#it could be dissociation repression that their father is more present with them so they have resources available to seek help
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You know, children of Hades/Pluto and Thanatos/Mors with a propensity to develop SZPD or AVPD would also work. Their fathers are entwined with death, the dead, which makes connecting to the living hard for them.
It could be partly because of rejection when their parentage is discovered by demigods, possible unease mortals may feel around them due to their aura or whatever, and then partly because of their own innate nature, meaning even in the friendliest of circumstances they struggle to connect with the other person.
#in my headcanons bianca is the one with an innate detachment from living people outside of her immediate family#however i don't think she'd develop szpd if she had lived. she can make connections and friends easily. it's just not instinctive to do so#and she wouldn't fully meet the criteria needed to qualify. it would just be the personality type 👍#happy talks pjo#but if i was assigning them pds (which im not) I'd put Bianca at SZPD Nico with AVPD and Hazel with both#nico was rejected due to be a child of hades so there's that#as for Hazel i think it would be a combination of many things - her abusive upbringing making her recoil into herself#the racism and explition alienation due to the curse from the people around that she had to deal with#followed by isolation and an overbearing morher when she moved to alaska#then when she's brought back to life she struggles with derealization which causes a disconnect from the people around her#and she can't really socialize or talk about her life because 1) she was dead for 70 odd years 2) she's cursed but no one knows#and 3) her life sucked#so i think she'd have the fear of rejection from others for avpd as well as the disconnect/detachment from people for szpd#again I'm not headcanoning any of them with the above. I'm just playing around with where they would fall#for the most part what we see of the underworld kids is that they are relatively more adjusted than other demigods despite their traumas#it could be dissociation repression that their father is more present with them so they have resources available to seek help#or it could be that a general disconnect with their own life because as child of the dead they will never be fully grounded while alive#so all the pains really hit them once they die but while they're alive it's just oh well terrible things happen to me but its whatever
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how do you feel about jaime and tyrion’s eventual reunion. it breaks my heart bc their relationship is never gonna be what it was and neither of them realise how important they are to the other. even now that theyre leagues apart both of them grieve for the other whilst simultaneously convincing themselves that they hate each other. its so depressing but i dont have high hopes for them.
I love them both so much too. The way they viewed each other before the Tysha confession is so interesting: link. They both admire each other, and seek to emulate the qualities that they recognize as ever present in the other and feel that they lack themselves.
I think bc both might be involved in the WFTD there is some hope left. It is very clear that they still have love for each other, love that seeps through when they are off guard, lingering affection they repress: link. I dont think grrm would have emphasized that so much if he didnt seek to provide the reader with a tiny flicker of hope that those two may still meet again. The thing is, Jaime should really feel no rage towards him, none that I feel is really that justified anyway (Tyrion did not even kill Joff, he is not actually the monster they all say he is, he said things because he wanted to hurt Jaime for how he hurt him), his negativity towards Tyrion is certainly not as intense as his is towards him after the fallout. It is more bitterness, and for a mix of reasons. He did not really grieve Tywin like that, and much of AFfC is him examining his relationship with his father’s legacy, and he ends up going a certain opposing direction at the end of ADwD. Tyrion was justified in killing his abuser in my eyes and I cheered to see that vile man fall 💯 and i know catharsis was not the point and it leads to a spiral, but you know what i mean. That is also not what Jaime is truly upset with, he blames himself more for that. He is more upset over being confronted with truth, and a sense of deeper betrayal. Anyway, I think it is Tyrion that is in a position with to forgive Jaime, bc I think it is the latter that is a more guilty party here. The Tysha case really disillusioned Tyrion hard regarding his “perfect” older brother who he could forgive everything. Another interesting aspect though is that Tyrion does not really know the new Jaime yet, despite their interaction when he rescues and frees him. Once they reunite it will be way more apparent to him that he is not the golden son anymore. He is gonna be a broken cripple who has faced LSH. Which is especially interesting considering how Jaime was absolutely not free of blindspots regarding the ableism that Tyrion faced despite the kindness and love he showed him compared to his close family (see interactions in AGoT). There is a reason that he thinks about Tyrion during this moment: “still, long after they had snuffed out the torch they'd used to sear his bloody stump, days after, he could still feel the fire lancing up his arm, and his fingers twisting in the flames, the fingers he no longer had. He had taken wounds before, but never like this. He had never known there could be such pain. Sometimes, unbidden, old prayers bubbled from his lips, prayers he learned as a child and never thought of since, prayers he had first prayed with Cersei kneeling beside him in the sept at Casterly Rock. Sometimes he even wept, until he heard the Mummers laughing. Then he made his eyes go dry and his heart go dead, and prayed for his fever to burn away his tears. Now I know how Tyrion has felt, all those times they laughed at him.”
Tyrion also has some misconceptions about Jaime, but that is very understandable to me bc the Jaime he could see then was the individual that buried his idealism and ability to care and live outside of being on autopilot under layers of violence, sex, dissociation, and faux insouciance. So it is easy to see why Tyrion’s vision of him does not exactly match up with the version that we see in ASoS & AFfC (e.g. Tyrion was convinced Jaime would murder Lancel once he found out about the affair, the opposite happens). I certainly think it is gonna be a difficult reunion, and the relationship will never be what it once was, but I think it should not be ruled out that those two will be able to love one another again in some way. Maybe they will also be able to view one another in a more real way, truly go beyond the surface, because I think before there were plenty misconceptions anyway. and the concept that george keeps emphasizing with jaime a lot in interviews is the “possibility of forgiveness.”
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okay so ..... i wanna make one thing Very clear on our& portrayal of alicent & helaena.
our& alicent is a repressed, closeted lesbian. she does not have a romantic relationship with criston. could she have had a sexual encounter with him in, say, a thread? possibly yes, but keep in mind that she is heavily closeted & repressed lesbian catholic woman in a heavily medieval catholic christian coded society & she was incredibly lonely & the only times that happened was out of grief & a desire to intimacy, it had nothing to do with romance or sexual attraction & it likely only happened once or twice. she appreciates criston's loyalty & devotion to her & his willingness to step up to be a father figure for her children but that's all it is. she certainly wasn't fucking him while her daughter & her grandchildren were in danger.
our& helaena is not weak willed. she did not just stand idly by & give up jaehaerys, her eldest son & heir like that so easily. she did not whine & whimper & offer a simple necklace & then point to which child b&c should kill like that & then pick up jaehaera & run to alicent. she quite literally OFFERED HERSELF AS A SACRIFICE & TRIED TO FIGHT THEM OFF & was FORCED TO CHOOSE BETWEEN HER SONS WHILE ALICENT WATCHED BOUND & GAGGED & WHEN HE WAS KILLED SHE REFUSED TO LET GO OF HER SON'S BODY. i'm okay with more show aligned verses where maelor isn't present because helaena's pregnant with him but either way she doesn't just give up jaehaerys like that, not without a damn good fight. she tried to muster up as much strength as she could the way alicent did at driftmark, the way she charged at rhaenyra for aemond, the way she stood between aegon & meleys (if this is more show aligned) & betrayed rhaenyra for her children & defied the king & her father for. she tried her best to make sure her children didn't suffer to the best of her abilities, offering herself to die & begging & imploring them not to kill her children but in the show she offers to buy them off with a FUCKING NECKLACE & then grab jaehaera & fuck off to alicent & tell her that her son, calling him "the boy" is dead & it's. underwhelming & anticlimactic honestly. like. are you fucking kidding me. like obviously i don't take pleasure in the scene of the death of a child, i can understand why it would need to be offscreen but like she Had to witness her son's death, she didn't just fuck off & leave him to fucking die & let them kill her baby like that, because the death of her son & how cruel it was is what LED TO HER MADNESS & INSANITY & DEEP DEPRESSION & DISSOCIATION & COMPLETELY WITHDRAWING FROM SOMETHING HORRIBLY TRAUMATIC. she had to WITNESS HER SON'S DEATH AFTER BEING FORCED TO CHOOSE WHICH SON HAD TO DIE & THEN KILL THE ONE SHE DIDN'T CHOOSE ANYWAY & MADE SURE THE ONE THEY SPARED KNEW SHE CHOSE HIM TO DIE & the show took all of that psychological nightmare shit away & it was nowhere near as horrible as it was in fire & blood aka THE BOOKS ITS SUPPOSED TO BE BASED. she makes jaehaerys' funeral shroud. she prays to the stranger to kill daemon because jaehaerys NEVER deserved that shit.
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xander 7 tucker 4!! aaaand 19
XANDER: 7. Is there something that could cause your oc to question their identity? What?
OHHHHH MY GODDDDDDD okay so yeah xanders identity has changed a lot over the years.
this question is rly good bc there’s a rly big difference between “questioning” and “changing” . xander changes his identity a lot-he’s bigender but even beyond that he likes being what people want from him, whether that be in regards to his gender or her sexuality. but because he’s always changing he doesn’t question his true identity a lot. there’s only been like a few times where life events that have forced him to self reflect and change himself.
i just wrote and then deleted an entire paragraph because it gave away a ton about xanders backstory LOL but tldr 30-50 years before the wolfsbane narrative xander identities as a binary trans guy. he presents almost exclusively feminine but it’s all a performance due to [life circumstances]. his need to perform for survival caused him to completely lose touch with his own femininity which is why he identified that way. but then like [the horrors] happen and he has to completely rewrite himself to avoid the law and when he finally stumbled into some sort of security (with the help of a very very loving drag community and also tucker’s weird gender presentation), she actually starts to think about her own femininity again and how a performance can still be personal in a way? xanders whole story reflects my struggles with dissociation and identity and the resolution is accepting that he can inhabit multiple different roles/personalities/lives and for all of them to be genuine. idk. i could say a lot more but i don’t want to completely spoil everything lol!
TUCKER: 4. Is your oc's environment supportive about their identity? How does this impact them?
umm ok so tucker’s OLD environment was very unaccepting both of his queerness and just of him as a person lol. werewolves are interesting critters though bc they naturally have an over abundance of testosterone so tucker like. passes before he comes out but his father is still very angry about the way he identifies. it makes for a rly strange social experience where he isn’t accepted but still, for the most part, looks the way he wants to? but yes tucker’s dad is a piece of shit it’s like the biggest conflict tucker faces in the pre-narrative. he escapes to jordan’s house a lot because jordan’s dad was RLY COOL and even after he dies jordan’s mom kinda sucks but she’s like fine with the whole queer thing.
umm CURRENTLY tucker’s environment is a LOT better obviously. like better than he is lol. tucker struggles with internalized shit for a lot of the early narrative and when ur only friend is xander it tends to come out a lot lol. but one of the first things xander does for tucker is just completely pay for his top surgery because he’s hiring tucker to be a performer and tuckers a lot better of a performer when his body doesn’t make him want to kill himself all the time.
from there tucker still has a lot of repression to work through (a lot of it moreso to do with being a werewolf but i explain why that’s the same as internalized queerphobia below lol) and xander forces him to get into drag to help learn to accept himself. from there it’s pretty smooth sailing in the queerness boat and post-narrative is just about their queer liberated future where tucker gets to just ride the ebbs and flows of his identity and doesn’t have to like. fucking worry about it. most conflict he has with his queerness at that point is deciding what kind of bottom surgery he wants. lol.
19. Do you have preferences about depicting homo/transphobia in your stories? What, and why? Does it vary by story?
this is actually really interesting. i tend to try and stay period-accurate but i usually don’t make homo/transphobia the, like, biggest conflict in the story. I also often prefer metaphors for queerphobia over actual homo/transphobia because i think it’s more productive to discuss how a fear of queerness impacts people as opposed to just depicting, like, surface level hate crimes.
for example: tuckers dad is extremely hostile towards tuckers gender and sexuality. like, blatantly. but the more prevalent conflict between them is tucker’s dad’s anger over not being able to control tucker, and to form tucker into the perfect werewolf. this conflict would still exist even if tucker wasn’t queer, and would still probably come across as queerphobia (“don’t act like that or people will think you’re gay!”). when tucker finally leaves that environment he struggles to accept his identity as a werewolf and his ability to love others but again those struggles reflect and include his actual queerness (how he feels about xander, how he feels about jordan. Weird Body Stuff that just makes him feel Bad). the way that discrimination against monsters is portrayed and the way that monsters deal with their own identities often mimics queerphobia, and then is made deeper by the actual inclusion of queer characters. hopefully that makes sense.
all of my other stories are a lot less fleshed out than wolfsbane but still follow a similar vein of thinking. i guess my fantasy stuff doesn’t have as much of the blatant queerphobia; since there’s no way to be “period accurate” it doesn’t really make sense to make queerphobia exist in the same ways. but the conflict still arises from people trying to instill a certain set of beliefs or norms into a group and that ultimately leading to a worse world, which is like. a queer line of thinking among many other things.
#wolfsbane#tucker#xander#blurry answers#anoff#mine#uhhhh no i didn’t watch hxh before i wrote wolfsbane and that’s not a joke re: tuckers relationship with his dad#there’s so much more i could say aaaaAaaaaAAAAAAA
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Dabi’s Missing Heart
So I’ve been seeing two main responses to Dabi’s character as portrayed in BNHA 292, both of which I feel touch on a very surface understanding of his character and role in the story despite seeming like opposite takes.
Take #1:
Dabi is an unfeeling monster created to show the redeemability of Shigaraki and Enji in contrast with his true eeeevil villainy! He will never be redeemed!
Take #2:
Dabi is a sweet softy who did nothing wrong! He will never be redeemed because of this chapter which is so out-of-character!
Note how they both have the same endpoint. I’m not actually gonna address the redemption question much because I can’t fathom what this panel foreshadows if not Touya’s salvation (alive):
I’m not looking to debate this either; I’m just putting it here because I know it’ll come up if I don’t.
Instead, I wanna address Dabi’s character. He’s my favorite, and I’ve been asked a few different times whether I enjoy him as a villain or as an uwu poor baby, and my answer is always both.
Dabi is a villain. This chapter’s rampage is, in my opinion, not remotely out of character for him. But neither is it the summation of his character, and he surely is not meant to make Enji look good by comparison.
So, who is Dabi?
Dabi is kind of a flaming jerk, and that’s why I like him. He’s an abuse victim who gets to be angry and crass and sharp. He pushes people away because he doesn’t want to open up to them and get burned (heh). He’s just like Shouto in that, except with a dose of murder.
