#sometime people get superpowers when they go through a traumatic event | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

someone-always-cares · 4 years ago

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bonus 2, post chapter 4

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[image description: an sac webcomic page. 5 pages styled in a manner similar to a medical brochure titled “navigating your new abilities, what does this mean for me?”. the brochure is about superpowers, what the are, side effects and health risks, and job oppurtunities. the brochure has white and light blue for the main colours, with a dark purple accent. page 1: mostly showing a girl transforming, with the title listed above, with smaller text reading “created and supported by the paragon institute for superheroism.” the girl is a younger white woman who has a light purple colour scheme, long straight hair and bangs, a crop top, and elbow pads. shes shown from the waist up, half her body and an arm cut out of the photo. her transformation takes the form of dripping black-purple goop spreading, with a starry texture. a similar texture takes up the image background.

page 2: title: what are superpowers?. “Superpower is a term used for superpowered abilities that go beyond the natural abilities and conventional laws of reality. There are little limits to the potential types of abilities that a super powered person may possess.

It is currently unknown what causes superpowered abilities. Despite many theories, the only known way to guarantee superpowers is to inherit them from a parent.

London has the highest percentage of superpowered people in the entire world, in addition to having 42% of all supers in the united kingdom”

next to this text is a grinning woman in pink winking while posing with one hand on her hip, and the other in a fist held up. the woman has long wavy pale pink hair, light brown skin, many freckles, and hot pink eyes. her outfit is a pink dress and gloves, pale pink tattered cape, and a hot pink long sleeved undershirt.

“how do i use and control my abilities? Superpowered people will typically have an innate sense for how to transform and use their abilities,but like any skill it will take time and effort to fully control their abilities.

In some rare cases, a superpowered person may lack control over their powers to the extent where it can cause harm to those around them.

This is most common in those who have inherited their abilities. In these cases the P.I.S offers programs to assist these people in learning control with 24/7 care and supervision. If you or someone you know requires these programs, please call our number or otherwise contact us via our website.

Due to the range of superpowered abilities, there is no one-size-fits-all method of developing control, however, the P.I.S do offer training services, of which you can read more about atwww.pis.uk/pis-services/training

next to this is a teenage superhero, an androgynous boy with a grey colour scheme, smiling slightly, his arm turning into smoke. he has light grey hair and eyes, brown skin and a dark grey bodysuit. he has a grey poncho/cape conbo and gloves, both of which are lined with light grey fleece or fur. his outfit looks as if is was meant for cold weather.

page 3: what are some other symptoms of superpowered abilities? Superpowers are also accompanied by complete transformations, including bodily and outfit transformations. Body transformations will include a change of eye and hair colour, but can also include a wide variety of changes, commonly including changes to eyes, ears, and hands, animal-like features, changes in shape, colour, additional limbs and features, and more.

below that is 5 examples, inside circles with a white border: a close up of an eye, all blue including sclera, the pupil is pale and slit like a cat. next is a close up of a green haired braid. next if also from behind, a red haired person with red wings, the longest feathers of which are white. while the last three arent of any known character, the latter two are wraith, shown from behind, only showing hair and a cape, and part of an arm, and quartz, a close up of his elf-like ear.

Outfit transformations are even more varied in appearance, and will typically be in various shades of the persons 'main' colour. It is common for the outfit to contain additional accessories, tools, and weapons. Electronic devices created from these transformations do not need recharging and if using internet or data, will use the strongest available signal to do so. It is illegal to create, use, or otherwise have in the open, a weapon in public without a registered superhero licence.

The act of transformation will vary from person to person, but will usually involve a bright light, and is likely to reflect the user's powers of their effects. In the case of those inheriting their abilities, they will inherit body traits and transformations from any and all superpowered ancestors.

The effects of a transformation will likely change through a superpowered person's lifetime. A change will usually happen after a dramatic change in the person's personality, ideals, traumatic incident, or other life development, although a change is not guaranteed, and will rarely occur without these.

The first transformation will usually be the simplest aesthetically both in outfit and body, with simple details, but will usually get more complicated, and it's likely to gain more body transformations as more changes happen. A superpowered person may experience 1-2 changes every 10 years.

Objects and outfits created via transformation will dissipate upon detransformation, regardless of if it is removed from the person. The same goes for additional limbs and features that do not exist on the original body, although these injuries are permanent, unlike clothes and objects which will reform upon transformation.

page 4: other known possibilities of transformations:

- Partial changes to a transformation may occur in the event of permanent injury, such as gaining a prosthetic after losing a limb, but nothing else in the outfit changes.

-It is possible for a transformation's change to be affected by other superpowered persons. This is commonly shown by similarities in outfit transformations, as elements of the superpowered persons apperance change to resemble each other.

-Changes in colour are extremely rare and usually only occur in small aspects

other changes and risks: Some changes are permanent and may not disappear when a superpowered person detransforms.

-Reproductive changes: Any biological offspring will have the exact same powers as the parent. However, pregnancy will be risky, and have a high rate of failure, especially if the mother does not have any superpowered abilities.

-Dreams: While there is no known reason for this occurrence, supers will rarely be able to remember their dreams, except those with dream related abilities or legacy supers. However, despite this the people in question will usually be experiencing nightmares, and superpowered people are at high risk for night terrors and sleep terror disorder.

-A superpowered person's body will adapt to their powers and it is extremely unlikely for one to be harmed by their own power, but this may result in permanent changes that may cause inconvenience in daily life. If this is something you or a loved one experience, please inform your GP

-Overuse of powers: While powers appear to be adapted to not cause harm to the user, overuse of powers can result in a large amount of pain and possible long term damage

below that is an image of two people, on looking like a doctor, a pale man with dull brown hair and dull green eyes, dressed as a doctor and smiling with a clipboard, looking at a person shown from behind, with long mint hair.

page 5: what does this mean for me?

Discovering and controlling your abilities is often the first step one may take inbecoming a superhero. Here at the P.I.S we offer many pathways to doing so,including all required training, courses, and experiences.

We also acknowledge that some super powered people do not seek to become asuperhero, but the P.I.S still has a place for them! We offer many career pathsand courses for almost any job and our career advisors can match up the perfectpower-job combinations to give you a leg up if you are interested in using yourabilities in your career. For more information, visit jobs.pis.uk

Use of powers in a job, or to otherwise earn money using superpowered abilities,without a license is a serious offence that can result in fines starting from £5000,and a potential ban from working in that field.

below is the superhero arrow, grinning at a woman in a plain looking suit. he has one hand on his hip and the other is shaking hands with the woman. the women has red hair and eyes, and pointy red nails.

Due to the nature of superpowered abilities, it is important to gettailored advice and support for affected individuals.For more information call us at our support helpline at 020 7946 0xxx. Both our lines are open from 8:30am-10pm mon-fri and 9:30am-9pm sat.You can also visit our website for more resources at pis.uk/resources. end id]

sorry for last weeks lack of update, irl stuff is happening too much and too fast

anyway heres something ive wanted to do for a while, a pamphlet thats kinda medical style? it seemed like it would be fun and i wanted an excuse to try something new and im always down to infodump (affectionate) about my ocs

however im half asleep, ive already delayed an update for a week, and im a little stressed so i didnt get a proper proofread so sorry if theres any typo or if i left a placeholder in ill get it later if i see any late

edit: did i really forget to fucking finish the fake phone number at the end? anyway sometimes fake phone numbers are reserved for tv and stuff if a phone number is needed, thats the one used for london fake numbers, i just forgot to finish it until i went back to write the id there

#someone always cares #sac #webcomic #lore #worldbuilding #im nervous to post bc i was like. is this to self indulgent? will people like it?#and then i was like bro.#its my fucking webcomic OF COURSE its self indulgent that half the fucking point #some of this is stuff ive rambled lots to friends but realised oh it just hasnt come up in comic so here it is i guess #im hoping this is readable bc i can read it fine on my phone

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queenretcon · 4 years ago

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Barbara, Cass and Dinah for the "ask me"

idk how to do a read more on mobile so sorry for how long this is I have thoughts

Babs

favorite thing about them her managing to keep going after a traumatic event and become something better than before is still one of the shining examples of what shared universe superhero comics CAN be

least favorite thing about them anything written in the past ten years

favorite line

brOTP Ted & Babs 💙💚

OTP Dinahbabs!!!!!! The best ship!!!!!!

nOTP brucebabs is a boring answer but the truth is sometimes boring

random headcanon she definitely holds multiple speedrun records, right?

unpopular opinion anyone who enables fake ableist Babs by writing her, drawing her, buying her books, or positively sharing content of her is responsible for her continued existence

song i associate with them maybe Running Towards the Light by Aaron West and the Roaring Twenties? I need good Babs song recs

favorite picture of them

Cass

favorite thing about them redemption narratives aren’t something I’m usually super into (not opposed just. Not super into), but that’s because they’re not usually about a traumatized teenage girl trying to forgive herself through doing good

least favorite thing about them her secondary character makeover in rebirth

favorite line “You can change. You can.” still makes me weepy

brOTP Babs and Cass!!!!! Babs and Cass!!!!

OTP stephcass was one of my first f/f ships. An important step

nOTP there are people who ship timcass. And that is a mistake on their part.

random headcanon I think she likes cute clothes but prioritizes not restricting movement. No skirts without bike shorts under them, no tight jeans, never too many layers.

unpopular opinion She would deck Jason and drag his ass to Arkham. Come visit him regularly and try to convince him to change his ways, but punch his lights out first.

song i associate with them I’ve thought of this less than I should! Maybe Innocent Party by Jetty Bones?

favorite picture of them

Dinah

favorite thing about them god i just love everything about her but I’ve got a special soft spot for superheroes who have a superpower but are superheroes just as much because of their own honed skills. Like girls got a voice that could kill you but she’s still going to kick you in the gut instead. Icon.

least favorite thing about them I . . . Don’t have a least favorite thing? Oh I hate having to scroll through arrow stuff to get #content

favorite line

brOTP Helenadinah. Or her with any of the arrow kids

OTP still dinahbabs!! Always dinahbabs!!!

nOTP that time ra’s was trying to fuck her was weird eh

random headcanon she sometimes kind of wishes she could really let go when singing without ya know. Severely injuring everyone in the vicinity

unpopular opinion i’m not AGAINST dinahollie but i don’t really see the appeal. They seem to genuinely like each other, so I’m happy for her, but I don’t understand whats exceptional to people about them I guess?

song i associate with them let’s go with Cherry Bomb by The Runaways

favorite picture of them I love a lot of the art from her most recent series but this lotay variant is a fave

#talk tag #ask tag #anonymous #long post #sorry

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sersi · 4 years ago

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theory on why monica's upset with carol? literally my entire enjoyment of the show hinges on monica with the added bonus of jimmy and darcy, so when That Scene happened, it threw me off for the rest of the ep lol. i find it hard to believe that carol didn't return every so often in those 20 years tbh!

Ummmm, I don’t have super specific theories at the moment (since I feel like, while probably not explaining all of it, there’s a decent chance the show itself will reveal a bit more, at least from Monica’s end), but there are a few things that I think are likely important when both interpreting Monica’s weirdness about Carol this week + considering where things might go. (And it’s under a cut because I accidentally wrote a novel 🤡).

The biggest thing to me is that this show is taking place only three weeks after Endgame and, thus, only three weeks after Monica found out her that her mother had died three years prior. So while Monica is clearly choosing a Steve Rogers adjacent “let me throw myself into work” method of coping, she is definitely still going to be dealing with an immense amount of grief. So, depending on what exactly has or hasn’t happened with Carol, I think that, on some level, Wanda, a person divorced from Monica’s personal/family life, is probably a lot easier to talk about and focus on than Carol is.

Now, that said, I do think something happened. Given that we don’t have much to go on beyond knowing that Carol was on Earth at least long enough for Tony’s funeral and that Monica, three weeks post-Blip, doesn’t want to talk about her, there are tons of options as to what could have happened and not very much to narrow down the field. So, I’m just going to talk about the things I’ve thought about most for the last day or so.

While I chose to believe that Carol either returned to Earth between 1995 and 2018 or was met halfway by Maria and Monica via S.W.O.R.D. missions, knowing that Carol is busy throughout space, I could see a universe where Carol was not necessarily around when Maria was diagnosed with cancer and Monica consequently resenting her for that. I could also see Monica having mixed emotions about whatever happened between the Snap and Maria’s death two years later. (I assume Carol and Maria reunited after the Snap, but given how close to falling apart the world seemed to be during the five year gap and Carol’s own stated busyness during Endgame, as much as I love the idea of Carol and Maria having two years of domesticity, I don’t really think that’s what happened 😣). Finally, and I think this is probably the most likely option (potentially/probably combined with some earlier issues, either of the kind I mentioned or something else entirely): Carol and Monica reunited sometime between the Blip and the start of WandaVision and it somehow went sideways.

No matter what their relationship has been since the end of Captain Marvel, there is a lot of potential for miscommunication, mixed feelings, and potential clashes between two women at different stages of grief. Carol lost Maria three years ago. Monica lost Maria no more than twenty days before (since I assume any theoretical meeting would have taken place before Monica returned to S.W.O.R.D.). Further, Carol (and basically everyone who survived the snap) has had the trauma of living through those five years and losing numerous people they knew and loved in seconds, whereas Monica has the trauma of waking up and discovering that five years had passed and her newly cancer free mother died three years prior from returned cancer. Both of those experiences are going to be incredibly traumatic but also potentially clash in the immediate aftermath of the Blip (since to Monica the Blip itself was THE traumatic event or at least the moment she became aware of her own trauma, whereas to Carol and to everyone else who survived the Snap, it’s the moment when the universe was fixed and everyone came back). That’s a ton of stuff to work through and even with the absolute best intentions, I can so easily imagine it ending in a way that left Monica (and probably Carol as well) with a lot of messy, mixed emotions.

So basically, as someone who, like you, is emotionally invested only in Monica/watching mostly for her, this week’s episode left me with a lot of questions and very 😬😬😬😬😬😬😬😬. It’s my hope that we find out a bit more about Monica’s emotional reaction to Maria’s death and, potentially through that, to whatever has happened/hasn’t happened with Carol, before WandaVision ends. However, I don’t really expect it to be all sorted by the end. One, because while my emotional investment is entirely in Monica, the show is unfortunately not only about her, and with only four more episode, at least two more sitcom decades to get through and a whole lot of Wanda/Vision centric questions to answer, I just don’t think there will be time to fully explore this thread. (Especially if Monica is gonna go full superpowers by the end, which I tend to think will be happening). Two, and kind of building off the previous point, I think in order to fully resolve this plot thread you need Carol to make an appearance and I don’t really see any version of the overall WandaVision plot/third act conflict where a Carol appearance seems likely. And three, because of the number of Disney+ shows set to come out between now and Captain Marvel 2′s current release date, I think there’s a lot of potential to return to this thread post-WandaVision but pre-CM2. (Aside from Ms. Marvel, where I tend to assume Carol will show up and where Monica/S.W.O.R.D. could easily show up as well, there’s also Secret Invasion, which, if it ties into CM2 at all, would be an especially logical place to have Monica and Carol show up).

And, because this was ridiculously long:

tl;dr, I’m not panicking, I want answers, but, while I think that WandaVision may explore this thread a bit more, I don’t really expect to get all those answers/the Monica x Carol reunion hug we all deserve in WandaVision or anytime super soon.

#elysia's inbox #anon #monica rambeau #carol danvers #wandavision #wv spoilers #I wrote a LOT for someone who is also clinging to the Notion of maria having faked her death 🤡

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paragonrobits · 5 years ago

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random idea: take the idea Immortal Hulk introduced when the Devil Hulk claimed that he doesn’t operate by the same rules the other Hulks might do, and take it to the logical conclusion with every incarnation of the Hulk having their own completely unique set of rules, for things like how their powers work, the specific mechanism of how they transform and limits on how they can maintain it, and so on.

ultimately one idea that i think works to figure out who gets precedence is to emphasize that the Hulk isn’t Bruce having enough and exploding at people, but as a defense; he transforms when he is in trouble. sometimes, his traumatized mind interprets any level of excess stress or emotional response as trouble. and other times, its simply part of the way that Hulk works, but the main thing is that the Hulk who dominates is whichever fits the current criteria AND is best suited, from Bruce’s point of view, to help. (Savage Hulk tends to come out the most for this reason; his connection to emotional distress resonates the most with Bruce, and he embodies most of the repressed feelings Bruce doesn’t like to think about.)

some ideas here:

Bruce: Possibly a controversial one, but one idea if you really want to shake things up is to play with the idea that Bruce Banner is not the default state of the Hulk system, but has become one particular manifestation of it. The purest embodiment of intelligence within them, the one that is the most outright human, a conscience to the rest, and most ideally suited for doing human things and living in human society. Possibly the physical power the other Hulks tend to have is channeled into intellectual power, alluding to some of the ludicrous gadgets and super-scientific wonders he’s made from time to time.

Joe Fixit: Emphasize the idea of him coming out at night and a connection to the moon; he mostly comes out to take charge of Bruce’s body during particularly traumatic parts of his life, or for a more positive interpretation, when Bruce wants to retreat or can’t deal with circumstances. Probably the most likely to directly front like an actual alter might; outside of a Hulk event, he’s the one you’re most likely to see. When he does emerge, it is only at night, and he grows stronger the closer to the full moon it gets, and his appearance grows more monstrous. At new moon, he looks pretty much like Bruce (akin to Immortal Hulk). As full moon approaches, he gets more inhuman, gray-skinned and massive, until he is an enormous behemoth with cracked skin like broken stone.

Savage Hulk: Likely to come out whenever Bruce is particularly stressed or in trouble, and shows the ability to manifest through other Hulks when they’re upset enough; if, say, Devil Hulk is panicked by a trauma button for him, Savage Hulk might briefly manifest to fight on their behalf. Otherwise he is the most clear of the defense mechanism superpower here; he comes out when Bruce is in trouble, or feels like it from an emotional point of view. Alternatively, if you want to emphasize him emerging when Bruce is stressed or feels strongly, this might be a case of him trying to come out on his own and battling with Bruce over it. Is likely to light up and flare green as he powers up, in a similar way to the fire demonstrated by Red Hulk, though it looks more like radiance than actual flame

Devil Hulk: Only comes out VERY rarely. He normally stays within Bruce’s mindscape, organizing it and keeping dangerous elements out. If a psionic individual comes into his mind, he will have very stern demands for them to explain what they’re doing. He only comes out if Bruce actually dies and then resurrects the following night, but once he does, he STAYS out. only sunrise (or a simulation of it, like UV lights) can make him go to sleep. The most outright mystical of the Hulks, to the point that when he shows up all the local monitors start blaring ‘THE MONSTER IS HERE’ or something like that.

Professor Hulk: I like the idea of him as a merged state, not his own specific alter, so in this case he’s more of an situation, not a character in his own right. He’s what happens when Bruce and one or two other hulks merge together for a while. It never sticks but the end result tends to balance out so much that people rarely notice Professor’s behavior shifting from time to time.

Green Scar: Undoubtedly the most mysterious Hulk in terms of what summons him and the conditions surrounding him; he may be akin to what happens to when the Professor doesn’t have Bruce involved in the merge, a potential true fusion of all the Hulk alters, or a true adult figure within his mind, lashing out at the wrongs done to him.

