#and thats all to neglect the fact that not all my characters get treated poorly

[pigeons-with-jello]

I honestly hate the 'm well im a writer so obviously i torture all ym characters' or something to that extent because like. no. I 'torture' my characters by giving them moments to navigate to change shitty character traits they have. Any competent narrative driven work ive ever so much as gotten a vague outline for has had reasoning for any bad thing that happened. Maybe i write a one off pure whump thing, but even then its usually just a section of a bigger thing that ill clean up later. Im not senselessly throwing some character itno the worst thing ever and im sick of hearing stupid hyperbolic jokes about it.

[lintwriting]

can we retire that trope where characters are like “I WAS NOT ABUSED” and then make a huge deal of the moment where they admit “… I was abused.”

I feel like the only time I’ve enjoyed it was by simkjrs, where a plot point was that other characters DIDNT believe that he was abused, and they had a whole petty drama about it. He had to put his foot down and air his traumas out for them to believe him. That’s so real. That happens on this damn website every day to survivors of sexual assault.

As for the rest of the fics I’ve read, it makes my skin crawl. Something about how all the other characters are just SO PROUD of the abused character for admitting it. They’re sooo supportive and the abused character just has an irrational hatred towards the word until eventually they accept that that’s what happened to them.

I don’t know why this makes me so uncomfortable. This happens in real life all the time.

Maybe it’s because it doesn’t match my experience at all. I didn’t have the words for what was happening to me, but I knew it was wrong from the beginning. The only thing I didn’t know was whether society would agree or call me a crybaby sensitive snowflake.

Maybe it’s the way people place such emphasis on the word itself. Like somehow physically slapping someone is fine but calling it abuse makes it into something bigger.

It doesn’t. It was wrong either way. Like I said, it was wrong even when I didn’t have the words for it. I wouldn’t have been a crybaby sensitive snowflake whether it was called abuse or not.

I guess my real gripe is the way we use the word abuse. Like it’s magical, mystical, special. It confers the right to righteous anger and trauma, where ‘normal’ actions do not.

Reality is that abuse IS normal. It happens all the time. Many times your friend will casually mention an annoying coworker or a past ex, and you’ll realize… “Wow, my friend inadvertently bullied someone and didn’t even realize. Wow, my friend was neglectful or controlling and didn’t even realize.” I KNOW this has happened because many people have abused me that would have never thought of it that way because I was a weirdo, and they weren’t obligated to be nice to a Debbie downer rude weirdo.

Workplace scandals like that happen all the time, like the Asianguystream drama, and fans take his side because they cannot conceptualize abuse as coming from people they like because it is too mystical, too evil for THEIR life. But it’s not. I guess I’d be more interested in an inversion, where someone is like “I WOULD NEVER ABUSE SOMEONE… I already have, haven’t I?”

Another thing is that it represents an increasing pathologizing of our lives.

It can’t just be annoying, it has to be problematic.

It can’t just be that someone treated you poorly, it has to be that they’re a narcissistic abuser using cluster B personality manipulations.

I want to take these people by the shoulders and shake them. It was bad before you created all these words to pathologize them! What you read as narcissistic, I read as simply abuse! Abuse is bad PERIOD whether or not narcissism was involved. Do you even know what that word means?? Because the field of psychology has famously little research about NPD, so I doubt you’re one of the few people qualified to speak on it!

Not everything is about narcissism, narcissism is just the most evil, most mystical boogeyman thing you can think of so you have a “right” to feeling that self righteous anger and trauma. But like I said before, you had a right to those things even before you added that stupid NPD stigmatizing label to it. That’s not even getting into the fact that Psychology labels are NOT REAL the way people frame them, they’re just observed groupings of symptoms.

Calling someone a narcissist is about as helpful as saying they have a transactional worldview and a struggle with criticism, but the latter two don’t sting quite right, now do they?

