#something something the human psyche

[freshfromhell]

hold on guys i gotta be weird and earnest on my blog for a second

these past two years have been so insane for my health, and especially my mental health. the rupture i dealt with last year strangely made me start remembering a lot of childhood memories i had totally forgotten. or... like... remembering them and contextualizing them and then realizing how truly fucked up they were. and the gyn appts I'd been going to had slowly wore down on me, until I suddenly was triggered into a full on ptsd freak out that lasted for over a week and made me realize how traumatic the shit i went through as a small child really was. and all of this compounded and made me realize that people don't experience much of the world the way i do. because i had always intellectually acknowledged that the things i went through as a kid were traumatizing and abusive, but I had never acknowledged it in the emotional sense. as in, having feelings about it. and as i've started actually addressing the things i felt and compartmentalized back then, i'm realizing that a lot of people don't feel things the way i do. a lot of people don't experience the fear, and the rage, and the irrationality that comes with ptsd. they don't understand the crushing helplessness, and the lashing violence that follows. the physical, clawing, teeth-aching need to fight one's own powerlessness at any cost.

obviously, if you follow me, you read MANIA, and probably relate to my writing enough to know what I'm talking about. i've written these traits into billy and mandy with intention. it just hadn't occurred to me until recently that some people have never grappled with these types of feelings. that the reason i could not find these type of characters in the books i read growing up is simply because most people don't know the feeling, or cannot verbalize it.

there is a great amount of people that have never been pushed so far as to have to toe the line between the rational man and the frightened, primal animal. they can experience loss and grief and injustice and it does not feel like the end of all things. their grief does not manifest itself like a black hole, turning the world around them into a soundless, colorless void. they will tell you that it will pass, that you'll get over it, that it's not the end of the world. they will tell you there's nothing to be afraid of, to just do it, that it won't even hurt. they'll tell you that you have no choice anyway. it's do or die. it's all inevitable. you can't control anything. but you'll be fine. you can just get help. they'll dance themselves in rational little circles around you. placating, rationalizing, condescending. like it all never occurred to you. like it was ever an option. like you have a choice.

i guess my point is: i didn't know that so many people had never turned from the sun to peek down at their own shadow. the thought has never even occurred to them. some people don't know they have a shadow at all. a lot of people don't have these dark night of the soul moments over and over again, and when they do have them, they are not so harrowing, not so bone-deep. it is a wound, but life for them has not been all wounds. it is easy for them to remember that the wound will heal. it is easy for them to remember the coming promise of the sun. for them, the sun has always risen, and the wounds have always healed.

anyways, i'm losing steam here, so let me get this out quick:

i had a dream last month about saving a bobcat i initially thought was a rabbit being mauled by a dog. i saved the bobcat, but not before the dog ripped off its leg. it yowled and lunged at me as i backed away from it through the snow. it carried its leg between its teeth, growling around the meaty stump, splattering blood in loops all around the snowy ground as it chased me. i wanted to help it. i wanted to save it. to pin it down and stitch it back together again. but it was too angry, too vicious, to get close enough to help.

as i drove out to chicago a couple weeks ago, i saw a real one, fluffy with a stubby tail, dead and stretched along the side of the road. it looked like a teddy bear. that probably means something.

[firestorm09890]

Y'ALL. Y'ALL so for a long time I've believed that "the sun" in Meursault's story is Carmen, and I went to check Hell's Chicken's dialogue to see exactly how he said that he'd dealt with distortions before, and... you know what else he said?

To my knowledge, it is a phenomenon where an individual morphs into a form often unfit to be considered “human”. It has no known causes, and the appearances were all different.

Unfit to be considered human.

Meursault, who, in his book, was judged by the court to be soulless.

Meursault, who has EGO for Cyborgs who have been so mutilated they barely act like people anymore; a murderer who was experimented on until ceasing to be human; a sheep named after Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, a novel about the humanity of androids and the inhumanity of humans; and now a rose that can't help its bloodsucking nature, based on Carmilla, a vampire whose story emphasized the duality between her vampiric traits and her human ones.

