#memory wards

[thenalexica]

Fantasy Medical Romance structure:

Healing magic resonance compatibility Emergency room portal mishaps Forbidden magical organ transplants Cursed medical resident rotation Soul bound attending physician duty Enchanted medical equipment malfunctions Interdimensional hospital transfers Magical malpractice investigation team Destined healers share patients Immortal medical board oversight Combined healing spell procedures Accidental life force transfusion Past patient cases connect them Magical hospital code violations Memory charm affects diagnoses

[akiacia]

multi-step shenanigans

[craetor]

Faith doodles

[catkin-morgs-kookaburralover]

if you struggle with mental health, one piece of advice i would genuinely give you is learn to knit.

or crochet: something repetitive to do with your hands, assuming you're capable of it. if you're like me and learnt to knit as a kid but let it lie fallow for a long time, it may be that starting a large, simple project (for me it was a cloak, but a blanket could work too) gets you back into it. or maybe doing something smaller, idk. i personally found socks really hard for a while because they felt smaller than my cloak but weren't getting Done quick enough for me. as i've sped up i find it more interesting to knit socks.

regardless, a repetitive task is great for emotional regulation (also see: autistic stimming), and something that you can look at and go hey i've done something, unlike simply using a fidget toy, can also help to pick your mood up when the brain is being cruel.

it's also useful as a conversation starter or distracter if you don't know what to talk about. if you're wanting to talk to older people also you're more likely to reel them in with knitting (i work better with older people, and 99% of people who ask what i'm knitting are older than me). it also gives you the opportunity to not make eye contact because you're busy knitting, even if you're still carrying on a conversation. if you're absolutely stuck for conversation you can count your stitches and people might stop bothering you.

if you have trouble focusing without doing something with your hands, you can knit! i knit a lot in church, and it helps me to focus on what's being said.

i probably have more reasons you should pick up knitting, but i can't recall them right now, so yeah.

[artbyblastweave]

How do you think Worm (+ Ward) would change if Wildbow wrote it in the present day? Both in the sense of him having more writing experience and of him xeconstructing a different superhero landscape. (Also, him having even more planning/drafting time.)

Well, one answer is, "I don't think it would have been written-" Worm really got released in an incredible sweet spot where superhero stuff was ascendant in the mainstream but not yet culturally dominant, and written in reaction to a bunch of specific stylistic dysfunctions of early-2000s big-two comics that aren't necessarily gone but have certainly shifted their manifestations a bit. I don't think Worm would have taken off the way it did if he was trying to write it today, when we're like three layers deep into comic book movie ascendancy, backlash and re-ascendency.

But to engage in slightly better faith, my suspicion is that if written today the book would be, in every sense of the word, more online.

Movement-building by The Very Online is already of visible interest to Wildbow from, like, Twig onward (probably a consequence of the ways in which he, himself is Very Online). You see this to an extent in Ward as written, which in the Capricorn flashbacks in particular had interesting worldbuilding ideas about superheroic social media marketing that Worm didn't go into in the same way because it wasn't as big then. (This, incidentally, was one of several beats, in both the story and in the extraneous materials, where Wildbow backdated elements of the 2020s internet zeitgeist into a setting where the world ended in 2013, which is a very funny way to end up with an alternate history.) This would dovetail with the genre in the sense that whenever I stick my head back into what's going on with Big Two comics these days, I perceive the space to have gotten way, way more online in quite a few ways. Comics that feel written for people on twitter, by people on twitter, with an eye for incorporating whatever the hot-button activist issue is that week and the kind of panels and dialogue that blow up when cropped and reposted without context. Ecoterrorist Thor, inherently-thematically-confused ACAB street-levelers, Miles Morales trashing a landlord's car. You know what I'm gesturing at with this one if you follow Why-I-love-comics or any of the other excerpt aggregators.

This is more of a value-neutral judgement than I'm making it sound- When Al Ewing does this kind of thing, it's usually great, when Tom Taylor does it...I have less charitable thoughts on when Tom Taylor does it. But either way I often feel that there's a building tension between a need for these things to be socially conscious, progressive, left-leaning and so forth, and the inherent limits of how much a mass-market status-quo-bound serial publication can commit to being any of those things-the mealy-mouthedness of framing superheroes as change agents in a setting where nothing ever changes.

Given the extensive write-ups of activism-issue aligned capes in the Weaverdice docs, and given the direction his writing took with Pale and Claw in particular, I find it hard to imagine that Worm as written in 2025 wouldn't want to poke at those tensions. Very-online young-gun superheroes firebombing Walmarts and sticking their dicks in police actions, except there's no editorial reset button and that actually goes somewhere politically. Probably somewhere bad.

