#i also sympathize with my autistic mom who did her best with some really poor clay

[diehellasrache]

i have this really uncharitable thought sometimes and i'm not sure how to articulate it but it's like. those posts where people are (entirely reasonably) expressing pain at adults in their life not saving them/helping them/noticing their mental illness as children and it makes me think. you're an adult now. who have you saved. is the answer "i've done a little but mostly i'm drowning in my own problems and not in a position to armchair diagnose people and also solve their problems" because i think that was probably the case for everyone who knew me as a child, and they also didn't have the benefit of a bunch of free education about mental illness

[nianderful]

nia’s 30 days of witchaversary (days 1-17)

um, oops?

i meant to do this sooner, i swear, but i’ve been very busy with work and other real life stuff this month

i actually wasn’t intending to do this at all, but since my initial plans to celebrate WITCH have kind of fallen off, i may as well jump on the bandwagon! i hope i’m not too late 😅

day 1: favorite guardian

orube! i absolutely adore this girl. she’s such a great character--appearing to be a hardened warrior but in reality is the biggest softie...while also kicking a lot of ass. i love her interactions with the guardians, i love the depth she has, and while i could gush about cedrube all day, they deserve its own space. 

honorable mentions go to....well, the rest of w.i.t.c.h., will and taranee in particular. i relate to both of them a lot (mostly with being pretty shy and socially awkward)

day 2-favorite villain

(will smith poses) THIS GUY. i know everyone and their mother loves phobos, but i am not Everyone And Their Mother.  i honestly think phobos is kind of lame

cedric on the other hand, is a different story. this guy’s a CHAD. he was the one Actually Doing Stuff in the first arc. HE was the one pulling weight during phobos’ scheme in the fourth arc, AND ludmoore’s in the fifth.

also he’s just a great villain in general; a consistent threat through and through, powerful as heck (unlike his tv counterpart who got his tail whooped by everyone) and do i even NEED to bring up him and orube? (i’m gonna get to them, i promise) 

day 3- favorite love interests

i honestly think all the WITCH bois are good but if i could pick a favorite....

peter! he’s just so good. a sweetheart, a looker, a great big brother.....he’s perfect. (like tadashi, ‘cept he doesn’t die)

look at him and corny being goofy. love is real and it’s in the picture above me.

 day 4: favorite pairing/ship

aww man this is a long time comin’ so let’s get it DONE

cedrube. always cedrube. forever cedrube. 

these two are just....so good. a twosome on opposite sides, brought together by their shared experience of being Fish Out of Water. orube brought out the best in cedric (his semi-redemption, anybody?) and cedric allowed orube to experienced something she longed for.

if only their ending was as happy as they are in this picture...

day 5-favorite friendship

picking all of w.i.t.c.h. would be too predictable, so i choose...

these two! i love how irma and hay lin are Those Two Gals, joking around when the others are being serious. these two are perfect together, and i love the scenes when they’re messing around.

day 6: favorite cover/promo/pin up art

the cover for issue 56!

ugh i love this. it’s gorgeous; the movement’s fluid, the expressions are on point, and it’s a tribute/celebration of the tv series! (particularly with the girls curled up in element colored balls; a reference to the toon transformation)

day 7: favorite issue 

had to go with the one that started it all, issue 1. this series has been with me for a long time, and i remember being so captivated with the first issue. i may sing the praises of precure, but w.i.t.c.h. was actually my very first magical girl series, and this issue was my very first experience with the genre. i will always hold it close to me. 

day 8-favorite special

the orube special! orube sadly isn’t a character that gets much play outside of her role as w.i.t.c.h’s ally/honorary guardian, but this issue gives us just that! we get to see her get a job, make friends, and learn a little more about how to be an earthling. 

day 9-favorite guardian uniform

i’ll pick taranee’s! 

it looks the most....practical to me. like, if i was a guardian, i’d wear something like this. also i ADORE the fact that tara keeps her glasses in guardian form. any other show would have them get magicked away, but not here. as a Black Girl With Glasses, it’s a detail i really appreciate.

day 10-favorite world/planet

um. kandrakar, i guess?

it’s pretty. 

day 11-something awesome

speaking of tara....

this moment from issue 4. another moment i remember vividly from my childhood, and one of the first scenes that shows us that taranee is not to be messed with. don’t play with fire INDEED. 

