#tw // abuse

[jadethetransfem]

Oh… I see now

“Why do you beat yourself up so much over little mistakes?”

[ace-and-the-rpg-horrors]

the psychological horror of being the boy that David the Demon possessed.

you don't know how long it's been. you don't know how long your mind hasn't been your own. all you know is that you were in London the last time you were conscious, and you wake up on the ground all the way in America. in a desolate, dark place with two people standing over you. one of them holds a butcher's cleaver.

you don't know that for God knows how long, a demon has been using you as its puppet to traumatise someone. using your mouth to manipulate, threaten and abuse.

are you told any of this? do you really want to be? of course, you should be made aware of the extent of what's happened to you. you have the right to know why you're so far from home, why you can't remember the past weeks, perhaps even months. but would it be better if you didn't? could you handle the truth? could you live with it afterwards?

you have been forced to act as the villain in someone's horror story. it's your face that a girl you don't recognise sees in her nightmares.

it's not even clear if the very name "David" belongs to the demon or yourself.

[sharkboywrites]

My perspective on Curly as a victim of abuse

Tw for abuse (physical and sexual)

Hey mouthwashing fandom, so this is kind of a hard topic for me to tackle, but recently with seeing people’s opinions in the fandom on Curly as a character, I want to put in my own two cents as a victim of abuse.

I want to clarify before I start that I am not a victim of sexual abuse specifically. The abuse I faced was physical that bordered on sexual, but I was never sexually assaulted. That’s why this analysis isn’t about the sexual assault aspects of Anya’s abuse, like her relationship with Jimmy, but rather on the aftermath of the abuse on how the people she trusted (specifically Curly) interact with Jimmy after they know.

For context so people can understand my situation: I was in a very physically abusive friendship that bordered on sexual abuse in my freshman year of high school. Now, through my sophomore to senior year, I was forced to be in the same school as this person. In the same classes, in the same clubs, in the same events, and the same friend group as my abuser.

This is why I relate to Anya so heavily. I understand being forced to stay in situations with the person who abused you and being around people who either don’t know or do know and haven’t done anything/hold them accountable.

Now onto the main topic of my rant: Curly. So far from what I’ve seen, Curly is a hot topic for debate on the morality of his character. Anya confided to Curly about the abuse, and Curly, as far as we can see, didn’t do much. This makes it really easy for people to point fingers at Curly and call him an awful person and say that he is just as bad as Jimmy.

This is where I disagree. I don’t think Curly is a bad person.

Again, I understand the pain of having people do nothing. I have watched people I confided in about the abuse I face completely ignore what I have said and continue to be friends with them. I have had people say that I was lying. I have had people defend them right to my face because “They look like they’re getting better” or “But they seem like such a good partner to their (current) girlfriend!”

I get how frustrating that is. I understand the level of hurt that brings and how unsafe that can make someone feel. But once again, this is something the fandom immediately jumps on Curly for without really looking any further into it.

The thing is, these are people I know at school. These are people who can actively control their situations. These people can stop talking to them, stop giving them rides, etc. to stop interacting with them.

This is not the case for Curly and Jimmy. The most obvious thing being: they’re literally on a ship in space. They are all in a confined space and forced to be together for months on end. On top of that, Jimmy is a very unstable person, and Curly probably knows that. A lot of people like to characterize Curly as the “Oh, but he’s my friend, he wouldn’t do that” guy, but that’s not what happened. He listened to Anya, and while he definitely been more empathetic and done a bit more, he still didn’t deny it.

I personally feel like Curly specifically not denying it means he knows that Jimmy did it, and that he knows Jimmy is a bad person.

All of these are faults of Curly’s. He let someone he knew onto was dangerous onto the ship, and when he did something bad, he didn’t do enough to help despite being the captain.

