#but also that’s not the point of going to this therapy the *point* is talking to someone who specializes in religion and queerness

[tethrras]

ngl i am. so curious as to what your breaking point was with the game lol

it's tricky to pinpoint bc i was trepidatious off the top but was willing to give bioware the benefit of the doubt. i was looking past the therapy speak, the defanged companion interactions, but then there was the state of the world and the lack of urgency and then but the isseya quest really solidified it for me.

tay and i have been talking in detail about how a lot of this stuff feels like a classic "somehow, palpatine returned" moment (like with illario being in cahoots with elgar'nan... ILLARIO?) which is bad enough re: isseya, who should've been dead for 500 years at this point but that coupled with a complete lack of nuance and care regarding isseya and the griffons is driving me fucking insane. valya does not offer her unique perspective from reading the journal, in which isseya EXPLAINS WHY SHE DID EVERYTHING SHE DID AND EXPRESSES IMMENSE GUILT, one can easily extrapolate that the fourth blight would've gone on significantly longer and been significantly worse if she hadn't done what she did with the griffons. she was a brilliant tactician, PART OF THE REASON THE FOURTH BLIGHT was as short as it was, she was garahel's right hand woman and SHE DID NOT WANT TO BLIGHT THEM. and then, not to mention, SHE'S THE REASON A CLUTCH OF EGGS WAS SAVED AND PROTECTED AS WELL AS IT WAS AT ALL!

and then the gloom howler quest is her saying nothing bad will ever happen to the griffons again and fuck the wardens but then also recruiting old wardens and calling them grey wardens still like... they could've at least had her call them the Gloom wardens or something sick like

so much of dragon age is about grey morality but they take the hardest stance on one of the most interesting, unique characters across every installment of their franchise. and there was a way to make her coming back good and interesting if we got to actually understand the depth and urgency of her situation at the time and give davrin some shit to second guess and question himself on but, like the rest of the game, there is no urgency. a blight is going on in ferelden and we're having gossip dates with the inquisitor. AND THEN NO REPEATABLE KISS! IN THIS ESSAY I WILL

[interstellar-productions]

I want to continue my earlier post about Aaron and pastels. More specifically i want to talk about why i think he would naturally lean to pastels. (Outside of my own personal bias of putting pretty boys in pretty colors)

If we’re bringing in my Aaron post yesterday (about how he copes with his traumas) then i think he’d lean naturally to pastels for similar reasons as to why the rest of the OG foxes like the vibrant orange of PSU. Aaron doesn’t want people to see him or look at him, he wants people to glance right over him. The artist part of me considers the symbolism of colors and how they can be used to convey messages.

With that i bring you this. The foxes use bright orange as their colors so that way they can’t be looked over. This has more then one meaning to me as a psych major and art enthusiast. The general public doesn’t like to acknowledge people like the foxes because their living breathing proof that the world is an ugly place. These are people that have been used and abused to a point where they’ve been severely damaged. By the foxes colors being bright orange its a statement that forces people to acknowledge their existence, their survival. “You ignored me when I was being broken. You will NOT ignore me now that I have to live with the aftermath of your ignorance” for the foxes the bright colors are an act of defiance.

Aaron hates the bright orange, he doesn’t want people to see him because people seeing him means that he has to admit what happened too him. That’s why he hates the bright orange because everyone knows what it represents and more importantly it’s such a bright color he can’t hide when he wears it. He’s forced to stand out and be seen.

Thus we move forward to several years down the line (in my mind he starts with socks in his senior year) he’s made peace with himself and what happened to him. Therapy and strong support system and building better relationships with his family (the foxes). He might never really get to the point of wearing or being comfortable in the bright fox orange (I imagine that all the foxes still have certain things that are fox orange, I also imagine that Aaron has never felt comfortable in the color). But i think at some point he gets used to wearing pastels. Aaron and Andrew wear dark colors a lot in the books and i have to think that for Aaron it comes from needing to blend in and Andrew it comes from a place of intimidation.

So as Aaron gets more comfortable and heals he starts to unconsciously lean to pastels colors. The foxes use neons to make themselves seen. Aaron leans into pastels.

The foxes: im going to make you notice me so that way you’ll never be able to say “i didn’t know” again.

Aaron: its ok if you look at me, I’ve made my peace with what i am

The foxes what you to see them, thats how they heal.

Aaron grows to be ok with being seen even if he doesn’t go trying to make people notice him.

Just Aaron whose version of healing is him going from so violently wanting not be noticed and wanting to be normal so bad it physically pains him, growing to be comfortable with maybe not being completely normal and becoming ok with standing out just slightly. Just enough.

Aaron going from being scared of being noticed to be ok with it if it happens.

Making peace with it. Making peace with himself.