day 12-something that made me cry

i have yet to cry when reading this comic, but a moment that really made me sad was when will’s dormouse died

this really hurt, not just because it came after the hope spot of will’s dad going away, as well as nerissa’s defeat, but because ol’ dormouse had been a staple of the series to this point, and it was clear that he formed a bond with will. just a really cruel moment to end the second arc on. (but not in a bad way, of course)

day 13-something heartwarming

the last page of issue 20! 

issue 20 is a bit of a roller coaster for poor will; she’s slowly being manipulated by nerissa, to the point where she shuts herself off from the girls. on the side, we have yan lin beginning to worry about history repeating itself with the current guardians.

but then this happens, a moment that shows us that WITCH will not suffer the same fate as the team that came before them.

will just spent the scenes before this pushing away from her teammates, even attacking them; for them to say that they trust her irrevocably says a LOT about their faith in will, and the friendship of WITCH itself.

day 14-something that irked me 

everything about the arkhanta arc that doesn’t involve orube or the astral drops!

(reader beware, it’s about to get personal Up In Here. mentions of ableism to follow.)

we may as well start with the backstory of ari, because his relationship with his son and how it’s handled is going to be the epicenter of everything i’m discussing.

‘yeah once upon a time there was a happy farmer who had a kid, but oh no he’s nonverbal and can’t communicate! happy farmer is sad now” (also he may have told kandrakar to Fix It but Oracle Said No)

see the problem here? it’s okay if you don’t, because i’m here to explain!

basically the villain of this arc is an Autism Dad who thinks his son needs to be Fixed. he constantly angsts about the fact that his son doesn’t talk, smile, or say I Love You....basic whiny Autism Parent stuff. 

except we’re supposed to sympathize with him. we’re supposed to see him as a poor innocent man instead of, you know, someone who may be unintentionally hurtful with his woe-is-me-isms (also will insisting that he’s in the right...)

and as if that’s not irksome enough....

maqi gets cured in the end. he’s speaking, he’s emoting, he’s not The Broken Kid anymore!

yeah, uh, no. i have autism, and have exhibited some of maqi’s traits on a regular basis. (and it’s not just me, my little sister imani was nonverbal for a lot of her childhood. we didn’t even think she was going to be able to talk.) and as someone who’s felt like i was a Broken Kid, that some thing was wrong with me, and has wondered Why Can’t She Just Be Normal....this ending does NOT fly with me, and neither does ari as a character.

ari’s not a Sympathetic Sad Dad, he’s an ableist douchecanoe. there’s a REASON i compared him to autism moms. maqi’s “problem” isn’t that he’s sick or anything (the comic even SAYS he’s perfectly healthy!!) he just isn��t emotive or talkative....and for the comic to paint as something that has to be fixed is more than a little gross. i know the comic wasn’t intending to offend with this, but that’s exactly what it did.

thank goodness for orube and the astral drops, or this would’ve been my least favorite arc.  

day 15-something that needs a quick fix

um. i got nothing for this one. 

day 16-something that needs an overhaul

the arkhanta arc. either cut out the ‘must cure my son of his autistic-coded traits’ or create a new conflict all together. (like the whole maqi thing could’ve been fixed with simply giving him and illness or putting him into a coma!)

and like everyone else, i’d like a overhaul of new power and beyond.

day 17-something that needs to be resisted

sweet mother of monkey milk, the astral drops. i wanna see how they’re doing. i wanna see what their lives are. do they remember anything, even secretly?

also visit orube while we’re at it, see how she’s doing post 5th arc.

[autistic-science-cryptid]

Introduction

I am an autistic person, as I’m sure you know. And, as the title suggests, while I am not literally a cryptid, I might as well be a cryptid, at least according to autism researchers, for a number of reasons. You see, for starters,I was diagnosed with autism in the late 80s as a baby, and I mean a literal baby, just over a year old, because my mom (who later realized she was autistic and self-diagnosed as a result of watching me grow) talked to the doctors and was like “Oh by the way, I noticed that other babies look at me but my kid does not. Hmmm. I wonder why that is”. That’s the first cryptid point right there - researchers are still looking for ways to diagnose autistic kids at age 2 (so they can push that hellish ABA therapy on them - boooo) even though like two seconds of observation would enable them to see who is autistic much earlier. Which is probably a good thing if that kid has the type of parents who would push them into ABA. Good thing my parents didn’t buy into that crap, no matter how much later experience with abusive assholes convinced me they did or it was only a matter of time before they did.

