#that’s my experience with sex and I think a lot of other neurodivergent people

[nightyraven-art]

My hcs for kabru sexuality are so contradictory lmao.

I hc that he's like demisexual not bc im projecting but because If I remember correctly he struggles to form relationships at first. I know he has this flirty personality which is why I'm considering that hes either neurodivergent like me and can't distinct relationships and friendships he starts to flirt like to make friends and yet its funnier if he just went dated a lot to feel a spark but he realizes that it's not working and wanted to try a different approach but he never tried to get too deep in relationships just a few dates and thinks it's not for him.

I like that's he's on the aro spectrum but what if its way complicated and he has no label?

Like he's trying to understand where he stands with and once he finds the one it flips his own views and woah feelings are overwhelming but he'll get there.

Once he's with his s/o I think he's more willing to please his lover and is head over heels.

I honestly don't know where to put him exactly because I like many hcs but In my heart he is demisexual but in a "?" way

Like what he is or who he is? Post canon Kabru tho its another different world.

Still the same but he learnt to relax a bit and I think he needs alone time with his s/o maybe he's starting to love himself a bit more and gets his feelings sorted out.

Idek as a kabru fan I don't know where to really pin him at.

Anime kabru is a mess but post canon Kabru I think is demisexual (in my heart)

I like any hcs that I can see. I'm more where he just struggles to anyone and have this facade to being not seen as weak.

[nortism]

I wanted to talk about @pilferingapples ‘s autistic Fantine headcanon that has been brought up in the Les Mis Letters server because it has rewired my brain and the more I think about it the more I can see my own experiences as an autistic woman reflected in Fantine’s story.

Fantine is introduced as being an outsider amongst the other grisettes. I think Hugo’s intention here was to paint her as innocent and virtuous in comparison to them but the way it reads to me is that she is someone who just can’t quite connect with her peers. She is described as being dreamy and “always having a queer look about her” in the words of Favourite.

The way Fantine is treated by the other girls rings very true to me as an autistic woman in my experience with friendship. She does consider the other grisettes her friends yet they speak cruelly about her behind her back (Favourite saying she puts on airs) and to her face (Dahlia mocking her for crying over a dead horse). Yet she offers no resistance, in fact she barely seems to acknowledge these things as offensive, because that’s just what being friends is.

The friendship between the four grisettes is shown to be truly shallow when after Tholomyes’ “prank”, they all go their separate ways, with Hugo saying it was like they’d never been friends in the first place. Realistically, one of the few examples of female friendship in the brick being portrayed as shallow and catty is most likely down to some lingering misogyny on Hugo’s part but it is something I find relatable as someone who has allowed myself to be treated poorly by others because I thought that’s how friendship was supposed to be. I’m sure a lot of other autistic people can relate to this as well.

Additionally, I think it’s interesting how the other grisettes criticisms of Fantine come down to her not acting in the expected way and fitting in with group. Favourite accuses her of putting on airs because she won’t swing like the other girls (therefore let the men look up her skirt). Dahlia laughs at her for getting emotional over the dead horse because her emotions are tainting the happy outing they’re all having. Fantine being empathetic towards animals isn’t an inherently autistic trait by itself but her inability to suppress her emotions or just go along with what everyone else is doing is something I think a lot of neurodivergent people can relate to.

Her relationship with Tholomyes is probably the biggest example of Fantine not understanding unspoken social rules. I’m no history expert and people have definitely written more in depth posts on the relationships between upper class men and working class women in France in this period but from what I’ve gathered it was understood that these relationships were purely transactional. The men got sex and attention and the women got gifts and nice days out to places they couldn’t afford by themselves. There’s more nuance than that I’m sure but that’s the gist.

We know the other three grisettes are aware of this aspect of the relationship. They are eager to receive a “surprise”, an expensive gift they could later sell on. Favourite flatters her lover to his face and says all the things he expects of her but confesses to the other girls that she doesn’t like him because he isn’t playing his role of spending money on her.

Fantine is seemingly oblivious to all of this. Maybe it’s her ostracisation from the other girls that is keeping her ignorant or maybe she knows how it is for them but genuinely believes she and Tholomyes are different. Either way it’s clear to me that her and Tholomyes have very different ideas about their relationship and that subtext has not been picked up by Fantine. For the record, this is completely on Tholomyes, even if he’s supposed to be playing the expected role, leaving his mistress without any financial aid for their child together is bad even by the standards of the time. However Fantine is definitely naïve.

Also if you read Fantine as autistic, her reasons for being in love with Tholomyes make a lot more sense. From Hugo’s description, it doesn’t seem like Tholomyes has many redeeming features: he’s balding and missing teeth, he’s a student in his thirties and he is in poor health. Yet he pays attention to Fantine, he flatters her and spends money to keep her in a nice apartment.

If we assume that Fantine is autistic and has spent her life being an outsider, this onslaught of affection would lead her to let her guard down and believe that this is what love should look like. Even without the autism, Fantine was an orphan, she didn’t have any examples of what a marriage was supposed to look like growing up so how could she possibly resist a man who seems to be doing and saying all the right things?

I think my conclusion is it doesn’t really matter if you want to read Fantine as being autistic or not. I think all the factors I’ve outlined in this post can be explained by her upbringing and her still being very young during her relationship with Tholomyes rather than having to be neurodivergence. However, I think looking at Fantine through an autistic lense has given me a new appreciation for the character and being an outsider in society, a big theme in Les Mis, is generally a relatable sentiment for neurodivergent people and I think it’s interesting to explore that in the context of Fantine.

[tirfpikachu]

saw a post that was like

"hahah not trans ppl telling radfems to kill themselves as though trans people aren't masters at it haha XD"

and respectfully, as a detrans gyn, that shit is fucked up and i do not condone this behavior in feminist spaces. dysphoria DOES lead to a high rise in self-harm & suicide attempts. it's a debilitating symptom and as a chick with chronic mental illnesses and who had chronic dysphoria for years that shit can really fuck you up and it almost killed me. you say you care about detrans women + dysphoric ofab people but do you really?? do you really give a shit about us???? or do you actually think anyone struggling is a naive overdramatic little bitch who can just will herself/themself into being neurotypical or non-dysphoric overnight through sheer willpower alone. you only allow me to be around these parts w/o harassment because i'm post-dysphoria. that's not actual detrans allyship or dysphoric support.

y'all are just having fun being stupid little bullies, using conservative rhetoric recycled to be woke with feminism as a shield. the ableism and belittling of dysphoric struggles on radblr is unhinged. i don't trust a lot of you. don't think for a second that bc i've stayed quiet in the past or that we interact on my dash peacefully that i don't think you're a piece of shit when i see your posts/reblogs like this, mocking my past experiences and traumas. tras are horrible for making light of suicide by sending us suicide bait-type asks. let's not follow their example. it's a low-hanging fruit. woman the fuck up gyns. you're alienating so many detrans women, dysphoric women/ofab people, and just so many folks who desperately need real feminist support.

you claim to be all about outreach and supporting "all females" or whatever but even with that you don't. you really don't. you just wanna be the typical catty mean not all other girls type. you just want to mock mentally ill, neurodivergent & disabled people w/o criticism. sometimes this space feels like 4chan or a bunch of ableist r slur swinging male minecraft youtubers. you say you've peaked but you've only peaked on the axis of sex-based oppression and not systematic ableism & ableism trauma. it's always easier to overlook this shit and not unlearn ableism, internalized or not.

@ mentally ill and/or dysphoric radfems, don't feel you need to laugh along or keep following/interacting with gyns like this. you deserve better, we all do. we can carve out a space w/o that bullshit.

[abolitionpsych]

i think the funniest reason against self dx being that only drs are capable of thorough unbiased assessments is that most drs are not unbiased or thorough. they barely even assess.

True !! Its so funny when people reify a "professional judgment" about you that psychologists make in 0.2 seconds because of the jeans and boots you wear and your dyed hair. Like my clothing and hair dye unironically played a role in getting diagnosed with a personality disorder several times.💀 one psychiatrist told me that my top and boots look histrionic and my hair obsessive compulsive . Another one told me that Im antisocial because my jeans are ripped and I "sit like a rockstar" . no one can tell me that diagnoses are a scientific truth and not a moral judgement about me. Another one told me that he can tell by my hair and clothes and the way I sit and talk to him that Im "promiscuous" (=that I have a lot of casual sex) and that thats a sign of borderline . Im literally asexual .I dont know how I could ever take any diagnosis seriously .

But honestly I personally dont use the biomedical model (=which says that mental illness is the same as physical illness. This model tells us that if we have a psych label then we have "symptoms" of an underlying "illness" .) to understand my experiences at all anymore. I neither think of self dx nor of prof dx as particularly helpful. But honestly everyone can use the framework that makes most sense for themselves to understand their own experiences obviously. I would never tell someone that theyre using the wrong words to describe their own experiences or the wrong framework to understand themselves - I'm not a psychologist.

I personally reject all diagnoses and use a different framework instead of the biomedical model that makes more sense to me - the neurodiversity framework . I think of a lot of the experiences that got me diagnosed and that also made me label myself as "ill/disordered" as simply a deviation from "neuronormativity" (=whats societally deemed 'normal' to think/feel/do depending on your assigned gender/age/socioeconomic status/...) - this includes the norm deviation of "suffering more severely than others" . It just makes more sense to me since all mental illness diagnoses are solely descriptive labels - they literally only summarize experiences that you have . Thinking "well i do x because i have y condition (which was diagnosed based on clinician observations of x) and my brain is simply broken in a way requiring me to submit to expert clinical management and surveillance" was a sure way to make me go to therapy and try meds again and again and again . Like when I said "Im suicidal because of my depression (which is a label I got because I am suicidal)" it was like saying "I'm suicidal because I'm suicidal" . Its a circular logic . The question remains: what was actually the cause of my pain ??? Theres never been found a biological cause for any mental illness label by the way (neither low serotonin in depression nor a genetic defect in schizophrenia or that neurotypicals have a different brain than neurodivergent people or whatever else) .