And it all starts his last year at PSU when he’s at the mall and comes across a pair of socks that will be so comfortable with his scrubs and work shoes. He doesn’t even care that their sky blue with pastel creamsicle orange fox silhouettes.

[deoidesign]

.

[oidheadh-con-culainn]

i feel like i'm a weird candidate for sex therapy bc it's like yeah on the one hand i grew up evangelical and repressed and on the other hand i've spent ten years doing queery theory and hanging out in more or less exclusively queer spaces and deconstructing everything to the point where i've got nothing left that makes sense so i can talk about gender and sexuality with a ton of nuance and understanding of historical and cultural context and also there's a part of my brain that still secretly believes i'm going to hell for it

but i have already done so much work on unlearning that to the point where i have circled around to a completely different issue, which is that i objectively believe it's fine to want whatever you want, and even though my instinct is that this doesn't apply to me i know that's unhelpful and i should ignore those thoughts because they're not true, but also i have absolutely no idea what i want and even less idea how to label it because i'm too aware that labels only describe our current cultural constructions of identities that actually don't adequately match how i understand myself bc i spent too much time thinking about premodern conceptions of gender and sexuality and got myself stuck in a corner with it

so like. i already therapised myself a lot. i've thought a lot about identity and how it works. i've done so much challenging of unhelpful thoughts and dealing with trauma responses and whatever. i have quite an advanced understanding on that front and frankly have probably taken it too far at times. but the basics of "what do you actually want, néide"? nah. fuck if i know

people who know this much about queer theory should be better at queer practice. unfortunately,

[camp-counselor-david]

I was wondering what bugged me about the season 4 Cameron Campbell redemption arc, and I think it finally clicked for me. (And yeah it's 95% David related)

Tw for talks of abuse under the read more.

(Spoiler warning for s3 & 4!)

My relationship (from a character standpoint) with Mr. Campbell is very iffy. He's meant for comedic relief, as is his treatment of David within the series.

Side note- I know that the wolf in "The Forest" being a metaphor for Campbell's abuse of David isn't technically canon even if it's pretty widely accepted by now, so I'll be excluding that part in my analysis.

Mr. Campbell goes through a lot of changes within the series. He starts out as sort of a criminal mastermind type. Self-serving, a blatant scammer, and someone who is seen abusing David in particular many times in the show, physically and verbally. That's not even mentioning the scene in "Jasper Dies in the End," where he attempts to murder a young David for witnessing Jasper's near-death experience. Despite this, David looks up to him and idolizes who he is as a person.

Up until when things peak in season 3, where it's revealed to David that he's not only a terrible person, but he has attempted to frame him for the camp being a scam. Season 3 handles Campbell the best in my opinion, up until the ending of "Camp Corp" where it's decided that Cameron Campbell is more of an idiot than a mastermind, so his new punishment is staying at the camp under David's watch.

Season 4 is where it takes a turn for the worse. As per usual, David is on board with the idea of redeeming Mr. Campbell and places faith in him changing for the better. This didn't bug me until the episode with the escape room where the series begins to explore a different side of Campbell. There, it's revealed that despite how awful as a person he was, he secretly has some type of heart! He still had feelings for the woman he ghosted for 17 years to the point of never once seeing another person in all of that time. Not only does that feel impossible to believe, but given how he acts when he's coming back from the club in "Keep the Change," it feels a lot more like a retcon to me. You're telling me that someone as greedy as him would make such a responsible choice when it comes to any of his personal relationships? In 17 years? While regularly being under the influence of alcohol and other drugs throughout that time period?

It felt like a quick "See? Mr. Campbell isn't actually that bad of a person!" To which I feel is not the right angle to take with his character, at least not so quickly. I understand that characters can have nuance. They can have good traits and still be bad people, but these traits have to line up with what makes sense for the character, and from my perspective, it didn't.

They then change the approach with Campbell and start making him a lot more reasonable of a person in the way he talks. "Time Crapsules" ending with an admittedly nice message from him about change using the camp itself as a metaphor for his own character growth, which becomes apparent in the last prominent Campbell episode, "St. Campbell's Day."

This is the episode that urks me the most. Since the very beginning, David has had full faith in Mr. Campbell. He spent time making excuses for him and going out of his way to prove that change is really possible. But (spoilers, sorry!!) then this episode features the very first time that David stands up against Mr. Campbell. He sees the fake holiday that he's making for presumably self-serving reasons and decides that Campbell is showing his old patterns again-- because why else would he make up a holiday revolving around making money?

David ruins the holiday by stealing the holiday supplies and reporting him to the presses as a con artist. Then, the show reveals that David was overreacting, and this was really pushed by the campers rather than Campbell himself. They wanted to raise funds for the camp to get new things like the outhouse, and David feels bad. Afterward, there's a happy moment where David apologetically fixes everything with the help of Gwen and QM, which is admittedly very sweet, and Mr. Campbell forgives David for jumping the gun and assuming the worst.