#marvel #hulk #bruce banner #ideas

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astrid-goes-for-a-spin · 6 years ago

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I read your reply on a marvel post and I don't want this to sound rude or aggressive or anything, but what did you mean by 'disability erasure in “merging” the Hulk and Bruce.' I'm genuinely curious because I've never heard of anyone having that opinion.

Oh hello! So, one of the reasons I love-love-love Bruce Banner and the Hulk is because of the representation of trauma and mental illness. Bruce Banner is diagnosed with DID (disassociative identity disorder) in the comics, and it’s fair to say this is true to his portrayal in the movies as well. Bruce has had an incredibly difficult and traumatic life - child abuse, his father beating his mother to death, trying to blow up his high school/commit suicide in the comics, and even trying to shoot himself in the MCU. On top of all this preexisting trauma is the medical experiment that irradiated him.

The Hulk is a product of the post-WWII fear we lived in as a society. Nuclear power could be a good weird (like Spider-Man), or it could make you into a rampaging monster. As someone who studies the superhero genre and disability within it, I think it’s safe to say Bruce in the MCU has DID: the Hulk is the “protector” identity who takes over when Bruce’s life is in danger - or if he gets triggered and feels out of control (“don’t make me angry”). Because of comics science bullshit, the Hulk is a physically different person than Bruce Banner - not only is he 9ft tall, green, and so strong he can break the world, his face is shaped differently. His hair is cut/styled differently. Comic science bullshit gives us an opportunity to see the Hulk as he is: NOT Bruce Banner. Psychologically, the Hulk’s defining feature - his strength/indestructibility - comes from child!Bruce’s desire to protect himself and just be strong enough to protect his mother: the Hulk is the strongest there is.

We see a lot of this in the 2008 The Incredible Hulk, a movie that I love beyond words. Yes, Bruce’s situation is complicated by the fact that he’s hiding from Thunderbolt Ross, but he’s living a life very familiar to people struggling with mental illness. He’s isolated, but maintaining a routine; he’s learning to defend himself but also manage his physical response to his triggers; he’s meditating constantly and keeping a log of how many days he can go without losing control. His life is defined by trying to get rid of the Hulk - or, in disability terms, to “cure” himself of DID. This is a perfectly reasonable thing to want, especially if your alter is causing so much damage (especially to those you love, shoutout to the forgotten but much beloved Betty Ross). Unfortunately Bruce lives in the superhero genre, and General Ross wants to use the Hulk as a weapon, which ups the stakes.

That movie follows a man made homeless, naked, and begging by his mental illness across two continents. He wants to go back to the way life was before. He wants his lab, he wants Betty, he wants to stop hurting people. He’s plagued by guilt and flashbacks of events that happened to the Hulk. His metronome for meditating reminds him of the initial experiment gone wrong, and the associated fallout. He collapses in the shower because the showerhead spraying water looks like a cannon spraying bullets.

Because of Superhero Drama, Bruce eventually realizes that the Hulk is the only one who stands a chance against the Abomination, and comes to the conclusion that he will sacrifice himself to the Hulk - possibly losing himself forever - for the greater good. The Hulk takes out the Abomination and runs off; later we see Bruce in a very desolate cabin in the British Columbia. He’s exercising, he’s meditating, and he’s working on his mental health in that he’s gone so long fearing the Hulk, trying to kill the Hulk - who is basically a superpowered toddler desperate to protect the ones he loves - maybe that’s not the healthiest way to approach his DID, and he starts working on some strategies to switch to the Hulk without the triggers - thus working on eliminating the danger of the triggers at all.

Fast-forward to The Avengers. Bruce never names the Hulk in The Incredible Hulk, referring to him only as “it.” By now he’s using a more familiar moniker - “the other guy.” Bruce has not quite gotten over his suicidal intention (which was how the 2008 movie was intended to open, a failed suicide attempt), but he’s trying to make the best of his life by helping others. That’s what he’s always wanted to do. Natasha comes to recruit him, and he keeps his cool through Tony’s insistent attempts to catch him out, finally confiding the loss of control and horror and pain he feels when he’s not there anymore. (DID can feel like blackouts, like being possessed...the MCU seems to go with “blackout with some fuzzy memories in flashback form”). Tony asserts the Hulk saved his life - which would be his primary objective as the protector identity. Bruce scorns the idea, because he does not value his life.

I’ll point out there’s only one accidental Hulk-out here: Bruce and Nat fall two stories and Bruce gets banged up. His head is messed up, and while Nat had the good fortune/training to land fairly safely, Bruce catches the fall on his hands and knees. His wrists and knees are definitely cracked. He tries to hold the Hulk at bay, but with these injuries and a bonk on the head, the protector identity with healing factor is eager to fix Bruce’s tiny mortal body, and he feels threatened.

Fast-forward to “I’m always angry.” I’ve been trying to puzzle this line out for years. I can believe that Bruce Banner is always angry, deep inside. His life is profoundly unfair and agonizingly painful. One of Bruce’s greatest strengths is that he does everything he can to remain kind and empathetic and keep his alter from reigning that anger down on the world. Some fans have speculated that his body is always in a state of high blood pressure, etc; some fans have no idea. I think that after around 8 years of living like this, Bruce has it mostly under control due to his myriad lifestyle changes, but at this moment just allows himself to be just as angry as the circumstances deserve. His pulse skyrockets, and the Hulk punches the Leviathan out of the sky.

This is a complicated issue for him - Bruce’s fear has always been that the Hulk would be weaponized - but as it was with the Ambomination, it was a do-or-die situation. He wouldn’t die, but by god, everyone else would. His morals can take a backseat to saving lives.

Which brings us to his tortured state in Age of Ultron. Bruce loves being part of the team, much in the same way Natasha does. It’s the first real family he’s ever had. What he doesn’t love is Code Greens, which are sometimes necessary, but he’s taking precautions, because that’s what you have to do when you have an unpredictable mental illness: he’s designed Veronica to put him down. He’s worked out the lullaby with Natasha to tell the Hulk that it’s safe and Banner can come back. He has shock blankets and comfy clothes, he has nice headphones for his soothing opera music; he asks obsessively about how the Hulk is in battle; Natasha asks lightly, “When are you gonna start trusting me?” but instead of flirting back, Bruce replies darkly, “It’s not you I don't trust.” Even able to eliminate most of his triggers, even able to change into the Hulk at will, Bruce feels like he’s got a monster inside him - because he does. And even if things are better than they were, he feels like any wrong move he makes can cascade into innocent people - and people he cares about - being hurt.

We don’t see his fear-vision in AoU; we don’t have to. He lives it. Bruce’s worst nightmare - the Hulk’s worst nightmare - is being out of control in a civilian population. The Hulk has no control over himself while under Wanda’s spell; much as the other Avengers are rendered catatonic, the Hulk is sent into hyperdrive, desperate to get away, get her out of his head. When the spell finally wears off, the Hulk is devastated to see the damage and the screams and the fleeing people and the dust - while he is a savage Hulk, his purpose is protector, and this goes against his nature. The Hulk loved to smash the Chitauri, but he also loved to protect the terrified officeworkers in the skyscrapers and save Tony’s life, something the Hulk felt only he could do, so he did.

But Bruce still thinks of himself as a monster. Not the Bruce part - but the Hulk part. He’s not giving the Hulk enough credit, but how can he? He doesn't understand the way the Hulk works. He’s never been diagnosed, he’s never been to therapy, he’s never taken medication for DID. All he sees is traumatic flashbacks and disturbing security footage and the equally disturbing reaction of the world claiming that the Hulk in all his violence and savagery is a hero. He spends AoU desperate to run away. To start a new life somewhere (preferably with Natasha), and never have to be the Hulk again.

Natasha’s on board. That’s the tragic part. It’s just that she can’t leave a mission unfinished, so she throws him in the hole and the Hulk comes out. However, the Hulk has a relationship with Natasha separate from Bruce’s - just as Bruce and Betty had a different relationship than the Hulk and Betty. When Natasha calls for the Hulk to come back to her, he reaches for her, not understanding she’s just a hologram - he’s expecting their pressure-point secret handshake. Accidentally, he cancels the call and loses contact with Earth for two years.

Fast-forward to Thor: Ragnarok, which some people say is the best Hulk movie ever made. I think I sobbed through every single time Bruce or Hulk was onscreen, even in the comedic parts.

So let’s break it down: the Hulk has made a life for himself, a life that he loves. He’s valued. He lives in a palace. He has everything he could ever want. People like him instead of fear him (”Earth hates Hulk”). He has no responsibilities, and no guilt. He’s the strongest there is, but there’s no one he needs to protect besides Banner - who’s safe by being not there.

The recorded message from Natasha, however, pulls Bruce back out of the abyss of the Hulk. He’s been gone - like, suspended animation or coma-ish gone. He has no memories. He has had no consciousness. The first thing Bruce asks is if the Avengers saved Sokovia. Then, he asks about Nat - because the last time he saw her, he was breaking her out of a HYDRA base run by Ultrons. His worst fears have been realized yet again. The Hulk was weaponized - for a good cause, and by someone he trusted, but still - and he hasn’t been himself in two full years. Meanwhile, the Hulk has been running a gladiator ring and killing indiscriminately. In suppressing Banner, the Hulk has grown beyond who he was initially, but he’s still an angry toddler, and he still wants to protect people (notice he didn’t kill Thor in the arena, despite the fact that he could’ve easily given him a wound he couldn’t recover from). Bruce is sure that with how out of balance their dynamic has gotten in the past few years, if he changes into the Hulk ever again, he, Bruce Banner, will be lost forever. But he makes the sacrifice to save the Asgardians anyway, and the Hulk rises to the occasion and eagerly helps fight the Fenris wolf and probably would’ve gone head-to-head with Surtur forever. He’s even willing to fight Thanos.

OKAY SO THAT’S UP THROUGH THOR RAGNAROK. HERE IS WHERE I GET ANGRY AT THE REPRESENTATION.

In Infinity War, when the Hulk crashes into the Sanctum Sanctorum, he shrinks back into Bruce immediately. With no explanation of why he can do so after the build-up in Ragnarok about Bruce being gone forever if he transforms one more time. And then Bruce comedically spends the rest of the movie trying to get him to come out and fight. The prevailing fan theory is that this is because the Hulk has never been scared before - he’s never been up against something he couldn’t win. But the Hulk has been scared: he loves, therefore he is scared. He’s scared when Betty is knocked unconscious while he’s trying to protect her from the crashing gunship, and he’s scared when the helicopter catches fire with her inside. He’s scared when Tony falls from the sky and his arc reactor is dark. He’s scared when he and Natasha are under fire on Sokovia. He’s scared about being alone when Thor leaves him on Sakaar. So the fact that the Hulk, whose psychological purpose is the protect Bruce Banner, does not take over to protect him during some of the most dangerous situations Bruce Banner has ever endured, is incredibly upsetting to me. If Bruce is triggered by his life being in physical danger, or by being terrified and angry and he actively wants to transform into the Hulk - why can’t he?

A literal decade of nuanced and beautiful storytelling - on some dark and touchy subjects - is condensed into a few jokes.

But that’s not even the worst part.

When Bruce - and I have to assume that this is Bruce, unless we’re delving deeper in to the comics and we might call him Professor Hulk (a third alter) - shows up in IW, he nonchalantly informs the Avengers that he decided to combine “brains and brawn” and is now Bruce Banner...living in the Hulk’s body. The Hulk is expunged. Bruce Banner’s body is gone. The plot needed a strong guy who knew particle physics, and this was how to do it. But in doing so, they alienated the communities that felt represented by Bruce/Hulk - and even though I don’t have DID or personal experience with it beyond extensive research, they alienated me.

Bruce has, over a course of many movies, taken many courses of action to try to mitigate the damages done by the Hulk, to try to eliminate the Hulk, to try to find a peace in himself substantial enough to control the Hulk. But he has, as mentioned above, never been diagnosed or treated for mental illness. While one viable course of treatment for DID is a therapy designed to “merge” a person’s identities, this is work that takes months if not years, an experienced and licensed professional, and a support system. Isolated Bruce Banner, whose friends have been snapped away, deciding “I’ll combine brains with brawn” wipes away all the work he’s already done. All the representation. Effortlessly, he overcomes every struggle he’s been faced with in the last fifteen-or-so years, with no mention of work or difficulty, much less it being shown onscreen.

So... yeah. One of my big problems with Endgame was disability erasure. Bruce Banner has a disability. His mental illness, DID, his alter identity - the Hulk - disrupts his daily life and requires him to make changes and live differently than the people around him. This is excellently and thoughtfully portrayed in the films up until IW, and then completely trashed in Endgame. I say this because as of Endgame, Bruce Banner is no longer disabled. He no longer has DID, because he no longer has the Hulk as an alternate identity. It’s disability erasure because we didn’t see him work toward that “recovery.”

TLDR: IW and Endgame use Bruce and Hulk as a joke and do not make any effort to portray the effects of DID or trauma on a person in the way the previous films have.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk

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liathgray · 5 years ago

Text

Anyways, here’s that essay

Please keep in kind this was not written to be consumed by people familiar with the source material, it was for a class. It’s focused on weird stuff and was meant to compare and contrast the Judas Contact storyline and season two of Titans.

Okay, here we go.

In 1984, a four-part story was published as an arc in Tales of the Teen Titans titled as The Judas Contract. Since, it has become one of the most influential and well-known stories to come out of the DC publishing company for its bold story choices and permanently changing characters who had been around for decades, as well as introducing death as something that can occur in the present, not just in the mechanics of a backstory. It garnered four separate adaptations, the most recent of which being the second season of Titans, a loose live-action version of the titular team. Between the two, there are many small plot and character details that do not line up, so for the sake of simplicity, pedantic plot elements will be removed from the comparison, instead focusing on individual motivation, the importance of the setting, and how characters are impacted and changed by the actions in the narrative.

The Judas Contract proper follows a team of pre-established young heroes being unknowingly spied on by their newest superpowered member, Tara Markov. She works alongside Slade Wilson, a mercenary and personal rogue of the Teen Titans, feeding him important information in order to fulfill his contract to kidnap them, hence the title of the arc; there is a Judas among them. The contract is almost completed until Slade’s son, Joey, enters the picture, determined to prevent any more death at hands of his father, emotionally conflicting Slade enough for Tara to feel betrayed and collapse the cavern they had been in, killing herself in the process. In the end, it is her story alongside the former Robin, Dick Grayson, who is inspired to take up a new vigilante identity as a result. Titans, has the same basic idea of there being a mole in the group and the evolution of Dick from Robin to Nightwing, but the surrounding plot and progression are entirely different. The Titans had existed previously, but broke up due to a series of events involving Slade, starting with the murder of a teammate, and ending in the death of Joey. There’s much grief and trauma surrounding this, so when years later Dick decides to reopen the team’s old headquarters to house and train new young heroes he stumbled across, his old friends are a mix of angry, re-traumatized, and reluctant, especially with the re-emergence of their aforementioned enemy. In the place of Tara, there is Rose. Daughter of Slade and, again, the spy on the team who, unlike Tara, has a change of heart and reveals her betrayal in an attempt to warn her newfound friends.

The most striking element of both is the use of character, and in what direction the agents go in, especially in light of the overarching themes that they share; that of redemption, recovery, guilt, and betrayal. In the comic, the focal point for all of this is Tara. She is continually treated well by her teammates whom remain compassionate to her, despite her brashness and tendency to get violent. They know little of her, yet still welcome her into their home and personal lives. It is revealed to the audience early on that Tara is working for Slade, which makes each interaction she has with those she is deceiving all the more upsetting, even distressing to watch. Tara’s particular flavor of trauma deals with abandonment, something she acquired after being forced out of her home country, which later developed into malignant narcissism. She becomes very attached to the idea of being in a position of power and finds comfort in the presence of Slade, as he was the first person to justify her being alive. Tara, in the end, fails to redeem herself, instead the illusion she had built of stability and power came crumbling down after she spends ally after ally until there is no one, and she has no power left. Though it’s somewhat cynical, the idea here is that these cycles of betrayal and neglect cannot always be broken, that’s the point of this character; sometimes people are just too dysfunctional and if they are not willing to put in the work to get better and heal, they just won’t.

Rose, Tara’s counterpart, goes through a very different metamorphosis, despite the setup being similar. Her initial motivation was revenge for the brother she never knew, having been told it was the Titans who killed him when in fact it had been Slade, though it wasn’t intentional. Slade, however, blamed the Titans, specifically Dick, thus Rose believed him and was willing to participate as a double agent. When she encounters them for the first time, she is met with sympathy and understanding, people who didn’t value her as a weapon, creating incongruity with the story she was fed of elite fighters and master manipulators. Upon learning the truth about the circumstances under which her brother died, and who exactly killed him, she backs out. Rose realized she was lied to and manipulated, almost immediately grasping the gravity of the situation and seeing how hard she was pushing people whose greatest crime was daring to care about the very person she thought she was avenging. Later, she tells her newly acquired love interest the truth, following it up by saying, “I’d take it all back if I could. But I can’t.” (Zhang). Where Tara failed, Rose succeeded; she got rid of the poison in her life and recognized that she was the bad guy, alongside seeing the humanity of those she attempted to sabotage.

The theme of redemption and recovery doesn’t stop with Rose. It is furthered by all the other existing characters, young and old. On the basis of new beginnings for the second generation, and moving past the collective trauma and fear associated with teamwork for the first. More so than anyone else, this idea is present in the journey of Dick Grayson. In the original story, he is motivated to save his friends from an ugly fate while in the throes of a very real identity crisis involving the title of Robin, which he had recently discarded, believing that it was time for him to grow past the role and create a legacy entirely his own. Which he does do; he rebrands himself as Nightwing, rising to the occasion and overcoming the difficulties of abandoning a role that represented his culminative childhood and heritage to do save the people he loves. It is very much about the conquering of his external obstacles.

This is not the case in Titans, it is largely about his spectacular fall from grace and the struggle of building himself back up from rock bottom. He had kept a secret from all his closest friends about the death of Joey; he told them Joey was murdered before he found him, when in fact, he wasn’t. Joey died trying to protect Dick from Slade, and Dick felt so much guilt and shame in having been partially responsible that he lied about it for years. When his teammates find out, his worst nightmare comes true: they leave him. He is with next to no support, devoid of the family he fought tooth and nail to keep together, and is left in the tomb of his last chance to remain stable. While Rose and Tara had to redeem themselves to other people, Dick’s story is a redemption to himself, not anyone else. He stops doing things for other people and imagines himself of deserving the loneliness of, in essence, being re-orphaned. In a desperate attempt to find forgiveness, he seeks out Slade who, instead of offering the sought after peace of mind, says, “I sentence you to live alone (…) Forever knowing that your Titans family lives and breathes somewhere out there in the world, but you can never be with them.” (Morales). His lowest point is monumentally more devastating than his comic counterpart; he isolates himself entirely, going as far as to get himself jailed to carry out the self-imposed punishment, expecting to be abused and killed alone in a prison, the prospect of death barely startling him. In moments like this, the tragedy of the character hurts so much more because the audience knows that if he gets knocked down, he may not get back up, he has every reason not to. Which is why it is so earnest and exhilarating when he does. Dick was broken down to his factory parts, every mistake and bad trait not only was put on display, but magnified. He was made to confront those things before being able to piece himself back together, only then could he take on a new identity as Nightwing. Seeing him fall again is tangibly damaging to the character, so seeing him climb his way back up, scratching, clawing, slipping up, and struggling all the way, it’s all the more satisfying when he reaches the top.

