#but i find it quite common for these ones in my experiences because they’re often viewed as ‘dangerous’ or ‘unpalatable’ by society
Explore tagged Tumblr posts
mlgrace · 5 months ago
Text
it’s unbelievable how “all people deserve human rights and no matter what circumstances they’re in shouldn’t be stripped of these basic rights” is a controversial statement. people will support human rights until they’re reminded that criminals and those with mental illness and/or addiction and poc and asylum seekers and children also deserve them. it doesn’t suddenly become conditional when someone of a certain demographic has their rights violated because we are in fact all humans actually.
4 notes · View notes
sflow-er · 2 months ago
Text
Henry and Simon’s dynamic over the three seasons
For YR Faves Fest 2024 organised by @youngroyals-events Prompts: 2. Favourite teen side character (+ 7. Favourite not-quite friendship)
In one of my replies to the recent side character ask game, I briefly mentioned being partial to the dynamic between these two. So for this Faves Fest, I decided to elaborate with an analysis post (featuring screenshots of variable quality)!
Tumblr media
I want to preface this with a brief acknowledgment of Henry’s privilege and classism. It is not my intention to diminish them. I do, however, feel that it’s a bit apples-to-oranges to compare them to Simon’s views (citrus pun intended). 🍊 is politically active and has put in the effort to form his own beliefs, while 🍏 shows us time and again that he is ignorant of the world outside the elite bubble and not inclined towards deep reflection. He is largely a product of his upbringing and the (liberal conservative) values imparted by his parents.
While Henry doesn’t grow enough to change his core views and values in the canon timeline, he does change his views on Simon. This isn’t enough progress for them to become actual friends before we leave off (I doubt Simon could be friends with someone who only exempts him), but I would still argue that they end the show on amicable terms.
And yes, I mean that in a mutual sense, even if Simon doesn’t soften towards Henry quite as much as Henry softens towards him!
So, let’s dive in!
Dialogue taken from the English CC and [abbreviated or corrected].
1.01: the tax debate
Henry: “Take my dad’s estate, for example. They’re struggling to make ends meet because of the high taxes.” [Simon chuckles and explains his views] Simon: “Like your dad. [Do you know how much he gets in EU subsidies every year]”? Henry: “And what the fuck does your dad do?”
Tumblr media Tumblr media
Like most viewers, I find it a lot easier to relate to Simon’s views than Henry’s here – but I do think Henry often gets judged quite harshly for insulting Simon at the end. His comment does not come out of nowhere (cf. Stella’s unprompted dirty look at Simon and Sara when she talks about welfare scamming).
Henry only knows that his father has said their estate is struggling, so of course he won’t take kindly to Simon suggesting that they are actually getting undeserved subsidies instead. It’s also important to note that this estate isn’t just any old farm. It was granted to one of his ancestors as a reward for their services to the Crown, which makes it a core part of his family history. As we learn in 1.04, Henry is a Society boy and very proud of his noble ancestry, and Simon’s comment likely feels like an insult to his entire family. So although his retort is unquestionably rude, it is understandable that he lashes out.
Also, Henry has no way of knowing that Micke is a deadbeat. He is just applying a common stereotype (and potentially making assumptions based on the views Simon just expressed on welfare).
1.02: parallel but separate experiences
Tumblr media
Early in this episode, we see Simon side-eye Henry and Walter for the paid tutoring. He decides to follow their example, but as we know he can’t actually afford it, we can already guess it won’t go as well for him as it did for them.
Next, we see Henry in the group as the rowing team ignores Simon at morning training. The camera also pans to him and Walter when August gives that bizarre speech about Simon’s class journey.
Tumblr media
These moments highlight how different life at Hillerska (and beyond) looks for Henry and Simon. They are technically coexisting and even doing the same things, but their experiences are nothing alike.
However, there is also some potential for development here. August’s words about rowing bringing people together (and also about the class journey) should absolutely be taken with a heap of salt, but as we no longer see any open animosity between Henry and Simon, we can still wonder if rowing played a part.
Being on the same sports team is an entirely new frame of reference for these guys. They are no longer just the sosse and aristocrat who have been going to school together since pre-canon and clashing over their views; they are crewmates. They may be able to ignore each other for most of the time, but they may also have to do some team activities or even cooperate on occasion. At the very least, they will be around each other several extra times a week from late September/early October to Christmas break. This could definitely help to put them on more neutral ground.
1.05: Henry pays attention to Wilmon
In this episode, Henry learns more about Wilmon than the average Hillerska student knows. He is present when August tells the Society that Wille and Simon “hang out”, and also when Wille changes the plan from Simon to Alexander.
What’s more, he actually looks fairly thoughtful leaving that last meeting. We don’t know if it’s just shock over Wille’s ruthlessness, if he’s thinking about the plan to set up Alexander, or if there’s something else on his mind.
Tumblr media
Now, this may veer into overinterpretation, but for the sake of thoroughness, let’s also include the blink and you’ll miss it moment before the Lucia procession where Henry notices Wilmon texting each other. In this cropped screenshot, you can see him looking at Simon, who has just put his phone down and is looking over at Wille.
Tumblr media
1.06: Henry shows restraint
As we know, Henry is the only classmate who tries to treat Wille normally after the video, asking if he “saw the match yesterday” (he absolutely knows Wille didn’t). What is perhaps less noticeable is that he also shows more restraint than most of his schoolmates when the rumour mill gets going.
Tumblr media
In this scene, Henry is pretty dispassionate reminding Walter that Wilmon sat next to each other at movie night and the two of them talked about it. There is a stark contrast to Walter, who absolutely pounces on that bit of gossip.
This one quick scene could just be a coincidence, but the same thing happens again when Wilmon return to school. Instead of engaging with the others who are all eagerly talking and whispering, Henry is already sitting at his desk minding his own business when Wille arrives. His only reaction to Simon showing up is this quick look, which is immediately followed by his show of kindness to Wille:
Tumblr media Tumblr media
So the restraint does look very intentional.
As an aristocrat, monarchist and Society boy, Henry is loyal to Wille, who he now knows has been carrying on with Simon for a while already. He also knows how far Wille went to protect Simon, despite the fact that Simon had actually supplied the drugs, so he is going to side with Wille.
What’s more, Henry’s behaviour in these scenes also confirms that he isn’t hostile to Simon. We can surmise he probably doesn’t think Simon is the most appropriate choice of partner for the crown prince, but he is willing to take his cues from Wille. We never see him sneer, joke, or say anything nasty about Wilmon as a couple (cf. Stella and Fredrika joking about surrogacy).
We are also shown his reaction to Wille hugging Simon before we move on to season two.
Tumblr media
2.02: the floorball hug and walk-by
The first interaction between Henry and Simon in S2 is them celebrating a floorball goal with a spontaneous hug, as seen at the top of this post. What a difference a term makes!
Now, I don’t think this moment is meant to signify that they are friends all of a sudden, and I do feel it comes slightly out of the blue. I suspect it was included as a nod to those who already liked Henry after S1, but I for one would’ve preferred to actually see their reconciliation.
But then again, if their initial antagonism was always class conflict rather than personal beef, maybe there was no need for apologies…? Maybe each of them just accepted that the other was going to be around and decided to try and get along (potentially aided by their shared rowing team history)? Henry is following Wille’s lead as we already saw – and as for Simon, I doubt he would be hugging Henry even in the heat of a game if he held a grudge. Whether we saw it or not, they have moved on.
In the same episode, we also have the locker room scene.
Tumblr media
Contrary to popular opinion, I don’t believe Henry actually overhears the entire conversation, but he may have still heard something about them having to wait two years (as Simon did raise his voice for that). It’s also possible he comes out of this scene assuming that Wilmon still “hang out” in secret. In any case, he probably assumes that Wille wants to keep the whole thing quiet, as per the usual “policy” on queer relationships among the upper classes. In addition to his monarchist ways, he also seems to be casually friendly with Wille in S2 (keeps inviting him to do stuff, from coffee to pranking Sprucewood). So it makes a lot of sense for him to keep whatever he overhears or suspects to himself.
2.03, 2.05 and 2.06: book report scenes
While Henry must be a nightmare to have in the group, he and Simon are nice to each other in all the book report scenes. This is further proof that they are in a place where they can talk civilly and even work together.
They start the project before the rowing race and only present it the day before the gun range scene, which means they had these group sessions for at least a few weeks (the timeline is a bit wonky here).
Tumblr media
2.04: Henry snitches on Wille and Felice
The lunch scene at the start of the episode starts with this bit of vicarious interaction, as Henry and Simon (and Wille too) are amused by the nonsense Walter is spouting about girls:
Tumblr media
Also, Walter's monologue feels more comphet every time rewatch it, but I digress.
As this post is focused on Henry and Simon, I’m not going to dig too deep into Henry’s role in spreading the story about Wille and Felice. Suffice it to say that he did tell his canonically gossipy bestie Walter, and it was recently pointed out to me that he seems to have let something slip to someone else as well. In the common room, Walter goes “det var du som sa till…” [you were the one who said to…] just as the focus shifts to Wille and Nils, which suggests that Henry either purposely told someone or misspoke without realising it. The latter would explain why he seems genuinely appalled when Wille confronts him, but it’s not a hill I’d be willing to die on!
If Henry did spread the story on purpose, I assume it was because getting with Felice was considered a credit to Wille and also “fair game” to tell, unlike the relationship with Simon that Wille wanted to keep hidden.
Still, Henry and Simon are definitely on better terms in S2. Even though Henry inadvertently causes pain to Simon with his part in the Wille and Felice thing, they still keep working together on the book report without any animosity.
Insofar as Henry’s lacklustre effort can be called working. Simon is a bigger person than I am for not blowing up at him when he announces minutes before the presentation that he won’t be taking any questions.
3.01: background Henry
Tumblr media
We start S3 off with this one-sided interaction where Henry reacts to Wilmon kissing with a mild smirk. No more waiting or secrets to keep.
3.02: double standards on the camping trip
Tumblr media
It’s not entirely clear what Henry is thinking when he says the infamous line about gay couples being allowed to share but not straight ones. I think some people read it as him deliberately putting Wilmon on the spot, but personally, I doubt he even realises it’s going to make them uncomfortable. He’s just noticing the double standard and pointing it out to mess with the teacher.
While Simon is very clearly not pleased with Henry for the comment (glares at him while saying to Wille that people are going to think they plan to have sex), he does not seem to hold that against him. Because what we do see them doing soon?
Sitting next to each other by the fire, even though Henry could’ve easily sat with Walter and Simon with Wille:
Tumblr media
Also, it seems Henry isn't new to camping, as he tells Wille that part of the fire is too hot to grill a sausage in.
The part where things get interesting is when Henry acts classist towards the Marieberg students.
Henry seems to be down with meeting Rosh and Ayub, who are there as Wille and Simon’s friends. But after Fredrika brings up New York, he agrees that the situation turned “stiff as fuck.” That stiffness was entirely Fredrika’s fault (I think she is at least semi-consciously trying to mark herself as the most compatible partner for Stella there), but Henry seems to feel it was more about Rosh and Ayub not fitting in.
He also sneers and makes nasty comments when the other Marieberg students get into an altercation with Malin, which elicits a frown from Simon.
Tumblr media
And yet, Simon does not condemn Henry as strongly as he might have done in the past.
Importantly, Simon tells Wille “it wasn’t the right time for everyone to meet.” This indicates that he could’ve imagined them all getting along at a better time, and it’s pretty clear that also includes Henry. Furthermore, “you [meaning Wille and the others] don’t realise how privileged you are sometimes” is actually a pretty neutral way of putting it. Simon would have been entirely justified if he had said the others were classist pricks, but he blames their privilege and lack of understanding instead of their character.