Believe it or not, this is a very realistic response to abuse, and very common too. It’s good to see that representation. If the writing was indeed just “he’s bad get rid of him,” well, that would of course be a terrible representation. But seeing a mean victim get redeemed? Now that’s some good sh*t I’m here for.
If you want a sweethearted, misunderstood soft victim, there is one in MHA, and that’s Shigaraki. Dabi is not these things, but that does not mean he’s not a victim or that he’s somehow an unfeeling monster.
You see, Shigaraki is a heart character. Dabi’s the mind. (Heart and mind characters are a literary pattern that is utilized in literature across the globe; it’s not an eastern/western cultural thing. It has its roots in alchemy.) The problem is that you can’t have a heart without a mind nor a mind without a heart. If you lack one, you’re missing half the picture, and you won’t accomplish anything.
We see this with Shigaraki in his quest to look for ideals, something to believe in, purpose to justify/enable acting on his feelings/emotions.
Dabi, in contrast, has conviction and ideals, but eschews any kind of personal connection and care.
So, both Shigaraki and Dabi struggle to unite heart and mind--but they need to do precisely this.
It’s not a coincidence that Shigaraki expressly envisions both Dabi and Himiko when musing on what his purpose is.
Yet Shigaraki is able to unite more easily with Himiko as opposed to Dabi because Himiko is also a heart character. She claims to be motivated by extreme empathy that warps around to become a lack thereof (wanting to be who she loves).
Shigaraki’s motivations are basically revenge for hero society not saving him--which encompasses both a deep internal and external (societal) need for empathy and a need for better ideals. Shigaraki needs Himiko and Dabi. They’re a trio, and all of them need each other to grow. But Himiko, being similarly driven expressly by emotions, is easier for Shigaraki to understand and work with.
The irony is that Dabi is actually a very, very emotional character as well. But what he does (as is typical for a mind character) is repress them, compartmentalize, dissociate. He constantly pushes people away, yet admits privately, to himself, that he’s primarily (and paradoxically) motivated by family. This is emotional, yet Dabi claims he “overthought” and, according to other translations, “snapped” can be actually be read as “went crazy” as a result over overthinking (note: both are mind allusions).
Dabi repressing who he is--Todoroki Touya--is symbolic of him repressing his emotional side, because again, family and emotions are tied together for his character. Now his identity is acknowledged, and Dabi claims to be losing his mind (again), claims that he can’t feel, and yet is completely consumed by emotions. Like, does anyone think he’s being methodical and calculating this chapter?
It’s not just negative emotions (rage, hate) that drive Dabi in response to his family. His seeking belonging and emotional connection is present even in a chapter where he tries to murder two members of his family and laughs off the risk to the life of another.
See, Dabi first asked Shouto to validate his pain:
But like, given the circumstances, of course Shouto doesn’t really respond well. How Shouto responds is this:
Shouto’s words are triggering. And keep in mind I am not blaming Shouto: he’s in shock and he’s a kid. I’m merely trying to explain how it likely comes across to Dabi.
You’re crazy. Your feelings don’t matter. You don’t really care about Natsuo! You’re a villain and that’s ALL you are. Not a brother or abuse survivor. Just a villain.
So, uh, yeah, Dabi then retreats back to being unable to feel, dissociating as has always been his coping mechanism. But that’s not all: Dabi’s been repressing for so long that of course he’s gonna go a little insane in response to the dismissal of everything he’s trying to point out. Why wouldn’t he? His family dismissed his pain back then and now again, and so, without that heart, without those emotions, principle is all Dabi has. This has been present since long before Stain’s ideology came into his life:
Now, he answers this question of existence through Stain’s ideology. Purpose is all he has, and to him, Shouto and Best Jeanist are dismissing that too. Why are they dismissing it? Best Jeanist dismisses him for an ideal: the overall good of hero society. Shouto has a mixture of this ideal and also like, genuine shock and pain.
Back to Dabi. Dabi’s summation of himself and his purpose is incorrect and harmful to himself and others. I’m not excusing him or justifying, just explaining. It’s a tragic reflection of what Endeavor raised both Touya and Shouto to be (and thereby ironic that BJ uses an ideal to dismiss him):
Instead of being raised to be the symbol of hero society--as Endeavor intended--he exists to destroy it. The root is the same: Dabi assumes he exists for hero society, as a tool. He dehumanizes himself, hence why his quirk physically harms him (which also fits his almost religious zeal for Stain’s ideology). But it is not all Dabi is. He’s not a tool, he’s a person, but to acknowledge he’s a person involves acknowledging his heart/emotional desires, and that gets to my next point.
Dabi’s not a reliable narrator about himself. At all. I’ve written about Dabi and dissociation before. So let’s look at Dabi’s devotion to his ideals, the ideals he puts above people and claims he only cares about... because there are moments where Dabi goes against those ideals.
For one example, Dabi’s gone against those ideals when he’s allowed his personal need for revenge (an emotional/heart motivation) to overcome his longterm plan. Like, he was fully about to get himself killed here, even though that would likely mean no one would know the corruption of the Todoroki family and hero society, just for the chance to prove to his father that he hurt him.
In addition, I’ve talked before about how Dabi’s the only character in the entire damn manga to comment that maybe using child soldiers is not okay. While it’s not explicitly stated, it’s reasonable to conclude that Dabi considers the abuse of children in hero training a sin of hero society that ought to be purged (hence, part of his ideals).
That said, I have also pointed out that Dabi has gone after children in the past when it benefits his mission (Bakugou would like a word). So let’s look at four examples of Dabi and his principles concerning kids--since, after all, he claims to be motivated by heroes who hurt kids.
Firstly, Dabi’s “save the cat” when he spared Aoyama.
Why did he spare Aoyama? We can only speculate, but it seems quite likely there are two reasons: 1) hurting Aoyama would not add anything to his overall goal of downing hero society, and 2) a terrified, cowering kid might just have been a teeny bit familiar to Dabi. Here, his ideals--destroying hero society--either take a backseat to a reflection of his personal pain (and)/or his ideal of not abusing kids directly contradicted his ideal of bringing down hero society. But the important part is that in this instance, Dabi chose mercy and the goal of bringing down hero society was jeopardized as a result.
So then why did he attack Tokoyami, Nejire, and Shouto this arc? Well, Dabi does things he knows are wrong for the sake of accomplishing his overall purpose. He does things he knows hurt himself for this purpose. This isn’t new. If he can’t be acknowledged, can’t exist as a person with emotions, then he at least will ensure he still has a purpose.
In addition, let’s look at what sets Dabi off in all of these instances. (Again, this isn’t me saying “well actually Dabi’s justified.” He’s not. I’m just pointing to what’s in the text to explain the machinations beyond “bad guy do bad.”)
Dabi tries to reason with Tokoyami, pointing out that Twice was doing essentially what Tokoyami is doing: trying to save his friend(s), but Tokoyami doesn’t listen (also again: not me saying Tokoyami should have listened--realistically, in this situation, it makes sense Tokoyami trusted his mentor!)
Only after his reasoning was rejected did Dabi go to flames mode. He could have just let Tokoyami save Hawks, but instead he really wanted to kill Hawks and that overrode his other principles. Was this just because of his furthering his goal--killing the #2 hero would help destroy hero society--or because of a sense of personal revenge for Twice? That’s open for interpretation (in my opinion, it’s likely a mixture, because again, it tends to intertwine more than Dabi likes to think it does). His principles and/or emotions are brushed aside, and Dabi Does Not Like That.
Dabi does this again with Shouto this chapter, asking him where he stands on their family issues, and gets brushed aside, and then Shouto goes into his rage mode and Dabi responds. Again, not saying Shouto is rational here or that he should side with Dabi’s murderous plan, but like, his words really don’t come across well to Dabi.
Dabi going after Shouto after explaining things, asking Shouto for help, and then having his pain dismissed is pretty much a repeat of Tokoyami. When Dabi’s pain is dismissed, he says fine, let’s aim for the highest principle possible: making Stain’s will a reality, and damn any emotional ties.
Dabi’s obsession with ideals, you might say, is a smokescreen to cover his own pain. Far from feeling nothing, he feels very deeply. (I promise I’m getting to Nejire.)
So what does this indicate? Well, that Dabi does have a heart and a conscience. But when he lets his heart act, when his heart reaches out, he gets burned. His heart jeopardizes his overall purpose, so he most often dissociates himself from it. But by pretending he doesn’t have a heart, he dehumanizes himself, and he projects that dehumanization onto others (see: seeing Shouto as an extension of Endeavor, when that’s actually the precise image Shouto is trying to shed).
It’s not a coincidence that Shigaraki has been unconscious during the entire confrontation with Endeavor, nor is it a coincidence that Himiko has been MIA. But, Shigaraki wakes up a bit this chapter not only when hearing Dabi spout about how hero society needs to burn, an ideal/the thing Shigaraki lacks, and through a less important but still-ideal-driven character in Spinner asking him to accomplish his supposed ideal of destruction, but when Dabi saves Shigaraki and Spinner.
Dabi doesn’t burn Nejire for lols (not that this makes it better because it doesn’t) or even for ideals. He burns her to save Shigaraki and Spinner, because they are his links to full humanity right now.
(Again, this is also dissociation and projection: Endeavor did this! No, Dabi, you did. You’re perpetuating violence against kids rather than stopping it.)
But anyways, when Dabi calls upon heart, Shigaraki wakes. He lends Gigantomachia and thereby Dabi and the league power.
Dabi can only grow and actually accomplish anything related to his ideals (fixing hero society) through accepting a heart--even though that will likely mean some painful surgery to shift his ideals to accommodate said heart, because pure ideals don’t leave much room for humanity. He needs to feel to actually change anything, because right now he’s just making things worse (hence, the need for saving and redemption).
I know the League aren’t the protagonists of the serIes, but their complaints aren’t exactly incorrect either (if anything they’re almost a little too valid). But through growing together, Dabi, Shigaraki, and Himiko might actually be able to accomplish something, and get themselves in a place where they can be reached and saved by Shouto, Deku, and Ochaco. Because to be saved, the kids will have to acknowledge the villains’ pain and complaints, and do something about it.
#bnha 292#bnha meta#mha 292#mha meta#dabi#todoroki shouto#todoroki touya#todoroki enji#hado nejire#toga himiko#shigaraki tomura#shimura tenko#best jeanist#boku no hero academia#my hero academia#bnha theory#mha theory#league of villains#spinner
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hi, i just found your blog, i was hoping i could ask some questions. ofc, if youre not comfortable sharing your answer to a particular question you can just skip it lol
1. could you elaborate on what the fantasy model is and how its harmful? i know that the theory is false, but it would be helpful to have more details on what it specifically is.
2. i know that you werent the one to make the comment, but you didnt really combat it either which is why im asking. in that one post where you (and another person) were arguing against the op which mentioned the fantasy model, the other person mentioned repressed memories, which are largely regarded as pseudoscience. what are your opinions on it? they dont need to exist in order for did to also exist, seeing as traumatic memories arent really "repressed" or forgotten in did. rather, traumatic memories are just held in parts/alters instead (ie trauma holders).
3. you also mentioned carl jung at some other point seperately on your blog, which seemed to be a joke (partially bc your blog is themed after athena, who canonically studies jungian psychology/analytical psychology, but mostly bc the statement was literally like "carl jung is rolling in his grave" or smth like that lol), but seeing how repressed memories are explicitly tied to him (and freud), it prompts me to also ask; do you agree with his form of psychology?
4. very unrelated and also much less serious, but since youre a system, what are your thoughts on how did is portrayed in ace attorney 6 (or, i guess they say multiple personality disorder in game, but seeing as its an outdated term...)?
sorry if any of this comes across as accusatory or anything, i dont mean for that to be the tone. im just a singlet trying to educate myself on did/multiplicity and would appreciate input from actual systems. also if any of what i said in the second question was flawed, please feel free to point it out. thanks in advance!
I don’t mind questions at all. It gives me an excuse to ramble.
1. The fantasy model is the belief that DID is actually a delusion or hypnosis-induced. It’s harmful because it does not address the root cause of DID--childhood trauma--and thus inhibits recovery and integration. It’s also just generally associated with therapists who do not fully listen to their patients.
2. Repressed memories are a controversial subject in psychology, true, and I have a graphic demonstrating my current beliefs on the subject.
Structural dissociation. My current belief, summed up, is that traumatic memories are held in EPs, emotional parts, that may be dormant, so they appear repressed. Following the theory of structural dissociation of the personality, EPs exist in all trauma disorders--although, they are far less defined than what DID/OSDD-1 have, hence the distinction and lack of being dubbed a system. EPs in other disorders may present themselves as emotional states, such as in BPD (which also would explain memory loss due to mood swings), or as just big enough to hold reactions to a trigger, such in PTSD.
BPD and DID/OSDD-1 are what I like to call sister syndromes, because of this similarity--and its why people believe BPD systems exist. However, EPs in BPD systems are not fully defined/separated, and are still seen as the self, which is why BPD itself does not produce a system.
3. My views on Carl Jung and Freud are quite all over the place. I respect both as fathers of psychoanalytic theory, and I am a firm believer in Jung’s persona theory (which is why I made that remark, because persona theory deals with acting differently in different situations). They both have their faults, however, and I still have much more research to put into the both of them.
4. Despite it being called MPD, I quite liked its portrayal. It was nice to see them take the stereotype of “murderer with DID” and establish a person with DID as innocent. And no evil alter! The bar is also pretty low, given Split/Glass and Total Drama’s subpar depictions of DID.
And that’s all I have to say, I think. If I think of more later I’ll just reblog this.
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You’re falling now. You’re swimming. (This is not harmless. You are not breathing.)
In a different universe where Dref survives Tiberius' attack in Burza Nyth. Everyone is having a hard time processing, hopefully this time they have eachother.
Travis was having a bad day. That wasn’t too weird, considering they had just gotten out of Burza Nyth, Dref had been in a critical condition for weeks and they had only just managed to stop the Mariner. They all were having odd days: processing, repressing or whatever.
Still. Gable had known Travis for a long time, too long, and his bad days generally consisted of getting angrier and more venomous than normal.
Gable usually didn’t even notice, just got hurt and bit back, generally they left him too it, not willing to deal with him. Until they thought back on it; a day or even months later, realising this was Travis’ only coping mechanism. They added all the times they had hurt him in retaliation to the enormous pile of guilt they already carried, and kept going.
