TW — Asylum/Hospital setting, mental disorders, medical malpractice
Inspired by Fran Bow, Sparklecare, Pure Trance, and other such things; I had an idea for a Dandy’s World AU that centers around a hospital setting
I feel like a lot of people don’t like asylum or hospital AUs because they are full of exaggerated or misinformed ideas of what mental illness is. I tried not to do that, though I’m not a professional so I still might be wrong about some things. I don’t want to take this idea too far in fear that it might be distasteful, but I do want to share this idea to see if others like it too.
Dandy’s Care is a separate world where, instead of a museum, Dandy and his friends were meant to be for a children’s hospital to treat the sick and ill. They were meant to be comfort characters to patients and were meant to support them during their stay. Like in Dandy’s World, the hospital shut down due to unspecified sanitation issues. Dandy, also known as Dr. Dandicus Dancifer, slowly became more and more starved for activity. He started targeting his friends, making the hospital into an asylum for them. He changed their characters, changing his friends into patients. The toons have no memory of their former self, only knowing their diseased and ill present self.
The staff is made up of the main toons. All of them are nurses and Dandy is the main doctor. They all act like their former selves, though they have no memory. I didn’t want to draw all of them so just imagine Astro and Vee in these uniforms.
Read more to see other toons (not all of them drawn or thought of yet, don’t attack me ;-;) ↓
Razzle and Dazzle, the only ones that I thought of completely because I already drew them before. They’re the reason why I made this entire thing anyway.
They are just experiments by Dandy, who wanted to see if the two could live together if they were attached. They used to love each other, now they don’t. Razzle is no longer looking for comedy, Dazzle is no longer looking for hope. Both are only set on the idea of revenge against Dandy for making them this way.
Life is hard when you can only feel the sensations on one half on your body, they can barely walk and can only stand or sit. They take many painkillers as their wounds take a long time to health properly. They wish they could escape this place and just die already, but they’re stuck and forced to live for as long as Dandy wants.
Razzle is a lot more violent now. He is prone to biting and scratching the staff. He hates doing all the lab tests and medical procedures, he hates being near Dazzle, he hates being stuck in this living hell. Razzle is the reason why they’re not allowed near sharp or blunt objects.
Dazzle became paranoid, scared of any noise that happens. He’s terrified of Razzle because of how violent he can get, he hates him too. Dazzle cries a lot, he cries until he can’t everyday. Dazzle wishes he could just die already, he thinks everything is scary and out to get him.
Shrimpo is thought to be a patient that had anger issues and aggressive tendencies. According to Dandy, he was admitted for being violent in public, although this is only part of the fake story that Dandy gave him. Shrimpo was forced to get a lobotomy, unethical but who cares. Dandy sure didn’t.
He’s still in the recovery phase, so he might be a bit loopy. Once those bandages are off, he’ll be as right as rain. Shrimpo is a wanderer around the hospital as he’s no longer a threat. He’s allowed to leave his room and go out in the play yard but only if a nurse is with him.
Shrimpo doesn’t really have much going for him. His thoughts are scrambled and he only cares for things in front of him. Although the lobotomy made him more passive, it doesn’t mean he’s any better in terms of motivation. Shrimpo certainly has no drive for anything anymore, he doesn’t mind but it gets in the way of his health as well. The staff needs to remind him to go to the dining room to eat or to go take a shower, because otherwise he’ll forget.
Boxten was made to believe that he has had problems with insomnia ever since he was little, of course it’s not true. He takes sleeping pills and melatonin, but it only seems to worsen his nightmares. This makes him skip his doses to avoid sleeping, repeating the cycle over and over.
Boxten is afraid of imaginary things that might get him. He thinks they’ve already in his head, eating away at his brain and giving him nightmares. Of course the only thing the nurses can see is his music box. Boxten has lost all trust in the staff since they couldn’t see or feel the things he can.
