#but like given that generational trauma is a factor in why he reacted the way he did i get it

[reanimatedgh0ul]

once again thinking abt re:animated au and how the reason jack isn't initially accepting of danny is in part due his own trauma as a son and his relationship to his own father which he's still trying to contend now that he's dead

he genuinely wasn't expecting danny to be his son and how that he is jack is now at a crossroads as how he goes abt continuing to raise him

#he's no different from maddie in this way it's like i want to be a good/better parent to my kids than mine was to me #but how exactly do i that w/o unintentionally and ultimately mirroring them in the end #like it obviously doesn't excuse jack invalidating danny's identity and him/maddie wanting to pass it off as 'just as a phase' #so that it's easy for them to digest #but like given that generational trauma is a factor in why he reacted the way he did i get it #that's not even taking count how danny feels in relation to his own complicated relationship w masculinity and how compared to jack #he weirdly feels like he isn't living up to that expectation either #and how i do think jack's dad and him were both affected by machismo in some capacity and carried themselves the way they did bc of it #robi rambles

[tautokomai]

Denial and Minimization of Child Sexual Abuse Cases

Child sexual abuse is similar to any other form of physical attack - it involves violence. The victims of this type of crime experience long-term effects and trauma that can actually ruin their entire lives. Being sexually abused as a child means that the victim is subjected to an act of aggression that utilizes power and manipulation. It is a classic symbol of the powerful overcoming the weak. The two main motivational factors of child sexual abuse are the desire to satisfy a sexual need and the need to exercise control over the victims as a showcase of power and authority. sexually assaulted hamilton

While most of us view the victims of child sexual abuse as the ones who suffer the most, the way society views them may not be the same. Social and cultural norms these days consider child sexual abuse a taboo, but why do some people put the blame on the victims?

Various studies have been made detailing several scenarios where accusations of child sexual abuse were concealed and the alleged victims are either blamed, suspected of lying, or simply criticized. Although sexually abusing a child breaks every single rule of morality, there is still an ongoing trend of denial, minimization and suppression from the family of the victim, authorities, and the society in general. sexual abuse helpline

The main reason why society reacts differently in child sexual abuse cases is because there are several factors that come in. For instance, the kind of response from a specific allegation may entail different consequences not only for the victim, but for the family, neighborhood, town, and the society as a whole. Supposed your child accuses the resident priest in your church of molestation, how would the entire congregation react to it? Are you sure other church members will support your child or are they going to take the side of the priest?

Apart from the example given above, another scenario is when the abuse happens within the family. There have been thousands of reported cases of intra-familial abuse. However, there is also the same number of abuses within the family that hasn't been disclosed or revealed. The reason for this is that many families prefer to conceal the abuse since telling the public about it will only embarrass and taint the image and reputation of the entire clan. It will surely result to embarrassment and negative perception towards the other members of the family. have I been assaulted

Unfortunately, in this type of scene, it is the child victim who suffers the most. The denial of the family will only result to never ending trauma and negative effects towards the victim. He will certainly live a life that's full of misery and pain - not to mention the resulting physical and psychological disorders brought about by the effects of non-disclosure and concealment of the crime.

Another reason why there is a continuing denial and rejection of child sexual abuse allegations is the fact that society and the public in general do not want to accept the crime of child sexual abuse as being prevalent. A few decades back, families in the United States don't think that their children were at a constant risk of being victimized by pedophiles and sex offenders. But if we look at the numbers today, it is clear that the cases and accusations aren't isolated anymore. But a lot of parents still don't want to take it seriously since it will only cast fear and anxiety to the entire family. ptsd sexual abuse

Finally, the issue of child sexual abuse definitely involves a lot of emotions like fear, anger, embarrassment, and others. Because of this, there are actually a lot at stake whenever someone accuses a person of the crime, especially when that person is a notable and respected member of the society. Thus, we have to accept the fact that the society's response to child sexual abuse will always be dependent on the other consequences instead of providing the victim justice and healing.

[bigskydreaming]

Y’know what REALLY hasn’t come up in enough fics and headcanons about the Ric Grayson arc and Bruce’s (non)reaction to it, for the most part?

The fact that KGBeast was hired to take out Nightwing BY Bane, BECAUSE of how it would hurt Bruce.