Travis being hurtful on purpose was at the very least familiar by now, almost comforting. But today Travis was silent, distant, only doing motions on auto pilot. Which was acutely distressing, even to the crew who didn’t know him like they did.
Gable might have been able to deal with just Travis, but Jonnit had the look of someone who hadn’t slept in a while, and a quiet nervous energy. Dref was still recovering from Tiberius’ attack and pushing himself to get back to work.
Gable might have been able to deal with all of it if they didn’t dream of Hildred’s fear after she had found out what they had done, if they didn’t feel like they had inexplicably failed everyone around them. If it didn’t feel like everything was falling apart and they were going to lose everyone. Again.
They were all sitting in Dref’s office. Dref was writing something, but Gable got the impression he was only writing for the pretence of having something to do.
Jonnit was sitting on his desk next to him, talking about small traditions he had as a child. Clearly he was trying really hard to cheer everyone up. Gable’s heart ached, he shouldn’t be responsible for holding them all together, and yet they knew his familiar chatter about what cake his mom would make him for his birthday was probably the only thing keeping them going.
Travis was sitting on a cabinet and not interrupting Jonnit at all. In fact, he seemed to be staring at a fixed point on the wall. Of course, he might just be bored of the conversation, but if this was the case then he usually just left.
They were all hanging on a small thread, teetering on the edge of something.
“Your mom sounds like she is the best, Jonnit,” Gable commented, hoping to join in lightening the mood.
They felt the awful pang of guilt as Jonnit started tearing up.
“Yeah,” he said, “She was.”
There was a deafening silence. Dref looked at Jonnit like he wanted to help, but didn’t know how.
Gable felt anger flare up in them, anger at the way the world always seemed so unjust to the people they loved. They were so acutely aware of how young Jonnit was, how he deserved everything to be nice and safe. And how they couldn’t give any of that to him.
They gathered their boy up in their arms, hoisting him onto the chair they were sitting in. Jonnit clung back, he was clearly crying now. Not quite sobbing, just like the tears were falling despite himself.
“I’m sorry,” he said, attempting to wipe his tears, but they just wouldn’t stop. “I’ve just been thinking about her lately, her and my dad and Zana, but at least I’ll see them again and she is just‒”
He choked on his own sob and Gable held him tighter, desperate.
“You d‒ on’t need to ap‒ apologize,” Dref said, hovering over them, unsure. “It is only l‒ logical you would f‒ feel this way.”
Travis was holding the side of the cabinet so tightly his knuckles had turned white. Still turned away from them.
“Travis?” Gable tried, tentatively.
Travis turned around, his eyes red and puffy, visibly shaking. “I am fine,” he snapped.
Dref flinched at the tone in his voice. Jonnit pressed his face into their chest.
It was too much, just too much. It felt like falling, or even worse, like drowning.
-
Travis fucking hated dissociation.
If there was something he was familiar with, it was feeling like a stranger in his own body. Distantly, he remembers years ago, when dissociation had been a welcome relief to not feel like he existed when his father had still been around.
The newer fear he had acquired around not being in control, combined with the fact that it always brought him back to his brilliant childhood, meant that now it just sent him into a panic, which in turn made the unreality worse.
The worst goddamned cycle he was trapped in.
He was aware he was crying, in the sense that logically, he knew he was crying, but he couldn’t feel the tears roll down his face. He saw them fall into his lap like he was looking through the eyes of another man.
In that same way he could see Gable looking at him worriedly, Dref was now pressed into their side, not quite hugging but holding their hand, clearly upset. Of course he’d gotten hurt, he should know by now that that’s the only thing Travis knows how to do. Get people hurt.
Travis couldn’t talk, or perhaps he could? Did he not want to? He only knew that trying more than simple sentences would make him cry more and he really didn’t want that. He wanted to leave so badly and he just couldn’t.
Gable was holding onto Dref and Jonnit, and they looked so lost, barely holding it together. Travis had to leave them. He would. But Jonnit had hit a nerve ‒ why did people always hit his nerves ‒ and all he could think of was his mother, weak and feeble in bed, and the sound of his father’s angry shouting.
Don’t leave me. William had said to her and then there was a river, and he was shouting louder and he couldn’t save her either.
He wanted his outbursts to be dramatic. It would make sense, screaming and ugly panic, but instead he stared into a corner and cried. He was trying so hard not to, but despite that he couldn’t stop it.
He felt like he was looking onto himself, like a spectator of his own life. How pathetic the picture was, with his friends he didn't deserve sitting across from him, not knowing what to do and him weeping, helpless, like it had always been.
It was brilliant really fucking brilliant
‒
Jonnit was known for being optimistic, but even he didn’t really know what to do with the current situation.
They had all been worried about Dref for weeks now. He’d finally woken up just a little after they took off from Burza Nyth, but the lack of sleep and constant stress had worn on all of them.
Partially because of that, probably, the anniversary of his mother’s death had hit him harder than it had in years. Usually he would have Zana and his dad, and they would cook her favorite food and share memories, like a bittersweet celebration. In hindsight, talking about it to someone, anyone, might have helped, but he’d known everyone was already feeling pretty bad. No need to saddle them with his feelings too.
It felt weird to even be upset about it, with everything that had happened, with the Mariner lurking and Dref being hunted by whatever the cutting stone was. But as much as he loved all his friends, he missed her, and he missed his family and his home.
Everyone had been quietly feeling awful, and it just so happened that they all had reached their breaking point now.
Gable was holding onto him like he might disappear, or run away. Dref still looked pale and sickly, now with added helplessness. Travis looked worse than Jonnit had even seen him, and he had seen Travis almost bleed to death. He was painfully aware of how small he was, how even with all his power, this is something he couldn’t solve. His friends had gone through so much pain he didn’t understand, and he so desperately wanted to help them.
But really, he was still just a child, and he too had been swallowed in the sea of problems, just like everyone else had. So he just clung to Gable, and then Dref took one of his hands, and they held each other, like a liferaft in a flood.
-
Dref was trying really hard to do breathing exercises. He was painfully aware of everyone's present distress, which is precisely why he had to calm himself down first. It was difficult, with two shaking hands in his hands and Travis’ awful sobbing in the background, with Tiberius' voice lingering, with the sharp pain still in his body.
Always thinking you can help everyone, Alisdair.
Another deep breath, hold it, exhale. Exercises like this helped, but it always felt like giving up when he needed them again.
Pathetic.
No. He was stronger than the ingrained memories and thoughts. His friends needed him.
He closed his eyes, felt the pressure of everything, adjusted his grip on the hands he was holding and took yet another deep breath. It was like fighting against a strong current, but a few more breaths and he felt more in control.
He let go of Gable and Jonnit, giving them a shaky but reassuring smile. They were both still wrecked, but it was okay, he needed to maintain his calm.
He went over to Travis.
“T‒ ravis,” he said, very carefully putting a hand on Travis’ hand, “C ‒ an you h ‒ h ear me?”
Travis’ eyes focused on him, he nodded.
“C ‒ can I help?”
He shrugged and shook his head. I don’t know.
Gently, Dref coaxed him to stop hurting himself by holding on so tightly, at least, and helped him off the cabinet. Then, he started to push his desk to one side. Jonnit and Gable quickly caught on and stood up silently to help him move it. He had a couple of blankets lying around in the office. They had been for if he fell asleep working late, and now they were to keep him warm as he recuperated.
Together they haphazardly laid them out, and in a few moments they had something that vaguely resembled a nest. Gable and Jonnit flopped onto it, Jonnit still safe in their lap, and Dref sat close next to Gable. He didn’t like tight embraces, so instead he held their hand.
Travis placed himself at the other side of them. Gable cautiously put one of their arms around him. He looked as limp as a rag doll, but he leaned into the touch a little, and didn’t seem quite so acutely distressed. Jonnit started humming softly, Dref rocked a little, and slowly they all calmed down together.
Gable was the first to break the precious silence.
“Thank you,” they said to Dref.
“Yeah,” Jonnit said. He looked tired but otherwise alright. “We really needed someone to pull us out of this one.”
“A‒ anytime,” Dref said, and he smiled, knowing they could get through anything, together.
Gable turned to Travis. “How are you holding up?”
Travis was still tucked into their side, looking mostly like an annoyed cat.
“I will say I have seen better days,” he said, “But overall this still doesn’t make the top ten worst days, so.” He shrugged.
The rest of them shared a look, but they all knew this was probably as close as Travis would ever get to admitting he was feeling something.
“We probably should talk about....well you know, stuff,” Jonnit said, gesturing vaguely. “That's what people always say, right?”
Gable actively winced, Travis groaned and Dref also felt a familiar twinge of apprehension.
Maybe they could all use some professional help. Dref filed that away as an idea for later.
-
They all went around and talked. Most of them were still clearly skirting around some topics, but that was okay. They were trying at least.
Travis barely said anything, but he still felt better hearing for everyone's voices, feeling the familiar weight of Gable around him. He looked around at them all. He could feel how much he cared about these people in his chest, and he decided not to pay attention to how afraid that made him. At least, not today. And he would never admit it, especially not to Gable.
-
Jonnit felt lighter after talking, even if he couldn’t fully verbalize his feelings about everything. He could only vaguely explain the feeling of duty, his desire to fix everything.
“T‒ that should n‒ not be your r‒ responsibility, Jonnit.”
Gable added quickly, “We are here to help you. We’re in this together.”
And at that he cried again, but this time it felt like the weight of the world had been lifted from his shoulders.
-
Gable knew there was nothing that could fix the guilt they had carried around for so many years in one single afternoon. They couldn’t even bear to talk about Hildred or what she had found out, not yet.
But it was alright, even then, because this time it felt like there was a way out of this downward spiral. Out of the darkness. There were at least these three people to help them, and this time, Gable was going to let them.
They laid down their head, and for the first time in ages they didn’t feel like they were running. They were home. They let themselves believe, hope, that maybe everything was going to be okay. Maybe they all deserved this peace, with each other.
Even if the universe didn’t let them have it, they were ready to fight tooth and nail for it, and in the determined faces of the others, Gable could see that they were too.
-
Dref had never really known what it was like to be part of a loving family. The lingering marks of his parents, Tiberius, and Olivia were still in his mind and his body both, and it often threatened to overwhelm him. But here was Gable's steady hand to anchor him, and Jonnit’s excited chatter to ground him, and even Travis’ annoying presence to distract him.
He looked at all of them, as they dissolved into a debate about something inconsequential, still tangled up onto each other, and he smiled to himself.
They were his family now, the one Alisdair Youngblood had always dreamed about on particularly lonely nights. He caught Travis’ similar wistful look, before he immediately looked away. But still, Dref could see the smile on his lips.
This family was small, broken and complicated.
But it was his, and that was all that mattered.
#campaign podcast#skyjacks#travis matagot#gable skyjacks#jonnit kessler#dref wormwood#my writing#special thanks to the uwuru for fueling my writing skills dafjfjkhla
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This is the first time, outside of therapy, that I am opening up fully my past, I ask that you remain respectful.
Trigger warnings: Suicide, torture, neglect, alcoholism, … a lot listen you’ve got to be well resourced before you read this.
I know Dean, because I was Dean. I was raised to be “perfect”, I am so much like my dad, I didn’t have a childhood, I was tortured, I have lost time (dissociation not possession by an arc angel), I am fairly closeted, and I’m finally starting to get better.
Ever since a very young child, I was raised to be perfect. To look at a 99 and learn what I got wrong before I brought the grade home, otherwise, I was sent to study. I was raised to not be heard and taught to stay in my room. I was raised to not show emotion because anything more than stoic meant that I was an inconvenience. I had “fend for yourself nights” where I had to sort out what I would eat for dinner, and at inexcusably young ages, 5-6 years old. I learned to shoot at 8, and was taken fishing anytime my dad went. I was brought to the construction sites, learned how to use power tools, and eventually had my own set at home. While I wasn’t trained to hunt demons or other things that go bump in the night, I was molded to be just like my dad. My mom wasn’t around much when I was a kid, so I idolized my father. He was like a god to me. As I got older (legal), I even would drink things that my dad approved of like scotch and I smoked cigars. Often praised, “that’s my girl! Look guys, my daughter drinking scotch and smoking a cigar! Where are your kids?” The validation was like a high to me. I was desperate for his approval. Just like Dean. Talked like his dad, walked like his dad, drank like his dad, I get it.
I was blatantly ignored including being told that I was invisible by siblings. They would hold up a remote to me and say, “you’re invisible” and ignore me. I could leave the house and they would not come look for me. With my mom and dad often gone (usually working or partying we were quite poor), I didn’t have anyone looking after me since I was 4 so when my dad was around, much like Dean, all I wanted to do was make him happy and proud of me.
I was a closeted bisexual, who made so many gay jokes towards my cishet brother that I feel quite a bit of shame as an adult. I repressed every facet of desire I had for the opposite gender because being bisexual really meant that I must be gay. At least that is what Will and Grace told me, and I did not want to be gay. Things were bad enough, I didn’t need to add to my shit pile. By the time I was 12, I had no idea how to feel emotions and I had no idea how to love myself. Most days, now at 29, I still don’t know how to love myself. I am not out to everyone in my family. I don’t feel safe with everyone. All the gay jokes between the brothers, all the Dean is bi subtext, I lived a lot of it.
Torture can take the shape of many different forms but they fall under two umbrellas: physical and psychological. I was subjected to sound torture and sleep deprivation forms of physical torture that have lasting psychological effects. When you live through something like that, you don’t “rebound” in the traditional sense, and I would dissociate. My consciousness would retreat back into itself until it was safe enough to come back.
I dreaded Thursday nights as that is when it would begin. My father would bring home several cases of Michelob Ultra, from the store, and then he would start drinking. My dad didn’t measure his consumption in beers, instead he measured by the case. A form of extreme binge drinking that to this day I still don’t completely understand. While he would drink, his music would get progressively louder and louder until the whole house vibrated with noise.
There are some songs and artists that I cannot listen to anymore. They’re not songs by Metallica or Black Sabbath, instead they’re by Credence Clearwater Revival, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison and the like. Songs that people dance to at their weddings, sing at funerals, and enjoy on a road trip with the entire family. They are generally described as lively yet not heavy, yet this music was the conduit of 5 years of actual torture for me. I used to say that these were my favorite songs, but it was a way to cope with hearing them at home, and then hearing them play in the car on the way to school the next morning. In my house, the music was played so loudly that walls and floors shook and overwhelmed my senses and ability to sleep, think, do anything but have a heartbeat and breathe. It would last all night. I never learned to “fall asleep” I would pass out. To this day, I can be desperately tired, and able to drive for several hours without being a dangerous driver. Like my body learned to ignore fatigue. “I just need like 4 hours every couple of days,” yeah Deano, I’ve been there.