But one thing we do know is that Jimmy is a manipulator. He will manipulate or threaten anyone to get what he wants. First off, we don’t know if Jimmy manipulated Curly to give him the job in the first place, which could have very much happened. Second, he was seen manipulating Curly AGAIN in the psych evaluation scene, the birthday party scene, and near the end of the game when Curly confronts him after talking with Anya.

Every single thing Curly falls short on is a direct effect of Jimmy’s manipulation in the first place. Yes, he absolutely could have done more in both situations, but Jimmy manipulated into him into letting him off easy.

On top of being manipulated by Jimmy, there wasn’t much Curly could do. He can’t just throw Jimmy out into space and he couldn’t let Anya have the gun because he can’t have his crew killing each other obviously (even if Jimmy is a threat).

The only critique I have of Curly at this point is doing more to protect Anya. He could have made a better effort to keep Anya safe from Jimmy and really put his foot down when confronting him.

Although again with all of this, it just boils down to Jimmy. If manipulation doesn’t work with Jimmy, then he uses threats or brute force. Curly probably knows that Jimmy is unstable, and probably didn’t know what he would do if he had been firm with him or done literally anything that could be seen as against him, evidence being the birthday scene. Everything that happened and everything Curly fell flat on was becuase of Jimmy’s manipulation and unpredictability tendencies, so really, it’s not 100% his fault.

Tldr; While Curly could have done a little more and should be critiqued, all of the stuff he falls flat on is because of Jimmy just like everything else in the story, so people should stop treating him like he’s a bad person or could keep Jimmy in control because he was a victim too.

[thestarlightforge]

“when safety is gone, what grows in the space it left behind”

There are a lot of abuse and recovery stories out there in fandom.  A lot of them are written by people who’ve never been in an abusive relationship.  That’s fine, that certainly doesn’t mean you can't write it, especially when it’s present in canon.  Unfortunately, it does mean that a lot of people get it wrong.

The usual abuse narrative you see in fandom is a story about absence.  The lack of safety.  The lack of freedom.  The lack of love, or of hope, or of trust.  They try to characterize the life of an abused kid, or an abused partner, based on what’s missing.  They characterize recovery based on getting things back: finding safety, discovering freedom, and slowly regaining the ability to trust–other people, the security of the world, themselves.

That doesn’t work.  That is not how it works.

Lives cannot be characterized by negative space.  This is a statement about writing.  It’s also a statement about life.

You can’t write about somebody by describing what isn’t there.  Or you can, but you’ll get a strange, inverted, abstracted picture of a life, with none of the right detail.  A silhouette.  The gaps are real but they're not the point.

If you’re writing a story, you need to make it about the things that are there.  Don’t try to tell me about the absence of safety.  Safety is relative.  There are moments of more or less safety all throughout your character’s day.  Absolute safety doesn’t exist in anyone’s life, abusive situation or not.

If you are trying to tell me a story about not feeling safe, then the question you need to be thinking about is, when safety is gone, what grows in the space it left behind?

Don’t try to tell me a story about a life characterized by the lack of safety.  Tell me a story about a life defined by the presence of fear.

What's there in somebody’s life when their safety, their freedom, their hope and trust are all gone?  It’s not just gaps waiting to be filled when everything comes out right in the end.  It’s not just a void.

The absence of safety is the presence of fear.  The absence of freedom is the presence of rules, the constant litany of must do this and don’t do that and a very very complicated kind of math beneath every single decision.  The lack of love feels like self-loathing.  The lack of trust translates as learning skills and strategies and skepticism, how to get what you need because you can’t be sure it’ll be there otherwise.

You don’t draw the lack of hope by telling me how your character rarely dares to dream about having better.  You draw it by telling me all the ways your character is up to their neck in what it takes to survive this life, this now, by telling me all the plans they do have and never once in any of them mentioning the idea of getting out.

