular, since he’s the first recorded (and surviving) telling of the stories i was looking at, there is no way to tell how much of his version is his own innovation and how much is drawn from oral traditions or previous works that he had access to but that are unknown to us. but that certainly doesn’t stop people from trying to write very specifically about how certain myths arose out of the context of female storytelling and were later appropriated into men’s repertoire.

for instance, ann suter’s article “the myth of procne and philomela” tries to reconstruct the philomela myth in its pre-ovidian incarnations in a way that i find highly suspicious– essentially she reads the myth as originally being about female fertility and the relationships between women that do not revolve around men (rivalry about fertility) and as being later transformed by men into a myth about the control of female fertility by men through violence. but we really have no way of knowing that!!! it’s highly speculative!!! and also john heath’s article “women’s work: female transmission of mythic narrative,” which gets close to claiming that ovid’s source for a lot of the metamorphoses is an oral tradition of epic storytelling circulated among women. as if ovid listened to or cared about the real women in his life, not just the symbolic ones in his poetry.

basically i am not on board with anything that so much as mentions “original myth” or tries to claim that a story in its entirety came out of women’s storytelling or women’s experiences. i’m looking for an approach that acknowledges that certain elements of a myth, like for instance the motif of magically-prolonged childbirth, can be traced back to women’s experiences, or that one (of the many) cultural realities that the homeric hymn to demeter addresses is a reality of women’s lives. i don’t think it’s ever accurate to say that any myth comes originally solely from women, as the two scholars i mentioned above are on the verge of doing, but i also don’t think it’s usually accurate to say that a myth comes solely from men, as is our inclination given that the vast majority of our sources from the ancient world are men. 

i think that myth and folklore come out of culture, and that it can be helpful to take a step back and ask “would a group of men have come up with and included this specific element of the story?” and sometimes the answer is yes: the magically-prolonged childbirth motif might be traced back to women’s traumatic experiences with childbirth, but it could also be a product of men’s fears for their wives (and daughters and sisters) as the women in their lives went through a potentially fatal undergoing that they had no way of understanding. but do i think an entirely male group would have described demeter’s grief as sympathetically and accurately as the homeric hymn to demeter does, given that those men would have been complicit in taking their own daughters away from their homes to be married? less convincing.

this is long and not particularly coherent and not really what you asked for, but the short answer is that i don’t have anything to recommend because the only things i’ve seen about women’s participation in the formation of their culture’s folklore take it way too far and overcorrect that assumption that myth was formed by men by claiming that certain myths were formed by women, when what i really want is an acknowledgement that myth comes out of culture and a culture is made up of more than one gender.

[whatthehellistherapy]

Interprofessional learning and practise. APT010l003Y

Interprofessional learning and practise. APT010l003Y (1443 words)

Dramatherapists, whether you’re still in training or have been a registered practitioner in this field for years, we all ‘kind of’ know that other arts therapies’ techniques can creep into our work. We are often encouraging our clients to embody their experiences and feelings and I’m sure you have a stack of arts materials, a box of small world objects and a drum (at the very least) that all make regular appearances in your sessions. We borrow from other modalities regularly, but what’s the link? How relevant are the skills found in the related professions to the work we do with our clients, and to us as therapist? And why is it that they cross over into our field of work seemingly so easily?

I’ve got two left feet, never got the end of ‘three blind mice’ on the recorder at school and can barely draw a half decent stick man, so how can I incorporate dance movement psychotherapy, music therapy, art psychotherapy and or play therapy into my work as a dramatherapist? And should I even bother? Can’t we just stick to what we know and draw on our knowledge and experience using character, story and script work?

I had the opportunity to attend workshops for all other modalities within arts therapy with the aim of gaining some further understanding of why I often incorporate at least some of their techniques in my own work with clients of all ages, across broad and varied settings. The first thing that really struck me about the arts therapies is that they all encourage a type of creativity that often comes naturally to children. When thinking about the development of a very young child before any sort of cognitive understanding or clarity, there often comes sound, movement, play and creativity, all of which can be linked to a means of communication. This concept resonated with Sue Jennings’s developmental paradigm of ‘Embodiment, Projection and Role’ and lectures and research suddenly came hurtling back and reminding me of the importance of understanding a client’s early interactions in relation to self and other.