I would freeze mentally. Almost like a zone out but on steroids. Then I’d look around and things wouldn’t feel real to me. I would look in the mirror and see a stranger. Now I understand that I had developed dpdr as a way to cope. I don’t wish it on anyone.
My mother? She would leave the house and go clubbing. My siblings were 8 years older than me and lived on their own a great distance from where I lived. Besides, I had school to go to on Fridays. So I cooked, I monitored myself, I had to become an adult. I didn’t get to be a kid. My catharsis was angsty and fluffy Harry Potter fan fiction. You can find it on FF.net, RandHrFan I no longer post with that handle. Dean’s were movies, movies that my dad, and I’d wager his dad watched. I also love westerns just like my dad and my grandfather, there is something about them.
When Dean cries and opens up to Sam about his hell experiences, I get it. I’m so proud of him for telling Sam. To some it seems like he’s closed off but he’s not. He’s opening up as much as he mentally can. And Sam listens. Just like my sister eventually did. When Dean gets mad and yells at John and Mary, I’m proud of him, because he is fighting for himself. He knew he deserved better and he didn’t let it go. Just like I have done in my not so distant past.
All the while my parent’s marriage was fracturing and I was mentally declining. My mom began sleeping in my room and in my bed, and I was basically left to sleep on the couch. On days when my dad would drink, and my mom would go out, I could get to be in my room again. I could be on the computer (laptops weren’t a thing yet) which lived in my room. I could connect with the two other friends on AIM, but the reality of my situation I couldn’t escape. I was isolated, didn’t trust my family and I didn’t know how to ask for help.
One day I attempted to take my life. I saw no value in it. What was I doing with my life. I was a broken human who didn’t deserve love, who didn’t deserve safety, who didn’t deserve well anything. So I downed a bottle of pills. I had an iron clad stomach, I wasn’t too worried about not being successful. Except, I sent a goodbye message to a friend, and that friend saved my life. He got a hold of my sister who got to me in enough time to make me throw up. (She was a champ at that, having suffered from bulimia and taught to throw up from no other than my dad.)
I didn’t receive help afterwards. I signed a paper saying that I wouldn’t attempt again and was taken home. (I hope this isn’t how hospitals roll anymore.) I left my house, I went to school out of state and found stability, created stability for myself. But my past still haunted me whenever I went home. So when Dean has a death wish, and gets discharged from hospitals before he’s stable, I get it.
My parents eventually divorced, and I came home to a place where I couldn’t live anymore for a solid couple of months, I couch surfed, and again my mental health took a nosedive, but nevertheless, I persisted. I got my head back in the game, and finished my degree. Chemistry. I couldn’t go back home, because if I did I’d be working for my dad. I couldn’t do that, it was too painful. So I went to grad school. I got my Ph.D. I began to chart my own path. But there was a rage in me that I couldn’t escape. I lashed out at anyone and everyone to hide the pain that I felt all the time. People were afraid of me. I was great at what I did but I couldn’t make lasting connections with others.
When I was 27 suicidal ideations became dangerous, and I got about as dark. I tried to harm myself, and wanted my world to burn. It didn’t matter that I was married, with pets, and owned a home. Nothing mattered. I finally had to decide between life and death, I couldn’t continue in that state. I can say confidently that I would be dead if I didn’t get help that day. I wish Dean had this chance. He gets close to this in moments with Cas when he is honest about his feelings and experiences, he cries, he gets angry, lashes out, but Cas is there for him. From someone like Dean, I’ll tell you Cas being present holds more weight than gold for Dean.
I have been in intense therapy for a year. By intense I do mean more than once a week, regular check ins with her, and the occasional group session. She sends me articles to read, homework, and we do EMDR work, emotional integration therapy, mindfulness, etc.
It was then that I began to learn that all the rage that I had built inside me was hiding intense fear, loss, and disappointment. The rage gave way to tears, and the tears gave way to a new anger that I could make peace with. That anger comes from the person I am today. The person who fights for herself. Who doesn’t take shit from anyone. The person who says, humans don’t break, vases break, and I am a human. I see a lot of that in late season Dean. He is a fighter.
But I am still the person who receives a compliment and shuts down, there is still a side of me that doesn’t believe that I deserve nice things, good things to happen to me, but that person is getting smaller. My therapist likes to hit me with compliments when I am vulnerable as I am more likely to believe them. I still react like a dead fish when she says them, and then after the session sob for hours over it. One day my head and my heart will believe the same things about myself. I would have reacted the same way as Dean to that confession.
When the cards fall, I still know that I can depend on myself before anyone else because I had to. My life as an impoverished, unstable, depressed, neglected, and abused kid says I should be dead or amounting to nothing, but hear I am. I’ve now closely mentored about 20 undergraduate students, a handful of graduate students, and have helped them find their paths in life. I have taught nearly 1000 students. I made a difference with the life that I tried to throw away.
I have come to a place where I can love my dad. He is sober again, and yes, my love for him does depend on his sobriety. When he is drinking he is not the same person. I wouldn’t call him an A+ dad by a long shot, and hell I am so much like him that at times it makes me sick, but I do love him. I have been able to forgive him. Forgive in the sense that I can make peace with what happened. It doesn’t change what happened or how much it affected me, and I certainly don’t forget, but that isn’t what forgiveness is. I don’t hold the rage anymore. The fact that Dean is able to is personal for Dean, as it is for me, and it isn’t some “family that is what you do” type reason.
I do experience flashbacks when there are fireworks, I can’t go to a movie theatre because of the volume, when people play really loud music in their cars I typically have to peel off into a parking lot and meditate for 20 minutes to be able to drive again. There are some stores that I don’t shop at because their music triggers me. So when Dean experiences those flashbacks, I get it.
There is a belief in the psychology that monster shows help us become comfortable with our dark sides. My dark side saved me over and over again. My dark side told me to be better than them. My dark side told me to fight for me, to adopt a survivor mindset. (If you can’t tell I am a green veined Slytherin and have never been sorted into any other house even by random house generators.) The things I delight in are a bit off color. I cultivate a poison garden, consume way too much true crime, to gore I say give me s’more and so on. Dean gets to experience his dark side, and he has to make peace with it. He makes inappropriate jokes, laughs at it, but he also does talk about it.
This is the hard part: Just like Dean, I am also light. I love people (vomit), seriously though, they are more precious to me than any earthly possession. Plants bring me serenity. Animals are a comfort and companion in the worst of times. There isn’t much I wouldn’t do to protect living things. My motivations come from a place of love and a need to protect others from what I have been through. I know I can survive, but I don’t know if that is true for everyone else.
I know Dean. I was Dean. I see that every episode. Moments when he yells and screams for himself, I cheer him on. Moments where he tries to waste his life away, I understand, and am crying right with him. The purgatory apology guts me, I’ve had to make that apology more than once. The dead fish reaction, hell that is me at the end of a therapy session. I am here to say: Dean is not broken. Dean is strong. Dean is resilient. Dean doesn’t just fight for himself, he fights for the whole of creation. Dean is not a vase. He is a human.
Oh and John’s taste in beer, much like my fathers, is crap. Don’t drink shitty beer. Also, I don’t drink scotch anymore. I'm a gin girl and I drink *okay* beer.
I’m the same blogger who does drunk blogging regarding Supernatural on Saturdays. It is a lovely bit of comfort and joy for me and I won’t be stopping any time soon. We will get back to the lovely and light “Dean is Bi he he” commentary this weekend.
#dean winchester#john winchester#castiel#survivor#people are not broken#dean is not broken#dean is probably bi#trauma#daddy issues#mommy issues#neglect#alcoholism#adult child of an alcoholic#i relate to dean#i really wish dean could have had a chance to recover#potentially triggering#torture#dpdr#therapy#opening up#supernatural#other perspective#can we have an official hug dean day where we post photos and gifs of dean getting hugged? I feel like it would be healthy#in my secret good version of supernatural dean is in therapy and healing#childhood trauma#trigger warning#i hope i got all the tags to keep people safe who need to avoid this#this was incredibly cathartic
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I promised I’d write about this, and I really do think Tyrion/Lemore is an underrated relationship. And usually when people talk about it they only talk about Tyrion being a fuckboy, and he is, but he’s no worse than the way Jaime treats Brienne through much of ASOS. I think a lot of people use this subplot as merely more evidence for Tyrion’s downward spiral, but what’s really interesting about Lemore is the way she challenges Tyrion when he’s in that dark place of self-loathing and dissociation from others, especially with regards to women.
At the beginning of ADWD, Tyrion is in a place where he is incredibly cynical about love, and no longer interested in the idea of sex, even. He purposefully scares Illyrio’s slave because he wants her to hate him, to see him as disgusting, even though he is not interested in having sex with her. This is framed in stark contrast to the illusion he had previously paid for with sex-workers, in which he wanted to avoid, and feared, “the look” that he describes seeing in reaction to his disability. This is, of course, all linked to his trauma over Tysha, not only the fear of rejection but the sexual trauma of being forced to witness and participate in her rape, which also makes Tyrion a victim of sexual abuse and rape. What Tywin did, essentially, was take a consensual loving experience that Tyrion found comfort in and make it something ugly and disgusting. This makes Tyrion both compelled to re-experience what he had with Tysha by seeking out sex-workers and makes him feel that there is no way he could experience real love. When he learns the truth about Tysha, the coping mechanism of seeking out sex-workers becomes no longer satisfying, and the only thing Tyrion is left with is ugliness and self-blame.
I’d also argue that another major sexual trauma leading up to ADWD is his marriage to Sansa. Tyrion has brief fantasies that he can play a chivalrous romantic when he is married to her, but of course he knows that this isn’t possible. This is, in no way, Sansa’s fault, but being forced into a marriage with her is deeply sexually humiliating. Again, not because she rejected him, but because she is in no position to accept him. Tyrion becomes increasingly withdrawn from relationships, which is shown in his interactions with Sansa and even Shae, who he is less and less satisfied with and more insecure around than ever after his marriage. His sexual shame increases to the point where he can’t bear undressing in front of Sansa, the idealized, innocent maiden. Even the scene where he has sex with Shae among the dragon skulls and afterwards spends several uncomfortable moments searching for his clothes in the dark demonstrates Tyrion’s sexual repression and shame, in contrast to the way Shae treats it as a game.
"Shae . . ." He reached, but she spun and slipped free.
"You have to catch me." Her voice came from his left. "M'lord must have played monsters and maidens when he was little."
"Are you calling me a monster?"
"No more than I'm a maiden." She was behind him, her steps soft against the floor. "You need to catch me all the same."
He did, finally, but only because she let herself be caught. By the time she slipped into his arms, he was flushed and out of breath from stumbling into dragon skulls.
[...]
After, as they lay entwined amongst the dragon skulls, he rested his head against her, inhaling the smooth clean smell of her hair. "We should go back," he said reluctantly. "It must be near dawn. Sansa will be waking."
"You should give her dreamwine," Shae said, "like Lady Tanda does with Lollys. A cup before she goes to sleep, and we could fuck in bed beside her without her waking." She giggled. "Maybe we should, some night. Would m'lord like that?" Her hand found his shoulder, and began to knead the muscles there. "Your neck is hard as stone. What troubles you?"
Tyrion could not see his fingers in front of his face, but he ticked his woes off on them all the same. "My wife. My sister. My nephew. My father. The Tyrells." He had to move to his other hand. "Varys. Pycelle. Littlefinger. The Red Viper of Dorne." He had come to his last finger. "The face that stares back out of the water when I wash."
Shae kissed his maimed scarred nose. "A brave face. A kind and good face. I wish I could see it now."
"Better you than me." Tyrion sat. "We have a long day before us, both of us. You shouldn't have blown out that taper. How are we to find our clothing?"
She laughed. "Maybe we'll have to go naked."
And if we're seen, my lord father will hang you.
Sexual shame is a big part of Tyrion’s narrative, something that has been drilled into him by Tywin. Shae’s carefree nature is put into contrast with the limitations and insecurities Tyrion experiences over his disabled body, both with regard to Sansa and Shae, and his insecurity about being seen naked once the sun comes up.
Interestingly, Tyrion’s insecurity about being seen naked is not present in A Game of Thrones, where he pretty casually walks out of his tent on the Green Fork without putting on clothes and pees outside while having a conversation with Bronn. I used to assume this was because he does not feel sexual shame at Bronn seeing him naked, as he is not sexually attracted to Bronn. Or that it’s just one of those things where Martin had not yet established his characters wholly, and just used this moment to show the casual nudity that is part of the “historical” feel he is going for in his novels. But also it could be that Tyrion’s sexual shame has increased from AGOT to ASOS, due to the events that transpire. By ADWD, Tyrion is afraid to take off his clothes to even bathe, and that’s one of our first introductions to Lemore.
I need to bathe. His boy's clothes stank, and so did he. The others bathed in the river, but thus far he had not joined them. Some of the turtles he'd seen in the shallows looked big enough to bite him in half. Bonesnappers, Duck called them. Besides, he did not want Lemore to see him naked.
Tyrion’s insecurity over his body is centered on Lemore, who he is attracted to, and Lemore is also juxtaposed in contrast to Tyrion’s sexual repression, as she bathes in the river every morning, and does not seem to care who watches her. Indeed, she is aware of Tyrion watching her and openly teases him about it.
"Good morrow, Hugor." Septa Lemore had emerged in her white robes, cinched at the waist with a woven belt of seven colors. Her hair flowed loose about her shoulders. "How did you sleep?"
"Fitfully, good lady. I dreamed of you again." A waking dream. He could not sleep, so he had eased a hand between his legs and imagined the septa atop him, breasts bouncing.
"A wicked dream, no doubt. You are a wicked man. Will you pray with me and ask forgiveness for your sins?"
Only if we pray in the fashion of the Summer Isles. "No, but do give the Maiden a long, sweet kiss for me."
Laughing, the septa walked to the prow of the boat. It was her custom to bathe in the river every morning. "Plainly, this boat was not named for you," Tyrion called as she disrobed.
"The Mother and the Father made us in their image, Hugor. We should glory in our bodies, for they are the work of gods."