All of this forms a backdrop for my interpretation of the scenes in the next episodes.
3.03: First of May
Simon: “You do know that you’re not off so you can party the day before, right?” Henry: “Uhh…what?” Simon: “It’s the First of May.” […] “The day of the labour movement?” Henry: “Okay, so what’s their style? How do they celebrate?” Simon, scoffing: “You don’t celebrate. You demonstrate.” [Henry and Walter share a chuckle]
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
This may be a controversial take, but I don’t think Henry is being particularly nasty to Simon here.
He actually looks and sounds quite sincere asking how the labour movement celebrates. When he and Walter laugh, it reads more as “there he goes again, our very own sosse, saying wacky things!” than the kind of disdain he expressed towards the Marieberg students in the last episode.
Simon also doesn’t take the laughter as an insult; he’s just stupefied by their ignorance. Also, note that he already scoffed at Henry’s question, marking the question as silly.
This exchange is immediately followed by Vincent attacking Simon for his beliefs, which feels like an intentional trick to create contrast between his and Walty’s treatment of Simon.
3.04: the lollipop
Tumblr media Tumblr media
In this scene, Henry starts out asking quite nicely and seriously if Simon has another lollipop, as if they had that kind of rapport. Simon makes a face, but then he just shakes his head and nicely says no. It’s only then that Henry switches to offering money for the already half-eaten lollipop, to which Simon reacts with disbelief.
He does not, however, get snarky with Henry. He settles for exchanging a look with Wille as Walty go on to complain about the hunger strike. Only when Henry isn’t present anymore does he point out to Wille how ridiculous Henry was being.
In a sort of parallel to the lunch scene, Simon and Wille now share a chuckle at the wacky thing Henry said:
Tumblr media
Feel free to disagree, but I actually wonder if this could be a common pattern between Simon and Henry. They have accepted that they aren’t going to see eye to eye on many things, but instead of getting into conflict, they just roll their eyes/laugh at how the other can seriously believe/say such things. Then they let the conversation move on to something else.
Which is a perfectly valid dynamic. They can acknowledge that their outlooks on life are wildly different without hating each other for it.
3:06: Henry includes Simon
Look, I dislike the library scene as much as the next person. The talk that Henry interrupts between Wilmon was so much more important than anything he could possibly say. It was just a moment of comic relief that didn’t add anything to the story.
Except… Now that we are tracing Henry and Simon’s “not-quite friendship” arc, this scene does give us a conclusion.
Henry: “Hi! Uh, what are you wearing tonight?” [He rambles on about clothes] Wille: “I don’t know if… If I’m coming.” Henry: “Okay…?” Simon: “I don’t know if I can come either.” Henry: “Oh come on, you two have to come!” [He rambles on about how much fun it will be] Simon: “Yeah, we’ll see. I have to go now.” Henry: “The point is that we have to be together! This is the only night we have together, maybe ever. [I mean, we are brothers!]”
Tumblr media
In Swedish, Henry goes “vi är ju bröder” just as the music starts. This has been translated to “we are like brothers” in the English CC, which is already quite something, but the little word ju makes the original even stronger. It means that something is true, so instead of just saying they are like brothers, Henry is saying that is what they are.
(In the dub, there is an audible pause after like, so Henry is actually using it as a filler word. They should have put a comma in the CC to denote that.)
Given that Henry prefaces this ramble with “you two have to come” and barely stops to acknowledge Simon’s exit, there’s every reason to assume he is still talking about all of them. He is saying he considers himself, Wille, and also Simon part of the brotherhood that will be disbanded indefinitely come morning and wants them all to have one last night of fun together.
Simon never hears the brothers part and is of course frustrated with Henry for interrupting, but he still takes his leave on a casually friendly note. He gets that Henry wants him to come and have fun (Henry is unaware that Simon doesn’t drink when he tries to persuade them both by talking about the alcohol). Thus, Simon politely says “we will see” even though he has zero intention of going.
We do not see them interact at the party when Simon goes after all, but we do hear Henry being ushered away when Simon comes to talk to Wille. We don’t see it’s Henry, but someone insists that he wants to stay just as we see Walter and Alexander leave, and all three of them were there moments before:
Tumblr media
I’m tempted to end this with a parallel to Wille’s initiation party.
Way back in 1.01, Henry and Simon were explicitly shown discussing the first party with their friends. They never talked about it with each other or interacted there – Henry attended as part of the in-crowd, and Simon only got to go because he supplied the alcohol. But for this last party, Henry was the one to get the alcohol, and he specifically invites Simon to come. They still don’t hang out as they are both there with their respective friends, i.e. in their own bubbles, but those bubbles do bump into/brush past one another without clashing.
Kind of like Henry and Simon’s lives.
Thank you for reading this marathon post! I hope my take on these two brings something to your next rewatch, whether you agree with me or not!
115 notes · View notes
starmosaics · 6 months ago
Text
Natal Sun square Uranus
I have this aspect in my chart and it's one of the most challenging ones I have so here's some things I've piled up from my own experience with this aspect and how its manifested within other people's charts;
Those with a Sun square Uranus aspect often experience a strong need for personal freedom and originality. This aspect gives one a drive to break away from the conventional road and way of living to forge something that is uniquely their own. As a result, conformity can feel uncomfortable and frustrating for these individuals. Most people with this aspect feel very drawn to seek out radical and original experiences, often finding themselves fighting against societal expectations and standards. These folks are not seeking conventionality, they're seeking radical and original experiences.
Because of this they can feel out of place a lot of the time. Their takes and opinions may be very outlandish to others because of their free thinking abilities. They may feel like the odd one out, feel like they stick out like a sore thumb, feel like they do not quite fit in, or feel like an outsider within in their environment. Sun-Uranus folks have a very hard time accepting their differences and the things that make them unique at first. Because of their crave for unorthodox experiences, this can lead to feelings of alienation. This can be particularly challenging when their innovative ideas or unconventional approaches are met with resistance or misunderstanding from others. Their sense of not belonging can become a battle within themselves, which could lead to suppressing their unique traits in an attempt to gain acceptance in worst case scenario. They can also end up pretending to be someone they’re not because of rejection from society/others.
This can make one a rule-breaker, an inventor, risk taker, a contrarian, defiant, a rebellion, scientist, alchemist, villain, etc. These people will refuse to do something if it goes against their beliefs or is unethical to them; they can be incredibly set in their own ways. They tend to do things with a different approach that works for them which tends to piss others off, especially those who like control. Often needing to do things differently than the common person, they may purposely take the harder route and go against the grain. This resistance to approach things in a conventional way can be liberating, but can also lead to conflicts and a lack of compromise with those who take more traditional approaches. People usually have a hard time figuring out those who have this aspect.
Those with a Sun-Uranus aspect thrive on innovation and variety. They are unpredictable and hate being told what to do. Their open-mindedness make them willing to try almost anything as they view most things an experience to learn and expand. Nothing feels normal to these folks. Sun-Uranus people are the types to act first, think later. They're also frequently changing things about themselves internally and externally. If stuck in one place for too long, they tend to feel restricted and restless.
Famous people who possess this aspect include; Doja Cat, Dennis Rodman, Elon Musk, RuPaul, Sky Ferreira, Mitski, Grimes, and Frida Kahlo. These people are known for their unconventional lives, innovative ideas, unique/distinctive styles, and refusal to conform to societal norms.
Some scenarios a Sun-Uranus person might experience:
Not trying at all in school because they know it won't be relevant to their future aspirations.
People having to compromise with them a lot because they tend to want to do things their own way.
Leaving their 9-5 job because they got tired of the same day-to-day tasks.
Facing issues in their personal relationships because of lack of communication.
Doing the opposite of what someone wants them to do because they don't like being ordered around.
Getting up and leaving one day without telling anyone because they felt trapped being in one space.
Deciding to do something last minute, neglecting their responsibilities.
Having issues with their bosses or other authority members.
Challenging rules and those of authority because they might believe certain rules don't apply to them.
Waking up one day and deciding they want to completely change their appearance/ways of living.
Creating a trademark for themselves whether it's through fashion, music, art, etc.
134 notes · View notes
pallastrology · 2 years ago
Text
🖤 astro notes 🖤
🐇 sun in the eighth house has always interested me, because i have found they try to be seen as enigmatic and shadowy, the way scorpio placements can be. i don’t know if this is a conscious want or a subconscious illumination of those traits due to the sun’s influence, though
🐇 women with cancer and pisces placements often find that they give off a safe, “familiar” vibe. people entrust them with secrets and sensitivities, sometimes without really knowing the native at all. in my experience, it’s most common that men empty their heads into your hands, leaving you unsure of what to do with the pieces
🐇 venus in sagittarius comes across as well-travelled and cultured, even if they’ve never left their hometown. i think it has to do with their dreaminess; they are accepting, intrigued and open to learn from those around them and the wider world. nowadays you don’t even have to leave your house to become acquainted with other cultures and places, either
🐇 sun, moon, venus, jupiter and ceres in the second house can point to a love of cooking. it can be a way to nourish and nurture yourself and your loved ones, a useful skillset and an intersection of art and science. with moon or jupiter in the second especially, the native may have inherited a love or need of cooking
🐇 taurus sun, leo moon natives often become a focal point of their social circles. they have an almost regal energy about them, and when they’re at their best, they can really light up a room and make everyone feel appreciated and welcome. at their worst, they can attract drama and chaos however
🐇 people whose chart falls into a wedge pattern can often, seemingly ironically, find themselves feeling lost and rudderless in life. i think it’s because the rigidity of the pattern leaves little room for exploration, and so the native can feel like they’re being squeezed into a hole. when their path isn’t working out, they can feel there aren’t any other options for them, though this isn’t really true
🐇 natives with significant virgo placements are often quite closely connected to animals; especially house pets. they may be one of those people who always end up making cat friends while out walking, or have a lot of pets, or even work around animals in some way. this is something that shows the softer, more nurturing side of virgo brilliantly
🐇 air moons are incredibly intelligent, but their intellectualising can be a massive pitfall for them. gemini moons overthink to the point of paralysis and catastrophising. libra moons won’t allow themselves to feel “ugly” emotions, and care so much for others’ comfort they push their own feelings aside. aquarius moons turn off their softness and can become cold and seemingly heartless, to their own detriment
809 notes · View notes
esther-dot · 1 year ago
Note
But why do you think jonsa wasn’t more foreshadowed if they’re the main romantic pairing?
Well, I think we have comparable foreshadowing, often as a positive contrast to Jonerys foreshadowing which the entire fandom believes is the big romance of the series, so I’m gonna challenge your premise and argue that it isn't the lack of foreshadowing for Jonsa that you're noticing, but the fandom's refusal to accept it. I believe that's because Jonsa is a threat to their priors (Jon and Dany are the heroes, they will meet, fall in love, and defeat the Others together, something that is impossible to believe when Martin says things like this) rather than it being a fair evaluation of the existence or merit of our foreshadowing.
Below I'll point out a few kinds of foreshadowing/examples and present the similar Jonsa version so you can see what I mean.
