#being suicidal is annoying

[roachemoji]

big talky !!!

[sihtryggr]

Yeah, so, is this a safe space for me to say what the fuck? Not a single conversation - not even a single interaction - between Jinx & Sevika acknowledging what happened with Isha? As if the three of them hadn’t become a little family unit of their own. Certainly a choice.

[glitter-stained]

Jason Todd Meta: My opinion on the csa headcanon

Does Jason's behaviour suggest he was a victim of csa?

There is very little, in terms of clinical signs, that’s going to point to csa specifically, because most symptoms, for psychiatric disorders, aren’t specific to one disorder or cause. One thing that’s usually a good hint would be children making very sexual statements/references/jokes/behaviours that are very inappropriate in context (a good example of this would be Roman Roy from Succession); night terrors are bed wettings amongst children/teenagers over a certain age. But that is absolutely not necessary: many, if not most victims of csa don’t display these specific signs, and a twelve years old that suffers from night terrors is not necessarily a victim of csa. The one thing that tells you for sure, in a person with trauma, that they have been a victim of csa, is that they’re telling you they have been a victim of csa. I’m insisting on that part because there’s a whole bunch of therapists (cough cough psychanalysts) that will tell you confidently that your psychiatric symptoms stem from a childhood sexual trauma (cherry on top of the shit cake if it’s incestuous) that you didn’t know about because you’ve repressed it. I repeat, that’s bullshit. If you meet a clinician who tells you that, RUN. So, a warning: this is probably the least “psychological analysis” of my “Jason psychological analysis posts”, because Jason’s symptoms do not allow us to conclude formally for or against a history of sexual abuse. But that doesn’t mean we can’t do some meta, make sure we're on the same page with what's analyzed here, some textual analysis, discuss what the csa headcanon does and does not imply in terms of his behaviour. I think it’s a good idea to start with it so we know where we’re standing with our analysis, regardless of the fact it’s maybe not the most interesting in terms of psychopathology and neuropsychology.

A couple of disclaimers:

I only talk about the comics I want to talk about. This is for two reasons, which are that 1) I do what I want and if I don’t like/don’t find something interesting, I’m not gonna waste time on it; and 2) I’ve been reading comics for a couple of months only, and there are, like, a lot of them. If there are comics you wanna see analysed under that lense, feel free to suggest them! I might not want to, but it also could be that I haven’t read them yet. Additionally, I'm not interested in questioning the morality of Jason's actions here. Ethics are fun, and I like talking about them sometimes, and morality sometimes has a place in talks about demonization but largely speaking this isn't the space for that. I separate talk about morality and psychology stuff as much as I can for a reason, so if you are looking here for excuses for his behaviour or arguments as to why he is a bad person, you're in the wrong place. Moral judgement is irrelevant here for the most part.

On the events of Red Hood: Lost Days:

Jason has, at some point in the comics, been a victim of csa. When Talia kisses Jason before pushing him off a cliff right after he got out of the Lazarus Pit, and when she initiates sex with him in Lost Days, that’s not consent!! That’s a grown woman taking advantage of a traumatized teenager who is, on top of that, deeply indebted to her. That’s a predatory act, with a steep power imbalance, it’s sexual assault, and on top of that there’s an element of suggested pseudo-incest. That decision was retconned, and thank god, because it was a brutal assassination of Talia’s character based on a good bit of racism, and also because the way it was portrayed doesn’t make it clear that Jason is a victim in a situation rather than that super annoying trope of “teenage guy gets to bang a hot MILF and hahaha lucky him”, writing a male character in a situation of SA without acknowledging it as SA or taking it seriously is one of the tropes I hate most, it reinforces stigmatisation and isolates victims. For all of these reasons, I’m not gonna include that element in my analysis, but it’s important to note that if you do include those scenes in your conception of it, then Jason is undeniably a victim of csa and everything discussed about it applies to him.

What if it were a lie?

I’ve said it before (and I’ll say it again), I deeply, violently hate headcanons/tropes where a character lies about being a victim of csa (whether it’s for manipulation, personal gain, any reason really I don’t care). It’s rare as fuck in real life, however it’s a common trope that feeds into fear of being wrongfully accused that causes push-back and increases social stigmatization. CSA is a painful thing associated with intense feelings of shame and already a deep fear of not being believed. Imagine making a considerable effort to seek help after something terrible happened/is happening to you, and you have to brave your fear of not being believed on top of that, and once you’ve made all that effort you get rejected and villainized because it’s just easier for the person you’re reaching out to not to believe it. So I’m awfully weary of this type of headcanon, and I think a general rule of thumb is “if your interpretation of what the character is saying is that he’s talking about how he was abused, especially if he’s talking about sexual assault, then it happened.” If you don’t like that, if you don’t feel like that’s good representation, then you can question the story, think it should be retconned, or rethink your interpretation of what the character says if it’s ambiguous, but hcing that the character lied about his assault is not a hypothesis we’re going to accept here no matter what. So we can start by scratching that one out: Jason never lies about being a victim of csa, or wilfully hints at it even though that’s untrue, at any point.

