#cw suicidal ideation

[qoldenskies]

donnie HATES when leo pulls stupid stunts during fights, especially because EVERY TIME leo brushes it off and makes jokes and usually heckles him for trying to tell him off about it. he will storm up to him angry and leo will laugh at him and donnie will tear up and leo is always IMMEDIATELY like No. No no No wtf Oh My God STOP IT IM GONNA KMS ????????

Leo seeing Mikey as a replacement for himself is kinda funny. 4’7 aggressively optimistic box turtle and Leo’s fucking raging like “oooohh he wants to be his big brother so fucking bad. Everyone should wanna protect Donnie but it should also only be ME!!!”

leo sees someone who is ACTUALLY confident and independent who isnt bullshitting, that donnie actually gravitates towards, and becomes SICK with envy like mikey isnt literally baby. i mean he's a fierce little baby but he's still BABY

they're JUST similar enough for leo to compare them in his head, and donnie is pretty much the only person leo feels comfortable opening up to-- it's a lot easier to create this narrative in his head where mikey is trying to take his brother away from him than the true one, that donnie just wants to split his time (and is currently extremely stressed out because of what's going on and needs space)

which is funny because he doesnt like raph because he's mean to donnie. motherfucker PICK ONE

[writing-for-life]

If the paywall comes up, try to put the link into this: https://www.removepaywall.com

Posting in the spirit of not staying quiet about this.

I strongly suggest you read this—all of it, because it’s long. Lila Shapiro is the journalist who wrote the investigation into Joss Whedon btw and won an award for it, so maybe people can finally stop making this all about Tortoise Media.

[reasonsforhope]

I’m sorry to come to you like this since you probably wanted someone to come in for a reason for hope but I’m freaking out and have no one to talk to about this rn. A music artist I follow put this stuff in their story on instagram..how are things getting better??? I’m so confused and scared. I’m terrified to be alive. I should’ve died in election night. Idk if I can do this anymore. I don’t want the world to end nor live in an apocalypse/dystopia. I can’t do this. I’m not strong enough. I’m going to die before I even reach the age of 25 or 30 instead of dying of old age😥😥😥😥😥

First, breathe.

Second:

Go read these links. Keep going down the list until you feel better:

Read:

this article* on why the doomers are wrong

everything in Fix the News's awesome year-end roundup* of good news

everything in my masterpost on why we're going to beat climate change

everything from my masterpost on net negative carbon emissions

everything in Fix the News's archives, until you feel better

*it's a fantastic article in many ways but warning for (brief but serious) fatphobia and some annoying Western-centrism. Warning for fatphobia also applies to (one point on the) Fix the News roundup.

You should not have died on election night. Absolutely not. Yes, there are great injustices in the world. But this too shall pass. Literally everything does.

Some notes:

This isn't the end of the world. It's not about to be an apocalypse. And, if the world wasn't a dystopia when half of all people died before the age of 15 (aka all of history until the past 250 years), it's definitely not a dystopia now, imho. (x, x)

Literally every single week on Fix the News, I see the news that some country has ended some disease! Usually I see multiple stories about that each week! We're making real progress that has saved billions of lives!

In 1900, 120 years ago, there were 5 full liberal democracies in the entire world. Now, about 97 countries (out of approximately 195, depending on how you count) are democracies. That's almost half the countries in the world! This is actually, writ large, a time of massive expansion of human rights, hard as it is to believe from looking at the news. (x, x)

Also Imho the most likely explanation to the Fermi Paradox is that we're only 0.13% of the way through expected lifespan of the universe (x, x). Very little time for life to evolve, comparatively.

Finally:

Unfollow this person. Unfollow everyone who posts something that makes you feel suicidal - literally and ongoingly, every time you see a post that makes you spiral, immediately unfollow that person.

It's not about sticking your head in the sand. If you want, you can calendar time to check ACTUAL news sources (NOT social media) a couple times a week to make sure you're staying up on things.

But you know what? The number one priority is keeping yourself alive.

How are things actually getting better? To quote the first article I linked:

"I could tell you that a little more than 200 years ago, nearly half of all children born died before they reached their 15th birthday, and that today it’s less than 5 percent globally. I could tell you that in pre-industrial times, starvation was a constant specter and life expectancy was in the 30s at best. I could tell you that at the dawn of the 19th century, barely more than one person in 10 was literate, while today that ratio has been nearly reversed. I could tell you that today is, on average, the best time to be alive in human history."

Stay alive. And do what you need to do to keep yourself that way.

