#anyway typing out my experiences like this makes it more real cause The Dissociation Is Real Y'all

[brinnanza]

tw frank discussion of anxiety, anxiety meds, references to spicy content, drugs (I used the community tag but like this isn't addiction related my body is just a k'nex bridge built by a sleep deprived toddler)

so klonopin might be magic???? I am on day four? I think? And I went from constant unending nightmare anxiety from a laundry list of stressors to basically. none. like I took the first one thursday and then went to go dig in the woods (rockhounding) which I would have done anyway but usually I'm fairly wracked with anxiety about bugs and dirt and creatures and nah man I just had my finger raw doggin in the dirt without a concern y'all I had sex in the woods and did not think oNCE about whether a spider was gonna get on me, something that I am concerned about Constantly in the woods unless I specifically tune it out. it was incredible. I have been SO fucking anxious for WEEKS I have been smoking weed like a MANIAC I went through a 1g d8 pen cart in like a week but man three days of klonopin and I was smoking for fun again not just in desperate anxiety escape in fact it was SO effective at removing all of my anxiety that I cut back to half a dose this morning cause some of my anxiety IS practical because I'm autistic so like I'm trying not to act a fool in public or be carelessly rude to people I care about. also I'm a little bit concerned about the long term effects and I really do not want to build up a tolerance. I mean I was only prescribed .5 mg which I split into .25mg this morning and most substances work on me in tiny amounts because I am Sensitive To Things (except for fucking molly apparently but that's because of my prozac) so I wouldn't anticipate too much of a problem, but yknow Still.

[plural-culture-is]

hello, i saw that you take asks asking for advice? sorry this is gonna be kind of long-

so at some point (i have no idea when, i've always had a really bad sense of time lol. i think it was maybe almost exactly last year? idk lol) i started talking with a voice in my head (which i passed off as an imaginary friend), but over time they kind of. multiplied. and then i kinda went 'ah shittake mushrooms am i plural??'

initially i kinda went 'oh whatever' and didn't end up interacting much with (what i believe to be) my system for a while. if it's relevant, i ended up getting a concussion at the end of july and before that i was not having a funky fresh time in school so i kind of shoved plurality onto the back burner

then in december, my director made a passing joke about the possibility of me being plural during a rehearsal, and someone in the system (who doesn't wish to be named) said something to the effect of 'he doesn't know there's (i forget the number) of us' and i ended up spending the weekend obssessively researching plurality.

anyway- i've been treating it as if i was system for the past little while bc i'd rather be wrong than y'know. accidentally ignore real people that happen to share my brain. (when i don't accidentally think to myself that i'm probably not plural while talking to them-). and i guess i kinda want an external opinion?

-i do experience a lot of dissociation, and often don't feel like i'm me or that these hands are not mine, or that i'm not controlling myself and it's just some autopilot being on. this has been happening for as long as i remember. i also seem to have two handwritings, and have communicated with members of the system via journalling

-i did use to do competitive sports from a young age, which i hear can potentially cause undue stress/trauma to a child, so that could also be something?

-some of them (members of the system, we haven't decided on a term bc communication is spotty) do fit classic roles of a system. most notably is there's one that continually keeps me from doing things that could harm myself and helps 'protect' me from intrusive thoughts

-when i discovered apparently people remember shit and the brain doesn't just dump it like an hour later, that surprised me. i'm still in my teens, but i genuinely do not remember much about... anything tbh. the term 'gray out' honestly explained a lot for me

-i have aphantasia, but the system insists there's a headspace. some of them make fun of me for 'being blind in headspace', but i think they're also helping?? me with the aphantasia, since recently i've been able to see shadowy outlines of stuff they 'airdrop' to me. this includes waking me up by bombarding me with the word 'boo' zooming at my face when i was half asleep.

-sometimes i can feel them like, hugging me or comforting me

-i also do feel some sort of presence in there, and can sometimes pinpoint where certain members are. i also seem to be unable to access the 'back half' which is apparently intentional so.

i mean there's probably more but my memory is not great lol. typing this out does make me feel a bit more like this is real and i'm not misinterpreting things (i do have a very active imagination, hence why i initially went 'ah late imaginary friend having'). but i'd still like an external opinion, so thanks for taking the time to read this half rant that is way longer than it should be haha

yes, i do think you're plural. i have nothing else to say lol, all of that sounds very plural and it seems like you already know that anyway

[bakedbananners]

Ok hold on I’m making this a readmore bc it got long as Fuck anyways wayyy more under the cut

@serizawadyke @haemocyaninz (tagging da mutualz yay)

OKAY SO LIKE.

The reason I think it’s more OSDD-1 (going further, more like what ppl in the community sometimes call OSDD-1a) than outright DID is that “Mob” and “Shigeo”/??? aren’t really distinct as far as alters would go. They both call themself the same name, plus they (mostly) have the same childhood memories. While they’re both dissociated self-states, what mainly differs between them is how they feel about and act towards the people in their life. Also, it’s implied that before speaking to each other in their headspace in the final arc, they’ve never seen or spoken to each other before then. They both more or less take the same shape, and fight over who is considered the “real” Shigeo, rather than being two separate identities with different self-concepts. There is the detached “Mob” self and the emotional “Shigeo” self, in a way.

If anything, Mob acts as the Apparently Normal Part/Host/“Shell” between the two. He’s emotionally detached most of the time, he’s the more functional part and interacts with the world. He explicitly tries to hide his emotional self from other people bc he considers it to be dangerous and bad. ??? states that “Mob” is the “fake” between the two, he’s the one who is trying to exert a new “self” and deviate from his original purpose of being the unfeeling, dissociated mask.

“Shigeo”/??? is an Emotional Part in the most obvious sense. He feels things intensely, he’s intrinsically linked to the source of their ESP because of it. In a way he qualifies as a protector, because he only fully comes out when their life is in danger. BUT he also seems to get triggered by Ritsu getting hurt. I hate that the anime excludes a lot of his conversation with Mob bc anime-onlys miss out on some key context that while ??? Is capable of extreme brutality, he really does care about Mob too. He could also be considered the “core”, as he considers himself the original (and personally uses his given name “Shigeo” rather than his nickname) while Mob is the shell.

I think this is most apparent in their relation to Tsubomi. The entire time, it’s shown as if Mob himself feels romantic attraction towards her, but when prompted he can’t think of why he feels that way. And then it’s revealed that Shigeo is the one who holds the emotional memories as to why. They have amnesia barriers that work both ways. ??? is outright hostile to both Teru and Reigen, because his experiences with them are vastly different to the way Mob’s relationships developed regarding them. Mob feels infatuated with Tsubomi without understanding the reason why.

It would be easy to say The Ritsu Incident caused them to fracture. However my personal working theory is that kid Shigeo began dividing himself between “Mob” and ??? around the time he started getting picked on and teased in primary school before that. While it’s shown early in the manga, Mob actually brings it up in one of the most recent omakes that looking back he considers it to have been a type of bullying to a degree. I do think that the trauma of the incident caused mob and ??? to dissociate more from each other because of it. And after that Mob always interpreted ??? as his “power” not as, like, another “person” the way he might’ve with full DID. While ??? always considered Mob to be the “fake” that’s always taking control of their life and shutting him out.

Being a natural-born psychic, being highly imaginative and in his own little world with few friends, having a flexible young kid brain, experiencing the trauma of almost killing your brother and some other people count as contributing factors imo. Mob is already pretty heavily coded as autistic, or at the very least lacking important social skills and being a bit delayed. He’s also pretty sensitive. I think it’s also good to acknowledge the other canon espers and compare. Serizawa is very similar to Mob, he struggles with being around others and having extreme anxiety that makes him lose control of powers- but he doesn’t differentiate his ESP from himself. Touichirou relies on his power so much, stockpiling it to the extent that he becomes a being entirely made of energy, almost wearing his vessel like a suit- but there’s no differentiate between the “vessel” and the “soul”. There’s also Mogami, who purposefully turned himself from a psychic human into a spiritual being after death- but again there’s not separation between his human self or spirit self. The point is while they all struggle with “power”, Mob is the only one of them who has dissociated from that “power” to the point it’s a different self-state. Nonetheless, they are both Shigeo, just different part of the same whole.

Then there’s his emotional explosions. I definitely don’t think these are like full clear switches between alters, but imo I think they resemble blending between otherwise normally dissociated parts. Mob doesn’t experience amnesia or really act like an entirely different person with completely different self-concept during these. It resembles OSDD-1 to me because he has an “angry self”, a “sad self”, a “brave self”, etc rather than these self-states being their own alters. It’s more like “Mob” is a shell through which ??? blends through. It happens through like the entirety of his fight with Touichirou- and he even points out just how emotionally unstable Mob is. (One of my fave parts is 100% Ecstasy. You can see that Shigeo clearly enjoys being able to use his ESP to its fullest extent with someone who can actually take it.)

The end of the manga and the resolution to Mob’s arc is also important to analyze. It is not resolved by ??? or Mob disappearing, but rather by them both co-existing. Ritsu says that the two of them can’t be separated and that he must accept them together. By the epilogue it seems like they do, mainly by showing Shigeo to be more outwardly expressive and active. This could be interpreted as an integration between the parts to a certain extent, where their system is at least more cooperative and connected than before and has less barriers between the two. at the very least! Neither “Mob” nor “Shigeo” disappear per se, but it’s more like blending into a more cohesive self I guess.

anywaysss plural Shigeo is canon. To Me!!!

can I talk about mob being an osdd system

[littleoddwriter]

Hope | Roman Sionis x Male!Reader

Guess what - It’s another vent fic! I promise to keep going with the requests I still have open, very soon. Be patient some more, please. Inspiration comes and goes pretty quickly at the moment. Anyway-

summary; You are being rejected by another potential therapist you contacted and you’re not dealing well with it, but  Roman’s here for you to make you feel better.

Notes: TW // RSD (Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria); Self-Harm (cutting); Bad experiences with therapists mentioned; (mild) Dissociation; Implied Suicidal Tendencies; Hospital Mention. Emotional Hurt/Comfort; Hope; Hugs; Love Confessions; Soft Kisses; Roman is trying his best.

For over a year, you’ve been searching for a new therapist to go to. Unfortunately, you kept being rejected left and right and were therefore forced to fight everything on your own for the time being. You couldn’t go back to your previous therapist for several reason, the biggest one being that she wasn’t good for you. She’s put you down a lot, mocked you, laughed at you, never helped you with anything you’ve told her, and you’ve finally reached the point, where you’ve officially had enough, taking all your courage to stop seeing her.

Yet, you hadn’t expected to not find one willing therapist to take on your case. It was extremely frustrating and hurtful. It made you lose hope of ever receiving the help you needed, and deserved. You didn’t want to live from hospital to hospital. The last time you’ve been there, it didn’t really help you anyway. So you wanted to keep away from them for now. You just wanted to have a chance on living your life, while you were being treated for your issues.

A while ago, you’ve received another therapist’s data from your social worker. It took you a long time to fight your anxiety over the pending phone call. Eventually, time was a little pressing, since you wanted to have some results to show to your social worker at your next appointment with her.

So you forced yourself to call in the morning before you did anything else and could potentially put it off any longer.

Trembling, sweating, and with a pounding heart, you picked up your mobile phone and dialled the number, checking it five times to make sure it was the right one, and after a minute of encouraging yourself verbally, you hit the green button to make the call go through.

It didn’t even ring, after the dial, it clicked and the therapist’s voice rang through your ears. She sounded as if she had just gotten up, which surprised you and made your anxiety spike even more. You greeted her and stated that you were looking for a therapist, hoping that your smile was audible and that you seemed friendly.

“How’d you get this number?”

You faltered.

“M-my social worker gave it to me. She said I should give you a call?”

“Ah. Well, the earliest that I’d have time for a first session would be in a month at the earliest.”

“That’s okay,” you replied quickly, lightly. It wouldn’t have been a problem to wait another month after all this time.

“Do you have any diagnoses? What are your issues?”

Quickly you listed off your diagnoses, making sure there were no surprises this time. You had even written it all down, just in case your anxiety would have gotten the better of you.

“I can’t help you with that.”

It was the same as always. You had expected that, especially since she wasn’t the type of therapist you were recommended by others. Your social worker had insisted on trying different approaches, though. Which is exactly what you’ve told this therapist, but she wouldn’t even consider it, only repeating that she wasn’t the right one for you because she didn’t even cover all the disorders you had. After that you already said your quick goodbyes.

You carelessly let your phone fall onto the table, trying hard to hold back tears. The rejection just wasn’t something you could handle very well; it ate you up, ripped your heart apart and fogged up your brain.

Shaking your head to clear it a little, you got up and went straight to the guest bathroom. Roman was showering in your shared one at this moment, and you were glad about it, even though you had to be quick anyway.

On autopilot, you opened one of the drawers under the sink and got out the small blade you kept there, hidden and kept safe in a paper towel. You disinfected it, just in case, and then looked at it for a moment. Now was the time that you could still put it back and stop yourself from ruining your recent best streak. Before you had even realised it, though, you watched yourself press the blade into your forearm’s skin, drawing a short line. Blood quickly welled up from the new wound.

It wasn’t enough. You were almost there, but it wasn’t enough. Only an inch below the spot you’ve just cut, you nicked your skin once more, creating a smaller, but just as deep, incision. Sighing, you put the blade back where it was, nursed your wounds and got out of the bathroom.

The twin band-aids glared at you. You could see them out of the corner of your eyes at any given moment, which made your insides fill up with guilt all too quickly, choking you from within.

Trying to ignore the evidence of the mistake you’ve just made, you sat back down at the table and looked through your phone, while you were anxiously waiting for Roman to be done with his morning routine.

Eventually, Roman walked over to you, putting his hands on your shoulders and kissing the top of your head. “How did it go?”

You just scoffed, “Same as always. Already got rejected on the phone.” Roman stayed put behind you, so you pressed your arm against your stomach, hoping he hasn’t already seen the band-aids.

“Fuck! I told you I can pay them a visit for you, I’m sure someone would take you then,” Roman offered for the umpteenth time in the past year.

“No, I wouldn’t feel comfortable with that. Thank you, though. It’s sweet of you.”

Clicking his tongue and then humming thoughtfully, Roman ran his hands down your arms, prying your injured one from your body. You didn’t really put up a fight then. It was a lost cause anyway.

“Aw, baby, no. That cunt wasn’t worth it,” he cooed, leaning over you and lifting your arm to take a closer look at the plasters.

“I’m sorry,” you mumbled, feeling your heart clench painfully.

“It’s not your fault. Still, I’d have liked for you to wait for me, or come to me. You’d have been very welcome in the shower, you know?” He gave a quick kiss to the band-aids and let your arm down gently.

You chuckled softly and nodded, “I know, I’m sorry. It all just sort of happened, as if I was completely on autopilot.”

“I get it,” Roman sighed. “Stand up.”

Without questioning it for even a second, you got up from the chair, while Roman took a step back to make room for you. As soon as you stood there and turned around to look at him, he was on you, embracing you. You melted into the hug immediately, burying your face in the crook of his neck, inhaling the sweet, pleasant scent that was his cologne.

“We’ll find someone for you. Eventually, someone’s just got to take you in, baby. I promise. Just hold on for me until then, ‘kay?” he spoke softly into your ear, which made you shiver slightly and had you hug him more tightly.

“I’m trying as best as I can, Roman. I swear, at this time, I’m only staying for you anyway.”

Instead of giving you a verbal answer to your confession, Roman leaned back a little, effectively making you look at him; and then he kissed you, oh, so softly. Those kinds of kisses were rare to be initiated by him, which only made you treasure them more. You smiled into the kiss and reciprocated it, sighing.

All of a sudden you felt so light and carefree, as if none of the other things had ever happened. You never wanted it to stop, it was just too heavenly, and you couldn’t bear the thought of returning to the hell on earth that your current situation felt like.

Yet, you had to admit that maybe it wasn’t just all hellish.

Roman cared about you and made you feel it. He comforted you when you needed it and didn’t shame you for the things you did. He really was your anchor in this world, the only thing – person – keeping you somewhat afloat and fighting every day. He made it worth the pain. In a way, he was the hope you so desperately clung onto.

It was one of the many reasons why you loved him so much, why you would never dare to leave him, even when your brain was screaming at you to do so for whatever new reason it had come up with that wasn’t real.

“I love you, Roman. Thank you,” you whispered when you two finally broke the kiss.

His eyes turned so gentle and soft for a split second, and he lifted one of his hands from your back, cupping your face with it, and stroking his thumb over your cheek. “I’ve got you, my prince,” he replied.

It made your heart flutter. You knew it was his way of saying ‘I love you’ back to you. You appreciated it more than you could ever truly put into words.

[why-this-kolaveri-machi]

the wolf should’ve been afraid of me.

Titans 3.04

just under the wire! ... i hope.

like with the previous review, i’m typing this up as i see the episode. here we go!

spoilers ahead.

1. ... well. that was an interesting cold open.

1.25. i don’t know whether to admire this show’s restraint when it comes to gotham and its excesses, particularly arkham asylum. it’d be easy to go hammer and tongs, like suicide squad (2016) did, or any number of bat media did, at a tropey, colourful~~insanity~~ that can be quite damaging, casting mental illness in strangeness and criminality. it definitely shows gotham as... separate from the rest of the country, its own ecosystem of heroes and villains, a sort of rogue state. 

but that ecosystem is still human, with its heroes needing to clip parts of themselves away just to survive, growing old and needing to be recycled, its villains languishing in the same kinds of systems that fail everybody else who needs to be helped. it’s a quieter, tenser sort of wrongness: not strange enough that you can dissociate, but not close enough that you can completely empathise. gotham is its own creature.

1.5. i know that the reasoning behind this is more doylist than anything, but i’m so glad that joker was killed off with little fanfare right at the start of the season. he is the one man in the batverse that’s transcended its confines as this sort of ethereal boogeyman/eternal edgelord and to justify his presence in the series would mean giving him this tired, overblown importance and too much of a stab at colourful, tropey “madness” in this otherwise-subdued series. i wish all batmedia would follow suit and get rid of this fucker.

1.75. so jason is bucking scarecrow’s control! or reminding him of who exactly holds all the cards right now. circling back to what i talked about in the last review, it’s remarkable just how little time it’s been since jason’s “death” and he’s already got ‘minions’ and elaborately set up plans to track, break and kill the titans. just how long has he been planning this? when did he first look at WE weapons prototypes and think that’s something i can use to blow somebody up? and the most unsettling question: did he plan his own death at the hands of the joker just so that he could break batman?

at this point it’s obvious that the scarecrow at least started jason down this path, but it’s frightening just how far he’s travelled already.

1.8. aaagh, less than one minute in! i’ll shut up. 

2. conner washing his hands at the sink reminds me that he was directly in the line of explosion when hank got blown up and he’s probably got atomised hank-bits all over his skin that he’s desperately trying to wash off.

... you’re welcome.

2.25. conner, don’t you speak to gar fucking logan like that, sir, no!

2.3. if anything it’s the lex part of him that gave him the knowhow to recognise the weapon and build a de-activator for it. 

anyway, for that ‘half-breed’ and ‘talking tiger’ comment?

(i wish, tho, that we actually see conner more interested in the superman part of his legacy, like maybe listening to stories from gar, or even better, dick, so we get a better idea of the pressure he’s feeling to live up to that part of him and not the part that’s lex.)

