#i should not be upset over fictionals. (<- she said insincerely. very much being upset over fictional characters)

[anxiously-sidequesting]

**slips and slides into the room with socks on and breaks the wooden table as i fall down on the floor in a haste** so anyways i actually just scared myself because i thought of exactly how deep Malorn's and Malistaire's parallels went. like in post-updated tutorial malistaire was said to have been kind and caring towards his students right. just like malorn right. just like malorn, right? isn't that just like malorn? hey everyone doesn't that sound just like malorn? kind and cares for his students? 'kind' and 'caring' are certainly two adjectives that describe malorn arent they huh? (is slowly sinking in quicksand as i desperately reach out to you as i say this) so if we are to say that malorn and malistaire are two sides of the same coin then what is truly stopping malorn from having one traumatic event from shaping the rest of his life into a descent of madness, grief, and isolation? Guys tell me what the difference is between this reality and an Evil Malorn AU guys? guys hello? hello guys? **(the quicksand has actually transported me to the Backrooms now, no one can hear me call out in distress)**

[inanawesomewave]

MY FRIENDS SAY I HAVE NO EMPATHY, BUT I DON’T UNDERSTAND WHY THEY FEEL THAT WAY.

Since I started therapy a while ago I’ve started to notice there are parts of my personality that are cooling down when before they’d spill over and reach boiling point. I’m still combative but I know which battles to walk away from -- no, I know which battles to not forcibly insert myself in even though they had fuck all to do with me and all I wanted was an excuse to fight. I’m better at laying down a healthy boundary rather than puffing my chest out and becoming as intimidating as possible to someone who didn’t know they’d flouted a boundary I forgot to lay down, and instead plotting to harm them for doing such a thing. I have started to accept that my rage about my childhood isn’t something that can ever go away and it shouldn’t have to, but that I can move with it without having to convert it to something I can’t accept like forgiveness or acceptance. I know how to be angry at one thing, and I’m learning how to compartmentalise that anger without turning it into anger at everything else. I’m not great at these things, but I’m getting aware, and I’m trying. 

Something peculiar has happened, possibly for the best, since we hit our stride with the therapy. We’re doing some schema stuff, that’s what worked for me in the past, and my therapist goes over some old traumas with me and we look for repeating patterns, why that might be, and how I’m reacting to things, how I might be contributing to my own unhappiness and fury. But also, without him telling me, “here’s how to empathise, and here’s why you should do it”, I’ve started to look at empathy in a new light. Let me explain.

It happens when I’m watching a tv show or a film. A character will say something to another character, something hurtful or cruel, and for the first time in my life I’m stopping to think, not even consciously, “I wonder how that other person feels having heard that?”. I’ll think, “I say things like that all the time and it doesn’t mean anything to me, but that other person seems hurt. Don’t they know it doesn’t mean anything?” and then I realise, “no, they don’t.”. It’s not like I’m consciously scouring for empathy, but i’m noticing it. Right now, it’s only in fiction, but it’s the first awareness of concerted empathy I’m having about myself. And it’s funny, because I sit there and I’ll hear a character say the kind of things I would normally quite casually say, and I’m starting to confront why it is cruelty can often spill out of me without me noticing what the big deal is. I think it’s because, for antisocials who are made by their environment (i.e are abuse victims), the language of cruelty is the one we were taught fluently. I remember being a small child and saying something quite hurtful to my dad (he wasn’t abusive in any way, he was very compassionate and supportive). He didn’t shout at me, but he sat me down, and said: “That thing you said to me, that was really hurtful and it’s made me sad. Why did you say that?” and I remember bursting out into tears. It wasn’t so much that I’d hurt him, though that was part of it, it was that I was stunned at my own obliviousness as to how I could have hurt someone I really loved. How could someone I care about so much be hurt by something I said? How did I not notice I was doing that? With my mother it was always different, she used to refer constantly to “a battle of wills”, so cruelty was something she wanted to match word for word. Her punishments were bizarre and severe, and if I didn’t react to that punishment with deference and regret, she would tell me, “I won’t enter into another battle of wills with you”, and the whole thing would become a face-off. She never told me, “that thing you said to me was hurtful”, or “I’m sorry I said that hurtful thing to you”. It was always, “yeah? You think that’s hurtful? You should hear what I’m about to say to you next”. It was a rally, a back and forth, a constant testing of boundaries on both sides. I was punished for not being subservient enough, and then forced into that subservience by any means necessary. Of course I didn’t learn how to be considerate of others, I was having to feign empathy and consideration for my abuser so she’d leave off me and believe I was on her side, and then learn how to resent myself for at least appearing to display weakness to her. If I were a gold star sociopath, no other personality disorder, I’d probably be able to rationalise this pretend subjugation as being part of the game. But I have at the very least some significant traits of narcissism, so the battle going on in my head was one of survival, and self-loathing at how I appeared to survive. Of course, in this melee, I never really learned what empathy looked like. I only ever saw empathy as: 1. Something I have to perform to stay safe. 2. Something people perform so they can exploit you. 3. A lie people tell to get what they want. 4. A foolproof way to collect allies. 