The premise for Jonerys seems to be that every similarity in their arcs is a parallel, but they are actually contrasts if you read closely (fedonciadale's post about that), and Sansa too has parallels with Jon as you can see in @thewindsofwolves's beautiful parallel series. Their similar journeys are also captured in this gifset and this gorgeous art, and it is certainly intentional, as Sansa seems to pattern Alayne in part on Jon ie we're being told she's getting to experience parts of his life. And, unlike Dany whose plan to conquer Westeros puts her at odds with the Starks, Sansa and Jon are written as having the same, very simple, compatible dream,
If I give him sons, he may come to love me. She would name them Eddard and Brandon and Rickon, and raise them all to be as valiant as Ser Loras. And to hate Lannisters, too. In Sansa's dreams, her children looked just like the brothers she had lost. Sometimes there was even a girl who looked like Arya. (ASOS, Sansa II) I would need to steal her if I wanted her love, but she might give me children. I might someday hold a son of my own blood in my arms. A son was something Jon Snow had never dared dream of, since he decided to live his life on the Wall. I could name him Robb. (ASOS, Jon XII)
If we're looking for a romance, foreshadowing that is about a personal relationship, this seems pertinent? And then there's Jon's desire to rebuild Winterfell, and the scene of Sansa literally building it out of snow:
Winterfell, he thought. Theon left it burned and broken, but I could restore it. Surely his father would have wanted that, and Robb as well. They would never have wanted the castle left in ruins. (ASOS, Jon XII) The snow fell and the castle rose. Two walls ankle-high, the inner taller than the outer. Towers and turrets, keeps and stairs, a round kitchen, a square armory, the stables along the inside of the west wall. It was only a castle when she began, but before very long Sansa knew it was Winterfell. (ASOS, Sansa VII)
Those two, back-to-back chapters, are absolutely full of parallels. They share a dream, and upon their reunion, will have a common purpose. I'll also link my post about how Sansa's forced marriage to Tyrion has connections to Jon's relationship with Ygritte, and @stormcloudrising's post about the similarities between the interactions of Sansa and the Hound & Jon and Ygritte. There are tons of these, but you get the idea. If we're looking for parallels between experiences, we have them.
Now, a popular method of finding foreshadowing is chapter order, but Jonsa has that too. Here's a 2018 post by @julibf that talks a bit about it, and @istumpysk's ASOS recap talks about that here and here.
There are two moments I've seen Jonerys shippers point to quite often as foreshadowing. Jon and the moon, Dany and the wolf. But the thing is, Sansa is the sun, and one of the "Jonerys" (Jon and the moon) passages has Jon running away from the moon to the cave with the sun (fedonciadale's post about that). The wolf moment also has a Jonsa contrast:
Off in the distance, a wolf howled. The sound made her feel sad and lonely, but no less hungry. As the moon rose above the grasslands, Dany slipped at last into a restless sleep. (ADWD, Daenerys X) All around was empty air and sky, the ground falling away sharply to either side. There was ice underfoot, and broken stones just waiting to turn an ankle, and the wind was howling fiercely. It sounds like a wolf, thought Sansa. A ghost wolf, big as mountains. (AFFC, Alayne II)
Far be it from me to say that Dany hearing a wolf but being lost to her desires and Sansa hearing a wolf, a ghost wolf, and finding it an overwhelming presence (mountain) means something, but if one does, the other does too. And if we're reading them both as foreshadowing, I think there are some reasonable, and unreasonable conclusions to draw from them. So, you can see why imo the fandom employs a double standard in how they weigh the merits of foreshadowing and interpret one as nonexistent and the other as real and positive.
Another oft referenced bit is Dany's vision of the blue flower and the dream of the shadowy lover, so I'll link some analysis of those that I think is far more...uh, shall I say, contextualized. There are @agentrouka-blog's posts on Winter Roses here and here, and her tag for it if you're interested in really exploring it thoroughly. There’s fedoncidale's post about it, her post about the shadowy lover, and @ladyofasoiaf's spec about how the shadow lover foreshadowing is actually Euron.
Oh, and I almost forgot Val who I've seen brought into the picture as foreshadowing for Dany, but there's a funny thing with her hair which again, if we're gonna look at her hair color and say she's a stand-in for Dany, we should be able to look at it and say, ok, but that means over here she's a stand-in for Sansa, and besides, the connotations for Jonerys there are very bad as discovered by @wintersnow39.
Basically, I don't think there's a lack of foreshadowing, I think there's simply a bias in the fandom that rejects Jonsa foreshadowing while happily accepting incredibly similar foreshadowing for other couples.
153 notes · View notes
catscidr · 10 months ago
Note
Could we get some Dottore x escaped experiment reader? Gn if possible, doesn't even have to be smut. I just can't find anything along those lines and I like your writing style :)
i. note — hehehoho i might have uuuhhh used this ask as an excuse to go off a lil and try something new teehee °ᗜ°) but this was really fun to write!! thank you nonnie for the suggestion, and thank you very much for liking my stuff enough to req something!!! i hope u all enjoy ii. includes — dottore, gn!reader iii. cw — unhealthy and toxic dynamics, no dialogue, mentions of cannibalism, mild body horror, one (1) dead body, not quite stockholm syndrome but maybe kinda, reader is a mess and dottore is not a good person (shocker). minors do not interact, age in bio or block. iv. wc — 2k -> posted on ao3 too!
Tumblr media
To humans, running is what they do when they’re late to work, when they’re working out, or even when they’re playing games at recess as children. To predators, running is what they do in order to secure their next meal. To prey, running is what they must do so they can escape from the predator’s clutch in one piece, to not end up as a mangled corpse serving as someone or something’s food. 
You have more in common with prey than you have with humans, despite being one yourself. 
It hasn’t always been that way. One moment you were enjoying the warm afternoon sun of your home region out on a walk, and the other you found yourself thrown over someone’s shoulder with a bag over your head. 
You always find yourself reminiscing, yearning to feel the warmth you felt that day— minus the incident. You used to be a model citizen; someone people would rely on. 
A shame no one helped you when you desperately needed it. 
Your own mind is all you’re left with, as you’re clumsily tripping over your feet, rocks scraping your skin and blood trickling down your legs. The feeling is almost peaceful; but after running for so long, and with how often you’ve gotten yourself in this exact situation, you’re starting to second guess your motive for running in the first place. 
Is it a form of entertainment, are you growing bored of the four padded walls engulfing your five senses at all hours of the day that you feel the need to get the energy out of your body like a hamster does by using the wheel in its cage? Is it to leave the predicament you found yourself in after trusting someone you, under no circumstances, should have trusted? 
Or is it because you gradually have come to find yourself sharing more similarities to a dog, begging its owner to even unenthusiastically throw a plastic frisbee for a smidge of attention to fulfill your need to be seen, to be heard, and now you feel the responsibility to own up to that label you inflicted upon yourself? 
The lines between reality and your thoughts have blurred so much it frightens you. 
...Or, rather, it should scare you. After spending so much time in your own head, one would find that it’s surprisingly easy to come to distrust your own mind. You’re not sure if you should believe what goes through your head, even less believe what you feel. But at the same time, you’re all you have. You have no choice but to trust yourself, even when you shouldn’t. 
Only a select few are aware of how dreadfully strong and outright stubborn the human mind can be, whether it be from their own personal experience or from seeing others slip into a state like yours. 
Unfortunately for you, He’s familiar with your situation. Painfully familiar. 
… 
Sometimes you wish you were a luna moth. Delicate and radiant, people would be torn between praising you for your beauty and shunning you away for the crime of looking different than what they’re used to. You wouldn’t be a butterfly, would not conform to what society wants you to be. You would be able to be who you want, look however you want to without worrying over other’s opinions. 
The people that did like you, though, would treat you with care and would do everything in their power to make your stay in this world a pleasant one. A stay that would only last a week. 
Not long enough for you to become familiar with the horrors that await humanity. Seven days filled with nothing but genuine smiles, void of empty promises. 
You’d crawl out of your cocoon, eat good food, find someone to help continue your bloodline, then die somewhere peaceful and hope that your crumbling, decomposing body will bring relief to someone desperately needing something to eat. 
But you’re not a moth. 
… 
It’s unbearably cold when you come to your senses. Peeling your eyes open, you glance around to find yourself surrounded by cold limestone, barely illuminated by the cave’s entrance just a few feet away. The hairs on your skin rise from the wind guiding snow through the passageway, making you curl into yourself in a pathetic attempt to keep your body’s temperature from dropping too low. 
You look down at yourself; your pants are ripped at the hem, and you see messy splotches of brownish red staining the fabric and your skin, going all the way down to your calloused feet. You’re not sure how long you’ve been out for, but it must have been at least an hour given how the bleeding from the numerous scratches and gashes on your legs stopped without any assistance. 
The cave felt completely foreign to you, but even then, it brought you more comfort than He had. Or at least you think it does. 
You feel free. Despite the way your body shivered endlessly from the wind howling into the cavern, despite the dull but searing pain that made it feel like your feet were scorching that traveled up your legs, despite the way you couldn’t move your lips from how dry and cracked they were, split from sheer cold. 
You think this is the most freedom you’ve felt since you’ve gotten yourself stuck in His maw. 
... 
The wind is reduced to a soft, soothing melody when you wake up again. Almost calming enough for you to drift off to sleep a second time, but a nagging feeling in the depths of your gut told you that it was a bad idea to fall unconscious this time around, so you try to shake off the numbness in your limbs instead of succumbing to the call of the void. 
Standing up proves to be a challenge as your legs buckle under your weight. You catch yourself before you fall, holding onto the rough formation of a rogue stalagmite; it’s a struggle to hold yourself up, but at the very least you didn’t give yourself a concussion. 
The pain isn’t completely unwelcome, though. Your feet are throbbing, and the palm of your hand holding yourself up with the help of the stalagmite stings. As you blink the drowsiness away and the blood begins to flow through your limbs correctly again, you straighten your back to take in your surroundings properly. 
The cave’s entrance was filled with thick snow. There was enough that it would reach your stomach should you walk up to it, ignoring the snow that fell into the grotto, and not the snow that partly obscured your way to the outside world. You can’t see much outside, only the faint outline of pine trees wavering in the distance, far enough that you can only barely make out their form. 
Looking away from the blinding whites outside, you notice how utterly desolate the cavern is. Not even a single trace of a life was left behind in this cold, worn hollow. Maybe it’s better this way. You’re not sure you would have appreciated seeing even a wild hare or a fox in here, much less a bear. 
Sitting down on the rocky ground again to give your legs a break, you take a moment to think back to what got you here in the first place. 
You faintly recall rusty medical equipment, convulsing organs, and seeing Him jot down notes. You remember a plate being handed to you, the vague image of a man covered by a stained sheet of what used to be white, and the bile that rose to your throat when your gaze focused on what was on the plate itself. 
Everyone knew the Doctor was a twisted man, but you doubted He was twisted enough to force someone to cannibalize one of their peers. 
Clearly, you were wrong. 
Then, you remember making a mad dash for the thick iron doors of his laboratory. By the grace of god, you were able to leave; and you now found yourself in this desolate cavern, tucked away from civilization. 
As far as you were aware of. 
But you shouldn’t trust your mind. You knew this, yet you also knew not to trust yourself when you told yourself you couldn’t trust yourself. Simultaneously believing in logic and being a mess of paradoxical jargon— it exhausted you to think about. So you try not to. 
Whether by a stroke of bad luck or because of something else entirely, your dull sense of hearing picks up the faint sound of snow crunching beneath boots. Your hands and legs scramble to take you where you can hide as much of yourself as you can behind a rock formation, and you stare out of the cave’s entrance, holding your breath. 
The sound becomes louder. An almost gentle woosh noise accompanies the scrunch of snow, and soon after it stops, you’re able to make out a blurry figure approaching the cave’s entrance. The icy flakes make way for Him at His command, hand waving to get rid of what was keeping you physically separated from Him. 