Meursault, who answered Heathcliff's ironic question of if he had metal for brains like this:

I'm placing my bets now, that line from Hell's Chicken is foreshadowing for Meursault's canto even more than "I have witnessed a number of [distortion] cases in the past" was

[sparrowlucero]

Hello sorry I am being shy and anon but do you have any advice for someone who wants to get into Doctor Who again after briefly dabbling (and enjoying it very much) in like the early, early 2010s? I know this is mostly your art blog but you were the only person I could think of to ask you're like the Doctor Who authority of blogs I follow

Oh yeah of course! People can be really confusing about this so I'll try not to be.

So first, the majority of doctor who episodes are self contained stories that you could just watch and understand perfectly without any further context. even when there is some overarching context it's usually written in a way that's either pretty easy to glean and/or just doesn't impact your understanding of the story. 99% of the episodes don't even care if you know the premise and are just like "what if some people were on a spaceship and the devil was there? wouldn't that be fucked up or what??". Don't feel like you have to binge a 60 years long show to watch it. Some standalone episodes I think are fun if you (or anyone else) just want to check out one or two:

The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances (A supposed-to-be-dead boy in a gas mask haunts a young woman in world war 2)

Blink (A woman gets wrapped up in a mystery involving statues that make people disappear. This one is especially good if you flat out know nothing about the show. Has some really great time travel stuff.)

A Christmas Carol (A christmas carol pastiche (of course) where the doctor tries to rewrite the past of a cruel man who's going to let a lot of people die. very sad and sweet. I love the "wintery planet with sky fish" setting of this one)

Vincent and the Doctor (The famous Vincent Van Gogh Episode™)

The Rings of Akhatan (A pretty lowkey little adventure story about an alien festival. has supreme autumn vibes)

Flatline (A species from a 2 dimensional world tries to break into our 3 dimensional one. really fun special effects)

Midnight (A tour bus breaks down on a diamond planet where nothing can survive. Something knocks at the door.)

Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead (The Doctor and friend go to a library that covers an entire planet and finds that everyone has disappeared. Has a lot of really great, interesting concepts baked into it that I won't spoil)

It Takes You Away (A girl is left alone in a cabin in the woods when her dad disappears through the mirror. Has a famously goofy ending that I really love)

73 Yards (A character is steps on a fairy circle and is followed by an old woman who always stands exactly 73 yards away)

The Devil's Chord (This doesn't really have, you know, a plot, but it does have jinkx monsoon as an evil music god)

Boom (The doctor steps on a landmine on an alien planet and cannot move)

Wild Blue Yonder (A two hander where the Doctor and co are trapped on a dilapidated spaceship at the edge of the universe. really atmospheric with some fun/strange visuals.)

That being said, it does add a lot to watch it in order; there's a lot of plot twists, character dynamics, and general payoff you get if you marathon it. I would personally recommend starting with either the first episode of the 2005 show ("Rose") or the first episode of the 2010 season ("The Eleventh Hour") and just watching in order from there. I think you could also start with "The Snowmen", "The Pilot", or "The Woman Who Fell To Earth" if you wanted, but the first two (especially rose) are the better jumping on points.

some other little notes of advice I don't often see people mention:

it's stupid sometimes just roll with it

once in a while the show sort of "reboots" with different writers, actors, directors, and a new tone. it's much more like watching several small shows than one long show, so don't be too put off by the length!

