#went on another tangent and idk how much of it will make sense cause I'm not going over this again

[rottenaero]

For me Jonathan dying makes way more sense than Steve dying.

I think a large part of Dustin's arc is not losing his other big brother figure. It would be so cruel to lose Steve after Eddie, and it's predictable because everyone wants him dead since s1. It would also be great for Steve to overcome his self sacrificial tendencies, overall I just don't think Steve dying makes sense after Eddie.

Now with Jonathan, he is very close to Will and El, which are the main targets for Vecna. He would also sacrifice himself for his family, especially Will. Plus he didn't have much of an arc since s1 really, getting to be the hero in s5 makes sense for him.

In general I don't think main character will die, Stranger Things isn't the show for that.

Yeah, okay I see your point.

Jonathan’s kinda been a tagalong for the past two seasons, so my mind didn't immediately go to him being the one that dies. But it honestly makes alot of sense.

Stranger Things has killed atleast ONE decently important character each season, in helping the crew to get to where they are in their assumptions of how to kill the big bad, or what's happening in general(Hopper doesn't count)

Barb's death being the one to introduce Nancy, Jonathan, and Steve to the upside down(And later Murray after being hired by her parents.)

Bob being the one to figure out how to tunnels connect and work, where the base(or heart) is.

Alexei was the one who was working with the Russians, told Hopper, Murray, and Joyce about Planck's Constance.

And Eddie was the one to witness some of the Vecna murders, and tell the group about him being back. Meeting him at Skull Rock also helped them figure out the gates opening too.

All people who have had at least one big purpose before going out with a bang.

Jonathans been on the downlow, this season and season two at least, season three he helped as a getaway driver and being with Nancy at the hospital.

Each character has had their big arc and he's been waiting for his.

If it's not him or Steve though, there's a chance they'll just bring in another brand new shiny character though to kill off.

I doubt the Duffer Brothers will kill nobody off.

[squishmallow36]

I experienced a thought on the bus this morning and I don't know why so uh yeah let's talk about elvin agriculture.

But first I must establish my credibility. As you see, Perry the Platypus, I got third in state for agricultural science for science olympiad and I may very well might have forgotten the vast majority of it.

Now we don't have an exact figure for how many elves there are and iirc Sophie said there was a meeting with a representative from every family but considering they don't interact with their family after they're, like, 18 I don't see how that makes sense but whatever.

The Elvin population is going to be constantly increasing at an exponential rate. Granted, it will be a slow exponential but birth rates will increase and death rates will remain near zero, resulting in population growth. This makes it so that the environment doesn't have a set carrying capacity for the number of elves and while the population growth may be slow enough in the beginning to adjust without much of an issue, eventually it's going to increase fast enough that it is an issue.

This population will require more food, causing current agricultural lands to deplete their nutrients faster. While in the past, a crop rotation schedule where half a field is used and half is fallow might shift to a more mediaeval era (in human terms) rotation of three sections.

And now this is where we go off on a tangent. First of all, I don't know where they would have space for growing food because they've got estates and they've got cities and nothing in between (or at least that's what it sounds like canonically). Now a place like Rimeshire yeah sure they've got gnomes why can't they have a garden but a place like Everglen idk if this is my fedex brainrot speaking but they seem like they'd be too snobby for that kind of thing. And foxfire has to get food somewhere and i sure as exile wouldn't trust level threes in an agriculture class.

Okay my real thought was "what about fertilizer?" Most of prev was just justifying that so uh sorry. Using my deep wild kratts knowledge, I know that bat guano is a good fertilizer. Commercially, other types of manure are used more often i'm sure. Google says manure has been used for 8000 years as a fertilizer...a time when the human population would've been fairly close to the elvin one today...so it is plausible.

...except elves don't keep livestock. Well. I guess that ends the train of thought.

But if elves still have a need for nutrients in their soil, there's a couple of options out there. The first is "don't worry about it, gnome songs are ~magic~ and avoid the need for chemistry." The second is, "don't worry about it, something something alchemy."

-> which does have its merit. The haber-bosch process--(3H2 + N2 -> 2NH3) which produces ammonia for plants to grow because nitrogen deficiency is less than ideal--was invented/discovered/verbed in the early 1900s which would have put it during the human assistance program.

Another option is bird poop islands, which is what the humans used before Haber went and Bosched the process and I found that thought entertaining until I realised the gnomes would be in charge of that and i don't think those little photosynthisizers deserve that.

But finally we get to my real point and i don't know how you made it this long. Another source of nitrogen is CH4N2O / NH2CONH2 (depends on who you ask on formula. Organic chem is like that sometimes.). But well this compound is commonly known as urea. Now, for extra credit, can you name something else that comes from the same origin? If you said urine, you win! Urea is found in urine!

Which means that if you as a gnomish farmer were really really really desperate for nitrogen and, of course, the chemical composition is the same technically you could pee in the fields to solve your problem.

[traumasurvivorshelpingsurvivors]

Tw: Self-doubt, just a whole mess of what is real vs. what is fake/mistaken. Identity crisis?