((i talked about conner’s stages of moral development in his introductory episode last season, but i wonder if the next stage of his self-actualisation would be to further integrate the parts of himself and realise that they are only parts and he, conner, is an entirely different person unto himself that can make decisions on how to use what he has and what he knows. his superman abilities can be used to destroy. his lex knowledge can be used to save.))

3. oh dawn :((

3.25. is this the last we see of dawn and hank? i mean, we know donna is coming back; would it be a stretch to think they’ll try to have a go at resurrecting hank as well?

3.5. “deathstroke didn’t make us into killers.” good, because deathstroke didn’t make jason a killer either. there’s a missing step there you need to be looking for, dick. 

3.75. dick did try to break the cycle, step away from gotham, run from the possibility that he could turn into batman. it didn’t help; he couldn’t fully withdraw from his vigilante persona the same time he loathed it, and batman literally haunted him both asleep and awake. but maybe gotham doesn’t have to turn anybody into anything. maybe gotham has nothing to do with it at all. it’s about taking responsibility, realising some sacrifices are pure bullshit, and building an actual family instead of merely a team.

anyway: hugs!

(oh, also? mr “i hate flying”? i mean, there’s perfectly valid reasons to hate flying that’s not related to childhood trauma, but then again, this guy was literally a ‘flying grayson’ once. also also, remember that he also gets sea-sick. must’ve a lot of fun stories to tell.)

4. ooh that gar/kory confrontation was brief but cool!

listen, i have never seen a psychiatrist with that extravagant an office and SIR I WOULD LIKE TO KNOW HOW--

4.5. kory’s so unused to reaching out for help and it’s breaking my heart that HPG likely is some kind of impostor that’s maybe causing her symptoms in the first place. 

kory and dick have mostly been apart this season but it’s remarkable how their journeys have paralleled each other; kory processes her grief, isolation and existential dread into a determination to take care of this new family she has, no matter what it takes; dick does much the same, forging ahead with plans and solutions until he has no fuel left in him and spirals into a massive breakdown.

4.25. listen titans this really is a TERRIBLE continuity error. we aren’t goldfish; we can clearly remember that two minutes ago it was gar’s upper arm that was burned, not his forearm. COME ON.

“sensory deprivation tank” *SNORT*

anyway, gar is the BEST

4.5. i wonder where these visions of experimentation took place. was it on tamaran, or on earth, after she came to hunt down rachel/trigon and before she lost all her memories? is HPG a part of the scientist group that experimented on her? ... god, i hope not. i mean, i think he is, but it would be cool to have some positive therapist representation in media. 

5. you’d think the van transporting a dangerous supervillain that only batman could catch would be more secure but... i’m also not entirely surprised. 

5.15. i love dick gives ZERO shits about hiding himself or even ensuring scarecrow is adequately contained. just turns away after kidnapping him in BROAD DAYLIGHT and says ‘let’s go’. I LOVE THIS DUMBASS

6. lmao gar is having a really really shitty day SOMEONE GIVE THIS MAN A BREAK or just a goddamn story arc of his own

6.5. i’m really confused about the timeline here. so... sometime ago, kory came down to earth to hunt down trigon, yeah? at some further point down the line she and her sister were kidnapped and experimented on. THEN she somehow escapes but... loses her memory? a few months pass and then we see blackfire alive and well and free; she kills faddei, can impersonate other people, and is clearly seeking out kory. but now she’s still in the experiment facility...? what’s going on?

i’m not entirely surprised about the facility being mostly deserted. either the biggest investors in this project gave up on it and it was left to the most fanatic to carry on, or they were deliberately trying to lure kory and get her to free blackfire--expand the environs of the experiment, so to speak.

7. hopefully barbara is going to get something to do other than listen to various men give her Attitude

8. how do you terrorise a terrorist? well:

i love when dick is a scary-competent motherfucker.

8.25. ooooh, the attack on crane at arkham a ploy to get crane to blackgate? nice one dick, i didn’t even think of that. but why though? to protect crane from the titans? to intercept the van to blackgate and “rescue” him? seems likely--red hood was there, except dick got to crane quicker.

9. still reeeallly unclear about the komand’r situation. was komand’r captured after s2? is this all A TRAP?? if so, why are you stepping into the only thing that can contain you, kory????

9.25. so... definite parallels between dick/jason and kory/kom here. i’m just. i’m still. really confused. i’ll shut up now.

10. this may be my favourite dick look yet:

woodsman!dick in a beanie.

10.5. i unironically love how titans has made this bizarrely-devoted-to-his-moniker, toxin-spewing supervillain into a tamer version of hannibal, psychoanalysing his victims into submission. it’s of a piece with how inward looking titans is, the way all of its villains are obsessed with how our protagonists’ minds work, to the point where they would actually spend time inside of them. 

there are no big plots to end the world. no apocalypses or endgames here. these villains collect the titans’ insecurities like infinity stones. the way the titans defeat them is by achieving character growth--literally winning by the power of love. literally “the real superpower is the friends we made along the way”!

10.7. anyway, i’m betting dick is used to this bullshit from crane and is humouring him in the service of getting more information. the story about the wolf? an implicit threat, not to mention dick getting to control what crane knows about him and what methods he would use to manipulate him.

am i giving dick too much credit here? i don’t think so. he’s really impressed me so far this season.

10.75. like. there’s a real unreliable narrator vibe coming off with every person that talks about bruce (much like how the various members of the titans talked about jason’s motivations) and to buy into crane’s talk about bruce being a psychopath is to fall for the same manipulation that jason fell for. dick is the only person who hasn’t really psychoanalysed bruce this season, and i think some part of his detective brain is piecing things together into a bigger picture.

11. i’m glad kory rescued kom but did she have to kill the scientist?

(i mean, yeah, probably - the less people know that kom escaped the less likely they’re going to have the fucking govt on their doorstep, but still.)

11.5. dick’s gonna come back to wayne manor, stare straight at komand’r and go, well which room would you like? because the team might as well adopt ANOTHER person, yeah?

12. oh MAN that red hood/nightwing fight was AMAZING! and he did the thing! the boomerang escrima thing! i’m so delighted!

12.5. the anger and disbelief in dick’s voice when he says you told crane EVERYTHING?! tells me that he knew exactly what he was telling crane himself.

12.75. “everything you are is because of him” - oh that reminds me of halluci!bruce from last season. i hope we see halluci!bruce again--he is so vicious but so entertaining... so much more effective at tearing dick down than crane or jason combined. goes to show that dick’s biggest enemy is own fucking head.

12.8. oh no! dick’s shot! crane is in the wind with red hood! blackfire is now with the titans! i love it!

honestly this season’s pacing is such a big step up from the last couple. gold star, show.

[fursasaida]

Would love to hear about all of the ways ppl misunderstand HG (if you feel like it)

i’m doing this as bullets bc i don’t have the oomph to like write it out properly

they think the socioeconomic specialization of the 12(+1) districts is the typical thing of like, “i will construct a wholly implausible society that’s about putting people in totalitarian versions of thinly disguised hogwarts houses so i can show how my heroine is Special and Unique” instead of like, a specifically elaborated form of oppression by the capitol that shows how aestheticized the political economy is. it’s not that most people in panem really believe everyone from District 4 (? IIRC) is suited as a person to fishing, or whatever. it’s that the capitol said “you produce this and only this for us, how much we value that commodity category determines your value, and that is all you are” and this is completely interwoven with the spectacle of control that is the Games. (the Games are basically a dramatization of territorial control but wah wah wah “battle royale ripoff” wah wah shut up.) it’s actually a very interesting political economy concept which i could go on about at length but i value my life

due to the above they think Katniss is supposed to go on the usual character arc of Doesn’t Fit In --> Discontent --> Dismantle the System and Be Happy

this causes them to complain both that she doesn’t change enough (first of all, she does change, just not in the way they expect; and second, the ways she doesn’t change are part of the POINT! this isn’t a story of personal transformation! it’s about political change!) and that she’s too like sad or limp or whatever later on. IT’S A VERY GOOD DEPICTION OF TRAUMA, SHUT UP.

they complain that the ending is “unsatisfying.”

of course the ending is “unsatisfying,” because the political change that occurred is incomplete and nuanced, and also, she still has all that trauma, there is a cost, the whole thematic backbone of the series is “internalize the externalities/make the invisible costs visible.” it’s the interplay between the hypervisibility of spectacle and the extraction of people’s time, bodies, wealth, relationships--their lives--that it both relies on and hides.

relatedly, people think katniss shooting whatsername at the end is some kind of unjustified twist. i don’t know what to say about this. i throw up my hands. WERE YOU PAYING ATTENTION AT ALL.

does anyone think about what the story is actually about? they do not. ("no one” is an exaggeration, i just mean the people i’m mad at)

the love triangle. oh my god. again people just take this as a “typical YA” thing of like, let me show how desirable and special my heroine is by having both the boys want her!! it is not that at all. Gale and Peeta stand in for different sides of her personality and respectively bring those sides out in her. her being torn between them is in fact where the “personal change” aspect of the story happens.

both of them are very strategic thinkers but in entirely different registers, and they value different things. she has much more in common with Gale at the beginning (on the surface), and her choice to see the value in Peeta’s way of thinking and do the very hard work of developing those capacities and responses in herself is her choice about who she wants to be and whether she values a reversal of power (Gale) or actually improving society (Peeta). whether being a ~rebellious hunter~ or being a caretaker (the reason, remember, she did the illegal hunting in the first place!) is more important to her.

they are both from her home district and people she’d known before the games because, again, these are qualities/tendencies she already possessed; choosing which to turn toward and develop in herself is the personal aspect of the political story.

and it is not a coincidence that it’s after the total dissociation and alienation she experiences in being made an aesthetic spectacle qua ~rebel by District 13 that she does the incredibly difficult, steadfast, further-traumatizing work of helping bring Peeta back to himself and so to her. the ending doesn’t happen without her whole process of negotiating her relationships with those two characters.

but these people don’t understand the ending anyway so i don’t know what i was expecting

this is called good writing and it’s an extremely valid way to develop and use supporting characters

god i could scream

Suzanne Collins’ origin story for this series, about channel-flipping between reality TV and coverage of the Iraq War, really just puts it all out there for you and these people ignore this! if they even know about it they just take it as like, “what if i put this thing on this other thing.” but she is getting at something very real with that! she is saying that both war and entertainment are spectacle-generating machines, fueled by inequality and the bodies of young people, that maintain power structures. (the big thing THG is really missing here is how this works internationally because there just aren’t any other countries in its world.)

[redacted: extremely over the top musing about race and class intersections in re: the unequal distribution of exposure to premature death and how intentional Collins was or wasn’t in getting what she got right right and what she got wrong wrong]

a few years back i was watching The Voice (leave me alone) and they had this whole ~storyline about a girl (i think 19 tops?) from a tiny, tiny rural Southern town, who was too stage-fright-y to perform to her potential. every week the judges would tell her she disappointed and every week her coach would save her because, he kept saying, he still had faith she could deliver. (she was fine but they had a Narrative to construct.) and then one week magically they changed up her makeup and clothes to make her much more overtly sexy, but in this like fucked-up babydoll innocent way, and lo and behold she discovered her confidence and wowed everyone. who could have predicted!!

I remember another contestant on The Voice who was literally there to try to get to a point where he would be able to get his family back into housing after flooding destroyed their home in i can’t even remember which (socio)natural disaster.

like that is just literally how the hunger games work. the promise is that this is a rare route to economic mobility. it requires a dramatic makeover, patronage, all of it. the makeover involves being essentialized as a citizen-type, a national subject that fits into a particular box (rural/urban, gendered, raced, etc--all of them are just entertaining backstories and narrative handles for the audience). this is a violent process, however visual and symbolic it may be via reality TV. it remains a process on which your odds as a contestant depend completely. and of course no one has heard from either of these people i mentioned since, because there can only be one winner; and even if you win, you can still lose the game of being a winner. no one asks what happens to them when it’s over, much like many people don’t really think about military veterans. if you think about the post-games life of the winners in THG, they are literally what you get if you imagine a military veteran and a D-list celebrity being the same person. reality TV already IS a gladiators’ arena where people ARE fighting for their lives. the violence is just sublimated. like i said. internalize and visibilize the costs.

(there is something here too, in the overlap of spectacle, about how the contemporary US treats its soldiers more as signifiers, high priests of civic nationalism, and/or sin-eaters than as people. similarly reality TV contestants come to stand for certain archetypes of the nation.)  

[theenchantedforestsystem]

hi!! I had a few questions. I’ve been questioning if I’m a system for a while and I rlly don’t know at which point it’s ok to say I am(how do I become confident in that?). I truly feel like different people with separate identities at times, and like I possibly have passive influence..especially with gender and sexuality. but what if if my identity is just fluid? along with feeling like different people, at times I rlly feel like the world and body isn’t mine or that I’m not even real or human. I think im ghostkin(as in involuntarily I feel like I am a ghost..dinosaur too) but I wonder if these are actually non human (or “undead ghost”) alters? how do I tell? recently I also looked back on old(but honestly not even that old at all) conversations.. to find that I had an extremely different typing style and way of behaving.. it distressed me and I didn’t think I could ever behave like that… especially since the way I act/type has changed so much in a short period of time.. I don’t remember this change happening.. possibly it’s just me becoming more mature but I rlly felt disconnected from that “past me.” Ive also always had dissociation and have been forgetful at times… it feels like everyday besides the current present never actually happened and it’s hard to remember or feel like it was me that experienced it. I do end up remembering stuff (it depends-) but is that amnesia? bc I know to have DID and OSDD-1a u need amnesia��� so I’m like .. if I don’t have it then would I have OSDD-1b?.. the problem I’m having though… is that I’m not exactly having any communication with ANYONE in any way and I know very little(no names and such) about any other alters except: one feels transmasc one feels transfem and I started calling the transfem one momo?.. there’s also me having a traumatic experience and started to identity 100% as a fictional character (two but mainly this one happens right at the trauma) so I wonder if it’s not a kin but a fictives? .. plus at a young age I do remember experiencing trauma … so it makes me wonder if I’m a system or not .. but honestly I don’t know how to tell at this point bc I’ve tried to talk to others and it doesn’t work … I don’t feel confident saying I’m a system bc my experiences are not the same as others.. (they have carrds listing s bunch of info on all alters) and I don’t…and I don’t want u to dx me!! I just don’t know what to do at this point in time..? I don’t know how to move forward or what I should do .. I’m scared to tell my therapist ANYTHING mental health relays honestly

Hello there! First off, I am just gonna say we are in no way a professional so we cannot say for certain, but your experiences sound pretty similar to how ours have been especially looking back going "wtf is this? I don't remember this? Why was I writing like that?" and all that "good stuff"

It does genuinely sound like you might be part of a system, and please remember this as you go on, There is no universal plural experience. Not a single one will be exactly like the other, there will be similarities, but please don't freak out or worry when your experiences are not the exact same one. I also suggest at least asking your therapist.

You don't need to have complete and total amnesia to be a system for instance I do actually remember some of the things that happen if I'm in or near the front while someone else is piloting the body (Ex. I remember Sammi messing the body's mom with some of the plain white full face paper mache masks). I no longer know which one specifically we are specifically due to conflicting sources and explanations *but* I believe little to no amnesia is a much better definition for OSDD-1B and often amnesia, i.e. not remembering virtually anything while someone else is DID I can't remember much about OSDD-1A though.

And those could very well be fictives and and trauma at a young age definitely increases the likelihood of you being a part of a system. As for communication, perhaps try leaving notes in places they'll see with little questions like what their name is and what their pronouns are.

And finally if you don't trust your therapist with your mental health, then you should absolutely try and find a new one. And be careful of things you research cause even official sources can spout lies (such as school books, seen ones that describe having DID or anything like that as just "role playing" and it was honestly disgusting.) but anyway, if you have anymore questions, or you just wanna talk, please feel free to message us on here or on discord at Enchanted Forest#9637 and we'll help you out in any way we can or just talk if you need someone to talk to! -Liru, Jameson M., Sammi, LoganOE (Aong with the rest of the M's) and Yan!

[preparetosufferemotionally]

Home, Part Four: You Left Me to Bleed

Prinexity

TW: Trauma, cursing, Unsympathetic Janus, Unsympathetic Patton, past abusive relationships, child growing up in a toxic home, manipulation, emotional abuse, physical abuse, a stray cat, playboy, Remus, Trans!Virgil, friend break up, trauma, alludes to dissociation, traumatic experiences. 

Jeremy Empire was the school heartbreaker. Fitting, since he had his broken first. He knew that these weren’t the only names he was called. Gay JD, bad boy, fuck boy, and no good peice of shit were a couple of his other favorites. Remy was never in one place, he was in five at once. He caused trouble, but no one could ever declare him guilty. HIs fathers weren’t exactly pleased with what he did, but they did acknowledge that they gave him those traits. Roman gave him the romance, Virgil the emo rebel, his uncle Remus lent the trouble maker, and Emile...oh he gave him pain. 

Pain seemed to be a family trait. Everyone in Remy’s family always had some heartbreak, some emotional destruction. Hell, even their cat, Panic!, had something wrong with his life. The cat was a stray until Remy’s dads found and adopted him. 

Regardless, none of that mattered. Remy threw on his leather jacket, grabbed a coffee, got on his father’s old motorcycle, and went to school. It was junior year, a year of stress and susceptible emotions. So, the perfect time to find someone new to hit on. Remy went through the ideas as he walked through the halls. Maybe an aggressively straight guy with obvious internalized homophobia? Or the gay nerd that really wants attention? Or the- 

Remy’s thoughts were abruptly interrupted when he accidentally slammed into a fellow student. 

“Shit,” He cursed. He saw the person’s tawny hair and sweater vest. Clearly a nerd, considering how many books were lying on the ground. Maybe he should help? But by the time Remy came to that conclusion, the books were already in his arms. 

“Sorry, I didn’t see you there,” the person mumbled. “I’ll just go.” The person started to walk away but Remy grabbed their sleeve. They sounded familiar. The person stopped. “Could you let go of my sleeve please?” Remy didn’t respond, instead pulling the sleeve slightly, which caused the person to turn around. Remy attempted to make eye contact through sunglasses, but the person dropped their head, avoiding it like a pro. He was impressive. “Please let go of my sleeve.”

“Make eye contact and I let go.” The person shifted the books in their arms and sighed, before lifting up their head. Remy stumbled backward. A sixteen year old Emile looked at him uncomfortably through glasses. He barely changed since they were kids, still with a face that looks like it could smile in moments.  “Emile?” Remy gasped, too shocked to say anything. He hadn’t seen him since sixth grade, he had assumed he transferred schools. 

“I’m sorry, do I know you?” Emile asked, dropping his gaze again to avoid eye contact. Remy felt all his emotions rush forward again, just like the day Emile abandoned him. He attempted to keep his cool, but it was so hard when fucking Emile was standing there, acting like they had never been friends. First leaving him alone, and now this. Emile was a son of bitch. 

Remy didn’t even realize Emile had shrunk back, holding his books to his chest, until he came close, almost nose to nose with him.

“You should.” Emile flinched, taking a step back. 

“I’m really sorry, but I just don’t know who you are,” Emile panicked. At this point people stopped to watch. It was the most interesting they’d see all day. Everyone knew who the two were. Emile would always be there with a smile if you needed help and Remy had broken hearts so many times, he was probably heartless. 

“You are a fucking monster.” Emile’s eyes filled with tears that he stubbornly held back in. Those words echoed in his skull.  Remy glared at him. 