A large part of this fall and rise, or in the case of The Judas Contract, the lack off a fall, is to do with the setting. The comic has all their main characters living in relative harmony or with their own spaces. When they are not off stopping cults from destroying political landscapes or battling supervillains, they are at home, going about their daily lives as somewhat normal people with jobs and relationships. It exemplifies that they all have a decent grasp on who they are, and even if they don’t, they have a bed to go back to and a support system to rely on. This is an established team with a running headquarters, lovingly named Titans Tower, the scene is only a part of the narrative as the backdrop, as a story punching bag that ultimately doesn’t matter, and that is all it needs to be. The story is much more interested in the series of events taking place, otherwise known as the act. Everything that goes down becomes a spoiler because there are so many plot points to cover and twists to reveal, thus the scene becomes story fuel, which in turn fuels the act, fueling the actors. There is less of a fall because they all have a home to turn to; it is built around the idea that the primary agents are at least somewhat realized people, with lives of their own. They react to the world around them as it throws obstacles, and the idea is re-enforced by the irrelevance of where the action takes place, wholly opposing the priorities of its live-action adaptation.

Not to say that Titans doesn’t jump from place to place, in fact it shifts its characters around quite a lot, but those moves are reactions to and influenced by the primary setting. The Titans operate out of, again, Titans Tower, but instead of a home and safe place, it is a monument to their old team’s sins. A ghost town that continues to haunt them, bringing back their darkest times and motivating nearly every move they make. When they first arrive, it’s tense, they’re subconsciously expecting the worst and prepare to bail at the first signs of trouble, which they eventually do. It is their return that sparks the entire story moving forward, and the presence of a looming shadow built from mistakes colours their reactions and triggers a sort of trauma response. Conversely, it is a beacon of hope and rebirth for the younger members. It is the first place wherein they have been allowed to be themselves, even at their worst, then collectively learn to get better as a group, a family even. The motif of past and present, trauma and recovery, informs the presentation of Titans Tower, making the growth visible in ways it previously hadn’t been. Using the setting as story plays into how Titans is structured; it drip-feeds the audience information, allowing the plot to meander so each development can happen and be processed before the next major plot point kicks in, and if they lose the setting, their home, there’s nothing else, thus the consequences are much steeper.

Throughout its two seasons run, Titans has been unapologetically divisive; deeply flawed characters with a universe quite different from that of the comics. It was not designed to make audiences comfortable, often forcing them to look at the worst parts of characters they might have previously idolized and showing the amount of hard work that has to be put into self-betterment. It is highly character-driven, mostly following interpersonal relationships and intimate growth. Barely anyone feels self-assured, often scrambling for any sense of identity. Though everyone goes through their fair share of change, this is ultimately Dick’s redemption story to himself. It departs from the source material, which often showed readers the best parts of people, that the downfall of heroes comes from outside sources while overall making a cynical statement about the cycle of abuse regarding Tara. These are heroes who know who they are and have no problem in the actions they make, whereas in the adaptation, almost every conflict is generated internally by lies and secrecy. The adaptation removes the halo from these supposed heroes and allows the emotions to be a bit dirty and muddled, creating an equally satisfying but very different take on a classic comic story.

#titans #DC Universe #DC comics #tara markov #rose wilson #joey wilson #jericho wilson #slade wilson #deathstroke #robin #nightwing #dick grayson #titans dcu #ceces lengthy excretes

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comicteaparty · 5 years ago

Text

May 16th-May 22nd, 2020 Creator Babble Archive

The archive for the Creator Babble chat that occurred from May 16th, 2020 to May 22nd, 2020. The chat focused on the following question:

What are you trying to show or tell with your story that you find to be underrepresented?

Eightfish (Puppeteer)

-Mind control/mind reading where both people are okay with it. I like themes of trust -"Superpowers" without secret identities. Because researchers aren't always evil goddamnit! -Portraying people who hurt others not as card-carrying megalomaniac villains but as pitiful and broken people. I haven't gotten to this part of my story yet but I hope I can do it well when I do. -Queer characters but they never say that they are or talk about it in any way. Yes I know I'm probably the only one who wants this

Also, maybe the idea that you don't need to "do anything" with your life for it to be worthwhile? But I'm not sure that I believe this myself

Deo101 [Millennium]

Mostly I'm trying to write about love, and I hardly think that's underrepresented! But, I'm also trying to show a bit of my own personal disabled experience, and I find that the kinds of things I've experienced are hardly represented at all. so, I think I'm trying to show a sort of hope and positivity for things that I think are usually pitied and viewed negatively, which I wish were done more.

chalcara [Nyx+Nyssa]

I just wanted a good ol' classic Eddings-style fantasy romp, but with characters that would usually be cast in the "evil" role, without going the "misunderstood" route.

Plus I wanted to write about shitty family (born, found and married) and that you do NOT have to forgive them in the slightest to move on and better your life.

Cronaj (Whispers of the Past)

Hmm... One of the main things I want to express with Whispers of the Past is that after past traumas, you may not be the same, but eventually, you can be okay again—even if your "okay" of now, is very different than your "okay" of the past. Normalcy isn't a constant. It shifts with time and becomes something new. A new stasis. A new peace. A new normal. I don't know if I've ever seen another story show this in this way. Another underrepresented theme in WotP is that of the hero choosing mundanity over the amazing. When the quest is over, and all is said and done, and the big baddie has been vanquished, the hero doesn't become ruler, or claim bountiful riches, or sail across the sea to find new lands. No, the hero returns to a world that is familiar and unremarkable. The hero would rather just be an average person.

shadowhood (SunnyxRain)

-Fanfiction. I’m very surprised there hasn’t been a webcomic talking about what it’s like to create fanfiction! But overall the culture involved around it and being a creator. -The relationship and hardships of having a stepparent/being one. Particularly stepdad/stepdaughter relationships -Anger as a reaction to trauma. I see a lot of trauma portrayed as mostly sad, but I want a story where the heroes feel anger, where it’s seen as both a motivator and a detriment -The hardships of dating as someone who’s both touch aversive and on the grey spectrum. Not everyone would be as wonderful or understanding, but it’s important to be around people who are and will stand by you.(edited)

eliushi [a winged tale]

This is why I gravitate towards all these stories made by independent creators I think. So many personal and poignant messages. I’m with you there on the queer characters Eightfish. I want a society where it’s fine to be what you wish and respected to be who you want to be. I think having more positive ways of showing how we can reach that sort of openness can be helpful. In AWT I further explore: - characters in STEM fields and approaches to research design - informed consent and what that means - how to live even when things are falling apart around you, when things are falling apart within you - navigating through crushes, confessions and friendships!

Wow the beginning sounds like the objectives at a science lecture and you won’t be wrong thinking so

Joichi [Hybrid Dolls]

For my Hybrid Dolls comic, there are several things I want to explore: - Psychological trauma and the effects or damage it can give, without proper treatment. -Writing queer characters without them needing a self discovery episode. But I know some identities are better to be upfront? But in the story, they simply live normal or exciting lives - Narcissism in a relative that one doesn't have to forgive. Being treated as invisible or judged by age, birthright. - Other Concepts of love explored. Attraction that isn't conventional romance. - Friendship bonds between girls, and my own take on an eccentric quirky girl lead. - Being unapologetically feminine, girls who doesn't need to feel like being 'one of the guys' I'm aiming for more character variety in historical fiction, instead of yet another story of a girl 'defying gender norms' by raised as a boy/disguises trope in other similar comics. So the women in my story, use their wits and charm.(edited)

DanitheCarutor

I complain about this all the time, so I'm just going to do a quick overview since I'm sure everyone is sick of it. - Abusers can be smart, popular, generous, charismatic and subtle. I'm kind of sick of them always being portrayed as really obvious, and sometimes really stupid, while there are people like that it's not very practical for them all to be like that. - General mental health stuff. More open representation of it, that it may be something you'll live with for the rest of your life and how that's okay. - Trauma, how it can change you, make you lose sight of the person you were and make you lose interest in things you used to enjoy. (this is coupled with mental health) - Non-romantic relationships with a queer cast. While this is showing up more in fantastical indie works, not very common in slice-of-life type of comics. I can only imagine this is because readers would find it boring or too mundane (can't tell you all how many people tell me my comic is boring. Lol), but being a person totally sick of romance in everything I wanted to do something focusing on family, friendship and the relationships we have with ourselves. - You don't always heal completely. I've already mentioned this, but I want to put a focus on how someone who's been through a lot of shit doesn't alway heal completely, and that's okay. I see in a lot of media where people just overcome their issues, and they live happily ever after with everything all perfect, I want something along the lines of "we still got a long way to go, but we're doing better and we're happier than before". - Not having labels for everything. This sounds like hipster trash, but I don't see the point in putting labels for every character. Like, I put labels for them, mostly during Pride, but it feels pointless in the comic. Apollo is happy to say he's a gay man, but with Julian they're not interested in categorising themselves, all they want is to be comfortable and I don't see nothing wrong with that.(edited)

LadyLazuli (Phantomarine)

For me, it’s the importance of communication and empathy, and the dangers of its absence. And it’s something I’ve had to think about a lot recently, being more active on social media Everyone’s got their reasons/methods for cutting people off, but I’ve never been a huge fan of a point-blank communication cut unless it’s absolutely warranted. And I’m not a fan of instant demonization when someone messes up or does something I don’t agree with. People are people. We’re all different and we all mess up and we all can change. Keeping lines of communication open is essential for allowing that change, or else we all get locked into little echo chambers where anyone outside is automatically The Worst.™ In a world where everything has gone to hell - and may go further yet - how can things heal when no one is even listening to each other? Where the other side is automatically at fault no matter what? It’s something I grew up struggling to understand (maybe because I grew up outside Washington DC, lol), and really affects me to this day. And if you do end up protecting yourself with silence, how can you still allow other perspectives to be gleaned? I don’t quite have the perfect formula for it. But unless someone is genuinely trying to cause harm, I try to at least attempt to understand where they might coming from - whether I accept it or not. Otherwise it’s so easy to see a lot of people as monsters. It’s a complicated topic for sure, especially nowadays. But yeah. Something like that

Miranda

Hmm that’s an excellent question. Well, a big thing is the varying effects of trauma and ways to handle it. Mainly how burying the past and ignoring traumatic events can affect someone. Also that villains can be people we relate to that just take an extreme way of reaching a goal that most people can understand And how shared experiences can bring people closer (not a unique one) I also want to portray queer characters that are not solely defined by their queerness and don’t have to announce it to everyone.

Tuyetnhi (Only In Your Dreams!)

- Having some talks about the implications of asking what you wish for and the potential consequences that comes with it. - Having more unappologic Vietnamese things happening in the comic. Giving representation to some common things that most Vietnamese Americans (or Asian Americans) can face in terms of relationships, roles, etc. Also since er i'm also directly affected by this, how does the Mixed-Asian Identity plays about it too.(edited)

hmmm I think another thing is that I want to bring up that men who express themselves in a more feminine form is valid and there's no shame that comes with it (positive masculinity hell yaaaa). Also same about expressing characters who are also queer but aren't defined about it either. it's just what they are along with their other interests and goals.(edited)

sierrabravo (Hans Vogel is Dead)

wow, this is a great question! I'm trying to be better about interacting here so I'll give it a shot. My comic is a historical fantasy set somewhat in Interwar Europe/WWII Europe and partially in a fantasy world based on the Brothers Grimm fairy tales. -War stories/histories that aren't about the actual experience of combat: most memoirs and diaries of soldiers I read doing research are about the day-to-day activities, meals, sleeping habits, and random thoughts instead of fight descriptions. It really bothers me when people zero in on in-depth battle maps and obsess over what kind of rifle was used by whom when, when I think it's much more interesting and important to look at the mindset of who was fighting, why they were fighting, and what emotional effect it had on everyone involved (including civilians!) -Asexuality, especially asexuality in history, bc it tends to "disappear" in the historical record as people who may have been ace before that label was widely used tend to not self-identify as it. I'm ace, people in the past were ace, it's a history I'd like to talk about more! -gryphons, they're cool monsters and I think they should be used much more than they are haha

eliushi [a winged tale]

I agree sierrabravo. I find it’s the personal, down to earth, close perspective accounts in historical records that resonate the most with me. Gryphons are also awesome!

snuffysam (Super Galaxy Knights)

I feel like there's two separate answers for Super Galaxy Knights Deluxe R (http://sgkdr.webcomic.ws/comics/) The first is what SGKDR represents compared to other webcomics. To me, a major thing I wanted to show with Super Galaxy Knights was a new style of creating webcomics. Animation is underrepresented as a storytelling style, sure, but the main thing I thought was underrepresented in the webcomic space was a "seasonal" method of storytelling. Like, most webcomics I see are either "each page is its own thing" or "it's one big long story, with chapters mostly there to split up different scenes/locations". I very rarely see webcomics build to a major climax in the story, then a resolution, then introduce a brand new conflict. The second is what SGKDR represents compared to other action series (specifically shonen manga/anime, as that's what SGKDR riffs off of the most). I can only think of one shonen story with a female lead, I can't think of any with an explicitly LGBTQ+ protagonist (i only know of one implied one), romance is usually handled very poorly (characters usually get paired with the protagonist due to being female and in the same room, with very little actual relationship building), there aren't many varieties of character motivations besides "pursuit of power/status" of some kind, power scaling usually gets way out of whack, and I... I dunno, I love those kinds of stories, but it just gets tiring after a while. So, I wrote my own that had all the things I wanted in it.

Cronaj (Whispers of the Past)

@sierrabravo (Hans Vogel is Dead) I totally agree with the difficulty and importance of talking about ace representation in a historical setting! It's extremely difficult to talk about when asexuality was so unknown at the time. I'm eager to see how you handle it!

eliushi [a winged tale]

@snuffysam (Super Galaxy Knights) can you speak about

I very rarely see webcomics build to a major climax in the story, then a resolution, then introduce a brand new conflict.

I find slice of life/ some really long mangas with continuous streams of antagonists/web novel like formats use this too but unsure if that’s what you were referring to?

I am also looking forward to more ace representation in the webcomic world

snuffysam (Super Galaxy Knights)

Yeah that format is the sort of thing I was talking about. It's out there, but I don't see it very often.

eliushi [a winged tale]

Ah gotcha! Thanks! I recall some slice of life high school ones I’ve read years ago that have that sort of narrative structure (which feels like the story can continue forever).

Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn)

There's a recurring trope in SF/F where the robot/AI/golem learns that it wants to have free will and make its own decisions. Or there's a biological species that are assumed to be "natural servants", and inevitably you get to the reveal that they're not actually any different from humans in terms of wanting self-determination and independence. If you think of this as a metaphor for relationships between different groups of humans, then yeah, that's the obvious outcome! But one of the great things about SFF is that you can write things that aren't just "direct metaphors for real-world issues, with spaceships and dragons thrown in for flavor." So in But I'm A Cat Person, I wanted to write something about, what if there's a group of beings who really aren't going to develop free will or self-determination? What's the reasonable, ethical way to deal with that? ...also: there's a ton of nonbinary characters in webcomics these days, but at least I can say BICP did it before it was cool.(edited)

Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn)

Leif & Thorn, meanwhile, has a regular old "character forced into servitude, who definitely has independent thoughts and desires that are being controlled" situation. And there's no "Master has given Dobby a sock" loophole they can exploit for a quick fix, so they have to keep up a long-term process of double-talk and rule-bending, to communicate Leif's actual feelings without getting him in trouble. The "realistic language barriers with no convenient universal-translator to get around them" situation -- which, in this comic, is one of the biggest Underrepresented Things I wanted to explore -- makes it that much harder...

Capitania do Azar

I gotta commend you on that, @Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn) because you're out there serving my bilingual needs

kayotics

Ingress Adventuring Company is all about the hero after they've finished saving the world, which I think is pretty underrepresented. It's not a quiet contemplative story, since there's still a lot of fun questing stuff going on, but I'm trying to make it clear that this all takes place after the main character has done his big saving the world quest and is still trying to figure out his place after supposedly settling down.

Eightfish (Puppeteer)

I love that Kay

Toivo feels like he has so much history behind him

sssfrs (JOE IS DEAD)

I'm trying to represent orthodox/religious jews because I almost never see my community represented in media. There are orthodox Jewish characters that will be appearing in Joe is dead. In future comics I want to try to plan the story more around including more religious Jewish characters because there still aren't that many in my current project

Also mental illnesses, like trauma and intellectual disability I want to represent my own experiences with it

There isn't as much of a distinct lack of that in media but it's good to have in stories(edited)

Also androgynous lesbians

Nutty (Court of Roses)

With Court of Roses, I'm trying to tell a fantasy story that's for older audiences but proving that Mature Fantasy doesn't have to be ultra gritty. People have each other to depend on, the world isn't bleak, and not every noble is greedy, peasant is starving, etc. I know a lot of fantasy likes to take from realistic Medieval Europe, but the freeing part about making my own world is that it doesn't HAVE to be like that. Their religion is different, more accepting, and again, people are more focused on looking out for each other and having a good time.

Mature themes are still present, such as murder, banditry/pillaging, alcohol, traumatic experiences, etc. but my goal isn't to present them in a darker fashion.(edited)

keii’ii (Heart of Keol)

I wanted to make something influenced by my culture (Korean) without heavily drawing from the mythology. Mythology is just one facet of a culture, yet a lot of people who haven't read it expect HoK to be all about Korean mythology just because it wears a metaphorical hanbok. No. It reflects the traditional aesthetics, but more importantly, the cultural values and the unspoken rules of the society, regardless of whether I agree with them or not. Related to that is body language. I don't want my non-American characters using American body language, such as shrugging, or American ways of using eye contact, etc. I want to show them using (mostly) Korean gestures, sitting, standing and walking like Koreans. I always feel like there's a huge missed opportunity when friggin' aliens use American body language in sci-fi! I understand why people do that -- it makes the work more clear/accessible to English-speaking audience. But in HoK I'm taking the other path. It's a challenge for sure, but I would not have it any other way.

On a more thematic level, I really wanted to explore deeply hurtful experiences that happen in genuinely caring relationships. It's not about good guys vs bad guys, it's not about a nice person being hurt by someone who just doesn't care. Those stories certainly are valid, just not what I wanted to do with HoK. This story is about people who love each other, but don't always know how to communicate their love or needs.

Joichi [Hybrid Dolls]

I am also looking forward to more ace representation in the webcomic world

@eliushi [a winged tale] I agree, the ace rep is a challenge I would like to take on, I'm also curious how it will work in historical times? Even tho I'm ace,I'm still learning new innovative things(edited)

eliushi [a winged tale]

It’ll be important to dig deeper and research into what things were like if you want to capture the authenticity of the period you’re writing in! I’m sure there are personal accounts or documentation of these lived experiences.