Two other ideas I’ve seen floating around that I think are worth mentioning:

No, just because Jason lived in the streets as a kid doesn’t mean the only way he survived was through underage prostitution. I genuinely don’t understand that idea, yes being a street kid makes you extremely vulnerable, yes it makes the risk of resolving to underage prostitution to survive higher but it’s absolutely not a fatality. That idea is, quite frankly, weird. Do you automatically assume if a real life person tells you they were in the streets for some time at a kid that they are a victim of csa? Also, I've seen the idea go around that because some people have a strong reading/hc of Jason as bi (which I have no problem with I love bi Jason), that would be an argument in favour of the csa hc. Please don’t do that. There’s no link between queer sexual orientations and childhood sexual abuse, that’s a harmful myth that we should work to deconstruct or, at the very least, not continue to vehiculate.

Another important thing to keep in mind: childhood sexual abuse =/= childhood sexual trauma.

Now, a traumagenic situation is a situation that might induce trauma (so development of, acute stress disorder, ptsd, cptsd, derealization, any traumatic pathology really). These situations exist on a continuum of probability to be traumatized by this situation. For example, a flood, a car accident, witnessing a murder and being sexually assaulted are all traumagenic situations, but the probability of developing trauma from them are very different. It hinges on personal, situational, social, and environmental risk factors (that have nothing to do with being weak, anybody can develop trauma). A definition for traumagenic situations can be found in the diagnostic criteria for ptsd in the dsm-5:

A. “Exposure to actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence in one (or more) of the following ways:

1. Directly experiencing the traumatic event(s).

2. Witnessing, in person, the event(s) as it occurred to others.

3. Learning that the traumatic event(s) occurred to a close family member or close friend. In cases of actual or threatened death of a family member or friend, the event(s) must have been violent or accidental.

4. Experiencing repeated or extreme exposure to aversive details of the traumatic event(s) (e.g., first responders collecting human remains; police officers repeatedly exposed to details of child abuse). Note: Criterion A4 does not apply to exposure through electronic media, television, movies, or pictures, unless this exposure is work related.”

Note that the this last criteria has been added from the DSM-5 in order to explain cases of PTSD observed in at-risk jobs like cops exposed to repeated detailed child abuse, first responders collecting human remains, or, crucially, vigilantes repeatedly exposed to brutal crimes. This means that Jason, when he works on the Dumpster Slasher case, when he is horrified to find Gloria in the immediate aftermath of her rape (and later finds her dead body, because witnessing the consequences of these traumatic events is also an important component of that second-hand trauma), is being exposed to a very traumagenic situation. As I said before, that doesn’t necessarily mean you will experience trauma (thank fuck for that), but there are factors that influence that. SA related situations has an already pretty high probability of inducing trauma. On top of that, age is a big factor in that: the younger you are, the less resources, emotional regulation, development and coping mechanisms to face the traumagenic event you have (though there is such a thing as “too young to have PTSD" -when your memory is simply not developed enough for the memory to traumatize you because you will not remember the event.) At fifteen, with his memory fully developed but his brain going through so much changes because of teenagehood and his past history, Jason would be at risk. On top of that, you’re more at risk to get traumatized if you’re already stressed out when the event happens, so Jason’s mental state at this point in his robin run is also a risk factor. All to say, it’s very plausible for Jason to have sexual trauma without being a victim of sexual abuse in relation to canon events. Besides, in headcanon territory when it comes to Jason’s childhood before Robin, there are so many ways to be exposed to sexual violence : witnessing/finding his mother being a victim (considering the position of extreme vulnerability Catherine was in), witnessing assault in the streets, being the victim of attempted SA and escaping, watching street kids get picked up and later find their bodies/being told by other kids, as a cautionary tale, in excruciating detail, testimonies of their own assault… Or for example, if we’re thinking about Arkham Knight, being constantly threatened with SA, it being hinted and joked about and hanging over him like a sword of Damocles is something I could see Joker and other inmates do that could definitely induce sexual trauma even if it doesn’t happen ; what matters most, in trauma, is that the fear is real. Mechanically, when we’re looking at the way trauma works even on a biological level, the overwhelming fear is at the core of the pathology. (This is also why you can develop PTSD after a psychotic episode.) Like, my point isn’t that one of these things happened to Jason, or that he has to have sexual trauma from the events of the Diplomat’s Son or anything -mostly just that this is a possibility, something very serious that happens and an important nuance that I never see in discussions on the csa headcanon, and while it’s not exactly what the debate is about, I think it’s something important to ponder.