“I’m sorry,” Emile whispered, quickly running off into the crowd. Remy watched him run off. Then he stormed off into the opposite direction. 

For the rest of the day, gossip followed the two around school. Were they scorned lovers? Mortal enemies? Did Remy break his heart? Did Emile break Remy’s? Was there a  dramatic backstory? Did the two meet and one had a concussion and forgot? Was this some alternate universe that they traveled to where only Remy knew he saw Emile? Nobody was too sure. But two things were known. Remy was furious, and Emile was terrified. And that was enough for the rumors to make their way home. 

“All I’m saying is, hypothetically, you could murder him.”

“REMUS!” 

“Whaaat?” Roman shook his head at his brother, holding Virgil’s hand gently as they sat on the couch. 

“I don’t know if you know this Mr. Mad Scientist, but in the real world murder is illegal!”

“Only if you get caught,” Virgil chimed in, petting the cat. Roman looked at him, exasperated.

“It's amazing that I’m the only impulse control in this house.” Remus cackled as Virgil chucked a pillow at Roman’s head. Remy sat silently, not talking about anything that happened today. The adults stopped when Remy remained silent.

“Hey Remy, sweetheart, are you okay? I know that must have been very upsetting,” Virgil said softly. Remy rolled his eyes and huffed. 

“Upsetting is one word for ripping out my heart and stopping on its already broken pieces.” 

“You sound exactly like your father,” Virgil snorted. Roman smiled, leaning over and kissing the top of Virgil’s head.

“What can I say, I have the better genes.” Virgil leaned on Roman’s shoulder. 

“Aren’t you related to that trash rat?” 

“Regardless, still better.”

“Alright, stop flirting with you two. Clearly your son is having an emotional crisis. And I’m shit at emotions, so do your thing,” Remus said, gesturing to Remy. Virgil sighed and nodded.

“I know this is rough-”

“You have no idea how ROUGH this is. How could he just forget me like that? We were best friends, and he abandoned me.” Virgil and Roman exchanged a look as Remy fumed. Then Roman sighed, and stepped forward.

“He didn’t abandon you.” Remy looked at him incredulously, standing up.

“Um, I’m pretty sure he did dad!” Roman shook his head. 

“He didn’t. At least not on purpose.” Remy fell back into his seat, confused.

“What?”

“Virgil will explain better.” Virgil got up and sat next to his son, one hand on his back soothingly. 

“So it looks like I’m going to have  to tell you a long story. It started in college.”

“You’re kidding. Emile abandoning me, starts when you were in college? Bullshit.” Virgil rolled his eyes while Remus and Roman exchanged a look. 

“You are very lucky I didn’t start when I was in sophomore year of college. Trust me, this shit goes back a long while.” Remy flopped backward. 

“Fiiiine.”

“Good. I wasn’t dating your father at the time, instead I was dating Deceit.”

“Okay, this is not some dudes name is it?” Roman joined in, responding for Virgil.

“No it's not, but it's very difficult for your father to refer to him by his given name.”

“Why?”

“i’m getting to that,” Virgil said, getting irritated. “I will explain everything, just please stop interrupting.” Remy rolled his eyes but nodded. “Now Deceit was not a good person.”

“That's a nice way of saying absolute dickhead,” Remus muttered. Virgil glared at him and he shut up. Remy sat up, a bit more interested.

“Anyway, he wasn’t a good person,”

“Dickhead,” Remus muttered. 

“AND his brother was a person named Patton Lugner.”

“How is this important?” Remy asked, becoming bored again, grabbing a cup of coffee and starting to sip out of it.

“COULD YOU ALL JUST LET ME SPEAK?” Everyone immediately shut up. “Thank god. Now, I had been dating Deceit since sophomore year of highschool and we moved to college together. He was the only person I knew, so I was very isolated and alone. I had terrible anxiety at the time and being alone around him made it worse.” Virgil hitched a breath. Roman came over, encouraging him with a gentle arm around his shoulder.

“Deceit could get violent. In fact, he rarely didn’t. On the outside, you wouldn’t have known it. It was so easy to fall into his trap that way. He smoothly talked and lied about everything. He could have said, ‘The sky is green’ and I would have accepted it without question. That was the type of person he was. I had been incredibly nervous so I only saw people with Deceit. Naturally that met the only people I ever saw were people Deceit trusted to not help me. So, I met his brother Patton. I was convinced he didn’t know, so I acted secretive. He did know though. About everything that went on behind the closed doors.” Virgil inhaled and exhaled, trying to calm back down. Roman soothed him, and he began to speak again.

“Then I met your uncle Remus. He was best friends with Deceit.” Remy spit out his coffee.

“WHAT?!”

“Hey, I didn’t know he was a complete dolphin’s asshole at the time,” Remus shrugged. Remy gaped at his uncle. This was quite the story to be hearing and it had barely started.

“We didn’t talk much, he was quite loud and out there, and frankly I was terrified. But one night I ran out of the dorm, absolutely terrified and in pain. And your uncle Remus was there. I was hidden by the dark and my hoodie, so he didn’t know it was me, but he was kind and asked why I was here. I said I had been hurt badly,” Virgil unintentionally flinched at the memory, trying to get back on track. “He asked who did. And I said it was my boyfriend. He wanted to get me help immediately, because despite his off the wall attitude, your uncle was a good person.”

“Why thank you Virgey.” Virgil rolled his eyes.

“I said no, because I was so scared what would happen if he found out. But he tried to encourage me to leave, even if he couldn’t help. I didn’t listen at first, but the words sunk into my brain and stayed there. He succeeded in planting the doubt in my head. And one night, when I had finally had enough, I broke up with Deceit and immediately ran out the door, not listening to what he wanted to say or do next. Next thing I knew I was in the center of the grounds running as fast as I could away. And then I bumped right into your father.”

“This is like a cheesy rom-com,” Remy muttered, before Roman, not Virgil shot him a dirty look. 

“Anyway, I ran into your father. And I didn’t really know what I was doing at the time, but I begged for him to let me be in his dorm. I said I was running from someone who was trying to hurt me. Your father was always a big softie and let me come in. Turns out he was sharing a room with your uncle Remus. He was surprised to see me because,” Remus joined in.

“Aren’t you J’s roommate?” 

“I panicked immediately, but your father helped me through my attack and I calmed down. I didn’t tell them why I was scared, just that I switched rooms because Janus had a partner who was there all the time and it freaked me out. They let me stay, and eventually, I met their friend. His name was Logan Berry, and he was a very smart law student. As it happened he was friends with Deceit. Or not friends as much as acquaintances. He was, however, close friends with Patton, Deciet’s twin brother. So naturally, the twins hung out with us. I hadn’t told anyone about Deceit, but I quickly figured out from side glances and careful looks, Patton knew. And he didn’t care.”

“Should these names feel familiar? Because they are to me, but I can’t place them,” Remy asked. Virgil nodded.

“Oh they should. Patton scared the crap out of me, but he was Logan’s friend and by extension mine, so I tried to get rid of the underlying fear. And I just tried to pretend Deceit wasn’t there.  At some point your father and I started dating. He knew I had serious issues from something, but he didn’t know what. Eventually he discovered it was Deceit and I swore him to secrecy, albeit reluctantly. Then, Remus came in. He was crying. Actually crying so we knew something had happened. Remus, want to take this bit?”

“Yup! So, Logan dropped me as a friend. I didn’t know why, but it was very painful. At first I wanted to cry, and then I wanted to rip out his internal organs. But your dad was suspicious of what happened, especially after Logan started to date Patton. He went to talk to Logan, only for Logan to dismiss it and leave. Your dad got home, and then vowed to confront Patton about this.” Virgil sighed.

“So, after class, I went to go find Patton when I was stopped by Deceit. He threatened me with exposing what happened to me to everyone if I did anything. And while I had more confidence, I didn’t have enough to say ‘Fuck you, I’ll do this anyway.’ So I listened and went back, my suspicions confirmed when Logan walked back to class with foundation on his face. I’ve put on enough makeup in my lifetime, whether it was for me or to hide a bruise, so I could immediately tell what happened. I wanted to do something and tell someone what happened. But I knew no one would believe me and everyone would just end up hurt.” Remy looked confused.

“Why wouldn’t someone believe you pops? Surely people take this seriously.”

“I wish that was the case. But I was a scrawny twenty year old trans man, who hadn’t even fully transitioned yet. They don’t take this seriously when someone with confidence says stuff, how the hell could I even think of it. Regardless, things got better for me and unfortunately worse for Logan. I didn’t see him in class a week later. When I tried to call him, my number was blocked. And then he got married Patton, becoming Logan Hart.” Remy’s jaw dropped. 

“WHAT THE HELL? ARE YOU SAYING WHAT I THINK YOU’RE SAYING?” Roman and Remus couldn’t help but laugh at Remy’s reaction. Virgil smiled. 

“Wait until I finish and you’ll really be shocked. Obviously, me and your dad got married and had you after we finished college. We lost contact with Logan, for obvious reasons. We knew he was married to Patton, but that was about it. Once you turned four we sent you to a preschool. You know the one fifteen minutes away? Then your father ran late to pick you up one day and that’s when we get to you. Patton was your teacher and your father vaguely recognized him. Your father suddenly saw Logan and everything clicked. You were playing with Emile, so you didn’t realize. Naturally, your dad told me what happened and I was tempted then and there to hunt down Patton Hart.”

“But,” Roman interrupted, taking the conversation, “I didn’t let him do that. Instead we bided our time. We didn’t want to ruin your and Emile’s friendship. You were both so happy. But everything went wrong on your first playdate at a house. It was ours and you had a good time. Everything seemed fine. Me and your father remained civil with Patton. Maybe this would work out. And then you asked-”

“What loud noises start at night?” Remy whispered, pulling up the distant memory in horror. Virgil nodded as Roman continued.

“And Patton immediately shut the door in our faces, bringing Emile in with him. You didn’t understand and were led back to the car. We don’t know what happened next in their home, but you can bet it was nothing good. I strongly suspect Patton might have manipulated or scared Emile into ignoring you.”

“And,” Virgil added, “Emile likely associates you with a traumatic memory and his brain blocks you out to stay safe.” Remy stared in horror at his fathers, who stared at him solemnly. 

“Holy shit.”

[trombonesinspace]

Typhoid Mary: feminist femme fatale?

“Season 4 was going to be Typhoid Mary, Alice Eve [who played the role in Iron Fist], we were doing a kind of...I had a much different version of her than what Raven [Metzner] had done in Iron Fist. I was kind of rebooting what she was going to be like, and we were going to do a, you know, kind of a warped love story/murder mystery kind of femme fatale, but kind of a modern-day, feminist version of it, as opposed to kind of the older, sexist kind of femme fatale archetype.”

-Erik Oleson, in conversation with Steven DeKnight, SaveDaredevilCon 

As I said yesterday, I have some thoughts about this! If you want some opinions nobody asked for, about a storyline that may never come to pass, you’ve come to the right place! Let’s dive in.

A femme fatale is a character type with quite a history, that can take various forms. She is always an attractive woman who brings ruin to the man who gets involved with her. But sometimes she is deliberately manipulative, while sometimes she is more a victim of circumstances. She may be evil, or she may be sympathetic/tragic. But whatever her moral alignment, she has two defining traits: sexual allure, and some form of negative consequences for the hero as a result of his involvement with her.

A woman who schemes against the hero, and succeeds in harming him, but without using feminine wiles? Not a femme fatale. The Marvel TV universe has featured several examples on different shows: Madame Gao, Mariah Dillard, Alexandra. And, ironically, the version of Typhoid Mary who appeared in Iron Fist. (We’ll get there.)

A sexy woman who tries to manipulate/damage the hero, but fails? Also not a femme fatale. I wish I could give some examples, but sadly I can’t think of any, in dramas at least. Our current media culture loves a sexy manipulator, no writer ever seems to introduce one into a dramatic story without making her succeed in her schemes, to some extent at least.

Which is unfortunate, from my perspective, because I loathe sexy manipulators. It’s a character type I really dislike, whenever I encounter her. As soon as she shows up, I know the hero is going to fall for her bullshit like a chump, and I’m going to end up respecting him less as a result. I could try to unpack my feelings about this a bit more, but that would probably make a post all on its own, so for now I’ll leave it at that.

This doesn’t mean I hate all femmes fatales—it really depends on her motivation and her behavior. If she isn’t trying to harm the hero, and it happens due to circumstances, then I might like the character, but the story becomes a tragedy. Which is not necessarily bad. Just, you know. Tragic.

Anyway! Let’s talk about Typhoid Mary.

Mary Walker is a woman with Dissociative Identity Disorder (multiple personalities), and high-level combat skills. In the comics, she is also a mutant with mental powers. She appeared in the Daredevil comics starting in 1988.

In this original version, her personality fragmented due to childhood abuse, leading her to vow as an adult that no man would ever hurt her again. Her personalities are: Mary, who is timid and gentle; Typhoid, who is adventurous, lusty, and violent; and Bloody Mary, who is even more violent, sadistic, and hates all men.

Mary becomes romantically involved with Matt Murdock, who is cheating on his girlfriend, Karen Page, to be with her. At the same time, Typhoid is trying to ruin him, having been hired to do so by the Kingpin. Matt can’t tell they’re the same woman, because when she switches personalities all her bio signs change (voice, scent, heartbeat, etc) so much that he can’t recognize her. (Uh, sure.) She may also be using some of her mutant powers to confuse his senses. I haven’t read the comics, I’m relying here on what I could learn from the internet.

Eventually Typhoid drops him off a bridge, but then Mary finds him and gets him to a hospital, saving him. Karen is with him when he wakes up, but he breaks her heart by calling out for Mary.

This storyline...does not thrill me. As I said, I haven’t read it, but comics writing about mental illness is generally neither nuanced nor accurate, and comics writing about women circa 1988 is also not great, by today’s standards. And comics Matt’s disastrous love life is legendary—cheating on your girlfriend is bad, Matt! Don’t do it! 

I have, however, watched season 2 of Iron Fist, where we get a different version. This Mary Walker is a US army veteran, special ops, who was captured by the Sokovian military. Her personality fragmented due to the brutal abuse she received from her captors for nearly two years, until she finally escaped. She got a medical discharge from the army after being diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder.

Her personalities are: Mary, who is innocent and naive; and Walker, who is a ruthless, coolly efficient mercenary-for-hire. The existence of a third, ultraviolent personality, previously unknown to either Mary or Walker, is revealed near the end of the season. 

Mary meets and befriends Danny Rand, while Walker is hired by his enemies to stalk him, and eventually capture him so they can steal his Iron Fist powers from him. She later changes sides, getting hired to bring down Davos, the season’s main villain, by Joy Meachum, his former ally.

There are clear parallels to the Daredevil comics storyline, albeit in less extreme form—Mary befriends the hero, but isn’t romantically involved with him; her more violent personality works against him and fights him, but doesn’t try to destroy him. 

I enjoyed this version of the character more than I expected to, for a couple of reasons. For one, she is never the out of control, “crazy” stereotype of a person with mental illness. Both Mary and Walker are more-or-less functional adults, managing to live a strange hybrid life, aware of each other’s existence even though they don’t share memories.

But what I especially like is that she isn’t sexualized, at all. It’s incredibly rare, in my experience, to see a young, female antagonist opposing a male hero, and not have her be sexy. Older women are exempt from this obligation (see my list of examples above), but the young ones always vamp it up, and I am so tired of it. I am not opposed to sexy women, but I am very opposed to the requirement that all women must be sexy. (Unless they’re old.) Male antagonists aren’t required to be alluring, so why should women be? (Yes, I know why. I just don’t like it.)

There’s also a lot of potential YIKES in sexualizing a woman with a severe mental illness, which was caused by (among other things) repeated sexual violence. Could it be done in a way that isn’t super problematic? It’s possible, sure. Am I assuming that most television writers would give the subject the respect it deserves? NOPE! 

I’m really glad they chose to just not go there. Walker is extremely good at what she does, takes no shit from anyone, and (almost) never gets riled up. After everything she’s been through, nothing in her present life has the power to faze her, and none of the men around her have the power to intimidate her. It’s pretty great!

She isn’t the least bit coy or seductive, and, equally refreshing, none of the men try to sexualize her or hit on her. Everyone Walker talks to knows she is a highly skilled professional, and they treat her accordingly. Or, when someone does disrespect her, it’s never gendered as far as I can remember, and it stops as soon as she calmly states what she’s going to do to him if it doesn’t.

As for Mary, although she has a more feminine appearance than Walker (hair down and loose, makeup), she is also not sexualized. Her friendship with Danny, who is in an established relationship with Colleen Wing, is platonic, and no one else tries to hit on her that I remember.

So this is the version of Typhoid Mary that Erik Oleson was going to reboot, into a femme fatale. Only, you know. A feminist one. 

I...have some questions. What does that even mean? What does feminism mean to Erik Oleson? Let’s be real, the idea of a woman becoming an ultraviolent, sadistic man-hater as a result of sexual trauma would have been seen as feminist in some circles, back in 1988 when that version was written. So what, exactly, did he have in mind?

As I said before, sexual allure is a necessary component of a femme fatale. So she was definitely gonna be sexy. And you know now how I feel about sexy female antagonists. As for the “warped love story” part...Matt wouldn’t be cheating on Karen, since they aren’t together (please, for the love of mercy, don’t have them get together right before he meets Mary, we did that once and I do NOT want to see it again), but I am still not a fan of Matt/Mary as a couple.

Her Dissociative Identity Disorder raises some serious issues around consent, and even if the show chose to ignore that, there’s still the issue of past sexual trauma. Unless Oleson’s reworking of the character was going to include a completely different back story, a Matt/Mary relationship would mean Matt unknowingly having sex with a woman who has suffered brutal sexual abuse in her past. Not to mention, having sex with her that only one part of her personality actually wants.

Is it possible for someone with Mary’s past trauma and present mental illness to have a positive sexual relationship? In reality, of course! In the hands of writers with only a layman’s knowledge of psychology, on a show that loves to torment its hero, I wouldn’t bet on it. How do you suppose our poster boy for Catholic guilt would react when he inevitably finds out the truth?

Plus, aside from any issues around Mary herself, Matt starting a relationship with anyone other than the handful of people who already know his secret identity, means a whole new round of Matt lying to someone he cares about. Does anyone really want to see that? I know I don’t. Sure, maybe he’d tell her eventually, but how long would they have to date before he decided to trust her with the truth?

I’m not opposed to the Mary Walker from Iron Fist appearing in Daredevil, if the writers could come up with a new story for her (i.e, don’t just have her repeat all the same plot beats with Matt that she already did with Danny). But bringing her in as a femme fatale really doesn’t sit well with me. We’ve already seen Matt in an ultimately destructive relationship with a sexy, violent, morally grey woman. I really don’t want to watch Round 2: now with multiple personalities!

Of course, maybe we never will. The quote at the beginning of this post is from just a couple of weeks ago (July 25 2020), so Erik Oleson still seems to think it’s a fine idea. But obviously we don’t know yet if there will ever be a season 4, or who the show runner will be if there is. He may never get to make the story he was planning.

So yes, I realize I’m merely speculating about a completely theoretical story that may never happen. But I wanted to write this anyway. I had a strong “ugh, no” reaction to the idea of a feminist femme fatale Typhoid Mary, and I wanted to go deeper and pick apart my reasons for not liking the idea.