[zipsunz]

in a social link this would be a rank up

[daily-crabbys]

This Friday's meme is: you always do this

[pokeberry5]

red robin in his hot girl summer era

alts + closeup:

[oobbbear]

[wereshrew-admirer]

for a moment brnine thought they’d finally done something right, but then they realize they’re still alive

an extremely delayed secret samol gift for grace<3

alt text below

45 seconds of animation(+10 seconds of credits)

brnine and dahlia stand in a sunny but lifeless approximation of a livingroom. one of the windows is a map of all divinity that blinks. dahlia gestures at flashes of space battles, brnine slowly reaches into a pocket of their cargo pants.

brnine and dahlia, close up, stand in front of the map, but brnine’s reflection has been replaced with an image of valence glowing and angry. the glass begins to break and the camera pans to dahlia, whose reflection is crysanth, bloodied and snarling.

an excerpt of brnine’s interview with continental countunghouse begins to play when the camera cuts to brnine alone in the stellar combuster room. lights flash and they crouch down to pick up a tangle of wires on the floor.

a closup of the wires in their hands flashes between integrity, bloody, and valences arm opened for maintenance. their hands tighten around the objects in unison as the blood from integrity drips down their wrists.

a drop of blood meets water pouring into a glass, mixing into a the bright lavender that has been used to represent valence throughout.

brnine’s hand lifts the glass and behind it are gur sevraq and valence having a discussion. they rotate and valence fades away, leaving only gur sevraq who turns and looks at brnine while The Figure sits up in front of them, revealing that it was a recording or a ghost the whole time.

tears drip down the figure’s concrete face. the tears become sweat dripping down brnine’s face as they finish their interview, awkwardly finishing a glass of water before grimacing and waving, “hi mom, i guess”

[wild0moon]

someone pls teach him proper trigger discipline

[dailyhmsw]

loop 47

sacrifice

[eelektrossfan]

To Decay

[vaguely-concerned]

do you ever think about how, when we get lucanis' ossuary mind note on what he was thinking during the fireplace scene at the end of his recruitment mission... what's implied to be his instinctive internal reaction as he's saying "you'd have to kill me" out loud sure isn't 'and I don't want to die'. it's '(and spite would die)'. do you think spite's gremlin-y candle-hungering give-me-FIRE! >:D presence has maybe saved that guy's life even more times and in more ways than are immediately obvious at a glance. do you ever. cry.

it's also very. him that the thing that would stay his hand on killing himself partially might be that he just isn't willing to visit the same cruelty or harm on spite as zara, even when accepting his passenger spirit as collateral damage would at least offer a chance to put an end to his own pain, which at that point he seems unable to see any other way of truly escaping or find real relief from than to die. there's so much resentment and fear and other understandable fraught emotions in spite and lucanis' relationship early on, but it's just as clear that deep down lucanis conceptualizes spite as fundamentally innocent in what's happened here -- perhaps, indeed, more innocent than he manages to conceptualize himself until someone else can help him get in there and start to untangle it with him. he's protective of spite in some subtle ways right from the start, taking pains to point out several times on the jog through the ossuary that the spirits here were just as much victims in what was done to them as anyone else. when spite acts out during the fireplace scene... how much of lucanis brushing it off the way he does is about the '*actively bleeding from the eyes* don't worry about me' avoidant side of it all, and how much is him trying to shelter spite from the eyes of people he does not know well enough yet to predict how they’ll react in response — towards himself or spite. (additional idea to really bring on the heartache: do you think he has maybe intervened in pretty much the same way between illario and caterina over the years and that’s how he does it so smoothly and automatically; it’s basically psychological muscle memory. Haha. ow.) 

Between that and the pretty consistent language he uses that frames spite as child-like, even when he means that in frustration/enfant terrible flavoured terms lol, you get the sense that regardless of how much Lucanis is aware of this on the surface, there is a deep instinctive protectiveness in him for spite. I think that even comes across in the scene where lucanis tells you he’ll continue to pursue a way to separate him and spite on the minrathous route. So I was kind of picking up on/working with that already subconsciously, but when I found that note it hit me like a sledgehammer that clearly in some part at least, the reason lucanis is still here is that he knows now that spite would die with him and doesn’t find that price acceptable. Spite thinks that lucanis mentally locking himself in his (torture :() room and refusing to speak to him is an act of rejection or trickery, but to my eyes taken with everything else we know about how lucanis’ brain tends to work… as much as it’s an expression of avoidance and fear and overwhelm and trying to get away from the voice pushing him towards action when the mere prospect of action fills you with despair to even contemplate (“There’s nowhere to go”), I think it’s also a mark of lucanis’ affection and protectiveness of spite. The guards along the way make it very clear that more so than to keep the outside world from coming in, this place is for protecting people from what might break out. 