Secondly, since I didn’t know how to please IQ testers when I was really little and had not been pushed through official ABA by my parents, the “experts” claimed I was (and this is their word, not mine) “retarded”. Which, as we know, is a slur, but was a medical term in use back then, before they said “intellectually disabled”. Fine thing to put on a baby. And here’s the thing: No intellectually disabled person can write the way I’m doing right now. So one more cryptid point - apparently the real me didn’t exist to them then, either.

Thirdly, when I was really little, a dog (whose owner foolishly claimed he “loves kids”) got its mouth around my throat, and my autistic nervous response of freezing up in the face of that type of danger is the only reason I’m not six feet under right now, as pretty much any neurotypical kid would have been when confronted with a situation like that. So one more cryptid point for me. Especially since I always have and still love dogs, and if anything, that incident had me firmly convinced that dogs are not mindless killing machines, because if they were, I’d be dead. Whereas a response I had to a teacher ducking me underwater and giving me fake praise was more normal - it made me afraid of the water, and only a teacher from the YMCA cured me of that fear, whereas the special ed middle school I went to, which had a pool, only punished me for that fear. I’ll get back to special ed later. 

Yay “errorless learning! (/sarcasm)

I also used to stack a little table on top of a chair when I was a kid to reach stuff because for some reason, my dad always put Cheerios on top of a really high wardrobe (Gee, thanks) And I never fell because I was careful climbing that precarious structure. One more cryptid point for me - kids normally aren’t able to do that.

I am also a person who was in private Special Ed schools from the time I was like ten months old throughout high school, and my middle and high school in particular was emotionally abusive to me. While they never officially claimed to use ABA, they did - if it walks like ABA, talks like ABA, and quacks like ABA, it is ABA no matter what you call it. And really, it’s quite weaselly presenting your core discipline method as like a fun extra for your students to earn (which I found out on their website years later). It’s especially weaselly given that this method was the exact method used to punish me for not swimming a length of the school’s pool due to the fear of the water (and especially the deep end) that I mentioned earlier, a fear that wasn’t even as difficult to solve as many other hydrophobia cases, so of course a Y teacher was able to fix it. Throughout that time, but particularly during middle school years, I tried multiple different little schemes (not adult-level schemes, kid-sized ones) to try to be a more successful kid (so yes, I do sympathize with Pa Ingalls, even as I recognize that it is far more problematic for him to do that than for kid me to because he had several people to look out for and I had zero). That’s another cryptid point - usually you see that kind of behavior pattern from grown men, not tween girls.

As an extra bonus, the special ed high school I went to let me into their college program the first year, one where you take college courses for credit, and I got an A in that course. Nevertheless, my school had set me up to fail that - they had a lady teacher sit next to me, one who was entitled as fuck. This teacher whined about her job to us, and also bragged at one point about how Tom Cruise called her and was polite to her. I mean, hello? Tom Cruise is a Scientologist, and assuming that teacher wasn’t lying, the only reason Tom Cruise would call some random teacher is to recruit her into Scientology. But of course, that teacher was so full of herself that she could not see that. This teacher also, when confronted, said “I have other kids to worry about”. Nevermind that I was the only student from that special ed program that she was sitting next to. She also allowed me to work on a project alone instead of in a group because of course I was going to take that option when they offered it (even though I am perfectly capable of working on group projects). But them allowing me that option was a setup. 

That, combined with talking to myself and maybe poor grooming was what they used as an excuse to kick me out of that program. Though they never told me about poor grooming as a reason, and it was usually my parents they hid things from, so I’m not sure poor grooming was what they were primarily concerned with. Anyhoo, it seems as though talking to myself was enough to get me kicked out of that program in spite of getting an A, with the teachers literally laughing like bullies at my parents as they told my parents the news, and furthermore, they recommended me for VESID, which was really just recommending that I live in a sheltered workshop (which I would have shot myself in the foot in - I am a fast worker at certain tasks, and had my parents agreed to the sheltered workshop placement, I would have given the people my best performance, and ended up getting paid less than minimum wage, and worse, they would never let me go because they would be using me to pick up the slack for other workers and would find all sorts of excuses not to let me move on). 

So the A alone may as well be a cryptid point. As is my using NYC public transportation all by myself - those fuckheads claimed I couldn’t travel independently, even though I had been using the subway all by my lonesome to get to the work experience programs I did the last year (in former years, I had gone to work experience stints on the bus). So, pathetic as it may seem, my ability to use the subway/bus all by my lonesome is another cryptid point.