One of the first things mentioned in the music therapy workshop was the idea of being ‘along side’ a client without the use of words, communicating through a ‘transcendence of language’ and ‘music links with our innermost emotional, spiritual and most private selves, and yet is also a social experience.’ (Stige and Bunt, 2014)

I learnt that a lot of research has been done into the very earliest stages of communication and there is an inherent musicality in pre-verbal infant/carer interactions. During this particular workshop I was struck by the realisation of how powerful and evocative music can be in relation to feelings. You know, every time you hear that specific song and you suddenly feel like you’re headlining your very own world tour? Or the moment in a film when you’re holding back tears and then the music starts and suddenly your popcorn is swimming in a small salty river of your own making? And haven’t we all stared moodily out of the window of a bus or car and imagined ourselves in a music video? No? Just me? Well, if we admit it or not, music can affect us. It can move us, and it can be a vital tool in helping us connect to emotions we may not be able to vocalise and sometimes they may even be feelings we aren’t fully aware of.

(the picture shows just some of the instruments used during the music therapy workshop)

I found a similar connection during my participation in the dance movement psychotherapy workshop. I learnt that the therapists’ intention is for the client to embody an experience rather than rely solely on words. We were invited to take part in a pair exercise where one person leads, moving as they wish with a motivation or an emotion in mind, and their partner aims to simply be ‘along-side.’ They are not controlling or changing the client’s behaviour but taking the time to notice and support them physically. After all, the therapists’ role is not to try to ‘fix’ but to be ‘with’ the client. This reinforced for me, the importance of considering the whole person when working therapeutically. I have personally found I difficult at times to work in the body both in training to be a dramatherapist and in my previous training as an actor but I also respect and understand how important it is for this type of creative therapeutic work. It is vital we learn to notice what a client is communicating beyond what they may or may not be saying and developing these skills can be particularly important, especially when working with clients who are none verbal or who have limited verbal communication skills. The idea of working with the whole client in therapy, establishing a link between body and mind, which is less commonly found in more traditional and more cognitive therapeutic approaches, appeared paramount across all the arts therapies and is an idea supported by Bessel van der Kolk, in ‘The body keeps the score.’ This book explores how trauma is manifested in the body, it has links to some illness and disease, and it is interesting to see how that may influence our work with our clients.

I experienced a theme of transcendence of language across all the arts therapies as each workshop focused at some point on the therapists’ ability to be along side the client in their expression of self. It was clearly less important to focus on what the client created and much more about what they were communicating. The importance is not on the creation of a piece of music, a dance or a sculpt but it is the lived experience between the client and therapist that offers the most value and space for therapeutic change. 

The play therapy workshop put emphasis on giving the child permission, not to change or question their choices but to be alongside, to allow them to play and to be creative. This brought up my desire to ‘fix’ or to ‘make better’ and I often find myself wanting to step into the role of the rescuer and regularly explore this in supervision. The notion that there is no right and wrong is an idea I found, present throughout all modalities and something I learnt in each of these workshops. I found this vital in helping to establish not only a safe space for the child or client to work but also to enable a relationship between client and therapist to form. Arguably one of the most important factors for therapy.

I entered these workshops with concern over my ability, or lack thereof (thanks shadow) and thoughts such as, ‘I can’t dance, am I too fat for leggings? I’m no good at art. I can’t play an instrument and what if I play out of tune?’ all allowed my self-judgement to creep in before I’d even started. It made me think of how our life experiences, including experience of trauma, contribute to the development and growth of the shadow and what this can mean in terms of our relationship to creativity, and in turn, therapy.

The art therapist began by sharing a quote from the Peter London book, ‘No more second-hand art’ and stated ‘Meaning, not beauty, is what we are after.’ This really resonated with my own sense of judgement and the pressure I place on myself to be ‘good enough.’ In relation to my clients, I noticed how important it is to allow their feelings to be present and how a non-judgemental and permissive approach found throughout the arts therapies can help to hold a client throughout the work.

So, how and why do we incorporate these other modalities in our work? Well, I realised through attending these workshops that, in one way or another that they all go hand in hand. Creativity is not limited. It isn’t about choosing and rigidly sticking to one form or the other. As creative therapists we have a set of tools which change and grow as we learn and understand and they can be adapted to our clients. We, as humans are not mind then body. We are one whole being, we feel as well as think. Our emotions live in us and not apart from us. Creativity is usually the first and the most natural, innate means of communication and if we can keep this in mind and continue to understand its importance, we can enable our clients to work with their emotion, their life experiences, their trauma and pave the way for understanding, permission and positive change.

