#lol thor's just like 'welp might as well say something nice'

[thenexusofsouls]

Which of these muses do you relate to the most, mun?

{i am the caretaker of souls} Welp... time to get super embarrassing, haha. Um... honestly the muse I can relate to the most out of all the ones on this blog is... Tony Stark. Now... I am not a genius, heh. Or a billionaire. I know nothing about robotics, very little about physics, next to nothing about nanotechnology other than what the Metal Gear Solid series taught me, lol, but... at a core human level, Tony and I have several things in common. All negative, heh. I’ll share this, even though it was pretty embarrassing for me, because I find it interesting on a psychological level.

So... I had never watched the Iron Man movies at first. I saw all the Avengers and Captain America movies, even Captain Marvel, a couple Thor movies, Black Panther is next on my list of ones to catch up on. Anyway... I always hated Tony. I thought he was a shallow, crass, arrogant asshole who only cared about himself. I really disliked him almost to the point of hate. Really loving characters like Wanda and Vision from the comics and coming to love Pietro in the movies didn’t help, because there’s a lot of anti-Tony sentiment there or at least confusion. But then I thought okay... this is a major part of the franchise that I’m missing... and... I should just watch these movies and get it over with.

The first Iron Man... was okay. Good story. Learned a lotta stuff about him I didn’t know. He was never a character I read in the comics, so I’m not familiar with him outside of MCU. Then I watched Iron Man 2. Ugh. I really didn’t like this movie, haha. But Natasha was in it, so... score. Then I watched Iron Man 3... and I had exactly five panic attacks... and my perception of Tony completely changed.

I have chronic anxiety. It manifests mostly as social anxiety, a fear of loss of control, a fear of public embarrassment, mild germophobia (an interesting thing for a microbiologist to have, but whatevs), and something called catastrophizing, whereby I fret, worry, mull, and stress over every possible poor outcome to a situation and anything even remotely bad that could happen to me in the foreseeable future. Usually in place of sleep, heh. It wastes a lot of psychic energy, lemme tell you, and if it gets bad enough, I have panic attacks. Before I saw Iron Man 3, I never considered myself a person who could be triggered by anything. I’m going with the actual real definition of triggering here, as in resulting in a panic attack, flashback, or other severe psychological reaction to something. Apparently, I was wrong.

After watching the movie (I’ve only seen it once... would love to try to watch it again) and having five panic attacks (I average maybe one or two a month, and I just had five inside of two hours, so... this was notable, and I’m defining a panic attack as elevated heart rate, sweating, ringing ears, tingling feeling in my scalp, sometimes tears, hands shaking, feeling cold all over, and teeth chattering), I was more fascinated than upset, honestly. Panic attacks are a weird thing for me because very often I will feel rational and calm mentally but my body is going haywire, so I’m sitting here watching this movie like... why is this bothering me? I’m obviously bothered, but I don’t know why.

So I asked a friend of mine who had gone to school for psychology, and he asked well, when did they happen? I don’t remember all of them, but for example, they occurred during the scene where Tony has a nightmare and Pepper basically calls him immature and leaves him despite the fact that he’s begging her to stay. And then again when he has a panic attack while driving and has to stop the car. And then again when that little boy kept pressing him like, “Are you on medication? Should you be? Are you upset? Are you panicking? What are you going to do now?” and he just wouldn’t stop and Tony kept getting more and more panicky.

I have always been a very empathetic person, whether I wanted to be or not. I see those starving children and abused animals on those TV commercials and I cry every time. I watch movies and cry because I see other people crying. It’s terrible. Well, apparently, my friend thought that I was empathizing with Tony during moments when he was the most not okay, and that was triggering my own anxiety. When Tony would have a panic attack, I would. When he would lose control of a situation, I would panic about it myself. When the coping mechanisms and carefully constructed social facade fell and he was actually genuine with someone only to be rejected harshly, it upset me immensely and triggered another attack. It made a lot of sense to me... both my own anxiety and my empathy coming together to both sympathize with and be triggered by this character who has some very severe mental health issues.

From that moment on, I saw Tony differently. I went back and re-watched the Avengers movies, the Captain America movies... and I was able to see him in a completely different light. Looking through the lens of my own struggles with anxiety, coping mechanisms, and trying to look and act normal when I’m not okay, I suddenly realized that I understood Tony a lot more than I ever wanted to, heh. It was shortly after that that I realized he’d become a muse for me, when I couldn’t stop thinking and analyzing and teasing apart the mess that is his psychology and making sense of it... which is easier for me to do than I ever would have expected. 

Aaaand I don’t have a nice neatly wrapped ending to this rant, except to say that Tony was a muse I never expected to have, but now I am so protective of him (and don’t ship him with Pepper because reasons) and I have really come to love writing him. He definitely is the muse I relate to the most on THIS blog. On ALL blogs, I would say Wanda Maximoff might be the one I relate to the most out of all the canon characters I write. But yeah, for now I will stick to just muses on this blog.

[thorhamilton]

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Thor: … whoa, heyy, that was not what I wanted to see during dinner. Wrong person, mate. Thor: But if you want a compliment then totally fuckable if I’d been into that.