#am i talkative in person? FUCK no. im a recluse. but i have to reflect now to see in what ways i could be talkative

[lokilysolbitch]

accidentally proved my own point by reaching the tag limit so i'm finishing what i was saying here✋😭just uhhh pretend this is a really long tag up here

my POINT basically is spirituality and religion if used well will lead you to self reflect. and ideally be kind. it's spirituality. you can't see that shit, you can't prove a lot of it scientifically, everyone is gonna see the same thing differently, etc. it's floaty and fluid like gender. you cannot sit down and study it in a nice neat scientific way to prove if it's real or not and you cannot force it into boxes and say it's wrong when it stops fitting in the box it was never going to fit in. you can't reliably test if astrology or Loki or tarot or psychics are real or not. but that doesn't fucking matter anyway/nm

what matters is did it make you feel better? did it make you learn? did it make you change? did it make you kind? (and these questions are applicable to gender as well, and most things ever) that's testable

me personally my autistic brain eats this shit up like candy and looking at my chart has taught me how to better work with myself and my habits AND has given me an understanding of people who think differently than me. so i will keep doing it

if it makes you judge people for being born in the wrong month or judge people in general uhhh then maybe quit that idk✋‼️

by god i love yappin

Astrology doesn't seem to work.

[aquagenesis]

legally im required to make a readmore text post every day on the internet   under the guise of socialization so today i will be vague posting an entire online community and mindset that does not belong to anyone i am in the immediate vicinity of.  yeah buddy.

so anyway as i was saying the subject of today’s stream of consciousness procrastination from playing the hit 2020 classic animal crossing: new horizons is People Who Want Mental Illness Representation In Media.

i am entirely making this post about characters with PTSD.  because i have PTSD and i am allowed to criticize every single man who has a war flashback upon rushing into a situation he is highly unqualified to deal with for the sake of saving everyone else.  because i do that shit fucking constantly and, just like in media, It Does Not Fucking Help Actually.  because then i am dying regardless of what fucking happens next.

So Anyway.  i cannot stand when characters have PTSD because it is always over the most shoehorned gratuitous torture theyre shoved into and then the narrative just like flips?  on them?  and then suddenly theyre cagey and reclusive and nasty and lash out.  but instead of garnering some form of intermission for these characters to like, fucking relax or get away from their issues, every time they try to make that distance for themselves it is Always Treated like a betrayal.

PTSD is like, what everyone gives their characters, and i think that fucking sucks.  obviously if you have it you’re exempt because you have it, and so what you’re writing would be from your own personal experience.

but when i have to watch a handful of characters in every show have Vaguely PTSD but it’s never expressed, it’s never handled, it’s always tossed off to the side as a fault on their point.  like writers will literally make a character’s entire personality “PTSD” and then wonder why they can’t fucking do anything with them to make them feel real.  then they’re always shoehorned into some deus ex machina healing montage where it’s just like “you need to live for ____ now” and then it’s just like oh okay cool for sure like yeah.

the thing is there’s absolutely no fucking reason to give a character PTSD unless you have a clear end for them to have their own personal character arc to get over it.  you can’t shove them in with someone else four different times and make it a consistent fucking problem and then wonder why it is so hard and so difficult to get across what you are trying to do.

the thing is you need to know what they were like before that.  the problem is that nobody fucking cares about PTSD actually or representation of people with PTSD except fucking War Movies, Actually now that i think about it.

i feel like i’m super bothered by this but it’s just actually kind of insulting.  like it is.  like when i see a character experiencing trauma and i just Know now i’m going to have to watch them go through that pain for the rest of the time they’re forced to be around.  like when a character is Fine but kind of irritating and then it’s like Ohhhhh Of course theyre traumatized whywouldnttheybeofcourseyoucantjustbeirritatinghuuuuuuuhhhhh.