Bibliography

Stige, B. Bunt, L. (2014) ‘Music therapy: an art beyond words’, 2nd edition, London, Routledge.

Van Der Kolk, B. (2014) ‘The Body Keeps the Score’, UK, Penguin.

London, P. (1989) ‘No More Second-Hand Art: awakening the artist within,’ USA, Shambhala Publications

[oscopelabs]

Jonathan Demme’s ‘A Master Builder’ and the Elusive Magic of Bringing Stage to Screen by Tina Hassannia

Criterion’s three-film box-set of the works of Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory—My Dinner With Andre, Uncle Vanya, and A Master Builder—features several supplements, including an interview between the theater artists and writer Fran Lebowitz. She makes a frank confession: “I don’t like watching theater.” Gregory, a man who’s spent his entire life in the theater, says he feels the same way.

Lebowitz explains that she loves to be drawn into a good film or novel, but, with the exception of Shawn’s work, she’s never experienced the same with theater. She’s not alone. While theater may not exactly be a dying art form, it was long ago upstaged by cinema and television as our de-facto entertainment, and our appreciation for it has dwindled in kind. Theater requires us to suspend disbelief that we’re watching mere make believe, more forcefully than film, which benefits from a metaphysical distance from the viewer. Why sit through 2-3 hours of physical artifice just to see actors move through the spectrum of human emotion when there are so many easier and supposedly better options?

Those lucky enough to have witnessed really good theater know this a philistine’s line of thinking, but even so, its cultural relevance is tightly bound to its usurper, cinema: film adaptations of plays are usually better known than famous productions. (Consider the populist understanding of A Streetcar Named Desire without Marlon Brando—it doesn’t exist.) But adaptations are in essence, films, not theater. Transmitting the visceral pleasures of actual theater is nigh-impossible. If you’ve ever made the mistake of watching a recorded stage performance, you know you’re missing an essential thing privy to members of the audience. No matter the quality of the performance or camerawork, filming a play cheapens the experience. Theatricality is transmogrified into an over-exaggerated mess onscreen. The chemistry unique to each performer and audience, which gives birth to an atmospheric energy that changes with every performance, is lost.

A Master Builder director Jonathan Demme tries to describe a similar sentiment in another Criterion supplement, an interview between himself, Shawn, Gregory, and critic David Edelstein. Having seen the duo’s final production of A Master Builder —which Demme calls “literally spell-binding” and “very emotionally intense”— the director chronicles in the interview his experience watching Gregory watch the play. Having finished his part as Brovik, Gregory joined the audience, but, according to Demme, appeared to subconsciously direct the performers as if through an “energy field.”

“I remember seeing his face responding to everything that was going on there and feeling the connection,” he says. Edelstein follows up with questions, as what he’s hearing sounds too “woo woo”: Were the performers looking at Gregory? Was he in their peripheral vision? … What, exactly? It’s not Demme’s fault he can’t eloquently explain the phenomenon, because words rarely do the experience of live theatre justice. It’s an inexplicable sensation that can only be experienced to be understood.

Filmmakers sometimes struggle adapting plays for the screen. Those who succeed understand the key differences between the artforms. They preserve the essence of story and drama, the play’s unique blueprint. They subtly reframe the story to be told more visually. And they honor the reality that plays are usually verbose in nature. Results have varied in quality from baffling (August: Osage County) to transcendent (Amadeus). But the outcome is usually more accomplished in the literary appreciation of theatre—say, a modern or unique interpretation of a classic text, like Orson Welles’ Macbeth—than the emulation of that woo-woo theatre magic.

And then there’s Demme. The director took on Shawn and Gregory’s third film collaboration. A Master Builder is dedicated to Louis Malle, who brought to life the actors’ long-form conversation My Dinner With Andre and their modern interpretation of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. Demme was a perfect replacement for Malle, as they share a visual intimacy in their work. Demme also benefits from a swirling chain in his aesthetic DNA: an unparalleled gift in recording live performance that sometimes makes you feel like you’re really there, really present, inhaling the performers’ energy.