While I don't hate this, it just rubs me the wrong way that the one time David stands up against Campbell, he's punished by the narrative. He apologizes to Mr. Campbell, a thing that Campbell never properly does for David, the one who actually deserves it.

This episode could have been a good opportunity for there to be some reflection on how David, who vouched ceaselessly for his redemption, might have some mixed feelings on his abuser. Exploring this side of things more would have made this a better episode and overall a better arc for me rather than "Silly David!! You've ruined the one good thing he tried to do!".

The concept of David wanting to be happy about the changes but finding that part of him guiltily thinks that Campbell doesn't deserve it is something I really wish they explored a lot more.

The tl;dr of this is that the Mr. Campbell redemption arc isn't a bad angle to shoot for! Some of it was handled decently, but the loose ends that we'll likely never see wrapped up leave a sour taste in my mouth. A few kind moments don't make up for around 14 years of abuse, and that's not even mentioning the death of Jasper as a consequence of Campbell's actions.

I love this show a lot, and this is by no means hateful towards it, I just feel a little put off by how they handle the Campbell-David stuff.

[nashvillethotchicken]

Ldpdl need some friends he ain't fuckin or kin with and bad. Like real bad

[pollen]

i've been diving a lot deeper into adhd symptoms and comorbidities and misdiagnoses and whenever i tell my boyfriend something i learned that sounds like me he responds with something like

[5eraphim]

how are you a femcel if you've had sex before? Also you are very pretty you could get any guy you wanted.

it's aaaaaalll about the mindset my friend 💘🗡️

[bedforddanes75]

i just think you deserve eternal happiness actually. funny and actually nice. u are jesus. anyway No pls i AM AFRAID u are simply too cool and i cant deal

[purpurussy]

.

[givemewallywestorgivemedeath]

Feeling very violent rn so here's a very controversial opinion:

Everything after season one of Young Justice sucked.

Look, I know I'm obsessed with the show but that doesn't mean it's good, it means that I'm too deep into it at this point to get out. There are good moments within the other seasons but in general? They were not good.

I'm sorry. I understand that they wanted to be creative and have a neat narrative and deep lore and all that. And they do! The narrative and lore is extremely deep.

But the plot? The characters??

Season one was an actual functional show that balanced character development, plot and dialogue with world building, lore and messaging.

The other seasons do not do that.

Season two bounced back and forth between like 16 characters. We got some development for some characters but even that was minimal compared to the character development in S1. And this isn't me complaining that the og group wasn't in S2 enough. That's not my issue. I would've loved to focus on a new group and I think that Jaime, Bart, Ed and Gar would've been super cool to focus on. I loved what character development they did have and I craved more.

But the problem? The problem is when you have 16 fucking characters that you are trying to develop and shove into a coherent plot and have actual meaningful scenes. There just wasn't enough focus on S2. Imo, S2 was meh because the characters got left by the wayside. The plot, dialogue, world building, lore and messaging was fine, there just seemed to be a lack of heart/warmth in the show because of the characters. It's hard to get invested.

Then holy shit. S3 introduced more characters. And the plot got more contrived and 'big picture' to the point that it started to abstract. It felt like nothing mattered. There were no stakes, you were just watching things happen. There was 50 fucking things happening an episode and 80% of it was lore/world building. It felt like I was studying for a fictional history exam.

I'm pretty sure the main character in S3 was earth 16. Just the entire universe. Because goddamn. We checked in on almost every living being and EVERYTHING was a plot point. Most of it wasn't even relevant to anything happening in the season. Man it was.... it was bad.

And at that point it just wasn't enjoyable at all to watch. I probably should've stopped watching but at that point the sunk cost fallacy had already kicked in. I knew it could be good. Maybe it could be good again. And people were constantly praising it as cinematic genius so I was like 'okay well maybe I'm missing the point? Maybe you aren't supposed to enjoy shows? Maybe this is fine?'

But season four broke me.

The creators heard that people were frustrated by the lack of character focus and the episodes following 72 characters and the episodes switching between 50 different subplots every episode and their solution? Their solution was to take allllllll the different unconnected plots and, instead of evenly spreading them throughout the season, jam them all into 'arcs'. So you had a bunch of mini seasons consisting of 3-5 episodes dedicated to a cast of ~5-8 characters (some of them new). And each of these episodes had unconnected a plots, b plots and c plots.

THAT IS NOT A SOLUTION

Holy shit that is not a solution.

Not to mention the overarching plot of the season, in which we had no fucking clue what was happening until the final episodes where everything became a speedrun to wrap everything up. We literally had no idea what the main plot was until it was ending.

Good god it was bad. It's bad writing!