In my original notes, it said that Boxten might have psychosis.
Well that’s all the once I’ve drawn, I don’t really have the motivation to make every single toon. I have a couple of ideas though
— Goob somehow survived a terrible accident, but both his arms needed to be amputated making him armless. He suffers from brain damage and internal bleeding. He doesn’t seem to have any change in his personality, still as joyful as ever. Maybe it’s a coping mechanism
— Tisha has severe OCD which damages her mental health. She’s constantly worried about everything that happens around her, making her super aware of her surroundings. She could be a danger to herself and others as she sometimes has very aggressive thoughts but can’t control her actions. She unintentionally hurts herself because of her OCD, such as washing her hands so many times that they start to bleed.
Not for a toon, but I did have an idea for an added addition to the hospital. Maybe there’s a twisted reform center where the staff try and heal twisteds back to their normal self. They would clean the ichor from them but since the ichor is also inside of them their personalities don’t change as much. Twisteds such as Finn and R&D might be too far gone though, they would have to be disabled for life. I might draw this idea because I think it’s kind of cool, I definitely will if people also think this is interesting.
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The Unfinished Project - lemmuun
There was once a master sculptor named Mori Ougai, who decided to sculpt a piece he called ‘The Demon Prodigy.’ At first, the clay shaped into what he wanted, the features coming out just as he envisioned. However, over four years, the clay became stubborn and hard, unforgiving and ultimately too difficult for Mori to work with. In the end, he discarded the unfinished sculpture, leaving it out in his workshop for whomever wanted to pick it up. A sculptor named Oda Sasunoske took on the project. The techniques he used were gentler and the clay he used was soft, however he succeeded in shaping the sculpture, not to his liking like Mori attempted, but rather into a much kinder looking piece. Oda renamed the sculpture “Dazai Osamu”. While the clay he used contrasted directly to Mori’s, the sculpture ended up blending seamlessly, as if it was Oda’s project to begin with.
There once was an amateur sculptor called Dazai Osamu, who decided to sculpt a piece he called ‘The Black Fanged Hellhound.’ The clay he used to shape his project was compliant yet crumbled easily, making Dazai’s mistakes almost irreversible once he had performed them. And while the sculpture was starting to take to how he wanted, the countless mistakes made along the way were too hard for an amateur like him to erase. So after two years of working on him, Dazai ultimately decided to take a break from sculpting altogether, leaving his project in his old workshop.
But Dazai forgot to lock his old workshop, having been so desperate to flee, which allowed Mori to come in and ‘finish’ his project for him. The clay he used was similar to Dazai’s, and after having more expertise, he managed to cover up Dazai’s old mistakes while shaping the sculpture to his own liking, which ended up resembling the vision he had for his original project, ‘The Demon Prodigy.’ Because Dazai never came back to his workshop, Mori decided to take the sculpture as his own, and rename it ‘The Port Mafia’s Guard Dog’. But having been worked on for so long with such little care, the piece was fragile, so much so that its surface was starting to crack, and its base beginning to become unstable.
After staying away from sculpting for four years, Dazai decided to try his hand at the craft again. This time, he was patient and took more time to learn from past mistakes, and thus he sculpted his new piece, ‘Atsushi Nakajima.’ Despite wanting to try and fix his old piece, Dazai refused to step foot at his old workshop ever again, too tormented by the memories of that place to want to stay there any longer.
The ‘Port Mafia’s Guard Dog’ was a sculpting apprentice, who had very little experience with clay. However, not wanting to disappoint his master, he began a project called ‘The 35 killer.’ But his hands were shaky, and his skills not perfect and it wasn’t long before he realised he wasn’t cut out for this. He tried the methods his master had used before, but all that resulted in was mess and chaos at his station. Nakajima Atsushi was a sculpting apprentice, who had very little experience with clay. He doubted his ability to even make a vase. But when he saw how his rival, the ‘Port Mafia’s Guard Dog’ was sculpting his project, he couldn’t help but interfere. His techniques were wrong, he treated the sculpture with little to no regard, and Atsushi couldn’t stand it. They fought over the piece before his rival gave in, and told Nakajima to take it and leave him be. So with his little skills and homemade clay Atsushi sculpted the project into what he thought was best, something that wouldn’t be as fragile as his rival was making it. He renamed the sculpture, “Kyouka Izumi.”