That’s a hell of a thing. One of the most debilitating things to happen in Dick’s life, derailing his entire life for over a year....and it didn’t even really happen because of HIM or anything he did. He wasn’t even the real target, even when he was directly targeted.

I think that’s hands down a huge part of why Bruce’s non-presence during everything was so frustrating. The ironic thing is, it absolutely goes a long way towards explaining why he pulled that bonehead move of showing Dick the video footage of him getting shot in an attempt to jumpstart his memories.....Bruce wasn’t thinking clearly and felt guilty as well as just reeling from the loss of Dick’s often-stabilizing presence in his life. He wasn’t trying to ‘fix’ Dick so much as he was trying to ‘fix’ what had happened to Dick because of one of HIS enemies, in an attempt to hurt HIM.

Bruce does tend to make his absolute worst decisions when he feels his most guilty. Its kinda a pattern with him. IMO he views his ability to compartmentalize and analyze on a vast scale as his own kinda superpower, his strength in his own mind is his ability to keep track of, navigate and make the most of all the moving parts in his field of view, and so when things OUTSIDE his stratagems and his plans throw everything into disarray, he blames himself for not seeing it coming, and doubles down on trying to compensate for the unexpected....which unfortunately tends to go hand in hand with doubling down on his attempts to control all the variables in his field of view, which is the very thing his independent-minded children, Dick in particular, tend to react so badly to and push back against so vehemently.

The part that’s missing for me in all of this and its aftermath, is the awareness of that element. That KGBeast didn’t just HAPPEN, but that he was hired, by Bane. That’s the thread that seems to have disappeared from that narrative entirely, in fanon takes as well as canon repercussions and post-Ric Grayson analysis, and when you combine the relative absence of that part of the whole Ric Grayson storyline in general with like.....the way Dick/Ric is repeatedly and consistently given shit for being essentially a bad survivor, coping with his trauma and the upheaval of his life ‘badly’ or just not in a way that was more accommodating with the needs/feelings of everyone else in his life.....like. Yeah. That’s not an awesome combination of factors.

To be clear, its not Bruce’s FAULT Dick was shot either. The blame still lies solidly with KGBeast and Bane. They’re the bad guys. They’re the ones who plotted this, did this. Bruce isn’t to blame for their actions.

I’m just saying he was a FACTOR in all of this playing out the way it did, and occupies such a specific place in the chain of events and various players’ motivations in all of this, that when held up in conjunction with the way Ric was received, perceived and treated by characters and readers alike....its that specific conjunction that made the latter all the more frustrating. The reactions to Ric with very little acknowledgment of he and his reactions being the aftermath/fallout of him being not just a victim but a TARGET, and not even targeted because of his own actions, impact or heroism.

[seoafin]

tbh,, i havent read the raws of the interview yet, only the translated ver from fan-translator and b4 i start, i think that this will be just me talking in circle and in no particular order AND a real mess (my brain does weird things after exams) but uhh here we go

gojou collects talented people, and by doing so he finds the people he can most probably relate to, except that he can't, not really, because something in the universe shifted when he was born. and it makes me think of how he's always known it, that he is special, and he's proven it, time and time again— he wants to take in talented ppl and he does, but there rly isn't much he can do for them. for they are talented, more talented than the world can understand,,

but they aren't gojou satoru

gojou took in megumi, bc he knew megumi was strong, and would grow up to be someone even stronger, but gojou can't facilitate or encourage his growth, bc for all they're similar, they are so fundamentally different. ALSO,, while geto was in his life, gojou rly judged everything according to his understanding of geto’s moral compass. gojou wears a human suit and geto is how he learnt to wear it well 🏃

the dragonfly analogy regarding to geto’s response to gojo, who was shown wearing a dragonfly patterned yukata in HI arc,, i’m trying to not think abt the fact that dragonfly symbolized victory in jpn....pain. i quoted from a web here for more explanation : In Japan the dragonfly is known as the "victory insect", or kachimushi, because of its hunting prowess and also because it is known to never retreat. Dragonflies are agile and fast fliers and can even hover, but never fly backwards

and bringing this up again, matricide and patricide are 2 of the 5 worst act to commit in buddhism, and it was said that if u commit one of those act u’re going to spend a real long time in the deepest pit of hell before continuing the samsaric cycle (higher chances to be born as an animal after that probs)— this might be geto’s divine retribution. held no power over his own body and could be considered that he’s the same as those “monkeys” 💀