THATS BECAUSE “NARCISSIST” HAS BEEN STIGMATIZED, WHICH MAKES YOU PART OF THE PROBLEM WHEN YOU USE IT TO FEEL JUSTIFIED ATTACKING SOMEONE.

God I hate the way we talk about abuse online. That’s not even getting into how ghoulish it is that psychology named someone’s psychological disorder after an insult, “shitty bitch disease” why don’t you call it. Though, maybe people are using narcissist the way it was supposed to be used—it’s clear that the disorder was named to help the people around them and not to help the narcissists themselves.

Finally, why do people bring talk of abuse and therapy speak to cultures where that does not exist? God I hate it when fics set in a fantasy ancient world have these moments the most. “I was… abused.”

First of all, abuse has this stigmatized connotation in part because it’s become inextricably tied to mental health and psychology. A character outside of that context would not normally struggle to say “I was abused” any more than they would struggle to say “My father burned my face off” unless they knew the implications of abuse, such as that abused people are somehow mystically more hurt and righteous than other people. “I wouldn’t want to claim that label when I haven’t earned it”

But like, for instance, do you think a factory worker being abused by his boss is going to have this moment of “… I was abused, wasn’t I?” Where everyone is like soooo supportive and walking on eggshells as he finally claims that label?

NO! He’s going to be like “… That blasted Henry Ford never treated me right.” And it would be just as meaningful as him saying he was abused because that’s what abuse means!

It’s not some mystical thing! At most it’s disillusionment with whatever system taught you to accept the poor treatment. But these fics ironically feel invalidating because it acts like the poor treatment is not actually serious unless a character is diagnosed with CPTSD or calls it specifically “abuse” within the fic. Even when CPTSD is a very modern concept and would’ve likely been called/conceptualized as something different back then.

It reminds me of how people sometimes try to act like a show portrayed a villain in a positive light simply because no character explicitly calls their actions abuse, and then rectify that in fic. But AGAIN, poor treatment was poor treatment regardless of if it’s called abuse. These characters were villains for a reason!

Guess I’m just sad because it’s clear these people don’t feel valid without a diagnosis. They’ve had others call them a crybaby and a snowflake, and now they only feel like their pain is valid with the label, to the point where they HAVE to label other characters to feel valid. Like when people call historical figures gay or trans when ancient cultures had a totally alien understanding of sexuality and gender that gets lost with these labels.

[char-lotteral]

what pisses me is that everyone kept their 700 design except her and whyyyyy!!! They've been doing our girl dirty since boruto started and that's one o the reason I dropped it a year ago. Screw them!!! Let me go to bed with snacks and watch The last so I can pretend the post credit scene is the real ending

The way the Boruto writers handle Hinata will be my villain origin story

And Im not only talking about her clothes! Its the way they write her too! I have nothing against her being a housewife but they constantly give her the "trophy wife trope" where whenever shes on screen, shes either cooking, cleaning or with Himawari. What drives me wild is how Naruto (a male character btw) is given all these relevancies (and yes I can understand since he is substantial to the plot) but the fact that a male character consistently progresses throughout the whole plot while his wife is treated as a background character, mainly seen to be cooking or cleaning (stereotypical gender roles me thinks *shocking*) and is incredibly invisible to the plot does not sit right with me.

And not just that but how she is annoyingly neglected in the manga too??? Like we dont even get to see her reaction towards Boruto taking steroids. She obviously knows abt it but why cant they show just one scene??? Or idk her fight scenes too???? And why can't they show her scenes where she trains her kids??? I WILL COMBUST RN LIKE WTF---

"She's just a side character, she's not important"

Let me remind you of Kushina. Kushina *a character with limited screentime, and not that many dialogues* had such an impact on Naruto, that she was his main reason for character devlopment. They handled her so well, why tf can't they do that with Hinata??&!&#??

At this point, I'd rather see her dead than continue to be treated so poorly. Kill her off for the MC's development already. God knows thats the only way yall know how to write shounen mothers