The pure white snow behind His body glinted off his intricate accessories, the light forming a halo so otherworldly that it left you utterly breathless. 
His boots make a soft clicking noise against the limestone as He steps into the grotto, your safe haven for however long you had been here— now not. Not a single word left His lips as he assessed your rugged appearance. 
You wish He would smite you right then and there. He was most likely able to, and with ease, but you doubt He would willingly discard one of his longest-running experiments for disobeying a rule that you had broken many times before anyways. 
Your jittery gaze follows His movements as He outstretches His arm, offering you a gloved hand, silent. 
Did he know how much you simultaneously trusted and distrusted your own judgement? You stare at His hand, unmoving, heart racing against your ribcage— torn between bolting away, into the darkness of the cave, or intertwining your fingers with His, allowing Him to take you away voluntarily. 
This was mercy either way. You could either die at the hands of whatever lurked in the shadows of the grotto, or you could die at the hands of the man that brought you so much pain it morphed into comfort, solace. He stood, unmoving. Observing you. 
You knew Him well enough to know that He was taking mental notes on your behavior even now, outside of the familiar comfort of his lab in Haeresys. 
Both options were foolish, but you weren’t exactly known to be in the sanest state of mind. 
Pulling your arms away from your body, you bring a shaky hand up to take ahold of His, allowing Him to pull you up to your feet. You almost fall as a result of your nerves, but thanks to His quick reflexes you find yourself tucked in his arms, cheek pressed up against His navy cravat. The hand that wasn’t holding yours comes up to pat your head, gently untangling the knots that had formed in your hair. You melt into His touch, eyes fluttering shut to bask in the warmth He provided. 
As you stand there with Him, knees weak, body upheld by His will alone, you shove down the thoughts that brew in the forefront of your mind. Usually you would welcome the noise, even be grateful that you, at the very least, had yourself to lean on. But you find yourself wishing to lean on Him more than yourself, both literally and metaphorically, keening at the comfort He brought you. 
You knew you couldn’t trust your mind, so why not trust His instead? If you couldn’t rely on your own instincts, judgement or thoughts, then how bad would it truly be to let someone other than you become fully responsible for your wellbeing? 
... 
You were neither a moth nor human.
You were a dog.
72 notes · View notes
danzinora-switch · 1 month ago
Text
Typing the Turtles (ROTTMNT) Part 4 - Michelangelo
This started out as an investigation into the turtles’ insecurities, because one thing the show does so well is demonstrate that they are still teenagers. And being a teenager is a confusing experience - there’s angst, drama, exploring one’s identity, a lot of growth, and overall figuring out who you are. That’s a messy process, too! And we see this mess in our turtles: they mess up, they’re learning, they self-doubt, they have fears and insecurities, but they’re also discovering their strengths and how to overcome their inner obstacles.
So after thinking about all this way too long, here’s my psychological breakdown of each turtle (I’ll be referencing MBTI and the Enneagram a ton, but will include links for more general information on those if you don’t know what I’m talking about). 
Parts One , Two , and Three found on the links for Raph, Don, and Leo.
Mikey: ENFP, 4w3
The Individualist, the Campaigner, the Enthusiast, the Diplomat
I struggled for FOUR. YEARS. To figure out if Mikey is an enneagram 4 or an enneagram 2. And I’m finally going with enneagram 4.
Mikey is creative and very in tune with his emotions. To understand the enneagram 4, we must get away from the stereotype that 4’s are moody, mopey, angst-filled. Happy fours exist! They are quite common, in fact. https://www.elisabethbennettenneagram.com/post/the-happy-four  This is especially enhanced by Mikey being an ENFP: extroverts who want to ‘get deep’ with others, learning their intrinsic desires and motivations. Mikey has both of these aspects.
We see that Mikey has a pretty strong sense of self in episodes like ‘The Clothes Don’t Make the Turtle’, where he actually doesn’t want to engage in dress-up montage and is the first to state that they are perfect as they already are and to “embrace the Turtle, baby!” Fours are driven by uniqueness and individuality, with a desire to find both themselves and their purpose. https://www.enneagraminstitute.com/type-4/  Mikey is constantly expressing himself through his art, cooking, and a myriad of other skills including DJ’ing (Mascot Melee and Lair Games) ballet (Lair Games) and some sort of rodeo clown/mime class (Bug Busters). 
But Mikey doesn’t keep this concept of self-expression and identity to himself. He likes to meaningfully connect with others and the way they express themselves, too. He often supports their endeavors as the world’s biggest hype-man (stated literally in Shell in a Cell). ENFP’s are called the campaigners because they’re looking for that deeper, meaningful joy in others even as their own upbeat approach to life lets them explore new things. https://www.16personalities.com/enfp-personality  You want someone to enthusiastically encourage you and cheer you on as you Do the Thing, whatever thing that may be? That’s Mikey.
Tumblr media
This kind of engagement is also why I believe he’s a 4w3. Three wings are usually more ambitious and goal-oriented with people-pleasing tendencies, which can (in my opinion) look a lot like a Two. Fours also move to Twos in stress, becoming clingy and needy.
What does all this look like? The biggest example is Mikey’s Draxum project. There has to be more to this warring warrior-scientist because there always is more to everybody. Mikey’s goal is to rehabilitate him, yes, but it’s to rehabilitate him by connecting with him on a deeper level and getting Draxum to connect with others (humans) on that deeper level, too (Repairin’ the Baron). Additionally, when Splinter asks Mikey why cares about Draxum so much in Hidden City’s Most Wanted, Mikey responds “He made me. He made us. …Maybe he didn’t make us for the right reasons, but I’m still glad he did.”
Mikey is only one of four teenage mutant ninja turtles in this world, and that makes him pretty darn unique. He embraces that. He loves who he is, and he loves other people for who they are.
Mikey at his Worst: We don’t like to look at Mikey at his worst self I think because so often he brings such joy and positivity and caring into the world that it feels easier to ignore any negative aspects about his character. But Mikey is only human turtle, too. These behaviors are usually emotion-driven to the point that they blind him from greater context/awareness. He’s not thinking about the others around him. For example, in Nothing but Truffle, Mikey is very bossy to Todd as he fixates on getting that shadow moon truffle. This is probably the episode that depicts Mikey at his most selfish: he starts off determined to figure out how to make his pork chops as good as MeatSweat’s, then becomes enamored by a day hanging out with his idol (that 3 wing kicking in, as well as ENFP overaccommodation).
Mikey also has a competitive streak in him second to Leo’s. He can’t wait to “rub it in Raph’s face” when he gets the game in Hot Soup: The Game, and needles Leo by calling him ‘second place’ throughout You Got Served. Additionally, when Mikey gets mad, he can let his anger carry him to some extremes. In ‘Donnie’s Gifts’, he demands that Raph tell Donnie exactly how they all feel. In ‘Pizza Pit’, we see Mikey’s anger/hangriness drive him to extreme rage as they chase down DIGG for destroying their favorite pizza places. When he’s blocked from being able to do (razzmatazz) or get (pizza, the truffle) what he wants, he’ll let his feelings take over regardless of how it affects those around him.
Tumblr media
Average Mikey: Most of the time, Mikey lives completely in the present. He is often reacting to whatever is right in front of him at the time. Outside of danger, he is happy to spend his time playing video games, creating art (Flushed, But Not Forgotten) or cooking (The Ancient Art of Ninja Hide’n’Seek, The Longest Fight, Pizza Puffs, Donnie’s Gifts). He also enjoys hanging out with all of his brothers, playing various games with Leo (You Got Served, Sparring Partner) or helping Donnie with his projects (Repo Mantis, the scrapped Gourd Almighty). Being so in tune with the present, Mikey often hits the nail on the head with what exactly is going on (usually emotionally) with the situation, and responds. 
This type of response is neutral, however. For example, in Bug Busters, after they destroy the lobby of the hotel, Mikey says “we need to do the right thing, guys… and get out of here.” Another moment includes their first time hero-ing in Origami Tsunami where he comments “Man, this seemed like a really cool idea until we didn’t succeed at it.” Or in The Gumbus, when Stockboy asks if they’ve subscribed and donated to his channel, Mikey replies “No. But we’ve been thinking about meaning to.” Or even cheering on Draxum in Repairin’ the Baron after he admits he’ll need to tolerate humans with a happy “there’s the bare minimum!” The humor in all of this is that Mikey’s not wrong. He’s exactly right, and just outright states it, for better or for worse.
Which is another thing about Mikey: nothing is subtle. He puts himself out there, and everything he does is done to the max. When he cries, he sobs. When he laughs, he laughs hard. When he’s scared, he’s terrified. When he’s mad, he’s enraged. 
Tumblr media
Even his ‘doctor’ personas (which you can look at as a 4w3 who prefers ‘the stage’ than a quieter 4w5 for expression) are extremes. https://www.crystalknows.com/enneagram/type-4/wing-3  Dr. Delicate Touch tells it how it is, no matter how much the truth may hurt (Pizza Pit, Bullhop). Dr. Positive looks on the bright side, no matter how far out of reach that goal may seem (Repairin’ the Baron). Dr. Feelings will commit to emotional intelligence and the importance of experiencing feelings no matter how closed-off to the idea his patient(s) may be (Breaking Purple).
Mikey at his Best: The thing is, while Mikey is often unapologetically his whole entire self, bad side and all, he accepts the very same traits about everyone else. He believes everyone is perfect as they are (The Clothes Don’t Make the Turtle) not because they have obtained some kind of ideal, but because he thinks their entire being, warts and all, is what makes them beautiful and perfect.
Mikey appreciates everything around him in this way. In Hot Soup: The Game, we see him constantly pausing and appreciating various items in the store. The suit of armor he fell in? Has a feather! The ice cream kitty statue? Is adorable and makes him coo. There are dozens of little moments throughout the entire show where he constantly just pauses and notices what’s around him and how cool/beautiful/fascinating they are.
This is how Mikey views people, too. He was the first one to warm up to Todd, even when there was still a chance he was the spine-breaking bandit (Repo Mantis). He looks up to Rupert Swaggart for his cooking skills, while simultaneously acknowledging that the guy is a jerk (Nothing But Truffle). Even after Bullhop has been “working a nerve!” he still asks him at the end if he wants to join the Mad Dogs. He points out to Donnie, as he’s having trouble with Shelldon, that Shelldon “is at a delicate age. You need to nurture his spirit, or you’ll drive him away.” (Breaking Purple). And he’s right.
Tumblr media
This is also how I think Mikey can come across as a Two very often. He’s so supportive, so generous in always helping others, hyping them up, and being there for them that it can read very much like a Two. But the motivation is what it comes down to: Mikey doesn’t help out because he needs to be needed, or to feel loved. He already feels loved. He’s engaging with them on their terms. His connection with them is utterly genuine and authentic. That is a very powerful kind of acceptance that is hard for anyone to say no to.
The biggest example of all of this is, again, Draxum. No one else was going to touch Draxum with a ten foot pole. But Mikey, as a 4, takes his past in stride and meets him where he is with a full, true, connection. Even though Draxum grouses, he doesn’t turn down Mikey’s help. Unlike a two, Mikey’s not helping to be loved, or because he feels he needs to help. Mikey states “He created us. That makes him family. And once he feels like he’s a part of our family, his goodness will shine.” His entire logic is that Draxum needs to feel part of a family, something that is missing from him currently. Right before that sentence, Mikey lays out, very clearly, exactly what state Draxum was in. He was totally alone and helpless. And he’s not doing it in a judging way, exactly, nor lauding how great he is for helping him out of that. He’s stating the blunt truth. Mikey encountered a depressed, powerless, down-on-his luck warlord. And he still accepted him for everything he was: a depressed powerless, down-on-his-luck warlord, and his creator. Since he created Mikey (and since Fours heavily value their sense of identity and purpose) this means A LOT to Mikey. 