In his concert films, including the masterpiece Stop Making Sense, Demme captures both spectacle and the musicians’ shamanistic force. In Swimming in Cambodia, a kind of filmed play, for lack of a better term, it feels as if you really are watching Spalding Gray’s affecting one-man show. Demme relies on close-ups to get us as close as possible to the performer, but maintains a respectful distance. Instead of trying to direct the performers to be more naturalistic for the screen, he blends himself into their forcefield. Perhaps this is why Demme is able to transform Shawn and Gregory’s take on Henrik Ibsen’s play into something simultaneously cinematic and theatrical. The humanistic, democratic POV that Demme often brings to his work nearly elides his personal perspective, thus allowing the viewer to virtually breathe in the full depth of the performer’s space and energy.

Shawn plays Master Builder Solness, a narcissistic aging architect who won’t allow his associates Brovik (Gregory) and his younger son Ragnar (Jeff Biehl) to build anything on their own. Tensions in Solness’ personal and professional life are a direct consequence of his tight reign over his company. Suddenly a mysterious nymph-like woman named Hilde (Lisa Joyce) visits the Solness estates, and their past history is one of many contradictions the play teasingly weaves into its narrative. Through the course of their labyrinthine conversation, the viewer understands how Solness views his selfish actions, the traumatizing effect they’ve had on his loved ones, and his deceptively innocent explanation, simply imagining his success into existence.

Ibsen’s original The Master Builder is a difficult play to mount and even more trying to comprehend, full of delightful contradictions that produce different interpretations.  One understanding—supported by Shawn and Gregory’s modern adaptation—is that Hilde is an imaginary figure in Solness’ death fantasy, a chance for him to reckon with his many mistakes. Shawn and Gregory crystallize Ibsen’s ambiguous magical realism into something more obvious, turning the typically physically robust Solness, who self-deprecates about his inner “trolls,” into someone who actually resembles one. (No offense to Mr. Shawn). It’s clearly intentional. He’s on his deathbed but then suddenly dashes into a spry man upon Hilde’s introduction. Their conversations are all a dream, despite seeming real. Occasionally the film interrupts their garrulous chemistry to show a more liminal headspace that very well could be reality: we hear beeping monitors and frantic nurses trying to save the comatose Solness, but all we see are Demme’s signature mobile establishing shots of trees and the architect’s many buildings.  

In A Master Builder, Demme gives the actors sufficient room to block their minimal but lustful action. The beautiful interior architecture provides an elegant and visually interesting complement to what is essentially a chamber drama, that most notoriously difficult kind of story to film. Demme toned down the actors’ acting so that it was suitable for the screen, as film tends to capture every minute facial twitch and shift in body language. But the actors retain a good portion of their theatricality, as it’s the play they’d been rehearsing and performing for many years. This is a rare feat in film adaptation: the preservation of theatre’s intensity and magic that piques curiosity in Ibsen’s strange little play.

The Master Builder thrives or dies on the dynamic between the actors who play Solness and Hilde; their immediate palpable chemistry is imperative to intrigue the viewer. So much of the play focuses on these two strangers oversharing personal details, a conversation that delves deeper and deeper into personal, vulnerable territory. It only makes sense for the viewer to know why these two people seemed “destined” to meet again, why we want to hear them speak at length, and with such intensity. The use of close-ups to capture Hilde’s wild-eyed fascination for her master builder, her hunger evident through body language, all seems outlandish for a long while until she reveals details of their shared history that Solness conveniently forgot. It sounds tedious but the pace is dramatic given the ugliness of their past. Until then, the viewer remains bewildered why a young, ambitious and confident woman would ever be so openly smitten by a troll.

Shawn and Gregory downplay an integral component of the story, however, to suit their “death fantasy” interpretation, for better or worse: in Ibsen’s original, it is pretty obvious Solness physically handled the 12-year-old Hilde in some inappropriate manner (according to her, he, all but a stranger to this child, kissed her on the mouth, called her a princess, and promised to build her a castle in ten years). It’s a conversation that is more grounded in the original and treated more lightly and ambiguously in this version. A practical, psychologically grounded interpretation of the original might conclude Hilde’s pursuit of her abuser is a trauma bond she never recovered from, with the “princess in the castle” fantasy carrying her through adolescence into young adulthood and here we are, ten years to the day, Hilde having found her master builder at last, so he can deliver on his promise.