ALSO the fact that sukuna's interest is "eating" rly drives home his hedonistic philosophy of seeking pleasure for himself. and he’s a cannibal...makes me think if he’ll just chomp on ppl with the mouth on his stomach

randomly, to date i think he hasn't really called himself a human, shaman, or a curse, and has held himself apart from all 3, and we've also the intro of the cursed wombs so i wonder if he’s trying to become, or is, a different entity altogether

so onmyoji got mentioned in the interview and what they practice is called onmyodo and abe no seimei and kano no yasunori were the notable practitioners,, and the kamo in jjk is the same as irl who served the imperial court back then

maybe i was right when i said that the relation between the govt. and jujutsu elders are similar to how the shogunate and imperial court work (ie, the former holds the actual power) but... lets see later,,

and i cant believe that i actually nailed it on the analogy of jujutsu practices by religion,,, so mahayana buddhism, shintoism, and taoism is present in jjk along with their respective jujutsu practices...but between the 3, it shld (?) be taoism > shintoism > mahayana buddhism (which could took a path to pure land buddhism)

it’s weird that the number of curses are supposedly higher in jpn comparable to other countries when taoism was brought from china....tengen sus

so the zenin family tree is sth like :

brothers: [toji's dad] ; naobito ; ougi

so toji, naoya, and maki & mai are cousins of the same generation

[toji's dad] → jinichi (probs) ; toji → megumi

naobito → other brothers, naoya

ougi → maki, mai

but yea i’d call anyone who’s within/close or below my age range as cousins and others above 30 as uncles/ aunts LMFAO,, i dont rly memorize my own family tree 😭😭 especially since most call the other by honorifics instead of names : aunt, uncles etc or attaching said honorifics at the end of a name for an older sibling figure/ older cousins [but like ppl in my country also call the other who are older with sibling honorific even if we’re strangers,,, rly similar to korea’s hyung/oppa—eonnie(unnie)/noona but some uses more genderless honorific] (1)

tw // topic of incest, mentions of abuse

if anyone got the wrong idea when reading this : i am not glorifying/ romanticising incest(uous themes),, i’m looking at this with absolutely no lenses of bias even tho im rly against it

初恋 = literally : first love, or puppy love

恋 = romantic love/ deep longing

i literally don't know how else to put this...🧍and with language barrier...using a western interpretation of the eng word "love" to explain a jpnese term is not quite that simple, unfortunately

that thread omg,, i rly do understand how exactly someone could associated kindness with love bc of my upbringing, it was when i was slightly older that i was just...oh so its not like that orz,,, so the most plausible explanation would be that

but the problem is that,, akutami never specify when exactly she had a crush on them,, and when megumi answered todo’s question she had a “♡” reaction 😶,, uhmmm there’s rly no way to look past this if its this way or be in denial

i’ve seen some of "why wouldn't mai react that way after hearing megumi say he'd like someone who's compassionate when she's surrounded by men like naoya",, well I MEAN,,, that, but also mai probs admires that megumi grew up so well out of the clan, regardless of the fact that he had the foundation (10 shadows) to do so. imo she seems happy for him the way she can't be for maki, bc maki ultimately had to leave her behind

hate to say it but yea,, the 3 clans most likely still practice inbreeding in order to preserve their power and presumably their wealth too 😀

i had an idle thought abt it at first but i filed it deep in the back of my mind asap,, bc i ont wanna jump to conclusion abt this out of all things too early. it’s probably not even in jjk, but all those elite clans in other ani/mangas that produce powerful heirs and whatnot also do the same,,, but this way of (my personal) thinking was influenced when i first got into tsukihime (type-moon),,, i read abt the nanaya family background and found out that they practice that in order to keep their bloodline “pure” (to keep it short : they have an optical power),, and i had this kind of assumption ever since so there’s that

i’m,, convinced the zenins' inbreeding made it more difficult for them to get powerful shamans bc they got 2 jujutsu technique-less children with heavenly restrictions in the same generation: toji & maki

even more convinced that maki might be a bit stronger than toji bc toji could see curses without aid while maki can't so the pay-off must be higher,,, SJJASN IDK ,,, plus naoya sort of implies his older brothers are nothing compared to him, and idk if we should take that as his arrogance or that his older brothers rly are weak/powerless. it would make sense as to why naobito had a lot of sons, ig, as head of clan