“How can you say there’s no such thing as ghosts, when there’s such a thing as us!” (The Gumbus)
“He created us, Raph. Without him, we wouldn’t even be here.” (Repairin’ the Baron)
“He made me. He made us. …Maybe he didn’t make us for the right reasons, but I’m still glad he did.” (Hidden City’s Most Wanted)
“We’re perfect the way we are! Embrace the TURTLE, baby!” (The Clothes Don’t Make the Turtle)
Of course he decided he was family, and of course he believes that connecting Draxum with family is going to grow Draxum into a better person. Mikey is all about embracing the wonderfully unique, diverse, and fascinating people in this world and finding the joy and beauty in even the darkest, ugliest places.
Now, there are three other teenage mutant ninja turtles in Mikey’s world.
Mikey Relationships:
I’ve talked about Mikey’s relationships in all the previous Typing posts, but will try to continue here. What KILLS me, though, is we were on the cusp of some surely-great Mikey episodes before Nickelodeon interfered, which would have made this entire post much, much easier (T-Hex, the Turtle Tots episode, ‘Wedding Crashers’). So I’m going a little out on some projected limbs, here.
Raph: It’s interesting that though Mikey is usually supportive of Raph, Raph tends to be less supportive of Mikey. He’s hesitant to let him go on a solo mission (Hot Soup: The Game), or back up his and Donnie’s plan in One Man’s Junk. I think this was really going to be explored in the planned episode where Mikey and Raph confront each other about this: Mikey is growing up, becoming his own person, and Raph needs to let him grow. He can’t keep him sheltered as the Big Brother all the time. This would cause an ENFP 4 a lot of friction if they can’t explore for themselves and stretch their wings. 
Tumblr media
Donnie: Mikey has a close relationship with Donnie, and there’s a lot of team-up episodes with the two of them (Repo Mantis, One Man’s Junk, the fight in Bug Busters, etc.) There’s also a dozen little moments of affection between the two, hugs and pats on the head that indicate a lot of sweetness (Hot Soup: The Game, Bug Busters). Donnie’s the closest brother Mikey has to also being a creator: he builds inventions, and engineering marvels, Mikey creates art in graffiti and culinary forms. Additionally, they both love music and dance (Mascot Melee, Lair Games). That is a great environment for Mikey’s unique, creative side to grow in, probably seeking more of Donnie’s company as Raph’s becomes stifling.
Tumblr media
Leo: There are a surprising number of similarities between Leo and Mikey. They get along as easy as breathing, hanging out in a number of casual off-screen ways (Mrs. Cuddles, Sparring Partner, You Got Served). Mikey’s competitive streak can exacerbate Leo’s, as they share that 3 on the Enneagram, but Leo is also one of Mikey’s biggest supports. He goes against Raph in Hot Soup: The Game, to let Mikey go on his solo mission. He points out in Origami Tsunami that Mikey is known for his legendary optimism. Mikey is Leo’s Hype-Man in Shell in a Cell and Leo encourages Mikey while he’s masquerading in the hippo costume (Newsworthy). They’re pretty solid.
Tumblr media
Overall, Mikey is a genuine, authentic, creative and expressive turtle who is not afraid to meet people where they are. His emotional openness, curiosity, and solid sense of self make him a truly engaging friend, ally, and loved one. I wish we could see him challenged a bit more, and truly the center of an episode exploring his traits, but until then, we’ll love him as he is.
Tumblr media
For more information on the ENFP and Enneagram 4 personality types, click here:
https://www.16personalities.com/enfp-personality
https://www.enneagraminstitute.com/type-4/
https://www.elisabethbennettenneagram.com/post/the-happy-four
https://personalityhunt.com/4w5-vs-4w3-similarities-and-differences/
https://www.crystalknows.com/enneagram/type-4/wing-3
14 notes · View notes
von-blutdurst · 8 months ago
Text
behold, my tf2 oc
Tumblr media
more info about him below the cut!!
meet the artist! his real name is oliver pick and he is a sarky little bloke from the city of britsol in england. after a run in with merasmus left his art supplies cursed/enchanted he can now use them either as projectile or melee weapons. mann co. soon gained knowledge of his abilities and hired him to fight in the gravel war alongside the rest of the cast. my bf helped me a lot with his lore ^w^
he is an attack based class, mainly dealing up close hits with a giant paintbrush/pencil or widespread attacks (eg. splattering acidic paint everywhere). i don’t have any illustrated depictions of how his attacks work so sorry. his art supplies have an “attack mode” and a “resting mode”. what this means is when they are in “rest mode” they appear as normal art supplies and when in “attack mode” they enlarge or become more hostile looking. all of his art supplies typically have bright green paint on them to signify their connection to merasmus and glow bright green when they’re preparing to engage in “attack mode”.
in terms of his personality, he is quite introverted and awkward. his only real friend in the base is scout, because he’s one of the younger mercs and artist finds it difficult to converse with the older mercs. he’s 19 years old, so, pretty young compared to the rest of them. here is a more in depth list of what his relationships with the others are like:
scout - pretty close with him in a brotherly way. they tend to shit talk the others most of the time and scout likes to ask him to draw stuff.
soldier - artist is actually kind of afraid of soldier, mainly because he dreads to imagine what would happen if solly found out he was british.
pyro - artist and pyro share a common interest, being art, so they get along fine. pyro likes to put stickers on artist’s art supplies and artist likes to paint on pyro’s mask.
engie - he really really really likes to help engie draft his schematics. engie typically lets him do a few lines at a time before taking over again, because artist is a dumb kid who shouldn’t be trusted with drafting schematics in his eyes.
heavy - heavy tries to take on a more father-like role with artist because he worries for the little baby man. being faced with so much atrocities at such a young age cannot be good for him. artist likes spending time with heavy, playing catch and other such games. he doesn’t really understand why heavy’s so worried about him though.
demoman - demo and artist get along fairly well. artist doesn’t really interact with him often but every time he does it’s always a positive experience. demo typically offers him a drink like that cool uncle at family reunions and he gifts him some shrapnel from the battle field sometimes.
spy - artist hates spy. point blank. even thinking about him makes him wanna throw up. do not ever mention the frenchman to him. ever.
sniper - artist doesn’t really like sniper either. he finds the whole concept of jarate weird and gross. his first death was due to the enemy team’s sniper so there’s also just some mild resentment there.
medic - artist is unbelievably terrified of medic. he’s afraid of the things he’s capable of doing but chooses not to. he’s always avoiding him, even on the battle field. this leads to artist having a very high death streak compared to the others.
so yeah that’s a somewhat-not-really brief overview of my silly little guy!! if you have any questions about him i’m more than willing to answer! thanks for listening to my mad ramblings!!!
30 notes · View notes
stellarfire · 9 days ago
Text
it’s that time where i word vomit again !! this time about kelly and voight (mostly) !! thoughts under the cut !! i yapped so much i’m so sorry in advance, this isn’t very comprehensive but it’s late and my brain is every which way </3
let it be noted that i am not a frequent pd watcher so i am not crazy familiar with voight’s character !! a lot of this ramble is kelly-centric and is just my perspective on things !! cool? cool. okay let’s go :)
at their cores, i think the two of them are very different. that’s to say, mainly, voight is a lot more morally gray than kelly is. but that said, they’re not entirely different (DONT BOO ME I’LL EXPLAIN)
first and foremost, i have no idea how exactly these two are gonna butt heads. obviously, there’s some level tension between voight and 51 bc of past experiences. voight has and will go against what’s ‘objectively’ right and will consequently resort to questionable and/or concerning means to reach a solution he wants. compare that to kelly, who often tries to mitigate the damage to that/those around him in order to reach a solution
✨however✨ i think a lot of people seem to forget what lengths kelly is willing to go to when it comes down to it? this is mostly side thoughts but i’m saying them anyway💀 by all means, more often than not, kelly takes the objectively right path. he’s always putting other people before himself. but then you factor in things like him brushing off pascal indirectly admitting he set bishop’s car on fire, him quite literally not only stabbing cotner with a pike pole when he had his gun pointed at stella, but driving it deeper, and what i would honestly consider the holy grail of what could be considered objectively incorrect actions: him threatening to kill a guy and beating him senseless after cornering him to get information on katie’s whereabouts when she was kidnapped, rather than letting the police handle it. granted, i sure as hell don’t knock him for it!! the man has a protective streak for his loved ones that runs 100 miles wide. but that doesn’t change the fact that his actions technically aren’t objectively correct (by ✨societal standards✨)
ANYWAYS tho, back to the actual crossover thoughts. as i said here, i think the bulk of their tension is gonna result from how to get everyone out from the subway collapse. from my personal perspective, they have conflicting interests: voight strikes me as the type to be more concerned/focused on the suspect than anything else (outside of ruzek and potentially stella, but i’m not very familiar with his relationship with adam so please excuse me), while kelly, outside of stella, is more worried about the victims than anything else
maybe voight tries to suggest actions against the suspect (or getting into the subway collapse overall) that puts everyone else in further harm’s way?? and kelly has an issue with it?? i have no idea !! that is just me spitballing
but it makes me wonder where they’ll find common ground, bc lord knows they’re gonna have to, or else. will voight dial it back? or will kelly dial it forward? voight doesn’t have the same emotional attachments in this situation that kelly does; as much as he likely does care about adam (and stella, to an extent), there’s a clear fundamental difference between that and stellaride’s marriage.
that said, this is arguably the worst situation stella and kelly have ever been in. mayday (10x1) is definitely up there in that it forced stella to start considering a life without him, and it’s probably the worst situation at this current point in time before the crossover has aired, but now, there’s so much more at stake. and i think you can tell that by kelly’s visceral emotions alone
it makes me wonder (again). he clearly will not be 100% emotionally sound during this like he normally is on calls. it’s gonna be rough. and that’s not even including the fact we know they’re potentially gonna be saying goodbye to each other (and other emotional things) because they don’t know what’ll happen. so i wonder… how far would he be willing to go?
do i think he’ll actually do anything stupidly drastic? no. but god knows he’d do anything by all means necessary to get stella out of there alive. and so a part of me can’t help but wonder what lines he could potentially cross, who he’d be willing to defy (i.e., pascal, mainly) in order to ensure that he can get to her. i can definitely see him defying pascal as well as other security measures, and i think, just maybe, voight could be a further nudge in that gray direction
as a final note tho, as much as we’re about to see tensions between him and voight, i also know that they’re two of the most competent leaders there in their own merits, and i think it’s predominantly gonna be them who put this thing to a resolve (of sorts) by working together
9 notes · View notes
apriciticreveries · 5 months ago
Text
ok so . . this . . is seriously my last lil guy . . im really done this time . . i don’t think i can keep up with posting about all of them consistently and equally,
and since i actually rushed all of their existences, and also just made a lot of them on whims, ill be honest . . im not even that attached to like, any of them anymore ( which means that im not motivated or interested in thinking about them or expanding them ) 😭
ill try to be, but im really, really struggling . even with zero who i wanted to spend more time on but ended up rushing too in the end . .
welp, anyways,
———————————————————————————
Tumblr media
introducing zero !
honestly made this one on a whim . started out wanting to tailor him to @junebluues sirius, but eventually kinda lost my way on that route . also kinda rushed his profile since i promised it today . but,
here’s some additional and extra details on him ! :
he / him pronouns, but he’s more genderfluid in general . . also, he’s both demiromatic, and demisexual . though he struggles a bit with physical intimacy .
his guardian is named guardian keirii ! although there’s not much information about them, but they’re known to be a pretty rare species of segyein, similar to phan, hyuna’s guardian . they’re also a researcher who specializes in ▉▉▉▉▉▉ !
not a very opinionated guy . pretty neutral on everything, unintentionally uninfluenced, in a way . because of this, he often just takes popular or common opinions as examples when asked particular things .