So the reason why I personally dont see both, self diagnosis and professional diagnosis, as helpful is because it made me think I need to take medication and go to therapy to feel better and to lead a life that I enjoy . Its ironic that I ever thought that since therapy and meds always made my life much worse. and I know for certain that I would be doing better nowadays if I had never been to therapy and if I had never taken any meds. Believing that my diagnoses (self dx or prof dx) are true and say something about me made me think that I'll never be happy in life, that I'm a lost cause and that no one can help me (I was always labelled as non-compliant and as uncurably sick) . I dont think of myself as ill, I think of myself as neurodivergent (= deviating from neuronormativity) .

[aspd-culture]

Welcome back. You’re very informative.

I’m very confused about how numerous people, from you, to other antisocial people speaking from their experiences (some of which I learned are actually friends) to prosocial researchers of ASPD say that antisocial people see relationships as transactional. It’s not weird that you guys see it that way, it’s more like “and prosocials… don’t???” Because I’m certain I’m prosocial. I’m neurodivergent, sure, but no signs of ASPD. So, how do most prosocial people typically view relationships if they’re not transactional?

So I find prosocials and pwASPD both tend to think “but doesn’t everybody” when we hear this - it’s a super undescriptive term - but we’re thinking different things define something as transactional. We also see the reason for that transaction to be different.

From a prosocial generally, they’ll mean “I only want to be around people that ‘don’t drain my energy’, that don’t just take take take, that we mutually enjoy the friendship/relationship and want to be around each other”. That’s kinda their definition of getting something out of it, and they want everyone to get something out of it. If they’re draining you, they want you to be free of it so you can be happy, and the transactions involved can be purely emotional/vibes. The reason they feel this way is a desire for positive and enjoyable social connection; the consequence for an uneven/bad/missing transaction is discomfort and wasting their time in negative experiences and generally feeling bad in association with that person.

PwASPD see those transactions very very literally. There’s no vibes nor emotions in the transactions, those are either a reaction to the transaction or a bonus. We mean that we are getting something tangible or practical out of it. Rides, help with things we can’t or don’t want to do alone, sex, maybe even the social relief from the annoyance of “why don’t you ever talk to anyone?” coming from all sides. We also don’t always care if it’s even on the other person’s end. If they’re ok driving me everywhere/if they do it and don’t say or show they’re uncomfortable, then I will assume they are fine with that piece of the transaction. If I’m taking more than I’m giving and they seem chill with that then I’ll accept it. However, I won’t give them *nothing* and that’s because of our reason for transactions - it’s dangerous otherwise. First off, I have shit I need I can’t get myself as much as it sucks, so I need to be around people. But if we need something from them, what we learned in our childhoods is that we don’t get that for free. There’s always something over your head. A lot of pwASPD had friends or caregivers that would hold favors or even *basic, legally-mandated caregiving* over our heads as though we didn’t deserve it. Often our value was determined as a child by what we provided, and since children can’t provide much, we were worthless and not deserving of good treatment.

This is part of the reason (TW non-descriptive CSA mention, skip to the next paragraph if you want) that people thought ASPD was directly correlated with CSA for a long time - many cases of long term CSA come from either “I’ll give you x/do x for you if you help me with this” or worse, doing something first then saying “but I gave you X!/did X for you! I wouldn’t have if I knew you’d act like this”, often call us selfish if we tried to say no and maybe get aggressive or forceful after, and that is an easy lead-in to our view of interactions.

So a lot of us see it that if we want to be safe/know we can continue to get what we need, we HAVE to be giving them something. If you claim you like being around me “just to be around me” or worse that you’re willing to do something for me “just because I want to”, that’s not safe. You want something from me and I’ll give it to you - just tell me what it is. If you’re not telling me, that means it’s not good or you’re just gonna decide later that I’m selfish. You might hurt me to get what you want and justify it with this. Take something from my side so we’re even, because even means safe. Even means I get access to what I need and you get access to what you need - so now we’re both using this relationship/friendship/etc for something and you wouldn’t wanna mess that up by putting me in danger any more than I’d want to mess it up by putting you in danger.

Of course, not every prosocial sees it the first way and not every pwASPD had those experiences and/or sees it that way. But that’s what I’ve found to be common. If you see “they make me happy” as what your or their end of the transaction is, it’s definitely a prosocial response, maybe with the exception of thinking of it as “getting their brain to dopamine/oxytocin” vs caring how they’re actually feeling. If not, if you need it to be practical, that’s definitely transactional.

It’s important to note this is personal relationships with no practical consequences to ending the relationship - most people see relationships (platonic) with coworkers or managers as transactional and that’s a way I usually explain it to prosocials (“do you deal with your boss bc you like them or bc they sign your check - and would your boss keep you hired if you didn’t do your job because you make them happy just by being there?”). But with a romantic or sexual partner, a friend, etc. this is not a typical view of relationships.

That said - you can *absolutely* not have ASPD and have transactional view of relationships. It’s not a 1:1 thing there; not everyone with ASPD has it and not every prosocial doesn’t. It’s just a really common piece of the puzzle that is this personality disorder.

Edit: ack I’m so sorry I forgot to add the csa tw tags they’re there now.

Plain text below the cut:

So I find prosocials and pwASPD both tend to think “but doesn’t everybody” when we hear this - it’s a super undescriptive term - but we’re thinking different things define something as transactional. We also see the reason for that transaction to be different.

From a prosocial generally, they’ll mean “I only want to be around people that ‘don’t drain my energy’, that don’t just take take take, that we mutually enjoy the friendship/relationship and want to be around each other”. That’s kinda their definition of getting something out of it, and they want everyone to get something out of it. If they’re draining you, they want you to be free of it so you can be happy, and the transactions involved can be purely emotional/vibes. The reason they feel this way is a desire for positive and enjoyable social connection; the consequence for an uneven/bad/missing transaction is discomfort and wasting their time in negative experiences and generally feeling bad in association with that person.

PwASPD see those transactions very very literally. There’s no vibes nor emotions in the transactions, those are either a reaction to the transaction or a bonus. We mean that we are getting something tangible or practical out of it. Rides, help with things we can’t or don’t want to do alone, sex, maybe even the social relief from the annoyance of “why don’t you ever talk to anyone?” coming from all sides. We also don’t always care if it’s even on the other person’s end. If they’re ok driving me everywhere/if they do it and don’t say or show they’re uncomfortable, then I will assume they are fine with that piece of the transaction. If I’m taking more than I’m giving and they seem chill with that then I’ll accept it. However, I won’t give them *nothing* and that’s because of our reason for transactions - it’s dangerous otherwise. First off, I have shit I need I can’t get myself as much as it sucks, so I need to be around people. But if we need something from them, what we learned in our childhoods is that we don’t get that for free. There’s always something over your head. A lot of pwASPD had friends or caregivers that would hold favors or even *basic, legally-mandated caregiving* over our heads as though we didn’t deserve it. Often our value was determined as a child by what we provided, and since children can’t provide much, we were worthless and not deserving of good treatment.

This is part of the reason (TW non-descriptive CSA mention, skip to the next paragraph if you want) that people thought ASPD was directly correlated with CSA for a long time - many cases of long term CSA come from either “I’ll give you x/do x for you if you help me with this” or worse, doing something first then saying “but I gave you X!/did X for you! I wouldn’t have if I knew you’d act like this”, often call us selfish if we tried to say no and maybe get aggressive or forceful after, and that is an easy lead-in to our view of interactions.

So a lot of us see it that if we want to be safe/know we can continue to get what we need, we HAVE to be giving them something. If you claim you like being around me “just to be around me” or worse that you’re willing to do something for me “just because I want to”, that’s not safe. You want something from me and I’ll give it to you - just tell me what it is. If you’re not telling me, that means it’s not good or you’re just gonna decide later that I’m selfish. You might hurt me to get what you want and justify it with this. Take something from my side so we’re even, because even means safe. Even means I get access to what I need and you get access to what you need - so now we’re both using this relationship/friendship/etc for something and you wouldn’t wanna mess that up by putting me in danger any more than I’d want to mess it up by putting you in danger.

Of course, not every prosocial sees it the first way and not every pwASPD had those experiences and/or sees it that way. But that’s what I’ve found to be common. If you see “they make me happy” as what your or their end of the transaction is, it’s definitely a prosocial response, maybe with the exception of thinking of it as “getting their brain to dopamine/oxytocin” vs caring how they’re actually feeling. If not, if you need it to be practical, that’s definitely transactional.

It’s important to note this is personal relationships with no practical consequences to ending the relationship - most people see relationships (platonic) with coworkers or managers as transactional and that’s a way I usually explain it to prosocials (“do you deal with your boss bc you like them or bc they sign your check - and would your boss keep you hired if you didn’t do your job because you make them happy just by being there?”). But with a romantic or sexual partner, a friend, etc. this is not a typical view of relationships.

That said - you can *absolutely* not have ASPD and have transactional view of relationships. It’s not a 1:1 thing there; not everyone with ASPD has it and not every prosocial doesn’t. It’s just a really common piece of the puzzle that is this personality disorder.

Edit: ack I’m so sorry I forgot to add the csa tw tags they’re there now.

[crosshairs-dumb-pimp-gf]

My friend! Please send OC lore at your earliest convenience!

Ooo Some Tiddy bits about my self insert Tah'nyem Ra ?

Where to start?

(⚠️TW: These excerpts will reference sex work, exploitation, and abuse! Nothing too graphic or in depth but do proceed with cation!⚠️)

Tah'nyem or as you all know her colloquially "Tahny" is the daughter of gangster and flesh work entrepreneur Nyem'tok Ra. They hail from a planet I created called Ga'hah, you can call them Ga'haiians.

I made my own world to work with cause I'm not actually that well versed in Star Wars Canon and though it safer to make something that can exist in parallel. Ga'hah is a pleasure planet. Tidal locked, it's night side is a tourist hotspot full of casinos, bordellos, a race track and other entertainment based venues. Despite sex work being open on the planet, the atmosphere is generally family friendly, somewhat like modern day Vegas. (More on Ga'hah Here and Here)

A big reason Ga'hah is the way it is was so that Tahny could hail from a culture free of sexual shame. There's no purity culture on Ga'hah and their base relationship model are polycule clans rather than pairing off into couples. Originally. That's where the day half of the planet comes into play.