But the film suggests a different understanding: here, Hilde is not so much a real character with baggage guiding her actions as she is a fantastical figure in Solness’ final reckoning with his id. While Ibsen appears to have written Hilde as something of a wild child (and there is symbolic value pointedly repeated in dialogue about her stay in the Solness residence’s empty “children’s rooms,” her presence also representing Solness’ guilt about his deceased children), Shawn and Gregory’s maximalist interpretation has Hilde literally wearing a childlike outfit. These outlandish aesthetic choices, while more acceptable in theatre, veer into ludicrousness in the subtler frame of the camera, but Demme’s setup elegantly frames it for magical realism—a form that some people have intuited was Ibsen’s real objective with The Master Builder.

One reason why this play remains a lesser produced work by the Norwegian playwright is its baffling complexity. Its many contradictions don’t offer any satisfying interpretation. One way to cut through the bullshit for a theater artist—especially one responsible for bringing it to the masses via film—is to hint heavily at their interpretation without directly spelling it out. That approach works best for two-dimensional, captured film. Otherwise the viewer may find A Master Builder, no matter how refined and well-filmed, an obfuscated maze to walk through. There’s just enough realism to make us question whether or not we are watching reality or a death fantasy. In either case, it’s a fascinating exploration of a narcissistic mind, and a gem of a play granted wider access through the medium of film.

[sol1056]

I don't know if this is relevant to ask on your blog, but I am currently creating a longer story where the main character has been abused and neglected by their parents, and while I can find sources on how childhood neglect can have different impacts on people, I would really like some more 'personal' accounts (as in, not quantitative research). Do you perhaps have any links to blogs/studies/other people sharing personal stories? I don't want to be adding to any ignorant stereotypes in my story

On tumblr, you can try asking @scripttraumasurvivors. Or get yourself to a reference librarian, and asked for recommended autobiographies. Long-form journalism is another one, so long as the writer includes a significant percentage of firsthand interviews. Or try books or articles by therapists, which may have (anonymized) patient stories as illustration. Use the google, and search for whatever keywords you can think of. Someone out there has posted their own experience on just about every topic imaginable. 

I’ve also used a more convoluted method of reading self-help books geared towards the particular experience I’m trying to write. Sometimes you can reverse-engineer your understanding of the damage through understanding how the healing works. (If nothing else, it’ll help develop your empathies for what people face when recovering from trauma.)

There are also writer’s reference books, and the one I’m thinking of is about difference specific traumatic experiences. Naturally now I’m blanking on the title. (I want to say it’s the same folks who did the books on negative traits and positive traits, but I could be wrong.)

Ultimately, how one individual reacts to trauma (during and after) will be similar only in the broad strokes. At the personal level, they’ll be unique, because each person’s personality, experience, health, resources, and resiliency will differ from anyone else. A single subtle change in your character could send them along a completely different path in terms of the impact, its aftermath, and how they (hopefully) recover. 

That means reading everything you can get your hands on is only half the task. The other half is to think backwards to who the person was, before the trauma. I’m assuming your story takes place after the trauma’s starting point, so you need to know who your character was, to understand who they became – and thus to understand who they have the potential to be.

A stereotype, at least ime, is a greater risk when you’re just picking two from column A and three from column B, without regard for the human in the equation. So first, you have to understand this human you’re creating, and the life they knew (or thought they knew).  Then you’ll be better equipped to know which reactions, coping mechanisms, fears, and hopes, make sense for your specific character. 

[neriad13]

Best of the Best Media Consumed 2019!

This year I had a whole lot of focus on nonfiction, film and comics. Resolution for next year: read more fiction. Seriously, I read over three times more nonfiction than fiction this year. I read a little over one novel a month. But I really do love picking up a book on something I know nothing about and coming away knowing more than something. X-P

Anyway! The list!

Books - Fiction

Out of the 17 works of fiction I read this year, the best of the best is...

The Snow Queen, by Joan Vinge

The Snow Queen was one of my absolute favorite fairy tales as a child. The 2002 film adaptation of it was one of the things I watched endlessly. 

It was SO MUCH FUN picking apart this sci-fi retelling and discovering which characters are meant to represent the ones from the original story (of particular interest: the character representing the reindeer is human in this...and he has a one night stand with the character representing Gerta. Yes, I’m still cracking up about this. Yes, it actually was a pretty well written scene). 

But the absolute best part of it was the masterful characterization. Every single character has ulterior motives and often heartbreaking reasons for why they are the way they are - especially including the Snow Queen herself, whose final scene is horrifying, tragic and beautiful. 

I always like me some solid villain characterization.