i feel so bad that if one of the factors that can caused heavenly restriction is inbreeding,, toji and maki and mai had no say in how they wanted to be born but are scorned for it,, typical asian families projecting their traumas and ideals onto their kids but get mad when they realize that those ideals are ugly...😁😁😁

since the zenin are conservative,, i wonder if they still hold onto old jpnese dining traditions. where in ancient jpn, hierarchical relationships were made readily apparent even within families. a dining table where everybody sat down and ate as equals would be unheard of. rather, each individual is given their own table that indicates their status,,, someone who is not considered “strong” according to the zenin’s views most likely have no place at the table, and probs eat when those who are “strong” finished/ serve them when they are eating

if toji was tossed into a swarm of curses,, i dont think abuse during said time is below them,,,

the zenin clan was already great, but they further amassed power and strength by, what i assume to be, marrying and adopting powerful individuals into the clan 🤔 ,,, i imagine they're like the hiiragi but without doing what they did to shinya (ons reference)

BUT after all that, i like to think that since akutami’s a big horror fan, jjk might be an outlet to explore said topics or even darker ones, so i wouldnt be that surpised abt it. given that there’s more than enough “red flags” before this was dropped : a reference to “tale of hikaru genji” when a grown woman asked for gojou’s number in HI arc (out of all things); granny who transformed into the man’s daughter, sat on his lap and man just touched her waist; mei mei and ui ui ; and...this (incestous theme is in the novel btw)

lets not start with whatever the fuck in kubo’s head in the interview otherwise i’m writing paragraphs with every curse words possible,, those big 3 mangakas are so— UGH,, a planet w out (cis) men like him sounds real good rn 😌 if one of yall out there decide to do it,, pls hmu rly cant do this shit anymore

akutami said i like my men pretty and i like women who will step on my neck and spit in my face (I REMEMBERED TATSUKI FUJIMOTO’S INTERVIEW WHEN HE WAS ASKED ABT MAKIMA AND IT WAS SO 😭😭😭😭) but ykw,, love that for both of them <3

when i said 3 : one piece, bleach, naruto. aside from the blatant depiction/ characterize of women in those 3,, idk if some ppl arent aware yet but oda is friends with two (2) convicted pedos,, man...the major disappointment and disgust when i first find out abt it

anyways this is just my 2 cents (which i think rightfully belong to the trash can) so pls just take this w a lil to no grain of salt - 🐱

YEAH THE ♡ LMFAO I THOUGHT IT WAS JUST A “good answer ♡“ heart BUT NOW IM RE-EXAMINING?????

honestly i wouldn’t be surprised if the three clans practiced inbreeding. but ik people are going to be  😡😡😡😡😡 about it when the queen of fucking england is literally married to her (something) cousin. i’m not justifying it but like....love the double standards, just as always with the west 😍

DON’T EVEN GET ME STARTED ON THAT FUCKING PED* LIST THEY SHOULD ALL BE IN JAIL. JAILLLLL. it’s all so gross. that’s why i fucking hate when people look towards manga for positive representation because the chances of that are super slim to zero, especially since the industry is saturated with misogyny and ped******* and a lot of other gross stuff.

i think ppl forget jjk is a horror manga LOL so obviously it’s going to confront darker themes. the question is whether it’s going to be done tastefully or not......

#honestly I don't have high hopes unfortunately 😭 #but who knows I might be...pleasantly surprised #idk I don't have high hopes in manga nowadays so hmmm #anyway as always I enjoy ur thoughts <3 ❤️❤️ #hope ur doing well!!! #and getting all those genshin impact goodies #🐱 anon #long post

[whetstonefires]

Hi Whetstonefire. I have a question about the comic where Nightwing cheats on Starfire with Barbara: What happens directly after that? Does Starfire find out that Nightwing cheated on her? And, if so, how does she react? I've read online that (according to Marv Wolfman) Starfire is the opposite of everything Batman taught Nightwing to be and that Batman taught Nightwing to be repressed and cold. What did Nightwing contribute (emotionally) to the relationship between him and Starfire? (Cont.)

(Cont.) From what I can tell, from online, Nightwing was adamant about standards of mercy and monogamy - how do you think, if Starfire were to be written as her own character and not written around Nightwing and his emotional needs, she would handle and react to that? (This bit is an FYI for other readers: this is just speculation, not hate. Sorry about that.) Sorry about the questions! Have a nice day! 