The Elites of the sun locked city of Sohn are chasers of status and influence. After a long time of trading with The Republic they started to adopt their ideas of power structure. The Sohnese introduced a cass system based on blood purity and started segregating power with political marriages in a more classical "Republic" fashion.

So now you have Tahny. Her father is a full blooded Ga'haiian who worked his way up through the ranks by underhanded means. At face value he's a man of the people. Using bordellos to gain wealth, his exploitation of the working class is disguised behind a veil of mutual benefit- his workers are paid well and are cared for so anyone on the outside looking in is bound to agree. He married a wealthy Coruscanti socialite to further his own influence, making Tah'nyem a half breed.

Half Blooded Sohnese are considered a lower cass, property to be traded and controlled. Tahny is to be bound to the highest bidder at her father's discretion.

She tends to ignore this expectation of hers, living on Coruscant through secondary school she's allowed more freedom than usual.

Nyem'tok took control of the Red Light district on Coruscant using his wife's money and influence. He put Tahny in charge of the club at the top of The Red Spire, known as The Red Crown (Think the Moulin Rouge of Coruscant.) Taking over the club at 18 she's the youngest in the field. To keep the "Ja'hans" in line she's developed a rather ruthless demeanor. The girl is viscous and has inflicted some damage protecting those in her charge.

She's highly trained in the arts of the field. On top of the technical skills of massage and uh...other, she can control her heart rate and body temperature to mimic arousal. She's resistant to Jedi mind tricks and her pain tolerance is abnormally high.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Tahny is a reflection of my past in the child pageantry industry. No, not sex work, lol, but the parallels are there. On the outside looking in I had a charmed childhood. Ballet, Martial Arts, Horse Back Riding, Vocal and Walking lessons etc etc, but it had it's price. I was a source of income for my family- the cash prizes for pageants and talent shows were major windfalls. I spent most of my childhood practicing "Or else!"

With my activities and neurodivergence I didn't socialize with other children much. We moved around a lot and it sort of affected my ability to connect to others.

Tahny shares my discomfort, in a position of being on the outside looking in, unable to relate to others since our life experiences are so different. The experience of loving a parent that only saw their child as a means to an end. She has commitment issues, attachment issues and can be a little manic when faced with her own weaknesses.

Her pairing with Crosshair plays off of their architypes of gendered servitude. For more on that see their Clone X Oc Week intro.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Thanks for asking and sorry if that's darker than expected. Check out the links for more info! I do plan on writing more on Ga'hah since I've left it open for others to use. Let me know if you have any follow up questions!

[xianjaneway]

So, here's the thing.

I was in a cult.

I had no idea I was in a cult, because NO ONE KNOWS when they're in a cult. I thought I was just REALLY devoted to Jesus. 🙄

I got out of the cult. I got my husband & my kids out of the cult. I helped a lot of other people get out of the cult.

After a while, though, I just wanted a life that didn't involve cult-y things. What would I be like if I'd never been in the cult? Would I have still been a musician? Would I have had as many children? Would I ever have been diagnosed w/ADHD? What would my career have been? Would I have married the same man? Would I have healed from my upbringing in some different way?

We'll never know, but we can know what life is like AFTER the cult. THAT is the option open to me now.

You know what I didn't do while I was in the cult?

Read.

I didn't read fiction books anymore.

And I had a degree in Creative Writing!

Know why?

Because I was supposed to, "....take every thought captive, & make it obedient to Christ!"

Thoughts lead to actions, and sin in real life begins with your thought life.

Aaaaaannd, if I were to read a book with, let's say, a sex scene in it, & it made me have sexy thoughts about someone who was NOT MY HUSBAND, then that's a sin.

Not just against God, but against MY HUSBAND.

Yep. My sexy thoughts are supposed to start AND end with him & him alone. Anything outside that is like bringing other people into our marriage. It's LIKE ADULTERY.

Folks, as you know, most fiction books don't have a rating system like AO3.

You can't filter them quite as easily.

I could be reading a hardboiled-detective noir mystery set in Appalachia in 1987, thinking we're about to explore a hidden robotics lab that's tucked behind a waterfall, but SUDDENLY, SEX!!!

And, regardless of how I reacted to the words on the page, by letting myself read any of them, I was (seriously!) giving the Devil a foothold.

To my neurodivergent brain, (which was also raising up to 4 small children & working night shift) it was simply easier to stop reading fiction written for the secular market, than it was to try & research which authors would do a fade-to-black.

A researcher named Steven Hassan came up with the "B.I.T.E Model of Authoritarian Control." He shows how cults control:

Behavior.

Information.

Thought.

Emotion.

Look him up, if you want to understand why your Trump-loving relatives have lost their minds. 💔

I'm just sorry.

On behalf of all the Christian nationalists who are making life hell for everyone now, I'm TRULY sorry that I ever believed any of this bullshit.

Cults get ahold of you when you're vulnerable. It can even be argued that the churches (yes, plural) that I was in were at one point NOT a cult, & slowly became a cult, over a period of decades.

As I'm trying to live my non-cult-y life, I'm just so damn thankful that fanfiction exists.

See, there are only so many things I can talk about in therapy, & there are only so many experiences I can go have in any given day.

However, I have HYPERLEXIA, baby, & a job with plenty of boring-AF tasks!

I read over 700 wpm.

And since I'm a woodworker & eBay seller, (who also has Long COVID--thanks Anti-vaxxers!) I work by myself a lot.

I found a lovely app called Evie, which lets me download fics, & it READS THEM ALOUD to me.

And, as I've re-discovered fiction, I've realized that I'm processing a lot of emotions that simply HAD NO LANGUAGE OR OUTLET before I read your stories.

Yeah.

If I left you a bunch of weirdly-vulnerable comments in your fics, THAT'S WHY.

Because that's what cults do: they take your language away, your emotions away, & your choices away, & then, to add insult to injury, they use your energy, your fucking life-force, to further their own agenda, whatever it is.

And yet you people....

You brain-rotted, fandom-obesessed, encyclopedias of pop culture that you are, have churned out incredible, moving, healing, BEAUTIFUL, SKILLFUL pieces of fiction that are HELPING ME HEAL FROM IT ALL.

I'll never forget the day my husband said something that irritated me, but I'd read the sweetest Good Omens fic earlier, where Aziraphale had responded to Crowley's grumpiness with a funny quip. I'd invited something *kind* to be planted in me, & was able to respond to my husband in kindness.

I'd spent such a long time marinating in the cult's expectations, & their promises for eternity.

It's so damn nice to read about real human emotions, experiences, struggles, relationships, or whatever, just to wash my brain with a different perspective.

Maybe it's old news to all of you who didn't spend the last 25+ years in a cult, but fiction helped develop my under-nourished empathy. It lubricated the rusty gears of my brain, with new words & new experiences. It gave me a new dictionary & thesaurus worth of words to describe my experiences & inner life.

Limiting information limits language, which limits thought, & ultimately limits action.

Every time you write, you help set someone free.

[fountainpenguin]

i know youve mentioned that the dimmadomes have adhd but are there other characters in your fics that are neurodivergent? :0 if that makes sense

It's not usually mentioned in-story, but here are some that have shown up in my writing:

Humans

- You brought up the Dimmadomes having ADHD/OCD comorbidity. They're some of my favorites just in terms of me developing those headcanons somewhat separately for each one of them... starting with Dale, not Dev, actually. But Dev was a logical conclusion afterwards.

Detail I think is cute: Both Dale and Dev like Sims games because they like building nice, organized things that are under their control (Yes, Dev does have a computer in his bedroom and I imagine he uses it mostly for games). Dev likes cleaning and organizing simulators. Dale played a LOT of Sims during the 50 years of frozen time. I like to think Sims was an awakening for teen Dale in terms of same-sex relationships, but he will never, ever tell you that. Come to think of it, there's no way boy x boy manga-loving Dev is not also exploring same-sex relationships through his Sims world. Like father, like son?

Realizing how funny it would be if Doug had ADHD and OCD and that's why he jumps from one business to another and why his dream in "Mooooving Day" is a suburbia of people dressed in identical outfits living in identical houses in many identical rows still has me on the floor. I'm sorry, I just think my realization of that when I'd already headcanoned both Dale and Dev with ADHD/OCD was extremely funny. Big "Wait a minute" lightbulb moment.

Dale has several interesting things we could talk about, and they're discussed in detail in the character profile I'm posting for him next week. On his list are complex PTSD, hypervigilance, and dissociation. He also has misophonia as part of his OCD (and so does Dev).

- My OC Hadley Harrington also has ADHD/OCD comorbidity. Her big thing is hoarding OCD. I discussed it more in her character profile and we saw it in action in "50 Words of Dev and Hazel," where Dev dug through his mom's stuff to rescue an au pair that had been crushed under her hoard.

In that story, Dale told Dev he was allowed to go to a Christmas party with his peers as long as he brought back some of their wrapping paper so Dale could wrap Hadley's present. She actually likes her presents when they're made of scraps because the recycling helps her feel better than paper being wasted, plus she thinks it looks fun in videos, and Dale knows that. Just a little detail I thought was cute.

- Chloe has mild OCD. She sometimes has anxiety attacks and experiences dissociation.

- Timmy and Mikey Munroe are two other characters who have ADHD in my works and I LOVE playing them as foils for each other, with Timmy being less attentive and Mikey being more hyperactive.

- Mikey also has dyslexia (Heavily implied by canon where he struggles with the spelling bee), which is interesting. I am still obsessed that his crush (Sophie Sanders) seems to have dyscalculia. Boy who struggles with words, girl who struggles with numbers, what crimes will they commit?

- Peppy Happy Betty has severe anxiety. In the original version of "Solo" (which was posted and up for a while), she said Sanderson helped her through her self-harm struggles. I later tweaked it so she says she's been scratching herself as I didn't think the original phrasing fit with the rest of my T-rated content (and I didn't want to catch people off guard with it).