This is of major importance when it comes to aftermath stories, too.  Your character isn’t a hollow shell to be filled with trust and affection and security.  Your character is full.  They are brimming over with coping mechanisms and certainties about the world.  They are packed with strategies and quickfire risk-reward assessments, and depending on the person it may look more calculated or more instinctual, but it’s there.  It’s always there.  You’re not filling holes or teaching your teenage/adult character basic facts of life like they’re a child.  You’re taking a human being out of one culture and trying to immerse them in another. People who are abused make choices.  In a world where the ‘wrong’ choice means pain and injury, they make a damn career out of figuring out and trying to make the right choice, again and again and again.  People who are abused have a framework for the world, they are not utterly baffled by everyone else, they make assumptions and fit observations together in a way that corresponds with the world they know.

They’re not little lost children.  They’re not empty.  They’re human beings trying to live in a way that’s as natural for them as life is for anybody, and if you’re going to write abuse/recovery, you need to know that in your bones.

Don’t tell me about gaps.  Tell me about what’s there instead.

[jellyskink]

so what was it that finally broke ford? i know it was a gradual process, but what would you say pushed him over the edge?

This is a major reason why Ford goes feral over real human food. He's got mad trauma

[carto0ncritter]

People are so desperate for LGBT representation, (specifically gay and lesbian couples), that they're willing to accept literally any homosexual ship regardless of the concerning elements.

Let's see, we have ass ships like

1)Stolitz - Stolas is an abuser, a r*pist, a racist man who has so many powers yet is emotionally fragile, passive and wimpy, a man who victimizes himself over and over, a man who emotionally neglects the child who desperately needs him for his sexual fantasies with his victim, a man who is the creator's pet, a man whose actions aren't wrong according to the writers, a man who can just blame everyone else around him but himself with no consequences

2) Catradora - Catra is an abuser too, but was treated like a cute kitty cat in s5 despite having done atrocious things, she was instantly forgiven with no consequences, and she ended up dating her sister and the biggest victim of her abuse

3) Huskerdust - I haven't talked about this one so far, but Angel sexually harassed Husk and never apologized, Husk himself sang "Loser, Baby" and as a SA survivor I felt like he was trying to say this to Angel: "Oh, you've hit rock bottom because of SA? It's your fault lol, accept that you're a whiny bitch and a loser even tho the problem is extremely serious and out of your control and just suck it up, I'm a loser too despite not going through the same thing you have, you're not alone in being a loser BUT YOU ARE STILL A LOSER BABYYY A LOOOSER" Like, ik the message was supposed to be how we're not alone in our struggles and how there's always someone who will understand and make us feel less alone, but the way this was handled rubbed me the wrong way. Also, I'm not sure whether or not to mention this as well (screw it, I will), but Husk is described as "the old bartender," his voice sounds like it belongs to an old dude too, and he apparently died when he was like, 70, while Angel died in his 30's. I'm not gonna calculate their ages based on how it works in Hell because personally I feel like it doesn't matter. What matters is how old they were when they were alive. But however you decide to look at their ages, it's not just the implied enormous age gap that bothers me, no... it's more so the difference in maturity between Husk and Angel. Husk is described as a dude who has seen and experienced a lot of stuff. On the other hand, Angel is clearly immature and there is this weird... emotional imbalance between them? It's like a mentor dating his apprentice, at least that's how I see it. I'm not saying dating someone who's 40 years older than you is morally wrong (if you're both adults) but IT IS WEIRD imo, especially since Angel & Husk are not on the same page when it comes to life experience and maturity. Oh yeah, I also don't think Angel should be in any kind of romantic relationship... for his own good

[ghosting-plural-userboxes]

TW for syscourse and everything that comes with Astro

Seeing our mutual get attacked by Astro is so annoying and fucking funny.

so we are making a post about it and debunking some shit .

As someone who is clinically diagnosed with multiple delusional disorders and psychotic disorders I can tell you that even IF our plurality was caused by psychosis that’s fine. Also we are diagnosed with brief psychotic disorder so our plurality literally could not be prolonged psychosis . Telling people they are in psychosis or delusional is in fact ableist . It is in fact an awful and harmful thing to do , especially if said “ delusions “ or perceived delusions are not PHYSICALLY HARMFUL to themselves or others .

