#all fun and games until they randomly trauma dump to you

[sillywormz]

a few days ago I was in bed trying to go to sleep, but then out of nowhere I got a idea for a Squid Game AU

where Sang-Woo won the games instead of Gi-Hun, (which of course means Gi-Hun dies😭), and when Sang-Woo leaves the games with the money, he thought he would be the happiest man in the world, but, over time, he realizes that he just doesn’t feel happy, like, he paid off his debt, and his mother has forgiven him for it all, but, he just doesn’t feel happy, and as he tries to go on with his life, that’s when the realization starts to kick in

He realizes that, those games did something to him, things that made him commit horrible things, and that, every single piece of the money, was someone’s life, and he realized that, if he had stopped the games, Gi-Hun, would still be alive

This realization completely flips his world upside down, overcome with grief and despair about what he has done, but all of this grief causes him to have some sort of a mental snap

He now routinely has nightmares about the games and all of the players that were in it, he starts having extreme panic attacks, but, he also starts having nightmarish hallucinations of his dead friends, Ali, Sae-Byeok, Ji-Yeong, and of course, Gi-Hun, but, despite everything, Sang-Woo holds on to his sanity, and realizes that…

He Can’t Let This Happen To Anyone Else, He Doesn’t Want Others To Go Through The Same Pain As He Does

So, he makes a promise to himself that he will never rest, never stop until he finds the people who run the games and make them pay for what they have done

So, like, basically in this AU, instead of Gi-Hun being the only survivor of the games and then spending like 3 years trying to find the games, it is Sang-Woo who survived and returned to the games to try and stop them

But, it can be pretty hard to come up with a plan to stop the games when you also have twisted hallucinations of your dead friends routinely mocking you in basically any chance they get, (Because that’s exactly what Sang-Woo has to put up with basically every single day)

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I feel like this is the reason why my sleep schedule is so messed up, (Not Just Because Of My Sleep-Deprivation), but also because I will randomly get AU ideas at like 4 in the morning, (Please Send Help)

Also sorry for just randomly dumping this on you, I’m just really bored and I can’t really do anything because I’m sick, and also I just really love your art, I too am a fan of Baehun and just Jung-bae as a character in general

IM SO SORRY IM LATE ANSWERING THIS ANON i've had a kinda meh day today but i loved seeing this ask so much and i'm finally getting round to it :D

I LOVE THIS IDEA‼️‼️ idk if sangwoo would expect to be happy after the games but at the very least i think he'd believe he could just plow ahead with life and forget that it happened......... but like you said, the guilt would keep eating away at him until he snapped imo.

i can tooootally see sangwoo being the kind of guy who gets tormented by guilty hallucinations of the people he killed.......... he would be an absolute mess post-games i think esp since he had to kill gihun. i think he would potentially just try to kill himself due to the guilt and trauma but would have an epiphany before he did so that he couldn't let this happen to anyone else........ and he'd resolve himself to stop the games as a way to save people from suffering in the same way as him but also in an attempt to "pay back" the debt he feels he owes to gihun and saebyeok 👀

since sangwoo isn't as much of a "moral" or compassionate person as gihun i think things would definitely go a lil differently in this au and it would be so fun to explore! also the toxic yaoi dynamic between him and inho would be absolutely INSANE can you imagine......... they would be so fucked up together

i can also imagine an au where sangwoo would end up working with inho tbh. i cannot see frontman!gihun happening (nor do i want it to happen) but i can imagine sangwoo being swayed by inho/coming to understand him, bc he's got a much colder view towards his fellow humans than gihun does. i don't say this as a negative thing abt sangwoo it's just who he is yknow........ he's not a bad person but he's more cold and brutal than gihun. if he DID decide to stop the games and dedicate himself to that, i can imagine him actively pursuing inho and the recruiter even more than gihun did...... and being much more vengeful abt it

the mental image of him being "haunted" by gihun's "ghost" is also something i rlly enjoy...... using gihun's memory as a mouthpiece for his own fears and insecurities but also desperately holding onto the spectre of him out of a sense of obligation and bc he doesn't want to forget who he was........ bc letting gihun go and letting that emotional wound heal would feel like killing him all over again and he's already done that once he can't do it again. Ough

ANYWAY SORRY IDK IF ANY OF THIS MAKES SENSE i just rlly love this idea :D tysm for sending it to me, i love getting messages and please always feel free to send me stuff like this!!! i love it!!!!!! ALSO YAYAYAYAYAYAYYYYY BAEHUN/JUNGBAE ENJOYERS UNITE YAYYYYYYYYYY

[blazehedgehog]

Do you ever think of yourself as being on the ASD? Up until the past few years (I'm 25 now), I never considered the possibility but as I delved deeper I identified with a lot of common behaviors (obsession, preferring isolation, social issues/anxiety, pickiness) and explained why I found it so difficult to assimilate in high school.

I’ve occasionally wondered, but there are a lot of things that kind of go against the grain of that kind of diagnosis. The few symptoms I exhibit of ASD also overlap with something that’s far more likely, and that’s that I probably have ADHD.