Pink and Gray is supposed to delve into her self-harm, which is part of why I plan to raise its rating when it comes off hiatus (and I'll update the tags accordingly). This is one of the stories that I expected to censor most from its original draft, but since I want to raise its rating for other reasons anyway, I'd like to explore her self-harm arc too. Carefully and with proper tags as mentioned. Betty gets into tattoos later as a way to redirect some of those feelings. I... think she has bat (Anti-Fairy) wings tattooed on her back, but I'll have to double check. Pretty sure it's bat wings.

- I'd also like to write Hazel as autistic- I've seen autistic writers talk about the many things they relate to with her and I like their portrayals.

- I've been waffling over making Kevin Crocker neurodivergent because it feels right to me, but I haven't nailed down exactly what I want to do with him. Open to suggestions, but still doing research and trying to find what feels right :)

Non-Humans

Disclaimer - My non-humans have non-human brains; I'm translating a few things from their in-universe diagnoses for clarity.

- Goldie has Harm OCD. Her species (will o' the wisps) are stereotyped as "damsels force drakes into harems" and she has a lot of paranoia regarding that.

Enter Goldie-Poof dubcon arc where Poof feels awful about expressing his relationship concerns to Goldie, knowing she'll panic about them, so he keeps hiding his feelings. "Watch and Learn" was a story where Poof broke up with Goldie, only to take her back almost immediately.

- Anti-Cosmo has bipolar disorder (hand in hand with mania, depression, dissociation, and hypersexuality). Specifically, he has a parallel of it that applies to his specific species- In-universe, he has multiple diagnoses for his condition.

Anti-Fairies refer to him as "having a lightning spirit in his head" (and those he grew up with used they/them pronouns for Anti-Cosmo in his youth because of this, in accordance with Anti-Fairy culture). Fairies diagnose him as "being a Fairy in an Anti-Fairy's body" since his mood changes are arguably similar to those of a drone without pheromone exposure.

In Fairy terms, Anti-Cosmo has divus displacement disorder, which is treated by rubbing pheromones on his face every day. This is referenced again in the sideblog post I'm putting up tomorrow (about pheromones), but Anti-Cosmo throws off a lot of people because he always smells different due to those pheromones. Fairies consider him to have a shifting identity and don't trust him.

- Anti-Cosmo's mother (Anti-Florensa) and brother (Anti-Robin Jr.) have a magical parallel of schizophrenia. His brother experiences hallucinations of the past while his mother has hallucinations about different future timelines.

Anti-Cosmo had a bad falling out with his brother around the time he figured out who he's a reincarnation of (Frayed Knots), as Anti-Robin's struggle to remember who Anti-Cosmo is in this lifetime (and react to him appropriately) strained their relationship.

In Anti-Fairy culture, they're also considered to have their souls entangled with nature spirits and are referred to as they/them by many people (though their enjoyment of being addressed that way fluctuates).

- Foop has dissociative identity disorder. I don't really have anything more to say about it. Lots of trauma going on there. Definitely some PTSD. And again, as an Anti-Fairy, his culture also diagnoses him as having a nature spirit tangled with his soul.

Unfortunately, Foop doesn't get a lot of the help he needs because Anti-Fairies tend to wave his situation off as a genetic condition rather than something trauma-related, seeing as several members of his family tree are also diagnosed with nature spirit conditions. This actually plays into why Foop connects with Fairy culture in a lot of ways (and why he has a pixie therapist, not an Anti-Fairy one).

- I think Poof has a little PTSD too and/or some anxiety, seeing as he had a panic attack at the end of "All I Ever Wanted" when talking about life with Goldie.

- Two characters of mine (a fairy named Rupert Roebeam and a pixie named Walter Keefe) have dysolfactya, which is a parallel of dyslexia I created for the inability to organize scents in your head (Not exactly the easiest thing to live with in a world that relies on pheromones to keep you from wandering into dangerous areas).

- I... usually refer to Longwood's and Poof's lack of interest in preening as a parallel of asexuality for a world where licking necks and faces is a big deal, but it's kind of interesting to think about. In-universe, they'd probably be diagnosed in some medical or psychological way.

Very pre-DSM update vibes, which absolutely fits the time period I have the cloudlands set in. Something akin to "diagnosed with critically low libido" for sure, but for licking.

- H.P. has OCD (Imo, this is implied by the song he sings in the Musical about how he doesn't hate the Fairies and doesn't want to take over, but can't stop himself from doing so because he "must cater" to his urge to be "the world's administrator," not to mention his insistence on 37-year plans).

He hates untidy notes- There are several scenes where he rewrites his entire note page because he doesn't like marks on his notes (including crossed-out words). He also has issues with lying and his athazagoraphobia (fear of being forgotten), leading to the winning combo of making it explicitly clear when he plans to enact a takeover plan. There's a whole thing about how he has to justify his takeovers in terms of "It's their fault for not stopping me; I warned them I'd do it."

H.P. also experienced zoochosis during his time at the Eros Nest (zoo run by Cupid's family), leading to repetitive behaviors with no clear end goal. That probably affects him even now in a PTSD-adjacent way.

There might be characters I didn't mention - I feel like I'm blanking on something Anti-Marigold experiences - but those are the ones that come to mind for FOP 'fics!

[andromeda-grace]

Writeblr Introduction

Hi, I’m Andromeda (she/they). I am returning to Writeblr and decided to start a new blog for my WIPs and writing updates! I want to use this blog to shout out other Writeblrs, make posts about my current WIPs, and experiences in publishing. I mostly write original fiction but write fanfic when the inspiration strikes. I love Writeblr games and asks!

This blog is a safe space for all identities, gender & sexuality, neurodivergence, race, and religion. I do my best with content and trigger warnings.

My Writing: Genre and Representation

I love horror, sci-fi, and fairy tales 

I don’t enjoy romance (if it’s only the pursuit and drama), but I love writing nuanced love stories where people communicate well and put effort into building relationships

Lots of queerness and queer relationships

BIPOC main characters

Neurodivergence- shout out to the undiagnosed ADHD queens, the anxiety, and masking/coping behaviors

Trauma, out of context, is seen as personality

Smut- sex is a part of life and it’s fun to write. Get down, make mistakes, get messy. My sex scenes aren’t just conventionally attractive people putting on a show. I emphasize body diversity, complexities of gender identity, and emotional state

Tropes:

Found Family

Villains

Redemption- working to be a better person, even when it’s hard

Poly-Amory- we often have more than one close friendship, and have variety and nuance in those different relationships, so the same thing goes for romance

Morally gray/Feral girls- women have so much responsibility put on them for the emotional wellbeing of others, but what if they aren’t capable of that? (think Broad City/ Bottoms)

Finished works:

The Devil You Know- short story- Out now! Find your copy here

Genre: horror, vampires, fairytale

Vibe: The Green Knight x The Witch

Anya has built a quiet life for herself, trusted as the village healer as long as she keeps her magic hidden. All of that changes when a strange traveler arrives at her doorstep. The man looks human, but Anya senses an old and powerful magic within him. Intrigued, she allows Owen inside. He claims to have been an apprentice to a witch, and Anya, despite her suspicions, finds him to be a kindred spirit. They begin a romance, both finding comfort in one another.

Their peace is broken when a family comes to Anya in crisis. Their child has been cursed, and is transforming into a monster. Desperate to save the boy, Anya asks Owen for help. He can grant her the power to break the spell, but it requires blood and forbidden rites. Knowing that she can’t break the curse alone, Anya faces a choice with deadly consequences.

WIPs:

Bubblegum Capital

Genre: Queer Cyberpunk

Vibe: 1984 x Legally Blonde

Novaczek is on the brink of fame. They’re an amateur gamer about to break into the pro leagues. But their dreams are crushed when work denies them time off for the championship.

Novaczek decides to play on shift and is caught. Everything comes crashing down. They find themselves at rock bottom having lost their job, company housing, and girlfriend all at once.

In a world where your value is measured by your social ranking, Novaczek has to claw themselves back up, hustling for money and favors from friends. As they work their way back up the ranks they discover an underbelly where nothing and no-one are what they appear to be.

Love, Asunder

Genre: Gay Vampires, Family Saga

Vibe: 1917 x Hellboy

James Townsend was supposed to be starting his new life, an American abroad, with a Fellowship at Oxford University. All of that changes when Germany marches on Paris. James can’t remain in the classroom while teachers and students leave their desks for the battlefield. So James enlists as a volunteer ambulance driver on the Front. The days stretch long with violence and misery, but he finds purpose and friendships in the trenches. 

Then he meets a man, a smuggler providing supplies and information to the Allies. Etienne is so different from the soldiers, bright and charming. They begin a secret romance, disappearing together when they can, and writing letters in between. 

An opportunity comes to meet in Paris, and James is overwhelmed at the opportunity to spend time with Etienne in the City of Love. Free to spend their days together, James quickly discovers just how much Etienne has been hiding from him, and enters a world of magic, beauty, and death. 

Tropes and fun stuff:

Butch witches

Femme werewolves

Playing the vampire tropes straight

Magical Underground

Found Family

Bio-Family responsibilities

Many, Many different kinds of love

I'll be sharing moodboards and snippets along the way! Looking forward to learning more about the other talented Writeblrs out here!

tagging: @hillnerd-art @suffrajett @starknstarwars @em-dashes @blind-the-winds @leave-her-a-tome @athenswrites

[bluedalahorse]

A highly incomplete introduction to AuDHD for YR fans who want to write more Sara Eriksson

Greetings, friends! In my time in the Young Royals fandom, I’ve seen a few people mention they were interested writing Sara but they didn’t know how to approach her neurodivergence, or that they find it intimidating. I figured it might be worth compiling a post where I share both ADHD and autism resources I’ve found helpful, as well as elements of my personal experience I draw on when writing Sara.

This post is by no means exhaustive, and I could probably say a lot more. But I figured I’d get it out there in case it was helpful to anyone else.

Part One: Resources and Such

Yo Samdy Sam is an AuDHD vlogger who talks about her experiences, and I find her video about how autism and ADHD show up together pretty informative. Since Sara is both it’s good to have a grasp on these nuances! Yo Samdy Sam’s other videos are also ones I’d recommend.

