#and hypervigilance

[qoldenskies]

cc!leo is so weird and fun to write because i have to capture the spectrum of him impossibly gentle and caring, goofy and nonchalant to make everyone feel better, and INSANELY invested in the prospect of brutally murdering someone all at the same time and writing ch23 really illuminates that for me lmao. like the characters just kind of take me places that i dont expect and apparently the answer to "what happens when you strip leo of all his layers of facade and make him forced to hurt the most important person in his life through horrifying mind control?" in this extremely specific instance was uhhhh. Bloodthirsty! apparently

he's so funny to me like bro can you CHILL

[theremina]

[lucidloving]

Brianna Albers, "The Audre Lorde Questionnaire to Oneself" // Anne Carson, Glass and God // Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood // @iasoup-deactivated20190921 // @puppy__problems on Instagram // p.d., "Rest Achilles, the world will wait" // Lyra Wren // @pencap // Latin phrase translations // Emily Berry, Dear Boy

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

anyone else have multiple traumatic memories associated specifically with holidays/family vacations? because that is a topic I never see discussed in all the So You Had A Shitty Childhood, Now What? self-help books i've been reading. but for me, it was a significant thing. and the more i think about it the more it seems like this would be an (unfortunately) common experience. would be grateful to hear if this matches other peoples' experiences...

[comicaurora]

I forget: do you read the comments section semi-regularly, or approve new commenters but otherwise avoid reading them? Relatedly, if a troll creeps in and starts trying to harsh everyone's mellow, is that a thing you'd want to be told about, or nah?

I don't micromanage, I approve new commenters and from then on new comments from previously approved users get auto-approved. I don't usually moderate comments for tone, I just block obvious spambots and occasionally accidental duplicate comments from people confused about the approval delay.

Basically, if someone's just being negative, that's not my business to block or censor, but if I missed a spambot you can let me know.

[willthespy]

my posts have been too positive lately so have this solangelo doodle where i depicted two different sides of ptsd/trauma bc i hate joy!! yay!

literally two sides of the same coin

[valtsv]

New road sign just dropped (courtesy of my unconscious mind)

this is a road sign that i would extend my commute to drive by

[vor-leser]

theyre so funny to me <3

[cassafrasscr]

Seeing people be like, "Why is Orym sleeping with his swords on his back?"

And I'm just like, "literally the night before he had to get up in an instant to go rescue Fearne, and you're surprised he sleeps with his weapons on him?"

(Also, he’s canonically a side sleeper. He always sleeps curled up, so unless he curls up like a dead cockroach, he's not lying on top of the sheaths on his back. 😂)

[furiousgoldfish]

Parents will go 'I did the best I could', 'I'm not perfect', 'You can't blame me, I've been through worse', 'I didn't mean it that way', 'You're too sensitive', 'I did it out of love' and 'Sometimes people make mistakes', and pretend like they're too dumb to understand that they hurt you, like they just didn't realize you were in extreme amounts of pain, neglected, feeling despised, condemned, irredeemable and suicidal, but for you there was never a moment of your life when you were allowed to 'simply not realize what you were doing.'

You have been punished every single time your intentions were right and you didn't notice you were annoying someone or testing someone's patience. You were held responsible not only for what you did but for how it affected everyone else, until you learned to be hyper vigilant of the effect of your every action, to the point where you'd get paralyzed because any action could end up in someone taking offense. You were never allowed to be dumb about your actions, you were not even allowed to learn! Even just not knowing everyone's reactions in advance could get you hurt.

You learned that they are allowed to be dumb, ignorant, walk over everyone else's feelings, demand attention, demand sympathy, consideration, leeway, compassion, understanding, and space to learn (even when they outright refused to learn), but you were not allowed any of these things. Even as they were the adults, they could play dumb and cause havoc, while you, a child, were responsible for being, in every situation, absolutely perfect, or condemned to hell for imperfection.