One day at the workshop of master sculptor Mori Ougai, Atsushi saw a piece. This piece was displayed with the name ‘The Port Mafia’s Guard Dog’. And despite how finished it looked in all its glory under the glass case, the surface was cracked, and the base was unstable. So Atsushi decided that he wanted to try and fix it. He swiped the sculpture when Mori was looking, and brought it back to his station, where he used his own, homemade clay to fill in the cracks, and stabilise the piece. Despite not being finished with the repairs, Atsushi decided to name this piece “Akutagawa Ryuunosuke.” However, Akutagawa was too fragile for Atsushi to fix, despite his efforts to restore the piece. The head of the sculpture broke off and hit the ground with mighty force, layers of clay that had been caked on were shattered, revealing the original mistakes of Dazai Osamu from six years ago. Since the piece had broken, Atsushi had been working tirelessly to fix it, staying up day and night trying his best to overcome every blemish and imperfection made by the sculptors before him. ‘Akutagawa Ryuunosuke’ became his passion project, his unfinished sculpture.
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know someone who enjoys horror stories? share this one! it's true!
hahahahahahahahahaha aarrggghhhhhhhhhh
3,000,000 deaths due to COVID-19 last year. Globally. Three million.
Case rates higher than 90% of the rest of the pandemic.
The reason people are still worried about COVID is because it has a way of quietly fucking up your body. And the risk is cumulative.
I'm going to say that again: the risk is cumulative.
It's not just that a lot of people get bad long-term effects from it. One in seven or so? Enough that it's kind of the Russian Roulette of diseases.
It's also that the more times you get it, the higher that risk becomes. Like if each time you survived Russian Roulette, the empty chamber was removed from the gun entirely.
The worst part is that, psychologically, we have the absolute opposite reaction. If we survive something with no ill effects, we assume it's pretty safe.
It is really, really hard to override that sense of, "Ok, well, I got it and now I probably have a lot of immunity and also it wasn't that bad."
It is not a respiratory disease. Airborne, yes. Respiratory disease, no: not a cold, not a flu, not RSV.
Like measles (or maybe chickenpox?), it starts with respiratory symptoms. And then it moves to other parts of your body.
It seems to target the lungs, the digestive system, the heart, and the brain the most.
It also hits the immune system really hard - a lot of people are suddenly more susceptible to completely unrelated viruses.
People get brain fog, migraines, forget things they used to know.
(I really, really hate that it can cross the blood-brain barrier. NOTHING SHOULD EVER CROSS THE BLOOD-BRAIN BARRIER IT IS THERE FOR A REASON.)
Anecdotal examples of this shit are horrifying. I've seen people talk about coworkers who've had COVID five or more times, and now their work... just often doesn't make sense?
They send emails that say things like, "Sorry, I didn't mean Los Angeles, I meant Los Angeles."
Or they insist they've never heard of some project that they were actually in charge of a year or two before.
Or their work is just kind of falling apart, and they don't seem to be aware of it.
People talk about how they don't want to get the person in trouble, so their team just works around it.
Or they describe neighbors and relatives who had COVID repeatedly, were nearly hospitalized, talked about how incredibly sick they felt at the time... and now swear they've only had it once and it wasn't bad, they barely even noticed it.
(As someone who lived with severe dissociation for most of my life, this is a genuinely terrifying idea to me. I've already spent my whole life being like, "but what if I told them that already? but what if I did do that? what if that did happen to me and I just don't remember?")