Runner Up:

Fairy Tales: Traditional Stories Retold for Gay Men

I am not a gay man...but this very much spoke to me. It was at turns heartwarming and hilarious and the turns these fairy tales took felt so natural, like they’d been told that way all along. 

There are also many allusions to AIDS in the stories - sometimes as something a character is directly dealing with whether in himself, or a loved one and sometimes under the guise of a metaphor for inevitability. These ones were my favorites (aside from The Frog Prince, which was turned into a metaphor for accepting the process of aging with grace). 

Books - Nonfiction

Oh boy. There’s...definitely going to be more than one here. Of the 65 works of nonfiction I read this year, my favorites were...

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes & Other Lessons From the Crematory

A memoir about the author’s time spent working as a crematory operator and her entry into the funeral business. This book was absolutely hilarious (it contains a story about the author getting absolutely soaked with corpse fat that wouldn’t stop flowing straight out of the incinerator), tragic (a 12 year old girl is cremated and her ashes are mailed back to her parents as part of a cremation mail-in program) and extremely poignant (the author talks openly about the time she was contemplating suicide). 

I love Caitlin’s youtube channel and I loved this book even more.

My Age of Anxiety

Partially the memoir of a man who has battled his extreme anxiety his entire life, a historical study of famous figures who have also endured it and a scientific look into why it exists at all. 

Ultimately, it offers no answers. As of the writing of the book, the author has found no treatment that helps him for longer than a few months. But what he has found over the course of his research is that he is not alone - that anxiety has historically been a factor in scientific breakthroughs and artistic accomplishments. And that perhaps most importantly, that anxiety has been a key part of human evolution from the start, which served a vital role in the survival of the species. 

Mental illness or evolutionary adaptation? Is there even a line between them?

Cassell’s Encyclopedia of Queer Myth, Symbol and Spirit

This is the only book, period, devoted to queer mythology, that I have ever been able to find. But the good news is that it’s fairly extensive (though the authors themselves admit that they had trouble finding as much information about non-western mythology as they did for western mythology), is chock full of references and is extremely thorough in the information it presents. 

I’ll admit that it was a slog to get through at times, but what it’s provided has been invaluable to my conception of history and my own place in it. 

Also, I can now say beyond a shadow of a doubt that almost every culture on earth has at some point in their history had a tradition of transgender shamans.

Hope After Faith

This is the memoir of a charismatic Pentecostal pastor turned atheist. It follows him from teenagerhood and the beginnings of his dream to be a preacher to a little bit after his deconversion decades later. 

The eventual crumbling of his faith was something that spoke to me on a deep level. The scene that I still think about months later is the one in which he finally gives up his belief in the afterlife and accepts the finality of death by saying goodbye to everyone he ever loved who has died with the words “I love you, but I’m never going to see you again.”

I was not a huge fan of the writing style at first, but this one won me over totally and completely. It touched me immensely at the time when I needed it most.

Comics - Fiction

I read 52 fictional comics this year and 46 nonfiction. I absolutely raided my library’s graphic novel section for months. It was a good time.

Beautiful Darkness

A French graphic novel wherein tiny people survive and feud over the corpse of the child they came from. It’s...hard to explain. Kind of a fairy tale Lord of the Flies, but more subtly horrifying. It’s a story about decay and collapse - of society, of the physical form, of the dreams of a child. It has no single interpretation and different people may take something very different from it. The most inventive horror story I read this year.

My Brother’s Husband

A story about microaggressions and how their buildup over time can drive a wedge between people without them even noticing. I cried. Go read it.

Mis(h)adra

A semi autobiographical account of a college student learning how to live with his epilepsy. I also cried over this one. 

The art is stunning, the metaphors are amazing (the main character’s epilepsy is visually portrayed as a set of ghostly knives that follow him around) and the ending is extremely affecting if you’ve ever dealt with any kind of chronic illness. 

Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba

The absolute most fun I had reading a comic this year. Gets extremely dark and incredibly sad but never feels overwhelmingly heavy, thanks to its great sense of humor. 

Edward Scissorhands: Parts Unknown + Whole Again

A series of adventures set decades after the movie, after Kim’s death, in a time when her granddaughter begins wondering if the stories about the castle on the hill are true. 

It deals with such issues as the difficulties Kim had with her daughter growing up, when all she would do is tell stories about Edward rather than give her the emotional support she needed, whether removing the thing that both makes you unique and brings pain is worth it and how to stop angry villagers from burning down your house (again). 