[trans-axolotl]

content note: discussion of suicide.

this next monday will be the six year anniversary of losing one of my friends to suicide.

when he died, my high school barely mentioned his death, even though for other students who died by things like car crashes or illness, there were so many public expressions of grief. they believed that having any memorials for a student who died by suicide would encourage other people to die the same way. in their rush to erase the circumstances of his death, they erased the memory of his life.

there are so many things i am angry at that high school about in terms of how they treated mental health (mandatory reporting and collaborating with cops, their refusal to recognize the ways in which that system led to peer-to-peer crisis support, their refusal to recognize the ways that trying to keep each other alive through trial and error was scary and exhausting, carceral disciplinary policies, etc etc etc). but i think one of the things i am still angriest about is the way they enforced shame around his death. it felt like they were retroactively blaming him for the constellation of circumstances that made suicide an option in his life. it felt like they were blaming those of us who missed him and cared about him and wanted to grieve him. it made those of us still there who were actively suicidal feel even more scared about the reaction if we did reach out for help from one of those mythical safe adults.

as an adult now involved in psych abolition/mad liberation work, it makes me so fucking mad to see the ways in which he was discarded by people in authority positions. and the older i get, the more options i have found in my life for making sense of the world and finding healing and community and support which were never available to him because he died when he was 16 and the only things offered to him were a carceral psychiatric system that blamed him for his own fucking death. it feels so incredibly unfair.

i miss him and i think i always will; i can't remember his laugh or the sound of his voice or his favorite color any more and that aches. this grief is so heavy and it feels harder in a new way each year, when i become older than he will ever be. sometimes meeting new comrades or seeing new anticarceral suicide support models hurts because i wish so fucking bad that we had that back then. i remember how close we came to losing even more people that year and i know it is simple fucking luck that i'm still here when he's not.

i remember another letter (never sent) that i wrote to a friend while they were in an ICU bed after a suicide attempt when i didn't know if they would live or not. i have spent so much time in the past 10 years begging for anything to keep me and my friends alive, but even in that letter i knew that there is so much fucking violence that is hidden beneath psychiatric logics of cure and safety that promise a "solution" to suicide. I knew that institutionalization, coercion, and shame would not have helped build a life more liveable for him or **** or any of the people i've loved and lost since.

there needs to be more fucking options for care and support that aren't so incredibly cruel to suicidal people. i know so many people doing incredible work in alternatives, peer respite, a million different frameworks for healing and liberation. but it makes me so mad every day i have to live in a world where there are still people restrained, locked up in psych wards, having all autonomy and personhood taken away from them. knowing there are dozens of people every day getting blamed for their deaths the same way he was blamed for his.

i miss him. i cared so fucking much for him. and he died by suicide, and all of those things are true. he has been dead for 6 years and he lived before that and the people who loved him want to remember all of him; our celebrations of his life should not require hiding the way that he died.

Image description: [1000 origami cranes in all different colors and patterns that are tied together in strings of 25]

(these were the 1000 cranes we made to give to his parents, in memorial and recognition of how much he meant to us.)

[brain--rott]

i can't accept that this is what life is. there has to be more than this. please let this all be for something. please let me mean something.

[whumpisgoodwhumpislife]

WHUMPCEMBER DAY 16

Amnesia

I might have turned amnesia into something worse.

- Who are you ? Don't touch me ! No ! S-Stay away !

Whumpee yelped as he scooted back on the bed clumsily, his movements restrained by the heavy straitjacket holding his arms to his chest. He was hyperventilating, his arms darting around. An orderly prepared a syringe, waiting for the doctor's orders. But the latter just sighed and turned back to caretaker, shaking his head.

- He's been like that for over two weeks now. Whumpee seems to be unable to create lasting memories anymore. Everything that happens to him, he forgets after a few days if not hours.

The patient shook his head, raising tear-filled eyes toward them.

- You're lying. I don't know you! I... I would know if there was something wrong with my memory...

Caretaker wrenched his hands in his lap, locking eyes with his friend, but whumpee just looked away. He turned toward the doctor, trying to contain his emotions.

- And... Is there a way to heal him ? It's... It just feels so wrong.

But the doctor gave him a compassionate look as he answered:

- I'm sorry. We know very little about this type of condition. And from his medical files, your friend already had a... fragile psyche, right ? So, this incident might have just been the straw that breaks the camel's back.

Whumpee looked so lost, so hesitant, it broke caretaker's heart.

- It's... Please tell me it's not real. Please...

@whumpcember

[sheepb1t]

Various KTP doodles except they’re all from memory and they’re characters I’ve never/barely drawn

[autism-swagger]

I'm your puppet

You control me

Reblogging is better than just liking.