^ partly because he wasnt really attended to, and wasn’t opened to any outside experiences . in his younger years with keirii, he was often locked in his room for days, the door only being opened for him to be given food and water, but when he got older, he was free to wander around the lab . ( as long as he didnt touch anything . )
( this also kinda stunted his emotional and imagination growth, so he’s commonly logical in a lot of things, and can also be cruelly apathetic towards others . he lacks a lot of basic human compassion and empathy, too . )
his like for sirius ( although it’s still generally a like ), is more of an interest ! hes aware of their true nature ( and other actions ), and as a result finds them quite intriguing . he also finds their presence quite pleasant . ( basically, “ huh . i actually really like you . . “ )
calming but also unsettling to be around at times .
plain asf . he gets good grades in all fields but nothing really sticks out about him . easily forgettable .
anyways, that’s all for now . . i shall do some lore posting about him next ( i think ) . . oh, here’s his full profile without the error sign !
Tumblr media
credits to @shakingparadigm for the profile assets ^^ !
12 notes · View notes
markerofthemidnight · 11 months ago
Text
Danganronpa Settings And Why They Work
(and also an analysis on Blackened Skies and Project: Eden’s Garden’s settings because why not)
I’ve had a pretty long day today and I’m currently nursing a mental headache that’s slowly over time evolved into a physical headache. What better way that to try and help with that then to get my brain working in an analytical way?
So, Danganronpa settings are cool and interesting. There’s a lot of different ways you can take them, but- as we’ll soon see when we get into this analysis properly- most take the form of some kind of prestigious or fancy area that’s been twisted into a mockery of itself.
Another thing they have in common is that wether a school like in DR1 or a chain of islands like in DR2, Danganronpa settings are secluded places closed off from the outside world, naturally as the goal is to get out. If it would be possible to escape it in normal circumstances, it isn’t now.
So without further ado, let’s talk about them:
Hope’s Peak Academy - Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc
Hope’s Peak is the main standard that all DR settings meet, as it is the first in the franchise. As to be expected from such, it’s rather straightforward when you get down to it, but there are a few interesting details:
Hope’s Peak is a prestigious academy for Ultimates that’s been turned and twisted by Monokuma into a frightening, almost claustrophobic nightmare.
And boy, is its appearance good at nailing that frightening feeling down and making it feel even more oppressive.
The school- specifically around the ground and first floors- is filled with these bright colours all over the walls and floors, in a way that, in any other case, would probably feel bright and happy, but now taken to such an gaudy extreme that it circles back around to being uncomfortable. It’s really dark, too. The shadows feel unnaturally strong.
Why, exactly? Well, if you ask me, that’s because we know that schools aren’t supposed to look like this. Colouring in real schools, to my experience anyways, tends to be quite muted. There might be a splash of colour here and there, but nowhere near like the way it is in Hope’s Peak where you’ve got countless colours being thrown at you and none seem any more overpowering than the other.
The best part about this effect is that, as I specified earlier, it’s most noticeable in the first two floors: ie, Chapter 1. The chapter where finding a way out of the school, no matter the cost, was at its most important: the rest of the game seemed to be more focused on why it was happening, and as soon as that was resolved, the issue of them being stuck there was fixed almost immediately after.
Also, is it just me, or do the rooms in Hope’s Peak either feel incredibly claustrophobic or incredibly agoraphobic?
The 2D rooms feel claustrophobic, since they all open up with the little cardboard cutout props appearing into the room, either popping up by themselves or scuttling in from offscreen.
The 3D rooms feel agoraphobic, since they’re rooms that, unlike the rest, you can move around in, and often tend to be incredibly big compared to all the rest.
Either way, there’s a sense of dread following you wherever you go in Hope’s Peak, and that does a lot to add to the overall feel of the game.
Setting Ranking: 8/10
Jabberwock Island - Super Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair
Now, Jabberwock is where things get interesting. This actually might be the most interesting setting on the list, now that I think about it: first of all, it’s the only entry on the list to be set outside rather than inside.
Secondly, and less obviously, getting off the island wasn’t really that… important in DR2? The game, at least the first few chapters, was more focused on getting it back from Monokuma.
However, there is one thing of interest about Jabberwock Island that I feel like I need to bring up: the sheer uncanniness of it.
It’s not as obvious as it was it Hope’s Peak, for multiple reasons (the game’s on an island so it feels more open, the sun’s almost always shining so there aren’t any strong shadows, and while there are still a lot of different colours, they don’t contrast each other and instead come together in a beautiful tropical aesthetic) but that’s all balanced out by Hajime repeatedly stressing, in the prologue, that something is wrong with the island.
And I have to say, I can’t blame him. Jabberwock, specifically the first island, feels almost… too perfect. The sky feels too blue, the beach too yellow, the whole situation is just too good to be true.
Rocketpunch has just about everything you could ever want, even if it shouldn’t realistically be found in a supermarket, like night-vision goggles. The hotel has personal cottages for everyone- all separate buildings no less, not different rooms in the same building- and its own restaurant.
Just like Hope’s Peak, there’s a sort of uncanniness to Jabberwock. An uncanniness that is repeatedly stressed by Hajime, specifically near the beginning of the game.
Admittedly, that uncanniness sort of… dies down after the first half of Chapter 1. I feel like SDR2 probably should have leaned harder into it, but I realise why it didn’t.
The uncanniness is replaced with a more desolate feeling in the 3rd and 5th islands, not to mention… you know what? This deserves its own section.
The Funhouse
Admittedly, there are times in the game where you come to appreciate the fun island aesthetic. The soundtrack, specifically Beautiful Ruin, really nails that feeling: it reminds you that, no matter what Monokuma and his killing game leads you to think, you were originally supposed to enjoy the school trip.
So naturally, the Funhouse segment says to you, “Hey, you know that fun feeling you’ve been appreciating while you can this whole game? Let me hold that for a second,” rips it straight out of your hands before you can even answer, and throws it out of the window for the rest of the chapter.
The Funhouse is everything I described earlier about Hope’s Peak but amplified to 11. The bright, eye-burning colours are back with a vengeance: but whereas Hope’s Peak at least had different sets of eye-burning colours, here, it’s just the same two dumbass patterns on bright lime green and pink wherever you go.
Also, since the Funhouse seems to consist mainly of 3D segments, you’d think it leans harder into Hope’s Peak’s agoraphobia, right? No, actually, it manages to flip that concept on its head: somehow, the 2D rooms seem too big and the 3D ones seem too small.
The fact that the entire cast are slowly starving whilst having to look at images of strawberries and grapes wherever they go just add to that feeling.
Setting Ranking: 7.5/10 (The Funhouse: 4/5)
The Ultimate Academy for Gifted Juveniles - Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony
Now, I’m probably gonna say this a lot in this analysis, but the Ultimate Academy is… interesting, because it doesn’t really feel like the first two.
It doesn’t have the same uncanny vibe that Jabberwock and Hope’s Peak have: rather, it feels more desolate. The sort of dreary aesthetic it has, and the overgrowth everywhere, adds to that feeling. That your life ends there.
But then, there’s the more futuristic aspects of it. The technology in the school feels high-end, like it takes place a few decades in the future.
Sure, it can be written off as the futuristic parts being Monokuma’s renovations and that the school itself is ancient… but you can never really tell.
And then there’s the Ultimate labs. I don’t know about you, but they’re probably my favourite part of the setting: they’re just so interesting!
We never got anything close to a talent lab in any of the other games… and for good reason, because I couldn’t see it working in any of the other ones.
I think we can all agree on this: if there wasn’t a Killing Game going on, and the place was cleaned up a little, the Ultimate Academy would be a really good place to stay, and the talent labs are part of the reason why this is, wouldn’t you agree?
The characters certainly seem to agree. The only ones who seemed to outright dislike their labs were Ryoma and Maki, who never liked their talents themselves to begin with.
All of the above come together to create a sort of… conflicting feeling about the Academy. Do you like it, or do you not? Is it futuristic, or is it from the past?
Which, I’d say, is quite fitting for a game about the relationship between truth and lies. It makes you question the reality around you…
And then there’s the End Wall. I… honestly don’t have much to say about it. It’s certainly interesting, but probably the most I could add to how it makes one feel is that really pins down the feeling of being trapped, and its sheer size makes you feel a part of something bigger than yourself.
Setting Ranking: 6.5/10
The Despair of the Seas - Blackened Skies (AO3)
(I’m including this because I think it’s a really good an interesting setting. If any of you would like to read it:)
The Despair of the Seas is much like the Ultimate Academy for Gifted Juveniles in that it’s unlike anything else we’ve seen in the list so far… but mainly because it’s actually a blend of the previous three, in its own ways.
The logic behind making it a cruise ship didn’t make much sense to me until starting this analysis, but now I start to realise: Blackened Skies takes characters from all three of the games, and what do you get when you take two prestigious schools and merge them with a tropical island? A cruise ship, obviously.
The Despair of the Seas, as described in the fic, is a very large ship. And, additionally, a ship with a very nonsensical layout. Now, it’s quite difficult to tell how this would make the player feel if it was a game, because it’s not, but… if I had to guess, I assume it would be similar to the feeling of uncanniness DR2 had.
The inconsistency of the ship, and the strange way it seems to be laid out, would make you feel almost… detached from it. Whereas Jabberwock Island felt simply odd in a way that was difficult to keep your mind off of, the Despair of the Seas would feel outright liminal.
Much like, say… purgatory.
It’s also interesting how the outside of the ship is described as just being a dreary ocean painted by grey clouds (or should I say, BLACKENED SKIES?!) It adds to the uncanniness the ship has, and amplifies the feeling of there being no escape.
And not to mention, when you start to think about it… it also highlights the themes of guilt and sin that the story has.
Rough seas are perfectly normal. Unpleasant, but common. And yet, despite your desperation to escape the ship, when you look out the window, suddenly you decide you want to stay?
Naturally, you would. Of course you would. And yet this feeling doesn’t do anything but make you feel worse about yourself.
It’s like you want to stay there, almost. The Despair of the Seas is an incredibly fancy ship, and not even in a gaudy or tasteless way: again, if they weren’t stuck there, the cast might actually want to stay.
But what I have to stress is that it’s like that on purpose. In just Chapter 3 of the story, it’s stressed that the protagonist feels as if the fanciful nature of the ship is Monokuma’s way of rewarding them all for killing.
So it makes you feel… tainted, almost. Like you’re in on the joke. Like you’ve been consumed by pride and greed, and the only reason why you want to leave is your weariness of all the other selfish murderers around you.
Of course, that’s just my interpretation of it. Anyways, the Despair of the Seas is cool and great and go read Blackened Skies if you haven’t already!
Setting Ranking: 9/10
Eden’s Garden Academy - Project: Eden’s Garden
Eden’s Garden Academy is… I dunno, it feels very down to earth in comparison to all the rest.
Of course, I can only go off of what little we’ve seen of the academy in the prologue, but… the best I can describe it is like a cross between the uncanniness of Hope’s Peak and the dreariness of the Ultimate Academy.