I’m autistic, now what? is also a good channel to check out for someone talking about their day to day experiences of autism. Her videos are a little longer, but she focuses often on how things have changed from her childhood to her adulthood, which can be helpful if you’re thinking about Sara at different ages/writing flashbacks/working on fic set in the future/etc.

Chloe Hayden, who stars in another teen drama called Heartbreak High, is both autistic and ADHD, and very fun and positive. She presents quite differently than Sara does—lots more talking and energy—but I think she’s a good example of every neurodivergent person presenting differently. Also, people should watch Heartbreak High and write me some fic where Sara and Quinni meet because I want it.

How to ADHD is mostly geared toward practical life skills when you’ve got ADHD, but it doesn’t neglect the way those interact with emotional well-being. Sara might try some of these strategies while working on her school work and chores, either because an adult recommended she do so or because it’s part of a system she worked out for herself. Also, the videos are perfectly designed for ADHD brains, and i have acquired many ways to self-accommodate by watching them.

Jessie Gender is autistic and does commentary about lots of nerdy things and trans rights. I really liked her video on The Queen’s Gambit where she talks about autistic girls and sex. If you’re planning to write spicer fic about Sara (which people should write more of imo) then Jessie might be a good resource!

Marieke Nijkamp is a multiply disabled author, and one of her disabilities is autism. I still have to get around to reading her novel length books but her short story “Better For All the World” made me cry and is one of my formative sargust mentor texts. I really recommend it if you can get a hold of the anthology The Radical Element. (Although, heads up, the story deals with the Buck v Bell case of 1927, which is difficult subject matter.)

Disability in Kidlit has some great resources on writing autistic characters from a craft perspective. If you’re going to write specifically from Sara’s point of view, or even if you’re not, it’s worth reading this article about the autistic voice in fiction and this article about humanizing autistic characters. Other articles on the site are also great!

I’m going to talk more about my personal experiences under the cut below…

Part 2: My personal experiences & takeaways

Sooooo if you’ve met one AuDHD person, you’ve met one AuDHD person. I can’t really claim to speak for all AuDHD people, and I’ve only recently gotten my diagnosis anyway. That said, a lot of my own personal experience colors how I write Sara. So in the interest of transparency, I’ve gone ahead and listed some of the things I’ve thought about when I write her.

An important note before I get started—this is not, actually, meta or analysis of the show. I’m not trying to tell you want I “really” think is going on with Sara Eriksson, or what the writers intended, or what the show is saying. You may read her differently, and I’m sure your interpretation is just as informed by your own experiences as mine. So please don’t take this as a criticism if your interpretation is different.

What I am explaining here instead are the ways that my personal experiences as an AuDHD person have influenced my perception of Sara, which in turn translates to how I’ve made sense of her storyline and written her in fanfic. None of these are “excuses,” but they are explorations. You can look at it as me examining my own thinking and writing process. I’m also opening up about some of my experiences and being a little bit vulnerable. If you have questions about any of these things below, or you want to know more for your own fic, you are always welcome to message me. I may not be able to get back to you right away but I can help however I am able. There are also some things I might feel more comfortable discussing in depth one-on-one, so direct messages might be better in that case, too.

Anyway, let’s begin…

Polarized strengths and weaknesses: In my own experience as an AuDHD person there are some pretty dramatic contrasts between what I’m good at and what I suck at. I’m in the 99% percentile in some skills and the 2% percentile in others. This adds up to stuff like, I read the Sherlock Holmes stories for the first time when I was eight and Les Misérables when I was eleven, but I cannot drive a car or learn a choreographed dance no matter how hard I try. This is inexplicable to some people because they’re like, omg but you know all these advanced words! Surely if you can’t drive a car, it’s just because you aren’t trying hard enough! Likewise I think it makes sense to write Sara with a spiky profile of her own, and have characters react to that accordingly.

Perceptions of maturity: AuDHD adults aren’t children. AuDHD teenagers aren’t children either. And yet part of ableism is the infantilization of AuDHD people. I don’t have a lot of huge narrative squicks, but this is one of them, and it’s rooted in frustrations I’ve had over people treating me like I’m still a child. I always write Sara as the age she’s intended to be in the fic. If I see fanfic scenes or headcanon scenarios where someone is treating Sara like she’s five, and that’s spun as positive or never questioned, it can make me really upset and it’s an immediate back button. This is something I would recommend writers be on the lookout for if they’re incorporating Sara into a scene. Maybe this one bullet point is spinning a little far into criticism of other folks, but I think if I could communicate one thing to other people writing Sara, this would be it.

Special interests/hyperfixations: The thing about special interests is that autistic people often turn to them to replenish their energy and get their nervous systems back to a state of equilibrium. (For instance, me writing this post right now about my blorbo Sara Eriksson is me engaging with a special interest to put my nervous system in a state of equilibrium and put energy back in my body.) Sara’s time spent with Rousseau isn’t just wonderful because she loves horses, it’s also something that’s probably helping her recharge after a complicated day of navigating social situations at Hillerska. This is why she panics at the thought of losing Rousseau. Now, there’s still issues here in that Rousseau isn’t actually Sara’s horse. And I do think many teenage and adult autistics with low support needs, like Sara, understand that they can’t engage with their special interests all the time. But in order to write and understand Sara, I have to understand that she’s counting on Rousseau and horses more generally as something that helps her self-regulate and stay grounded. (In Heart and Homeland I also added art as one of her hyperfixations, so she often draws to recharge and make sense of things.)

Alexithymia: Alexithymia is essentially a trait people can have where they struggle to read their own emotions. It’s pretty common in autistic people and other neurodivergent folk; I have a mild version of it. For me, tuning into my emotions is a bit like trying to figure out what song is playing on a staticy radio. I might have to wait and “mess with the dial” a bit before I can fully understand what I’m feeling in a given situation. The question “how are you?” is a bit of a nightmare for me sometimes. Because my alexithymia is mild, I usually can figure out what I’m feeling in time, but I still often need extra effort to discern the nuances. I tend to apply this trait to Sara when I write her, mostly because she seems to need to sit with her feelings to understand how they’re affecting her. This is most evident when she’s trying to figure out if she like-likes August, though it comes out in other ways, too. Sara might just need a lot of time to process her emotions. Even when she’s showing her emotions and in them, they might take a lot of time to leave her system, and she might not catch on to how they’re affecting her right away. In Heart and Homeland, part of the reason Sara keeps a diary in the first place is so she can sort through what she’s feeling.

Heightened empathy: There’s an old stereotype that autistic people don’t have any empathy. This is not true, and some autistics even have an excess of empathy. I would argue that Sara (at least the way I interpret and write her) is one of them. This may seem counterintutive to some, as I have seen people argue that she is insufficiently empathetic to Simon and/or Linda. I see it differently, however. In my own experience, having an excess of empathy doesn’t always mean that I come across as loving and sweet to the people in my life. Sometimes it can make it so you’re so full of feelings toward others that you can’t act. I often function clumsily in conflicts, and feel like I’m caught between different parties, especially if it’s a situation where everyone appears to be hurting. It’s enough to make me shut down and not do anything, or even side with the person who to everyone else is obviously wrong. Especially when I was a teenager, the answer about “who to side with” in a conflict wasn’t always clear to me. For instance, in college, I dated a girl who constantly belittled me and many of my friends, and I let her get away with it because I was sensitive to the ways she was genuinely hurting about life. I am not proud of it now, and I did break up with her eventually and made efforts to patch things up with my friends when I could, but it also took me two and a half years to get there. Thanks to life experience and therapy, I am now better at recognizing red flags and overriding my excess empathy to call people out on their shit when they need it. It took me time, though, and I can’t help reading a lot of that into Sara. In a way, I tend to think her hope that August will own up to his actions is born out of heightened empathy for both August and Simon. She pins her hopes on this solution because, in her mind, it meets Simon’s needs because the person who harmed him has come forward and is willing to be held accountable for his actions and it meets August’s needs because he can find relief in owning up to his shit and stop drowning in regret. Now, yes, Sara is absolutely misleading herself and ignoring crucial details of the situation because she’s in love, and she does misread what Simon actually needs in the situation. This is very typically teenage. At the same time, when I write her in fic, I see this as tied to an excess of empathy, and not a lack of it.

Inertia/Executive Functioning Struggles: Building on what was said above… some AuDHD people (like myself) can really struggle with making a plan and getting started on tasks, and the bigger the task, the bigger the struggle. “Tasks” is a word we usually apply to things like doing laundry, so we tend to think of executive functioning as an unemotional thing, but it can also apply to emotional stuff like, say, having a big conversation that needs to be had or breaking up with someone you know you need to. (Like I said above. Two and a half years with that shitty person in college!) In fact, I would say inertia can even make things harder with social/emotional stuff, because math homework is at least consistently math homework, but social/emotional situations can shift and become more complicated over time. At Hillerska, we see Sara get involved in ever-shifting social politics, and it takes things escalating to the field scene for her to take action at the end of S2. (In a more minor example, Sara taking a while to get ready in the parents’ weekend episode, and Linda rushing her out the door, is a great example of Sara being affected by inertia.)

Menstrual ick: Increasing numbers of studies show that people with uteruses who have ADHD, autism, or both are way more likely to have painful periods and PMDD. This is true for me—one of the biggest signs that my period is coming is that I am absolutely convinced everyone hates me. I don’t know how to apply this to Sara directly, but periods are part of life and if you happen to write about her dealing with menstrual nonsense, this might be something to keep in mind.

Sensory issues: A lot of people are aware of sensory issues for neurodivergents, and every neurodivergent experiences sensory issues differently, and not always in ways that are immediately apparent to neurotypicals. For me, I hate vacuums and car horns and bananas, but for my roommate, she hates any lights on after 7 PM and finds chocolate overwhelming. Sara doesn’t mention any particular sensory issues, but presumably she has some and masks her reactions, so uh… make up the ones that make sense to you, I guess. Or, don’t make them up, but maybe read about a bunch of different people’s experiences of sensory issues and work from there. External stuff like being tired, sick, or being on one’s period can heighten sensory issues, so think about vulnerability factors that might increase them for Sara.