Okay there are so many separate questions packed in here! I may miss some of them lol and I do not want to put in the hours it would take to produce an orderly response to all this, so this post is going to be a mess.

Initial query and important point: the cheating story was out of continuity. Like, literally, not just by ‘being rejected by the fanbase,’ it was just this weird retcon oneshot that seems to have been some sort of fuck-you to Nightwing or his fans or something. So no, it had no in-setting fallout lol. It, in more ways than most comics, didn't exactly happen.

It was just this weird thing where Dick hooks up with Babs before giving her a wedding invitation, which is both out of character for him in general and out of step with where he was leading up to the wedding--he was desperate to get married so they could have some Normal Stable Adulthood Happiness; the choice to recharacterize him as a fuckboy who regards it as a loss of freedom isn’t congruent, on much more than the level of principle.

As far as how Kori would feel about it, if she had learned...that is very hard to say. Apart from how it would require her to reinterpret everything about where their relationship stood at that point, the data is very unclear, and I don’t even have all of it. Gonna back up to cover some of the rest of the ask, get some context here.

So this actually brings up two of my biggest gripes with Wolfman’s NTT--weird Kori characterization and the weirdly negative interpretation of Batman as parent that backwashed heavily into other titles and influenced the character for the worse, in ways we're very much still dealing with today. 😩

The latter is pretty self-explanatory, though Wolfman’s take that the main thing Bruce taught Dick was repression does shed light on some writing choices and make others funnier. But Kori. Oh my lands.

So, item one, I wouldn't say that Kori is overall opposite Bruce, or even of his philosophy? There are just some very major points of opposition. She isn’t emotionally buttoned-down like at all, especially about positive feelings, although considered realistically with all the bullshit they’ve piled into her backstory she absolutely leans on repression to cope and stay positive, which makes her a lot like Dick actually.

To an extent, she was clearly written around foiling Dick’s Batman-derived traits in the same way that Robin was written to foil Batman, bright and glad and aerial. A Flamebird to his Nightwing in theme if not in name.

You could do some interesting stuff with that, and the bildungsroman aspects of this period of Dick’s life, like he has two roads forward in terms of how he’s going to define ‘adulthood’--does it necessarily require becoming more like his mentor-father, for good and ill, or can he make Kori in part a destination, as it were, and create an adult self that is derived from who he has always been as well as the man he’s modeled himself after?

To an extent I think this even was one of the things going on in ntt but like. Only a little bit.

(Given how much like Bruce Babs is in most of the ways Kori isn’t, especially once she’s Oracle, you could make a case for her as love interest being like. Symbolic of his not being in a rebellious phase? That gets weird and oedipal really fast tho lol.)

Okay stepping down one meta level lol, the thing about answering the 'what would kori' question here is that her character is deeply bound up in her culture, about which we are told and shown a great many contradictory things. Any attempt to read her as an independent character has to tackle not only the gender stuff you allude to and these inconsistencies, but how much of the sheer mess of her is rooted in racism.

'Fantastic' racism, technically, because Tamaraneans aren't real, but the 'taming the savage' narrative that kept surfacing between them and the language used in reference to it is just. The existing racism of presumably the writers, placed in Dick's mouth, and it's super gross. I hate it so much.

(I had a faint hope when they cast her for live action it was with a deliberate intent to directly tackle and better that history, but lollllllll nah. At least they didn’t double down in it tho! Can you imagine, with a black actress, in this day and age....)

So to predict and comprehend Kori, you have to make a lot of calls about Tamaran as a civilization. I like to slightly privilege stuff established earlier if there's no good reason not to, so while much is made over time of her inappropriate rage and the violence she was raised to normalize, I think what she says in her first appearance is good to keep in mind: in her culture, kindness is for friends and cruelty is for enemies. She doesn't understand why the Titans seem to have this backwards.

Kori is not a merciless person. She’s very empathetic, as a rule. With people she loves, she is self-destructively forgiving. That's not a trait only Dick benefits from--her family keeps betraying her in new exciting ways, and she keeps letting them.

Her arc of growing away from that habit is however greatly crippled by centering Dick in the narrative and by the awful 'civilizing' overtones that keep coming into it. When she comes back after the 1986 breakup, still married to Karras, she brings with her a commitment to doing things the Earth way--to eschew lethal force as more than a compromise with her friends’ values, but as a deliberate choice.