Hope’s Peak managed to feel both claustrophobic and agoraphobic depending on the area. Somehow, Eden’s Garden Academy manages to feel like both no matter where you are.
As soon as you wake up in the academy, it feels desolate. Like it’s been abandoned for a long time, and only recently renovated for the sake of the Killing Games: much like the Ultimate Academy except less obvious.
The entire school has a haunting feeling not made much better from the portraits scattered all over the walls. It feels almost like a horror game in that regard, like something’s going to jump out at you.
Another thing that adds to that feeling is how we’ve never actually seen the outside. We’ve been tricked into thinking we were outside, but we’ve never even encountered a window.
What results from that is a feeling of separation from the outside. You could be anywhere right now, and you have no way of figuring out where.
It also really adds to the feeling of being trapped. If the recent teaser is anything to go by, there’s also a fake exit somewhere in the new area, which if anything adds onto that feeling by a long shot.
I don’t really have much else to say since we’ve only seen so little of the academy so far, so… yeah.
Setting Ranking: 6.5/10 (but only because I haven’t seen enough of it)
Thanks for reading!
22 notes · View notes
ghostly-runes · 5 months ago
Text
Deaf/Hard of hearing Black family (And a bit of the Tonks/Rosier/Malfoy/Lupin/Riddle family (Pretty much everyone in the family tree I could think of))
Note: I am not deaf but I am disabled so I am somewhat pulling from my experiences so, if I get anything wrong or am insensitive in anyway please please let me know
- Sirius was born hard of hearing but never got the support he needed in childhood
- He didn’t know and wasn’t taught sign language until he was older and could learn it by himself
- Regulus and Andromeda were the only ones to learn BSL (British sign language) with him (More so Reg than Andy because he lived with Sirius)
- Deafness runs in the Black family but most of them learn to live with it so they don’t seem “crippled” (Narcissa and Orion are the only ones that aren’t hard of hearing or deaf in the family)
- Regulus grew up hearing but midway though his years at hogwarts he started losing his hearing (Pandora pointed it out)
- This is one of the few times during their years at Hogwarts and after Sirius runs away, that Regulus comes to Sirius because “How can he be the perfect heir if he’s ‘defected’. ”
- They had a long conversation about how that didn’t determine his worth and he wasn’t ‘defected’ or anything of that sort
- In a They all live!AU Regulus would have been completely deaf by 30
- Luckily though, at the age of 15 Regulus has a close knit friend group and they’re all willing to learn sign language for him (He sucks at lip reading)
- Sirius also has incredibly close friend group and they all start to learn sign language for Sirius, even if it’s just common signs
- Sirius actually doesn’t tell his friends that he’s hard of hearing, James just picks it up 2nd yr and when asked Sirius tries to deny it but he sucks at lying to James
- After a bit they tell Peter and then Remus
- After Remus, Sirius finds it gets easier and easier to tell his friends and soon most (if not his whole) friend group knows
- Regulus on the other hand doesn’t tell anyone but Dorcas, Barty, Evan, Pandora and Sirius for a while. (James and Lily have to learn about it from Sirius)
- Andromeda is born completely deaf and it scares her mother half to death because it’s not often that the Black children are born that way
- Because of this she isn’t able to talk very clearly and struggles quite a lot
- Bellatrix, like Sirius is Born hard of hearing but her mother is a little more accepting of it and makes sure her daughters learn sign language
- So the girls grow up learning and knowing LSF (Langue des signes française/French sign language)
- They teach the brothers bits and pieces when they get the chance but Orion refuses to let them use it in the house
- Orion and Cyprus both don’t start becoming hard of hearing until they are teenagers and even then they never go completely deaf
- Walburga was born hard of hearing like Sirius and was considered a failure by her mother for this (she continued the cycle of this to Sirius)
- Alphard was not born completely deaf but is by the time he is a small child he is (His parents are reallyyy not happy about this)
- Because he went deaf after he began to talk he can talk mostly clearly, he does struggle a bit at times but it’s not normally noticeable
- However, he cannot speak English as he didn’t learn any before going deaf (French is his first language) and he only knows bsl after he moves out
- Tonks (Nymphadora) is born hard of hearing and grows up in a house that uses sign language
- Draco, like his mother is one of the few family members that are born hearing but he starts losing his hearing a bit earlier than most folks
- Teddy is also born hearing but grows up with Andromeda so they learn sign language as one of their first languages
- Scorpius was surprisingly born hard of hearing considering his mother, father and grandparents are not deaf or hard of hearing
- But not to worry, the family trauma is being healed and he grows up with a good support system and people who know sign language and use it with him
- Delphi and born hearing and doesn’t usually have any problems with her hearing until she’s a preteen
15 notes · View notes
zoobiefish · 4 months ago
Text
Yo! So I’ve unfortunately fallen behind by nearly a week for Auctober because I’ve been travelling abroad this past week…whoopsie-daisy! So here’s a little catch-up post!
Day 13: Vivid Imaginations
This one is very true for me! For some reason there’s a big stereotype that Autistic people are incredibly unimaginative. But once again: We’re a spectrum! Some of us may not have the most vivid imagination or may not be the “creative type,” and that’s okay! But I do find that quite a lot of us tend to be very imaginative, artsy, creative etc. My imagination is so vivid that I can practically see an object I’ve imagined in grear detail and can visualize it as if it’s in 3D space. Sadly…this doesn’t make me any better at drawing 😝 Regardless of my skill level though, I’ve always had a passion for the arts. I love to draw, paint, write stories, write poetry, and I used to dabble in playing the piano as well! One of my coping mechanisms I’ve had since childhood has been to retreat into the fictional worlds I’d created in my mind. I do this to this day in my late twenties.
Day 14: Hyperfixations
So, I often see the word “hyperfixation” used interchangeably with “special interest.” (The latter is often shortened to “spin,” which I love!) My understanding is that hyperfixations are more common in ADHD and refer to intense, almost obsessive interests that last a shorter amount of time than a spin. A spin, on the other hand, is more common in Autism and is essentially the same as a hyperfixation but generally lasts longer—anywhere from years to one’s whole life. That was my understanding of the terms, but I of course could be very wrong! I do have both Autism and ADHD however, so I do experience both hyperfixations and spins. My spin that I’ve had my ENTIRE life was The Legend of Zelda. It’s my all-time favourite videogame series and it means so, so much to me. I always related to the main protagonist Link, whom I’ve headcanoned as being Autistic for years! A spin I had for years was Japan, and I taught myself a lot of Japanese from childhood until I graduated high school. It’s not so much a special interest anymore, though I’m still making an effort to learn the language, culture, and I would still very much like to visit Japan some day! 🇯🇵 A few years back, I had a hyperfixation on plague doctors of all things! I still think they’re interesting, but it was definitely a little more of a fleeting interest. Of course, that doesn’t mean it couldn’t resurface—hyperfixations often do resurface for me hehe! One of my current most prominent spins right now is Puritan New England. Recently on my trip abroad, I visited Boston and Salem Massachusetts and I was SO hyped!! I need to clarify that my interest in the Puritans is NOT at all due to any support for colonialism—I am staunchly anti-colonialism. I just have a morbid fascination with fanatical religious groups and their history. I usually compare it to people who have an interest in true crime—just because they’re interested in the subject, doesn’t mean they support serial killers or anything like that. Hope that makes sense!
Day 15: Pebbling
Awww, pebbling! One of my favourite things about the Autistic community and the neurodivergent community in general! For those who don’t know, the term “pebbling” comes from something penguins do when selecting a mate: they will find a rock they think is pretty and give it to the mate they’re interested in as a gift! Autistic people often do this too (though not necessarily in a romantic context; I mean, probably in that context too, but often we do this with friends!) Autistic people might see somehing they think is really cool, neat, or interesting, and give it to someone they like to share in the fascination. This is our little bonding ritual and it shows that we really like you, so feel honoured! I don’t do much pebbling myself, or at least maybe not as frequently as some Autists. But on the occasion I do, it’s usually a craft item I’ve made for that person! For example, when I made a new friend last year at uni who was also Autistic and has a spin with skeletons and spooky things. So, I made them a skull magnet out of fuse beads! (They loved it!) I recall back in high school as well, there was a time I was making like a bajillion origami butterflies for an art project I was doing at the time. I made a few extra, so I just gave everyone in my friend group an origami butterfly! 🦋
Day 16: Autistic Pride
I have always found it odd when people treat my Autism diagnosis as if it’s a tragedy. Yes, I won’t deny that it has caused me much hardship and sometimes I do think it’d be easier to be neurotypical. But if I wasn’t Autistic, I wouldn’t be me. I wouldn’t be infinitely curious with an insatiable appetite for knowledge. I wouldn’t be creative in my particular way. I wouldn’t have my unique sense of humour that everyone in my life seems to enjoy. I don’t think I would have the compassion for others and love of the world that my peers know me for. I just wouldn’t be the same person. I love being a divergent thinker and having a perspective on the world that is entirely my own. I may have difficulties and need a lot of help with certain things, but I’ve accepted it and I accept myself. I love being Autistic, and I have no interest in a “cure.”
Day 17: Repetition
I am known for being very repetitive—probably to an annoying degree. Sometimes it’s embarrassing too 😭 For example, I’ll find a joke far funnier for far longer than most people. By the time everyone is over the funny joke, I’ll still be unable to contain my laughter. I can’t help it, I’m sorry!! I also tend to repeat quotes from my favourite shows, movies, games etc. over and over again. Often with little to no context as well LMAO
Day 18: Self Regulating
Self regulating for me usually means stimming, fidgeting, or, if trying to prevent a meltdown, shutting the blinds/curtains, hiding under a blanket, putting headphones on etc. Sometimes the world is just too much for anyone—but when you’re on the spectrum, it’s like that more often. It’s hard for me to convey just how intense my sensory issues are to non-Autistic people. The best way for me to explain it is…imagine if your eardrums were *outside* of your ears. Or if, like a camera, the exposure (amount of light let in) was turned up to the max in your eyes. Or you know that one itchy sweater you hate? Imagine if almost every kind of fabric you tried on bothered you like that. It’s like all your senses are just…turned up to the absolute maximum. This is why we stim. Why we wear sunglasses sometimes even indoors. Why we wear headphones or earplugs. The world is loud, bright, and constantly coming at you. Let us self regulate. Doing so will make you a great friend to an Autistic person ❤️
That’s all for now, I hope to have a drawing or other form of art for the next prompt! Until then, I’m drained from writing all that and from travelling. I got a plane back to Canada to take soon. Bye bye!
7 notes · View notes
dreaminginthedeepsouth · 7 months ago
Text
Tumblr media
Rachel Connolly:
Earlier this year, I had a bout of what my friends and I term “mental health”. I was always tired. I couldn’t concentrate. I felt burnt out by the volume of communication that social media facilitates. I am 31 and, like many people my age, I’m in multiple group chats on WhatsApp and often find myself added to new ones. I use Instagram to post work and selfies, and to chat with people via the DM function. I use X similarly. (I’m too old for TikTok.) I enjoy some of this. I like talking nonsense with my friends. But I’d started to question how deliberate much of it was. I’d find myself posting a picture of a book I was reading and think, why do I need an audience to read? I began to wonder if, in the cycle of curating, recording and publicising our lives on social media, the things we do that are not seen and affirmed by people online feel somehow less “real”. My work as a writer means I probably get more online communication than the average person. Last year I published my first novel, and I have since noticed the slightly strange way that novels are discussed online. I get tagged in Instagram posts saying that my book is about a messy girl, a sad girl, a distant girl or a cold girl. There is an algorithmic basis to this. The easiest way to attract attention on social media is to talk about a trend everyone else is talking about, or to slot whatever you’re talking about into one of these trends.