IMPORTANT: pretty much all streaming services will separate holiday/anniversary specials from the show proper and you have to deliberately search them up on the same service to find them. It's really necessary to be aware of this because many of these specials are the first or last episodes for characters/whole eras of the show and are genuinely unskippable. I strongly recommend looking up a list of the episodes and checking it after finales just to make sure you don't skip anything on accident.

there's two spin offs (Torchwood, a more adult (read: gay sex) show about a mysterious agency that solves sci fi crimes, and the Sarah Jane Adventures, a pretty good monster of the week kids show) that ran concurrently with season 1-4. You don't have to watch them to understand anything happening in doctor who, but sometimes they cross over with the show in fun ways, Ex. the first season finale of Torchwood continues directly into season 3 of Doctor Who. My friend and I got a kick out of watching them at the same time so maybe you will too. (either way I recommend watching "Children of Earth", the torchwood miniseries, if you want to see a weird dark sci fi show about the government making contact with aliens. It's a bit like arrival (2016) if it was way nastier.)

alternatively, you can inject fast acting brain poison into yourself with this

anyways I hope this all reads as, you know, more approachable than the way dudes on quora recommend this show:

[itsdefinitely]

i wanna know more about the jerries/jeris

do you want to know the most horrific thing about them?

the lords did nothing to make them the way they are.

yes, the jerry jr was turned into the axeman because of the witchwood, which does what it does because of the lords, but everything leading up to that is just human nature. i see the "girl jeri is nibbly" or "they were influenced by a lord to do the thngs they do" and i need people to understand that that's just. not true. they're just like that. they were taught to be like that by their parents and, more accurately, their church. it's horrifyingly accurate how religion has shaped them into non-functional human beings, who would rather potentially lose their child to the many, many dangers of the literal woods than admit that they had sex outside of marriage.

it's only because it's hatchetfield that jerry jr grew the way he did. there was no lord's intervention in their decision to keep the baby, or to drop out of school to care for him, or to keep him seperated from any other people, or to revolve their lives around the idea that they'd committed a sin and needed to pay by pushing celibacy rather than. i don't know. properly raising their child. it was the way they were taught. the toxic pushing of overexaggerated christian ideals is what molded them. can you imagine being in their place? being a scared teenager and knowing that if you told any of the people you care about most your secret that they would shun you and disown you?

the only people they felt any kind of safe around were each other; of course they're going to be codependent. and even then, they're disgusted by each other for leading them to sin. they're stuck together unwillingly, because without the other, they're alone.

[peekychu]

I am an enjoyer of Bizarre Furry Art 🫡

(This drawing is Not an endorsement of the actions/beliefs of the original artists btw‼️ I am simply goofin around)

[bludpudding]

morpheus getting mad at the corinthian for having individualistic thoughts and emotions and ambitions is batshit considering he was the one who gave corinthian the ability to consume human emotions in the first place. WHY even give him that power unless you wanted him to do it in the first place. bitch

[imagine-lassie]

Imagine Lassie at family dinner defending you in front of your parents after they said one too many snide comments about you

[dreadeves]

yknow. vanitas’ mark from luna is in a rather weird position for drinking blood. it’s almost as if he had his arms raised in self defense, for the star mark to be on the outside of his forearm.

and also, the two books of the blue moon just lean even further into vnc’s twins aspect

[the-labyrinth-of-me]

I wonder where Alan Wake 3 takes us with Zane. He cannot be trusted. He tricked Alan into shooting himself in the Writer's Room, by planting that thought in him that the Alan sitting behind the desk is actually Scratch. Because he knows that Alan will leave the Dark Place alone, without taking Zane with him. Alan and Zane apparently worked on Return together, I think this we can believe is true. But because Alan doesn't trust Zane, Alan shot him. Zane tried to shoot Alan as well. And Zane remembers. Zane knows that Alan will leave him behind. That's why Zane doesn't let him go. Apparently he needs Alan to escape. Zane doesn't tell him that Scratch/the Dark Presence will take over Casey, and that Alan has to go back. Zane will force him to work on Return again and force him to leave the Dark Place together. He will probably find Alice and use her to get what he wants. He might disguise himself as Alan, even. From Alan Wake's American Nightmare, we know that Scratch plans to take Alan's place and play husband to Alice. Echo!Casey muses that Scratch and Zane are the same person anyway. My guess is that they're all separated personalities of Alan that if he truly wants to be free, he must take each of them with him. Alan cannot escape with Scratch and Zane. The question is how, and which role Alice will play in all of this.