I also get a few more cryptid points for currently studying animal behavior and cognition in grad school and working on a Master’s thesis (which I won’t talk about so, again, as not to dox myself). Let me explain.

First of all, in spite of being kicked out of that program, the high school let me graduate, and the way they described me was literally how intellectually disabled people are described. And, while intellectually disabled people are themselves severely underestimated, they certainly are not going to be in graduate school working on a Master’s thesis in animal behavior and cognition, because the scientific papers alone would be cognitively inaccessible to them - even the lay version of scientific papers might not be cognitively accessible to an intellectually disabled person. So, according to that logic, I should not even be where I am right now.

Furthermore, some of the top people at that school are ableist as fuck, and totally champion clicker training, both for animals (which is iffy in and of itself, especially as a general behavior training for highly social and compliant species like dogs) and for, you guessed it, autistic people. They totally support ABA “therapy” as well (and yes, they support electrically shocking kids as punishment and claim it is less cruel than either medicating or restraining kids who self-injure, which is bullshit and completely dances around the fact that kids at the Judge Rotenberg Center get shocked for minor things) and they totally gloss over some pretty alarming signs. They, of course, claim I am totally high-functioning with no issues whatsoever, so to them, the side of me that has meltdowns and occasionally self-injures is also a cryptid, since apparently autistic people who can get a Master’s degree can’t have meltdowns. Even though I do get those from time to time. So one more cryptid point for meltdowns.

This is a random list of talents and abilities I have (just those, if you don’t feel like reading a list of talents, you can always skip that part)

I can do a perfect kitty meow (seriously, you would think there is a cat in there if you were in the room when I did it). And I can also stim (god, I wish autocorrect would use that as an actual word) by rhythmically tossing a ball back and forth without looking, and I can also produce songs simply by clicking my tongue. Yes, that’s a thing, although I’ve never seen anyone else do it. Believe me or not if you wish, but I’m not about to dox myself by putting up a video, especially since I don’t want to be blacklisted as a result of smear campaigns by ableist researchers. Three cryptid points right there. Four if you count me teaching myself some sort of impromptu gymnastics move at one point (well below Olympic level - it wouldn’t even qualify for a low-level gymnastics competition)- I have no idea what the hell that move looks like or what to call it. I only know how it feels, so don’t ask. 

Five cryptid points if you count the fact that on occasion the neuronal electricity from my hand jumps out and “pushes” a computer button before I even touch it - it’s not really a reliably controllable act, but it is a weird quirk I have, and that I share with my mom. The only reason that isn’t a problem is because it only seems to “push” a few types of buttons and coincides only with my hand approaching the button, never before that, which is how I know it’s nerve electricity and not a glitch. If you think that’s woo, don’t follow me - I never claimed to be able to teach anyone how to do that or to identify whether someone has that ability (unless they tell me and don't falsely claim to be able to control it only to show no such ability), and it’s not like I can sell that quirk for money, either. And I can’t control it anywhere near reliably enough to prove it scientifically, either, which is probably a big reason why abilities like that (along with telepathy, which I have only ever heard of in real life, mostly not from me but from others I know, as being a random, uncontrollable occurrence or else, as in one case, so laughably pathetic that pretty much any scientific test for telepathy will never detect said ability) were never officially found, so don’t hold your breath waiting for that kind of thing.

One more talent I have is this: after seeing Orlando Bloom as Legolas (I’m aroace, so I don’t have a crush on him and don’t get any ideas) do a catlike leap onto a rock, I tried that same move and got it right on the first try, even though I had read he found it difficult to do. But then again, he’s a foot taller than me, and he has an acquired disability from foolishly walking, sober, onto a thin piece of metal that could not support his weight, and falling three stories, so maybe it’s a cryptid point, maybe not, because being a foot shorter than the guy you see doing a catlike balance move would make it pretty easy to out-cat him any day. Especially since I would never make the kind of mistake he did, because from what I can gather, Orlando Bloom is a pretty cocksure guy (kind of like Legolas, really, personality wise - too bad they made him play what seemed to be an entirely different character than the one in the book who is probably more like Orlando Bloom than the Legolas Orlando Bloom played), and I am not cocksure. Obviously not literally, because I am cis female, and not metaphorically, either.