Also, seeing Edward be surrounded by a group of friends who care about him was extremely healing.

Comics - Nonfiction

My Solo Exchange Diary vol 1-2

A series of updates about the author’s continuing battle with mental illness and about how recovery is anything but a straight line. 

Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?

Finally, some light reading!

It’s a memoir about the decline and death of the author’s aging parents. 

I found it...extremely comforting. Extreme old age, whether in one’s self or in one’s loved ones, is a scary and often obscured prospect, despite being a near-universal human experience. This book took the mystery out of aging and the fear out of taking care of aging parents. I’ve seen it done now. I’m more ready to do it myself.

The Best We Could Do

A memoir of the author’s family’s flight from Vietnam and their immigration to America, through the lens of the birth of the author’s first child. About how being a refugee changes a person in small, often unexpected ways, how trauma leaves its mark on families - and how, knowing all this, one can still keep living and raising the next generation.

Film - Fiction

I caught up on a lot of classics I’d not seen before and really got into Jidaigeki this year. Me putting only four of them on the list is a show of restraint. Of the 64 films I watched this year...

The Fall of the House of Usher 

Impeccable costume and psychedelic set design. The unanswered question that bounces throughout the entire movie: is it the curse or is it the fault of human belief in the curse?

Patch your walls, dude.

A Monster With a Thousand Heads 

A Mexican thriller about a woman whose husband is denied cancer treatment for seemingly no reason. The doctor gives her the runaround. No one can answer her questions. No one listens to her.

So, naturally, she and her teenage son spend a night kidnapping and holding at gunpoint every person she needs to get her husband’s cancer treatment approved. Wild and intense and timely.

Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

I watched a couple of Kubrick movies I hadn’t seen before and of them...I died laughing at this one. The tight plotting! The inevitable buildup to disaster over something so insanely stupid! 

I did not live during the Cold War, but damn do I feel for the inherent ridiculousness of it now.

Seven Samurai

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAFGFTRTRNHUKIJUHNJNHHHHHHHHHHHHYHYHYHYHYHYHYHYHYXCVVGGERDSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!

...this movie is insanely good. I watched Citizen Kane this year. This movie’s better. 

It has a plot which can be described in its totality, in a single sentence - a group of samurai are hired to defend a village from bandits - but what they do with that premise is so much more than that. 

This movie is three hours long. It did not lag once. 

Hara Kiri

As the Tokugawas secure their grip on all of Japan, war ceases. Great houses are dissolved and their retainers, cast into the streets. The relevance of the samurai is ending and the cities are awash in starving ronin. 

Once, one of these starving ronin approached a great house, asking if he might be able to end his life honorably, in front of witnesses there. So impressed was the lord with this ronin’s resolve, that he instead hired him on as one of his retainers. 

Hearing this story, other ronin, having no intention of actually offing themselves, tried the same trick in the hopes of securing a job, or at the very least, a little something to eat. 

It became a common scam which, in the end, fooled no one. Most houses gave the ronin a handful of cash and sent them on their way. 

But one house, seeking to preserve their warlike spirit in these peaceful times, chooses to treat one beggar ronin very differently. 

This is the story of vengeance taken for that death.

Yojimbo

A ronin enters a town that is being torn apart by gang warfare and decides to play both sides in order to end the conflict. It contains such comedic gems as:

 - the ronin suddenly deciding not to take part in a street battle, leaving both sides evenly matched and extremely nervous about fighting each other, while he watches it all from the top of a watchtower, laughing his ass off

 - the ronin is critically injured and being smuggled out of town in a coffin. A fight breaks out while this is happening and scares away one of the people carrying the coffin. A less intelligent goon of the gang he just escaped from is cheerfully recruited to carry the coffin the rest of the way

 - standing up in the coffin, declaring that he’s fine and immediately fainting

Also, you should totally bring a knife to a gun fight. 

Ran

A jidaigeki reimagining of King Lear. 

A visually astounding, sweeping epic with amazing acting and a complex interplay of conflicting passions which might just be more bleak than the original play. 

The scene in which the main character goes mad and is cast out into the wilderness is especially haunting.