Capitania do Azar

I see all these beautiful answers and I almost struggle to find something other than those to say I guess for O Sarilho https://www.sarilho.net/en/ I wanted to write a weird love letter to where I live and how I see my country (tho I'm glad I got other places I love in it too). To my knowledge, we don't get much like that, or at least that's not from a city perspective which is not what I'm trying to go for, at all. There's a lot of tiny cultural things that I want to touch that may be invisible for people who are not from here, but I'm glad that I'm including them for those three readers in the back. Linked to this, in a way, is the fact that I get really tired of those white/gray Sci-fi stories where everything is super clean and super white and technology is absolutely overwhelming and organised. I want Sci-fis in the woods too. And finally, there's something about the way violence is portrayed a lot of times that almost makes you feel like human life just is that cheap. I really don't want to go that road, I'm doing my best to tell a story about war in which death still leaves a toll and violence affects everyone involved

TL;DR I WANTED TO PAINT MY HOUSE

Cronaj (Whispers of the Past)

And finally, there's something about the way violence is portrayed a lot of times that almost makes you feel like human life just is that cheap. I really don't want to go that road, I'm doing my best to tell a story about war in which death still leaves a toll and violence affects everyone involved

@Capitania do Azar This is so beautiful (and tragic). This is something I also hope to express in my work. Super underrepresented message surprisingly.

eliushi [a winged tale]

I enjoy exploring sci-fi beyond the current conventions and absolutely love your setting shizamura!(edited)

Capitania do Azar

Thank u I really love Sci-fi but I don't appreciate that it has become associated with a very specific aesthetic because tbh I find it very limiting

DanitheCarutor

@Capitania do Azar That is actually really refreshing! Horror and action are so packed with glamorized death and violence, you can get really desensitized. The only stories I've ever seen that take those things seriously are war movies based on real life events, like Saving Private Ryan, (which my grandpa, a Korean War vet, said was the most accurate portrayal of what war was like.) and even then you get flicks that totally glamorize the whole thing. I really admire you wanting to put that sense of gravity onto the violence and death in your work, also I love when creators want to tackle war in all it's "too close to home", upsetting realism.

Capitania do Azar

I really love Saving Private Ryan, it is a very nice portrayal with a great message: nobody wants to be here

DanitheCarutor

Yes! I love Saving Private Ryan too, it was nice seeing a movie that didn't make war look like some fantastical bs.

#ctparchive #comics #webcomics #indie comics #comic chat #comic discussion #comic tea party #ctp #creator interview #comic creator interview #creator babble

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dragonroyaly · 6 years ago

Note

Alright, I'll bite. Tell me about your new MID AU.

WHY THANK YOU FOR ASKING ANON!

Quick heads up though: Death warning. I don’t usually make only fluffy AUs and this is not one of them. Proceed with caution.

Okay so like there’s a bunch of shit going on in this AU and I’m not exactly sure where the best point to start is so let’s start with Pierce.

I like the idea that the Daemos have little elements, so I decided to take a swing at that too. And I swung and Pierce ended up being like a grim reaper sort of dude, becuase who better for that role than the gentle giant.

He can see ghosts like they were actual people, and he can kinda sense when who he’s seeing is dead or not, but with the magic crisis and all the ‘Sense Death’ ability is dulling as the magic drains.

He tries to help ghosts move on to the afterlife the best he can while still doing his job, he really does care about this as the Grim type of Daemos are super rare and usually ghosts can’t really move on without help, but also being Asch’s guard or whatever he does interferes with that a great deal

So, cannon shit happens, y’all know the drill, and in comes Rileigh.

Rileigh is an OC, Ava’s twin brother, and very dead.

And in comes Ava’s part of the story. I keep giving characters tragic backstories becuase I’m That Bitch, I guess, and Ava’s Tragic Backstory is the kinda cliche ‘Dad was just Gone, mom never talked about him, mom was also highly abusive’ shit, y’all know the drill.

Cut to a couple years later, their mom either dies from like alcohol poisoning or she gets caught or something, I actually haven’t thought that part through, she just can’t take care of them anymore one way or another.

So, Andrew and Devon adopt them, both are really Really nervous because as previously mentioned their mom Was Not Nice and they hoped there was such thing as good parenting but also they were like eleven at the time and hadn’t been shown kindness by like Anyone before.

And Andrew and Devon were really great dads! They loved Ava and Rileigh so much! They knew their mom hadn’t been the best and they’d be wary of them one way or another but like the underestimated how bad that’d be.

A thing about their mom, she was usually all-around bad but sometimes thing got real good for a couple days, maybe a couple weeks, she would spoil Ava and Rileigh and be really nice but then things got really really REALLY bad and Ava and Rileigh decided next time that happens they’re just gonna end it.

So, using their not-too-smart and very traumatized eleven-year-old brains, they decided that Andrew and Devon would eventually turn out like their mom did and tried to kill themselves by overdosing on some pills they found.

And Rileigh did. But Ava didn’t. So Rileigh just decides he wants to see Ava safe and followed her around as a ghost, he’d move on when Ava died and he’d be with her in the afterlife.

Fast forward to cannon events, Rileigh’s still following Ava around, Pierce can still see ghosts, and eventually figured out Rileigh was a ghost.

So, Pierce does what he does, tries to see what Rileigh wants so he can peacefully move on. Rileigh isn’t having any of that, and Pierce can’t even meet his requests becuase he’s just like “I’ll move on when Ava moves on.” “But Ava’s still alive. I’m not going to kill her.” “Exactly.”.

Rileigh is happy that someone can see him, and Pierce doesn’t really have anything better to do, so sometimes they’ll just stay up and chat. Usually in the livingroom in the middle of the night when everyone else is asleep.

Anywho back to Ava for a bit.

I have trouble seeing a world with magic where people aren’t able to sense if others have magic or not, even if it’s more dulled than others are, so the Daemos would be able to tell Ava’s completely bullshitting it after a while.

So, I do the logical thing and I give Ava magic. Extremely powerful magic. And the Daemos know. Ava does not. She used to think she might have superpowers because in moments where she wasn’t completely there, like her being sick, or just waking up, or extremely zoned out, she swore she could levitate things or fly or freeze things, set them on fire, grow plants faster, stuff like that, but eventually chalked it up to her having an overactive imagination.

So, another thing, Ava has a lot of magic, easily enough to fuel Daemos for another century at least, but it’s all kinda just trapped inside her body and whatever the Daemos are sensing is a very dulled version of her true power. If Ava gets a scratch or something, more magic would come out.

So, one day they’re all just kinda la-dee-da-ing around the apartment, the boys are hanging out in the livingroom, Ava’s in the kitchen making soup or something, chopping carrots, and she accidentally nicks her finger becuase she has the hand-eye cordiation of a blind goose.

Cue all of the boys kinda just freezing in shock because it doesn’t matter if you have hyper magic sensing (Rhys) or dull magic sensing (Noi), that’s more magic than they’ve felt in their lives.

All from a tiny scratch. And Ava’s just like ‘Ow yikes gotta go get a mcfricken band-aid’ and all the boys are just. Staring. Becuase they knew she was powerful but not to this degree.

Rileigh, still very ghostly, is kinda there, witnessing their shock like ‘??? What’s going on? Yo Pierce you wanna explain this shit? Is it the smell of blood, are y’all like vampires or something??’

Needless to say the Daemos are very careful around Ava from then on becuase she could probably blink at them and kill them instantly. Though she didn’t know that.

Rileigh learns what happens, laughs, continues to have a mini existential crisis becuase holy shit would he have had that much magic??

Fast forwards a couple months. The Boys have now been gone on Daemos for like two years and no one can get to them becuase there’s no longer enough magic left to open a portal to Earth. I am estimating on the time here go easy on me.

Pierce has gotten himself into a bit of a sticky situation. He has. The biggest fucking crush on Rileigh. Cue a couple internal crisises or whatever the plural of that word is, asking Ava what love felt like because all of the boys are stupid with emotions and Pierce is no different, Ava very loudly responding “BABY DON’T HURT ME” as a knee-jerk reaction to Pierce asking ‘What is love’ and a very quick run-down on memes.

This is also where my now commonly used line “I mean you do you but I have questions” comes from. “So how would y’all react if I said I had a crush on Ava’s dead brother” Pierce says. “I mean you do you but I have questions.” Asch says.

Ava is also aware she has magic now, and very strong magic at that. Still can’t use it for shit. Has made books go flying straight out the window when she tried to lift them with her telekinesis or whatever.

Fast forwards another little bit, Rileigh also has a crush on Pierce, tells him becuase he’s not a fucking coward and also knows emotions and shit.

Quick note, I know Daemos don’t do human shit but like kissing is a thing on Daemos becuase I fucking said so. They also tap horns together but like irrelevant.

So, Pierce, due to the nature of his magic and me being a cliche bitch, if he kisses someone they’ll straight-up die. He knows this from experience and swore off love after that.

So back to the scene, Rileigh and Pierce kiss, which would’ve looked hella weird if you couldn’t see ghosts but Pierce made sure that literally no one else was in the same room as them when he and Rileigh talked.

Pierce describes this as quite possibly the best thing that’s ever happened to him and kissing Rileigh feels like heaven.

And guess what happens next?

It takes a hot minute but eventually Pierce is like ‘Wait a sec Rileigh isn’t giving me dead people vibes anymore what’s up with that’ and both kinda freak out when they realize apparently that legit brought Rileigh back to life.

Cue Rileigh yelling becuase no one could hear him for the past like twelve odd years so he got a little used to just Shouting when he wanted to, and he woke Ava up.

Ava who was VERY surprised to see her previously dead brother (Who now looked her age because if one twin dies and the other doesn’t and the dead twin doesn’t move on they’ll continue to age like nothing happened), Pierce being caught in the middle of this kinda just stuck with the surprised Pikachu face, Rileigh who’s feeling Hella Hyper and Happy becuase he’s alive and also Pierce fucking kissed him.

There were tears. Ava cried and clung onto Rileigh. Rileigh also cried. Pierce was just sitting on the couch for all of it wondering what the hell he should do. At some point the other boys come out and are collectively like ‘WHO FUCK THE IS THIS BITCH??’ And Pierce has to explain the whole thing in detail becuase Ava and Rileigh are too caught up in their little ‘Holy shit you’re alive’ ‘HOLY SHIT I’M ALIVE’ thing.

Cut to like a week later, everything’s perfect, Rileigh’s alive, Pierce has gotten himself an entire boyfriend (That he can kiss and stuff without killing!), Ava finally got a mcfricken job. Andrew and Devon don’t know about any of this becuase that’d mean explaining even more stuff to them that Ava’s not sure she can do without getting a headache.

Asch suddenly realizes “WAIT SHIT WE’RE SUPPOSED TO GET MAGIC BACK TO DAEMOS SHIT” So after Ava gets home they have to do that.

And they fuckin do that, just open a portal in the middle of the livingroom and go through. They didn’t exactly have a plan, just take a bit of Ava’s magic, she has enough of it to fuel that entire dimension for ages, as previously mentioned, and with Rileigh in the mix, who does in fact have magic like Ava does, there should be a peaceful way to solve this, right?

They did not get to explain the plan fully before The Daemos are like “So like if we kill The Magic Princess we’ll never have to worry about magic and right? Right. Okay bye we’re gonna go publicly murder her now.” And dragged a very confused and panicked Ava away before any of them can react.

I should say during this whole thing Rileigh was not immediately present. He was out getting groceries or something, I don’t know.

The Boys forget they can like rebel against the kingdom or go after them and explain that you don’t need to kill her you idiots just take like a teaspoon of blood and we’ll be fine for decades but you know how Daemos are. Only using their Violence Brain and all.

It takes Rileigh getting home with Lorelai in tow, he ran into her at some point and she was like “Hey you look like Ava!!” and Rileigh being like “Oh yeah I’m her twin!!” an Lorelai being herself and he ends up bringing her home with him to hang out or something.

Rileigh finds the portal and all there and is frozen like “What the fuck??!?! THEY’RE GONNA KILL HER??? NO???” And the boys still don’t remember they can just save Ava and go fuck off to her apartment for like until they die.

Lorelai, understandably, completely snaps and goes rushing into the castle or whatever because portal landed like right outside of Asch’s room, grabs two swords off the wall, like, you know those displays?

So it’s just Elizabeth’s fight scene from Black Butler but Lorelai and Daemos guards and Lorelai just guessing off of where Ava’s screaming is coming from.

The Boys finally fucking remember this does not have to end with Ava dying, which was pointed out to them by Lorelai, who is completely human with absolutely no magic whatsoever, and not built for fighting whatsoever, her just rushing in without a second thought, and also Rileigh, who screamed at them and kicked Asch in the head.

So they follow the trail of dead bodies Lorelai’s leaving behind and Ava’s screaming and end up looking at where there’s already a crowd, Ava’s about to be killed, Lorelai’s not close enough to save her, Asch fireballs whoever was about to kill her the fuck away.

At this point, Ava had just about complete shut down, just zoned out due to panic, so she was just kinda sitting there in front of the shocked audience who by this point had been like ‘Wait we were running out of magic? Wait killing her will give us like unlimited magic? WAIT THE PRINCE JUST KILLED A FUCKING GUARD WHO IS THIS LADY??’

So after like five minutes the boys and Lorelai and Rileigh are all surrounding Ava and trying to protect her and then.

And then the goddamn king shows up.

The king, very feared, Asch’s father, Rhal’s too but like Rhal had been backed into a corner due to Lorelai being Angerey so he wasn’t present for any of this.

And everything just seems to freeze. The crowd, the guards, Asch and Co’, Ava was still zoned out, Rileigh was clinging onto Ava, and everyone was staring at the king.

He takes about the same stance as everyone else like ‘So spilling this lady’s blood will give us unlimited magic? Sounds good to me if y’all aren’t going to kill her I’ll do it myself.’ but like logically more threatening sounding than that but like before he can do anything Ava kinda half zones back and looks up at him.

Now, here’s why Ava and Rileigh have magic and Daemos doesn’t.

Daemos had gods, very powerful gods, but eventually they all got tired and fled to different dimensions. The gods were fueling everyone’s magic, the followers of certain gods got certain powers, y’all get it.

So, eventually, there was just this one god left, right, the main dude who was the only one fueling anyone’s magic anymore.

He got tired, and he got lonely, so he gave the rest of his followers magic power and fled to earth. The King, who was his most loyal follower, got the highest amount of magic. Please note that The King was a total nobody before this. Didn’t even have magic. Why is Asch like that then? His mother, obviously.

The God went on to fall in love with Ava and Rileigh’s mother, and, surprise surprise, is Ava and Rileigh’s father. And even before all the other gods just left and dumped their duties onto him, he was still the most powerful. So that’s why Ava and Rileigh are so damn jam-packed with magic, they’re demi-gods.

Ava, who is still mostly zoned out but some deep dark part of her definitely recognizes this dude’s magic is the same as hers.

So she’s like “You have my magic, that you don’t deserve. Give it back.” In like the Irene voice or whatever and she stands up and looks at The King and please be aware she is zoned-out during this entire thing.

The King, who can also sense the same magic he has in Ava but definitely stronger, but is an idiot, goes ‘No, you will give me, me and the rest of Daemos your magic.’

And Ava’s like ‘Then if you will not give me my magic back willingly, I will take it back by force’ and straight-up absorbs this dude’s magic leaving him completely powerless and then both The King and Ava pass the fuck out. Rileigh absorbs half the magic Ava absorbed from The King becuase she couldn’t take all of it on her own and still be stable since like he tainted it or whatever. Daemos were not meant to handle magic, humans were.

So like no one knows what’s going on becuase both The King and Ava are unconscious and everyone’s still trying to handle the shock of the whole event and Lorelai never really snapped back out of Fight Brain.

After a moment, Leif just scratches Ava’s arm enough to bleed a little bit which, as I’ve said, is enough to fuel the dimension for like a solid year or so human time, and then they all run back to Earth and close the portal before anyone can get mad at them.

Ava wakes up after a bit, has one hell of a fever since The King had tainted the magic she had just absorbed and that was Not Fun, but they explain everything to her after the whole sick event after now like once a year Ava has to give up a tiny bit of blood to keep Daemos running happily and The Boys live on Earth becuase they like it there and Pierce has Rileigh and they’re all happy.

There’s a whole other disaster when Andrew and Devon find out about all of this because Ava’s just decided it’s not worth lying about. She wasn’t even sure how she’d explain Rileigh.

“RILEIGH’S ALIVE??”

“Shit dude yeah he sure is. Hey he’s got a boyfriend too, did you know that?”

“RILEIGH’S ALIVE AND HE HAS A- WHAT?!”

“Yeah, Pierce brought him back to life through the power of love or some shit. Hey did y’all know me and Rileigh are demigods?”

And at that point they’re just kinda staring in complete shock.

Lorelai always goes back to Daemos for their yearly teaspoon of blood sacrifice as Ava’s personal guard. Ava did not ask for this. No one asked for this. Lorelai is feared throughout Daemos due to the whole Elizabeth Fight Scene stunt she pulled. She low-key enjoys seeing people this scared of her. She is aware this is a problem.

Anywho this AU was like a lot more detailed than I previously thought, but it’s fun being able to talk about this. If anyone has anymore questions like specifically or as like a suggestion for this AU let me know!

#I Was Asked Shit #How did I come up with any of this? Flow Free and music and my overactive imagination!#I also have another AU I might mush into this one where one of Ava's dads was in the mafia but like #Might not do that #Aphmau #My Inner Demons #I don't actually remember how Rileigh specifically came to be but hell I love him

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jamesginortonblog · 6 years ago

Link

“Within our little nuclear family of four, it's completely normal to have type 1 diabetes; my dad is the only one who doesn't have it,

Despite his family history, the diagnosis still came as a blow.

“It was traumatic, because I'm a terrible hypochondriac anyway,” admits James. “But it was also manageable because I had the best role model in my sister, who was training to be a doctor. I called her so many times, worrying about things, which was strange, because I'd always been the protective older brother, keeping an eye on Jessie at parties.

“Having type 1 was particularly hard for her through her teenage years when she had so many other things to contend with. But then, when it was my turn, she got me through it, too.

“Because my sister had been diagnosed so young, my parents already knew all about management and control, and also the need for that psychological balance between recognising that it's a serious, life-long condition, but not letting it define us.

“As a family, we're so relaxed about our diabetes. My mum has had to bring needles to film sets because I sometimes forget.

“We don't think of ourselves as a 'diabetic family'. We're just three type 1s getting on with it.

A couple of weeks ago, his sister Jessie, now 31, had her first baby, a healthy boy named Kit weighing more than 10 lb. “She used Dexcom to monitor her blood glucose. Her HbA1c [average blood glucose over the past three months] was perfect throughout her pregnancy, so she was really able to enjoy it,” says her brother.

What's made the real difference for James is a new continuous glucose monitor called a Dexcom G6, which looks like a small battery attached to a plaster and sends a constant stream of data to his phone, sounding an alarm if his blood sugar level is beginning to go too high or too low. It is the only monitor so accurate that users don't need to finger-prick at all.

James wears his CGM on his chest. "But on days when I need to bare my torso, I attach it to one of my buttocks," he laughs.

James chooses not to use an insulin pump, preferring to give himself injections.

“As an actor, I'm constantly changing costumes. Sometimes I have to do a scene naked, with my top off, or wearing tight clothes. I don't want to be attached to two pieces of equipment.

"I give myself around 15 insulin injections a day," he says — this complements his main insulin dose. “I'm happy with that because it suits my lifestyle. Bear in mind it's a 5mm needle and it takes me all of seven seconds. I can do three during a meal — my Dexcom tells me if I need more insulin before pudding — and no one even notices.

“I know how lucky I am to have gone from painful finger-pricking 20 times a day, to the Libre, to Dexcom. I want to be able to sing from the rooftops how brilliant this technology is. But I'm painfully aware that not everyone can have it on the NHS [National Health System].

“The sooner this is made available to all type 1s from an early age, the more manageable the condition will be,'” he says. “It means people with diabetes can relax and live their lives without the constant burden of feeling different.