The gods must have been drunk when they got to me. The dwarf watched Lemore slip into the water. The sight always made him hard. There was something wonderfully wicked about the thought of peeling the septa out of those chaste white robes and spreading her legs. Innocence despoiled, he thought … though Lemore was not near as innocent as she appeared. She had stretch marks on her belly that could only have come from childbirth.
Tyrion’s open about lusting after Lemore, and doesn’t try to hide it, and in fact seems to want Lemore to know it.
Tyrion’s being openly lecherous, in the way that echoes his behavior when he is playing up the way people see him, as the depraved dwarf. But it seems to be a performance that hides his own insecurity and trauma. He openly stares at her as she is bathing but won’t join in himself. The way he feels about her reads like he’s dissociating, especially in the observations he doesn’t say aloud. He seems like he’s trying to gross her out the way he does to the slave at Illyrio’s, but her response is to give as good as she gets, something which Tyrion seems not to expect, and he constantly deflects any positive things she says about him.
Like, she’s totally flirting with him, and he seems completely unaware of it, even while he fantasizes about her topping him.
When Lemore climbed back onto the deck, Tyrion savored the sight of water trickling between her breasts, her smooth skin glowing golden in the morning light. She was past forty, more handsome than pretty, but still easy on the eye. Being randy is the next best thing to being drunk, he decided. It made him feel as if he was still alive. "Did you see the turtle, Hugor?" the septa asked him, wringing water from her hair. "The big ridgeback?”
"I missed the ridgeback." I was watching the naked woman.
"I am sad for you." Lemore slipped her robe over her head. "I know you only rise so early in hopes of seeing turtles."
"I like to watch the sun come up as well." It was like watching a maiden rising naked from her bath. Some might be prettier than others, but every one was full of promise. "The turtles have their charms, I will allow. Nothing delights me so much as the sight of a nice pair of shapely … shells."
Septa Lemore laughed. Like everyone else aboard the Shy Maid, she had her secrets. She was welcome to them. I do not want to know her, I only want to fuck her. She knew it too. As she hung her septa's crystal about her neck, to nestle in the cleft between her breasts, she teased him with a smile.
Good lord, y’all. Tyrion’s silently like “when will this milf sit on my face” and Lemore is like “let’s have a sexually charged conversation about turtles” and Tyrion’s like “I have no idea how to deal with this scenario but I think I like it?”
He also says that he doesn’t want to know her, which...feels like when Tyrion always lies to himself. Again, he’s trying to inhabit the role of the sexually deviant dwarf without getting attached, but does he really not want to know her? Tyrion repeatedly says throughout ADWD that he doesn’t want love from anyone anymore, but that’s the biggest lie of all.
"You have a gift for making men smile," Septa Lemore told Tyrion as he was drying off his toes. "You should thank the Father Above. He gives gifts to all his children."
"He does," he agreed pleasantly. And when I die, please let them bury with me a crossbow, so I can thank the Father Above for his gifts the same way I thanked the father below.
Again he deflects when Lemore compliments him, which is...what Tyrion does in all his relationships. But he does admit that he enjoys spending time with her, and spends a good amount of time trying to figure her out, for someone who says he doesn’t want to know her.
His doublet was divided down the middle; the left side was purple velvet with bronze studs; the right, yellow wool embroidered in green floral patterns. His breeches were similarly split; the right leg was solid green, the left leg striped in red and white. One of Illyrio's chests had been packed with a child's clothing, musty but well made. Septa Lemore had slit each garment apart, then sewn them back together, joining half of this to half of that to fashion a crude motley. Griff had even insisted that Tyrion help with the cutting and sewing. No doubt he meant for it to be humbling, but Tyrion enjoyed the needlework. Lemore was always pleasant company, despite her penchant for scolding him whenever he said something rude about the gods.
And Lemore seems to enjoy Tyrion’s presence, and openly banters with him throughout this section of the book, challenging his nihilism, sexual repression, and self-loathing. She’s also the one who cares for him after he is nearly drowned in the stonemen attack.
He was on the Shy Maid, Tyrion saw, under a scratchy blanket that smelled of vinegar. The Sorrows are behind us. It was just a dream I dreamed as I was drowning. "Why do I stink of vinegar?"
"Lemore has been washing you with it. Some say it helps prevent the greyscale. I am inclined to doubt that, but there was no harm in trying. It was Lemore who forced the water from your lungs after Griff had pulled you up. You were as cold as ice, and your lips were blue. Yandry said we ought to throw you back, but the lad forbade it."
[...]
Lemore emerged on deck with the prince in tow. When she saw Tyrion, she rushed across the deck to hug him. "The Mother is merciful. We have prayed for you, Hugor.
"You did, at least. "I won't hold that against you."
I think it scares Tyrion that Lemore cares about him, because he still deeply believes that he is unlovable, and Lemore directly challenges that. But he contradicts his own declaration that he doesn’t want to know her. In fact, he’s intensely interested in knowing who she really is.
Lemore had changed out of her septa's robes into garb more befitting the wife or daughter of a prosperous merchant. Tyrion watched her closely. He had sniffed out the truth beneath the dyed blue hair of Griff and Young Griff easily enough, and Yandry and Ysilla seemed to be no more than they claimed to be, whilst Duck was somewhat less. Lemore, though … Who is she, really? Why is she here? Not for gold, I'd judge. What is this prince to her? Was she ever a true septa?
In short, Lemore is an older, experienced woman who not only seems to care for Tyrion, she is openly sexual and is able to go toe to toe with him both intellectually and sexually. Also, like, there are so many different kinky possibilities here. I need fic of this like, yesterday.
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Words On My Skin (Part 13)
Bucky Barnes X Reader Soulmate AU
A/N: Without further ado, I present to you PART 13! WOOHOO! Also, happy 2200 followers to me! You're all the best! SORRY IT TOOK SO LONG! I had a great vacation! I’m at my bff’s house, now, and we’re gunna be writing all week, so part 14 will probably be done fairly quick!
Warnings: Feels, swears, and all that shit……… Mentions of sexual abuse as a child (googling ‘childhood traumatic memories’ and all that). I do talk about it a lot in the first half of the chapter, so if this is something you can’t - or don’t want to - read about… you’ve been warned.
Main Masterlist // WOMS Masterlist
Splashing some water on your face, you sighed in relief – the major feelings coming from Bucky through the bond starting to fade. You could still feel guilt, self-loathing, and hurt… but the feelings were starting to dull into an ache, versus a sharp pain.
As if he’d accepted the feelings.
That was almost worse than the heightened emotions.
“Friday?” You called out hoarsely, after drying your face, “Is Bucky out of his meeting, yet?”
“Yes, Ms. L/n.” The AI replied, “He is in the gym. Would you like to inform him you are seeking him out?”
“No thanks, FRIDAY.” You sighed, shoulders sagging. He must be beating his frustrations out on a punching bag, again. You could go see him in the gym… but it was kind of a little too public. You wanted to have a real talk with him, not something that should be talked about in the presence of other people. You didn’t want that, and you were pretty sure Bucky wouldn’t appreciate it. “Just… let me know when he’s in his room.”
“Of course, Ms. L/n.”
You leaned against the counter, staring at your reflection. Your face was blotchy from crying, nostrils raw from wiping your nose so much, and your eyes dull. God, you looked like absolute shit. You grabbed the towel off the rack, patting your face dry. You had taken a shower already, before Bucky had arrived back at the compound, but you felt dirty, again.
It’s your damn emotions. You just feel like shit, you don’t need another shower.
Ugh, maybe you should take a bath and relax.
Looking away from your reflection, you ripped open the cabinet under the sink, so you could procure your handy first aid kit. You needed to take care of your hand before it got infected, or something. Unzipping it, you looted around until you found the liquid bandage. You ran your injured hand under some water, cleaning the cut and the area around the wound. Luckily, it wasn’t that large, but it was going to be a bitch to try and hold closed while applying the liquid.
Somehow, you managed to apply it – wincing as the stupid liquid burned against your open wound. You held the skin together, waiting for it to dry.
Okay. What to do, now?
You could get some work done, clean your room, look at random Buzzfeed articles online, scroll through social media…
You should probably look up ‘traumatic childhood memories’, or something, and get to the bottom of your weird aversion to guns... and that weird dream… or memory… whatever the hell that was.
You had the time. Why not?
Because you probably wouldn't like what you found.
With a slow exhale, you poked at the adhesive to make sure it was dry. Once it was, you left all your belongings on the bathroom counter, making a mental note to have the handkerchief that Tony gave you dry cleaned, and exited the bathroom to flop onto your bed with your laptop.
Could one just Google ‘why did I see a memory of my father’s face after shooting a gun’?
Probably not.
You stared at the little Google sign, wondering what the hell to type in the search bar. Traumatic childhood memories? Random memories resurfacing as an adult? Were they even memories? What would be so bad that you’d forget seeing your father’s face and a bunch of blood? What was so awful that it took you years to even understand that something happened?
What happened?
You started with the first one, googling ‘traumatic childhood memories’. A bunch of random articles popped up, but most of them had to do with childhood sexual abuse and dissociation. One of the articles about sleep paralysis and childhood memories talked about how, when a child is sexually abused, they could dissociate and block out the memories in order to protect themselves from pain, but the memory still could affect them. The article talked about ‘recovering’ your memory of the original experience to help with the current problem…
But your current fucking problem was that you had the damn memory in the first place.
Plus, you were pretty sure that you were never in a situation that you could’ve been sexually abused… right?
You remembered going to the cabin… but… what about specific details? You remembered getting beers for your dad and his friends, you remembered fishing by the river, you remembered the trees… and… you remembered having fun? You remembered one summer when you got stung on the arm. There was a small memory about sitting under the stars by the campfire making s'mores while your father's friends told stories about ‘the good old days’…
What about the specific summer that the memory should’ve occurred?
What summer would that be?
What the fuck? Why were you blanking on this?
You shook your head, moving on to an article about ‘Signs You’re Repressing A Negative Childhood Memory’.
Well, get straight to the point, apparently.
“‘Specific places or situations freak you out.’” You read aloud, a frown forming on your face after.
Well… yeah.
You freak out over guns, and the sound of the gunshot triggered you into a damn episode.
‘It’s difficult for you to control your emotions’… Now, that one was a toss-up. You were actually able to control yourself pretty well, in your opinion. You really only snapped if there was reason to… right?
Oh god, now you’re second guessing everything.
‘Keeping a job has always been difficult’. Nope. You were quite good at keeping jobs, actually. Next.
‘You’ve always struggled with fears of abandonment’. You had your father to thank for that one. Emotional abandonment. Next.
‘Friends often say you’re ‘acting like a child’’. Nope.
‘You always feel anxious or emotionally exhausted.’ If they had your damn life, they’d under-freaking-stand.
You clicked off the article, looking for a more professional article to read. You should’ve done that in the first place, you moron.
Wasn't the internet supposed to be helpful?
Shoving your laptop off away from you, you hopped off your bed and over to your closet in search of a specific book. The stupid DSM-5. You only called it stupid, because you hated trying to find anything in the book. It was a good reference, though it was not something you’d ever actually use. You’d just bought it for a project when you were in college.
You threw it on your bed, diving back on and readjusting your position to get comfortable.
You could look up stuff about dissociating and go from there?
You flipped through the book, looking for ‘Dissociative Disorders’ for a bit of a reference about trauma and memories. Once you found the page, almost halfway through the giant book, you started reading.
Dissociative Amnesia? Seems promising.
As you read the passage, it started to sound somewhat like what you were going through. Localized Amnesia? ‘A failure to recall events during a circumscribed period of time… is the most common form of dissociative amnesia’. That sounded close to what was going on… but it still didn’t sound completely right.
Maybe look up PTSD?
You slid your computer back towards yourself, getting back on the Google search engine.
There were a few different articles about emotional trauma and memory loss, but you were starting to become frustrated with the topic.
Maybe you should just ask your parents?
Yeah. Right.
After today’s events, your mother was likely to never speak to you, again.
“Ms. L/n,” FRIDAY startled you from your thoughts, “Mr. Barnes is back in his quarters.”
“Thanks, FRIDAY.” You sighed, laying back against the bed and flipping the book closed with your foot. “This is going to be fun.” You muttered, staring at the white ceiling.
You tilted your head, straining to see the clock on your nightstand from your awkward position.
TWELVE THIRTY IN THE MORNING?! HOW IN THE WORLD?
Apparently, your search lasted longer than you thought.
Closing your eyes for a moment, you inhaled through your nose for five seconds – holding it for a moment.
Huffing an exhale, realizing that your breathing did nothing for your growing anxiety, you rolled yourself to the side to slide off the bed.
Okay. You can do this. You jumped up and down a few times, trying to hype yourself up, before padding to the door of your room. It’s just Bucky. Even if he was mad at you, he’s your soulmate. You can talk this out.
Your door clicked shut behind you, sealing your fate. You were doing this. You were going to knock on the door.
Before you could chicken out, you knocked quickly – anxiety starting to skyrocket.
Oh god. You couldn’t do this. What could you say to him?
The door was thrown open, before you could run away in fear, and Bucky was standing there – a confused frown on his face.
He must have just showered. The ends of his long hair were damp, he was dressed in a plain tee shirt with basketball shorts, and the smell of his body wash permeated the air around you.
“Y/n?” His eyebrows pulled together, eyeing you warily, “What are you doing awake?”
“Can we… talk?” You cleared your throat, crossing your arms over your chest nervously.
He nodded, opening his door wider and granting you entrance to his bedroom. “Come on in.”
As you walked in, you were immediately surrounded by the smell of him. It was warm in his bedroom, unlike yours. The walls were the same white as your room, but – unlike your own room – the walls were basically bare. Only a television decorated the wall, looking like it was collecting dust. His bed took up a lot of space – though, it didn’t look slept in. The black bedspread was perfectly made to army standards, not a wrinkle in sight. One side of his desk was littered with paperwork, some of which you’d sent over to him, and post-it notes filled with reminders. The other half contained various guns and knives, which he looked to be in the process of sharpening. You smirked when you saw a picture frame in the corner of the desk, containing the photo of the two of you at the sushi restaurant.
“This is my favorite picture.” You murmured, tilting the frame to see the photo better.
He remained silent, continuing to stand by the door. His arms were crossed over his tee-shirt clad chest – demeanor defensive, though you could feel the guilt through the bond. His face was neutral, even though you knew exactly what he was feeling. You wanted nothing more than to run up and hug him, but you knew that it was not the best idea – after what happened in the kitchen.