To the three of you who have read this all the way through to the end (this post is nearly 2000 words, yikes), thank you for indulging me! These are, as always, my own opinions, and YMMV. 

[fuzziemutt]

What’s a Family to the One Free Man ?

Summary: With some time to rest, Gordon's mind starts to wander. And he realizes that the scene before him is lacking some people... Tw: Dissociation, Panic attacks (please actually make sure the person having a panic attack is okay with being touched prior to doing so btw), This is hurt without true comfort (Gordon has bad coping mechanisms) Notes: This is based on my own post talking about how if Gordon does have a canon niece/nephew then he has a sibling as well and they've been MIA since the Black Mesa incident... (I can’t place this on a timeline exactly, it’s probs breaking canon hl lore timeline but I don’t care, it’s after stasis tho), no ships everything is platonic

Also: Yes I am using John, his wife and his kid Henry in a serious sense here because I didn’t want to create a whole new character for this angst,,, (and again typing this in one go, no edits, lets goooooo) (also also: Gordon is selectively mute based on my experiences) 

----

They had just gotten back from a quick scavenging mission that brought back a couple pieces of old clothes, tech scraps, and health kits along with a couple more bruises and scratches. It wasn’t anything Gordon couldn’t handle at this point; He was just glad to be able to sit down finally especially as his knees were starting to act up again. 

As he slumped himself into a nearby chair, he watched the rag tag team consisting of Eli, Alyx, Issac, Judith and Barney theatrically retell about the “adventure” they just had mere moments ago. Eli, Izzy and Judith had stayed behind while him and the others practically ran around like a bunch of chickens with their heads cut off if the teasing smile on Eli’s face had anything to say about what they saw from the home base. It almost felt quite homey here honestly with the way they joked as if they were a true family and not a group of people constantly fighting for their lives. 

Gordon wasn’t sure what it was exactly that caused it, it honestly could have just been from being tired, but as he watched Alyx and Barney bicker about who dropped the important gizmo she wanted, he slowly felt his consciousness take a step back from the action in front of him. He wanted to take part in the jokes a bit but he couldn’t help how clouded his head seemed to feel watching the two play fight. Something about the scene in front of him was trying to catch on something in the deep recess of his brain. 

He watched through sudden fog, body practically one with the chair underneath him as something finally caught. He was suddenly bombarded with memories and reminders of three specific people that he should have thought about already that he even felt a stab of guilt for forgetting about them for so long.

John, Iliza and Henry Freeman.

Oh god’s resounded in his head as it filled with memories of bickering and play fighting with his older brother not too long ago. And that was the kicker wasn’t it ? It honestly wasn’t too long ago for him. Just a couple weeks ago he was saying bye to his brother on the phone with the sounds of a small toddler babbling his own goodbyes too. 

John had been picking on him for not having visited since his son’s 2nd birthday and for spending too much time working on “boring” “nerd” stuff. Gordon had even actually mentally agreed, a rare moment for him truly, as he decided to talk to his boss about getting some vacation time after the big test the next day to surprise his brother with a visit. He had been practically dancing at the idea of seeing John and his family again after being away for god knows how long.

That was just a couple weeks ago.. he promised to talk to him tomorrow just before he hung up.. That was just 20 years ago now...

20 years.. since he last spoke to his brother.. John and Ili would be in their 50s.. Little Henry in his 20s...

That was if they even survived. 

His breath cut short and his throat squeezed. 

If they survived.

IF. 

Distantly he felt his increasingly strangled pants, the feeling of liquid slide down his cheeks, but he was too far from his head to realize what was happening. He just watched from the ceiling, detached and afraid as his body trembled and reacted to this recovered information. 

How could he have forgotten John, Ili and their kid ? The very kid he made sure to get a day off to visit as soon as possible after the kid was born and at his new home. The very kid John would jokingly tell not to end up as nerdy as his uncle “Gordie”. The very kid who loved playing with his ponytail not a rat tail and was even growing his hair out for due to it. The very kid he swore to protect and always be there for even if the world ended. 

His brother who he’d spend long nights talking nonsense to no matter how young or old or even far away they were. The brother who accepted him when their parents didn’t. The one who used his actual name for the first time without hesitation. The brother that despite his tough guy act and motorcycles, helped him feel safe even in public.

His sister-in-law who would always smile and clap excitedly whenever he got to visit. The sister who would go with him to stores, if John was busy, so he wouldn’t feel so scared and all alone. The sister who was patient with him and how he still sometimes struggled to speak to her even after so much time being part of his family. The sister who created such lovely paintings in her spare time.

And they were gone. 

He didn’t have a clue where they could even possibly be now. If they were alive, could they have come to City 17 ? Were there other cities nearby they could be in ? Could they have managed to escape all those years ago ? So much have changed in the span of 20 years, would they even be the same ? Would John resent him for having disappeared so long ago even if he didn’t choose to ? Would Ili look upon him in disappointment for abandoning them ? Would Henry not even care to recognize his forgotten uncle that cared about him too long ago ?

He didn’t even get to say a proper goodbye...

His head raced with so many unanswered questions, guilt and hopelessness. His family, even if it wasn’t arguably much, was gone and there was nothing he could have done about it. The choices were made for him. 

He had no control.

At some point, he began to notice the feelings of hands on him, someone was mumbling words he couldn’t decipher at all. Suddenly his hands were pressed against another’s chest he was guessing as his senses began to slowly sludge their way back into focus. He tried copying the gentle rising and falling he could acknowledge; his struggling breath slowly following suit as best it could. 

It took what felt like minutes to possibly hours until the feeling of detachment began to subside, the nonsensical words now beginning to register as what they were meant to be. It was mostly someone counting and saying some encouraging phrases. Something must have changed on his face, however, as the voice was now asking him to list what he could see, hear, feel and smell. 

He knew he wouldn’t be able to force himself to speak in such a state, he also hasn’t been able to feel safe enough to do so since that call with John anyways, and with his shaking hands still firmly to the other’s chest, he couldn’t even attempt to sign what was asked of him. So he just began mentally listing as things came to an off-tilted focus. 

He can see his hands, Barney’s hands, Barney’s face, his hetero-chromatic eyes, the scar on his left cheek.

He can hear his words encouraging him, the gentle humming of electronics, the fans of the ac system kicking on, the soft worried murmurs amongst the people behind Barney.

He can feel Barney’s hands around his, the gentle rising and falling of Barney’s chest, the sticky feeling of tears on his own face. 

He could smell the distant stench of rot, the smell of something that was burnt long ago. 

His name was Gordon Freeman, he was 27 years old and he was safe and what was happening was real. Everything was here. Everything was now.

When it seemed Barney was satisfied enough with Gordon’s awareness, he slowly let go of Gordon’s hands and placed them back on his lap. 

“Hey... you with us, bud ?” Barney whispered just barely enough to be heard which Gordon was thankful for as he didn’t think he could take any sudden noises especially with the now present dull thudding behind his eyes. 

All he could do was to slightly nod, forcing his tense muscles to relax before he snapped something. It was then, now that he was forced to be present, that he realized that everyone was in a loose circle around his chair, all with concerned faces. The others weren’t as close as Barney, seemingly to give some semblance of space, but he couldn’t help but feel they were actively holding themselves back from pouncing on him any second. Possibly to even question him as to why he suddenly decided a cry session and panic attack were the best courses of action at the time. 

It was too much, seeing them stare into him almost so hungrily, so filled with pity. He knew they meant well, but he couldn’t do this right now. Not when they were still fighting the revolution. Not when they still needed him to be strong. Not when he was the legendary, resistance “badass” Gordon Freeman who single-handedly killed the Nihilanth arguably a couple weeks 20 years ago.

He stood up, not making any eye contact and shakily signed what he hoped was an apology and him saying how he was going to check on the antlions, but he wasn’t so sure what he was saying or getting across and honestly he didn’t quite much care. Before anyone could object, he quickly weaseled his way between a gap in the circle and sped walked like there was no tomorrow with no further comment. 

When he was alone finally he could go about repressing it all again, his brother, the time gap, his panic and guilt, it all needed to go and needed to go now. He wasn’t going to let those possible deaths hold him back especially with all the blood already staining his hands. It didn’t matter. They needed strong, capable leader Gordon Freeman whether he liked it or not.

What’s a family to the One Free Man anyways ?

[normal-thoughts-official]

What do you think happens when Magnus and Alec both start to dissociate at the same time?

udbdidnd ok so disclaimer i've "only" dissociated once (that me and my psychiatrist were able to recognize at least?) so i'm mostly going off that here, so this might be inaccurate or lean more into one type of dissociation as opposed to others

ok so- i think alec dissociates more than magnus does, just because dissociating is not a very useful coping mechanism in magnus' position as he needs to be... i dont know, thinking all the time? specially when he's in public because he's always hyperaware of his every move as a ways to protect himself, so that makes it hard to dissociate. of course he has flashbacks due to his c-ptsd, but that's not really the same thing, as with flashbacks you are kind of pulled from the present reality and dissociating is more like ur unable to really feel and everything feels as if you're running on autopilot, safely distanced emotionally

so that's not a useful coping mechanism for magnus, specially because it would also probably mean dulling his magic, as it is a sense that's implied to be directly connected to his emotions. also, i think that both of his abusers (asmodeus and camille) specifically wanted emotional responses from him, so hollowing himself out was not possible because they would react violently to that and not do anything that would cause him to dissociate

note: obviously your coping mechanisms are not a choice, but they are shaped by your circumstances and experiences, and that's what i mean when i say that

alec though was raised in an environment where dissociating is a great coping mechanism. it's a military society, so it's easy to keep doing what he's supposed to do without feeling 100% present, just off muscle memory and instinct. of course there's the moments when he was out in the field, but even then, there was also another safe distance put by the fact that he's an archer, and he's a good shadowhunter, so he could easily just let himself be taken by his instincts and react accordingly, slay some demons, and go back home

and anyway he was always raised to control and hide his emotions (unlike magnus whose feelings were the main source of his manipulation and thus encouraged), and he felt absolutely helpless with most things, as he was literally just a pawn most of his life. so dissociating? it worked wonders. his dissociative-state behavior was encouraged as it caused him to act "level headed" like he was expected to, while also protecting him from both the bullshit and spilling the secrets he tried to hide

i also think that's one of the reasons he would split his knuckles so frequently - we know it's a form of self-harm and i'm not denying that, but i also think it sometimes happened on accident because he just dissociated and kept punching and punching and punching until he realized he was bleeding

so that also influences how they act when they are both dissociating. magnus is unused to it, while alec is used to it and might have even considered that it was a good thing when he was younger. like a clear state of conscience or something. i think magnus kind of wants it to stop, would be afraid of the situation if he were able to feel, or to process his feelings. and is mostly like "oh dear. this is bad". specially with my hc that it dulls his magic. a part of him is also kind of like, what if i stay like this forever?, thinking that it means that he's as cold and heartless as asmodeus had wanted him to be. so that's super fun, specially when he can't even connected to those fears in a real way

also, alec associates dissociative state with like, duty, so he probably grabs his bow immediately and goes full soldier on magnus lmao. parade resting and shit even when they are at home. to be honest i find it difficult to imagine a situation that would lead to both of them dissociating at the same time (maybe a particularly exhausting clave meeting after an already emotionally loaded day?) so i'm mostly picturing them back home, still dissociated, kind of like "hm". alec is parade resting and keeping his bow close to himself and magnus is just kind of lying on the couch staring at the ceiling until he eventually turns to him and is like, alexander, i can't feel a thing

and alec kind of blinks and refocuses on reality for a bit and is like, me neither. it'll pass. and magnus stares at his hand kind of trying to will it to do something but the most he gets is some feeble sparks and he's so empty, and being empty is his worst fear, and he's not even scared because he's too empty to be

and magnus is like. this usually doesn't happen. i don't know how to deal with it. and alec says nothing, just kind of staring at him

and he goes, it happens to you, doesn't it? and alec's like, yeah, it's pretty useful. and magnus sighs and is like what do you do then? and alec shrugs and is like "whatever i need to"

which is unhelpful since there's nothing either of them needs to do right then. so magnus just sighs. which leads alec to decide his Something To Do is make sure magnus is alright, so he goes up there and hugs him, and it's weird, because the both of them feel mechanical and like they're on autopilot and it's like an echo or shadow puppets, or something. but there's some comfort in there

then they go to sleep and wait for it to pass i guess? which takes a while to happen, specially for alec, since for him dissociating = running on instinct, and his instincts are to be super tuned into whatever is going on, as he's a soldier, so it's hard to sleep when he's aware of every little noise and movement in the general vicinity of the loft and also there are a lot of cats

and the next day they probably both still feel tired but at least there, and magnus confesses to alec that he's scared of not feeling, that it's the worst thing for him, to think "what if my father was right?" musingly and find himself still empty even at that

and alec tells him a bit about how he used to see dissociating as a good thing, as something to be desired. and that even if he's not scared of it anymore, he doesn't want to go back to not feeling things, doesn't want to be an empty shell of duty again

so they both probably cry in each other's arms and alec holds magnus' head and is like, see? you care so much, magnus. you could never be cold and unfeeling. you care so much.

and ugfdsryhnigdsa yeah

[nadziejastar]

I’m glad the creators want to emphasize thatCloud’s “badass, silent dude” personality was just a fake persona he created. I think a lot of fans had the misconception that was his true personality all along.

Warning: FVII Spoilers

Nomura: “While Cloud may look this way, he was a dork. I believe those of you who played the the original would understand what I mean by saying he’s a dorky character.”

I totally agree. I think a lot of people aren’t good at picking up subtle characterization, especially since the original game didn’t have advanced cutscenes or voice acting. Cloud always seemed like a dork to me after I learned he really had dissociative identity disorder and his whole SOLDIER thing was just a persona--an alter. Barret knew it, and made fun of him. So many people complained that Cloud was OOC in Advent Children and I remember feeling confused because I really didn’t think he was? He was depressed, but it seemed realistic after everything he’d been through.

“In severe cases of mental splitting when the extreme pain drives that person into disassociation, at the moment the person disassociates from their body, the soul-psyche manifest coping mechanisms to survive. To disassociate from the painful trauma felt in the body, the soul and mind will split into sub personalities, or create alternate identities. These are called alters.”

While we’re on the topic of Cloud’s fake badass silent persona, the way Tifa repairs Cloud’s fractured mind in FFVII always reminded me of the power of waking in KH. I’m sure FFVII was the precursor to this idea. Cloud developed his badass persona when he watched Zack get murdered right in front of him. He dissociated and took on a tough guy alter in order to cope.

Sora turned around. Empty husks? Is he saying they’re going to break them with sorrow and put another heart into them…? Or did they already do it?

“Translation—they were gonna turn all the members into Xehanort.”

“Make more Xehanorts?” You’re hollowing out people’s hearts to put Xehanort’s inside them?!

In order to turn people into Xehanorts, they had to break the person’s psyche with pain. That way, the Xehanort “alter” can take over the body. I’m sure that’s what the mind control experiments were about.

You could say Cloud’s heart was in the Realm of Sleep, like Ventus’s was when he first met Terra and Aqua. He was unable to talk and he was not really aware of his surroundings. Cloud’s mind was in pieces and Tifa had to “dive” inside his psyche to repair him and restore him to completeness.

KH3′s tagline was “face your fears”. When I write my KH3 rewrite fic, I wanna give each of the Seven Guardians one of these segments to fully explore their fractured psyche. A time for them to face their insecurities and fears, and actually show them being healed. That’s THE biggest thing I think KH3 was missing. Before waking up, each character needed a Tifa to help them piece themselves together. Riku got swallowed by the Demon Tower in the beginning. I think the Demon Tower was supposed to be something that causes you to be trapped in your worst nightmare. Then he’d have to face his fears with the help of Mickey. His “other self”. He’d have to confront all his insecurities and his guilt over feeling like it was his fault Destiny Island got destroyed.

Mickey got swallowed by the Demon Tower later on. Then he had to deal with his guilt over feeling like he failed Aqua and left her to rot in the Dark Realm. I think the Dark Aqua boss fight was probably originally supposed to be part of Mickey’s nightmare that Riku was trying to wake him from. All the things she said sounded like a reflection of Mickey’s worst fears. And that darkness bubble thing looked like the same thing Sora was trapped in at the end of KH3D, when he was in the nightmare.

I think ALL the main characters, including Sora, were supposed to get a segment like that to give their arcs closure. Sora would have to dive into the abyss at the beach (the KH equivalent of the Lifestream that Cloud fell into). That beach is basically the collective unconscious. All of Sora’s sleeping memories (of Castle Oblivion/Namine, Roxas, and Xion) would have to be confronted. And after that, he’d have to help Aqua face her worst feelings, which was that she failed to save Ven and Terra.

The whole opening of 0.2 foreshadowed the part where Sora would wake Aqua up. Sora didn’t really connect with her heart in KH3 or help her face her fears, though. The whole saving Aqua thing felt so rushed. I think higher ups at either Square or Disney thought that a AAA game like KH3 shouldn’t “waste” so much time with exploring the characters’ psyches and the story needed to move at a faster pace. But we missed out on so much.

I’m sure Ven was supposed to face his fears of feeling like he failed Terra. Lea would have to face his fear that he abandoned Isa for his new best friends and forgot all about him. He’d have a lot of guilt over that and he’d have to face a Nightmare Saix which would be the manifestation of all his worst fears. Honestly, I’m sure the FFVII Remake will do a better job demonstrating the power of waking than KH3. Which is sad.

Back to Cloud. In Crisis Core, you see a shy insecure kid who can’t even face Tifa. That’s the real Cloud. The part of himself he can’t accept.

Cloud never even really wanted to be a SOLDIER for its own sake.

He just wanted to accomplish something. He was lonely and depressed and thought a man was “supposed to be” a soldier. He just wanted to be noticed by Tifa. And Tifa didn’t know this. She genuinely thought Cloud was just a typical boy who wanted to leave home so he could fight in the war.

She took care of him during his time of weakness. And the whole point of FFVII was that Cloud was “weak”. I liked that he wasn’t the generic badass hero who simply “won” the girl by being strong and cool. And it made me like Tifa, too. At first, she wanted her and Cloud to fulfill the stereotypical heterosexual relationship roles. She told Cloud that when she was in trouble, her hero would come rescue her. Then Tifa got to know the real Cloud.

He loved her. But he wasn’t really that heroic. Even his mom thought he needed a girlfriend that would take care of him. But Tifa accepted him anyways, even when he didn’t live up to her knight in shining armor fantasy. She got her relationship with him, with all its flaws. She was HIS hero, actually. I liked that because FFVII was really the first game I ever played where the main couple had what I thought was genuine intimacy instead of simply the girl being the “prize”. And I LOVE FFVII. After he is pieced back together, Cloud acts completely differently. He isn’t cocky or cool. He seemed humble, quiet, and not so much a natural “leader” type.