Do you consider the csa hc to be canon?

So, there are a lot of Jason stories, and I’m very pro “not take in account what is said in comics you dislike in your conception of canon” because if I did that absolutely no bat character would be readable, I have to believe that no character is defined by their worst writers. And boy, does Jason have a lot of bad writing… On top of the personal retcons, there are also the canon retcons: like Battle for The Cowl is retconned… Unless someone decides to reinject/revamp it into the narrative (please don’t please don’t it’s irrecuperable let it lay with the Flying Todds where it belongs). So, let’s see. There are three writers/arcs that imply/mention the csa hc: Starlin’s writing of Jason’s post-crisis Robin Run (canon though some stuff in it seems to have been retconned), Winick’s writing in Green Arrow: Seeing Red (canon as far as I know), and Battle for the Cowl (retconned). It’s worth noting that one of those are considered to be foundational works for Jason’s character (Jason’s post crisis Robin Run and Starlin’s part in it), and another was written by Winick, who wrote the other two foundational Jason stories: Under The Red Hood and Red Hood: Lost Days. On a personal level, I’m very mitigated about what I like and accept about it. I base my whole love and characterization of Jason about his post-crisis Robin Run, I love that little guy so much, Starlin’s take on Jason’s Robin Run is absolutely canon to me (which does not mean I like Starlin as a writer, thank you very much). On the other hand of the spectrum, the only reason Battle for the Cowl isn’t my least favourite comic ever is because The Killing Joke exists, absolutely not canon, get this thing away from me. And then in the middle, my feelings on Seeing Red (on the entirety of Winick’s Jason really) vary depending on the day, because I do like a revenge story that challenges the status quo with tropes of “bad victim” and it sets up Jason as a character based on love rather than morals which I adore, but there are also some elements of psychophobia in the writing that I (who approach stories through the filter of psychopathology first and foremost) can’t just look past, and also the way it intertwines with classist stereotypes. So do I consider Seeing Red to be canon? In good faith, yes, but whether I’ll accept it as such really depends on the day. In terms of the csa headcanon: it’s heavily hinted in BTFC but not outright said, it’s there as a undercurrent in Starlin’s run because of his intention (to make Jason die of AIDS). And then we have Seeing Red. Basically Jason lists elements about Mia’s life, including her past with underage prostitution (so, just to be very clear, csa), and says they’re very similar, having both lived on the streets, and understand having to do bad things when it’s necessary. This is not the same as saying “I was a victim of csa”, and what he’s saying could be interpreted differently (we know that he was stealing tires, and “only what he needs to survive”, so he could have been referencing small-time theft.) So, it could be a reference to something else, I totally understand why some people want to interpret differently. It just… Feels like such a weird and weak argument to be equating boosting tires to underage prostitution, to me it’s very ooc (in comparison to UTH Jason), and it would feel like weak writing from someone like Winick. Aka it’s not technically canon, and you don’t have to accept it as such(I understand the mentality of "I'm rejecting this interpretation because it feels like demonization of csa victims" perfectly), but personally I think it takes a lot from Jason’s character in Seeing Red and from this story in general.

[cinderellaenjoyer]

Fellas is it emotionally manipulative to *checks notes* try and talk a guy out of killing himself

[aropride]

one time in high school a guy made a joke like “this class makes me suicidal” and our teacher was just like “me too go back to ur seat”

[pcktknife]

.

[tobythetrashyartist]

tw // death, implied suicide

(not explicit)

A scene from Chapter 2 of "Haunting My Own Skin," written by @kirii-kitten

Bonus pages:

[birdsribcage]

I want to cry one of those deep sobs that makes my chest hurt but I just don't have the energy

[deathdaydreamm]

[royaltercets]

sometimes i think abt the fact that ray turned to alcoholism because his alcoholic late mother didn’t love him, his father didn’t show love like he should have, and his whole friend group kept calling him a burden (a burden!!! who fucking calls their friend that!!!) instead of loving and supporting him which is all he needed, as proven by sand, to stop self harming by ways of alcohol and drugs and letting himself get fucked when drunk only so he doesn’t remember anything, and start rehab and a path to sobriety. if you can’t have an intervention for your friend and support him through hard times, are you really a friend? or are you keeping him around for, idk, the money he might have a bunch of, or something?

i honestly feel like boston was a better friend to him than mew, who kept him around as someone to give him attention and affection and refusing to set his foot down and properly reject him. he was harsh, but not constantly unkind. boston, of course, had his own issues—not the slut thing, but the later infidelity thing with nick, and also the earlier seduction of taken men (which, by the way, is entirely as much, if not more, the fault of said men (*cough* top *cough*) as it was boston’s. cheating takes two people).