Also as someone clinically diagnosed with factious disorder calling every single person who disagrees with you a fucking disorder faker is in fact also ableist and overall an awful thing to do . You evidently are showing you have NO awareness on what facticious disorder really is. People with fastidious disorder fake disorders for FUCKING ATTENTION due to FUCKING TRAUMA usually caused by FUCKING NEGLECT .also you can’t fake a disorder if your not claiming to have it dumbass .

Calling everyone who disagrees with a you a “ girl / lady “ or a “ white girl “ is actually an extremely fucking sexist , homophobic , transphobic , intersexist , racist thing to do .

Threatening fucking RAPE is AWFUL for ANYONE to do . And when I say anyone we FUCKING MEAN ANYONE . Rape is NOT SOME FUCKING JOKE . Astro you “ claim “ to stand up for trauma survivors while inflicting more trauma and triggering said trauma survivors . Get your fucking act together .

Have you ever heard of IFS therapy ? Since there’s literal therapy around viewing yourself as a collective / system with different parts that you have to coexist with <3

The fact that me a severely disabled person with an Intellectual disability that makes it hard for me to comprehend most things is able to definitively say why every action of yours is wrong is fucking funny as hell !

-Link and F2 members of a medically recognized system who ah been in therapy for years .

( feel free 2 tag Astro in this if u want , but we do have him blocked )

^ adding this just in case spelling errors or worded wrong :3

[evavertun]

#still too freaked out by this game to verbalize thoughts but this THIS is why it's going to stick with me

man, i have so many thoughts about this game and i just.. AAGHHRGH.

mouthwashing calling out certain men, who wouldnt ever hurt a woman themselves, still holding onto friendships with abusive men and even dilute their horrible actions, is something i really appreciate from the story. while i think curlys intentions were good at heart and i think he truly felt terrible about what happened to anya, he still put jimmy and his friendship before her and suffered the consequences for not punishing him. really shows off how men can be biased towards each other in many different ways, not just the victim-blaming way.

while i totally understand that some might think curly not taking proper action dismisses anyas storyline, some even saying her being assaulted wasnt a necessary element and just there to add another reason to jimmy being terrible, its unfortunately very realistic for that to happen in the real world.

a woman being sexually abused in the workplace, she reports on it to her higher up, only for it to feel like her cries were left unheard because her abuser never got a proper punishment, instead he basically got a promotion in a twist of events. thats what makes her storyline so horrifying and so real.

at least thats how i interpreted it, i am simply an amateur when it comes to story analysis.

[keebieart]

I love Anya as a character so much.

You ever think about why she got Jimmy to give Curly his medicine instead of one of the others? You could read it as her knowingly putting Curly in a bad situation, but I think it's even sadder, I think she did it because she believed that Curly really did trust Jimmy, I think she didn't think Jimmy would hurt the others, because she thought Jimmy only hurt her because it's her (both in the sense that he was motivated by misoginy, so that's a motivation that would be different with Curly, but also in the sense that i think Anya has some underlying self worth issues & might feel like it was personally a 'her' issue, & so therfore, the others were safer in her mind)

I think Anya & Curly have such an interesting relationship,

Curly finds out Anya is having a problem with Jimmy, & i think he does care, but he fails to actually support Anya & keep her safe, because he has internalized biases, but also because Jimmy is his friend, & also because i think he didn't realize how bad it was, & also because it was a situation with no clear solution, because of how little options they have & the being trapped with him, & because of the codependant & unhealthy & manipulative relationship between him & Jimmy.

Anya knows Jimmy is dangerous, knows Curly can't really defend himself, but she fails to realize that putting them alone in a room together could be dangerous, because Jimmy is his friend (maybe not any more, but she doesn't know that), because it was a situation with no clear solution, with so little options, Curly's "friend" may have seemed like the best option, because she didn't know how unhealthy & strained Curly & Jimmy's relationship really was.