Zack was the badass everyone thought Cloud was. He took care of Cloud after they were experimented on and Cloud was broken. I cannot help but think that Lea and Isa’s past was originally similar to theirs after being experimented on. Crisis Core was an inspiration for me in imagining their past. Lea is similar to Zack. Cheerful, confident, resilient, and heroic. Very compassionate, too. The way he talked to Cloud even when he was “broken” was very sweet. And I think Isa was similar to Cloud who is more sensitive, vulnerable, and needy. Cloud mentally fractured after watching Zack die in front of him. I wanted to write something similar with Lea and Isa. Isa mentally shatters because he witnessed Lea lose his heart. :)

[simptasia]

lost characters based solely on how i portray them in my text post memes

jack: constantly crying and/or screaming. no emotional stability. no social skills. terrible bedside manner. endearingly bland. into powerful women. loves the red sox... a lot. daddy issues. doesn’t believe in himself. has shitty tattoos. being crushed under the weight of everybody’s expectations. more or less hot. he is not cool at all. repressed attraction to guys. chronic hero syndrome. adorably embarrassing as a dad. passionately and violently overreacts to the mere concept of people believing in things. mansplains but in a non malicious way because he is literally that oblivious. gets into fights a lot. dissociates in mirrors. gets injured a lot but doesn’t wanna make a fuss. thinking about caves

kate: desperate need to protect women. bi. is frustrated by jack and sawyer’s personalities but wants to fuck them oh so much. rowdy. feminist. biceps. will call you out. is love with claire and jack and sun and- she has a lot of love to give. she can be ur angel or ur devil. exasperated. doesn’t understand astrology but she’s trying. she’s the slytherin friend every hufflepuff needs. uses guns. doesn’t know how to cook. go to relationship advice is “dump him” or “suck his dick”.  just because you put things in her vagina doesn’t mean you know her. gemini

hurley: sad clown. haha laughter! hiding real pain! has debilitating mental illness. he’s doing his best to stay positive. virgin. genuinely kind soul. overwhelmed by food. awkward around girls he likes. much smarter and wiser than anybody thinks, including himself. a special boy who we all love. says dude a lot. the only valid rich person ever. doesn’t like himself. sees dead people. kinda silly. also he’s fat (but i don’t joke about it in a cruel way)

sawyer: compulsive need to nickname people. from the south. bewildered by charlie’s english slang. covering up vulnerability with jokes and being mean. loves juliet. is an asshole but a loveable asshole (this varies, mostly he’s an asshole). conventionally attractive to the point of boring. got a Thing going on with miles. can’t stand daniel being smart around him. babies freak him out. treats animals poorly

locke: very supportive and new agey type. i’ve made two jokes about him encouraging people to jack off, that wasn’t on purpose but Okay. he doesn’t know what its like to have friends. he says Deep Sounding but odd things. he’s super duper into nature. he suffers. he’s very forgiving of ben to the point of absurdity and he desperately wants ben to love and fuck him. or maybe they are fucking. Who Knows. he loves knifes

sayid: sexy, suffering shannon fucker. he doesn’t respect boone. his life is an endless parade of misery culminating in going on autopilot. respects women

jin: he has no idea what’s going on and his life revolves around sun

sun: beautiful. perfect. very passionate about gardening

claire: bi. frequently ignored. cutesy and sweet. super into astrology and new age stuff. her cheery demeanour can only hold on so long before she loses it. kinda dumb. has baby. vanilla, at least for now. loves charlie but is kinda frustrated by him. goes feral and “kitten thinks of murder all day” sums it up

charlie: that he needs attention and validation to survive would be a gross understatement. bi. trans. punk. stupid. english. really horny and slutty. adores music more than anything. drug addict (again, i refuse to be cruel). severe jealousy issues. inferiority superiority complex. hates himself but will get offended if you hate him. can’t take any form of criticism. is bewildered by sawyer’s american-isms. bit of a madonna whore complex. smol but will go the fuck off like a terrier nipping at ya heels. catholic and riddled with catholic guilt. goofy and obnoxious and he knows it. passive aggressive. terrified of bees. nice ass. mood swings. did i mention he’s short? anyway here’s wonderwall

ben: ugly. just plain terrible. beaten and bruised. seething with rage and pain on the inside. virgin. liar. just causes problems on purpose. resembles a lemur or rat, rodents in general. loves bunnies. doesn’t think sex is real. just a really bad idea for him to be around juliet. has no friends. doesn’t care about other people. says creepy shit just because. he knows he’s a terrible person. killed people. the friend nobody likes and a general nuisance to the other characters

(also my literal first text post meme about ben was a joke about him eating his parents??? 2014 sapphire, i wanna talk...)

juliet: mom friend. seems very calm but she’s screaming on the inside. basically she’s the This Is Fine meme. depressed. has big tits. low-key kinky. feminist in a very gentle way. has no ill will towards kate and will only fight her for fun. concerned for daniel’s well being. has no chemistry with jack. loves sawyer. flat measured calm way of speaking. she’s breaking apart at the seams but will offer you a nice glass of water :)))

michael: has a son..... uh...... enjoys minecraft?

(i’m sorry)

desmond: scottish. drinks. easily and constantly confused. magic psychic time powers, like visions and electromagnetic dimensional stuff. easily angered. fucked off by the concept of time and destiny in general. hhhhhhhot

smokey: Hello Fellow Humans I Promise This Is My Own Skin Haha

miles: bi. aro. loves money (trying to fill the hole in his heart with money and things). emo/punk. pretends not to care but he really does care. thinks emotions and romance are dumb but of course is emotional... and kinda wants love. but not that he LIKES you or anything. exasperated. thinks everybody else is weird. kinda slutty or at least trying to be. masochist and into BDSM. mean to daniel for no reason. daddy issues. resting bitch face. jaded, bitter and salty. responds to romantic things dan or char say with vulgar or mocking comments. grew up poor. can hear dead people. trying too hard to be edgy. deadpan snarker. Fuck Off I’m Not Sad Don’t Look At Me [cries only around the audience and his mom]

walt: becoming older than 10 was when things went downhill for him

shannon: seems vapid but is more than that. deeply insecure. feels she can’t do anything right. constantly put down as worthless by other people. yeah she’s sad but she Looks Great. wants sayid to pound her (mood)

(gee, that was dark)

richard: very old and ageless. sees ben as a son figure. really not holding it together. seems smart but he has no fucking idea whats going on. cult mindset. quips curtly back at miles’ vulgar jokes. in love with miles based on very little interaction. misses his dead wife. has a cute giggle. is also hot. overwhelmed and just wants to go into the jungle and scream

frank: doesn’t understand what anybody is talking about. the only normal person here. doesn’t understand these kids today with their weird kinks. just wants to sleep. pilot. bit of a conspiracy theorist

boone: bi. stupid. soaked in blood a lot.  (L I T E R A L L Y all of my boone jokes are about him being dumb and bi and horribly injured and combos of those. i haven’t even made any incest jokes! what the actual fuck)

ana lucia: “[with tears in her eyes] DO U WANNA FIGHT??”. highly volatile. lesbian. bros with jack but will roast him. angery, sad and underloved

daniel: bi, agender, neurodivergent, just, just especially brain weird. The Scientist trope but kind of a shitty scientist. smart. in love with charlotte. in love with desmond. likes rats a lot. talks weird and soft spoken. withdrawn and polite but with bursts of bitterness. his mom won’t let him live the live he wants to live. time travel weirdness. loves music. gifted kid burn out. has a mental and emotional collapse. thinks a hydrogen bomb will solve all his problems. skinny. touches people a lot. he’s not okay. romantic. overwhelmed. memory problems. his lack of life experience and softness is used to contrast miles. takes some statements literally. pretty vanilla (for now) and doesn’t know what certain kinks are. likes that charlotte is Tough & Rowdy. doesn’t swear much. bad hair. was unhinged in college. has radiation poisoning

libby: neurodivergent and in love with hurley

eko: yeah... i’ve legit only used him for jokes where charlie says something EXTREMELY vulgar and eko says “go to church”

charlotte: bi, loud, passionate, beautiful, angery, knows All The Languages, huge nerd, loves daniel and thinks he’s a Snack, outspoken feminist, archaeologist/anthropologist and wants to explore some fucking ruins, The Lost Lenore trope, loves chocolate, exasperated, great smile, subtly insecure, doesn’t get that she could just tell daniel how she feels, has had many indiana jones like adventures (off screen, of course), for example: crashing her dirtbike into all 7 wonders of the world

danielle: french and unhinged, has seen some shit

alex: just a young lady with no chill

jacob: suffers from terminal apathy. has little understand of human behaviour. doesn’t care about people. he just plain sucks. has no endearing qualities. causes many problems. beats the shit outta richard. doesn’t like technology. so removed from humanity that he’s a touch uncanny valley

christian, eloise, charles and anthony jokes each have their own kind of flavours but fuck it, i’ll sum them all up as: contemptuous cunts who deserve to die

aaron: just a baby boy. does baby things. has like 5 parents

vincent: a dog. a good boy. does he know more than he lets on? is he mysterious? no, he is just a dog

[pseudoneiiric]

meta post: lili and her gender

let me go on the record to say that i fucking love lilian eyler with my whole heart, like, i typed all this out and im so fucking emotional about her! in the past, i've written things about hello charlotte and how the lgbt representation is... lacking, let's call it, and i've also made a few headcanon posts here and there about lilian's transition and her relationship with gender. so i thought, you know, let's actually write a whole ass thing about it. so here it is.

content warnings: gender dysphoria, suicide attempts, homophobia/transphobia in the original source material

PART 1: ETHERANE'S BAD TAKES so... etherane did not handle lgbt stuff well, like, in the slightest. lili is canonically genderfluid, as seen in one of those little profile things that etherane drew that doesn't actually show up in any of the games. but her genderfluid identity isn't handled well at all in the actual source material. actually, in general, hello charlotte is pretty transphobic. to cite one example, there’s this journal entry in hello charlotte 3 talking about “defective” charlotte vessels, and one of the things that can make a charlotte vessel “defective” is for them to be born amab or intersex. this already has some really bad vibes, but then we remember also that one of the big functions of charlottes is apparently for them to be sexualized (yikes!!!!!) and so we also get this weird kind of like, “trans people aren’t hot” kind of take?

but anyway. when it comes to lilian specifically, she never actually states in canon that she’s genderfluid or otherwise trans, not even in the spinoff visual novel, which, by the way, would have been the perfect place to address her gender identity, and she consistently uses he/him pronouns. we don’t actually get to see any of her thought processes about her gender at all — like at this point, i can’t even say it’s a non-issue because that would imply that they even mentioned her gender in canon. the only time we can potentially extrapolate from canon that lili might not be cis is when anri mentions that charlotte is lili’s self-insert oc. that’s kind of heavy-handed with the whole “charlotte being the female name for charles”, but that’s another matter. the point is, with the lack of any canon basis that lilian’s even vaguely questioned her gender, the reveal that she’s actually genderfluid with like, two pieces of artwork that are detached from the actual game feels very pxrfxrmxtxvxly xnclxsxvx (performatively inclusive) especially considering how.... etherane talked about lilian’s gender in particular within the actual canon material.

after all, the story behind lilian is effectively that, after she was born, her mother was forced to abort her second child, a daughter that she would name scarlett. doing so plunged her into a really deep depression that eventually took on delusional qualities. so ever since lilian was about three years old, her mother has been referring to her exclusively as scarlett, asking her to ‘ be a good girl ’ and similarly raising her as a girl. we can see here that etherane seems to have implied that genderfluidity is something that happens because other people make it so, and isn’t an identity and lived experience. (bad take!) although, albeit unintentionally, i think etherane did lay some groundwork to talk about lilian’s relationship with her gender, specifically with regards to her projection onto her oc, charlotte. in high school, when she’s more active on the internet, we see that she’s going by charlotte and using she/her pronouns. anri, her irl friend, is pretty openly critical of that, but she sort of brushes off anri’s complaints and continues to present as feminine online. now, there’s this fanfic writer who goes by the pseudonym “c”, and lilian very quickly takes an interest in him. the way she talks to c, who doesn’t know her irl, compared anri, who does, is just like flat-out like they’re completely different people.

compare, her with c:

to her with anri:

i also wanted to mention that lili does occasionally act more “femininely” with anri, but it’s never to the extent that she does with c, and in general, affectionate banter is sort of... outright ridiculed in their friendship both ways. see this one exchange:

anri: >:) always up for some roasting lili: right? <3 <3 anri: now you’re the one being gross

unrelated but it fucking kills me that anri was like “ily <3” and lili went “gross” so she went “kys” and lili deadass goes “that’s better” like that’s what anri is referencing when she says “now you’re the one being gross” and im like... please just be healthy friends who don’t wish death on each other???

it’s also worth noting that c doesn’t know that she’s not “actually” a girl, and literally when they meet, she goes like, “it’s you who should be disappointed in me. charlotte turned out to be charles, whoops! i bet you were hoping that i’d be a cute girl.” and that’s... really depressing, like, she ended up really leaning into that cutesy side of her when she was talking to c and now she feels the need to be a lot more... sarcastic and bitter, like how she is with anri, because now c “knows the truth about her”, that she’s “actually been a guy all along”.

in any case, i think the intent that etherane was going for with this was kind of like... “lilian’s actually a repressed cis gay man!” which is . not great. it gives off this really gross vibes where it’s implied that since lili was raised as a girl and is into men, she got “confused” and started going by she/her online because she couldn’t come to terms with her sexuality or whatever. and that’s just such a bad take!!!

not to mention that a really important part of lili’s backstory is... her germaphobia. she has persistent delusions accompanied by visual hallucinations where she sees people as “parasites”, which visually manifests as them rotting or decomposing. because of that, she wears gloves all the time and is repulsed by physical touch. but when she meets c (whose real name is vincent) in person, she pretty much instantly goes for skin-to-skin contact with him, where she takes off her glove and holds his hand. and like, sure, that’s sweet, but that’s really not how mental illness... works. in the slightest. she doesn’t react at all when his hand touches hers, despite the fact that she has literally had panic attacks in canon from touching things without her gloves. and it gives off this implication that mental illness can be cured with romance somehow, and that’s a really bad take!

this feeds into fandom understanding that like, well, if lilian sees vincent as pure and allows him to touch her, then Obviously she’d let him kiss her, they could probably have sex, etc. and like... she’s canonically asexual though! and that brings us to the other implication, that asexuality is somehow... caused by something. like, there’s nothing in canon to state that lilian experiences sexual attraction (or even really romantic attraction, like i know etherane went off in heaven’s gate and did a lot of ship tease, but she never really outright says she’s crushing on anyone), but judging from the way etherane handled lilian’s gender identity, i have a sneaking suspicion that she established lilian’s asexuality with her mental illnesses specifically in mind. lilian’s autistic, germaphobic, has severe ocd, and she’s been sexually assaulted in the past. therefore, she must be asexual! that’s the sort of vibes i get from the game, and im not here for it. similarly to how her genderfluidity was handled, she makes no actual statement in canon that she doesn’t experience sexual attraction. the closest she’s ever come to this is when she says to anri in heaven’s gate that she is just straight up not interested in kissing (to which anri is like, “well what if it were vincent owo??” which. ugh. anyway). it just seems really strange to me to design a character with severe mental health issues with regards to physical touch and then just sort of treat it as a given that she’s asexual. it’s another example of etherane implying that lgbt identities are results of traumatic experiences or symptoms of mental illness and not an identity or lived experience. you can be sex-repulsed and not be asexual, and while i understand that many people do identify as ace due to trauma and other such things, it still feels like really bad rep when taken with the way lilian’s genderfluidity was portrayed.

PART 2: HOW “CHARLES” IS DIFFERENT FROM “LILIAN”

throughout hello charlotte, lilian identifies herself as a passive observer, someone who doesn’t directly interfere in events. this applies mostly to her existence in false realm, where she’s like... a god, and doesn’t want to interfere in the balance of the world. but i believe she also has always seen herself as an observer. in her very first scene, the one where she and anri are watching someone get bullied, she’s the one who tells anri that there’s no point in getting help. because her role is just to observe. to take pictures for anri, to be a good girl, to say yes to everything and to never express her opinions, feelings, thoughts.

and honestly, i think the main reason for that is that she’s dysphoric. whenever she talks about herself, she’s really self-deprecating, especially compared to when she talks about charlotte. i feel like the main reason why lilian detaches herself from the world and refuses to really perceive herself is because she’s fundamentally disgusted with her gender presentation. and like, we can see in the two times that she’s presented femininely (with c and in that one comic) that lili is just so much happier and more bubbly when she’s presenting as feminine. you can literally see her stop dissociating and becoming more present in the moment because she’s just. so much more comfortable in her skin. compare:

these pictures with this one:

it’s funny i was going to say that there is a picture where she’s presenting as masculine and actually smiles like a person, but guess what! she’s texting c! so she’s actually performing femininity!

but the point is, like... when she’s presenting as masculine, especially in the canon pictures rather than etherane’s art, she just doesn’t look... happy. and then we compare that to how much more present she seems when she’s presenting as feminine, and how much more comfortable she seems in being, like, happy! and cute! but there is a downside to this. and that is...

PART 3: DIFFICULTIES IN LILI’S TRANSITION

in my sort of... “main verse” for lili, i have it so that her suicide attempt failed and that she was somehow... saved from drowning. mother passes away and she starts to... soul search a little bit and find a reason to live, and somewhere along the line she starts to transition socially. that means she starts transitioning at a pretty... extremely vulnerable point in her life. in the year between 18-19 years old, she’d be a wreck. she’s growing her hair out, but she feels insecure about it. she starts to wear skirts, but only at home. she buys makeup and never wears it. it’s a long process for her, because it’s one thing to go by she/her online or to claim she’s just a gender-confused gay boy and a completely different thing to come out as a trans woman and to actually see herself as a woman and not some kind of imposter. considering that she was raised as a girl, she would have a large amount of guilt over transitioning, feeling like she’s going to be seen as confused, or that her gender identity is a direct result of her childhood trauma. but she’s not just worried that others will see her that way: she’s worried that she’s going to see herself that way.

and for a long time, she probably does see herself that way. for a long time, scarlett would probably treat her transition as some kind of attempt to personify her unborn sister and comply with perceived expectations rather than an attempt to feel comfortable in her own skin. she’d get nervous that she’s somehow becoming scarlett, because though she’s always thought it would be easier if she’d just been her sister, she’s never really wanted to be scarlett. she’d be scared to wear mid-length skirts, scared to put her hair up in a bun, probably even scared to wear red for a time, all because she’s scared of somehow losing herself and becoming her alter.

because of her caution and concern with identifying as a trans woman and not as the “safer“ gender identity of genderfluidity (where she can say she’s trans but never actually have to “push boundaries” by wearing feminine clothing or using any pronouns besides he/him), it would likely take her a very long time to take the step to medically transition. she’d likely never get any gender affirmation surgeries just because of how invasive the procedure is, but hormones would probably be something she’d look into once she’s much older and has a more stable income.

i mentioned before that before her transition, she uses dissociation and observation as a way to cope with her gender dysphoria. she saw herself as someone who didn’t really participate in the world, was a class ghost, invisible to everyone and a minuscule part of a vast universe. but upon transitioning, she’d feel much more actively self-conscious. once she starts to present in a feminine way, she’d feel like she’s being seen, like she’s actually participating in the world, and that’s both a blessing and a curse.

she’d be much more prone to stammering, especially when saying her name, and would blush far more often. she’d be afraid of saying the wrong thing or messing up somehow. and on top of that, she’d likely feel predatory for talking to others, always wondering if others find her cute or repulsive, always wondering if someone will perceive her and harm her in some way.

she’d very likely also feel really guilty about her own emotional experience. because she’s so used to being a passive observer, a puppet that only does what others want, she would feel like it’s selfish to be just... content. she’s so actively disgusted with herself before she transitions that she’s never allowed herself to be mentally present for a happy moment in her entire life. she always second-guesses, always dismisses positive things as a mere coincidence, and after she transitions, when she starts being more present in her life, she’d feel so guilty for just allowing herself to be happy.

because of that, she has some trouble with presenting as feminine consistently — she’d vary the “level” of her feminine presentation from day-to-day, where she might go full femme one day and another day stick with a beanie and a pair of slacks. she’s much more comfortable with presenting as more traditionally feminine when she’s at home or with trusted friends in a private space, but around 19 years old, she makes a vested effort to remain in public spaces. she’d time herself, saying, “for one hour, i’ll stay in this café while wearing a skirt, and then i can leave,” and she’d gradually increase the amount of time she spends in public spaces. and eventually, eventually she does end up feeling really comfortable with her gender presentation and falls into a more static sense of style. she really likes clothing design, so she ends up wearing a lot more dynamic outfits when she’s more comfortable with herself, and she probably also mildly gets into cosplay.

i also like to think that she reconnects with anri during her young adult years. either it’s like, right after her suicide attempt (i’ve written before that she’d had anri listed as her emergency contact and forgot to change it when she moved), or it’s at some point after she starts transitioning socially. i think it’d be really sweet for them to be friends in a more real way, and the sheer concept of anri teaching lili how to properly apply makeup and to set her hair is just so fucking sweet i might die. they both deserve to have friends so i think this is just a step up from hello charlotte canon.