At the conference [TAD Talk 2019], he was asked whether he'd thought of taking a different career direction in the light of his diabetes.

“I was proud to answer that I never thought for a moment it would slow me down,” he says.

“The fantastic thing about an event like this is that you meet not only ridiculous luvvies like me, but professional athletes — cyclists, boxers, and triathletes — with type 1, who live ferociously physical lives and are at the top of their game.

James himself is so comfortable with type 1, he now describes it as 'like a mini-superpower'.

“It's given me extraordinary empathy," he says. "And that empathy extends to everyone — epileptics, coeliacs, diabetics — anyone who has something that makes them a little bit different. It's a lovely, empowering thing.”

#James Norton #T1D #diabetes #my gifs

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lalobalives · 6 years ago

Text

At five, I knew how to write my name and I knew how to tell myself stories up in the plum tree in our backyard. This was how I calmed myself down, and how I mothered and affirmed myself. I did that through story. I still do that through story.

See, even then I felt everything profoundly. It’s who I am. I feel everything profoundly. This is my superpower.

This weekend, I was attacked by my sister and her husband. They didn’t like what I’d written in “A letter to my brother in what would have been his 46th birthday.” They were malicious and cruel. They wanted to hurt me. This has been my sister’s M.O. all my life. 43 years. Her behavior this weekend is further evidence of this.

Her husband has also been disrespectful and abusive. He doesn’t like me and I don’t like them.

They have built a narrative about me, who I am and the work I do. They went into my blog looking for ammunition. This experimental essay gave them what they were looking for. They were so riled, they had to go out of their way to tell me how pathetic and pitiful they think I am. They commented on my blog. They sent messages to my author page. They had their daughter send me messages too. They called family members. They sent the link to people and I think they may have posted the blog link somewhere online because in matter of hours, I had hundreds of hits on my blog.

It was vicious what they did. The smear campaign was a direct attempt to hurt me. It was violent and vitriolic. That’s what hurts me the most, that my sister is capable of such cruelty. That my sister so willfully wants to and tried to hurt me… Sadly, I wish this was the first time.

No one wants to know that someone they love, that they share blood with, wants to see them in pain.

It’s obvious neither of them knows anything about art or why we writers of nonfiction write what we write. I don’t care to try to defend myself or my work. I know who I am. I know why I do this work. I know it’s not for validation or profit. I know that silence killed my brother and I won’t continue to perpetuate that silence. I won’t carry it anymore. My daughter won’t carry it.

I know that at the root of this work I do, the stories I write, the revelations I make, is love. I want to heal and silence doesn’t heal anything. Trauma will continue to do its damage as long as we don’t face it. They don’t have to face it, but I will. I choose me. I choose my heart. I choose healing.

They can try to crush my spirit but they won’t succeed. This is my life’s work. I know that. They don’t have to like it. I’m not here for their approval.

I am sharing the hateful messages they sent me. They want the world to believe this of me. They want a platform to say it. I’ll give them the platform. This is how sure I am of myself and my work.

See, my sister has never asked me questions about my pain or my grief or my writing. She has tried to shame and accuse and drag me. This is not new. This has been her M.O. all my life. 43 years. Here’s the thing: I ain’t scared. I know who I am and I know what drives my work and I know no one can take that from me. She can’t take that from me. She’s taken enough. I have given her enough.

If I was ashamed of my work, if I was hiding it, if I didn’t want people to read it, I wouldn’t have a public blog.

If you think I write for validation or likes, you don’t understand writing or writers or why we do what we do.

I live out loud. I am who I am everywhere.

This weekend’s events affirmed my conviction in my work. See, before the attack, the students in my Writing Our Lives Advanced Personal Essay Class submitted their essays for publication. It was beautiful to create this space for them and facilitate the process.

At the end of class, they thanked me. They went around sharing how much I’ve helped them in their journeys, the audacity I’ve given them.

I squirmed in my seat. I have such trouble taking compliments. I’m working on this…

It was on my way home after having a drink with my fiance that the smear campaign began.

I am exhausted. I am sad. I am disappointed. I am heartbroken that my sister wants to see me in pain.

I am also flared nostril, clenched jaw, white knuckle angry. I’m going to let myself feel all of it, because what your resist, persists. I will put it into the writing and I will put all this energy into my work and my stories. I will not be silenced.

Something beautiful also came out of this ugliness too:

So many people rallied around me. They called, texted, inboxed me and commented. They reminded me of how touched and inspired they’ve been by my work. They told me stories of how my work helped them write theirs. They affirmed me and checked in and said fuck that and fuck them, we gotchu. This weekend my friends and followers witnessed the kind of abuse I’ve been enduring from some of my family for a long long time.

I am so grateful for the love I’ve received.

I know I am loved and appreciated.

And I know Imma write these stories with even more fervor and conviction.

I also know that I am even more unfuckwithable than I thought.

***

I want to remind people who follow my work for insight on this autobiographical writing life:

Having an emotional reaction to abuse doesn’t make you weak. Sharing your feelings about it doesn’t make you weak. Writing about it or posting about it doesn’t make you weak. You’re not weak if you don’t immediately walk away. You’re not weak if you bite back. You’re not weak if you can’t immediately let it go. You’re not weak if you need time to process and rage and cry or so whatever you need to do to get that shit out of your body.

And, yes, this is what may happen when you dare to write about people who have hurt and been cruel to you. When you dare to expose these secrets that have traumatized and continued to traumatize you. When you have the audacity to choose you and your healing.

Writing about your life has its costs, make no mistake. I choose me. I choose my healing again and again. I choose my daughter. I choose the little girl I was who felt unloved and unprotected and unsupported. And I will fight anyone who comes for me for writing my truth. And I do so unapologetically.

I know what’s at stake. Do you? Are you ready? It ain’t easy. It will hurt sometimes. It will burn. But in the long run, the healing that will happen will astound you. Ask yourself: who protected you? Who are you trying to shield? Have they ever or would they now go to battle for you? Have they held you when you ached? Would they now? Sit with those answers. Let that be your fuel.

***

Today I know this: Story has been how I take back my power since I was five. It’s how I mother myself and take care of myself and heal.

I am my own anti-venom.

No one will take that from me. Ever.

I am my own anti-venom At five, I knew how to write my name and I knew how to tell myself stories up in the plum tree in our backyard.

#autobiographical writing #essay #healing #trauma #writing

4 notes · View notes

allofthisnonsenseplease · 7 years ago

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firesonic152 - 10/31/2017 superheroes??

SuspiciousPopsicle - 10/31/2017 Yus. -'u'- Who's got what sorts of powers? Do we wanna make Jack your standard super strength, super speed, flight, lego hair type? or something more tailored to his personality? also, if option A, should he have a secret power as well which he doesn't like using for some reason? and for Gabe, Reaper-esque powers? Or flip it to something that still reference that, but goes in a different direction?

firesonic152 - 10/31/2017 LEGO HAIR LMAO

SuspiciousPopsicle - 10/31/2017 or maybe even have him be more like Batman? Where he's got skills and gadgets, but isn't super human or enhanced? SUperman has fucking lego hair.

firesonic152 - 10/31/2017 ooo i like the batman-esque thing for gabe !!

SuspiciousPopsicle - 10/31/2017 you could pop it right off his head.

firesonic152 - 10/31/2017 LOL jack is just edgy captain america

SuspiciousPopsicle - 10/31/2017 oh, yeah, him too. like a lego man. i feel like it clicks into place too neat.

firesonic152 - 10/31/2017 XDDDDDD i want him to secretly be a mutant or something and yeah like you said earlier has some secret ability bc of it that he doesn't use

SuspiciousPopsicle - 10/31/2017 honest to god, my first thought as i'm sitting here considering what Jack's secret power ought to be was 'can give opponents instant boners' SO. setting that aside XD

firesonic152 - 10/31/2017 AHAHAHAHAHA

SuspiciousPopsicle - 10/31/2017 next thought was that he has some sort of mind control thing he can do--like, he can make an opponent so enamored of him that they'll follow any order he gives. but i kinda want his power to be integrated with the other things he can do

firesonic152 - 10/31/2017 ooooo i actually like the mind control thing... like he's really uncomfortable w leadership bc he doesn't like making people do things

SuspiciousPopsicle - 10/31/2017 yupyup

firesonic152 - 10/31/2017 which informs his whole loner schtick refuses to join any superhero organization

SuspiciousPopsicle - 10/31/2017 and he hates using it bc of ethical reasons, but he WILL if lives are at stake

firesonic152 - 10/31/2017 yeah QoQ but he always feels gross after

SuspiciousPopsicle - 10/31/2017 yup. and he tries so hard to avoid it so that he doesn't start to depend on it. plus, part of the reason he feels gross is bc it does give him sort of a power rush, and there is a slight temptation to use it to nudge events in his favor when he's just out, like, barhopping or whatever.

firesonic152 - 10/31/2017 yepppppp especially to get people in bed w him

SuspiciousPopsicle - 10/31/2017 exactly but that is All Sorts of Wrong and he knows it so he doesn't ever ever do it, and he hates himself for even thinking that it's a possibility. which, to be fair, it technically is. just a repugnant one. anyways, is this sort of a tiger & bunny thing where there's lots of heroes, and they have like, one special quirk, but sometimes someone with the proper tech can go be a hero too? and everybody just kinda thinks that Jack is one of the latter?

firesonic152 - 10/31/2017 yeah!! definitely and gabe actually is a batmany type

SuspiciousPopsicle - 10/31/2017 Angela developed the nanite swarm, and Gabe uses it for his hero stuff, and he's got, like, ninja/magician/illusionist tricks to make it seem like he's actually vanishing in a cloud of nanites & other junk. He's the opposite of Jack--a normal dude masquerading as a superpowered super hero

firesonic152 - 10/31/2017 gabe of course designs all the aesthetics himself LOL

SuspiciousPopsicle - 10/31/2017 ABSOLUTELY theater kid with a minor in special effects

firesonic152 - 10/31/2017 so gabe thinks jack is a lame version of him being a self made super

SuspiciousPopsicle - 10/31/2017 lol that's mean Gabe. He's trying. A for effort, Jack. are they rival heroes then? also, does Gabe work as a lone wolf to help disguise his lack of powers?

firesonic152 - 10/31/2017 yeah! so whenever they both end up at the same crime scene they get snippy w each other gabe's flashy dramatics grate on jack's nerves

SuspiciousPopsicle - 10/31/2017 XD jack firing off a round of something non-lethal into the disappating swarm of nanites after one of their fiercer arguments

firesonic152 - 10/31/2017 LOL gabe gets pissed bc it makes a rip in his cloak so is gabe like... mad rich and jack is more spiderman-y, way less resources but kinda smart enough to make it work

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 wealthy gabe. w a big mansion. lots of varied, classy, beautifully arranged places for the two of them to fuck. XD

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 >:3c they're both like. so angrily attracted to each other lol it's one of those gabe is determined to figure out jack's secret identity jack would rather not know anything about gabe. he doesn't want to get invested.

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 oh. =( jack's just there for the sex and violence? lol

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 yepp ooo we need to get into origin stories is gabe just... batman all the way dead parents when he was eight and shit except he likes guns

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 lol mmm... well, where does his money come from? inheritance? earned through his own efforts? lottery?

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 shady mafia parents?

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 XD that might be good, tho--using the mone they made in the illegal trade that eventually got them killed to combat crime paying the community back in his own way

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 yep !! what's jack's origin story something to do w mutant discrimination

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 he was spat out of a cornfield fully grown and hitchhiked to the big city

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 LMAOO or we could have him figure out his powers in some traumatic way as a child

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 what if his parents tried to send him to a camp to pray the abnormality away when his powers first presented and there was abuse and what not going on, so even after he went home, his relationship with his parents was strained. he didn't stay long, and they didn't look too hard for him when he ran away. He was fourteen or fifteen, and looked a little bit older than he was, but he was in over his head and had to use his power a few times just to get a meal or sometimes a job so that he wouldn't starve to death. he made his way slowly across the country, hitchhiking, mostly. anyone that wanted something more from him than he was comfortable giving as payment for the lift suddenly decided that what they really wanted was to pull over and let this wonderful boy out. Disgusted with himself, wondering if sucking cock wasn't actually a more honest way to get as far from where he'd been born as possible, Jack kept going out of sheer determination. Prolly did a few minor acts of heroism along the way, which gave him a taste for it.

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 AW GEEZ QOQ THAT'S UPSETTING AOJCNAECJN i love it lmao he wants to save people to redeem himself!! he never quite recovered from the feeling of self-disgust he got from his parents

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 ta-dah lol

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 lmao jack can tell from all of gabe's fancy gadgets and shit that he's rich as hell and is like super resentful assumes gabe's had a mad easy life and is just doing this for the thrill of it gabe meanwhile can tell jack is pretty angry and reclusive and is curious they always have fun banter in which gabe is overdramatic and jack is overly snarky

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 oooh, a mystery. let's poke it! :D

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 yep! jack accidentally slips up in his snark one day and comments on gabe's sexy ass like "what tf kind of money did you spend on those stupid pants that they cling to your ass like they're painted on" or something and gabe is like lmao you been looking? ;3

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 omg jack

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 jack's been spending a lot of time examining gabe's crotch lately wondering about that D

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 jaaaaaaaaaaaack

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 he's very curious about all gabe's gadgets and their alternate uses

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 jack pls you're supposed to be fighting crime

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 jack gets himself into trouble and gabe saves his ass. gabe insists afterward that jack have some kind of homing beacon in case he ever gets in trouble

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 well, that's sweet of him. Gabe, you big softie. Saying that since Jack doesn't have any powers, it's only right Gabe look after him a bit. He doesn't understand the flash of bitterness on Jack's face, and mistakes it for envy.

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 oh geez gabe you are pressing buttons you didn't even realize were there jack hates how much he wants to fuck gabe despite him being annoying as hell

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 lol they're both caught. XD stubborn fucks.

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 gabe keeps wanting to like mother jack and jack hates it lmao does jack like have a job irl to make money he's gotta

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 yeah. i think he'd need one lol what if he ends up as Gabe's chauffer or something?

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 LOL YES he gets fired from his previous job of something classically superhero like working for a newspaper and he somehow stumbles into becoming gabe's driver it definitely helps that gabe is wildly attracted to him for some unknown reason

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 XD oh, hey--what if something bad goes down while he's out driving with Gabe one day, and Gabe is all about rushing in to help save the day and Jack, not realizing who his boss is and being afraid that he's going to get himself killed, uses his power to make Gabe drive to safety while he stays to deal w the bad guys

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 AHHH and gabe doesn't know who jack is either once he gets to safety he's like WHAT THE FUCK I JUST LEFT MY DRIVER IN DANGER he quickly gets into costume but by the time he gets there, jack is gone that soldier 76 guy is standing over all the bad guys who are completely beaten to hell

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 Gabe is as serious as Jack's ever seen him when he comes dashing up demanding to know what happened to...Jack. XD

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 LOL jack is like what the fuck why does reaper care about. real me.

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 oh shit! XD i forgot he was all reaper-y! X''''D fuck, dude, i think i need to turn in. i am Not With It tonight.

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 awwwww

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 oh SHIT. yah. it's after 1. i DEFINITELY need to turn in.

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 hugs

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 ^^;;;;;;;;;;;;; hugshugs will ttyl <3<3<3

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 sleep well!!!

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 you too. =) night night

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 so reaper shows up to the crime thing but 76 has already taken care of it. reaper anxiously asks after the collateral damage and 76 gruffly assures him there were no innocent victims

reaper doesn't bother sticking around for banter, he's worried about his (handsome) driver. he rushes back home and changes back into gabriel and calls jack up

jack has to dash into a random alleyway and take off his mask to answer his cell phone XD

gabriel is all worried and asking if jack's hurt, says it's okay if he doesn't want to come into work tomorrow, apologizes for just driving off he's not sure what came over him

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 omg and Gabe feels soooooooooo bad about it, honestly, and every word of apology is another stab of guilt for Jack

!! Gabe taking just a little advantage of the situation to use it as an excuse to offer to treat Jack to lunch. Jack starts to decline (bc of course he feels he shouldn't benefit in any way from what he did) but Gabe insists

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 ahhhhhh gabe treats him and jack is once again a little annoyed at gabe's sheer wealth. internally grumbles about these damn rich people

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 KISS KISS FALL IN LOVE

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 LOL YEP ahh they start talking and it's a little too east to banter jack has to keep reminding himself that gabe is his employer

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 meanwhile, Gabe sees him forgetting that and isn't about to throw out any reminders XD

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 hahahaha god gabe wants to sleep w him so bad LOL gabe has a crush on jack and jack has a crush on reaper

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 XD this feels like that ladybug show

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 YEP gabe tries to apologize again for leaving jack in danger and jack snaps at him to stop with that ahh accidentally "ordering" gabe to stop doing that. and gabe does.

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 oooh. so, what if there's, like, a time limit to his powers? 24 hours or so? during which, the infatuation reamins high and people will still do what he says. that way, Jack can accidentally order him to stop (and get a LOVELY little reminder that he's still in charge of gabe) without him being unable to control that power he hates so much.

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 AHH jack gets all freaked out and mumbles that he has to go

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 bc obvs, the "date" was only due to his powers

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 oh jaaack he hurries home and kicks a chair over

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 ;; Gabe gives it a couple days to let him have some space, and when things aren't unbearably awkward (somehow???) on the job and Jack doesn't quit, he asks him out to dinner. And Jack kinda shor circuits for a minute as he tries to remember if he mindfucked Gabe again and forgot about it.

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 QoQ jack can't deny though. he has a thing for reaper and... gabe kinda reminds him of that....

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 lol jack. listen to that intuition of yours.

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 XDD

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 Jack being a bit nervous when he shows up for this date, trying to get past it by making a joke & asking if this is just for fun, or if he ought to look for another job. Gabe actually looks distressed over the idea.

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 AWWW gabe gets kinda flustered and says no, no he really... wants to get to know jack better jack bluntly asks if he's looking to sleep together

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 Gabe chokes on the sip he was taking.

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 LOL THE ANSWER IS YES but instead he kinda splutters what?? jack shrugs and looks at him through his eyelashes

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 Gabe tries to be both cautious--bc Jack IS his employee--and suave, and fails at both.

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 awwww just kinda blurts out that jack is unfairly attractive and he'd really like to... know him better jack smirks which is REALLY UNFAIR and says "in the biblical sense, i assume"

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 XD WHO IS IN CHARGE HERE??

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 XDDDD

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 Gabe feels his control of the situation slipping away. he had planned this, had meant to charm Jack and put him at ease and invite him home after dinner for drinks and maybe something more, but Jack went and threw off his game and now he can't seem to catch up.

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 awwww w gabe ahhhh but then something superhero related happens

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 Jack internally cursing up a blue streak, Gabe seriously annoyed but also thankful in a way that he'll have a chance to try again on solid footing

lol what if one found out who the other was bc they got food poisoning which set in during the superheroing, and left them kinda fucked up the next day? what a lame way to expose your secret identity

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 XDDDDD i feel like i want gabe to be found out first bc he literally has a superhero lair.

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 lol Reaper doubling over and raising a hand to his face, being so freaked out by the thought that if he doesn't get away fast enough he's going ot puke in his mask. XD and 76 offers to help out of actual concern and is waved off as Reaper lets slip it was probably something he ate. Then the next day, Jack hears from Gabe that some food poisoning fucked him up.

