#this is what happens when my ramblings dont get attention behind the scenes lmao dgfhgjhk gotta subject everyone to it on main

[vampiremourning]

yall okay so im. okay u know that writer thing you do where whenever you have an Experience in life you keep like. tabs and notes on it in a semi-dissociative state to file away for future reference in case it ever pops up in a story and you need to descrbe the emotions and experience? ive been thinking of vampires and Food. (this veers into ED territory so im gonna drop it under the cut just in case)

(this is copy pasted from discord for my own filing purposes )

 so mitchell, in case this was missed, is a former sufferer of a restrictive based ed. i only say former bc yknow, vampirism makes food impossible now. it was definitely a way she felt like she could control her environment and possibly conform to enough beauty standards to be deemed memorable and worthy of attention. i think being the odd one out personality wise gave her a complicated fixation w surface level beauty. she's underweight at the time of her embrace and it shows, tho she wasn't at hospitalization level yet--just kinda felt bad overall (brain fog, mood swings, anemia, vertigo, bad circulation, etc.) 

 and i think that like, while she knows now she looks visibly unhealthy, she's also got a distinct part of her brain that enjoys the fact that she got to be frozen in her illness? it's not progressing so there's no danger, she can just enjoy what she's hazardously cultivated. she also can't grasp that there are fledglings who miss having to intake food. it never tasted good enough to motivate her to eat, the mental energy and willpower was rarely there for cooking, and most textures were abhorrent to her. there's a period where she's more ashamed of the fact that drinking blood is somehow easier than eating ever was, and shouldn't she feel like a monster for that? isn't she supposed to mourn the fact that something so human was forcibly removed from her?

shouldn't she want to look healthier to keep up the illusion of humanity? 

 but like the thing is she doesn't lmao. she definitely wasn't at the stage where she was ready to get Help when she was embraced, but she did have enough self awareness to know she was playing with fire--she was just unfortunately too busy enjoying the suffering. i think on some level she believed that if she struggled enough, she would be able to assimilate & gain some sort of social status in her life instead of being alone constantly. 

 i dont think she would talk about this with other kindred tbh. she likes the fact that she's retained a high humanity level and the type of kindred who revels in the blood consumption typically hasn't been the sort she wants to associate with. she just can't relate to everyone else & would rather process that quietly over the risk of being ostracized again. she swings wildly between feeling as though she should have wanted to recover more/still want to recover now, vs feeling kind of relived that she never had to deal with it.

im honestly not too sure where i was going with this meta lmao. but it definitely carries through with mitchell's motif of being constantly torn about how she views herself & going between self flagellation and neutrality. at this point, her version of recovery would likely just consist of making peace with what's happened and that she doesn't need to carry forward a different version of her previous consumption-based guilt.