[aliusfrater]

sam as a character that breaks the 'us vs them' dichotomy of hunting with the conditions of his monstrosity is not only something that is deeply inherent to the narrative's exploration of the familial dynamics that sam disrupts, both metaphorically (in terms of hunting as a metaphor for the cycle of abuse) and literally but it's also something that is deeply internalised by every character that bears witness to the same conditions of sam's monstrosity that the audience does but most importantly both dean and sam himself.

there are a lot of aspects to the way that dean approaches sam's involvement within his own agency/independence as well as The Family Business that mirror or directly correlate with sam's monstrosity and when it's worth condemnation vs not but by far the most interesting aspect of this to me is the fact that there is an inherent separation between the idea of sam, sammy, that is not monstrous but is capable of becoming so and the sam that is unknowably monstrous and is capable of corrupting/encroaching on/preying on the sammy isn't/is not yet monstrous. like this idea is mostly explored within dean's idea of sam and monstrosity, either separately or together, but there are a few moments within which sam demonstrates a subconscious awareness of this separation, and subjects himself to it as well, and most of them are within 4.21 and explored as the fact that the Sam—corrupted and monstrous—that Sammy—othered regardless—is to be protected from is ultimately someone that sammy cannot escape. it is in him and evil ('them') and giving into it means freedom or an entire 'acceptance' (the usage of his monstrosity—"maybe there's no escape. after all, how can you run from what's inside you?" / "don't let anyone or anything get in your way."—something he's explicitly expressed since 4.04) of himself.

there will always be an 'us vs them'. it is vital to supernatural. and regardless of the fact that sam exists to break the dichotomy, the dynamic of the structure is one that demands you fit into it and ultimately, i think this manifests within the ideas of sam's monstrosity, more than it does around it, while he perpetually struggles to fit into his role under 'us' so much so that his struggle becomes a vital part of his role. it becomes a non-role that's present in examples of the dynamics of his and dean's relationship as well as the patriarchal structure that i've talked about previously

[some-pers0n]

That podcast is making you go through It huh

It's consumed me now. I don't know if this'll be something that'll last a couple days or months. Or years. I can't tell. I don't know. All I know is that I need to inject this podcast into my bloodstream

[sleeve-sleeve]

ok first murder drones now spooky month depression

[malachitezmeyka]

Sometimes I go like “I’m fine” and then remember that one friend whom I loved dearly who did a complete 180, told me to fuck off and essentially split apart our entire friend group in 2022 simply because I was Russian and she was Ukrainian. We didn’t talk politics, didn’t discuss the news too much, nobody held any anti Ukrainian opinions. We showered her in nothing but sympathy and support. And yet somehow, it was all our fault. We were 15 and it was our fault. Because we were Russian, so how could it not be?

I’ve never been the same since

[sacrilegious-skeletal-scribe]

Pride Deer Says: You are Merely Bone and Skin!

In Sufficient Quantities, Bone and Skin Could Drown the Earth.

Happy Pride!

[ntls-24722]

new skinny djmm lore. the rest of the pizzaplex cast are regular, possibly particularly sexy humans. Skinny DJMM is the only one that looks like that and obviously there will be an extreme focus on him

this is specifically mainly to spite the irritatingly and weirdly common thing i see in security breach comics/reinterpretations where they will keep every animatronic exactly the same but Ah! Ah! DJMM, only DJMM, always DJMM, is actually an Android/Human because that pesky giant spider form was too energy consuming/scary/something something, or literally just because

[swagging-back-to]

literally the only reason i didnt hang myself in the psych ward bathroom or put a wash cloth over the drain and drown myself or drink the ink from my sharpie markers is because i didnt want them to remove the doors for the next person and take away even more of their freedom and privacy