And that’s why I think this is also such a good case study to look at lucanis' internal freeze logic and why it has been so adaptive for him up until now when faced with completely impossible emotional situations to which there are no good answers or causes of actions available, even though it's inherently and unavoidably one of those 'what's worse, the medicine or the disease' solutions a brain cooks up. lucanis by the point of inner demons is facing this conundrum: 1) I can't live like this, it hurts too much. I've been in pain so long I’ve got screams where my blood should be and it just keeps getting louder, and nothing really touches or helps that. 2) I can't die to escape this, because that would also kill spite (and also I've got a job to do I guess *working 9-5 slowed with reverb and with underwater sound distortion effects is playing in the background*). those are of course not actually his only options, but in the state he's in they are the only options he can conceive of. (that's not infrequently how it works, when the suffering is that intense and unrelenting. Nothing gives you tunnel sight quite like ‘I just need this to stop’ agony that has gone on long enough to add sheer soul exhaustion to the mix)

so what happens in the end? his freeze brain -- honed, I'm sure, through many long years of attachment trauma and abuse and loss for exactly this kind of 'uh-oh. Incoming FUBAR situation alert let’s go' -- kicks into action and makes him do nothing except what's externally required of him, so he can stay just functional and momentarily distracted by a plethora of avoidance behaviours enough to get through his daily life, if like not particularly happily so... and otherwise, as it were, locking himself in his room deep inside where nothing can touch him, where nothing gets in and nothing gets out, no harm allowed to either escape from within nor allowed to pierce through and get inside. numbness isn't actually a cure for that kind of suffering, but it's the closest thing you're likely to get with any immediacy and if you’re desperate enough by god you take those. It’s how he survived his upbringing, and it’s how he survived the ossuary — as he tells Davrin straight out, the trick to just shut down every part of his soul he can to get through intolerable pain, loss or helplessness. I don’t think that mechanism came to him in the ossuary the first time, I think that blueprint was deeply embedded in his neurons and went ‘ah. My time again. Not to worry I’m a bit of an expert at this I’ll get us through this yet (though you may not thank me for it by the end of it all)’. 

In that state he's unable to himself reach out and meaningfully ask for help (and also like... why would his inner world have any framework for that as even being on the table? this has never been an option before in his life, not in any safe or consistent way; he's fucked up the way he is because the same things/people that should have been and partially, comparatively, were the sources of help and relief and safety growing up are also the sources of pain and abuse, that eternal irreconcilable ambivalence, the double edged sword of unpredictable insecure attachment), but it also keeps him from doing anything uh drastic the other way too, on acting impulsively in ways that can’t be taken back. (that seems to be more illario’s role/dubious privilege in the family lol.) at many points in his life and especially growing up, freezing and going numb around the pain is as close to having control of anything as there was any hope of. 'harm will be inflicted on me unpredictably, but fuck you I don't have to truly feel it as long as I shut all this other stuff down as well, that's what I can control' nervous system logic. (it'll get you every time.) for what it’s worth I’m not so sure his nervous system judged that one incorrectly, I think that is the kind of rebellion you would have to cling to while being raised by someone like caterina, because look at illario if you want to know how much she respects and rewards anything more overt or active. (I mean, if you don’t succeed, at least. swing at Grandma Dellamorte you’d better not miss or you’ll meet that cane swinging at you the other way and she will not miss)

I say all this because I think it's as easy to demonize the freeze response as it is to demonize anger, to conceptualize it only as an obstructive force that, as bellara puts it, is one of the purest forms of a heart not seeming to want to let you be happy, or a mindless byproduct of trauma. But in my experience, the brain doesn’t generally come up with ‘stupid’ defense mechanisms. Even in the most maladaptive of coping mechanisms, there is at the core of it some part of you that once meant to save your life, no matter what trouble it is wreaking for you today. when you look at the setup of Lucanis’ soul, as it were, you can see the dual and in some ways genuinely noble and even tender qualities this response has in him, however misguided: it does imprison, but it also protects, and it means to protect; for all the pain along the way it has sheltered all the parts of his soul that are most precious and breakable, the most vulnerable parts that want to live and so so importantly love completely and freely. Lucanis thinks he’s protecting not even primarily himself but everyone he loves by staying where he is. (“It would be better for me to stay here than to risk losing you”) A child’s logic, to be sure, but logic of a kind and clearly one that caterina has encouraged in him because that’s a conception of love it’s been very useful for her for him to have. Freeze looks like utter hopelessness on the surface, but in some ways I think it’s the utmost triumph of hope — a spare and unrelenting winter that exists because it thinks one day spring might still come, and the things too precious and fragile to thrive in your life as it is now might bloom then. 