Looking for: Advice, maybe just lending some knowledge if you have it.

I am an alter in an autistic system. Recently, we consumed a piece of media (I like how that feels, consumed media, it's funny, nice texture phrase) and I latched onto one of the characters. Hard.

At first I didn't think much of them besides relatability, which is common for me. If I get fixated on that character a little, sometimes I'll get a little...idk...shifty into them? Like not mimicry but a more intense version where there's just a touch of them in me, and usually this either fizzles out or another alter splits the day or two after and it turns out I was just doing a weird split.

But this time it grew over time, which isn't something that happens usually. And now I am hardcore on them, to the point where I'm having trouble with my normal memories and I'm getting memories of them instead, related only in sense of metaphors or tangents. I'm feeling phantom limbs and my inner voice and appearance is altering, as well as my outer world facial expressions (a clear tell-tale of who's fronting for many of us).

My first thought was, okay, this is normal when I fixate on a character, but even when I waited for a little bit, it still hasn't gone away. Some part of me misses the people from the show. I started panicking and I freak out every time I think or innerspeak in the character's voice. It's not uncommon for me to have trouble hearing the right voices from other people (pretty sure we know why), but my voice has always remained consistent. My outer voice is more or less the same, except I have to push down a couple of specific mannerisms from the character that would be concerning to people around me.

The character is also half-blind. The body is not. In the outer world the eye is really weird, like my brain feels like it's not supposed to be used but is (other disabled alters have the same feeling), and the only way I've managed to reduce that is by closing the eye. But that's not really gonna happen, so...idk how to deal with this other than just kinda. Hope it stops. Which sucks because I front a LOT.

I managed to half-convince myself that it was a new fictive influencing REALLY FREAKING HARD but even when I tried to get them to speak, I did my usual 'fake or real?' test (my imagination gets mixed up with alters sometimes so I developed a strategy to tell the difference) and it was fake. I asked another alter in the fronting room if there was anyone else there and they said no, checked with our Gatekeeper and they said no, but I was a bit weird.

I have severe issues with the lines between real and fake blurry sometimes, but I'm currently not in an episode of that, so it makes literally zero sense for that to be the case, plus in that case my memories aren't altered, just my perception of reality. This is vice versa.

We have partial and mixed fictives in our system (partial brain, partial fictive), so at this point all I have is either I am having an extremely odd real-fake-blur episode (which doesn't make sense as my confusion is the only thing causing distress, not the blurring itself, as well), or like. Somehow completely brain-made me is partially fictived?

I went on Google and saw things about fragments/not formed pieces/alters without identities finding characters that matched them near perfectly and attaching to them/forming into them, but I've been formed for a year now. Some parts of identity might not be fully filled in, MAYBE, but most parts are, and as much as I related to and connected with the character, I didn't see anything about it happening with formed alters.

I know that this isn't silly but it frankly feels ridiculous that I'm jumping to so many different possibilities, and what my brain is doing feels faked, but it's just...I know my brain (sort of). I know myself (sort of again). I know what it does when it screws around at least. It's not screwing around with me, I know it. The Gatekeeper already commented on it, I mean...

If you have literally any advice, thank you. Please note when responding that while I do have a therapist, she hasn't talked to us about the system and our Protector decided that we weren't going to say anything else for a while, so she's no help to me in this place right now.

It may seem kind of funny, all things considered, but I feel alone, and even if all you can give me are cat pictures, it'll make me feel less alone. Thanks.

Hi anon,

Please know you're not alone and that what you're experiencing is real and valid, and there is no right or wrong way to be a system, and every system is unique in their own way. It's up to you how to define or describe your experiences, but I can help flesh some of it out for you.

If I'm understanding what you're saying, you're wondering if it is possible for an alter to become a fictive over time. This can happen. In some cases, an alter may present as an original personality but over time may begin to identify more strongly with a fictional character. This happens for a variety of reasons, including exposure to media featuring that character, a desire to escape from reality, or a need to feel more in control. A resource that talks about this more is "Amongst Ourselves: A Self-Help Guide to Living with Dissociative Identity Disorder" by Tracy Alderman. The text discusses the concept of fictives and how they can develop over time.

Also please remember that it's an extremely common experience for systems to feel that they're faking their symptoms in some way, and it doesn't necessarily mean that they are faking it. As you may already know, the covert nature of OSDD/DID (assuming you're traumagenic) can mean that systems go through phases of denial, even after validation from a therapist or a clinical diagnosis. Please remember to be gentile and patient with yourself during this time as you're trying to make sense of your experiences and your identity.

Ultimately, if your protector eventually feels comfortable discussing this with your therapist, that could be super helpful in navigating what you're experiencing right now, as well as figuring out how to move forward. That being said, it is completely up to y'all what to do here, and y'all know yourselves best.

If anyone else has any comments or suggestions, feel free to add on. Otherwise, I hope I could help. Please let us know if you need anything.

-Bun