[yellowmagicalgirl]

Every Ghost In Me

So I thought this would be done in time for the @jlaireweek mini event, but college is hard and this fic decided to be the longest fic I have ever written.

The events of this fic are platonic, but Jim and Claire probably end up falling in love afterward.

Title comes from a Starset song.

Summary:

Jim and Toby are astronauts sent to the dimension known as D-13, or as the media calls it, the Shadow Realm. Jim's tether breaks, and he is left alone.

He isn't alone.

AO3

FFN

“You ready for tomorrow?” Toby asked as he leaned down from the bunk above Jim's. They were on the last day of quarantine before the mission. Despite the darkness, Jim could see a giddy smile on his best friend's face.

“Mostly,” Jim said. He was nervous in a way that his anxiety medication couldn't quite handle. They were going to another dimension, and they'd be the first ones doing so. It'd be just them with nothing more than tethers and space suits. It was probably to save money; the rest of NASA was trying to integrate Akiridion and various other technology into its projects. Jim was an orbital mechanics specialist, not an electrical engineer, so he couldn't be quite sure if it was due to the alliance that the king-and-queen-in-waiting of Akiridion-5 had made or the fact that certain military bases were actually sharing their research now.

“Mostly? What's wrong?”

“Nothing, well, nothing real, just the usual anxiety I've had all my life about something going wrong. But seriously, Tobes, I'll be fine. We'll be fine.”

The next day started inconsequentially, with an alternative rock song about space blaring from Toby's phone. Jim made breakfast and tried not to feel like anything bad would happen. It wasn't a long mission, but since there was no ship the two of the would always have to keep their helmets on. Due to this, they would only be in another dimension for a couple hours. They would be fine.

“Mister Jim, are you alright?” Blinky asked as he helped him suit up. His husband, Arthur, was helping Toby don his own astronaut suit a few feet away.

“Yeah, just, well, nervous.” It was a more courageous word than afraid, but the acting technician seemed to figure out Jim's words anyways.

“Goodness gracious, why wouldn't you be? You and Tobias are the first ones going into uncharted territory, and it doesn't help that the media has been calling this dimension the Shadow Realm. But remember, fear is but the precursor to valor. Don't think, Mister Jim. Become.”

“Um…” Jim trailed off. While he and Blinky had what could be almost considered a father-son relationship, he was technically Jim's superior. Due to both, he didn't want to be even vaguely disrespectful before the mission, not when there was a margin of error for not coming back.

“What's wrong now?”

“We work for NASA; aren't I supposed to think?”

“Well, today's mission isn't exactly rocket science, is it”" After a moment, they both started chuckling.

Jim's nerves were calmer as the airlock doors hissed closed. It was just him, Toby, and the Bridge. Or, well, they had taken to calling it a bridge. If anything, it was closer to being a wormhole, but its shape looked like a bridge, hence the name. Toby had mentioned that they were passing under the bridge, not over it, and thus it didn't make all that much sense, but the name had stuck.

“Ten,” came Eli's voice from the countdown. He was among the youngest of the engineers for the mission, but that came with the territory of being a graduate from MIT with a 4.0 GPA.

“Nine.”

Toby smiled. “You ready for the adventure of our lives?”

“Eight.”

“Of course,” Jim said. “I've got you by my side.”

“Seven.”

Wait.

“Six.”

Had Jim called his mom this morning? Or at least tried to?

“Five.”

Had he at least texted her?

“Four.”

There was a chance that Jim wouldn't be coming back.

“Three.”

Had Jim told her that he loved her?

“Two.”

“Relax, Jimbo. If you hyperventilate now, you'll use up all your oxygen.”

“One.”

Jim took a deep breath. It was only a couple hours, max. He would be back to talk to his mom.

The light at the top of the Bridge flashed bright blue, and bright blue light trailed down the edges. The light was closer to a sky-blue, or even a blue-violet, than the cyan that was common among Akiridion technology. When the light hit the base of the Bridge, that same blue light filled it inside, forming an opaque surface.

The Bridge was open.

“Remember, young Umbranauts,” Dr. Strickler said over the microphone. Toby groaned at the shadow-related pun that the media had created. So did Dr. Vendel, the director of the department. “Don't try to go further than your tether permits and use your best judgement.”

Jim and Toby walked through the Bridge and were immediately met with the feeling of weightlessness. It was a good thing that they had had the standard astronaut training despite not being in outer space. Jim chuckled.

“What's so funny, Jimbo?”

“Remember when they said we shouldn't need to do zero-g training because of Akiridion gravity generators?”

“I guess Steve can go eat his Vespa helmet now.”

“You know we can hear you, right?” Eli asked over the radio comms. The signal was weak and full of static.

“Um, barely?” Toby said. “There's a ton of interference.”

“Be careful, then.”

It was silent for a moment, until Toby pointed into the distance of what apparently wasn't an empty void. “Hey, is that an asteroid?”

It wasn't just one asteroid.

It was an entire cluster of moving asteroids, or at least that's what the two of them could see. The only light was the flashlights built into their suits and the distant glow of the Bridge.

“Well, there's definitely matter here,” Toby said. “I want to get a sample, that way we can figure out what type it is.”

“Knew your geology minor would end up being useful,” Jim said, propelling himself towards the asteroids.

“Hey, that one looks like it might be shaped like a house!” Toby pointed to a particularly large asteroid in the distance.

“That's kind of freaky.”

“Maybe a bit, since most of these asteroids are vaguely spherical, but maybe it used to be large and broke recently?”

“Still freaky, but I'll go with your explanation, Tobes.”

Jim tried to ignore the feeling that he was being watched from the house-shaped asteroid. It was just his anxiety. It had to be just his anxiety.

The two men landed on the asteroid. Toby got out his hard-light knife. It wasn't nearly as powerful as an Akiridion serrator, but it was less weight than the drills that had been used in previous years. “Huh, that's odd.”

“Oh?”

“The handle's glowing gold.”

Jim turned his head to look behind him. “I don't think it's the knife that's glowing, Tobes.” Rather, a large cluster of asteroids floated behind them; all of them were surrounded by golden light.

“I wonder what's causing them to glow like that.”

Jim's head darted to his left.

“Is something wrong?” Toby asked, looking at his friend.

“I thought I saw a flash of purple coming from the house-shaped one.”

Without warning, the golden asteroids began racing towards the two of them. They scrambled to get out of the way, tethers looping between the asteroids that weren't glowing.

“Houston? Eli? Anyone? We've got a problem!” Toby called out. Jim would have called for help as well, but all he could think of was trying to dodge. The glowing ones seemed to move without pattern, without any discernible forces acting upon them. The glowing asteroids changed shape to become sharper.

“What's going on?” Strickler asked. His voice was heavily altered by static. In the background, Eli was stammering something incomprehensible.

“The asteroids want to kill us!” Toby cried.

“They're sharp,” Jim said, his voice a detached, almost dissociated calm that scared him. A calm that certainly didn't match the rapid oscillation of his heartbeat. “They turned sharp.”

“Get out of there,” Vendel said. The order was almost unnecessary because Jim and Toby were already trying to do so. "And be quick about it; we can't let a hostile force into this side of the bridge."

They couldn't. The only person there with any combat experience was Arthur Galadrigal, but the trauma from his experience in the marines was so bad that despite being a brilliant engineer he had a hard time forming words.

The shard-like asteroids paused for a moment before directing themselves behind Toby and Jim, while a medium-sized asteroid rose up to join them. Jim felt a tug from behind him. His tether.

“Tobes! Tobes!” he called, realizing the danger. The shards began slamming down onto the tether. Jim wasn't sure what the asteroids were made of, but whatever it was they were strong enough that the outer shell of his tether was being shredded, leaving the vulnerable craft-store yarn core exposed to the asteroids. The idea of something so easily cut by scissors being the only thing keeping astronauts from flying into the uncaring void of space had made Jim nervous once, but acrylic yarn was cheap and light, and the fibers used as an outer casing were strong enough to resist space junk.

Once again, he feared the fact that the only thing keeping him tethered to the Earth could be cut by the scissors he had in his kitchen at home. Some disconnected part of Jim wondered if he'd be fine if they added in hard light to the blend instead of just using materials that were originally developed when he was fourteen or younger.

In space, no one can hear you scream because sound doesn't carry in a vacuum. In this alternate dimension with killer asteroids, Jim couldn’t hear the telltale ripping, but that might have also been the roar of blood and static in his ears.

Toby turned around in time to see the moment when Jim became freely floating in dimension D-13. He turned around just in time to see the fear that overtook his best friend's face as he began free falling in the Shadow Realm.

“Hold on, I'll get you!” On cue, another asteroid began to rise, and once again there was a flash of purple light.

Jim thought he heard someone saying to reel them back in, but he couldn’t be sure because it blended together with the static, with his heartbeat, with all the anxious thoughts that had come true.

“Tobes, tell my mom I love her!”

“Tell her yourself and look out!”

Jim looked behind himself at the asteroid flying towards him from below and behind. He began looking around for something, anything, to use as a handhold. He saw a blur of purple light that almost looked like a person rush up from below and in front of him. It looked like it was going to push him up and away.

When the light passed through him, Jim felt a rush of shock, and then a second one because the first one hadn’t felt like it was his own. Then he just felt pain. Blunt pain as the asteroid crashed into his back and shattered his helmet. Biting pain as one of the shards of his helmet flew up and cut his cheek because at least some forces were working the way they were supposed to. Burning pain as he tried to keep in the oxygen he had left.

Jim kept his eyes on Toby for as long as he could. He crossed through the Bridge and when it closed Jim couldn’t tell if that was the reason why his vision was going black or the fact that he was suffocating.

“You do realize that you can breathe here, right?” said a voice Jim had never heard before. Still, he found himself exhaling. “There’s enough oxygen in this place that I can start fires.”

He breathed in and out a couple times before turning to the voice despite the screaming of his back. The person-shaped blur of light was now actually a person. Well, a transparent purple one that had a multitude of hairclips in her hair. She looked like she was in the later years of high school at the youngest and barely old enough to start college at the oldest. She was also holding onto a broken-off piece of Jim’s tether.

“I guess I can’t touch you,” she said, and her voice shook a bit. She squeezed her eyes before opening them and pushing her shoulders down and back. The next time she spoke it was firmer, more confident. “Knowing her she’ll try to separate us so hold onto this. I’m going to get us to somewhere safe.”

Jim looked down at the cable. “Are you sure? Those asteroids already ripped through my tether, what’s stopping them from shredding this piece as well?”

“She already used up a lot of energy trying to kill you and that other guy – I think you called him Tobes? She’s probably gone back to wherever she normally lurks and plots how she plans to try and kill my soul and hijack my body next. That means that I won’t get caught off-guard and I can reinforce it with my powers before it can get shredded.”

Jim decided to pretend that he understood what the purple girl was saying about body-hijacking and powers. His day was already much crazier than he had intended. She didn’t seem hostile, and she knew the lay of the land better than he did.

Jim grabbed onto the tether and let himself be led away.

 Toby crashed onto the Earth side of the Bridge. “I could have gotten to him!” he shouted. “I could have saved him if you didn’t start reeling me back!”

“Don’t know that,” Arthur said, breaking quarantine to hug Toby. “Don’t want lose you, too.”

It was probably true. That asteroid had come up too fast for Toby to get to his best friend, but he could have at least brought back his best friend’s body.

 The purple girl was silent as she led him through the asteroid field. They were still moving, but they had relaxed their fast, erratic movements. She kept looking back at Jim, as if to make sure he was still there. Eventually she landed on a particularly large asteroid.

Toby hadn’t pointed out a house-shaped asteroid, even though it had looked like one. He had pointed out an asteroid that had an entire house on top of it.

“Well, we’re here.”

“Right,” Jim said.

She let go of the tether and walked to the front door, pushing it open. “Come on, she won’t be able to get to us inside.”

Jim followed behind the purple girl. “Who is ‘she’?”

The girl shrugged, closing the door behind him. “She has many names. Heck, those were some of her exact words. ‘I have many names.’ Some of her names include Morgana, the Pale Lady, and as I’ve called her sometimes, the gold-plated trashcan who needs to go burn in some other hell. I’m Claire, by the way, what’s yours, NASA-guy?”

“What?”

Claire pointed at the circular patch that rested over his heart. “Unless that’s a stolen spacesuit or the US had to lone one to another country, I’m pretty sure you work for NASA.”

“Yeah, I do, I’m Jim, but how do you know about NASA? We haven’t contacted this dimension at all before today. No one has.”

“Eh, debatable. I mean, I’m as human as you are. Or at least I used to be.”

Jim was silent as he looked around the room. It looked like an average American living room, which would make sense if Claire was from Earth, but that didn’t make sense. He knew Area 49-B wasn’t a fan of sharing extraterrestrial technology, but after General Morando had tried to invade Earth and the king-and-queen-in-waiting had fought him and his army off, all their information had been made public. They hadn’t sent a random girl into an alternate dimension.

“How long have you been here?”

“I think it was May first? Yeah, it probably was, it was a Monday and the day of the AP Chemistry exam and I had gone to the bathroom because I wasn’t feeling well, and,” she shuddered. “And then Morgana tried to possess me, and I’m here now. I haven’t been able to count the days since, well, there’s no sun and I don’t need to eat or sleep since I don’t have a physical body right now. Not to mention, there was that time where I nearly got turned into nothingness and had to pull myself back together. So, like, at most a year and a half?”

“Are you sure? Because May second is my mom’s birthday, and it was on a Friday last year.”

Claire’s face crumpled slightly. “What day is it?”

Jim had memorized the date of the launch, not knowing it would be his last day on Earth. “November seventh, twenty-twenty-six.”

Claire seemed to cave in on herself. “I’ve been here for over a decade.” Her voice was a heartbroken whisper. “I think I’m dead by now.”

 Barbara had just started her lunch break when her cell phone rang. The caller ID said it was Toby Domzalski. He had been Jim’s best friend since the two of them were five and had remained close all their lives. Today they had even went on a mission together.

“Hi, Toby,” she said. “You’re back already?”

“I’m sorry,” Toby said from the other end of the line. “I’m sorry, Dr. L, I’m so sorry, I tried to save him but–”

Barbara didn’t hear what he said next because she had dropped the phone. Toby and Jim had been best friends for nearly all their lives, but her son was gone now.

 Claire had walked away from Jim after claiming to be dead, and Jim had decided to let her have at least a few moments of alone time. He had just met her, and he didn’t know what to say to her to make her feel better. Instead, he had looked for a first aid kit and had begun cleaning his cut. He winced at the sting of alcohol and had placed bandages along the larger areas of the cut, hoping that he wasn’t taking too much of her supply. Afterwards, he put the kit away and climbed the stairs of her house, looking around. As he pushed open the door to a room with a crib, he heard a sob from behind him.

Jim looked into the room and saw Claire wrapped in a blanket. No tears fell from her eyes, but she was shaking enough that she may as well have been crying.

Jim didn’t know her, but he was probably one of the biggest reasons why she was in this state, and there didn’t seem to be anyone else who could comfort her.

“Do you want to talk?” he asked in a soft voice.

She sniffled, and for a moment looked surprised that she could. “Can’t say I’m good at it, since I’ve been alone for… you know.”

Jim sat a foot and a half away from her. She mimed the action of taking a couple deep breaths, but he didn’t hear her breathe. She was probably trying to act like she was still alive and still had a body, and he couldn’t fault her for that.

“I’ve tried to get back to my body multiple times,” she said. “I guess I always thought it was on life support after all this time. But I don’t think my parents would have kept my body around for that long, and since she’s not in it it’s basically a vegetable. And they have my little brother to worry about, anyways.”

“Your brother, what was he like?” Jim asked. “At least, what was he like before you came to the Shadow Realm?”

“The what?”

Internally, Jim wanted to smack himself. “Sorry, that’s what the media’s been calling this place, we’ve been calling it D-13.”

“I mean, I’ve been calling it stuff ‘my own personal empty hellscape’ or ‘prison’, so the Shadow Realm sounds so cool in comparison.”

“Yeah, I think that’s why so few people called it D-13, even those of us who were on the project.”

“Why’d you guys even call it that?”

“Well, it turns out that some parts of string theory were right even though Einstein’s theories of relativity were proven to be true, and there were eleven spatial dimensions and time. So when Dr. Kanjigar discovered it, he just named it numerically.”

“Huh, I thought it would have at least been named after him or something. Also, well, Enrique was barely seven months old when I, you know,” Claire said. Her entire body seemed to glow just a tiny bit brighter when she talked about her brother.

“Guess that explains the crib in the other room.”

“Yeah, I didn’t mean to make it? Since he’s not here, I didn’t need it, but when I made the copy of my house it just looked the same way my house had looked last time I saw it.”

“How did you make it?”

Claire uncurled herself from the blanket. “You remember me saying that I have powers?”

Jim nodded.

“So, I don’t think I’d be able to do this if I was back on Earth, but I can will things into existence, and I can also control the asteroids. I can also sense when things aren’t normal around here, which usually means Morgana’s trying to do something. It took me what felt like a long time to figure out how to use them, though, and it’s not like I can use them to escape.” Her form dimmed. “Believe me, I’ve tried.”

 A tired pair of parents sat in a house that looked a decade more modern than the one in the Shadow Realm, but other than that the same.

“It’s been over ten years,” Ophelia said. Javier rubbed her back and looked at a picture they had of their children.

“I bet she’d be doing something great if she had ever woken up,” he said.

“But she didn’t. Do you think we should…” she trailed off, a guilty look on her face.

“Hey mom? Could you help me with my math homework?” their son called from his homework at their kitchen table.

 “So, what’s the coolest thing you’ve ever done for NASA?” Claire asked.

“Other than get attacked by, as you put it, a gold-plated trashcan while being one of the first people to cross into another dimension? Probably that time I worked on Durian gravity generators.”

“Wait, we have those now? I thought you would’ve had to get zero-gravity training!”

“I mean, Toby and I did, but about a month after you came here the king-and-queen in waiting of the planet Akiridion-5 went into hiding on Earth. Like, they even went to my school, Arcadia Oaks High –”

“Wait, you went to the mole school?” Claire interjected. “I went to Arcadia Oaks Academy!”