Why was this necessary? Why is the world still fighting for everyone to take it easy on the parents, but condemn the children? Do we need children to emotionally and psychologically serve their parent's needs, to the point where they grow up neglected and traumatized? Do parents have children in order to have easily broken and controlled servants? Someone they could burden with all of their emotional baggage and then demand compassion and love from? While neglecting that same child, and pretending the child doesn't need any attention or help growing up? Punishing them for showing pain?

We don't need that kind of world, and we don't need that kind of parents.

[nothingbutnowhere]

If you're in a relationship with Simon "Ghost" Riley- in any universe- the second there's a fire alarm that man is picking you (and any applicable mobility/medical aids) up and carrying you out the nearest exit. 5 flights of stairs? No problem. Too heavy? Think again. He's a wall of muscle and stealth.

He's got you, love.

...

I do NOT consent for my works, part of my works, or my ideas to be used for ANY form of AI.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

I've been getting a lot of weird chest pains lately and they're the kind of pains that you're PRETTY SURE are just random non-heart muscles but it's impossible to ever be CERTAIN.

[spiralsublime]

imelda was from the get go supposed to be the femme fatale but that makes her quick marriage to lance even more important to me

the femme fatale is often characterized as a someone that draws the detective into a mess of shit that usually gives “self destructive”, and originally this is set up to be hunch as her connecting detective but LANCE MAKES SO MUCH MORE SENSE

hunch has his own arc, the detective taking himself more seriously, a detective who makes himself known and finally gets proper recognition. meeting imelda didn’t ruin his life, nor does he revolve around her storywise.

so imelda hits all other femme fatale beats and doesnt Need a male counterpart but we also get TROPES!! she, a wanted woman who is known to the police as a mad-woman who turned from an honest life to crime, meets a police captain (basically stand in chief of police currently) and immediately smooth talks circles around him. lance questions his boss, his job, and his life to chase after this sudden Excitement that he hadn’t allowed himself. literally, brennan says that lance has never felt so Alive.

imelda, the true version of femme fatale, finds her cynical and disillusioned “right side of the law” man, lance, and immediately they run together. then we learn that lance’s concerns is the reason that copper is so easily found in mentopolis doubling down on the “morally ambiguous” trope. she doesnt look at lance and go, actually dont be so wary of everyone, she (because she is impulse and because of how aware she is of the situation they are in) connects to him on his need to just Act.

imelda pulse is such a good femme fatale character and her moment with lance has lived in my head all this week. i cant wait to see how fast this marriage falls out once elias is no longer in that all or nothing space, though trauma, maybe they will stick together for a little longer than any of us are ready for.

[phoenix-positivity]

I think the difficult thing with trauma responses and fears is that when people try to comfort you by saying your fears wont happen is that: well actually, they did happen? Why would they not happen again? I have no reason to believe they wont. I want to prepare myself for when they happen again. And the advice of 'Don't assume people are out to get you and hurt you' is so hard to believe because you've experienced that actually, people were out there to hurt you. It's so hard to regain trust in people once it's been broken.

[bread-wizards]

I think that Orym actually does doubt Imogen, but this isn't a thing that is unique to Imogen. Orym doubts all of them to an extent, because paranoia is something he struggles with (and this is continuously reinforced by the story).

It's not a 'good' thing that he should never get over, nor is it an immoral character flaw that proves he actually hates Imogen. However it's also not something I think he can get over as long as the threat of having to possibly fight his friends exists.

"I have all the faith in the world in you guys, all of you. And I have also spent time thinking how to neutralize each of you."

[incisorconfiture]

kabru runs hot and thats why he sleeps in nothing but his underwear with the sheet mostly strewn off his body (even though the tavern basement is always cold according to others) and thus if izutsumi ever had a chance to snuggle up to him and rank what sleeping next to him is like, he’d get 5 stars for warmth, 4 stars for size feel, and 1 star for comfort, with a remark that he tosses and turns so much she felt like she was being pummeled by ocean waves. i also think he’s so hypervigilant he jolts awake constantly from footsteps on the stairwell or the creak of wooden furniture. and he wakes up to jot things down in a notebook or on his investigation board constantly. and he sleeps with a dagger under his pillow just like he keeps a knife in the heel of his boot