Jojo Rabbit

I don’t think I’ve EVER experienced such violent mood whiplash in a movie before. One moment you’re crying-laughing from a joke that hit with absolute perfection and the next you’re...actually crying. In the same scene. Within thirty seconds. Multiple times. It is the oddest feeling to be so elated by the best joke in the entire movie while every character we’ve come to know across the course of the movie is in the process of dying violently. It’s not a feeling everyone’s going to like, but for me it was completely new and fantastic. 

The best part of the movie is the main character’s relationship with Imaginary Friend Hitler. He’s wildly funny and relentlessly charming. I got excited every time he appeared in a scene and was, oddest of all, actually comforted by his presence. 

He was all of these things until, in the most terrifying scene in the movie, he was not.

This movie shows you the mechanisms through which fascism becomes an appealing idea for a lonely child by putting the audience through a version of the same process. It’s so clever, so funny and so sad. 

What do you do when your world is destroyed by absurdity and there is nothing left for you to return to?

You dance in the streets.

TV Series

Good Omens 

Wildly hilarious comedy, fantastic costume design, multiple androgynous characters for which NO ONE bats an eye and honestly?? the best queer love story I’ve ever seen in television or film. 

The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance

I am not sure if I have ever seen a production with so much love poured into it. The dozens of painstakingly crafted sets and characters, the sheer level of artistry on display - the next thing I saw was always more amazing than the thing I’d seen before it and the amazingness just kept coming with no end in sight throughout the entirety of the show.

And the story itself! The way it deepened and played with the lore of the original movie in the most perfect and unexpected ways! It felt like I was watching the most fantastic and labor intensive piece of fanfiction ever conceived, that was written by a person with a deep passion for and knowledge of the source material. 

Speaking of fantastic throwbacks...

Dororo

I’ve said a lot about this one already. While it ultimately fell kind of flat, what it did get right was phenomenal. The motherfucking FIGHT SCENES! The love between bros! The fascinating reconception of Hyakkimaru’s powers and its emphasis on a disabled character actually being portrayed as disabled! The journey of good characters going down the path of evil with good intentions!

Mwah!

Primal eps 1-5

Genndy Tartakovsky’s next big project after the completion of Samurai Jack! 

It is gory. Like, extremely gory. Do you know how much gore a thing has to have before I consider it ‘extremely gory?’ It’s a lot. Like...really a lot. There’s a thirty second (or possibly longer. time lost all meaning as I watched it) sequence in which the main character punches the intestines out of a horde of hominids in loving, exacting detail. It’s like Genndy’s letting out all the pent-up gore he was forced to keep in check during the years when he was working on Samurai Jack. 

But it isn’t just gore. It’s a journey about the main character’s grief over the sudden, horrific, unexpected death of his entire family. A story which is also mirrored by that of the dinosaur he joins forces with. There were parts during it in which I literally felt my heart being torn in two over the travails of these two, as well as wildly funny and completely adorable parts.

The settings, creature design and fight choreography are insanely creative, as is the decision to do it with no dialogue whatsoever.

And that cliffhanger, DAMN!! They’d better get the next five episodes out soon!

Honorable Mention:

Rick and Morty S4 eps 1-5

This one doesn’t entirely make the list proper because the latter two episodes...were rather subpar. But I can’t entirely keep it off the list because the quality of the first three episodes was off the charts. A particular shoutout to ‘The Old Man and the Seat’ and ‘One Crew Over the Crewcoo’s Morty’ - the former, which somehow managed to use toilet humor, of all things, to reach a crushingly tragic conclusion and the latter, which has a twist better than that of some of my favorite horror movies. 

Games

Shogun 2

I didn’t do a whole lot of gaming at all this year. But what I did do is have a fantastic time getting into the Total War franchise. Shogun 2 was my entry point and a FANTASTIC game. The ninja animations! The tiny, exacting animations of every single person running around on a sinking ship! The way Realm Divide changes the game into something much more dangerous and the way I learned to dance on the edge of it until I was good and ready! 

Plays

Love’s Labours Lost

One of two Shakespeare plays I saw this year, the other being The Tempest - which was also excellent (especially the part where it legit started raining when Ariel summoned the storm in the first scene and then that showing had to be cancelled. The second time was the charm). 

Love’s Labours Lost had some excellent comedy and the usual absurd web of misunderstandings you’d expect to find in your standard Shakespeare romcom. But the thing which pushed it over the edge for me was that...it had a sad ending. It goes against the definition of comedy and has a sad ending. Because it was so unexpected, it hit unexpectedly hard and made it that much more memorable.