He is an adult now, and Caterina no longer controls his entire world, physically and emotionally. There’s finally room for other things, other people, himself, in his life, without everything having to defer to the gravitational force of what Caterina wants from him at the end of the day. And while I think her jumpscaring him with the First Talon position is partly her attempt to wrangle him back into the status quo of control she once had, I’m not sure it’s going to work quite the way she might hope — at least in the Treviso saved route, there are just too many fresh spring shoots in his life at that point that could grow into something new, it’s too late to trample all the saplings growing up through the cracks in time (and indeed some of them might also fight back). (The outlook on the Minrathous saved route is um. Perhaps less convincingly immediately hopeful to me and the prospect of actually getting around to healing further down the road, but I refuse to give up on him that’s my little guy and he’s above all incredibly smart and stubborn and not a quitter and all the rest of this still remains true beneath it all, just like. Give him a moment here.) His hopes and dreams have diversified while she had her back turned lmao he suddenly keeps them with so many more people than just her and Iillario now. She doesn’t hold the monopoly of meaning and connection in his life the way she used to. And whether out of love (you know. Hope is every man’s prerogative I suppose) at seeing him really happy for perhaps the first time or sheer pragmatism, I think she’s going to have to accept that and adapt her ways of doing things with him accordingly, or else have him drift even further away from her.

Spite is the urgent impatient voice that starts to break through to go ‘that moment is now it HAS to be now. We need to shake off the shackles and illusions and face what’s actually here so we can learn to properly live now, or this winter will starve us to death as surely as anything Zara could do to us’. And he is right! As crucial as this soul-starvation landscape has been in survival, it has clearly reached the end of its sustainability, you can’t survive permanently on frost alone. I just also want to recognize the credit Lucanis (and his fucked up but valiant nervous system <3 pour one out for a real one) also deserves for stubbornly holding on in any way he had to until Spite’s true escape project is even an option for either of them. Especially since Lucanis seems to harbour a lot of self-loathing and frustration over his own propensity for freeze — “You know him. You can open the door, but he won’t walk through it”  (still one of the saddest most painful things I’ve ever heard. In case you were wondering. He knows. He knows what he’s like, and he despairs of it, he thinks it means it’s his own fault he still feels like this. Augh.) The real point at the end of the day is not that spite saved lucanis or vice versa, but that as traumatic as it was to get there and against all cultural expectations, it is ultimately their enmeshed condition, their togetherness, that saved them both. (which, again, when you consider the cultural narrative of possession and spirits most andrastian nations are working with…what a radical conclusion to come away with haha. Not unprecedented at all, if you look at Wynne and her spirit, but on a deeper and more psychological plane than ever and even more impactful for it, to me.)

[konckalicious]

"why would you climb a mountain like that?"

[hexcrystals]

sorry i can’t stop thinking about how at the start of the season ed was actively suicidal and he felt so unloveable and so broken that he didn’t see any way out other than provoking a mutiny bc he thought he was such a monster

and he gets to end the season at the very beginning of a new life, embarking on a new dream with a man who loves him, a man who not only is able to love him but who finds it incredibly easy to do so, who deliberately chose him over piracy bc he’s that important

if the end of ofmd s2 is not a kind ending then i don’t know what is

[zipsunz]

MANIA, MISERY, and FURY

(art by me, script by @sunkitty143!)

a lot of this is purposely up for interpretation and has multiple meanings, but i wanted to share a little concrete info: mania, misery, and fury are three separate bosses that mari must face on her own, no matter the route.

since something in the dark/walls/water specifically play into sunny's phobias, i wanted to create solo boss battles that focused on something mari would personally fear-- in this case, her friends' view of her and her guilt magnified by her struggle with imposter syndrome.

that being said, sunny's three phobias still play a VERY important role in the story and in headspace. even in relation to mari. ESPECIALLY in relation to mari. hehe. more on that some other time ^^

[sunlitlemonade]

so. uh. surprising thing about jason, who might be one of the most inconsistently written characters ever, is the fact that one trait about him has remained constant throughout different eras, reboots and even an elseworld. no, it's not his thighs tho that would be a very good guess.

it's his suicidal ideation. yeah.

[here's me screaming about the fact that he feels like a phantom that has outlived its purpose of haunting in detail if you're interested]