Now, at the ripe old age of 30, I still don’t fully understand or trust the safety of empathy, and I’m not sure how deep into the empathy rabbit hole I want to go. Do I want to learn how to naturally experience it, the automatic ping of it when I witness pain in another person? Not really, no. I’m still stubbornly holding onto my personality disorder like a shield. After all, that’s why they form. Survival. I’m not even sure how I feel about having the nature of empathy unfold before me like this. I feel... deficient. There’s nothing quite so infantilising as having to go through the motions of empathy through tv characters, like a child being taught by a therapist through play. I feel confused, because there’s three ways in which I can be mean: there’s the concerted, applied way in which I work out what would hurt that person the most and then I say it. There’s the panic move when I’m in a conflict and I need to get out of it on top, looking like I have some power, so I say the thing that will push the red button so I can leave the situation having tricked myself that I won it. Finally, there’s the one I’m currently learning -- there’s the fluency of my day to day cruelty, my natural speech which is peppered with insults and personal bait, the things I don’t realise I’m saying. The things I don’t try to say, or craft, or plan. Just the way I am, the language I speak. And that’s what I’m confronting right now, and it’s coming through when I see it reflected back to me on television. I’m not sure how I feel about it. I’m not sure that I like it. Admittedly there’s a blackness in me that wants to learn from this in a bad way, like: “Oh, I see. So that’s what people look like when they’re upset or hurt. I’ll make a note of that. This could make me powerful.”. But then I think of an old friend of mine who ended up in a medium secure unit after doing some quite... reckless things... who had a diagnosis of ASPD and also NPD. He emailed me from in there, telling me, and I quote: “And when I'm out I won't have changed, I'll still be me, I'll just have learned and I will be much more careful. “. It took him two more years to come down from his tower and what did he find when he got to the bottom? That sometimes loving people leads to being loved, and sometimes showing empathy leads to being empathised with. Our thinking is very transactional, as sociopaths. I’m sure we’re being empathised with all day long, but as we are so primitively minded, we haven’t noticed. So long as what we’re putting out is insincere, then we are convinced that what we get in return must therefore be insincere. I realise it’s not about faking it well but trying it hard, and I’m not sure where I want to be with that. After all, this personality disorder and its narcissistic little brother kicking at my shins all the time has kind of protected me. At the very least, it kept me alive. 

Empathy. What a bizarre concept indeed. 

[serenagaywaterford]

'#i am so upset at tht about this lol #(mostly cos yeah reality is that. but i'm watchign fiction dudes. gimme some character journeys. gimme development. gimme hope. #this flatline they have serena on just isn't good storytelling. straight up.)' -- i agree. & the idea i hate the most is that moss & the tht crew might have had a boner over whitford joining them & decided to give him what could have been serena's arc. the architect of the damn colonies can turn out decent but serena can't. GOT IT

“the architect of the damn colonies can turn out decent but serena can’t. GOT IT”

this is probably what drives me the most mad about the choices they made for characters in s3. lawrence literally–unequivocally and by his own admission as well as multiple other characters–created THE FUCKING COLONIES: prison labour camps where ONLY women go to suffer excruciating pain and rot from disease and DIE. he also, unarguably and explicitly, created THE ENTIRE ECONOMIC SYSTEM on which gilead relies on for its propagation and survival.

without HIM, gilead would NOT exist. and this isn’t a little thing. it’s like, it literally would have fallen apart without his massive contribution. (sure, maybe they would have found another genius economist with a penchant for brutal misogyny but as it stands, they didn’t have one. and HE STILL helps gilead survive.)

but uwu, he makes jokes and doesn’t do the ceremony and loves his wife so WHAT A GREAT GUY! LET’S GIVE HIM A RELUCTANT REDEMPTION ARC!!!!

i fucking loathe him. and he was shown multiple times even in s3 what he thinks of ALL women, and that isn’t fucking much. he’s gross. “i love my wife” YEAH sure buddy. fuck you. if you truly loved her, you wouldn’t have created an entire system where she gets fucked right over to the point she kills herself. cool beans, dude.

s3 was all about lawrence and june being reluctant allies and her working her dumbass moves on him, and that bullshit handholding at the funeral FOR THE WIFE THAT JUNE BASICALLY KILLED??? please just let me vomit in my mouth a bit.

he is not a good guy. he is not a nice guy. he does not like women. he does not care about them. he’s a pathetic little misogynist that she looks out for himself. but omg look how conflicted he is about the ceremony!!! UWU PRECIOUS BEAN, TOO PURE FOR THIS HORRIBLE WORLD!!

it’s like fandom/the showrunners are just salivating over male characters to woobiefy.

meanwhile MEANWHILE there’s a female character, the second most developed character on the entire show with the second most amount of screentime (prior to mid s3 anyway) and already a foil to june and “villain”esque character theoretically capable of change, but hey, no. let’s ignore the entire trajectory serena was on for the latter half of s2. let’s even ignore early s3 and all that set up. let’s just FUCKING FLATLINE her and make her 100% obsessed with a baby. it’s not like that storyline was already wrapped up in s2 and she’d moved on by early s3.