So everywhere you look it is Brat summers or trad wives, cottage-core or bloke-core, high-functioning anxiety, parentified children or whatever happens to be the latest term for pathologising your life experience. Everything is flattened, simplified. I worried that being immersed in it was making me think this way too. A friend recently got a “dumb” phone, a Nokia 3210, to use when she’s out of the house. She leaves her smartphone at home like a landline. It has made her happier, she says. I needed a break too, but I was drawn to the idea of spending some time cut off from all communication. A reset, of sorts. I found a weekend-long silent retreat, no phones allowed, and booked myself in. My craving for a break is not uncommon. Social media is such a constant background presence in our lives that it’s easy to forget how recent it is. Facebook, which feels impossibly passé, is only 20. Instagram is not yet 15. Researchers first used the term “digital detox”, to refer to a period of abstention from phones and laptops, in 2012, around the same time that social media was really taking off (chat rooms had been around since the turn of the 1990s without the concept surfacing).
Digital detoxes remained unusual for a time. In 2015, Essena O’Neill, an Australian influencer with 612,000 Instagram followers, made news around the world when she released a statement about quitting the platform. Today, similar moves by celebrities are so common they barely make headlines. Billie Eilish deleted all social media apps from her phone. Actress Tavi Gevinson wrote about using an assistant to manage her Instagram. It has been hard to keep track of the number of times Stephen Fry has quit and rejoined Twitter over the years. These dramatic exits can seem amusing, especially when they’re followed by sheepish returns, but mostly they underscore how addictive and overwhelming social media can be. My silent retreat took place in a large house in rural Devon. I arrived on Friday, one of a group of about 50. We were allowed to speak during registration and, because I had gone there determined not to use reductive labels, I could already sense myself reaching for them. A young man told me he had done several silent retreats before. Ah, I thought, so you’re the type of person who does these often. Then I caught myself. What type would that be?
During the first meditation session, our instructors explained that we would sit and try to embody, rather than think about, the question “What is this?” This distinction struck me as confusing to the point of meaninglessness. But they explained that one way of attempting “not to think” about the question was to resist the urge to answer it. They encouraged us to focus instead on how we felt, on the physical sensations in our bodies. If you have never tried this, I will say that it is extremely difficult. We sat cross-legged for 30 minutes. I stared at a wall. Then we walked in a circle for 10 minutes. Then we sat down again, and so on, for about two hours. Then it was bedtime. I enjoyed the communality of me and the other girls silently working through our evening routines together. I realised that I had never decided to bring my phone everywhere, like an appendage to my body
The next two days were structured around meditation and chores. At 6.30am we were woken by a bell. We did two hours of meditation, after which we had breakfast. Then a break, followed by another two hours of meditation and lunch. My chore was washing up after we ate. Then more meditation, dinner, another break, meditation, bed. If sitting in an uncomfortable position and staring at a wall while trying not to think sounds impossibly boring, I would say it is not so different from the way my days would unfold when I worked in offices, traipsing from my desk to the tea station and back. More earnestly, I would say I could not have imagined how much I would enjoy the retreat, or how much I’d get out of it. Over the weekend, one of the instructors spoke about trying to be more conscious of the labels we put on our experiences and interactions. It struck me that a similar fatigue with the overload of digital communication is probably what draws a lot of people to try a silent retreat. We were all the type of person who is fed up with “types of people”.
On my first morning after breakfast, I went outside. The countryside seemed fantastically vivid. The blackbirds looked as beautiful as anything I had seen before. I watched one, like a dash of ink, flickering against the mottled grey sky, then two sailing as a pair, in tune with each other. I watched a cloud of them, pulsing. It reminded me of a jellyfish. Back inside, from my seat in the meditation room, I could see a tree that the birds would visit. When I was frustrated with the way my thoughts rattled around my head, reviewing unsaid rebuttals to months-old arguments, I watched the birds and imagined the paths they were taking in the world. One of my issues with the task “embody but try not to think” is that the semantic distinction between thinking and feeling is hard to grasp. If you notice that you feel happy or sad, is that a thought? Or a feeling? I found animals a useful framework to try to understand the distinction, as they negotiate the world using senses. A bird might fly north because of an environmental cue, but it does not say to itself in words, “I want to fly north.” I came to understand the task not as emptying your head of thoughts, but rather resisting the tendency to narrate things to yourself in words. I noticed that this interior monologuing would lead me along familiar, superficial trains of thought, to recent memories associated with certain feelings, say, and soon enough back to mundane anxieties.
At night, I would sit outside and look at the stars. The clouds, invisible in the darkness, shifted to expose one patch of stars, then another, making it look like the sky itself was swelling and shrinking. Memories and ideas still came to me, but deeper, more interesting ones than before. It was as if I had cleared the way for them. I remembered that I used to look at the stars when I was a teenager. I used to read about how they’re born, how they sustain themselves, why we see only some of them, how they die. On Monday morning at breakfast, we were allowed to speak again. Some participants had found the weekend hard, they said. One person had cried repeatedly. Others said that eating in silence had made them feel as though everyone was being cold towards them. As they talked, I remembered old corporate jobs where I was always the office loser. People could sense the aura of failure emanating from me, so I would eat lunch by myself, in silence. I got used to it. I didn’t feel I was learning anything valuable at the time, but life can surprise you. Sticking out is not so bad, I realised. This is the message of most children’s books, but one it’s easy to lose sight of as an adult. Other people’s perceptions of you, real or imagined, don’t have to influence how you see yourself. Social media is designed to erase this perspective. Much of the anxiety it fosters comes from forcing you to see yourself, constantly, as relative to others.
8 notes · View notes
scythemichaelfaraday · 1 year ago
Text
“A Nice Guy”
Edgar Vargas is painted as a kind Christian soul with conviction and faith that was tragically brought to an untimely death at the hands of Johnny C.
Sure no one wants to die horrifically by the works of a homicidal maniac, but the way that Edgar goes about attempting to do so is quite covert and sheds a lot of light on who he is not only as a character but as a self-proclaimed person of faith.
Also to note before I begin: this is not a personal attack against those that see Edgar in a positive light.
Playing Nice to Get You to See Their Way (And Get What They Want)
A common tactic of Christians is to find the downhearted, the “broken”, the outcasts and build them up with friendship, affection, and support that susceptible people often lack. But their goal is not to make a lasting relationship, it’s to chip away at the person’s boundaries ever so slowly until they can indoctrinate them.
Now, Edgar’s goal obviously is not to indoctrinate Johnny, but he uses the same tactic of listening to Johnny rant about the mistreatment he experiences, offering some degree of sympathy, and ultimately showing that his primary goal of hearing Johnny out is so that he can slip in the request that he be freed. And he does this several times, most prominently, here.
Tumblr media Tumblr media
Tumblr media Tumblr media
The common pattern of listen, wait, and ask for what they really want.
Christians Don’t Deserve Bad Things Obviously
When asked about what he’d done to Johnny to end up in the torture device, Johnny responds that he hadn’t really done anything except for being a person.
Tumblr media Tumblr media
When Edgar learns about this, he questions why then Johnny, as person, doesn’t kill himself.
Tumblr media
Tumblr media
The first hint that he believes only the bad, the unworthy (whatever that could mean to him) should die. Johnny is just one of the unsavory, evil people that Christians like Edgar believe deserve to be condemned (unless they ask for divine forgiveness).
And the second hint is illustrated here:
Tumblr media
“What if I’m not like all those goblin people? You just randomly picked me out, when you could’ve taken someone more deserving.”
Many Christians like to believe that they are holy people divinely picked by God himself to show the people of this Earth how wrong they are and to come to faith to be fixed. So why would bad things happen to them? Are they not God’s special children, his “Army?”
Don’t those queers, those atheists, those left-wing lunatics, that street performer who impersonates robots and makes that irritating wheezy whistle noise more deserving of this anguish than them?
Christians don’t see any other line other than “people of Faith and my lifestyle” and “people not of Faith and my lifestyle” and anyone who fits into the latter is grouped altogether whether they be child abusers, people who get abortions, or a little child in Africa that worships another higher being than them.
Why poor innocent undeserving Edgar?
“A Heaven for Me, and a Hell For You”
This deserves its own point because in addition to claiming he is undeserving of his death, he also makes it clear that he believes in divine punishment (and reward) as all Christians do. And finally the niceties that Christians wear falls away.
Tumblr media
He doesn’t know really anything about Johnny other than he’s a deranged, ill murderer, but he has already decided that he is deserving of Hell. Again, anyone that a Christian perceives as not being of their lifestyle and Faith is condemned to Hell.
In fact, as a bit of an anecdote, a youth group leader at a church I used to attend was very adamant and very certain that children who die before they are “saved”(including infants) go to Hell. It doesn’t matter that they are innocent and have done nothing wrong, just because they don’t serve their God, that person deserves to go to Hell.
If one takes all of this into account, the only thing we can credit Edgar with is that he was civil with Johnny until he wasn’t (I think telling someone they’re going to Hell kinda ends a civil streak). We don’t really see much more about him outside of this brief interaction, but I think most people who have been burned by Christians can see through the kind façade that he puts up.
Again this is all just my personal opinion. Take what you like and leave the rest.
23 notes · View notes
chronically-persistent · 11 months ago
Text
I am once again experiencing the Horrors™️, so you know what that means! ME/CFS information time!
Though often associated with fatigue and neuro-immune dysfunction, ME is actually quite prevalent in the gut as well. Intestinal and stomach issues are not uncommon, so here are a few to mention (these are not an exhaustive list, please add if you experience others!)
IBS: possibly the most common diagnosis, IBS can cause a whole host of lower GI dysfunction, including indigestion, constipation, diarrhea, and cramping. It can range in severity and form between individuals.
Gastroparesis: a paralysis of the stomach muscles that causes delayed and sudden stomach emptying. Symptoms include bloating, fullness, pain, nausea, and in cases vomiting. Let me tell you, this one’s a doozy.
Bacterial overgrowth: Unfortunately being chronically ill has consequences on the gut microbiome too, and some studies have shown evidence that individuals with ME/CFS (and its comorbidities like fibromyalgia and IBS) have an overgrowth in the small intestine, which causes side effects similar to those mentioned above.
ME/CFS really is a systemic illness, and if you are experiencing gastrointestinal symptoms, please seek the help of a trusted physician. If there is no one you feel comfortable speaking with, there are a few things I find help me.
Stay upright, slightly reclined if possible. Being completely flat makes me more nauseous and painful.
Small meals. Big meals only serve to instigate the nausea and cramping.
Avoid heat unless your guts are cramping, for example with constipation. Otherwise I find heat makes my nausea worse.
Try liquid replacements. I’m currently trying Boost, and have experienced good things with it.
This one’s the toughest, but avoid stressors. I have GAD so I never like hearing this but unfortunately anxiety and the gut go hand in hand. If you can try to distract yourself, it may ease the symptoms a little.
GINGER GRAVOL! If all else fails, these supplements work wonders for my stomach, and start taking effect in around 30 min. They’re last on the list because they can run a little expensive, but if you need relief fast, these are a life saver in my experience.
Stay safe out there, everyone, and feel free to add to this! These are just my sleepy, nauseous ramblings, and ME/CFS is not a monolith. I’d be happy to hear your thoughts and experiences
11 notes · View notes