One of its known effects in the brain is to increase impulsivity and risk-taking, which is real fucking convenient honestly. What a fantastic fucking mutation. So happy for it on that one. Yes, please make it seem less important to wear a mask and get vaccinated. I'm not screaming internally at all now.
I saw a tweet from someone last year whose family hadn't had COVID yet, who were still masking in public, including school.
She said that her son was no kind of an athlete. Solidly bottom middle of the pack in gym.
And suddenly, this year, he was absolutely blowing past all the other kids who had to run the mile.
He wasn't running any faster. His times weren't fantastic or anything. It's just that the rest of the kids were worse than him now. For some reason.
I think about that a lot.
(Like my incredibly active six-year-old getting a cold, and suddenly developing post-viral asthma that looked like pneumonia.
He went back to school the day before yesterday, after being home for a month and using preventative inhalers for almost week.
He told me that it was GREAT - except that he couldn't run as much at recess, because he immediately got really tired.
Like how I went outside with him to do some yard work and felt like my body couldn't figure out how to increase breathing and heart rate.
I wasn't physically out of breath, but I felt like I was out of breath. That COVID feeling people describe, of "I'm not getting enough air." Except that I didn't have that problem when I had COVID.)
Some people don't observe any long (or medium) term side effects after they have it.
But researchers have found viral reservoirs of COVID-19 in everyone they've studied who had it.
It just seems to hang out, dormant, for... well, longer than we've had an opportunity to observe it, so far.
(I definitely watched that literal horror movie. I think that's an entire genre. The alien dormant under ice in the Arctic.)
(oh hey I don't like that either!!!!!!!!!)
All of which is to explain why we should still care about avoiding it, and how it manages to still cause excess deaths.
Measuring excess deaths has been a standard tool in public health for a long time.
We know how many people usually die from all different causes, every year. So we can tell if, for example, deaths from heart disease have gone way up in the past three years, and look for reasons.
Those are excess deaths: deaths that, four years ago, would not have happened.
During the pandemic, excess death rates have been a really important tool. For all sorts of reasons. Like, sometimes people die from COVID without ever getting tested, and the official cause is listed as something else because nobody knows they had COVID.
But also, people are dying from cardiovascular illness much younger now.
People are having strokes and heart attacks younger, and more often, than they did before the pandemic started.
COVID causes a lot of problems. And some of those problems kill people. And some of them make it easier for other things to kill us. Lung damage from COVID leading to lungs collapsing, or to pneumonia, or to a pulmonary embolism, for example.
The Economist built a machine-learning model with a 95% confidence interval that gauges excess death statistics around the world, to tell them what the true toll of the ongoing COVID pandemic has been so far.
Total excess deaths globally in 2023: Three million.
3,000,000.
Official COVID-19 deaths globally so far: Seven million. 7,000,000.
Total excess deaths during COVID so far: Thirty-five point two million. 35,200,000.
Five times as many.
That's bad.
I don't like that at all.
I'm glad last year was less than a tenth of that. I'm not particularly confident about that continuing, though, because last year we started a period of really high COVID transmission. Case rates higher than 90% of the rest of the pandemic.
Here's their data, and charts you can play with, and links to detailed information on how they did all of this:
Here's a non-paywalled link to it:
https://archive.vn/2024.01.26-012536/https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-estimates
Oh: here's a link to where you can buy comfy, effective N95 masks in all sizes:
Those ones are about a buck each after shipping - about $30 for a box of 30. They also have sample packs for a dollar, so you can try a couple of different sizes and styles.
You can wear an N95 mask for about 40 total hours before the effectiveness really drops, so that's like a dollar for a week of wear.
They're also family-owned and have cat-shaped masks and I really love them.
These ones are cuter and in a much wider range of colors, prints, and styles, but they're also more expensive; they range from $1.80 to $3 for a mask. ($18-$30 for a box of ten.)
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