You sighed, moving to his bed and sitting on the corner, wrinkling the bedspread. “I’m so sorry about what my mother said to you.” You gulped, looking down at your bare feet and trying to think of the right thing to say. “I… It wasn’t… it wasn’t right what she said.”
He scoffed, prompting you to look up from the floor. His face was scrunched up in a confused grimace, “You don’t control what she says.”
You picked at your fingernail, staring at your exposed tattoo, “I should’ve defended you more. I should’ve-”
“Wait…” He took a step towards you, feet entering your peripheral vision, “Why are you the one apologizing to me?” You glanced up at him, biting your lip in confusion as he continued, “I should be the one apologizing to you. You warned me that she was… judgmental… and I still let her get to me.”
“So… You’re not mad at me?” You asked quietly, biting your lip and not meeting his eyes.
“Darlin’…” He sighed, moving forward once more, and crouching down in front of you, “You think I’m mad at you?”
“Well… you did… kind of snap at me… and gave me a big ‘fuck you’.”
“Y/n, sweetheart, I’m not mad at you.” His voice was soft, and his hand moved to your face, gently turning it so you were looking at him. His eyes had softened, eyebrows pulled together with a look of guilt. “That little ‘fuck you’ was at your mother, regrettably. I should’ve never snapped like that.” He sighed, closing his eyes, “I should’ve never left you in the kitchen like that… I should be the one apologizing to you, not the other way around.” He took your hand, noticing the freshly dressed gash on your palm and examining it. “I am so sorry, Y/n. I’m sorry for snapping at your mom, for being rude to you, and for leaving you to clean up that mess.” He glanced up, blue regretful eyes meeting yours, “I’m sorry for letting you believe I was upset with you. I was… I was upset with myself.”
“I’m still apologizing.” Your lips lifted in a sad smile, fingers entwining with his cold, vibranium ones. “I’m sorry for, after being an asshole and ignoring you all week, I let my mother say those awful things to you.”
“I’m used to shit like that, sweetheart.”
“Well, I want you to know…” You pulled your entwined fingers to your chest, pressing your chin against the cold of the vibranium, “I don’t think anything she said is true.”
“You don’t?” He asked quietly, blue eyes shining. His adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed thickly.
“No.” You replied softly, with a small smile. “I never have, and I never will.” You reached forward with your free hand, gently laying it on his bearded cheek, “I remember when you first showed up in the news reels, after The Accords. I remember how hearing what happened to you made my heart hurt.” You gulped, tears filling your eyes and blurring your vision, “It still breaks my heart.”
He leaned his head into your hand, beard scratching against the palm of your hand. “It’s in the past, darlin’.”
“That doesn’t mean that you aren’t affected by it, every day.” You sniffed, tears sliding down your cheeks, “I hate that this happened to you. I hate that people don’t understand. I hate that people like my mother say and think awful things about you.” Your eyes closed, tears continuing to streak your hot face.
You were suddenly engulfed in warmth. He had stood, arms wrapping around you and burying your head in his chest. His face pressed against the crown of your head as he whispered, “Sweetheart. Don’t cry.”
“I’m sorry.” You sniffled, wrapping your arms around his middle, breathing in his body wash and fabric softener, “I just… I don’t like that people don’t see you the way that I do.”
He stayed silent, running his hand along the top of your back, trying to comfort you. It should be the other way around, you idiot. You should be comforting him, you jackass. You pulled back, moving so your arms were wrapped around his neck, chin resting on his shoulder.
“Enough emotions for one day.” He finally responded, pulling back and standing up fully. “Scoot back on the bed.”
“Wh-what?” You raised an eyebrow, blush warming your tear-stained cheeks as you wiped the evidence away. “Why?”
“Get your mind out of the gutter, sweetheart.” He snorted, moving to the desk and sheathing his knives with ease. “We’re watching the Netflix thing.”
“‘The Netflix thing’?” You snorted, scooting back so you were leaned up against the headboard, pillow behind your back. His bed was comfier than your bed. “I told you before, it’s just Netflix.”
“I knew that.” He grinned, grabbing the remote from the edge of the TV and moving to the bed, flopping down on it. “I just wanted to see that pretty smile.”
“Shut up.” You muttered, blush spreading to your neck. “Flattery will get you nowhere.”
“You’re in my bed, aren’t you?”
You scoffed, slapping him on the chest gently, “I thought you said you were a gentleman.”
He laughed, getting himself comfortable on the opposite side of the bed. He held the remote out to you, “Pick what you want.”
“Do you want scary, or do you want cooking shows?” You asked with a small grin, signing him in to his Netflix account, “Because we still have to watch season three of The Great British Bake Off… but I saw that The Conjuring is on Netflix.”
“What’s ‘The Conjuring’?”
“That answers that question.” You quickly flipped it on, scooting down so your head was leaned against his shoulder – as you usually where when you watched Netflix on the couch. Though, you’d never been on a bed together. The thought was… intimidating.
“Am I going to have to protect you from the imaginary demons?” He joked, moving his arm so you were tucked into his warm side, warmth seeping into your bones as you snuggled into the crook of his arm.
“I’m not that big of a baby.” You scoffed, rolling your eyes as the Annabelle doll’s face flicked across the screen. “I’m a grown woman, you know.”
“Remember when we watched that other movie? You made me walk you back to your bedroom, and you clutched at me when it was dark.”
“Okaaaay.” You cut him off, slapping him on the chest with a small chuckle, “I’m a little bit of a baby. Just shut up and watch the movie.”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
Part 14
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headcanon 001.
this headcanon is going to delve into todoroki’s psychiatric disorders and how they impact him. WARNING: this post will contain very heavy subjects, such as child abuse and its effects, depression, ptsd, and mentions of schizophrenia. also it’s fucking long. you don’t have to read all of it, but the important parts are the bold text and what follows it shortly after.
LONG POST !!!
c-PTSD
this stands for complex post traumatic stress disorder. “ Complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD; also known as complex trauma disorder) is a psychological disorder thought to occur as a result of repetitive, prolonged trauma involving sustained abuse or abandonment by a caregiver or other interpersonal relationships with an uneven power dynamic. ” thank you, wikipedia. i think this disorder is a bit obvious with todoroki, but i’m gonna get into it anyway.
some of the symptoms todoroki experiences are, but are not limited to, inhibited anger, shame, guilt, a sense of distinction from others, “Distorted Perceptions of the Perpetrator. Examples include attributing total power to the perpetrator, becoming preoccupied with the relationship to the perpetrator, or preoccupied with revenge” (source), isolation, distrust in others, dissociation, memory repression, reliving memories.
there are moments when todoroki becomes consumed with anger, even to the point of no longer being in control of his power, and it all relates back to his father (you know, his abuser). he is quick to feel shame and guilt about things, given that all his life, every “wrong” thing that he’s ever done, he’s been punished for. he’s been told all of these things were his fault and that he should feel guilty for them. he may not express it (which is something i will get into later) but even little things tend to get to him pretty deeply. like, say, he knocks something down by accident. he’ll take a moment and stare at it with a blank expression and process what happened, but he’ll freeze for a moment, unsure of what to do, and become slightly afraid and feel guilt for ruining something. of course, once logic kicks in, few seconds later, he’s able to assess and take care of the situation.
in regards to his distorted perceptions, i wanna be careful to mention that endeavor was indeed an abuser and it’s not just todoroki’s disorder that is “distorting” this. he WAS abusive, definitely, and him (and a bit of his mother, though he’s repressed the memory with her) are the primary reason todoroki even suffers from this disorder. that said, todoroki is still bitter and begins to fixate on this idea of spite that rises up in him at around 12 years old. this is the age when his anger begins to manifest and when he starts comparing his father to other peoples’ and realizes just how shitty he’s been treated all his life. he becomes resentful, to the point of getting into UA and trying to become the best hero without using his dad’s power solely just to spite him. he disregards all others’ opinions and fixates on his hatred, allowing it to fester and boil and refusing to ever have a proper conversation with his dad, despite how his father may attempt to. if forced into a situation with his father, he stays bitterly silent.
he begins to isolate himself from others near the beginning of the middle of his primary school experience. i’d say around 6 or 7 years old. out of fear, he never really felt that he could rely on others, and was very shy and unconfident which led him to not develop very many close relationships. he was very close with his older sister, fuyumi, and didn’t mind talking with others, so long as they initiated the conversation. he was quiet and studious, again, out of fear of disappointment and rejection from others. eventually, he became cold and distant -- after years of friendlessness, he becomes to feel bitter toward others, but mostly himself, thinking something is wrong with him and there’s something about him that is uninteresting and unappealing to other people. he begins to accept that he doesn’t need other people, despite his loneliness, and grows used to the idea that he doesn’t need friends to succeed. what with the trouble the idea’s always caused him, he begins to think that having friends would only hinder his goal in competing to be the top hero.
in regards to dissociation, he often dissociates when reminded of something he’s experienced in the past, or is in fear of experiencing in the future. he dissociated when his mother splashed his face with the boiling water and later repressed the memory, and continues to dissociate during different events to present. there are signs that point to this pre-battle with bakugou and during, as well as in his battle with deku in the sporting events. it is also seen that he has flashbacks and relives his memories as a response to a stimulus to them. this occurs when he is faced with similar situations or if he dwells on the ideas and memories too often, and will often manifest themselves when on his lonesome, or trying to sleep.
Schizophrenia
" Schizophrenia is characterized by thoughts or experiences that seem out of touch with reality, disorganized speech or behavior, and decreased participation in daily activities. Difficulty with concentration and memory may also be present ” (source). as well as " a serious mental illness that interferes with a person's ability to think clearly, manage emotions, make decisions and relate to others ” (source). i’d say he developed this in his early teenage years, around 12 or 13. he doesn’t really realize he suffers from this, however, often chalking it up to poor past experiences, stress, irrational thoughts, and general tiredness or confusion. everyone experiences schizophrenia differently, so i want to get into how todoroki experiences his.
before i get into all of his symptoms, i want to mention that some of them can come and go periodically and some of them overlap with the ones mentioned above. since i already explained those ones, i’m not going to get into them again. in order to better understand, i’m going to cross out the ones mentioned next that i’ve already explained.
some of the symptoms he experiences regarding this disorder are, reduced speaking, confused thoughts, hallucinations (not often, however), flat affect (i’ll get into what this means) which goes along with the vacant expression, trouble concentrating, trouble sleeping, irritability, dwelling unreasonably on the past, social withdrawal, problems making and keeping friends, angry outbursts, poor personal grooming, inability to understand certain information and social cues, and reduced feelings of pleasure in day-to-day life.
reduced speaking is pretty self explanatory, you know, he doesn’t speak much. he doesn’t speak unless he feels that he needs to, and he doesn’t speak unless he’s confident that he can voice his thoughts appropriately. he experiences confused thoughts that become jumbled in his mind somehow, which make it difficult to voice what he’s thinking without saying something he might feel is wrong. he likes to know what he’s going to say before he says it, out of fear of messing it up. he limits himself, for, any expression he’s allowed himself, he was later punished for. he might feel ashamed if he were to speak and falter in his thinking in front of others due to his reserved nature.
he has rare( r ) hallucinations, but only if he’s triggered by an event that bears resemblance of something he’s been through before or is afraid of going through in the future (or again). most of them are visual and auditory. he doesn’t experience any tactile hallucinations or any other sorts. they, 99% of the time, relate to his upbringing, parents, and siblings. during a moment in which he may be experiencing an emotional episode, he will hear his father’s voice once more, telling him degrading things about himself and giving him commands. he doesn’t act on anything that he’s told, but he’ll often hold his head in irritation and shame. they don’t last long, though, and he’s able to calm himself from them decently enough.
flat affect is “ a severe reduction in emotional expressiveness. People with depression and schizophrenia often show flat affect. A person with schizophrenia may not show the signs of normal emotion, perhaps may speak in a monotonous voice, have diminished facial expressions, and appear extremely apathetic ” (source). there’s not much else to be said on the subject of how it affects him... i think this is explanatory enough. i do want to mention, though, that flat affect is a reduction in emotional expressiveness -- todoroki still experiences emotions like any other person would, he’s just unable to express them well. like i mentioned before, vacant expression goes along with this. vacant expression is just as it sounds, like he’s spacing off, his eyes are empty, he’s not looking at anything in particular, and bears no emotional expression on his face. with this, he also has trouble concentrating. he’s able to concentrate well on his studies and when working on his lonesome, but in regards to other people and conversation, he often loses sight of what they are saying to him and can no longer find himself able to concentrate on what they’re saying. he may start to space off halfway through a conversation, or become distracted by something else, or other thoughts he may be having.
he has trouble sleeping, which ties into a bit of what i mentioned before in regards to his c-ptsd. before he sleeps is when he is alone and lets his thoughts run, and that can often lead to too many thoughts, an inability to relax, or reverting back to instances of his past, his day (whether they be positive or negative), and the replaying of random memories in his mind (sometimes distorted from the way they actually happened).
he experiences a lot of irritability, but it’s generally subdued beneath his ‘emotionless’ exterior, as well as purposefully held back in an effort to avoid violent confrontation. there are only little things that get on his nerves and annoy him, but it’s generally not anything serious enough to cause an issue over. so, he doesn’t. he had poor personal grooming before entering UA highschool, sometimes being unable to perform regular hygienic duties, i.e. showering, brushing his teeth/hair, etc. instead, he’d only be able to perform the bare minimum. once he entered UA, he felt more motivated to keep himself clean and presentable, despite how hard it may be for him sometimes, some mornings. it’s something his father always drove into his head, which tied into his thoughts when reminding himself that he needed to take care of himself.
he’s very intelligent and is able to tie certain things to others, thus giving him sound conclusions in battles and regular confrontation with other people, but he often misses out on social cues and understanding of given information. he’s better at deciphering and analyzing situations, but social cues aren’t necessarily one of his fortes, but it doesn’t mean he doesn’t always understand. the only thing is that he generally takes things quite literally -- he’s able to discern other people’s emotions and how they are feeling, but in regards to things like slang, metaphors, and sarcasm, he generally doesn’t pick on up on it well. though, that’s not to say he doesn’t understand any of it.
his pleasure in day-to-day activities, as well as a simple enjoyment of life is reduced and sometimes seems quite depleted. he often seems bored or uninterested (which isn’t always the case -- refer back to his flat affect) but he does have a hard time enjoying himself. this ties in a bit with his depression as well, which i didn’t mention in this post because, while it is a major disorder and matters greatly, people generally have a pretty good idea of what all it entails and how its symptoms most often affect individuals.