I had two or three teachers growing up try to convince my Mom that I had ADHD and that I needed to be medicated for it. My Mom refused to believe them, because back in the early 90′s, the traditional definition of ADHD included hyperactivity, and I was not a classically hyperactive kid. The image of ADD kids back then was being unable to sit still, unable to stop acting out. ADD kids were loud and grabby and uncontrollable, which I definitely was not.

We understand a lot more about the condition now and even though you should never self-diagnose, I’m 99% sure I have ADHD. My inability to focus on one singular hobby (hi, I’m an artist, game developer, sound engineer, youtuber, streamer, and writer), my extremely selective and poor memory, my inability to switch tracks and get motivated on something else after my mind is already set, my utter impatience for certain things, etc.

My isolation and social issues can be explained simply by my depression more than ASD, I think. I’ve talked about this before but I fell apart in high school. Things happened to me in middle school; I had bullies that acted like my friends, they did some deeply horrible things to me, and it completely destroyed my ability to trust anyone for decades. To some degree, it still persists to this very day. It just... wrecked me, in a way that’s hard to describe, and harder to even comprehend. I stopped showering. I stopped brushing my teeth. I just gave up on taking care of myself. I’ve blocked most of the memories out because of trauma coping mechanisms; I only know some of these things because other people have told me they happened. It really was that bad.

I had a really bad stretch of like, five years, from around 13 years old to 17 or 18, maybe even 19. I did eventually get away from those bullies in high school, but the combination of self-loathing they left me with combined with my ADHD and the mounting anxiety problems I was developing meant I coasted through an entire semester of algebra class absorbing absolutely nothing and I got a failing grade. Friends (new ones) dared me to skip one class with them for fun, and I figured “Well I’m doing bad in algebra anyway, so yeah, I’ll skip with you and go to the bowling alley.”

And that started the snowball. I became unmoored from the routine of school, which can be a big problem when you have ADHD. Skipping algebra every now and then became always skipping algebra. Then I started skipping gym too, because getting undressed in front of the other kids in the locker room was an introvert nightmare. Skipping two classes turned in to skipping three. Then four. Then all classes. Who cares, right? I couldn’t muster up the interest, especially when I realized I had no idea what the current lesson plan was anymore.

My girlfriend dumped me. The school waited until the start of my senior year to pull me aside and inform me that it was impossible for me to graduate under any circumstances (the first and only sign of disapproval they had shown me in three and a half years). My internet friends were yelling at me. I lost touch with my real-life friends. I had massive, gigantic, reality-ending panic attacks that left me too paralyzed to leave my room even to go to the bathroom. I teetered on the edge of having a nervous breakdown. I lost over 100lbs, leaving me nothing more than skin and bones. The mountain of stress I was feeling was taking a toll on my health.

I shut down. Closed myself off to the outside world. Ryan did not exist anymore. And for something like a decade, that’s how I lived. My only human contact was with immediate family (when they could drag me out in to the sunlight against my will) and with a core group of shrinking internet friends. The few that did not lose respect for me, anyway.

That does things to you. The parts of your brain that knew how to socialize atrophy and you forget how to hold a conversation. When I was still going to school, my cousin and I told each other we should become therapists, because we were excellent at listening to people and being mediators. We could fix anyone’s problems. Now, those skills died inside of me. I went from being able to make anyone feel better to constantly sticking my foot in my mouth. Being a nuisance, even when I wasn’t trying to be. I lost all sense of what was appropriate to say, or how to convey my feelings. Or convey anything outside of a keyboard, really. I made a lot of people angry and upset totally by accident, or pushed them away without realizing what I was even doing.

And all of these bad habits fed in to each other like an endless loop. It was a slippery slope that steeply went down, and down, and down. The more isolated I became, the more I wanted to isolate even more. The shame and embarrassment for who I was becoming kept getting stronger. I was caught in a spiral.

I was getting close enough that I could see where the bottom of the barrel was. I call myself introverted, but I’m also the guy who, completely of his own volition, downloaded the Shoutcast Server software in September of 2000 and hosted an all-night live internet radio broadcast. Alone. I was livestreaming myself playing video games for the internet four years before Twitch.tv was even invented. Whenever it came time to read aloud in class, I was always one of the best, clearest students, never needing to sound out words or pause for anything. Nowadays I'd never say I was anything but an introvert, but deep down there’s also been a voice inside of me dying to get out, and at some point I woke up and realized I could be better. I just need less fear and more confidence.

The person you see writing this blog today is the result of finally starting to become aware of what I was doing to myself, and forcibly dragging myself back out in to the world, inch by inch. I don’t think it’s going very well, but at least I’m still making an effort. I fell apart in to many small pieces, and they’re taking a long time to reassemble. I finally graduated high school about five years ago. (I re-read that post a few months ago and started crying.) As you may pick up on from the differences between that post and this one, I’m still learning a lot about myself and what’s wrong with me. The picture is always becoming clearer by the day.

But knowing the problem means you can find the solution, right? That’s what you’re doing, too.  It’s a slow process, but I continue the fight to heal the damage I’ve done to myself.

Anyway, sorry for getting so randomly heavy and spilling my guts out like this. I appreciate people looking out for me like this. And who knows, maybe I am on the spectrum after all. Just because I have my own theories doesn't mean they're necessarily right.