Jim gave her a flat look. “Yeah, well, my school hosted interplanetary royalty so I guess that settles the rivalry. Anyways, they stayed on Earth for a couple months before the guy who had taken over their planet invaded, and they fought him off. Afterwards, they forged an alliance with various countries on Earth, and our technology has really taken off since.”

“That’s really cool… wish I had stayed around a little longer, then I could’ve seen aliens.”

“Um, don’t call them ‘aliens’; most extraterrestrial species get offended by that. Refer to them as their species name, or life beings, or if you have to, extraterrestrials, but that one is still a bit touch and go.”

“Cool, will do… if I ever get out of here, of course.”

The words “not that I will” hung unspoken in the air.

“I mean, you getting in here seems pretty impossible, so maybe you can find a way to make it out?”

“Yeah, maybe, probably over my own dead body. I really wish I had picked Truth that night.” Seeing Jim’s confused look, she sighed. “I know this probably sounds crazy, but I’ve had a long time to think it over. Besides, my version of normal involves evil golden space witches and magic powers. A bit over a week before I got sent here, I was at a slumber party with my two best friends, Mary and Darci. You might’ve known them, they went to your school and we’re all about the same age.

“Anyways, we were playing truth or dare, and I knew they were trying to figure out if I had a boyfriend and if it was one of the band guys at my school or the college student who would help me with my calculus homework when I went to the tutoring center in the library after school, and I didn’t want to tell them because they’d tease me over it. So naturally I chose Dare, and Mary had found this weird occult ritual on the internet that was honestly a lot like Bloody Mary, except it was to summon someone called the Eldritch Queen. I’ll give you three guesses who that title refers to.”

“Morgana?”

“Knew you had to be smart to get into NASA. Anyways, I did the ritual, and I didn’t expect it to work or anything. Except then I started getting sick. I thought it was due to stress, but, well, the ritual was actually the real deal, or something. And I don’t blame Mary and Darci for it, because they’re not the type try and banish someone to another dimension, but here I am now.” She sighed. “And probably for all of eternity.”

 Ophelia and Javier had talked about their decision extensively. It wasn’t an easy decision, but it was time. That was why they had driven to the hospital after taking their son to school. Arcadia Oaks was a relatively small town, which meant that the care facility for the dying was another wing of the hospital. It was a wing they were quite familiar with.

Enrique had lived nearly his entire life spending weekends and times after school watching after an older sister who had never woken up. He had spent nearly his entire life with an older sister whose closed eyes would twitch for the first time in months only for her brain activity to show no signs of waking up.

It had been far too long to continue hoping.

“Oh, Mr. and Mrs. Nuñez, we were just about to call you!” one of the nurses at the receptionist’s desk said. Ophelia and Javier looked at each other in confusion.

“Did something happen?” Javier asked. They had wanted to be able to at least say goodbye to what was left of their daughter before they took her off life support.

Seeing their faces, the nurse gave them an awkward smile. “Nothing bad, though I think it’s best if you saw.” They followed the nurse to Claire’s room.

There was a television on in her room. It was always on because hearing was one of the last senses to go and being able to hear things was supposedly good for comatose patients. Right now, it was showing a memorial taking place at JPL. It was for the young man who had died in the mission to dimension D-13 two days ago. In the background, the song “Amazing Grace” was playing.

And vaguely to the tune of “Amazing Grace”, Claire was tapping the fingers of her right hand.

She hadn’t moved her fingers in over ten years.

“I don’t know how or why,” the nurse said, “but I think she might wake up.”

 “What’re you doing?” Claire asked. Jim managed to avoid dropping the equipment he was working on. He didn’t manage to avoid screaming and flailing his arm in such a way that it passed through her multiple times. Claire jumped back; the action of Jim passing through her made them both uncomfortable. He tried to avoid doing anything that would cause him to “touch” her. However, after a decade of not interacting with anyone other than an entity that wanted to possess her body and kill her soul, Claire had forgotten social cues like making noise when she walked to alert people of her presence, or not standing directly behind someone and asking questions out of nowhere.

“Trying to fix my radio. It’s a crapshoot on getting any signal with this, but I might be able to contact JPL or someone else with it. Of course, it might’ve only worked when the Bridge was open.”

“Oh, that’s cool,” Claire said, and while she sounded hopeful her form grew dimmer with disappointment. “I hope they can rescue you.”

Of course, if he was rescued she’d be alone again.

“I can’t say for sure, since I don’t work with that type of technology, but we might be able to transfer you into a machine of some sort once I get back to Earth.”

Claire’s form brightened.

“Can you shine some light near the radio? Thanks,” Jim said. “Akiridions have these robots called Blanks, and while they start out with no personality whatsoever, they’re able to achieve singularity.”

“Isn’t that what happens with black holes and stuff?”

“Er, technically, yeah, but with robots it means they pretty much develop a soul and you can’t really tell them apart from sapient life-beings. If we were to take a brand new Blank and place your soul into it, you might be able to live on Earth again. Well, not live-live but I think you know what I’d mean.”

“I’d like that,” Claire said. If she could form tears there would probably be some collecting in the corners of her eyes. “Want me to see if there’s a way I can try and amplify the signal?”

 It had been a bit over a week since Jim had died, and Eli was putting in overtime. It was either that or rewatching old Buzzfeed: Unsolved episodes while eating way too many chips that his mom would have never let him eat as a kid due to the amount of preservatives and trans fats they had. He glared at the code he was trying to write. If this was a case of a for loop that hadn’t been closed properly, he’d be so mad. The fact that his headphones had started to become staticky wasn’t helping.

Eli took off his headphones, and the static didn’t stop. He then noticed that the radio that they had used for the mission into the Shadow Realm was on.

“Hello?” came a voice from the radio. Eli fumbled with his phone to turn on the voice recorder to make a backup copy just in case.

“Hello, is anyone there?” said the same voice. There was heavy static and distortion overlaying it. “This is Jim Lake Jr, I recently got stranded in the dimension known as D-13. Can anybody hear me?”

“Jim! Is that you? It’s Eli, I’m listening!”

The transmission cut out.

 Claire’s face scrunched up in pain and her hands seized into fists.

The heart monitor beeped more rapidly.

She took a breath. As she exhaled, she released the tension and spirit that had started to build up in her body. Just like she had been for most of a decade, Claire’s body was still and at seeming peace.

 “Hello, is anyone there?” Jim asked into the radio that Claire was holding. Her eyes were closed, and her hair floated around her. “This is Jim Lake Jr, I recently got stranded in the dimension known as D-13.”

There was a loud screeching noise, like a microphone giving feedback, and Claire dropped the radio like it had burned her. Jim was able to catch it before it could hit the ground, but by glancing at it he could tell that parts of it had melted.

Claire was convulsing; her eyes had rolled back into her head and sparks were coming out of her hands. Jim looked around, trying to think of something, anything, that could help her. Claire inhaled, sharply, and for an infinite millisecond she just hung in midair, still and seemingly at peace.

He grabbed a cushion from the couch and used it to catch her when she dropped.

“I’m sorry, I can try to fix it later,” Claire said. She looked and sounded more exhausted than she ever had since Jim had met her. She tried to get up from the cushion but fell back onto it “I just need some time to recharge.”

“Claire, are you okay? It’s like the radio made you have a seizure. If it’s hurting you, we shouldn’t keep doing this.”

“I’m dead, Jim.” She gave him a weak smile. “I’ll be some form of okay no matter what.”

It wasn’t the lie she’d give so long ago. She hadn’t said she was okay right now.

  “You sent me a thousand texts, Eli! A thousand texts!” Toby had tracked down Eli as soon as he could once he arrived at JPL. “What’s your data plan like that you can send me a thousand texts?”

“It’s unlimited talk and text, but it wouldn’t let me send you the thing I wanted to.”

“What were you trying to send me?”

“Something that’s going to rock your world, Tobes.”

Toby glared as Eli began to walk away, gesturing to follow him. “Only one person got to call me Tobes, and that’s not changing.”

“Rock. Your. World.”

They were in a rather empty wing of the building when Eli stopped walking and pulled his phone out. He opened his voice recording app, and pressed play.

Toby started crying when he heard his best friend’s voice. Then he wiped his eyes and took a breath. “What do we do now?”

“I mean, it’s probably illegal and will make us lose our jobs and –”

“Eli.”

“We’d have to reopen the Bridge to get to Jim.”

“Well, it’s a good thing he’s more well-liked now than he was in high school.”

 “If you hadn’t gotten stuck here, what do you think you would’ve done with your life?” Jim asked.

“I’m not sure. I mean, I was dead set on becoming an actress because I liked acting in school plays and musicals, but then I started getting into black holes. Well, not literally, unless we’re inside a black hole right now.”

 Blinky and Arthur looked at each other, and then at Toby and Eli.

“Of course we’ll help you, Tobias,” Blinky said. “We can’t just leave Mister Jim stranded.” Arthur nodded.

“Thanks Blink,” Toby said.

“However, we shouldn’t tell his mother,” Blinky continued.

“Why?” Eli asked.

“Dr. L’s taking Jim’s, well, not-death pretty bad,” Toby said.

“Hurt worse,” Arthur said.

“Precisely,” Blinky said. “It would be cruel to get her hopes up and then immediately dash them if something were to happen to Mister Jim should we fail.”

Claire’s arms were outstretched in front of the kitchen counter. Her eyes were squeezed tightly, and her teeth were slightly gritted. There was a flash of purple light, and several avocados appeared on the counter.

“I thought you didn’t eat,” Jim commented.

“I don’t, but you do and I’m pretty sure at least some of those canned foods are way past their expiration dates.”

“Okay, one, I’ve been avoiding the cans that look like they could be even remotely spoiled. Two, you literally made them using your weird space ghost magic. If the food in them isn’t good, then no offense but I’d be less worried about food poisoning from mundane causes than from the fact that it isn’t from Earth. And if the cans are contaminated by the fact that this dimension is somewhat under control of an evil space witch you summoned at a slumber party, then I can’t see how avocados will be much better.”

Claire ignored his comment in favor of slicing open the avocados. “I used to be good at making guacamole, so I hope this tastes good.”

“You want any help?”

 “Are you sure about him, Eli?” Toby asked.

“Look, I know he wasn’t that great in the past, but he’s not a bad dude! Though he might be a bit more motivated you guys’ rivalry.”

“Exactly! He’s going to want to rub it in everyone’s face that he helped save Jim! I swear, his head’s already so big that I’m not sure how he can fit it in his Vespa helmet.”

“Well, do you have any better ideas for finding someone we can trust both not to rat us out and also to help us save Jim?”

“Yeah. Draal.”

“Isn’t Draal in DC right now?”

“Fuck, fine. Let’s go talk to Steve.”

 Claire didn’t try to fix the radio, at least, not at first. Instead, she was watching as Jim painstakingly took the radio apart piece by piece, and she tried to replicate the pieces he declared “probably okay.” She didn’t want to work on the radio itself after what had happened last time. Besides, that was Jim’s only way out of here. It might be her only way out of here as well.

“You okay?” he asked, looking up from his work. She realized that she was frowning slightly. “Seriously, take a break if you need to.”

“Yeah, no, I’m fine.” And unlike the well-worn excuse she would give when she was alive, she actually meant it.

“So, what you’re saying is that that buttsnack needs saving, and you want me for the job? Of course I’m in!”

Toby suppressed a groan with a half-hearted smile. “Just remember, Steve, no telling anyone.”

“Can I tell Shannon? She’d want to help, and she can probably help divert power.”

“I’ll talk to her,” Eli said.

“By the way,” Toby asked. “How are you in a low-gravity environment?”

 Jim pushed away the radio, blinking. “Okay, I’ll need fresh eyes for this,” he said, before realizing that there wasn’t a telltale purple glow in the room.

“Thanks for letting me talk to myself for an hour,” he said to the empty air. He walked through the house, mainly to stretch his legs but also to see where Claire had gone. He looked through one of the windows of the living room and saw her outside. She held a two-pronged staff made of purple light and fought an invisible opponent. Jim looked at her, grimaced, and then grabbed a broom before going outside. He didn’t want to go out into the asteroid field if he didn’t have to, but he wasn’t leaving her alone to fight.

“Need any help?” he asked from the porch. Claire looked at him and blushed slightly.

She didn’t have blood; how could she blush?

“Uh, no, just training,” she said, not quite looking at him. “Never can be sure if Morgana will attack.”

“Has she ever attacked the house?”

“No, but sometimes I’d get bored and try to explore here. It’s boring, by the way, no use trying to look into it.”

“That’s literally my job, you know. I got sent to this dimension to try and learn about it.”

“Yeah, well, I’m half sure Morgana created all the asteroids, so studying it might be a little hard when her magic is involved. Anyways, she hates me for not turning into her host, and thus she tends to randomly attack me when I go into the asteroid field. I’ve gotten kind of good at sensing her and any other anomalies here, but sometimes things still catch me off guard.”

“Okay, that makes sense. I was just worried you were getting attacked by some sort of invisible monster or something.” Jim looked down to the broom he was holding. “Do you want a sparring partner? I won’t be able to help with kicks and stuff, since we’d pass through each other, but I took fencing lessons in college.”

  “Is everyone ready?” Toby asked. He stood in the same suit he had stood in nearly two weeks ago. It was so much longer than he would have wanted. Instead of having Jim by his side, Steve stood in a stolen space suit – more stolen than the one Toby was wearing, anyways – and held several meters worth of cables that had all been braided together to make something stronger. Something that would hopefully stand up against the barrage of sharpened asteroids.

“Dispatching power on your cue,” Shannon said. In other circumstances, the glee in her eyes at the prospect of hacking the government – specifically, the section of the government that they all worked for and generally trusted to be humane – would have been a little concerning.

“Guard doors,” Arthur said.

“No one appears to be in the area aside from us,” Blinky confirmed.

“Shannon, Eli,” Toby said as he stepped forward. “It’s time.”

“Ten,” Eli started.

“A countdown is superfluous,” Blinky said.

“Right,” Eli said before opening the Bridge.

 Claire didn’t sleep, but Jim did. He had taken the bed in her parents’ room, while Claire tried to quietly practice her guitar. They were almost done fixing the radio. She still wasn’t sure why it had acted up like that, why she had felt such pain course through her. She hadn’t felt actual pain in so long.

Oh, she had felt emotional pain in her decade of being here. The loneliness had hollowed her. Learning that she had been here for a decade was like she had been smashed between two of the asteroids. It was all metaphorical; it all hurt. It was everywhere Claire could feel; it was nowhere she could claim to be a reflection of what had been her body.

This had been different. The pain had started in her hands and it had grown stronger, washing through her and she hadn’t been able to contain it all.

Nothing had hurt like that since Claire’s soul had been first ripped from her body.

Claire twisted the tuning peg, and then stopped as she noticed that something had changed. She stood up and ran to her parents’ room. The door was already open, or else she would have slammed it. She tried to shake Jim awake before being reminded of the fact that they passed through each other.

“Jim. Jim. Jim, wake up. Please don’t make me poke you with a stick, Jim. Wake up, it’s important.”

“Can it wait for five more minutes?”

“No, it can’t.”

Jim rolled over and opened his eyes. “What is it?”

“So, you know how I can sense when changes happen here? And how I was able to tell when your Bridge opened?” Jim nodded. “It’s open.”

Jim blinked away the tiredness that had clung to him. “They got our message.”

“Yeah, but I’m not sure where they’re expecting to find you, so we need to go before Morgana attacks them.”

Jim leapt out of the bed, and then stopped. “We didn’t arrange to get you a new body,” he said.

Claire was already walking out of the room. “I know.” She grimaced. “But I have time. We don’t know how much time you have.”

“Do you know how to fix the rest of the radio? I promise I’ll contact you after I cross through the bridge.”

“I think I’ll be able to figure it out.” She smiled. “Let’s go. You’re going home.”

 Steve floated near the edge of the Shadow Realm. He unspooled the braided cables and watched as Toby floated towards the asteroid field, calling out Jim’s name.

Steve hated low-gravity environments so much. This was why he was usually on Akiridion freighter ships and not old Earth-based ones.

Jim had better be grateful that he was doing this.

 Jim had been trained for low-gravity situations, but compared to Claire’s effortless flight he was clumsy. She was ethereal, a beacon of light in this dimension of shadows.

He was going to miss her so much. They had only known each other for a short amount of time, but they had become close. Or at least, he thought it was only a short amount of time. Jim couldn’t know just how much time had passed back on Earth. After all, Claire had been trapped for over a decade and had thought she had only been here for a couple months.

“Jimbo? Jim, where are you?”

Jim turned towards the sound of his best friend’s voice and was pleased to see that Toby didn’t look much older than when Jim had gotten trapped. Tired, yes, but grief will do that to you. Grief and stress and just the everyday life of a person who worked in STEM.

“Over here!” Jim shouted before coughing.

Claire looked at him in concern. “You okay?”

“Yeah, just space dust,” Jim said, already bounding over to Toby. Jim wasn’t able to see the concern change targets. He was able to see the way Toby lit up when he saw him alive. Jim was able to see the nervousness that came from the fact that Jim wasn’t wearing a helmet – it was easier to just break it all off than to fix it and worry about it breaking again and the glass cutting him. Jim was also able to see the moment Toby saw Claire.

“Jim I’m so glad you’re alive and someone’s behind you!”

“This is Claire, she’s been helping me,” Jim said before hugging him. She smiled from behind before turning her attention to the asteroid field.

“You’re going to have to be quick,” Claire said. “She’ll notice you sooner or later and try to, I don’t know kill you? Or maybe possess your bodies to go to Earth? Heck, if she can she might try going through the Bridge?”

“She?” Toby asked, moving away from the hug to tie a length of cable around Jim’s wrist.

“Evil golden-ghost witch who trapped me here.” Claire turned away from them as if she was trying to hide tears, but she couldn’t physically cry. “She made the, well, she attacked you with the sharpened asteroids.”

“By the way,” Jim said as the three of them – he was glad Claire was seeing him off – bounded towards the Bridge. “How long do you think it’ll take us to get a robot body for Claire? Because she’s been alone for over a decade.”

Toby looked away from the weird ghost girl his best friend had befriended, mainly to hide his own guilty expression. “We can try, but I don’t know how likely any giving our department funding’s going to be, since most people think you’re dead. Didn’t want to get people’s hopes up that you might still be alive if this mission went wrong.”

Jim bit his lip. Had he done just that? Get Claire’s hopes up of ever getting out of here?

“I’ve never seen so much debris here,” Claire said. Her hands lit up slightly, like she was getting ready to fight or manifest something.

“Byproduct of the asteroids, maybe?” Jim asked.

“Maybe, but, well, Morgana and I don’t exactly obey most laws of physics or anything.”

Toby gave Jim an uneasy look, to which Jim just shrugged. He’d explain later, if later ever came.

No, there would be a later. Even though the dust was starting to glow with golden light, Jim had to believe that things would be okay for him and his friends.

“Go, I’ll cover you,” Claire said. She moved as if to push Jim and Toby towards the Bridge, but the tethers that were connected to Toby glowed purple instead. “Hope that’s stronger than whatever asteroids she throws at you.”

“Hey, buttsnacks? What did you do to the tether?” Steve asked. “It’s purple.”

“Jim made a friend; please tell me you’re pulling us in,” Toby said.

“Sorry if I can’t see through the weird gold cloud; sucks to be you if I pull you into an asteroid because you don’t want me to be careful.” Toby felt an actual tug in the direction of the Bridge. “How did Lake make a friend here, anyways?”