when people “make characters with ptsd“ theyre like, not even making the characters.  theyre making whatever world around them, theyre making whatever plot point around them, theyre making whatever villain around them.  theres absolutely negligible amounts of time spent on the character themselves.

i feel like the only good example of “someone with explicit PTSD” is garnet/dagger from ffix.  like truly.  outside of war movies and shit.  she was explicitly traumatized from multiple fronts, explicitly left the group to pursue her own quest after the trauma, and eventually healed from it though she had in-game mechanics that reflected her PTSD.  you would not say she was not traumatized.  but she was not some caricature snapping at everyone and ripping everything to shreds around her.

that’s the fucking problem, man.  of course you can make someone nasty because they’re traumatized.  and then of course because they were just explicitly traumatized you can’t even “fault them” but that doesn’t make sense.

“PTSD” has turned into code for “they experienced some bad stuff so now they like need to heal” and it’s like yeah of course that’s fundamentally true but it’s just not all like that.  “PTSD” has turned into shorthand for “character who will be an emotional sewer line until we figure out what to do with them”.  “character who will be really cute or really mean but likeable because they’re nasty and people are fundamentally attracted towards villains when they are sympathetic”.

it does nobody any good to make villains with PTSD and yeah i mean the villains you’re gonna reform.  you can’t just canonically excuse away everything they did with “they’re traumatized” and then flip the narrative to be like “alright well we did just say you were right but damn dude :/ youre wrong now”.  can you make minor antagonists with PTSD?  sure.  villains?  nah.

because really it comes down to intent.  if you can justify someone’s actions with the deus ex machina of “it’s the trauma” suddenly everything holding them up disintegrates as soon as they gain any form of autonomy.  they have no personality because you as a writer shoehorned a husk into a body and abused that body to death.  they are PTSD.  that is their personality.  you cannot do anything with them.

im gonna touch on kinning here just because while i know it’s not integral to what i’m talking about, it does kind of illustrate the point in a direct access point.  if you kin catra you kin her because you were manipulated by someone who did not care about you and now you act out.  if you hate catra it’s because you don’t think people who were manipulated by someone and are now acting out have warrant to act that way, but it’s usually in the direct reverse to kinning where you “used to act like her but no longer do”.  sub catra for whoever she’s just the most “canonically traumatized” character who was handled...like a main character, i guess.  and had an arc where she got very bad and then had to face the consequences which No, She Really Didn’t, but i digress.  if you kin catra you’re keeping yourself in that to “prove you are her” even if it’s subconsciously; we all act like our favorite characters in the hopes someone IRL will attribute you to them.  if you kin idk how you think it doesn’t make you worse.

characters with explicit PTSD are allowed to be sympathetic from the moment they are traumatized.  they are!  it’s a good thing for the audience to like them.  but they need to be more than just trauma.  i am more than just trauma.  even when i was very really bad, there was more to me than just my trauma.  characters with explicit PTSD are NEVER treated like they are anything else.  because it’s not about them.  the narrative isn’t about them.  it’s about whatever did that to them.

when you force a character’s entire being on a screen to be a direct result of whatever greater evil did that to them, i don’t know how else to say that that is not in fact a character.  that is a plot point.  there is a difference.

plot points are expendable and come to a close.  characters do not.  when you showcase PTSD as a plot point and rob them of anything that makes them a character, you are displaying PTSD as a plot point.  PTSD is ugly.  PTSD is horrific.  PTSD ruins lives.  don’t attribute that to someone who’s, like, a lost cause because you as a writer don’t know what to do with them?  that’s bad writing.

and that’s the problem with relying on mental illness and oh my GOD PTSD to show how bad something affected somebody.  unless you’re going to give them the time and energy to flesh them out after you introduce them by wrecking their shit, don’t make them a character.  make it a plot point.  show it in some other way that isn’t pain that can tell you about it.

stop making shitty characters with PTSD.  it makes me look bad and yeah that IS what this whole post is about.