Flats and sketch ⬇️

+ additional doodles that I couldn't be bothered to flesh out tee hee ⬇️

Wall pattern of despair

[lostsyren]

Oh this cut right through my heart❤️‍🩹😓

[intertexts]

oh you wanna think about muse and trickster? yeah? it's been a while since I put a heartbreaking nhw post in your inbox <3 I know u love the prime dehumanization loss of bodily autonomy defenders. << im not even remotely trying to keep the acronym the same anymore. I've lost the plot. ANYWAY

briefly mentioned this before but because I loooove the aesthetic so much I think at least one important muse confrontation should happen in the tricksters city, specifically in the amusement park. make it like a fuckign scooby door episode everything is all abandoned and run down but as the wards are walking down a boardwalk or something all the lights flicker on and some distorted fuckign. carnival music starts playing and they find muse sitting in like. the rebar scaffolding or whatever in the ferris wheel. just like grinning chin in hands kicking his feet watching them. this image is so clear in my mind. some creep shit !!!! also its like when they first go to the spirit world to get tide back from.mal and end up in the amusement park. except ashe isn't with them this time

uhhhhhh also thinking about. downtime. when muse isn't out being destructive and causing chaos for funsies. like... does he have a bedroom????? does he eat does he sleep??? idfk !!!! I would assume he has to or else he'd fucking die but !!!! man the trickster is so far gone I don't think he even realizes his puppets are real people anymore. that's a fun little doll for him to play dressup with. literally never going 2 get the image of him braiding muses hair and like. putting makeup on him and dressing him in fancy little outfits out of my mind. making myself ILL. smile! good evening I'm gently placing the knife box in your in. << as I was going to type inbox I accidentally typed out inventory. yknow what I'm keeping it. knife box directly into your inventory. watch out they're RUSTY

GOD. THANKS FOR THE KNIFE BOX MAN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! knife box directly in my inventory!!! u know what this means is that now i can use them :3 <- has been drawing wards stuff abt this for the past two hours ^_^

this is so fucking good though yeahhh.... i love creepy carnival shit so much. he trickster probably Knows it's very over the top and horror movie creepy and just a little absurd. he's so fucking fun 2 think abt since he's literally always doing shit simply because it is funny to him. we can swing a trickster justification for anything probably. i bet he fucking saw traps people!! anyway. ashe isn't with them this time. except..... well. he kind of is. :(

I HAVE ALSO BEEN THINKING ABT DOWNTIME. FREQUENTLY. i guess. the answer to this is he lives however the trickster&co does. the image of him coming back in his fancy intricate little outfits to some disgusting nasty bloody industrial warehouse where they're posted up & always being this very jarring contrast to the gore and violence is really good. the image of him having a perfect doll bedroom and going through a fancy little routine half the nights when the trickster is in a good mood or feeling it & just. getting thrown on the bed & the door locked to pass out for a couple hours whenever he forgets or is busy is also really good. literally anything we do to muse makes me feel some kind of way man. i also have had the extremely vivid image of the trickster braiding his hair & chatting about all kinds of horrific things excited sleepover style to muse who is just. Visibly Not There in my head for so long. not even like he has to touch him, he could be making him do all these things for himself! he's literally controlling him! he just does it for fun!!!

anyway i think post-muse ashe should get to freak out very badly in a multitude of ways whenever anybody touches his hair. like i think he's touch-adverse in general (& miserable about it because he's also so touchstarved & his brain simply whites out in distress anytime anyone touches him because. literally the only person doing that was the trickster!!!!) but i think specifically his hair being messed with is a bad trigger for him. makes him freeze up n go nonverbal for hours. dakota knows that he's jumpy about touch but he still wants to do something for him & before the everything he loved them playing with his hair (its so long!! wibby & dakota think its so pretty!! virion's the only one who knows how to braid it because of his mom!! ashe melts into a puddle over it every time because nobody's ever done that for him before!) so he goes to just run fingers through it & ashe just. fullbody locks up and goes weird and still and silent & doesn't protest or fight back when dakota shakes his shoulder or smth and his eyes are distant and sort of dark and empty like virion's were most of the time when they first met him... maybe he wants to cut it a little bit just because he hates that it's been covered in The Ooze and he can't do anything with it without thinking about how the trickster would do the same thing but also he hates the idea of getting rid of the one thing abt himself that he really likes & is a little connection with both of his parents because of the trickster also, when he's already taken so much from him. (it does have to get gross and tangled and matted because he refuses to put it back or do anything to it for a while though. maybe virion helps him sort it out & it's slow and painstaking and miserable for both of them and they both feel better at the end of it.)

[darealsaltysam]

who would win the armies of hell or one asthmatic bisexual priest with a limp

[wind-dog]

Mentions of monsters in worm that i find very interesting

[dw-flagler]

[rabbitcruiser]

George Washington resigned as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army at the Maryland State House in Annapolis on December 23, 1783.