all so june could have some ~exciting plot of winning over lawrence and oooooh look it’s bradley whitford. what a great guy. he’s so funnieeeee and nice. 

it really does feel like they aborted serena’s arc for the sake of inserting whitford into what should have been serena’s journey of gradually coming to terms with her involvement in gilead, her own overwhelming guilt about her involvement (which i would like to point out is LESS than lawrence’s contributions. just so we’re all on the same page). and i know miller has said he “doesn’t believe in redemption arcs” (bullshit. that’s pure bullshit. they exist whether you believe in them or not, for one thing.) but lawrence’s character has been doing EXACTLY that. and all the fandom is frothing about how amazing he is blah blah blah. fucking miss me with that. i will NEVER root for a man who has done that to women and is a KEY player in gilead. he didn’t just help invent it, he CURRENTLY still sustains it. he seemed to have little concern for ANYBODY even at the beginning of s3. yet still he’s a hero. (at least the character is like “oooh i’m not a hero” which kinda sounded totally insincere to me. the same way people throw pity parties for themselves.)

but god forbid a problematic female character portrayed by a fantastic (but lesser known) actress gets the same generosity. and what’s even crazier is that the audience was generally in favor and excited about serena joining june in the resistance prior to s3, and even in the beginning episodes of s3. based on social media anyway.

but no……….

i just….

it infuriates me how they chose to give what could have been a decent character arc for serena to lawrence instead (and to take that from yvonne and hand it over to whitford cos he’s just so great. rolling my eyes so hard.). and everyone is just like “yasss king! we love you!! what great guy for saving those kids!!! yay redemption for lawrence! i love brad whitford so amazing give him an emmy!!!” 

i get they need to keep serena around and in some sort of conflict for june. 

actually no. i don’t get it. i don’t think it’s necessary at this point to have a female adversary of that degree for june. i think she could easily be a complicated/conflicted ally, or at least not a direct enemy of june’s. the SYSTEM is evil enough and produces enough conflict on its own. june no longer needs the personification of it and neither do we. just… ugh. stagnating the MOST complex character on the show (fight me. serena as a character was more complex and dynamic than june.) for the sake of throwing her in some stupid sideplot that had nothing to do with the protagonist, and made her entire story arc stall into a dead stop was a dumbass fucking move. the whole fred thing dragged her the fuck down cos there was zero acknowledgement or exploration of the actual dynamic of the domestic abuse cycle which was PLAINLY visible in early s3. instead it was just NICHOLEEEEEE!!!!! GIVE ME BABBY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! MUST HAVE BABBY!!!!!!!!!! every single character motivation serena had in s3 was a fucking sexist trope about women and baby fever. (not that they wrote june much better but this rant is about the shit they pulled with serena.)

there is no depth to any conflict anymore. and what drives me even crazier is that the few scenes with june and serena are still 100 times more interesting because of the pre-existing chemistry and dynamic they still have. but instead we’ve just got the same fucking scene of june/lawrence over and over for 8 episodes. “ooh is he a friend or foe? oh i will manipulate him! he is an ally! oh maybe he’s a foe, or friend, or foe, or friend?! who cares!! look how he lubs childrens! uwu!!”

they seem absolutely intent on keeping serena a villain, to the point of total irrationality. and the only way to do that is strip her character of any nuance and give her a singular and stupid motivation and pair that with a really boring and flat subplot. cos, organically, the character WOULD develop and learn and change, but since they’re fucking obsessed with not giving her anything even resembling “redemption” for some bullshit reason, they’ve thrown her entire narrative arc under the bus and just left her there.

and people wonder why i have no interest in s4. it’s cos of this shit. why the fuck would i be interested in watching yet another season of serena doing fuck all? (ooh a trial? BORING and guaranteed to make no rational sense. back to gilead? what for?! they’re never going to let her change/grow anyway!)… and june being painted as some saint and saviour, despite being not that much better anymore. and Lawrence being lauded as a goddamn hero for doing the very fucking bare minimum for no real discernible reason we’ve seen other than june’s oh so amazing ~wiles. like please.

i can’t stand june anymore. i fucking loathe lawrence (to me, he’s just nick 2.0). i don’t care about fred. moira and emily who? and am butthurt about what they’ve done to serena’s character journey (and can’t see that changing if miller, moss, & co. are so itnent on keeping her “evil”). so s4 doesn’t seem that fun to me.

and the fact everyone seems to have a hard on for whitford, including cast and crew just makes me angry. sure, give this dude all the good shit. take it away from the amazing female actors and just give it to him. why not? THT is male-run anyway and IT SHOWS. he should have been a minor character, not the focus next to june. (don’t even get me started on how fiennes gets second billing in the credits before yvonne cos i am so livid every single time i see taht.)

whatever, THT. whatever. bye. ugh.

wow anyway that was a rant i didn’t expect to make. thanks anon for drawing that out. i think i’ve been sitting on it a while lol.

i have a lot of rage.