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 LMAO jack puts together... rich... food poisoning... similar banter... the whole aesthetic... HOLY SHIT when he comes in to work he starts snooping and finds the lair

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 he'd be pissed if he wasn't really turned on his hot (potential) boyfriend is his arrogant rival

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 >:3c he's pretty psyched that the guy he wants to bone turns out to be the guy who wants to bone him soo why does he keep his own identity secret at this point bc he gotta

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 lol question! does Jack fine enough on his snooping to realize that Gabe doesn't actually have any powers?

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 oooooo yeah like finds all the gadgets and stuff

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 lol what if the nanites are semi intelligent, and he activates the swarm and they recognize him and sort of go into a harmless standby mode...and suddenly he's being followed around by Reaperbeans.

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 YESS they cling to his ankles and chirp adorably

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 he's not a registered user, so he can't give hem any commands, but they spend so long patched into Gabe that his interest in Jack imprinted on them XD

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 XDDDDD gabe realizes someone's broken into his lair and runs in w a pistol at the ready but finds jack surrounded by beans

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 Jack, with a cheeky wave: Hey, boss. Can I get a raise?

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 LOL

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 Jack now thinks he has a perfect excuse to get away from Gabe when stuff goes down--bc of course Gabe is gonna want Jack to go someplace safe--and Jack figures he can just drive a little ways away and put on his hero costume. That plan is thwarted the first time such a situation comes up. Gabe actually comes around to the driver's side door & when Jack rolls down the window, Gabe grabs him by the tie and pulls him in for a kiss, then winks and makes some crack about keep ing the meter running and they'll pick up when he gets back.

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 AHHHHH AHHHHHHHHH jack kinda gapes as gabe goes off to fight evil fuck. how bad of an idea is it to fight bad guys with a boner.

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 XD

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 .... not that it would be the first time lbr

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 he's SO FRUSTRATED bc he can't think straight enough to plan a good excuse for what to say if Gabe makes it back to the car before him, so he's STUCK

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 skcjnseckjn he decides it's..... probably fine if 76 doesn't show up this One Time....... gabe can take care of himself for one fight right? omg jack looking around at the tinted windows, then shamefully sinking lower in his seat and thinking about that kiss as he palms at his groin

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 XD sorry out of context, that seems slightly not the right reaction

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 XDDD

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 but i'd been thinking along the same lines--Jack getting himself even more worked up, so that when gabe comes back, he can't even comfortably drive elsewhere until they deal with his situation

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 YAY they clamber into the backseat and jack is for once REALLY glad gabe is rich bc the windows are impossible to see through from the outside

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 Jack telling Gabe between breathless kisses 'don't you ever fucking leave me like that again' and Gabe is touched, 'cause awww, jack was concerned for his safety! <3 but really Jack just doesn't wanna miss out on the ass-kicking sort of action, either. XD

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 XDDDDDD he gives gabe a frequently interrupted lecture on making an exit like that and how it's NOT FAIR don't DO that JESUS and gabe is just kinda laughing and murmuring "well if it's gonna get this kinda reaction...." omg jack has to wear a driver's uniform right like a nice dark suit

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 PLEASE

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 ahhhhhh gabe gets it all messy and disheveled

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 with the cap

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 YES

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 and white gloves or is it black gloves? prolly black driving gloves.

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 kajncsskjnc gabe gets him the absolute minimum undressed won't even let him take off the gloves jack is like YOU MADE ME WEAR THIS SHIT ON PURPOSE DIDN'T YOU. YOU LECHEROUS FUCK.

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 THE GLOVES STAY lol for some reason, i really like the aesthetic of built dudes in tight black tees and gloves.

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 me tooooo so does gabe apparently

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 he's got good taste in certain things, at least

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 XDD

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 pfft. Gabe makes Jack a custom uniform for the job. Something like this, but with nothing until about the third button. XD It's just a frame for his tits.

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 AHAHAHA YES jack is like ARE YOU KIDDING ME I CAN'T BE SEEN LIKE THIS and gabe is like you. you already put it on without me even asking

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 XD Jack's like, well, yeah, now follow me to that stupid cliche room you have with the fireplace and the bearskin rug

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 LOL gabe commenting casually one day that it's been awhile since he saw his rival 76

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 Jack freezes up briefly but obviously and hopes Gabe didn't notice.

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 ahaha gabe thinks it's jealousy or something >:3c hip checks jack and teases him about it

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 ooh...what if Jack, like, starts jokingly trash-talking 76 to kind of sound out Gabe's opinion of him? maybe even suggests that he's hiding a super power?

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 oooooooo

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 Gabe's wondering where that idea came from, and Jack tries to shrug it off with something like 'well, you hear stuff' and he suggests that, if that was the case, it would have to be something pretty bad for him to hide it. He isn't prepared for Gabe to defend 76 and argue that even if he does have a superpower, maybe he just doesn't know how to utilize it for crime fighting.

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 awwwwwww gabe's jokes that maybe it's something like the ability to make really yummy food or know how the plot of anything is going to end

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 XD Jack kinda basks in it and laughs along as Gabe makes up more and more ridiculous things bc he likes seeing Jack smile. Really, though, Jack is just enjoying these harmless hypotheticals. He's extra affectionate when they have sex later, kissing all along Gabe's jaw and neck, down his arms to his wrists where he turns Gabe's hand to kiss the inside of his wrist and the hollow of his palm. He goes slower than normal, enough that Gabe notices, and reaches out to cup Jack's face and ask him, with a hesitant smile and eyes that show he's trying not to think that something might be wrong, if Jack's okay. And Jack smiles for him, lips stretching wide and tight, eyes crinkling up and it's so strange how that expression almost makes him look like he's about to cry. But he just catches Gabe's hand and pulls it to his mouth for another soft kiss and murmurs into his palm that he's fine, everything is good.

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 QOQ AHHHHHHH I'M EMOTIONAL

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 <3

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 gabe keeps asking jack to move in with him but jack can't have that bc when he goes home is the only time he has to be 76 also he wouldn't be able to bring all his hero stuff with him to gabe's house and still expect to keep it secret

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 he can see that it hurts Gabe a bit every time he refuses, but he isn't ready to explain. the best he can do is just claim that he needs his space (Gabe's counter to that is that Jack can have a whole floor to himself if he wants), or joke weakly that at least this should prove he isn't after Gabe's money.

one night, as they're curled up and Gabe is dozing off, arms around Jack and lips against the top of his head, Jack asks quietly: '...what would you do if I had a superpower?'

Gabe stirrs and hugs him a bit tighter. 'somethin' you need t tell me, Jackie?'

He's so close to saying it. In that moment, with Gabe's warm arms holding him close, he feels safe. But the old fear comes back, and the knowledge that he's been lying by omission, and suddenly, this place he's found for himself seems terrifyingly fragile. 'Just a hypothetical,' he lies, pressing his face against Gabe's chest.

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 JAKXNASKJCNASC AHHHHHHH okay now what we need is reaper and 76 fighting a bad guy together and reaper is in danger and soldier has no choice but to use his power

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 He tries to make it as subtle as possible, substituting 'put down your weapon' or 'surrender' with taunts. something like 'looking for a challenge? come get me.' and then running off so that he can manage where Reaper won't see.

but it's still a REALLY strange thing for the bad guy to do, and gabe didn't miss the change in his demeanor.

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 dcjkasncbk gabe goes after him but 76 snaps at him to stay back and gabe finds himself just... doing it

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 he would do anything for 76. and once 76 is gone, and Gabe has a moment for his head to clear a bit, he realizes that he felt that way once before...with Jack.

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 KJSNCESCNJKAEKCHK

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 oh lord. what if, once Gabe knows about Jack's power, he starts to question how much of his feelings are real or if Jack's power caused him to feel that way.

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 NOOOO first he sets out on investigating if jack is 76

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 if he looks into Jack's past, one of the last things he'll find before Jack appeared in the city is gonna be the camp.

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 qoq

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 maybe Jack was among the last before it was shut down surrounded by scandal. there's a newspaper article where a parent of one of the kids who requested to remain anonymous claims that their child could control people's minds. they ask what they were supposed to do? how could anyone raise a child like that? Once Gabe's ready to confront Jack, he's also angry enough about being manipulated to lead with that. He tosses a copy of that article down in front of Jack with the anonymous quote highlighted, and just says: 'that's you, isn't it?'

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 OH GOD GABE THAT'S JUST GONNA TRIGGER JACK TO HELL AND BACK

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 okay. Jack TOOK CONTROL OF GABE'S MIND TWICE. Gabe isn't being particularly sensitive to Jack's feelings here, but I think he does have cause to be upset. XD

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 true XD but this will not be a fun time for jack's mental health he just kinda freezes and suddenly all the horrible memories from his childhood come rushing back

his face goes white and he nods distantly, staring at the picture of the camp in the newspaper

gabe doesn't know what to do at first. he'd expected jack to put up a fight. he'd thought he'd have to argue.

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 Jack shakily trying to speak in a voice that comes out as a whisper, insisting that he didn't use it, that he didn't use it unless he had no choice. He claps a hand over his mouth at one point, looking like he's about to be sick. Gabe is Concerned.

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 barely containing his anger, gabe asks jack why he never told him. jack shakes his head and retreats in on himself

gabe tries a different tactic. "you're... soldier 76, right?"

jack just keeps mumbling that he never used it, not unless he had to, he didn't mean to...

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 and at this point, Gabe is getting a bit scared, bc he's never seen Jack like this before.

He kneels and looks up into Jack's face, but whatever Jack's seeing, it isn't there in the room with him. Gabe's anger is shredded away as he thinks guiltily about the glossed-over mentions of abuse in the article about the camp. He hadn't looked any further into that, and he's starting to think that he compounded that initial mistake.

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 hhhhhhhh gabe moves to touch jack's face but jack slaps his hand away violently. he looks small and scared.

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 jeezus, what if they used to gag Jack so that he couldn't speak and use his power?

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 oh god DDD: what if his voice is all rough bc most of his childhood was spent silent

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 hey, that means we can knock a kink off his list for this one! :D

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 qoq yeah gabe keeps trying to get him to say something but jack's mouth can't seem to form words

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 first job is now to talk him down. after that will be time to rip him a new one. and possibly break up with him.

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 except as soon as jack snaps out of it, he beats gabe to it and shakily tells him he's leaving.

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 gabe, you've lost the upper hand once again. Gabe tells him oh no the fuck he isn't, he's going to stay there and explain himself and Gabe is gonna let him have it. Gabe actually physically gets between Jack and the door, and Jack is visibly shaking. Desperate, he tells Gabe that he can make him move, but Gabe calls his bluff. 'Do it, then. I'll call you to account for that, too.'

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 "you wanna break up, right?" jack says, trying to sound angry and intimidating but failing miserably. "then we're done. let me out. i'll never bother you again."

sure, that might end up being the end game for them, but gabe doesn't like how jack is rushing to get there

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 'I don't know yet if that's what I want. You fucked up, Jack. No getting around it. And don't think I'm not fucking pissed at you over it. But I'm still willing to hear your side before throwing you out.'

'I can save you the trouble.'

firesonic152 - 11/01/2017 qOq

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/01/2017 'If you're so dead set on leaving, then why am I still standing in your way?'

He watches Jack crumple, and has to keep a rein on his pity. Just because Jack isn't taking advantage right now doesn't mean he was right to in the past.

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/02/2017 'Why, Jack?' He's a bit surprised that the question is the first thing that comes out, but Jack answers.

'He was going to kill you.'

'But once the immediate danger was past, you stopped me.'

He shrugs, looking like a man condemned. 'Once I'm using it, it's hard to focus the effects. It only lasts a day, and it begins to wear off when I'm not around.'

He isn't making excuses, and Gabe presses. 'What about the first time?'

'I didn't know you were Reaper. I didn't want you to get hurt.'

'Have there been any other times you've done it to me?'

'No. I swear.'

ughhh. i think i need to turn in.

firesonic152 - 11/02/2017 QoQ I'M SO UPSET

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/02/2017 it could prolly be worse. we can re-work this bit to make it worse tomorrow, if you want.

firesonic152 - 11/02/2017 oh god. thanks XDDD this one is your fault btw

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/02/2017 how tf is this MY fault???

firesonic152 - 11/02/2017 you made it angsty lmao

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/02/2017 i did no such thing. my thought for big plot point was to have one of the directors of the camp show up in town w more research and tech and a program promising to remove superpowers--sort of like a reverse SEP. and Jack recognizes the dude immediately and gets super aggressive and angry about him.

firesonic152 - 11/02/2017 LOL well we can still do that

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/02/2017 lol tomorrow. also, don't let me forget about Jack being tempted to use the serum or whatevs on himself

firesonic152 - 11/02/2017 OH GOD hugs go to bed XD

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/02/2017 hugs night night =u= <3

firesonic152 - 11/02/2017 jack takes an offensive stance and says, "gabriel. i'm not going to order you. but i'm leaving and if that means i have to fight you, i will."

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/02/2017 FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT! What if Jack, like, for serious leaves? Leaves Gabe's house, leaves the whole city. Goes on the move doing his 76 thing. Gabe had let him go thinking they could both take some time, then talk things out and figure out what it meant for them, but Jack just completely disappears on him.

firesonic152 - 11/02/2017 omg QoQ he tries to visit Jack's house only to find someone else moved in there. Jack won't pick up the phone. He next hears about 76 being sighted across the country

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/02/2017 Now the quandary is: use ridiculous wealth to chase down exboyfriend who can mind control him (but who Gabe really misses) or not?

firesonic152 - 11/02/2017 Isn't that always the question XDD At first he's kinda pissed at Jack for just up and bolting but the more he lets it stew, the more he gets worried and lonely can Gabe get kidnapped or something and Jack comes back for him ??

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/02/2017 lol one the local chapters of the gang 76 has been tormenting is all: 'hey, remember when Reaper & 76 used to hang around a lot? Let's grab Reaper & use him as bait.'

firesonic152 - 11/02/2017 LOL ahh what if there's a group that like figured out 76's ability and wants to use it for themselves coughs// talon doomfist is v smart after all

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/02/2017 lol

firesonic152 - 11/02/2017 doomfist like straight up overpowers reaper and holds him hostage

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/02/2017 jack's gonna be soooooooooo pissed

firesonic152 - 11/02/2017 yeppp

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/02/2017 he tried SO HARD

firesonic152 - 11/02/2017 and doomfist like takes measures to make sure 76 can't use his power against them like special noise canceling ear plugs and pre-recorded messages and shit so yeah jack shows up kinda vaguely aware that this is 100% a trap but not really caring he puts up a fight and takes out all the grunts without too much trouble but doomfist is another story lmao and doomfist was kind enough to allow gabe to watch this entire thing. gabe is Dying.

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/02/2017 of embarrasment for having been turned into the bait? did one of hte grunts hang a sign around his neck that read bait?

firesonic152 - 11/02/2017 LMAO he's like beaten tf up and his pride is in shambles and now jack's fucking taking the bait like an idiot doomfist beats jack up and keeps taunting jack about how he's wasting his powers

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/02/2017 .......... what if jack like after the blow up with gabe he can't get rid of his powers but someone could get rid of him

firesonic152 - 11/02/2017 QOQ he just wants to make sure that gabe can get out and then...

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/02/2017 so he just lets Doomfist do what he's doing and kick the crap out of him. lol what if one of the Reaperbeans followed him? And Jack figures it can get Gabe out while he creates a diversion (read: gets himself beaten to death)

firesonic152 - 11/02/2017 qOq gabe hates seeing jack get the shit kicked out of him but he manages to escape with the help of the reap bean and figures now they can get out together but. jack doesn't follow.

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/02/2017 in true dramatic fashion, is there a bomb somewhere, or are we skipping that cliche? XD

firesonic152 - 11/02/2017 LOL like just as he gets out there's an explosion and he thinks jack is dead kind of cliche??

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/02/2017 maybe even Jack brings the bomb and he's gonna take out Talon's leader (& himself, no biggie)

firesonic152 - 11/02/2017 jkdnskcnxmvs HOW DOES JACK SURVIVE

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/02/2017 the reaperbeans flock to his stupid ass. Gabe has to dig him out of the rubble and get him home.

firesonic152 - 11/02/2017 skajdnakf jack is all fucked up and unconscious. gabe drags him home and jack is PISSED when he wakes up ((pissed at the fact that he did wake up mostly))

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/02/2017 XD

firesonic152 - 11/02/2017 gabe greets him with a "WHAT THE FUCK WERE YOU THINKING." jack just glares at him and rolls over, unwilling to say anything to him

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/02/2017 'It's what you thought, too, isn't it?' Jack grumbles. 'That a power like mine shouldn't exist? Couldn't agree more.' He curls tighter into a ball, unwelcoming of anger or concern.

firesonic152 - 11/02/2017 gabe finally realizes that nobody could hate jack's power more than jack himself ? |D

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/02/2017 AND KNOWING IS HALF THE BATTLE

firesonic152 - 11/02/2017 it suddenly hits him that jack set the bomb he thought it was talon even though it didn't really make much sense

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/02/2017 Gabe feels like someone just knocked the wind out of him. 'Jesus, Jack,' he breathes. He wants so badly to reach out, but this is they first time they've been together since Jack picked up and left town. He isn't sure what's allowed. Hesitantly, expecting Jack to lash out or bolt, he runs his fingers lightly down Jack's arm. When he gets no mor response than a shiver, he sets his palm against Jack's shoulder and strokes soothingly up and down.

firesonic152 - 11/02/2017 qoq

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/02/2017 knee jerk reaction was to finally have Jack break down into tears & Gabe climbs into bed behind him to hold him thorugh it. but. dunno if that really fits

firesonic152 - 11/02/2017 i want him to accidentally tell gabe to back off with his Command Voice and then collapses even more in on himself

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/02/2017 y u do this?

firesonic152 - 11/02/2017 like as soon as he says it and gabe moves back, jack's like "NO no fuck no i didn't mean...."

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/02/2017 if Jack can't control it, then it's going to be an on going problem, though. Like, what's gonna happen when they fuck? Gabe would do him a mischief if he couldn't keep from obeying Jack shouting out deeper-harder-faster

firesonic152 - 11/02/2017 hhhhhhhhh now there's a thought * w *

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/02/2017 oh my god

firesonic152 - 11/02/2017 jack just losing it while gabe fucks him and all his pleading driving gabe insane, something thrilling about the fact that he'd obey anyway but he can't refuse asdjsjbvh

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/02/2017 you are gonna do him a mischief Gabe goes so hard he snaps Jack's spine lol

firesonic152 - 11/02/2017 jesussss i feel like half the problem though is that he just denies his powers altogether so he has no idea how to stop them either HE NEEDS TO FACE HIS FEARS AND ALL THAT

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/02/2017 pls imagine gabe laughing so hard he can't breathe bc jack yells at his avatar in mario cart to go faster as if that will actually work

firesonic152 - 11/02/2017 LMAO AHAHAH

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/02/2017 anyways. Jack can't control his powers. Gabe has seen how much Jack hates his power, and he loves him and is going ot trust that Jack won't turn it against him on purpose, or continue using it once he has--but they DEFINITELY need to have a talk. ((haha remember the one we did where gabe was a useless demon and almost burned down his kitchen trying to make soup for jack and also he had no bowls to put the soup in?))

firesonic152 - 11/02/2017 LMAO THAT ONE WAS FUN and yes they need to talk Okay so Jack and gabe need to talk about his powers and they're finally getting somewhere maybe and then the scientist guy shows up w ideas on how to get rid of someone's power

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/02/2017 AND OFF JACK GOES!

firesonic152 - 11/02/2017 He hates the concept but. In his case it really would make his life way easier. so he secretly makes an appointment with the guy

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/02/2017 AND IT'S ONE OF THE ASSHOLES FROM THE CAMP

firesonic152 - 11/02/2017 YEP oh god the guy like recognizes him too and is super polite and nice and being like "ah child I'm so glad we can finally help you" and shit and all those old feelings of wanting to be anyone but himself come bubbling up to the surface for Jack

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/02/2017 ; ;

firesonic152 - 11/02/2017 he keeps it together for the consultation but afterwards he starts thinking about his parents and falls apart a little

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/02/2017 TT^TT goes out and gets drunk off his ass.

firesonic152 - 11/02/2017 Hhhh Gabe gets a call from the bar to come pick him up

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/02/2017 he keeps asking what set thi off, bc usually Jack can at least cut himself off and make it home (they live together now!!), but Jack refuses to say

firesonic152 - 11/02/2017 HHHH Jack's primary defense mechanism in this one is to shut up. It's what he's used to.