Rejection sensitivity: Many people with ADHD feel rejection or criticism from others with a high level of intensity, even as physical pain. (Fun fact: PMS makes my rejection sensitivity even worse!) I don’t know if we see Sara feeling rejection sensitivity onscreen much in YR, but I can’t help but imagine she’s dealt with it in the past, based on the way she says she sometimes feels like the worst person in the world, when she’s talking to August in 2.3. If Sara’s had therapy (which I assume she’s had in some form because she knows breathing exercises) then maybe this is something she’s worked on coping strategies.

Accommodations in school: I don’t actually know how this works in Sweden specifically or at a school like Hillerska, but I’d love to hear how it works! Someone else should weigh in if they know things. But I would not be surprised if Sara has the legal right to certain accommodations in school such as extended time on tests, guided notes, etc. (Not being Swedish myself, I’m not sure what the equivalent to the Americans With Disabilities Act would be in Sweden.) One thing to note here is that Sara would get to decide herself whether she actually uses her accommodations or not. I would say, based on my observations of teenagers, is that some neurodivergent teenagers tend not to use their accommodations so they can avoid sticking out among their peers. This seems like it might be the case for Sara, since she wants to make friends at Hillerska and not stand out. The other thing she might encounter at Hillerska specifically is teachers who don’t want to meet those accommodations because they’re “old school” and, frankly, ableist. Accommodations are something one should take into account when writing Sara’s academic life, though.

Double empathy problem: This is something that the psych community is talking about more lately, and essentially the idea here is that neurotypicals communicate best with other neurotypicals whereas neurodivergents communicate best with other neurodivergents. That doesn’t mean both groups can’t communicate with one another (and even reducing it to two groups is kind of oversimplifying things, because obviously culture and other things impact communication too) but there are different patterns of communication at work here. In my own life, I vibe well with people whose neurotypes are similar to mine—this is exactly why @coruscantrhapsody and I are such iconic roommates. The Double Empathy Problen is theorized to have played a role in stereotypes about autistic people not having any empathy. (PS: I don’t actually think August has undiagnosed ADHD in canon, at least not according to the writers. Still, I think it would be pretty interesting to write him in fanfiction as someone who has a missed childhood diagnosis given the way he struggles with rejection sensitivity, impulsivity, and emotion regulation, and the way that the adderall addiction could be a form of self-medication that has gone awry. For that reason I think it’d be interesting to see a fic where the sargust relationship is viewed through the lens of the double empathy problem. Obviously not in a way where the ADHD excuses August’s harmful behaviors, but you know. An added layer of delicious nuance. Alternately, I know some folks like to headcanon Wille as autistic. Sara really clicking with autistic!Wille when they finally get a chance to talk is something I’d like to see!)

Neurodivergent community: As far as I can tell, Sara doesn’t really have neurodivergent community. This makes me sad, as someone who strongly benefits from friendships with other neurodivergent people. I would like her to have some in someone’s fic, please! Let me know if you write it.

That’s all for now… maybe I’ll add more in a future post.

For any other AuDHDers, do you have any elements of your personal experience that you incorporate into how you interpret or write Sara’s character? Feel free to reblog and add on, if you feel so inclined. (But also, no pressure.) Like I said, every ND person experiences this stuff differently, so someone else may have completely different experiences than me.

[radfemsiren]

I just saw that twitter post "is she a pick me or is she just autistic" in regards to only being friends with men and let me tell you, as a woman who is autistic and I will note that yes this is soley my experience. I hated boys immediatley they were loud and annoying and triggered a lot of sensory issues for me and I much preferred being with girls because duh! Also autistic girls still feel the effects of misogyny and will also find ways to avoid it(like being seen as one of the boys) like I get it some girls are some real mean bullies (and I have trauma from one specific friendship) but so are boys. I didn't have good girl friendships growing up and a lot of them were filled with like hidden bullying but even now i'd still choose girl friendships over boys because even in moments of terrible behaviors (which again lbr are often fueled by being raised in a misogynystic male centric enviorment) there were moments of true sisterly support. And also quite frankly it is EMBARRASSING if u are now an adult and still acting like women are these uniquely terrible people. If a woman acts like that I assume she is the problem who doesn't even bother trying to connect to other women 🙄 sorry for the rant I am just tired of always seeing the whole autistic women will always find better friendships with men cause no the fuck we won't (and before anyone says anything yes that is an actual thing ive seen a lot of ppl say or as they will say "point out")

Thanks for sharing! Yeah, in my experience what I think is happening when I hear autistic women say female friendships are hard is that when you are neurodivergent, it’s hard to fit into your designated peer group. We all usually have friendships with other members of our sex, esp growing up. So autistic males have trouble fitting into their male peer group, and vice versa. Because these women can’t mesh socially with other women, they think it’s a woman problem. When it’s not, it’s a problem with neurodivergence.

I also noticed that the 2 groups that have the highest levels of gender nonconformity are homosexuals, and autistics. Gender nonconformity is also punished by peer groups in both men and women, and gender nonconforming people identify a lot with and have a lot in common with the gender they express themselves in…. But identifying and relating to men doesn’t mean they like you back lol.

[visgrapplinghooks]

friendlinghood: a proposal

skip to "terminology" if you don't want the long explanation

QPRs are really difficult to talk about because of the way the modern queer community has kinda framed it as like "dating but without romantic attraction"

when that's not entirely true

I mean, you COULD say that's a kind of QPR but it'd be a mistake to frame all of it that way. this is in large part to internet misinformation and shit as well as amatonormativity from which a lot of relationship discourse is framed against

queerplatonicism, from my pov refers to what is essentially the natural byproduct of queer and neurodivergent people having close friends

the queer community has been aware for a while that its members would have close friendships that in some way violated traditional social norms for behavior outside romantic relationships or family, etc.

when you sit outside the neurotypical and patriarchal norm, the conventional social understanding of what relationships are kinda breaks down for you

you display levels of closeness and intimacy and affection that are "inappropriate" for neurotypical and patriarchal society. in most cases they're not formal relationships, but natural evolutions of friendships between queer and neurodivergent folks

cishet people actually do have variants on this like the concept of "blood brothers" where two men who love each other basically make a pact to always have each other's backs and be their support and they do the whole movie thing where they mix blood to bind them together (it's a very cinematic thing, but the point is it exists in the popular consciousness)

"romance" and "friendship" each refer to a set of social norms and expectations. there's like a whole narrative constructed around those concepts and people internalize and have their own versions of them

a lot of people probably have friends they want to fuck or kiss or cuddle or declare their undying affection for but it'd just be "weird" within the social boundaries of acceptability and so people pigeonhole their relationships into either friend or romantic partner.

queerplatonicism (from my pov) is essentially accepting or practicing relationships which are neither platonic or romantic or even strictly familial. many queer people have them with other queer people they're close to. if you know queer folks then you probably know what I'm talking about - the friends they have that they're not dating but seem intensely attached and close to. they usually have weird names for each other that go beyond friendship like they'll jokingly call each other wives and husbands and siblings and partners... but it doesn't feel quite entirely joking. they'll express a lot of physical affection in the casual way you might typically ascribe to romantic partners. they'll prioritize time with those people as much as any romantic partner they may have etc.

straight and cis people and neurotypical people obviously experience them to some extent, it's just that patriarchy was built around cishet neurotypicals in particular, so it tends to cling to their mindsets more strongly, and once you're already outside of the "bounds of normalcy" by being queer, ND, etc. then it's a lot easier to feel like it's okay for you to be in relationships that aren't "normal".

because like the idea of loving someone with your entire fucking being... it's so tied up in these cultural ideas on how to behave about those feelings and it never made sense to me, because if you just let yourself feel those emotions you start to realize there are people in your life that maybe you love so much more than friends. but "more than friends" is so washed up in romance that you force those feelings down and think "this is fine, I'm happy with being just friends, what else can we be?"

maybe I don't want to have sex or hold hands on a ferris wheel or get. married or kiss or any of that. maybe I just want to exist in the same room as that person know that that person is in my life and know that person cares about me just as much as I do them.

terminology

I've started to use the term "friendling" in my day to day life, now. the term is a portmanteau of "friend" and "sibling" and "loveling" (the english cognate of the German word "lieblings" which can mean "favorite", but is also a term of endearment).

to me, it's probably the most accurate way to describe the Everything All At Once feelings that are simultaneously your weird friends that are your found family and also "romantic" but twisted beyond recognition where the term stops meaning anything.

I'm just throwing this word and explanation out there for anyone who feels like me and wants to use it too. not exclusive to queer people or neurodivergence or anything, I just think it's often easier to be cognisant of those feelings when you are queer and neurodivergent.

that being said, I do NOT want this to be folded into another "attraction label". this is, as far as I can tell, not a unique form of attraction but quite literally the opposite. it's an abstraction of the core impulses of attraction that ALL humans experience without the labels or social structures built around it. I do not want the language that I've spent so long trying to find for my experiences losing all of its value and being reapporpriated into the amatonormative, allonormative, and cisheteropatriarchal framework.

"friendlinghood" - is what I see as an attribute of relationships and the extent to which they deviate from socially conventional definitions of a relationship.

"friendlingship" - used grammatically like friendship. referring to any complex relationship acategorically.

"friendling" - used grammatically similar to friend. referring to those involved in any complex relationship acategorically.

all of this shit is nebulous and doesn't really mean anything beyond what meaning you choose to give it. I think any relationship can have some amount of friendlinghood and I don't think there's a clear line between friendlingship and friendship or romance or family, because it's not a type of relationship in the first place. it's just silly words I made that helped me.

language and labels

so the biggest problem with terminology like this is you can end up creating labels. my point was to create personal terms for myself and my relationships because that's what helped me personally process my own feelings.

that's not to say everyone needs or benefits from them. you can just vibe and do whatever you want and many people are happy with that.

I don't think words like this being codified and standardized really helps anyone. it's unavoidable that we as humans like articulating feelings, but the entire point of my interactions with friendlinghood is about certain things defying labels and language. language in this sense is just a tool, it's a hammer for a nail. it's not embodying the concept itself, it's just useful shorthand.

I will still freely refer to friendlings as close friends, best friends, found family, and other words. as long as I know the intention behind it is all that matters. I just needed that initial bit of language to articulate the feelings before the other words felt right to me.