#▻ hc (❅) ❛ reality's becoming / meta on what was. ❜#▻ out (❅) ❛ oversized sweaters & midnight blue. ❜#long post /#ptsd /#c-ptsd /#schizophrenia /#depression /#child abuse /#abuse /#hallucinations /#ask to tag.#[ im so fucking sorry this is so long.#this is so much longer than i thought#my fingers are worn and tired. i've been at this for hours.#i did this instead of my homework... jesus. ]#[ also if you identify with either of these disorders and have some input i'd be glad to hear !#i've been diagnosed with both but i'm still willing to hear and make sure i'm ?? portraying this correctly without offending anyone ]
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Some OC thoughts of late:
—It’s not like I don’t want to develop Dimitri’s clan more and create specific origin stories for them. It’s like the history is so old and the First Blight did such a number on the clan and even then the knowledge they perserved from the old kingdom is sparse due to their own isolation within the Anderfels and the creation of the Veil dampening magic. Not to mention how that impacts the understanding of how such things used to work. People in Thedas can’t imagine a world where the Fade and reality are one, so understanding the mechanics of that world along with the life and magic within it is beyond comprehension. Plus we just lack the access to the lore surrounding such matters.
—It also plays into Dimitri’s story being one of how memory works along with trauma, loss and general workings of mental illness and how it relates to memory and the perceptions of the world. (Which this comes from my own hugely personal experiences). The history of his clan reflects his own memories: broken, but within intense points of clarity. The clan doesn’t know what happened before the fall of Arlathan, but how the Blight shaped the clan is very real and well known. Like how Dimitri knows well of his life in the clan and how it has shaped him despite the changes in him, but to recall the instances that have changed him is nearly impossible due to gaps/static or the trauma making it difficult/impossible to speak about.
—This also plays directly into his mental state and memories in his perceptions of events both present and past and how he perceives reality currently. This can be illusions or some trick of the fade. Reality to him is a fickle construct that can be difficult to grasp. Sometimes he can’t distinguish between what is a flashback and what is currently happening. Like in the most recent session, he had to pose as a slave so the characters could get into this guild to achieve the goal of the dungeon. Well at one point he was being examined and he could hear Elrahal telling him about his experiences with such matters and Dimitri didn’t know (or perhaps care) if it was reality or some flashback. Reality can be a fluid thing for him when he has episodes relating to trauma. (Like things having to do with slavery remind him of Elrahal which bring up traumatic memories of static due to having witnessed Elrahal’s death).
—In practical terms with talking about him being mentally ill, he’s most likely got severe anxiety which he deals with via negative coping mechanisms, issues with dissociation, PTSD that manifests in extremely intense flashbacks that make reality a fluid thing, intense and repressed trauma, and most likely other things.
—Speaking of, I didn’t create him with the intention of him glorifying mental illness and creating an edgy character. He’s more than the mental illness. He’s snarky, sarcasric and has a dry wit. He’s intelligent and strong willed. He was trained to be a leader and he had incredible focus to be able to use his magic. He can be incredibly nuturing and loving towards children. He can be incredibly emotionally vulnerable and laugh at stupid jokes when he is comfortable. He can trust others and care for people despite all of his misgivings. He knows he’s difficult and unyielding. Like his big quote is: “I don’t want to forget. I want to be okay with remembering.” He wants to try and recover and be in a better place because feeling awful is shitty! He’s not down in the dumps and “emo” because he likes it. He just hasn’t found a way to try and recover yet. (Which this all is a big reflection of myself. Like damn it’s like looking in a mirror.)
Some Mage Darva thoughts:
—Darva intensely feared becoming like his mother when he found out he was pregnant. By the time he left the clan, it had been over five years since the death of his father and he couldn’t much remember who his mother was before the death of his father. All he really remembered, whether it was willing or not, was her intense patterns of grief she cycled through. He knew her intense and all encompassing sadness that left no room for anyone else. No one suffered as much as she did—not even Darva. Or he knew her anger and bargaining to where she would find herself in obsessive habits that if she did them right, he would come back. Then, when he didn’t come back, she would burst into anger and blame and Darva was the target. He stopped crying over his father because she was more important. It was her, her, her.
—It was all he knew of his mother by the time he left and he knew it was badly. Like: “unconditional love—like between a child and a parent—isn’t conditional.” By the end, his mother had conditional love that she called unconditional. He intensely feared bringing that into his relationship with Miriam. He didn’t want her to end up like he had. (He knew it was bad what she had done, so that was the first step in it).
—In certain ways, it mirrors Morrigan’s relationship to her mother and Morrigan’s relationship with Kieran. Like: “I am many things, but I will not be the mother to him that you were to me.” Darva won’t be like that to his daughter and he wasn’t, just like Morrigan. (I have my qualms with Morrigan, but her relationship with her son is not one of them).
—Also many of his fears in regards to it were dashed once she was born. He would do anything to keep her safe, even from himself if need be. (But that didn’t ever need to happen). He wasn’t without his fault while raising her like many parents, but he knows from himself and others that he didn’t fail her.
—Cole commented on it once: “a mirror with four different reflections, all looking and examining. The young girl with rubbed red eyes to stop the tears sees both of them and knows how it should be. You didn’t make the same mistakes, Darva. You weren’t your mother.”
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Shadows and Neverland
@stregaomega said: Hey, so any thoughts on how this could possibly tie-in to the shadows in Neverland and, possibly, the act of severing oneself from their shadow? Didn’t Emma also perform her first bit of intentional magic in the Shadow Hollow (or something like that, I forget the name)?
Good question! I definitely had some thoughts about this when I was writing The Persona and the Shadow, but I decided to keep them separate from that post.
I think the severing of the shadow is a more severe example of repressing that aspect of self, and the result is an even more dangerous version of yourself, very similar to what Regina and Jekyll did.
Dissociation of the shadow results in a perilously lopsided development of the conscious personality and renders us susceptible to destructive possession by the disowned shadow.
Pan was separate from his shadow and very much a destructive villain. The Lost Boys have dissociated from the part of themselves that needs to grow up, which is the only way they have the chance to develop into the people they were meant to be. Neverland seems like the mecca for dissociation. It was created from Rumpel’s father’s dream and dreams can also be compared to dissociation.
Although Rumple had a couple of different reasons for separating himself from his shadow, I think a large part of that reason was to dissociate from the part of himself that is a coward because he knew he would have to face his father. Peter Pan tried to tell Rumpel that they could start over if he joined him, but Rumpel was able to resist him. Maybe if his shadow had been present, his father would have been able to get to him, similar to how when Rumpel was a boy, he chose to keep giving his father chances even though he lied to him.
I went back and re-watched a little bit of the episode Lost Girl. When they were trying to make the map Pan gave them work, Emma had a conversation with Snow where she revealed that she still felt like and orphan, i.e. a lost girl. That’s a very telling scene and I think Emma still feels that way and that is why we are seeing her so out of balance now.
She said she saw herself in one of the lost boys, which speaks to her own dissociation. So, if you’ve felt like an orphan for your entire life and suddenly you have this family that you want to fit into, maybe you start mimicking them and doing what you think will make them happy to a level that becomes detrimental to your own health because it suppresses who you really are and who you really want to be.
I think Snowing has tried to make up for it the best they know how, but Emma isn’t a child anymore and they can’t go back and change the experiences she had or what they did to her psychologically.
It will be interesting to see what they use as a catalyst for Emma becoming a more balanced version of herself once again. Considering Regina just went through the process herself and they are supposed to be best friends, it would make sense that she played a large role in this for Emma.
#ouat meta#dumb positivity#swan queen#swan queen meta#rumplestiltskin#emma swan#regina mills#peter pan
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Hookup culture will start the Third World War. No, seriously.
Forget the ‘dating apocalypse’. We might be looking at the real thing.
Culture constrains not only [man’s] societal but also his biological existence.… Civilisation begins when the primary objective—namely, integral satisfaction of needs—is renounced.
—Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilisation (1955)
The work of Freud, and Marcuse following him, have cast the sexual instinct as the enemy of civilised progress: ‘Eros’, they say, directs man’s energy towards aims which are counterproductive in civilised society; to redirect that energy to more useful and permanent purposes, laws and mores have been set out which repress our fundamental instincts so that more constructive principles may prevail. What Marcuse recognises in his critique of Freud, though, is that a civilisation which continually contradicts man’s basic instinct cannot expect to survive indefinitely; indeed, in the sixty or so years since Eros and Civilisation Western society has begun to reform itself quite significantly in this regard. The seminal event which allowed these reforms was the invention of modern birth control in the 1960s—for the first time, unlimited sex was available without the economic consequences of unlimited reproduction; though still not productive per se, the sexual instinct was no longer counterproductive, and was accordingly allowed an increased licence. This is likely not the ‘non-repressive society’ envisioned by Marcuse—it still largely lacks the component of economic liberation which he viewed as similarly essential. It nonetheless reconciles man’s individual desires, both the biological desire for sex and the philosophical desire for liberty, with the needs of civilisation at large—an undoubtedly beneficent and stabilising effect.
The dissociation of sex from reproduction can be even more destabilising, however, if it is achieved in ignorance of the nature and origins of the various human sexual instincts. In the state of nature, there are essentially two, essentially opposites: the male or paternal strategy, born out of the almost negligible (biological) cost which males pay to reproduce, is to spread one’s seed as widely as possible, with perhaps a predilection for the healthiest or most attractive females but nonetheless undercut by the idea that (almost) any sex is better than no sex. This strategy has no use for commitment—the ultimate evolutionary interest, reproducing as many times as possible, is far better served by moving on and impregnating yet another female. Men likewise have an instinctual desire for variety in sexual partners that most women do not. The female or maternal strategy, meanwhile, is a product of the immensity of the burden which reproduction places on females. While a male can reproduce a theoretically unlimited number of times, a female is harshly limited by time and resources; her sexual strategy must essentially be to choose the one mate whose child she will bear. This induces her to be far more selective, not trying to attract—or even trying actively to avoid—any but the absolute most desirable males she can. She adopts the opposite priority to his: for her, given the burden of reproduction, no sex is better than bad sex. The second part of the maternal strategy is to induce the father to share in the burden of parenting; this strategy is so effective, in the long run, that its success is seen as a hallmark of an advanced species, certainly a precursor to human civilisation. The institution of marriage, however usurped by patriarchy, is its ultimate triumph.
The base male instinct, unused to commitment or even consent, obviously seethes beneath this feminine restraint—but that is, of course, as it should be. A species which devotes itself solely to the base instincts which it acquired in the wild cannot, by definition, be civilised. Thus, the conflict which might undermine civilisation is not between the paternal and maternal strategies. The triumph of the latter is imperfect, but incontrovertible; in the course of long time, male instincts which offend it will be selected out of existence. The egregious threat will occur if and when the balance between the two often contradictory parts of the maternal strategy is disturbed, particularly in a specific direction. On the one hand, co-parenting demands monogamy, which enforces a stabilising symmetry on the sexual landscape of civilised society; on the other, female selectivity presents a profound asymmetry with male indiscriminance. Absent the former pressure, a population requires far fewer males than females. Since biology produces about the same number of both regardless, many species—including ‘civilised’ humanity up to a relatively recent point—have killed off enormous numbers of young, lower-status males by assigning to them such highly fatal activities as hunting and war. If the symmetry fails, this could once more be our fate.
Birth control alone will not produce such a dire situation. Even absent children to demand co-parenting, people long ago began to value romantic love and committed relationships for their own sake. Furthermore, most people must still reproduce at some point in their lives for the species to survive—all we’ve done is delay it, creating a sub-population of young adults where the normal rules of evolution do not apply. Symmetry can be maintained as long as most sexual relationships are fairly long-term and based on monogamy and commitment; unfortunately, this does not seem to be the trend. Casual sex—hookups, one-night stands, however you call it—has gone from taboo to accepted to common, and is now rapidly becoming the norm, at least among urban twenty-somethings. People have even begin to suffer from ‘a kind of psychosexual obesity’, according to a scientist quoted in an ‘apocalyptically’ titled 2015 Vanity Fair article on the subject. The trouble with a statement such as that is its narrow perspective. Some people, particularly men, might experience a glut of available sex partners so great that their capacity for intimacy suffers, as the article seems to argue. Yet as much as I’ve spoken of the breakdown of ‘symmetry’, there is a more inviolable kind of symmetry at play: ordinary heterosexual intercourse demands one man and one woman. As measured as most women’s desires tend to be, the inevitable consequence is that sexual obesity anywhere is sexual starvation elsewhere. Some guys can sleep with a hundred different girls in a year, as one quoted in the Vanity Fair article claims to have, while on average millennials have fewer sexual partners than their parents, because a vast group of young men is slowly and invisibly being reduced to celibacy.
The most unfortunate among them congregate in dark corners of the Internet, wallowing in self-pity and uniquely susceptible to misogynistic extremism, a combination which does not generally inspire the outside world to empathise with them. That makes this problem uniquely difficult to solve. In fact, the majority of the people involved—all the women and some subset of the men—wouldn’t even consider it a problem because it benefits them personally. It’s a problem, though—it should be a matter of common sense that a society which forces any significant number of its young men into celibacy will not be stable in the long run. For one, as I pointed out earlier, Nature finds a way to eliminate surplus population. Since most of this is taking place in the developed world, famine is unlikely; besides, the cataclysm will have to target young men specifically.
So, of course, it will be war—immense, total war, a slaughter the likes of which humanity has not seen in almost four generations.
Gaialogical processes of this sort tend to revel in gruesome irony, so it comes as no surprise that some of these young men are themselves helping to create the political conditions which could lead to their being sent off to die by the tens of millions. There is a movement on the far right, led largely by Steve Bannon, which believes that large-scale war once every four generations is a requirement for civilisational catharsis. They, like many other right-wing movements, have found in their recruiting attempts that sexual frustration is a quite potent antidote to reason. The first step is to promulgate the narrative that feminism is responsible for these young men’s situation. This has been widely successful, evidenced by the existence of the ‘Red Pill’ subreddit (trigger warning: rampant misogyny). From there, they use this as an example to convince the new recruits to fear for the ‘decline’ of ‘traditional’ culture, creating intense nostalgia for a fictitious, nebulously defined time period in the past which none of the recruits are old enough to remember anyway. Finally, they declare that all is not lost—but revolutionary, immediate, even violent action is necessary to reclaim that dying Golden Age.
