#ty so much for this excuse to ramble at LENTH tho

[mallowstep]

Does Dove get to a place that's more stable for her in the future? Seeing her panicking over all this and needing comfort makes my heart hurt for her. (Love Dovey and Tiger) Also, what does she call Tigerheart to others or around others?

future matthew here answering ur second q first bc i had a LOT to say abt this ask n prob if it weren't so late would have more :3

anyway, to others, tigerheart. she does tend to avoid it but she knows what his name is, so to speak. around others, uh, ???

there's a reason i made sure that NEVER happened in istmsams.

realistically, she calls him a different pet name. i'm too sleepy to come up w a good one, but there r lots of options prob.

for fun, tho, she calls him daddy and only daddy ever.

but yeah she's just great on camera, and the guy is just....everone who wants to meet . uh. alk fj;i'm so sleep i forgot k y'all gn <3

yes absolutely!

interestingly the reason i've been using the word stable over recovered is --- well it's not ONE reason it's a lot, but one of the key ones is that when u talk about mental illness you're supposed to do it in the context of the culture of the person, right? (right)

so it's kind of hard to talk about dove as "recovered" because she's never GOING to reach the point of normal within clan society like. she's never going to be able to fight. she gets to the point where she can be AROUND fighting and she can handle playfighting (kind of), and she can do certain training type things (e.g., working on a specific move), but that's pretty much it, and she's not really interested in expanding that. those are the things she needs to be functional, and anything else is added and unnecessary stress.

that's unrelated it's just been on my mind and you gave me a good excuse to express it.

so yeah, she absolutely does. again, when she lives in a culture that goes to battle fairly often, it's pretty hard for her to feel fully safe. while it's not explained in istmsams, the reason dove's trauma is so bad is because she hears every single cat in the great battle die. all of them. and they were ALL cats she knew.

and then her power vanishes, truncating her senses.

so she's always going to be worried about tiger and ivy and fern when they leave her. that's not something she can realistically stop doing. what is a realistic goal is get to the point where she can function with it. she can continue her daily life and manage it.

like okay. her coping mechanism is valid and good and healthy! there's nothing wrong with it. she's being protective. the time to work on expanding your comfort zone is not the time of everything going on with the kin. she is in maintenance mode, so to speak. but ideally, even if that's her preferred tool in her toolbox, she is prepared and has others for situations when that's not appropriate.

i mean okay. for dovey's goals. i should say this is about dovey's goals. if dovewing was satisfied w where she was, y'know, that's fine! the point of living in a clan is they support one another. if dovewing needs a carer to be with her, that's 100% fine and she deserves that. (expressing this in the language of cats can be tricky, but that is what's going on at the end of istmsams, on the off chance any of you didn't pick up on that. dovewing's maara is taking turns, but still.) however, dovewing isn't satisfied with that.

i'm rambling on i just want to b careful w how i say this y'know? like at no point is anyone going "dovewing needs to hit arbitrary goals of recovery." they actually view mental illness as a pretty static thing. leafpool's comment that dovewing may-or-may-not get better and it doesn't matter what happens, her clan will support her, is 100% genuine.

n so for dovewing her personal goals r to expand her comfort zone and try to get to the point where she doesn't need someone with her all/most of the time, which is a reasonable goal for her n she works on it and she gets there!

she eventually mentors bristlepaw n everything! yes she still has bad periods but her family is there for her n they support her. even when she gets to a more stable point, she's still like. disabled by her ptsd.

(she could definitely benefit from therapy! she could probably increase her goals if she had actual therapy and not a supportive environment that doesn't actually help her process shit. just as a comment.)

so like. she gets to a stable point 100% yes. by the metric of her culture, she doesn't really "recover," but her culture also...doesn't expect her to? not in a bad way, they just...the clans are aware they don't know how to handle mental illness. that's like the only thing they DO understand about them. and that means like...if a cat is depressed, they don't know how to fix it. it's something that happens that may or may not unhappen and the best you can do is accept them like you would a cat who had physical limitations.

(thunderclan in istmsams is less ableist than normal for fluff comfort fic reasons, but this remains true in other fics.)

so like she doesn't "recover" but no one is trying to get her to recover but i say that because "recovery" in this context is like...not great? it's not what she would actually want?

dovey is FINE with the fact that she's never going back to before. she is fine with being disabled, she just wants to be happy and functional. (she also wants to have children. doesn't come up in istmsams, but she wants to have and raise and be the primary caregiver for children, so she wants to get to a point where that's something she can realistically do.) but that doesn't mean making her trauma go poof, it means feeling secure she would be able to get out of a fight, so she can feel safe, and then avoiding fighting.

nyway this ramble is super long so i'm going to go n answer ur other q at the top, but if u read this far i hope u enjoyed matthew rambles about mental illness and disability for a while bc dovey's obviously on the mind but SPECIFICALLY dovewing's relationship with her family n like. all three of them do serve as caretakers* in turn.

* i'm avoiding use of careGIVER because it's a charged word in contedxt.

so uh yeah hope this reassures u. dovewing reaches a place of stability n her family loves her sm.