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/02/2017 you're killin me dude

firesonic152 - 11/02/2017 qwq Gabe just wants Jack to talk to him about things. He doesn't know why Jack shuts down and won't say anything He understands Jack's whole self-loathing deal but this particular defense mechanism is such a break from how Jack usually is

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/02/2017 so how does he get Jack to talk? Or does he hear about the supposed cure and seek out the guy offering it when he realizes that the name was one of the ones he came across while looking into Jack's past?

firesonic152 - 11/02/2017 Maybe the guy calls the house to follow up on the consultation and gabe is like WTF

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/02/2017 oooh. that one. so, are we playing this guy as honestly regretful of the way that camp was handled but still thinking powers are impure and best to be avoided/elliminated? or is he manipulative and a bit evil?

just curious about whether he would tell Gabe a little bit about what happened to Jack when he was younger.

Jack needs fukkin therapy, dude.

firesonic152 - 11/02/2017 he does lmao I think this guy is evil/manipulative but genuinely believes he's doing right ya know

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/02/2017 lays it on thick with 'Jack's case was severely mishandled when he was younger, but from our talk earlier, it was obvious that he's in the right mindset. We're here to work with him now, not silence him.'

firesonic152 - 11/02/2017 GABE HAS SO MANY QUESTIONS Like "silence him?" What's with that specific wording...

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/03/2017 ugh that specific wording is proof that i'm no longer ay good with braining today. maybe he assumed that Gabe knew about what happened to Jack and he was trying to convince him that this is what Jack wants. i'mma go ahead and turn in night night <3<3<3

firesonic152 - 11/03/2017 Yeah exactly !! That wording tips Gabe off Ahhhhh good night <33

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/03/2017 :sparkling_heart:

firesonic152 - 11/03/2017 gggghh i was thinking again about jack like being forcibly silent as a kid and like. depending on how early it started he could have had so many developmental delays regarding speech skjfnesfkj

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/03/2017 something to check out when i've got a bit more time later today, sort of find a quick reference about how that might affect someone. in the maentime, him being so rude all the time (and preferring texts) might stem from odd speech patterns--if he's mean, people won't want to talk to him so much, and it just became a habit over the years.

firesonic152 - 11/03/2017 QoQ also just. general lack of good social skills ^^;; sometimes he just pronounces words wrong and tends to overreact to being corrected

SuspiciousPopsicle - 11/03/2017 well, yeah. XD like, it just started out as being defensive over his speech, and got worse with time as being rude got him what he wanted: less expectations that he talk to people. aww...poor isolated Jack. ;;

firesonic152 - 11/03/2017 q-q hhh this is the shit I'm studying I'm excited about this LOL Not this specific kind of case obviously but I am taking a class on language disorders and shit

#cornfuck and the reaper #R76 plot ideas #haven't been able to finish any actual stories to share recently but here is this =)

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kidslovetoys · 4 years ago

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What our children’s art can teach us

All children love to draw and paint, but why do they do it and what can their creations tell us about them? Dr Helen Jones explores the meaning behind the art and explains how to help your child’s creativity flourish:

Table of contents:

Art is personal

Realism vs expression

Modes of expression

The cross disciplinary nature of art: how it teaches us about other subjects

Final word

Art is personal

At the very earliest stages of evolution our forebears were making art.

In 40,000 BC, creative symbolic artworks were being handcrafted from shell, stone, and primitive paint by homosapiens. But it begs the question: why?

Why has there been an enduring drive, spanning our entire existence, to leave marks, to make our trace in the world, to create?

It is one of the few things which distinguishes us from animals. We have this wonderful yet mysterious power to create distinctly personal and individual remnants of our existence and personality.

Art is a discipline that champions our individualism. It allows us to show and share our experiences of life, without hiding who we are.

‘As we have changed, our art has changed, and how we have defined our art has changed, but that fundamental instinct to play experiment, repurpose, test and reimagine has always been central. Just as play is a deliberate pushing of the boundaries, so art has refused to be solely defined by one idea or one set of people.’ (Michael Rosen.)

We’ve all heard ‘No one is you. That is your superpower.’ As an artist, and head of art, I’d argue that nowhere is this superpower more visible, than in our visual creations.

Art prizes the original. It prizes the unique.

It says if you don’t comply with a conventional norm, then good on you. I love telling children in my lessons, that in art there is no right answer or wrong answer.

Yet very often we can act, even subconsciously, as if there is. Forcing our children into a straightjacket of neat and realistic depictions of reality.

Parents will ask me why one child can draw so much better than theirs, when perhaps they should be asking why we assume that child’s style of drawing is better.

There is a deeply-entrenched tendency to measure children's drawing by its ‘lifelike’ standards. But as John Matthews suggests in Drawing and Painting: children and visual representation: ‘The idea that the representation of objects is at the heart of drawing is completely wrong.’

Art is a cacophony of ideas, expression and imagination. What would the world be like if it were all logical, realistic drawing? Salvador Dali, Picasso, Pollock, Hirst, not to mention thousands of other artists, would never have dazzled us with their unique ways of seeing.

Perhaps we need to consider representation as ‘re-presentation’. Because as Matthews asserts: ‘what is ‘realistic’ to the child changes with age and context.’ Perhaps it is important to your child to draw you as a humongous, overly tall figure, because to them, you seem much bigger. Thus our adult definition of art doesn’t always align with our child’s way of seeing the world.

What’s more, there are many more forms of drawing than we often realise. Drawing through stitch, drawing in sand, drawing with a sparkler, drawing with wire and so on. Contemporary artists make drawings in all sorts of ways, in non traditional media, with unconventional tools. This allows them to express things they couldn’t have in any other way.

Realism vs. expression

Simply forcing children to draw from life doesn’t aid artistic expression. We need our children to communicate what they are thinking, imagining and feeling in many languages, verbal, spatial, gestural, musical and visual. We want them to embark on a ‘representational adventure in which meanings are given sounds, actions and images.’ John Matthews

I tell my art students ‘a camera is for capturing a realistic copy of the world around you. Art is for capturing your interpretation of the world and for expressing your unique individuality’. Often this falls on deaf ears, so prevalent are beliefs about the hierarchy of representational depiction. But what is realistic? How do things look really? Unfortunately our fixed assumptions to these questions can, at best, hinder learning possibilities, or at worst, damage our children’s self-efficacy[LINK]. So often children have fallen prey to adults working from a deficit theory - looking for what’s ‘wrong’ or ‘missing’ from their artworks. This can really corrode a child’s confidence, but more than that, it’s not necessarily right.

We unconsciously place realism at the top of the ladder, and all the other steps below it are often relegated as scribbles or ‘nearly corrects’. As children climb this ladder, (often in standardised educational settings), they get less and less opportunity to draw freely. Spontaneous drawing which serves the intentions and interests of children is becoming increasingly hard to find in schools. According to Matthews, this is detrimental to children’s emotional and intellectual development, ‘The child's own spontaneous visual representation and expression has been devalued in favour of a fixed, acceptable, cultural standard’

So how can we avoid this?

Perhaps we should spend more time listening to what their drawings tell us. Just as we as adults use hand gestures, facial expressions, tone range and movements as we talk, children use these features in their artwork. For instance, mark making can represent experiences of hide and seek, people leaving us and coming back into our lives, movement, such as going through tunnels, hiding underneath something, the feel and motion of swimming, and, importantly, it can reconcile traumatic encounters. Art is a processing of these happenings, through thoughtful gesture and mark making, which is quite different than mere representation. Thus the ‘re-presenting’ might not look like what the child is responding to, but what is occurring is a significant translation of that event.

Modes of expression

Children capture different types of information, often following different intentions or modes of thinking in their work, some of which I have simplified for ease of understanding.

Intellectual realism.

Sometimes children draw unrecognisable shapes and claim they are a certain person or object. While this may not be realism in the sense we know it, it could be ‘intellectual realism’ in that for the child it represents their internalised view of that object or person. It shows what the child knows, rather than what the child sees.

Symbolism and representation.

The vast majority of learning is based on signs and symbols, such as language and maths for instance, and even social interaction. Drawing is an idealised way to grasp this nature of symbolism. Discovering that marks on paper can stand for things turns a cornerstone in one's mind - a huge developmental shift.

Emotional.

Art and feelings go hand in hand. Matthews says: ‘Children’s drawing actions are sensitive to fluctuations in mood, both their own and those of people around them. The child imbues drawing with emotion and representational possibilities.’ Perhaps this is why art therapy is so successful - emotions are made tangible as they are inflected on the surface of the paper and the surface of their minds.

Grouping.

Children might group together different types of marks such as dots or dashes or marks at the beginning or end of these lines - separating out their shape vocabulary and becoming adept at matching their actions to shapes. By grouping marks according to type, he is beginning a process of classification. This is the start of maths.

Art as play.

Art can be nothing short of imaginative play. Sometimes there is no intention, other than sheer joy and exploration. I often see children use three-dimensional objects and toys in a similar way to how they use drawing - reconstructing comparable scenes and dealing with related issues. This shows that mark making is tethered to all of our experiences, especially play which has creative overlaps.

The cross disciplinary nature of art: How it teaches us about other subjects

If we listen to our body closely enough we know what it needs. I also believe if we listen to our mind closely enough we know what it needs. And children are no exception, in that they subconsciously know what they need to learn.

‘The child is constantly, actively, purposely, seeking out those particular experiences which will promote growth.’ John Matthews

Children are always in pursuit of learning, whether they realise it or not. For me, nowhere is this more visible than in their art. It makes their learning observable, and holds the power to teach a range of subjects and disciplines, and to make them fun.

Music and sound.

Listen to your child as they are drawing - what sounds do they make? I’ve seen children blend sounds and drawings together time and time again. My daughter's experiences with music - the tempo, beat, and patterns within the song - form a backdrop to the patterns and pulsating lines she produces.

Body awareness.

‘Proprioceptive’ information about the position of our joints and limbs, balance, posture and stance are heightened in art making. When making with our hands we learn how things move, how our body moves, and how shapes can be coordinated and controlled in a dynamic, swiftly changing format. Although I would argue that not only does art make us more aware of our physical selves, it helps us reveal our inner souls.

Mathematical.

The American professor of maths John De Pillis writes: ‘‘When learners have the opportunity to use their artistic skills and draw scenarios, they can more easily visualize and figure out math problems.’ Angles, geometric shapes, measuring, proportions, ratios of paint to water, scale and perspective are some of the mathematical gifts of art.

Linguistic learning.

Art is a visual language. A universal language, that anyone can speak. We all recognise certain shapes and symbols and know what they represent. Learning the language or art support language learning in all other areas. Being able to speak visually goes hand in hand with general communication.

Science.

Children can grasp some quite unfathomable scientific concepts in their art. For example, by attempting to represent invisible events like wind, music, suction, or showing clouds moving, rain coming down, spilling from a cup, or documenting movement trajectories. They learn how to organise space, time, patterns and sequences of movement which share characteristics with what they see in the outside world. They can translate experiences of crawling through tunnels, pouring liquid through tubes, looking through cardboard rolls, into their art. Children explore and rationalise all this through drawing.

Perspective.

In more sense than one. Children can gain mental perspective on the bigger picture in life, on personal issues and dealing with trauma, as well as exploring physical perspective. As you draw ideas occur, whether that’s how to deal with or respond to a certain situation, or logical constraints such as how things get bigger towards you, and smaller further away. This shouldn’t make sense in the minds of our little young ones, but through art it does.

Final word

Perhaps we need to ask ourselves what we believe is the major endpoint in drawing or painting. And not just to consider the destination but the journey. Realistic drawing is one way of approaching art in a multitude of possibilities. So let’s stop looking for it as a ‘what’s missing’ from our children's art and encourage some freedom of expression for all.

When I consider my daughter's mark making, I can see that each image is saturated with communication, thinking and emotion. And that, for me, is far more valuable than a ‘picture perfect’ outcome.

from One Hundred Toys - The Blog https://ift.tt/3lXERpP

#One Hundred Toys

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valheartandfriendsllc · 5 years ago

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Time Travel is the Best Superpower to Help Abused Animals Heal Negative Emotions

Just like humans, animal emotions can be both negative and positive.

Animals, just like humans, not only feel physical and emotional pain but can also feel and remember pain caused by traumatic events that have happened to them in their past.

The problems many pet owners face is not only recognizing these emotional wounds exist, and if they do, finding a way to overcome them.

It is unlikely that the vet you take your animal to will be able to help. Unless you are trained in the techniques that I teach in my masterclass, you will not be able to help either. No matter how much you may want to or how much training you do with your animal. That’s because you don’t know how to erase or rewrite history.

via GIPHY

Rewriting History is the Key to Helping Animals Heal From the Past.

Over my career, I have developed a wonderful healing technique in order to help mend these painful emotional wounds that I call “time travel”.

A lot of people struggle with this concept. To quickly clarify, no, I do not literally mean travel back in time physically!

Rather, what I have discovered is that…

Time is an illusion.

When I say time travel, I mean that I travel to moments in the past, using the memories and the minds of myself and animals as the vehicle.

Let me explain:

The speed of light is fixed, but time and space have to be flexible in order to make the world sync with the fixed state of light. Space gives us the concept of separation. Time gives us the concept of associations (within the body-mind or externally in the environment.) Light represents the continuum of the absolute—Brahman or the god mind—and the total awareness of the fully enlightened individual. Time/Space (sound/vibration—God) represents the ignorance of the intellect and the relative restrictions of life.

While this is a lot to grasp, understanding that time is a construct rather than an absolute, allows us to remove the barriers that stop us from going back and helping us mend negative animal emotions.

Once this is understood, we can begin to look at the idea of…

Expanding and Contracting Time

Our minds are linear, and as such we subconsciously organize our experiences as such.

In reality, time is more like a movie, which can be fast-forwarded, rewinded, or even stopped altogether.

If you think someone has plenty of time, it is because they have an expanded state of time. On the flip side, if you are always feeling rushed, that is a contracted state of time.

To understand this, think about the experiences that you have “lost.” This is also sometimes thought of as going into autopilot. One example is when you drive the same route to work as you always do. One minute you are leaving your house, and next you are at the office! Essentially, you have sped up time by stepping outside of the regular time-space continuum temporarily.

At this point you are probably thinking:

“Val, this is interesting, but how does it help me heal my animals’ past and negative emotions?”

Which is a great question! Once you can grasp the idea that time is not as we perceive it, we can learn the concept of…

Past and Future Lives

Sometimes, both humans and animals will react in ways that we cannot explain. Emotions, phobias, and emotions seem to come out of nowhere and no matter how hard we try, we cannot change how we feel.

Our bodies store memories of significant things that have happened to us, whether they be traumatic, or positive. Regardless, they are stored at a deep, subconscious level. While some of these memories are from our current life, some are not. Rather, they come from our past life.

The same can be said for animals. While some animal emotions can come from experiences they remember, others might come from their past lives. I have even talked to animals who have told me about incidents that happened to them with their owners from ‘before’.

So to help mend negative animal emotions, we must sometimes go back to their past lives to help find the stuck spot.

Future lives can also impact us as well. Once you have mastered an understanding of how time really works, you can talk to your future self, and bring back will help you, and your pet, in your journey.

Are you ready to take your skills to the next level and truly master your animal communication skills? Click here to sign up for my Platinum Club Membership and live Masterclasses!

A Therapy Dog’s Own Struggle.

I had the privilege of working with a wonderful therapy dog not long ago. Her owner is a professional counselor, and her dog helps her in her practice. My client was increasingly concerned about her beloved companion and partner because, starting last fall, the dog had, for the first time in her life, shown the unmistakable signs of fear of thunder and loud noises.

When I tuned in and ‘spoke’ with the dog telepathically, I asked her how she was doing. She said it had been difficult during the past few months—she was nervous and definitely not herself. She had lost her peace and tranquility and was not interacting with people like she had always loved doing before. I asked her to tell me about thunderstorms and why she was afraid of them. I asked if she could tell me what had happened to make her afraid.

Instead of answering my question directly, she shared with me that she had been having recurring nightmares. I asked her if she could tell me more about that. She was very frightened but was glad to be able to share these nightly terrors with someone.

She showed me an image of herself standing, watching her human. Then she heard a monstrous, thunderous boom that shook the earth. Standing wide-eyed, she then watched as great billowing gray clouds swallowed up everything and everyone she loved.

In the dream, she would frantically run and bark, calling for her owner. She was trying to get to safety but always losing her human to the ominous clouds as they blanketed everything.

Bark! Bark!

She could almost hear her human calling her, but try as she might, she could never find her. The therapy dog was lost and helpless, despairing of ever seeing her beloved human again, feeling that she had somehow failed to warn her of this catastrophe.

She wanted so desperately to save her loved ones but always lost them to the noise and that terrifying, all-consuming cloud. In her waking hours, she began being anxious and fretful. She was living in dread of any loud noise that reminded her of the awful nightmare.

As I watched and listened, I realized that she was describing the events of September 11, 2001. I asked my client if she had been personally affected by the events, or if she had counseled others about them, and she said yes to both questions.

At this point, we both understood how deeply this sweet, telepathic animal had been affected by our nation’s tragedy and our reactions to it.

It should come as no surprise that animal emotions are deeply affected by world events and tragedies, especially when they affect us so profoundly. It is helpful for all of us, humans and our animal companions, to discuss these things openly with each other, to share comfort and hope, as well as sadness, pain, and fear.

This is exactly what we did with this dog. A week later, her owner reported that her dog was acting less fearful and was continuing to improve day by day.

Through lots of open-hearted exploration, using the methods I have learned throughout my many years of training and education, we can start to bridge the gap between us and the other creatures who share this planet with us. A kinder, more communicative planet can start with you and your own animal companions.

Mastering this unique intuitive skill is important. Being able to communicate with an animal about their emotions will allow them to tell you about a past traumatic event, or that their person is struggling over something they’ve experienced. Once you know that, then you’ll know exactly what to do to help them.

Did you enjoy this article? Here are some more you might enjoy:

Healing dogs through meditation. TedX talk: animals are smarter than you think. Doggie depression: how to help your dog out of the blues.