[the-weirdo235]

don't mind me just screaming into the void.

Lunar has every right to be mad at Earth. He obviously didn't have a right to hurt her. But he had the right to, and honestly should be mad. I feel like both the show and the fandom has kinda glossed over the affect Earth being friends with Eclipse would have on Lunar.

Because the abuse Lunar faced when he was with Eclipse has kinda just been narrowed into that one slap and that Eclipse killed him. Which is bad enough. But it was so much more than that. To start with just the physical, they obviously couldn’t show it because YouTube wouldn't allow it. But we hear that Eclipse would strangle Lunar, and from what I remembered it seem he did it more than once. Eclipse would also test his weapons on Lunar. What really gets me is how casually Lunar talks about it, like it's normal. He would also force Lunar to allow him to check if Moon was still locked away, like what he did with EaPs Moon. Plus obviously he killed him.

Then there's the mental abuse. We all know Eclipse was quick to anger and shouted at Lunar often. But he would also belittle and degrade Lunar. He manipulated Lunar. Eclipse also drilled it into Lunars head that he would throw Lunar away the second he lost his use. So Lunar was living in constant fear of being discarded. I still remember watching when Eclipse told Lunar to get out of the room because he wants to talk to Moon, or when he came to find Lunar when he was at Montys house. It was absolutely toe curling. It really shows how much Eclipse has broken Lunar.

Now imagine your own sister, the one you've built a connection to, the one who's supposed to be your safe space, goes on and befriends the one who did that to you, the man who killed you. I also get why Lunar didn't tell her he wasn't okay with it. Because this was when they were all grieving Solar and Nexus was going crazy. So it's kinda hard to say to your sister, "Hey, stop being friends with that guy that helps you grieve your dead brother because I don't like it." It's probably also why Lunar stopped really trying to talk about his problems with Earth, because she kinda just gave him the middle finger. And I get Earth was grieving. But it's like getting with your friends ex, it's kinda just somethings you don't do. Earth should have know better.

[dd-writes]

Ummm...are those $H scars?

*jerks off and cums on them*

[divorceblogger]

this book is scary <3 pov you’re a fledgling vampire and your fathermaker who purchased you and will eventually abandon you because he’s disappointed that he didn’t groom you into a perfect vampire bride says this after denying you the ability to organically develop your own sense of personhood.

[sharkboywrites]

Honestly as a victim of abuse, and especially one who sees people sympathize and still be friends with their abuser, I kinda want to write an analysis on curly because it annoys me when people ignore his flaws OR act like he’s evil and just as bad as Jimmy

[pastelbandaidangel]

can we just societally accept that we should stop saying "omgggg you look so much like your mom!" as a compliment - that's literally my arch nemesis - my life's work is dedicated to being nothing like her

[antivivziepopparade]

Angel Dust's description is a clear fetishization of his abuse and also has the "stepdad" fetish included as a "joke." Viv should just admit that she thinks that gay male pornstars are a "joke" already instead of this pretentious "progressive" bullshit. 🙄

Vivziepop also ships him with his abuser. So no wonder. Gross... 🤢

Angel Dust, Lute, and Cherri Bomb were done so dirty in the Hazbin playbill. 😭

Most of Angel Dust’s information was about Valentino’s weird and creepy pornos.

Cherri Bomb’s information just sounded shallow, no mention of being Angel Dust’s best friend. All she likes to do is party and cause problems on purpose.

Lute didn’t have anything… it was classified information. Now they want to make her mysterious, what is she Lilith?

What makes this even worse is that the Hazbin hotel audition sheets had more information and heart into it compared to the playbill. Like I want you to look and compare their audition sheets to the playbill. Major Difference.

[ph0bianf]

Tw at the start and creds at the end

PTOLEMAEA MY BELOVED.