[garymerlow]

Get To Know Your Mutuals

Pretending I was tagged by @starrybouquet cause I need the distraction and I love answering questions about myself in a non-therapy setting, LOL

What’s the origin of your blog title?

It’s a line from Mark Owen’s song “Come Back”, which has been speaking to me lately. (Actually, I think if I’d heard it in any of the time since it came out, it would’ve spoken to me the whole time, but that’s neither here nor there)

OTP(s) + Shipnames

Too damn many to name, seriously! I’m a bit of an equal opportunity shipper, it’d be easier to get a list of pairings I don’t ship. Sorry if that’s a bit of a cop out.

Favorite Color

Yellow 💛 , though I love red/black/white/gold together in any combo. Light blue also really speaks to me as well. I just love colors…

Song Stuck In Your Head

Hard to have a song stuck when I’m listening to music right now. What’s playing is U2’s “Crumbs From Your Table”.

Weirdest Habit/Trait

Can’t talk too much about eyeball stuff or even really look into someone’s eyes in person without my eyes watering aggressively. It’s fucking embarrassing as hell and has lead to a fair few awkward moments.

Hobbies?

Not even sure I’ve got a lot of what constitutes as ‘hobbies’ right now? I guess my occasional photo editing and rare bead bracelet making would suffice, though the bracelets especially have been solely for myself.

If you work, what’s your profession?

I sort clothes at a thrift store, pretty much. It’s a lot more physical labor than you’d expect, but I get to listen to music or podcasts or fic all day long, and I rarely have to face customers, so I’m pretty happy there even if it feels like I don’t exist in the eyes of my coworkers 95% of the time.

If you could have any job you wish, what would it be?

The dream jobs that always cycle back regardless of impossibility are: special education teacher, music journalist, drummer/bassist/singer in a band though not all at once, and fashion designer…what lofty dreams I have, huh?

Something you’re good at?

I pride myself at being a good listening ear, if nothing else. I’m also pretty good at identifying 80s hits, but that’s not helpful unless it’s trivia night.

Something you hate?

The complexity of romance/friendship/sex.

Something you collect?

What don’t I collect LOL? I’ll just say pins/buttons.

Something you forget?

I apparently forget people’s birthdays…so sorry about that!

What’s your love language?

Shared experiences, always. Call it a side effect of my lifelong loneliness, but I cherish experiences with people I hold dear.

Favorite Movie/Show?

Favorite movie is Ocean’s 11, favorite show is 21 Jump Street :^)

Favorite Food?

Red beans and rice first and foremost…but beyond that I’m pretty basic and just love peel and eat shrimp.

Favorite Animal?

River otters! Or platypi!

What were you like as a child?

I’m probably not the one to ask about this if I’m honest haha…I was dealing with not properly diagnosed autism and social issues stemming from not talking until I was 4.5 yrs old. I used to chase boys on the playground and threaten to kiss them if I caught them (I never did but once) because I thought being boy crazy was something everyone did but I went too far with it. I was obsessed with dogs and cats, obsessed over cartoons and animation history, listened to oldies music from the 60s-80s while my peers were obsessed with Disney Channel music and hip-hop…I was a bit of a bookworm but not in the way other neurodivergent kids were to my knowledge. I had noise sensitivity issues that made social situations in large crowds REALLY tough. I’ve been told I was caring towards classmates who didn’t have a voice when I was able to lend that support. I wanted to be friends with everyone even if I wasn’t good at keeping them. Besides the constant company of my older sister, my childhood was pretty lonely on the whole.

Favorite subject at school?

Anything with computers, then history/social studies, then English. Could take or leave everything else.

Least favorite subject?

Math, but turns out it’s probably because I have the math form of dyslexia (along with ACTUAL dyslexia lol)

What’s your best character trait?

I…I don’t know. You should REALLY be asking my mutuals about that, I can’t come up with anything besides my kindness, I guess?

What’s your worst character trait?

I’m self introspective to the point of obsession, and it kinda leaks out into other factions of my life, especially my self esteem/image.

If you could change any detail of your life right now, what would it be?

I wish I had a more solid support system, but that’s something I should’ve been working on for years. But I think that would change my life/outlook on it more than anything short of systemic social change right now.

If you could travel in time, who would you like to meet?

There’s living people I’d like to meet right now (Robbie Williams and Michael Stipe spring to mind first), but if we’re speaking people who have passed, I’d say I’d either like to meet Michael Hutchence, or I’d like to have one more day with my late grandfather.

Leaving this as an open tag for whomever wishes to do this, I’d love to read your responses!

[thryth-gaming]

Representation within and beyond Me

This is familiar territory for me.

This thread by Gail Simone is great one that goes into the differences between allegory and direct representation.

Allegory is a pretty strong tool for creating a way to make one story or character appeal to a wide variety of people from different life experiences because the story represents some form of common ground between those grounds. She points to the way the X-Men have been a variably effective allegory appealing to a variety of marginalized populations.

Which is great.

I remember that the last time I got excited about a D&D race was when I read the section on Yuan-ti in Volo's Guide to Monsters. There's a section about the psychology which tried to explain why the yuan-ti were so evil. However, a lot of their justifications were relatable life-experiences and I realized at some point that if you removed the "and this makes them evil" that was appended to most of these bits... the yuan-ti were very much neurodivergent coded.

It came with that mixed bag of their neurodivergence being used to explain why they became evil. But still, here was a playable ancestry that I had found some serious personal overlap with. And in the nine to ten years since the release of that book in 2016 I've played a large number of yuan-ti and each of them was neurodivergent and somewhere on the ace/demi sexual spectrum.

Heck once you add in the way the yuan-ti's primary culture feels very fascist and very eugencist, with some strong parallels to corporate ladder-climbing in the way yuan-ti and their gods devour each other to move up, and the way the culture outright lies about the origins of species (granted that's a revelation only as recent as Candlekeep) then it becomes even more relatable to my position as part of white America growing and seeing layer after layer pulled back from the propaganda of our culture to the rot underneath.

Zihu Asutali, a yuan-ti celestial warlock trying to escape her oppressive culture.

Caress Melani, an ace paladin in service to a benevolent goddess associated with sex and sex-work (Sharess).

Proper Ruin, an artificer from Tal'dorei who had the good fortune to never need to mask.

None of this relatability was deliberate on the part of WotC. Like I said, they were trying to use some typically neurodivergent psychological traits as an explanation for why they are pre-disposed to evil. And the yuan-ti, or at least the Serpent Kingdoms specifically, are still dipped in an aesthetic that is a problematic mix of Southeast Asia and Central/South American as a shorthand for exotic evil cult. So I don't think they quite realized how much the Serpent Kingdoms' brand of evil follows American corporate/nationalist ideology.

This was a suspicion that was confirmed when Monsters of the Multiverse came out with a new version of yuan-ti with all the neurodivergence replaced by a bland statement of "they can be good or evil" and a picture that is admittedly neat but also very European with blonde hair and a hooded tunic with brooch that looks more Celtic or Nordic.

As soon as they decided they'd allow for yuanti to be good, they were immediately set to Euronormative and neurotypical. It was such a huge lost opportunity.

It was just such a disheartening confirmation that they linked all the neurodivergence they described to an inability to comprehend morality. A similar occurrence happened when I got ready to play Zihu and started gushing over the coming challenges of roleplaying a character without what humans considered "normal" emotions. And the GM, very much trying to help, suggested "what if your patron fixed you and gave you emotions." And boy did I deflate fast and very politely said "okay... I guess" or something to that effect.

I've rambled on this on my YouTube channel in the past with a bit moreof the publication history of the Yuan-ti included.

Likewise, there's all sorts of these unintentional allegories in my writing and even game design. The Changeling playbook was an allegory for struggling with realizing my own neurodivergence long before consciously admitted to myself that I was neurodivergent instead of using language like "substandard genius" or "broken" as I had in my youth to explain why I was consistently intelligent but still could not get a handle on how I was meant to act.

The situation of the Community and supernaturals in general from Divine Blood is the same. Most of them are able to pass as human, but they aren't. And there's nothing predatory or dangerous about them any more than there's danger in normal people, they are normal people. They're just not human and often process thoughts in very different ways. And the very fact that there should be nothing wrong with just being who they are upfront and public... but instead they kept secret and some were born outside the Community such that they grew up without knowing what they really were.

Since the personal revelation of being both asexual/aromantic and neurodivergent it's had some impact on my writing. I've been struggling to find a way to re-approach Divine Blood (and finally write a second novel) with this knowledge now conscious in the forefront. But it really helped me polish the Changeling into the version that reached Slayer's Survival Kit. I also deliberately drew on my experience as an expat for The Visitor and my self-esteem issues for The Forged.

The realization of my own writings and creations was immense. But the thing with the yuan-ti made me realize how easily a company can first draw me in and then alienate me. The key element here being that WotC didn't know the impression they were giving with the yuan-ti originally and thus when they answered our requests for people to no longer be depicted as inherently evil, they had no problem dumping that unintentional neurodivergent representation in the trash.

By comparison learning that Kim Howell, aka Parse, of Sentinels of Multiverse was canonically autistic was a much sharper emotion than than than my still strong attachment and identification with yuan-ti. This wasn't an accident. Parse was specifically noted as being autistic. The company wasn't going to rug pull me the way WotC had, because that depiction was intentional.

In addition, Parse is also like me in the way that she's got a belly and isn't the typical perfect physical ideal that superheroes lean into. Granted, she's very clearly in shape, which I'm very much not. Still it's great to know that there's this chunky lady out there in that universe as one of the more dangerous supers in the setting.

Another pitfall that Greater Than Games avoided with Parse is that they avoided making her autism the source of her superpower. Parse has a supernatural ability to analyze things down to a metaphysical level. It's very much the sort of thing a lot of well-meaning writers would imply as autism=superpower. But instead, she has an origin story very much separate from her status as an autistic person.

She'd been part of a project analyzing the programming of a rogue AI robot which had unknowingly been altered by cosmic energies. A burst of that cosmic energy carried through the programs is what altered her perceptions to the point of prophecy combined with truesight. Her powers are cosmic... not autistic.