“Hurry up!” Shannon called. Steve and Toby winced from the static. “They found us out!”

Steve pulled faster. Toby tried to pull from the other end, hoping he’d meet Steve in the middle and not pull the pilot further into the Shadow Realm.

The gold dust stopped its attacks on Claire. It stopped entirely, and for a second, she thought that Jim was safe. Then the dust became a column pointing to the three astronauts.

Jim saw Steve clearly enough that he could see the panicked expression and the golden reflections on his helmet. He turned his head and saw gold rushing towards the three of them. He also saw Claire, racing against the column to get to him.

I’m as human as you are.

Claire gritted her teeth as she propelled herself forward. Sparks began to crackle off her just like they had when she had amplified Jim’s radio. Her skin burned with magic. There was an incredible amount of pressure on her face and hands, so much that she could almost feel them splintering. Still, she pressed on. She wasn’t letting Morgana hurt anyone else, especially not her family or the guy who had floated into her life. Even if there would be nothing left of her to save due to just how much of her soul she was burning, it had been nice, interacting with another person.

She was already dead, but she didn’t want to die.

Or at least, I used to be.

To say that there was a flash of light would imply that the light went away. Rather, there was a pulse, a supernova of purple light that went through the Shadow Realm, but its source didn’t stop glowing. Rather, Claire was transformed. It had always been a purple light that had comprised her form, but that purple was now just an outline in the brilliant orchid flames that blazed all around her. She changed as she raced towards the Bridge. Her face grew less rounded, and she grew taller. She had been sixteen for over a decade and now she was twenty-six. This was probably what she would have looked like if she had never summoned Morgana.

Claire leapt in between Jim and the column, and the column exploded. A dome of swirling lights surrounded her and the three astronauts, blocking them.

Toby and Steve passed through the Bridge. On instinct, Jim grabbed for Claire’s wrist. He thought he felt warmth, protectiveness, and something that was almost solid.

It always felt odd when they’d pass through each other, but Jim never felt so hollow as when he crashed to Earth and realized that Claire wasn’t there.

 Claire created a dome of swirling lights to let Jim and his friends escape, and then she felt a hand almost grab her wrist. She felt a yank, and then all she saw was darkness.

She heard beeping, and she wrinkled her nose at the smell of rubbing alcohol. It took a considerable amount of effort to open her eyes, but when she did the first thing she saw were blank white walls. She looked around, and saw a young boy look up from the book he was reading.

Two identical pairs of eyes met.

“Mom?” the boy called, jumping up from his chair and poking his head out of the door. “She actually woke up!”

She wasn’t dead.

Was that kid Enrique?

 Dr. Usurna rushed into the room as Jim got his bearings on Earth. Her voice washed over him and slammed into his friends. She wanted to have Toby, Eli, Shannon, Blinky, and Arthur fired. Steve only technically worked for JPL, but she wanted him fired as well.

She didn’t say that she would have rather Jim not come back, but the message was clear.

 “Do you know what your name is?” the nurse asked.

“Claire Maria Nuñez.” Talking was hard. Moving at all was hard. Over a decade of not moving her muscles made for a large amount of muscular atrophy.

“Do you know who she is?” The nurse gestured at Claire’s mom. Her dad had taken Enrique – he was so big now – into the hallway while they tried to see just how much brain damage Claire might have had.

“My mom. She at least used to be a politician.”

Ophelia Nuñez was still enough of a household name that this didn’t make the nurse look at Claire’s mom to confirm her career.

“What’s the last thing you remember from before you woke up?”

The expected answer was for Claire to talk about how it had been the day of the AP Chemistry exam, and she had gone to the bathroom because she wasn’t feeling well.

“A little while ago a guy who worked for NASA got trapped in D-13, colloquially known as the Shadow Realm,” Claire said instead. “The last thing I remember before waking up is shielding him and the rescue party that came for him from a hostile force.”

Claire’s mom and the nurse looked at each other in concern. So Jim, Toby, and the other one whose name she couldn’t recall had tried to tell people, and they hadn’t been allowed to. NASA was part of the government, after all. There could have been a cover-up; no matter how paranoid it sounded it was better the alternatives.

The first alternative was that Jim had given up on her. The second was that she was the only one who had made it out alive.

“This is normal,” the nurse said, more towards Claire’s mother than to Claire herself. “Sometimes coma patients will internalize things they’ve heard. Since her brain was essentially coming back online, it was normal for her to dream and to use things she might’ve heard on the television, such as the funeral, as information for her dreams.”

“But I,” Claire said before looking away. The simplest explanation was usually the correct one. “Did the rescue mission work, at least? Since I probably got that idea on the news?” she asked instead. He wasn’t her Jim, he was just some guy who worked for JPL, but he was still a person who hopefully had a loving family.

“There wasn’t a rescue mission,” the nurse said. “You came up with it on your own.”

If the past decade of loneliness had been an actual nightmare, then that meant that there was no Eldritch Queen wanting to destroy humanity. It had still felt so real, more real than the idea of an entire decade of Claire’s life being a sleeping blank.

 Dr. Vendel was trying to make sure that everyone who had been involved in the rescue mission didn’t get fired, and with some nudging so was Dr. Strickler. Of course, there was talk about shutting down the department and transferring them all to lower-paying positions in other departments.

The idea of getting Claire a robot body felt like an empty promise, a faraway dream that would never come true.

In the meantime, Toby, Jim, and Steve were all in quarantine to make sure that none of them had brought diseases with them from the Shadow Realm. Toby had already had to sit through this, but he had to do so again. At least this time he had company.

Toby unlocked his phone before opening the app that phones were originally invented for. He scrolled through it before tapping a number. The phone rang a few times before the person on the other end picked up.

“Hi, Dr. L! Are you sitting? You might want to be sitting because I’ve got news!” Toby said before handing Jim the phone.

“Tell her yourself,” he mouthed.

Jim’s own mouth went dry as he tried to choke out the words.

“Toby, are you okay?” his mom asked.

Jim took a breath. “Hi, Mom. I love you. I’m back on Earth.”

 Claire’s family had left because Enrique still had school and she was too weak to go home, yet. She doubted it would feel like home to her. It would have changed so much, just like Enrique had. Besides, the Shadow Realm had been –

No, it hadn’t. Her experience in the Shadow Realm had been a dream.

Still, Claire stretched out her hand. She had been craving guacamole for a while. If her dreams were to be believed, then the craving had started before she had manifested all the ingredients to make guac for Jim. She wasn’t going to bother with the ingredients, she was just going to manifest it already made.

After her hand began to shake, Claire set it down and opened her eyes to the same empty white room that contained no guac whatsoever.

She probably couldn’t even eat it, anyways. Her stomach was too weak. Even if she had been trapped in another dimension, her physical body still hadn’t digested anything in years.

“Well, it turns out there was a rescue mission, but they kept it private,�� the nurse said, walking into the room. “It succeeded.”

“That’s good for him,” Claire said, keeping the emotions out of her voice.

It had been a random astronaut.

It hadn’t been a guy who went to the mole school and had wanted to save her.

 “So, that purple girl. Or, I think she was a girl ‘cause she looked like one? What was she?” Steve asked half a day into their quarantine.

Jim gave a wet chuckle. He had cried while talking to his mom. He wanted to cry thinking about the girl he’d left behind. “Her name’s Claire. She’s as human as we are, heck, she went to the high school that had been Toby and I’s rival. Well, at least she used to be human before an evil golden space witch tried to possess her. Either way, she’s pretty amazing.” Jim was smiling by the end, but the smile fell off his face. “I was going to find a way for her to live on Earth again, so she wouldn’t have to be alone anymore, but I don’t know if I can do that now.”

 Half a week had passed. According to the doctors and nurses, Claire’s muscles were regaining mass at an incredible speed. They called it a miracle, just like the fact that she had woken up at all.

The angry part of Claire that believed she had been fighting an otherworldly entity for over a decade wanted to scream that it hadn’t been a miracle, it had been hard work. The miracle was that Jim had managed to pull her through. The miracle was that she and Jim had found each other.

The part of Claire that was rational and listened to doctors didn’t completely buy the miracle bit but figured she wouldn’t be getting an explanation any time soon.

Claire had been given a tablet to help her catch up with the world.

Akiridions weren’t something that she had dreamed up.

She hadn’t checked the news to see more about the astronaut that had been stranded in the Shadow Realm. She knew he wasn’t the Jim who had sparred with her, but she didn’t want to let go of her dream boy yet.

No matter how miraculous her recovery had been, brushing her hair was still frustrating. Between her weak arms and the curls that had annoyed her since childhood, it was an ordeal.

Claire squinted into the mirror. Were her roots coming in a ghostly white?

 After the quarantine period had ended, Jim still wasn’t sure if he had a job. He had gone with his mom to her work instead. It was a lot like when he was too young to stay home alone, and his mom hadn’t been able to find a sitter.

Jim was walking back from the bathroom when he saw someone out of the corner of his eye. Jim stopped and looked through the glass wall. It was a woman with shoulder-length brown hair and brown eyes. Five silver hairpins encircled her skull in a deliberate pattern. They kept her hair flat against her head, but towards the bottom it formed curls.

She was beautiful, but that wasn’t why Jim’s breath caught in his throat.

His feet moved before he could second-guess himself.

“Claire?” he asked. She looked up at him; her expression changed to one of shock and wonder.

“Jim?”

He walked to her and took a seat next to her bed. “I thought you were dead, I wasn’t sure how I’d be able to get you out of there.”

“I thought I was dead, too, but everyone tried to tell me it was all just a dream because I had heard about your funeral on the news. I didn’t want to find out who the ‘real’ lost astronaut in the Shadow Realm was because I didn’t want to let go of you.”

Jim took her hand, and it felt odd. Not because of any energy jolting through the two of them, but because he didn’t pass through her. “You won’t have to.” He frowned. “Okay, literally you will, but until I know I have a job I can visit you every day because my mom works here, and we can still talk when I’m working. I can bring you some soup tomorrow, and maybe some guacamole if your stomach is up to it? I’m not sure if it’ll be as good as what you made for me, but I’m a pretty good chef.”

“I’d like that,” Claire said.

The miracle had been that they had found each other.

Fun fact: I always knew that Claire and Jim would find each other in the end when she was in the hospital. That didn't stop me from sobbing as I wrote about Ophelia and Javier thinking that Claire had died before they could say goodbye to her.

[kangseluigi]

ANOTHER personal post bc I deleted my facebook since no one reads that shit anyway and I need to let it out somewhere so THERE

I am…deeply damaged, by many things, but especially by my first “real” fandom???

Like, yea, I was hardcore into like Sailor Moon and Pokemon and Britney and shit as a kid, but that doesn’t really count for me. The first real fandom to me, was the first one I really spent my own money on, on merch, concerts etc. The one I was pushed into bc a “friend” tried to use it to exclude me from her talks with her best friend, so I had to learn it all v quickly to keep up with them and not be excluded every. single. time we spent time together. Her friend was cool with me and just focussed on topics we could all talk about or would explain things I didn’t get, but the other one, wow.

And now that I’m saying it, I realise how much deeper it goes than i realised.

I learned all that cryptic shit about the band within days and learned every song, which album it’s on, downloaded a whole bunch of pictures and forced myself to become obsessed within a week or less, just so I could join their talks. Of course that didn’t help me, because she only became annoyed with that and ended up mocking me for being too obsessed and all kinds of shit, or would change the topic to another thing I wasn’t involved in, like their shared trip to Paris, which I would never be able to catch up on.

And nowadays, I sill have a habit of forcing myself to “learn” fandoms in days and after 24-36 hours of obsessing (sometimes with a little pre-game/getting to know phase these days though) I just become so fuckin burned out I cannot enjoy it for at least another full day, sometimes a week or anywhere in between. It sucks.

But the whole situation, having been forced into it only to be ridiculed again, ended up pushing me even deeper into that fandom, because I guess, in the beginning, I thought if I love it enough, it will get me accepted as a real fan, but of course things only got worse. More people thought i had lost it for being that obsessed with the band, having no other topic anymore. On the other hand, the band had all these messages of their fans being their family and connection and whatnot. The kind of bullshit that a teenager with abuse at home and angry/overworked/stressed/… parents with no time for anyone would absolutely run into to feel a little taste of family and comfort.

It completely spiralled out of control. I was existing only for that stupid fucking band. I was existing entirely online and for the times I could go back online to talk in chat groups and message boards and whatever the fuck it was we had back then, to talk to other fans, some of whom actually became my friends, and stalk the shit out of that band. Any and every update had to be documented and I had to know it. Every picture, no matter how intimate. The shit I had found out about the band in the end was unhealthy! Pictures buried so deep in the web, because they were so personal, not even the most deranged fans would dare re-post them, but I ended up saving them just to be safe, just to have something. I honestly disgusted myself at that point, but I couldn’t stop, somehow. And I still find it gross, but I also know I was maybe 17 at the time I went that far out. My dad had just died, I was grieving, I was lonely more than anything, I felt like the only actual family who had still cared about me was gone, I needed something to hold on to and went into all the wrong directions.

But despite all the deeply intimate things I knew by then, there was one big issue I had somehow managed to keep missing, until they released a video for a song that upset me on such a deeply subconscious level, that I didn’t even know why, until it built up enough to cause my first real flashback.

There was a lot of drama about it within the fandom. A few of us who actually were triggered through the video into reliving our most traumatic moment, while everyone else still praised the shit out of them and told us we were just horrible for implying anything.

We didn’t imply anything. We just said we had a hard time dealing with it. But that didn’t stop threats of violence and death, even from people I was friends with until that point.

But amongst all that, one of the friends, who had already left the fandom to the most part at that point, told me the one big thing I had kept missing: The lead singer is a rapist. He especially goes for underage girls, but ultimately, it’s all the same.

There were enough stories about it out there and even if I think one or two may be made up—oddly enough the favourable ones seem the most unlikely—I think with that amount of stories, including things my friend has seen herself, it’s pretty evident that it has happened. And once that veil was lifted, I could see it. Maybe it’s my imagination, but some signs have always been there, and many people have said the same to me over time, some who knew, and some who didn’t. But that look is there, and cannot be trusted.

This whole thing just messed with me. It messed hard with me then. I had my trauma before, but I had had it well-repressed and buried so deep in my psyche only bits and pieces came bleeding through in the weirdest ways. Not enough for anyone to notice and only for me to occasionally wonder why I’m always returning to this specific topic. (Shit, I still have the hardest time using the term, especially when applied to me…) But now I also had flashbacks, and the knowledge that for the second time now, someone I thought I loved and thought—for some reason—loved me (In a way), was actually this kind of asshole, was a goddamn rapist, and had deceived me so horribly, only for me to go through the pain and trauma all over again.

I’m still thankful I had LInkin Park at the time, to be honest. I know y’all love to make fun of them, but they were there when I was bullied at 12-13 years old and felt all alone in the world, just when “Numb” came out. Translating their lyrics is how I learned english and at that point, Chester screaming in my ears alone, was often the one thing able to keep me from dissociating every 5 minutes, but moreover, he was screaming about the exact trauma that had come to the surface, that I wasn’t equipped to handle in any way, and I just knew I wasn’t alone with it, I knew he understood. It was a little comfort keeping me from losing it entirely, and it gave me some hope that if he could make it through the same bullshit and come out on top, I could, too. Of course, a few years ago that hope got shattered, but that’s another story.

The thing about this whole experience though, is that I still suffer from it. Not only can I still not look at that shitbag’s face without rage and sickness and pain—although it’s getting easier, not that I’m trying to look at him, but he’s unavoidable these days, fucking horrible. I can never listen to their songs again, not that I want to. Even karaoke versions or covers make me run out the room with massive panic attacks. Especially the songs from the same album as the song that triggered it all. The last time someone covered their song at an event I was at, I nearly threw myself off the balcony in the hotel lobby as I was trying to get away from it, because I was that terrified and in that much pain from hearing the first line alone.

And thinking about it, maybe that’s why I no longer go to events. I told myself it was finances, but i just don’t wanna run into that again. Ever. I’m so, so thankful the same friend who had informed me of it all back then was standing by on twitter to talk to me. Typing and reading is good to get your head out of it. It’s a mental and physical sensation and forces you to think of something else, even if it’s only spelling, and I could talk to her to calm tf down.

But mostly, I’m thinking about the very, very deep sitting trust Issues towards famous people and fandom I have developed through all of it. Up to this day, I cannot trust anyone who is famous. Riches being bitches is one problem, an intellectual one for me, mostly, but this is something else.

As soon as I see someone enjoying their fame—especially white men—I get suspicious, because it’s so much like him. What if they too are like him? What if they too only want fame to attain girls they can violate? What if? How could I allow myself to like someone like that ever again? How can I allow myself to fall for this stunt again? I can’t. That’s it. I see you enjoying your fame, I cannot trust you, to protect myself, if nothing else. To not accidentally promote someone who’d do those things. To not accidentally promote them to someone, who’s led right into the trap and has to endure what so many others already had to endure, what I had to endure, even if in my case it wasn’t even a famous person.

So I shy away from anyone who seems a little too “Type-A” or too joyful about their status as celebrity or… too talented, too inhuman. I don’t even know. A lot of it comes down to the eyes, and sometimes I’m definitely right, but in some cases even I am not sure if I see it, or if I’m just scared I don’t see it when I should. (Does that make sense to you?)

On the other hand, sometimes I am certain I don’t see it, and my brain goes into overdrive, running around in circles. We don’t see it, so does that mean it’s not there, or that they are that good at deceiving us? We’ve been deceived before, we failed to see it before, who says we won’t fail this time? Do we see it now? Maybe we only think we see it because we are scared and a little paranoid. But maybe-

it’s a never-ending circle. (Kind of the definition of a circle, isn’t it?)

Every time I see a famous person I want to trust be so visibly human, and warm, or shy, and just likeable, I trust them a little more, and want to trust them a little more, and that is exactly what makes the alarm bells go off in my brain! it’s ridiculous.

Yet, every time I see the same person interact with, say, a child, I freak the hell out.

This is not normal in any way, and it cannot be, and it shouldn’t be, I shouldn’t constantly be afraid of what thoughts some adult man has towards children, literal gd toddlers in frilly dresses. I cannot keep thinking that being nice to a toddler has an ulterior motive, because it’s wrecking me the hell up! Yet here I am, unable to shake those thoughts and I don’t know what to do about it, or how to feel about myself. I was angry at myself a lot today, partly because of that. But I’ve also been deeply depressed lately, partly because so much of my actual trauma came up again and again, and now it’s not going away. I cannot even listen to remix versions of that one Lady Gaga song the band once covered, because it all brings me back (and How very shitty for a rapist to cover a song by a rape survivor too). Even worse, because that song is in my workout game.

I don’t want to have to think about all this all the time anymore, I don’t want my brain to constantly suspect the worst in people, but I cannot fucking shake it off.

I know I’m getting better, generally. I know I’m breaking through some of my fears and all, but I also know I may never be ready to actually speak about this topic with another soul. Therapist or not, no one will ever achieve the level of trust I need to open up about this the slightest bit. If someone were to approach the topic (to talk about me, not themselves, that is), I’d shoot them down. I may actually fall into a panic attack and punch them and run away I don’t know. But this conversation is not going to happen, ever. So I really don’t know how to fix it, except keep fixing myself, but I just don’t know if I can this time.