I know people liked it and good for them. You should like what you like and you don't have to justify it. But for me it was insanity. I'm sorry I actually don't want a season long subplot where Beast Boy is depressed and sleeps all day. I would be cool with it if it had anything to do with the larger story but, surprisingly, spending five minutes watching Beast Boy sleep every episode didn't make for compelling storytelling.

I'm still not over how we didn't even know who the main villain was until the end of the season. And then all of a sudden he does a villain monologue to tell everyone his evil plan and his motives. Super cool actually. I love it when I have no idea what the stakes are for the majority of a show. It's incredibly good storytelling when you leave the audience in the dark about a major player in the plot for all of the plot. And then doing an info dump evil monologue in the final episodes to rush through the explanation??? Fucking fantastic and not a sign of terrible pacing at all.

I'm just so frustrated. The show isn't about being a show anymore. The show is an entire cinematic universe shoved into 20 something episodes. It's desperate to tell every single story at once, audience, pacing and good writing be damned.

I'm so tired of the constant praising of Greg. His whole 'i don't write endings because life doesn't have endings' and 'i don't write cliffhangers, I just leave things open ended' thing is pretentious bullshit. I'm tired of pretending it's not. A good story has an ending. Stories are not life! Some of the best shows I've ever watched had planned endings. And oh my god. The cliffhanger thing... that's just semantics my guy. Greg you write cliffhangers. You can insist they aren't but I'm going to call a spade a spade.

It's also.... I'm fine with explaining things, in fact I love it because it's an excuse to talk about the stuff I love, and I have a fairly decent knowledge of comic book lore. So, I could not only understand what was happening in the show but I was also super enthusiastic about explaining it to people. But hey Greg? Hey buddy? If 90% of your audience doesn't know what the fuck is going on and needs to be familiar with super specific obscure comic characters from the 70's then you might have a problem.

I think I realized halfway through s4 that the most enjoyment I got from an episode was when an obscure comic character would cameo in it. But then I realized that a) they generally weren't explained at all and b) 50% of the time they weren't just hanging out in the background and they were vital to the plot. So to understand who the fuck they were and what the fuck was happening you had to be familiar with... well all of DC comics actually.

Anyway this rant is getting long and unhinged and I don't think there's a point so I'm going to cut myself off even though I have so much more to say on the topic. I think my general point is just that I didn't enjoy watching the later seasons and it's chill if you did and we should all respect each other's opinions ✌️

[aropride]

therapy question for my friends in my computer, Specifically people w trauma, dissociative disorders, more stigmatized disorders in general, people who've been labelled "treatment resistant," etc. What type of therapy r u in and Does it help . bc cbt absolutely has not worked for me and idrk what to look into. i was in dbt when i was younger and that helped, and ive heard good things abt emdr (also bad things but we stay silly), but does any one have thoughts , advice, etc Bc i have got to get back in therapy at some point soon And preferably something long term

[romance-incubomp3]

like if therapy and meds help you that’s so cool but it drives me insane how people treat those as some magical cure all that EVERYONE needs to seek out even though the psych industry is fucked and biased and not affordable and if trying to find a good therapist or find the right meds is doing nothing but causing you even more stress and anxiety even after you’ve been trying to get help for years than maybe it’s not worth it at that point

[honey-skulls]

HUGE VENT

I'm sorry but i need to get this out, just please don't worry too much or take anything personally/gen

My routine these last two weeeks has been:

-Wake up at my 10 am alarm and spend the whole day in bed, mentally and physically exhausted, brain fog and no motivation for anything, only getting up to eat, having to wait for the "food time" hours to roll around that my therapist gave me because I'm not allowed to eat outside of those hours and if I'm hungry but missed the last food time then too bad, struggling to stay awake because again I'm not allowed to sleep out of the "sleep hours" she gave me and that includes naps, excitedly waiting for 21h30/22h to roll around so i can finally sleep

-Spend the evening mentally screaming in my mind because, while my body is still just as physically exhausted, my mind is suddenly sharp and full of ideas and motivation, but i'm still too tired to get up and draw

-Then spend midnight and onward rolling around in bed, hot and bored out of my mind because my physical tiredness also vanished, but i'm not allowed to get up and draw because it's "sleep hours" and i need to reschedule my body, and end up falling asleep at around 5 am

I'm totally not slowly loosing my mind 😃👍

Edit: Oh also the constant noise in my ears has gotten worse, i don't know what silence is anymore

Silence is actually worse than loud rooms

It's driving me insane

It's so loud

[cookiescr]

Wish me luck! small win yesterday with my mom telling me she might know a psychiatrist

[widevibratobitch]

omw to play emotional support for my mom disguised as ✨fun family bonding time✨ for the rest of the week <3333 there's something so deeply wrong with me uwu teehee