#its gonna start good then get ugly but you gotta stick with it bc it'll finish at beautiful

[mcytblrconfessions]

With all love and respect for Grian, his s10 looks like shit for now. I understand that he's in the middle of building it but like. It looks so incredibly messy with shit load of dirt everywhere. And it isn't even coherent in any way. I love Grian builds but this one is just hard to look at. I hope he gets to fixing it soon.

there's a been misunderstanding of the craft of creating here

[dandyshucks]

rambling about Guz under the cut hsdhgjkl, CW for abuse and (c)ptsd talk as well as discussion of racism

i've hesitated to say anything about his trauma-caused aggression and anger because i fear it'll be misconstrued by ppl (<- tags on that other post that i'm going off of bc i wanna ramble abt it)

he's not Scary or Violent or Mean. i mean maybe other ppl might view him that way, he might come across that way if you don't know him well, but like.... its trauma. if you were physically abused as a child... yeah. youre gonna come out of that with issues that won't be pretty. you're not going to be the Perfect Victim. you are going to have symptoms and reactions and whatnot that are ugly and difficult and upsetting and hard-to-be-around sometimes.

I am really aware and cautious of the stereotype where many men of colour (mainly black men, but this also includes indigenous men and some other men of colour) are portrayed as being Big and Aggressive, so I have avoided getting anywhere near that, especially since I made the decision to change Guz's skintone in my portrayal of him (which I'm not going to get into, at least rn, but that decision was carefully thought out as well for me). So I always get a bit worried that IF I show any of that side of his trauma, it is going to come off the wrong way.

When I look at him being angry and aggressive in any way, I'm coming at it from the perspective of "this is a man who was a child who was abused and beaten, and he's grown up being taught he needs to Fight, that he needs to be scary in order to be safe, and he is very afraid in a way that translates to anger because that's the way he learned to deal with that emotion." And then we (Guz and co) figure out how to work with that, how to start unravelling all the trauma that's packed into that behaviour, how to start unlearning those reactions and begin working on new ways of Being. He's got a safe environment now, where the people he's around genuinely care about him, where he doesn't have to scare the people around him in order to be respected and safe. Plumes and the squad love him, and Junebug loves him, and he doesn't want to hurt any of them. He also doesn't want to continue that cycle of abuse, doesn't want the grunts or anyone else to feel afraid of him like he was afraid of his dad, nor does he want any of the grunts to feel like they have to be aggressive to be safe in the world.

I'm also aware of the fact that I have white skin even if I am indigenous lol, and the little white-skinned partner appearing to be the "uwu soft niceys" one in the relationship with the big "aggressive" man with brown skin is uhhhh a really fucking awful look! really fucked up! And it's not something I'm interested in presenting to the world, even if it's just in this small circle of the internet. That's a really fucked up dynamic to be putting out there without context lmao.

Anyways, so even if Guz has that shit going on, I'm very careful with how I present it and aware of how it might come across, and if I ever step over any lines, people are more than welcome to holler at me and let me know I've fucked up!

Currently, I figure he was working on shit for a while before my self-insert came along (this is not a case of "i will fix you all by myself" because again... my white skin makes it look like white saviorism, plus I do not think thats a very interesting dynamic for me personally anyways lol, you gotta be putting in a bit of work yourself for me to stick around very long and help you out), and then Junebug showing up was just another motivational force to keep working on his shit. Guz has a good group of people around him and Junebug is just kind of a bonus in the situation. He'd be putting in the work either way, but they're just a little extra boost for him.

I think he’ll always have a bit of a tendency to react with the fight instinct rather than flight or freeze in situations where he is genuinely terrified and doesn’t have time to think through a reaction, but all of the rest of it improves. It’s amazing what a person can change about the way their brain is wired with enough time and effort and support!