i feel like people love overlooking this because…? i don’t know, they’re two characters who are framed to seem like assholes (and they are at times! they’re complex characters!), but this blatantly ignores the absolute red flags that is the rest of them; namchueam—who not only is one of the people to treat ray, who’s got probable ptsd and severe abandonment issues and like 79 other mental illnesses (okay, hyperbole, but you get the point) like absolute shit by continually calling him a burden—but also was like. fine with her brother nearly ruining boston’s life over a false rape allegation, because she disliked boston so much in the moment; mew, who as previously mentioned keeps ray around for his own gain despite thinking of him as a burden; top, who really isn’t a friend to ray but he’s part of the group by association, who’s honestly just an asshole who i guess realizes that he can’t always get what he wants without fighting for it. then there’s april, who is pretty damn spineless imo, but at least she’s not awful to ray (i might be misremembering here, though). idk what to think of her. she feels like she barely has any opinions of her own. she feels very… surface. honestly nick was a better friend to him and he wasn’t even really a friend? i like to think they get closer post-canon though.

nonetheless: the behavior that i see in these so called friends, truthfully, is what got him to attempt suicide twice. yes, twice—you don’t think a drunk person would twist the wheel so far that the car they’re driving crashes into the side wall in the other direction to the one they’re driving in by just falling asleep or losing consciousness or not being alert enough, do you? i’m pretty sure that was intentional. and, i’m pretty sure the reason he pushed away sand and refused to listen to his (albeit very important!!!!) advice about not driving drunk wasn’t because he’s Regular Self Destructive, but rather because ray wanted sand to hate him for hurting him and being stupid to make it… easier, somehow, on sand when he killed himself, or whatever. i’ve been in that situation myself, and i recognized it immediately—he knew his friends (if you can genuinely call them that) would probably hate him after that night, and he did it so that they wouldn’t miss him.

anyways, to conclude this dumb, ill-formatted, ranty post, so many OFTS watchers just… seem to look at the surface of it all. yes, they all have issues. that’s like. the point of the show. but if you consider ray an annoying burden due to his alcoholism and addiction and all of that, you have missed the main point of his arc, which really boils down to “sometimes someone going through a really hard time just needs some love and support, and if you can be that for them, they can become better and show a better side of themselves, which is invaluable to someone who truly loves and cares for them”. love isn’t only for those who don’t take to unhealthy coping mechanisms when they struggle, like nick.

to summarize: if you have a ray in your life, be their sand. not necessarily romantically, but love and care for them, genuinely. don’t be a mew or a chueam. or an april, if you can help it.

[plaguedpriest]

getting a non-art post blow up on twitter is a fate i wouldn't wish on my worst enemy fr

[takeyourcyanide]

asking for help always makes things worse

[mold-girl]

This is the latest, and the most enraging, femicide case in turkey

A male who has been obsessed with a girl has killed her and her best friend before killing himself.

He forcefully took her to a historical castle, she was screaming for her life the whole way there yet noone intertwined. He decapitated her and sent the location to her mom saying "your daughter is resting peacefully" when her mom arrived there he threw her daughters head at her.

He has been obsessively stalking her for over 5 years, they had a restraining order agaist him and she even stopped going to school and started homeschooling because of him. Yet one day he decided that he wanted to kill her and kill himself and that was it.

She fought for her life the whole time but just a male deciding that her life was over was enough for her to die.

[foccaccia]

does anyone have recommendations for fictional media that has like. actual lesbians in it. not like supergirl Two White Skinny Girls, One Blonde and One Brunette Kiss media, or "its implied lesbianism!!!" but just regular fucking lesbians

[corset]

You know as suicidal as I have been over the years I just kind of refuse to act on it. I think it would be boring like idk at least the suffering and everything else has some flavor you know. I'm not particularly attached to or precious about the idea of like Having A Body or whatever so I kind of conceptualize offing myself as some kind of deletion of my conscious by requirement which is like. I just don't trust the fabric of reality to not give me something that's completely dull on the other end of that do you feel me

[arthurtaylorlester]

OH MY GOD DURING ARTHUR'S MURDER REVENGE QUEST HE DID NOT FUCKING """""LOSE""""" HIS HUMANITY THATS NOT WHAT FUCKING HAPPENED HE WAS HAVING A BREAKDOWN AND WAS PROJECTING ONTO LARSON, THE ONLY PERSON HE REALLY WANTED TO KILL WHICH TRANSLATES INTO HIM BEING EXTREMELY SUICIDAL HE DIDNT WANT TO KILL ANYONE HE WANTED TO KILL HIMSELF HE WANTED TO MAKE HIMSELF HURT AND SUFFER THE CONSEQUENCES HE THOUGHT HE DESERVED

LIKEWISE, JOHN DIDNT "TAKE" ANY OF ARTHURS HUMANITY I HONESTLY THINK HE WAS OVERCOMPENSATING BECAUSE OF HIS DEAL WITH KAYNE