The post Time Travel is the Best Superpower to Help Abused Animals Heal Negative Emotions appeared first on Val Heart.

from Val Heart https://valheart.com/time-travel-is-the-best-superpower-to-help-abused-animals-heal/

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gerardwayisarchive · 6 years ago

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Gerard Way on Umbrella Academy: Hotel Oblivion and the TV Series

https://gerardwayisalive.tumblr.com/post/181689658259

https://www.denofgeek.com/us/books/the-umbrella-academy/278030/gerard-way-umbrella-academy

John Saavedra Jan 3, 2019

This article contains Umbrella Academy spoilers.

Gerard Way is a bit tired on the third day of New York Comic Con. He'd stayed up late for a Netflix cast dinner the night before (he's in bed by 9:45 most nights) and had overslept this morning. Worst of all, he'd been forced to skip his morning meditation.

"It's kind of throwing my whole day off," Way tells me as we sit together in a corner of the Dark Horse booth at the Javits Center, hidden from the masses. The writer/musician is dressed in a big fatigue jacket, hair long and shaggy. He's starting to show hints of a shiny gray. Once impeccably clean-shaven, he now sports a mustache and beard.

Gone are the days of bleached hair, marching bands, and eyeliner. The force of nature who belted out songs about wasted youth, love lost, and doom as the frontman of My Chemical Romance is dead (like the Black Parade itself). Three cheers for the next life of Gerard Way, one of the best comic book writers currently working.

In October, following his excellent work on DC's Doom Patrol with artist Nick Derington, Way finally returned to his original comic book creation, The Umbrella Academy, after an almost ten-year hiatus. The new story arc, Hotel Oblivion, is a grand return for the series as well as for Way and the brilliant Brazilian artist Gabriel Ba, who first collaborated on the series in 2007 and won an Eisner for Best Limited Series in 2008.

The Umbrella Academy is the story of an estranged family of superheroes, years past their prime, who must navigate a nightmarish family reunion, prevent the end of the world, and deal with their traumatic pasts at the hands of their cold (and sometimes abusive) father. In the series' first arc, Apocalypse Suite, the team must stop one of their siblings, a classically trained violinist, from bringing about the end of the world with her evil orchestra. The follow-up, Dallas, is the story of Number Five, a time-traveling assassin who's hired to go back to 1963 and kill John F. Kennedy. It's up to his siblings to either help him or thwart the assassination from ever taking place.

Just three issues into Hotel Oblivion, Way and Ba have laid the foundation for another epic story, this time spanning not only time but also space. At the center of this tale is the titular hotel, a purgatorial prison located in an alternate dimension meant to house the world's worst criminals. The secrets of this hotel and the family's connection to it are the focus of the arc, but there are also plenty of other strange shenanigans along the way.

You have to read it to believe it: 43 superpowered orphans are born around the world at the same time to women whom just seconds before hadn't been pregnant. This is the big bang of Way and Ba's outrageous comic book universe, an alternate version of our reality where Kennedy wasn't assassinated and wrestlers wage war against giant space monsters in the ring. Seven of these orphans are adopted by Sir Reginald Hargreeves, a rich scientist who also happens to be an undercover alien, and turned into the world's most famous superhero team, the Umbrella Academy. Together, these extraordinary kids have stopped the Eiffel Tower from taking over the world, defeated a rampaging Lincoln Memorial, and put all manner of costumed villains behind bars.

But those were the good old days.

By the start of the story, one of the orphans is already dead. You quickly find out he was the lucky one because the remaining six siblings are seriously fucked up, thanks to their manipulative and emotionally unavailable father, who's very good at saving the world but terrible at giving the kids what they need the most: love and support.

When the remaining members of the team -- Luther aka Spaceboy, Diego aka the Kraken, Allison aka the Rumor, Klaus aka the Seance, Number Five, and Vanya aka the White Violin (but only after discovering her apocalyptic powers as an adult) -- return home for Sir Reginald's funeral, things only get more complicated. Spaceboy struggles with depression, Kraken is unable to get close to anyone, Rumor's marriage is breaking down, Seance falls deeper into drug addiction, and Number Five...well, he's actually doing alright...

By the end of Dallas, the team is more broken than ever before and it seems that only distance from each other can help mend these characters. Well, a decade was plenty of distance, a lot of time for Way to consider what came next for his children. By the time Way started working on Umbrella Academy again in 2014, he found that the way he thought about these characters had changed.

"I think I understand them in different ways now," Way says. "I think I'm less hard on them. I think I've found more compassion in dealing with them. I've put them through some really hard things and sometimes I feel bad about it."

These days, Way is interested in really digging into the trauma these characters have faced and maybe even giving them some space to heal.

"Trauma is a very intense thing and a very real thing and everybody experiences it in some way. I obviously did not have a childhood like these kids. But I did have a childhood in which I needed to escape a lot."

Hotel Oblivion certainly feels like an escape for the Hargreeves siblings, who are spread out all over the globe (and in the afterlife because that's how the Seance rolls). The first four issues are a sort of exhale for these characters, who are still recovering from major losses, heartbreak, and the whole JFK business.

After all the blood, explosions, betrayals, and deaths, Hotel Oblivion is meant to be cathartic, according to Way: "It's about the past. It's about mistakes. It's about fathers. It's about redemption. It's definitely a therapeutic series."

At the center of the story is still the concept of family. The Rumor is trying to help Vanya recover from the injuries she suffered in Apocalypse Suitewhile also trying to reconnect with her civilian family and working with the ultra-violent Number Five on his latest gambit.

Most surprising is the mending relationship between the Kraken and the team's former leader, Spaceboy. While stuck in an eternal sibling rivalry in the first two arcs -- Kraken challenges Spaceboy's leadership, Spaceboy condemns Kraken's impulsivity -- these scarred heroes start to reach out to each other in Hotel Oblivion. It's a change in the dynamic of the team that didn't seem possible back in 2009.

"Kraken's interesting and his relationship with Spaceboy changes in this series," Way explains. "A lot of it had to do with the fact that I was tired of writing that type of character, that rebellious fool, that Wolverine kind who always gives the leader shit. I never saw Kraken always being that way. I thought he was gonna be that way in the beginning and then he would grow."

Kraken, the loner who most resembles the "Batman" of the group, is actually the one trying to reunite the superhero team. Meanwhile, an overweight Spaceboy, who fled to Tokyo after the events of Dallas, is dealing with an existential crisis and no longer interested in leading his siblings.

"He's searching," Way says of Spaceboy. "I like the idea of a lost leader. A leader that doesn't have the answers anymore. Who's maybe not even a leader anymore. So I loved exploring that with Spaceboy."

Spaceboy isn't the only leader in need of redemption, though. Even Sir Reginald deserves a re-examination, according to Way.

"I learned more about him. I learned more about his history in working through this stuff, and I can't reveal any of that, obviously. But I've learned to find even compassion for him. Like there's a reason he is the way he is. Over the course of the series, you discover that reason of why he is this kind of ruthless person."

For these heroes, their father remains the catalyst for their problems. Will these characters ultimately find peace (and maybe even love) where it previously eluded them? It's too early to say, but at the very least, the search for the Hotel Oblivion gives them a new place to inevitably find and help each other.

"The story at one point was gonna be a little bit less about the people that live in the hotel, but over time I found that I really wanted to tell their stories, so there are a lot more characters in Hotel Oblivion than there were nine years ago."

The Hotel Oblivion, with its faceless bellhops and cockroach entrees, might remind one of Captain Willard's stay in Saigon in the opening minutes of Apocalypse Now. Willard's hotel room is a sort of purgatory before his journey back to hell, a way station where he's left to relive his trauma over and over until he's lying naked on the dirty carpet, crying, bleeding, and a bit mad.

Way's prison isn't quite as dramatic as that, but it's doubly as terrifying. When Sir Reginald sends the villainous Murder Magician to the hotel, we get to see firsthand the lengths to which Sir Reginald will go to "save the world," letting the bad guys rot in a TripAdvisor hellscape without a trial.

"The concept of Hotel Oblivion deals a little bit with capital punishment," Way explains. "I think in terms of current events and the state of our world right now, in future Umbrella Academy volumes, we'll see a little more of that creep its way into the book. But right now I really wanted to explore capital punishment because we know what a super prison is."

Watching the villain watch a grotesque Lynchian cartoon about mice on the hotel television with nowhere else to go for the rest of eternity, you even start to feel for him. In one panel, he looks out his window at the desert beyond the hotel, surrounded on all sides by desolation and the bony carcasses of animals. This place could break him, the villain's face seems to say (Ba's pencils bring depth and emotion beautifully to this book).

"You don't really see mainstream comics exploring the ramifications of somebody having to live in Arkham Asylum and what that does to somebody psychologically. Or if the Phantom Zone is ethical punishment. So it deals a lot with that."

Way took inspiration from his real-life travels when creating the titular hotel, which he based on the Benson Hotel in Portland, Oregon where he stayed while working on the original Umbrella Academy stories.

"It's a very old hotel and it's kinda classy, but it's also a little bit old. From the outside, it kinda looks like the Hotel Oblivion," Way recalls. "I would be really isolated in that room just writing. I started to become inspired by the environment that I was in."

There was a time in Way's life when the writing didn't come so easy, though. Way told EW back in October that writing Umbrella Academy while on the road with My Chemical Romance became more difficult, describing the twilight of the band during that final tour as "really taxing." The band broke up in 2013 and Way jumped straight into a solo album, Hesitant Alien, soon after, further delaying his comic book work.

Way has a steady place to work now, a studio separate from his house. That's where the magic happens.

"I wake up really early, I hang out with my daughter, get her ready for school, I take her to school, I come back, I meditate, and then I start writing. And that takes up most of my time. I only make music on Fridays."

Since our chat, Way has released two groovy new songs, "Baby, You're a Haunted House" and "Getting Down the Germs," which show the artist moving away from both his emo pop roots and Britpop revival sensibilities to a more psychedelic sound. "Germs" even has a flute solo courtesy of renowned flutist Sara Andon. A third song, "Dasher," is a lovely Christmas ballad about a girl who falls in love with a reindeer, with backup vocals by Lydia Night of The Regrettes. Yeah, this is Way like we've never heard him before.

Way is also working on the upcoming Umbrella Academy Netflix series. The first season, which is set to debut on Feb. 15, will adapt both Apocalypse Suite and Dallas. That's quite a bit of ground to cover (across at least three different time periods), but Way, who has spent a lot of time on set as an executive producer, says that the series is going deeper into certain parts of the story than the comics did.

"Since they have more time, they can get deeper into things that may only be like two pages in the comic. And that's been really cool. They explore the characters a lot more." Way teases that both arcs "were expanded for the TV show. There are new elements in there. They've kind of enhanced the experience of those two graphic novels."

Beyond Hotel Oblivion and the Netflix show are more comics. In fact, Way is already developing the fourth arc with Ba.

"I'm putting all my notes together. So basically I know that there are eight volumes of Umbrella and I know what happens in each of them. I know what happens in the fourth. We're basically gonna take about three months between Hotel and when we start series four."

What can Way tease about series four? The arc will explore the biggest mystery at the center of their superhero universe, according to Way.

"We're finally gonna get to see some more of the 43 individuals." But he won't say any more about that.

Don't worry, though. The writer knows that you've been waiting a long time to learn more about these characters, to spend more time in their world. At the end of our chat, he opens up about how much it means to him that fans continue to ask for The Umbrella Academy.

"I just really appreciate them sticking around," Way says. "If people didn't care about it, I don't know, maybe I would have moved on to something else. But they still really want to know the whole story and so it's my duty to tell that story. I'm gonna give them what they want."

The Umbrella Academy: Hotel Oblivion #1-4 are out now. Issue #5 is out on Feb. 6. The Netflix series premieres on Feb. 15.

John Saavedra is an associate editor at Den of Geek. Read more of his work here. Follow him on Twitter @johnsjr9.

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thisishowyouletgoandfindyou-blog · 8 years ago

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Traits of an Empath.

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Alex Myles

on Jun 15, 2015

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I am an empath.

I have always known I was quite different to many of those around me. Discovering more about the empath personality type has led me to discover a good understanding of myself, and also my relationships with others and the world that surrounds me.

For so many years I felt like an alien on this planet. I often used to say, “I am not of this world.” I didn’t know many people who were like me, who felt things the way I did or who could relate or resonate to things in a similar way to which I did.

The most striking thing for me about being an empath is the way I feel the physical, mental and emotional pain of others as though it were my own. This can be and has been emotionally and physically crippling and it has caused me to suffer tremendously. It is often described as being similar to a sponge, absorbing every emotion and piece of energy around me, and then becoming weighted down by it.

Learning about the empath personality type helped me greatly, as not only do I now understood myself better, I have also learned how to protect myself and not allow outside toxic energies, emotions or behaviors to affect me negatively.

Rather than absorbing all other energies, I now observe them. This prevents me from becoming overwhelmed, exhausted, suffering mentally or physically and being overly emotional.

An empath is someone who is highly sensitive to the energy and emotions emanating from people, animals and everything that exists around them. They have the ability to scan other people’s auras and souls and can intuitively pick up on past, present and even future thoughts and feelings and can quite accurately determine another person’s emotional, mental and physical state.

The saying “never judge a book by its cover” would ring true for an empath. Never would they trust the outer appearance or deceptive superficial exteriors; they will always sense what goes on behind the masks, if they trust their own judgment.

Unfortunately all too often an emapth is led to believe that these paranormal type skills do not exist in today’s world and their words are criticised, disbelieved and are told to be wrong. Downplaying an empath’s intuition, will benefit someone who may be trying to manipulate or use trickery, or someone with very little faith that these abilities exists.

It is vital that, to thrive, the empath personality type needs to work towards learning to trust their own judgment and intuition so that they can be at one with the inherent superpowers they have been born with.

If an empath does not have a good understanding of themselves and how to work with energy rather than pushing against it or absorbing it all, not only can this be emotionally debilitating, it can also result in physical illness with depression, stress and anxiety taking a toll on the body and a very high chance of suffering from the effects of burnout.

Like with all things, there are variations of the empath personality type. Some people will identify strongly, others will only recognise themselves in a few of the following traits:

1. Feels calmer when alone, and, in relationships, requires distance and regular periods of solitude.

2. When in the company of others an empath struggles to work out whether they are feeling their own emotions or the emotions of those around them.

3. Struggles to remain present as the chaos of emotions around them pushes and pulls on an empath’s own thoughts, feelings and emotions.

4. Often says yes to others without thinking of their own needs.

5. In relationships or friendships, very often puts other people before themselves, as though everyone else’s pleasure and happiness is more important than their own.

6. Relationships can often move too fast and can become intense very quickly as the empath connects on a deep, intimate level very quickly due to the ability to absorb other people’s energy and emotions.

7. An empath will often take full responsibility for how others treat them and for anything that goes wrong in relationships. They have a great amount of compassion and can clearly see other people’s emotional baggage and so they make many excuses for why people behave as they do, and this is very often to the detriment of an empath.

8. Tends to connect with people who are suffering and often wants to heal others or try to make the world a better place for them.

9. Can find themselves taking on and absorbing other people’s problems and being used as a sounding board or dumping ground so that others can offload their emotional baggage.

10. Instinctively knows when someone around them is not being truthful.

11. Sometimes empaths just know things, without having any idea of where they gained the information. When trying to work out the truth from a lie it can seem as though the information has been presented forward so that it can be used to help make a decision. The empath should only trust the information if they are highly skilled at reading themselves and others accurately and if paranoia or other information is not clouding their judgement.

12. An empath’s mind is an inquisitive one and they are constantly searching for answers and theorize and philosophise constantly.

13. An empath who is highly in tune with themselves and skilled at reading others will often be able to pick up on someone else’s thought processes even if they are thousands of miles away.

14. Connects very strongly to the animal kingdom and identifies very easily with the emotional and physical pains that animals go through.

15. Is often most at peace and feeling harmonious when spending time with nature and roaming around the outdoors.

16. Can feel the energy surrounding physical things and will often choose clothing or material purchases based on the energy that has attached to them.

17. Very creative and highly imaginative, writing, art, music, painting, dancing, acting, painting, building and designing are a few of the traits that empaths very often are passionate about.

18. An empath will likely get distracted easily when they are doing things they don’t enjoy and will quickly zone out or day dream when placed in situations where their mind is not stimulated.

19. Can struggle to fully relax in the company of others and really let their hair down and have fun, unless they are extremely comfortable and at ease with those surrounding them.

20. Prefers their living space to be clutter free and minimalistic; chaotic surroundings make for chaotic minds for an empath and they have enough inner sensations happening without cluttering their psyche further.

21. Finds it very difficult to be around people who are egotistical or enjoy putting others down to make themselves look better. Empaths will often come to the defense of those that have been rejected or bullied in any way.

22. Crowded places are emotionally overwhelming and downtime is required after social gatherings.

23. Highly sensitive to sounds, smells, bright lights and the feel of certain fabrics.

24. Regularly suffers with fatigue and can feel drained following interactions with others.

25. Can become shy and withdrawn as a method of self-protection. This can result in empaths becoming introverts as a way of avoiding the emotional and physical pain that often stems from interactions.

Other people may see empaths as moody or loners due to the amount of alone or downtime they need. Others may struggle to understand that these things are just part of the personality type and feel comfortable and the most natural ways to exist for an empath. Empaths do like connection, but they need to balance that out by creating a safe space for themselves to exist in alongside it.

Supermarkets, bars/clubs, family gatherings and any crowded event can all be energetically overbearing. Frequent downtime or escapism to a garden, bathroom or kitchen will occur to temporarily break away from the intensely high energy that occurs when many people are close together in the same venue..

Empaths may have an addictive personality and can pick up habits such as drinking alcohol, playing online games or excessively indulging in a particular interest as a form of escapism to blot out feeling so much pain.

Listening to or watching local or worldwide news can be traumatic as the pain or violence the people or creatures involved experience is often transferred onto the empath as though the pain was theirs.

Empaths are free spirits, adventurers, life-seekers, rule breakers, they live outside the box. Often it can seem to others as very unconventional or unorthodox lifestyles. However, these lifestyles often suit an empath perfectly and feel to them the most natural way to live.

As empaths learn more about themselves, many of the traits above can become a thing of the past, or a new way of dealing with them is discovered so that they do not have negative side effects. While many people may recognise themselves in the traits above, there will be some who who see a lot of these things as how they used to be before finding ways to combat or work towards understanding areas so that life becomes less painful.

The key to thriving as an empath is to recognise each of the traits and then spend time thinking about each one and looking at how it may be negatively impacting or hindering a certain part of life. When we have a good understanding of how a certain characteristic affects us, we can work out ways to turn any trait that may have negative side effects into positive ones.

The easiest way to look at the empath type is as though the personality is a blessing and a curse. It is a blessing to have the ability to feel and experience life at such a highly sensitive level, so the joy and love around them will feel like constant electric pulses beating through them. However, the curse is that the lows are felt at an equal intensity.

When empaths learn to protect themselves by becoming consciously aware of how they are allowing outside energy to penetrate them, they are then in a position to turn the curses to blessings so that the painful and toxic energies are not absorbed within the psyche/soul. Empaths must be sure to surround themselves with others whose energies vibrate at a similar frequency so that they are not vulnerable and exposed to energy that can cause them harm. Self-protection is vital. I will cover all aspects of self-protection in a follow-up article.

Being an empath really is a beautiful way to live and to experience life. Finely tuning our frequency so that we keep our energy levels high and refuse to take on or absorb anything that will harm us is the simplest, harmonious and magically unique way to exist.

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