So, I dearly love Parse. She's amazing and I'm desperately hoping she's part of the Disparation supplement for the Definitive Edition of the game... because right now GTG has stopped producing new projects due to the tariff situation. If not, I still have the older edition of the game in digital form.

Which brings me to another point in the same thread above where Gail makes another comment.

My stories tend to be a bit diverse with main characters often being very different myself and with very different life-experiences. from my own and I am dreadfully terrified that have dreadfully misrepresented some group. Especially on the characters I most love. Am I representing Lucretia's trauma properly in Bystander? Is Hel's disability representation appropriate in Divine Blood? There are certainly several origins that I would not have created if I was creating the characters today.

I don't have too much to say on this for the simple fact that my writing has not reached very far and I haven't heard much beyond my immediate circles. So I can only speak in generalities and paranoia.

I'd love to hire a sensitivity or cultural consultant. I got to work with James Mendez Hodes on Hunter's Journal and Slayer's Survival Kit in the last couple of years, and it is something I recommend to anybody. He pointed out several places where I had made an assumption that was limiting or had an implication that was not intended and he really helped me through that... especially with The Forged and The Visitor.

However... that was part of a project funded by Evil Hat. I live pretty much paycheck to paycheck with what seems to be an ever growing debt said paycheck has issues keeping up with. This has kept consultants and editors just out of reach of my wallet and this rankles at me (there are currently maybe three short novels waiting for me get the money for a professional editor).

In all honesty, I'm unlikely to ever find out. I don't have much reach. I'd be surprised if even a thousand people had read my original works. But that doesn't matter so much to me. I want to have added something good into the world and I don't want to cause even theoretical harm.

What I can say is that if I am ever lucky enough for someone to stumble on one of my books and opt to make it into some sort of 1-season and cancelled acclaimed and popular Netflix series, and I had any sort of control, then I would not be the main author on the project. Same if they were to get taken up for a comic adaptation or something similar.

I'd ask for writers of culture appropriate to the characters to be found and do stuff with my ideas that give more complete representation. I'm perfectly happy to be in the credits under "based on an idea by...".

Might as well add links to my stuff. I need to make myself market more.

My Itch store-front

My Archive of Our Own page

My Patreon for reading unreleased drafts

Both my Patreon and my AO3 have some of my unreleased first drafts on them. More on Patreon. The Patreon posts do require a membership, but only a free one.

I'm really bad at self-marketing.

[rentumblsstuff]

Stacy headcanons? Since I love the way you write her

OOOO YAY UHHH LEMME SEE

My biggest headcanon for her is that Melissa (TGWDLM, Hey Melissa) is her cousin. She’s not a serial killer but she does have a little bit of a screw-loose like her. She also loves cats (and as opposed to being all serial-killer-y about people being animals, she’s really just into petplay-)

That connection being established, I think her family is rich! In Miss Holloween (a couple scenes were read in one of the fundraising livestreams for Cinderella’s Castle), it’s established that Stacy goes to college at Vassar in New York and that is not easy to get into and not cheap, so they’ve gotta have a bit of dough ykwim??? And in Hey Melissa, it’s stated Melissa flew all her friends in, and paying for 3 peoples’ airline tickets can’t be cheap. So……… They’re well-off.

DOM.👏 ENOUGH SAID.

She wears vanilla perfume!

Neurodivergent (and is very unaware of this) and cheer is one of her special interests! She’s also involved in the dance team at Hatchetfield High and could go on an infinitely long rant about the history of any given genre of dance (cause “what kind of a dancer doesn’t know that stuff???” A lot of them, Stacy… a lot of them.)

She also LOVES Sanrio and is secretly a huge fan of “girly” animes. She’s always wanted to bond with Richie over their shared love of Japanese culture but they were never really allowed to interact before Max “went missing.” Her favorite anime is Kakegurui and she tried to learn how to play card games because of it.

She was THRIVING with the whole e-girl look in 2020 and that’s usually how she dressed when she didn’t have to wear her cheer uniform. She WOULD HAVE been bullied for it if that’s not what everyone else was wearing too.

She’s got double d’s and this headcanon is PURELY because of the Stacy’s Melons thing from Abstinence Camp

In the future she experiments more with her hair because now she can do so without fear of getting bullied

Her favorite colors are baby blue and pastel pink.

Back to Stacy attending Vassar, I think she majored in women’s studies. Cause I don’t think anything else suits her better.

She’s had a crush on Richie for a while and hasn’t acted on it because she’s worried she’ll get bullied too, he’ll get bullied harder than he already does, or that her approach to flirting/asking him out will be too forward and creepy because she’s been told she comes across that way by other boys in the past.

Tw in this paragraph for SH; When Richie first admits to her when they start dating that he struggles with his mental health, she kisses the scars on his arms that he shows her.

If she had to be claimed by a LiB I think it’d be Blinky. She has a lil bit of stalkerish tendencies that he would appreciate. (Steph is Wiggly-claimed and Brenda is Nibbly-claimed just for reference in my head :])

If the NPMD cast was in a polar opposites AU where they’re all the opposites of themselves I think Opposite!Stacy would essentially serve the same function as Ruth, but she’s not role swapped with Ruth if you get what I mean.

SADIST. Paddles and clamps and shit dude. All her sex toys are super cutesy and aesthetic too. Definitely owns a couple tails.

I think with guys she’s dated before, they’ve done stuff but never gone all the way, so she’s technically a virgin. None of them could match her freak anyways 💅 she likes hearing about Steph’s hookups though; living vicariously through her best friend is fun and she totally doesn’t feel like an animal scratching at its enclosure to get out whaaaaaaaaat???

Trying to think of a wholesome one to end on hold on-

Her favorite fruit is pineapple because she learned that there’s an enzyme in it called Bromelain that breaks down proteins, so when you eat pineapple, it eats you back. She thinks that’s sick as fuck.

She watched Tiger King three times.

OH and her favorite app on her phone is Pinterest. She’s OBSESSED. Her boards are all perfectly organized, not a pin out of place.

There’s 20 headcanons :) thank you for reading !!! <3

[sevenmerrymagpies]

🪱Wiggly Worm Wednesday!🪱

@soaringornithopter tagged me back in July for one of these and I finally had something I want to share. If people are interested I would happily talk more about the alt season one I've imagined for this autistic Steve - all from Barb's POV.

I usually don't headcanon Steve as autistic. I like that idea for many other Stranger Things characters, and I have written Robin as explicitly autistic in a few of my fics, but for Steve, if I'm gonna make him neurodivergent, I usually don't pick autism. That doesn't mean I haven't read a lot of good fics where he is autistic, and of course, that got stuck in my head. How could Steve be autistic and be close to the character we see on screen?

Key canon characteristics that I think Steve has to have and would have to be addressed somehow would be: his popularity, his reputation with the ladies, his reputation as an asshole/bully, his athleticism, and his friendships with Tommy and Carol. 

His popularity could be explained by absent parents, good looks, and a lot of money at his disposal. To give an autistic flare, he could be naïve, a common trait. To the student body at large, that would make him either a lovable himbo or a usable idiot.

Steve was a weirdo in elementary school and probably a lot of middle school. My idea would be that he got hot early for a boy, so seventh or eighth grade. Carol probably realized he was impressionable and naïve, and she could use him as leverage on her own climb of the social ladder. Steve is not an idiot; he realizes that Carol is helping him not be a weirdo anymore. It also might explain why he is dismissive of Jonathan in the first few episodes. He was that kind of person, and he did not want to go back to that by any means necessary.

That would also explain his reputation as an asshole or even a bully. Even if he doesn't explicitly bully, if he is autistic, there's a good chance he misses a lot of the social cues of more subtle bullying done around him because he's either spacing out (thanks to the overstimulating school environment) or he is straight up missing the cue. It would also explain why he doesn't stop Tommy most of the time, but when Nancy complains, he does stop Tommy. She's giving him a cue he can understand that Tommy is overstepping. I also think hanging around Tommy and Carol would skew the cues that Steve has learned. He is meaner than he would otherwise be because he learned by watching them.

If I had to choose between hyper or hypo-sensitive to most stimuli, I would make Steve hypo-sensitive and sensory-seeking. That would potentially explain part of his love of athleticism because he's getting a lot of proprioceptive feedback through roughhousing, training, and playing in games. It also might be why he seeks out sex as much as he does in canon. Especially if you add handsome, naïve, and sensory seeking together, you get somebody who might seek out sex and get sex on the regular (caveat regular sex for a high schooler). I think someone who was hypersensitive to stimuli would not seek those experiences out as much.

Finally, I love making Steve's athleticism part of his special interests. I love that Steve was obsessed with baseball stats as a kid. That is almost cool and gets him a modicum of respect from his peers. He's not bad at sports in elementary school during PE, and maybe even talented at some things, but he doesn't have the attention span for it because he doesn't care about it at first. After he gets into the stats and they start playing baseball in PE, he discovers a love for the memorization and collection of statistics and the actual game itself. It also gets him a modicum of social approval, which he desperately desires. He got into more sports as time went on, and his special interest expanded because he learned that baseball was both fun to collect and fun to play. He expands his play as well. Because he is sensory-seeking, he also gets a lot of self-regulation from playing sports, and that helps reinforce his love for them.

In canon, he also has a reputation for being vain. I'd love to give him another special interest in his appearance. This is a guy who goes out of his way to buy fashion magazines when he goes to Chicago with his parents because that's the only place he can buy Vogue Men Italia.

I like the idea of those two special interests helping him pass.

Finally, I'd love to give him a big special interest that he keeps secret because he learned in elementary school that no one cared, and in fact, it made him weirder. Something benign but also that he could dive deep into. I kind of like astronomy, with a subsection of Greek mythology as a logical extension of learning astronomy when you are a child. He learned about the constellations and deep-dived into Greek mythology to learn what the constellations meant. But he doesn't even share this stuff with his parents because it's too weird.

Finally, it's very important to this version of Steve that he would not meet the criteria to be diagnosed as autistic in the late 60s and into the 70s. So he would have no idea why he was different, just that he was very different, and always had to keep it under wraps.