Make America Great Again, right?
That’s how serious this is. Steve Bannon is now the senior advisor to the President of the United States. Let that sink in. They are not just at the gate—they are within the walls. The palace has fallen, they are storming the Bastille, and still we are saying ‘let them eat cake’.
This was not—still is not—inevitable. It’s not because of feminism. It’s not because of birth control. Committed relationships and sexual symmetry can survive both of those. Romantic love, though not as fundamental an instinct as the others, is not merely a social construction that will vanish instantly when no longer needed. What has happened, rather, is that a variety of forces have convinced many young people that dating, at the point where they are in life, is not desirable. This philosophy, in some places, has acquired an almost cultic devotion—among those who can be successful in the casual sexual market, single status is often a point of pride. They revel, unironically and uneuphemistically, in their ‘freedom’—a word which, in this context, was once understood to mean ‘loneliness’. They must be lonely, the way I measure loneliness, yet they do not seem to realise, never mind care. The women among them have taken to painting their cult of singledom with a vaguely feminist colour—no doubt resting on the ancient notion that marriage means confinement to a domestic role. This has not been true for many years, but somehow it still sustains the view among some women that voluntarily avoiding serious relationships is an act of revolution.
Nonetheless, I think the roots of the equation between loneliness and freedom are still economic, though they apply to both genders now. The view that relationships are burdensome to one who aspires to professional greatness is quite old, famously espoused by Nikola Tesla. Having children is immensely burdensome, yes, but marriage or a stable relationship, by itself, is far less burdensome than singledom. Simply being in a relationship meets many of one’s social and sexual needs almost automatically, needs which would otherwise require a huge amount of time, effort, and often money to fulfil. (It might be even more productive to neglect these needs altogether, but that’s far from healthy and quite unsustainable to do voluntarily.) The other economic factor which penalises relationships, especially long-term ones, is education and work. In the first few years of adulthood, a successful person might be subjected to two long-distance moves: from his childhood home to college, then from college to wherever he finds work. As unpredictable as such opportunities can be, anyone who hopes for them is hesitant to tie himself down to anyone or anything until much later in life. Partly, it’s merely a matter of priorities: personally, I think that there are a great many opportunities worth forgoing for love, but then again, I consider relationships a central and imperiled thread in the fabric of civilisation, and I doubt I’ll ever convince many people of that view. It’s mostly, however, a matter of economic conditions, including society’s overemphasis on income and wealth itself. Rectifying those conditions will be a complicated, lengthy process which will require at least some degree of sacrifice on all sides. I don’t know where to begin, nor would I have the power to begin if I did. I just know that however hard it may be, the alternative will be far worse.
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Psyche
Psyche is the Wholeness of personality. Individuation is the process of integrating and harmonizing all components of the Psyche.
The Personal Conscious
Begins at birth and continues to develop across the life span. It is the only part of the person that is fully revealed to that person. These conscious thoughts consist of easily retrieved memories and current and recalled feelings and emotions. As the personality develops, the personal conscious becomes more and more unique. This process allows the person to become more self-aware and is known as individuation (Jung, 1936/1959b). The ego is the center of personal consciousness and has the executive function for organizing thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and emotions. The ego provides the foundation, stability, and organization for the personality by selecting which thoughts, emotions, and memories are recalled or experienced (Jung, 1936/1959b). The personal conscious and personal unconscious balance each other and are in a constant state of flux with content flowing back and forth. There is a self-regulatory function of the psyche that leads to psychic health
The Personal Unconscious
The personal unconscious is a product of the interaction between the collective unconscious and the development of the individual during life.
“Everything of which I know, but of which I am not at the moment thinking; everything of which I was once conscious but have now forgotten; everything perceived by my senses, but not noted by my conscious mind; everything which, involuntarily and without paying attention to it, I feel, think, remember, want, and do; all the future things which are taking shape in me and will sometime come to consciousness; all this is the content of the unconscious’ (CW8, para 382). ‘Besides these we must include all more or less intentional repressions of painful thought and feelings. I call the sum of these contents the “personal unconscious”’Carl Jung.
Complexes
Jung considered that the personal unconscious is composed of functional units called complexes. A complex is in the main unconscious and has a tendency to behave independently or autonomously so that the individual may feel that his behaviour is out of his control. Complexes have their roots in the collective unconscious and are tinged with archetypal contents. The problem for the individual is not the existence of the complexes per se, but the breakdown of the psyche’s capacity to regulate itself. Jung held that the psyche has the ability to bring into awareness, dissociated complexes and archetypal material in order to provide a balance or compensation to conscious life.
He thought that the ego was prone to making inappropriate choices or to onesidedness (not acknowledging the duality), and that material arising from the unconscious could help to bring a better balance to the individual and enable further development to take place. When unconscious contents break through into consciousness it can lead to increased development in the individual. However, complexes can easily manifest themselves without the ego being strong enough to reflect on them and enable them to be made use of, and it is then that they cause us (and other people) difficulties.
Jung was more concerned with the present and with future development than with delving into the past, emphasising a teleological approach and being concerned with the meaning of symptoms and their purpose.
Collective Unconscious
The archetypes predispose us to approach life and to experience it in certain ways, according to patterns laid down in the psyche. There are archetypal figures, such as mother, father, child, archetypal events, such as birth, death, separation, and archetypal objects such as water, the sun, the moon, snakes, and so on. These images find expression in the psyche, in behaviour and in myths. It is only archetypal images that are capable of being known and coming to consciousness, the archetypes themselves are deeply unconscious and unknowable.
Every infant is born with an intact blueprint for life, both physically and mentally, and while these ideas were very controversial at the time, there is much more agreement now that each animal species is uniquely equipped with a repertoire of behaviours adapted to the environment in which it has evolved. This repertoire is dependent on what ethologists call ‘innate releasing mechanisms’ which the animal inherits in its central nervous system and which become activated when appropriate stimuli are encountered in the environment. These ideas are very close indeed to the theory of archetypes
http://www.thesap.org.uk/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/ModelofPsyche.pdf
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Week 15: Narratives of Legal Responsibility Emerging from Oral History, Memory, and Testimony (Case Studies/Examples)
The Holocaust and the Second World War brought with them an unprecedented amount of horrors which millions of people in Germany alone, not to mention the millions of other horrified people across the globe, could hardly fathom. In this week’s journal, we will be analyzing the ways in which Germany dealt with the traumatizing aftermath of the devastating world tragedy that began on their nation’s soil. This week’s entry will further dissect Germany’s processes of healing, both productive and unproductive, by using the articles; Forgetting by Paul Ricouer and Kathleen Blamey, Committed to Memory: Rebecca West’s Nuremburg by Ravit Reichmann, and Storytelling: Historical and Ideological by Hayden White and Robert Doran as primary analytical tools.
While reviewing the Holocaust in retrospect, one could find it hard to believe that so many people remained completely oblivious to the insidious nature of the deliberate segregation and eventual annihilation of the Jewish community in Germany. While there are many cases in which forgetting is used as a genuine coping mechanism to deal with the harsh realities of one’s past, as per Paul Ricouer and Kathleen Blamey’s article, “selective ignorance, reveals a sly side of the unconscious when placed on the defensive” (Ricouer and Blamey 447). In this sense, the omitting of memory with respect to their direct or indirect role by the citizens in Nazi-occupied Germany, particularly those who were not victimized by Hitler’s Aryan race laws, can then become suspect. Is it possible that an insidious form of “forgetting” and “not-knowing” had taken place? While one cannot assume a universal experience for all the survivors and participants of the Holocaust war, we shall argue that the abuse of memory did, for the most part, take place post World War II (Ricouer and Blamey 448).
“After all, I was only human too,” (Langgäser 7) was both the “protagonist’s” (or antagonist’s, depending on how one interprets the story) moral alibi in the Elisabeth Langgäser reading, In Hiding, and was the moral alibi widely-adopted by those who either passively or actively participated in the Nazification of Germany during Hitler’s reign. What makes this prevailing attitude so problematic is that not only are moral and legal responsibility absolved from previous Nazis and Holocaust advocates, but what this implies is that the dangerous anti-Semitic behaviour that occurred during this time were completely normal in a “humanitarian” sense; implications that adopting the role as a complacent bystander to the mass murdering of approximately six million Jewish men, women and children, was simply a part of their national duty to relieve the German nation of its social and economical woes.
Another example of Holocaust denial can be seen in the movie, What Our Fathers Did: A Nazi Legacy (please refer to video below). This movie shows how memories of the Holocaust, not only vary from country to country or from ethnic community to ethic community, but can even vary on the smaller scale of an immediate family. In this movie, while one son acknowledged the crimes of their father, the other son refused to see any wrong. This level of Holocaust denial on an individual scale must not be undermined because the “banality of evil” is the root from where Holocaust denial on a nation-wide, to potentially even an international, scale stems from (Reichmann 133). This act of “forgetting” in a legal sense allowed for a lot of Nazi war criminals to walk away from the war consequence free and many even rose back to power with the advent of the new government.
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A more contemporary example of the act of “forgetting” is the justification of “All Lives Matter” in opposition to the “Black Lives Matter” movement in a post-slavery America (photo below). When people attempt to forget the atrocities of the past and/or refuse to inform themselves about the systemic inequalities of society, society is not fully able to progress.
“Official” history often forgets to acknowledge that the Soviets were one of the highest casualties of the Second World War. While this does not take away from the atrocities the Jewish community faced during the Holocaust, this denies the Soviets of their proper representation in history (Ricouer and Blamey 449). Dominant Western narratives often paint the Soviet Union as the enemy in “official history,” and this could be the reason behind the distortion of official historical narratives in the West. The “official” narrative of history concept reminds me of the Hermer and Hunt article which discusses how we often take for granted our passive consumption of the “official” graffiti of everyday life, and never question the official narratives of people in power, whether the production of our knowledge is corrupted or not.
While denial and repression were, and continue to be major forms of unproductive post-Second-World-War “healing” on both individual and nation-wide scales, this is not to say that all of Germany dealt with and viewed this historical trauma in the same way. For many, the weight of the war was just too heavy for them to merely sweep under a rug and go on as if nothing wrong had ever happened.
The Nuremberg Trials allowed for the use of commonly accepted facts on the Holocaust to convict Nazi war criminals and both respected and took into consideration the voices of the surviving victims (Herf 373). In the Reichman article, the author talks about journalist West’s literal accounts of the Nuremburg Trial Tribunals and how her articles described these trials as boring, un-amusing and undramatic despite these the fact that these trials would be locking away some of the most heinous war criminals of our generation (107). The purpose of her literal writing style was to allow the reader themselves to observe for themselves the disturbing realities of the time. Many of the people on trial themselves did not even think twice about their actions and saw their crimes as merely “taking orders”.
This reminds me of a Mark Twain article I had read which gave a very passive yet chilling account of a university in Germany during the Weimar period. Twain, in a very factual and unemotional manner wrote about these boys being trained to fight one another at the simple command of their instructor without any hesitation. After Germany’s national ego had been bruised post-WWI, boys were programmed to be war-like killing machines in school in order to revive Germany’s former glory. While the reading was not a predictable emotionally-charged text, the reader was able to observe for themselves the disturbing element to this factual reality.
In the White and Doran article, the author claims that it is more practical for the official narratives of history to be undramatic and untheatrical, so that the personal biases of those who actually lived through these historical moment do not distort the factual chain of events (276). This concept is in conversation with Reichman’s article which although at first criticized the “boringness” of the Nuremburg Trials, eventually accepted that this “boring” trial is what was needed to impartially and unbiasedly serve justice to the Holocaust victims (107).
In the Hayden and Doran article, the authors also talk about how important it is to include real-life human accounts of historical events within historical narratives as opposed to just providing scientific and statistical narratives (273). The hierarchy of narratives dissociates historical facts from the emotional lived stories of people and this idea reminds me of the Baron article where Baron claims it is important to give power to the individual stories of human beings in law because not doing so could oversimplify and distort the complexity of human motivation. The authors also talk about how it is important to acknowledge that the “heroes” of history were not the only social agents of their time (Hayden & Doran 275). This can be related to what people are often taught about the American Revolution in schools. While many learn about the heroic victories of the Patriots during the revolutionary war, there are very few personal histories of slaves, women and children documented in archives, which in no way means that they were less involved in their community than Patriot soldiers (i.e. many children and slaves had fought in the war, women had fought for the revolutionary cause through protests and replacing men in the work field, etc.)
While these trials can be viewed as a huge milestone for Holocaust survivor justice, on the other hand, one could note how the law is limited to only so much “real” justice and how the Holocaust will for the most part, truly be “without witness” (Horowitz 100). The survivors who lived to tell the tale are prisoner to a language that cannot possibly portray the suffering of the Jewish community in its entirety since those most affected by the monstrosities of the Nazi concentration camps are no longer present. Therefore, in this unprecedented situation, the court system, rather than being a mediator to produce a fair solution between the victims and the accused, then only becomes a symbolic gesture for national healing and acceptance of legal responsibility (Reichmann 133). An example of this can be seen during the Attorney Generald v. Adolf Eichmann trial in which witnesses not only spoke on behalf of their own experienced traumas, but also spoke on behalf of the “six million accusers” who devastatingly did not live to strand trial (Douglas 102). Symbolic or not, the Nuremberg Trials broke through the veil of silence that was once placed around the voiceless victims of the Holocaust.
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Works Cited:
Douglas, Lawrence. “Ada Lichtmann on the Stand.” The Memory of Judgement: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001): 97-122. Print.
Herf, Jeffrey. “Multiple Restorations and Divided Memory.” Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1997). Print.
Horowitz, Sara. “The Reluctant Witness.” Voicing the Void: Muteness and Memory in Holocaust Fiction. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997): 95-108.
Langgäser, Elisabeth. In Hiding. 7-12. Print.
Reichman, Ravit. “Laws Modern Literariness” and “Committed to Memory: Rebecca West’s Nuremburg.” The Affective Life of Law: Legal Modernism and the Literary Imagination, (Stanford, CA: Stanford Law Books, 2009): 103-33. Print
Ricouer, Paul and Kathleen Blamey. “Forgetting.” Memory, History, Forgetting, (Chicago: University of Chicao Press, 2004): 412-456. Print.
White, Hayden & Robert Doran. “Storytelling: Historical and Ideological.” The Fiction of Narrative. (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2010): 273-292. Print.
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