This deserved a lot more space and time than it got, and the fact that it didn’t get it is only somewhat due to her being subordinated to Dick and to general writing fail; a lot of it’s just the team book problems of everything happening to everybody all at once.

I mean, Dick’s journey later on to deciding he loves her enough to date her even though she’s married and it’s technically against his principles was packed into this absolutely heinous issue where he was inspired by a woman refusing to separate from her husband who’d just threatened to kill her and their kid with a knife, until being stopped by Nightwing. Because he’s apologizing for what he did.

This is his inspiration for accepting Kori’s marital status! It’s supposed to be heartwarming, as far as I can tell! Not heavyhanded messaging that this is a self-destructive terrible choice in which Kori will inevitably harm him somehow! This issue is pro ‘consensual open relationships under certain circumstances’ and also ‘giving abusers another chance’ as expressions of love. Welcome to the 80s ig.

(Notable is that the wife in this issue was black and the husband and son both looked very white, so it’s probably her stepkid and she probably wouldn’t get to keep him if they separated; this is not even vaguely treated as a factor.)

Point is, everyone was getting too little space to actually go through the amount of development they were getting, and it was clumsily handled; it’s not just her.

In an overlapping period Gar processed his issues with his adoptive father with whom he constantly fought and their shared trauma over the rest of their family (the Doom Patrol) having died violently not long ago via a batshit several-issue storyline where Mento went crazy, created supermutants, and abusively mind-controlled them to attack the Titans. It is literally all like this.

Back to the infidelity thing, now. So much to unpack. So like I mentioned above, their first big breakup, while partially driven by Dick’s existing conflicted feelings about their different ideas about things like ‘killing in battle’ and ‘her identity and loyalties being tied up with her home planet,’ is explicitly over different takes on monogamy.

When Dick is breaking up with her, Kori makes it clear she thinks it’s totally reasonable to have both a husband and a love, since Karras also has someone he loves and they’re both fine with it, but the story doesn't really explain how nonmonogamy works on Tamaran, or even if it's practiced outside the context of political marriage. They do do a sort of...soulbond fusion dance...thing, as part of the ceremony, so marriage is definitely serious business. There are so many levels of cultural difference that get poor to no development.

But to return to the weird ooc retcon cheating story: because of this context, no matter what her personal norms are, Dick specifically casually sleeping with someone else would be something for Kori to be mad about, because of the hypocrisy.

Then there’s the Mirage Incident, which I haven’t read through properly and which was very poorly handled by the writers. Kori is upset about Dick having slept with someone impersonating her and there’s a general vibe of this being treated by Dick’s social circle as unfaithfulness even though he was in fact sexually violated by deceit; it famously sucks.

We still don’t learn a lot here about Kori’s ideas about monogamy, from what I have seen, because her focus is mostly on feeling like Dick doesn’t care about her enough or in the right way since he couldn’t tell the difference. Which is an understandable feeling, even if it’s not an appropriate reaction to have at him at this time.

What Nightwing contributed emotionally........hm. This is a mess, honestly; he was all over the map, and not just because of having Brother Blood in his head. I cannot speak definitively on this, it’s too inconsistent.

For most of their relationship, Kori was the more intensely invested one, the one to initiate and the one who was shown at length to be excited to come home at the end of the day to their shared apartment because her boyfriend was there to see and talk to. If we set aside his more egregious white male bullshit, Dick was pretty emotionally available most of the time, though? They were cute.

Since they split up a lot of ink has been spilled making him less into her in retrospect, but he was pretty invested--leaving her coincided with mental breakdowns both times, and it wasn’t even mostly because she was doing his emotional processing for him, because she wasn’t, although it’s fair to say he often fell into using the relationship as an emotional crutch. Kori was definitely doing the same thing though so...it wasn’t the most balanced relationship in fiction history, but apart from slight codependency and the racism, it was decent enough.

She gets more evenhanded development than most superhero love interests, honestly, because she was costarring in a team book. She had her own storylines. She had other friends.

Mostly both of them just needed some space to finish growing up and stop being retraumatized long enough to process some of the existing trauma better, and I think they could have gone on being good for each other for a long time.

#long post #this did in fact take me about two hours #ask #a nonny mouse #dickkori #koriand'r #dick grayson #nightwing #hoc est meum #teen titans #new teen titans #wolfman and perez #sexism #racism #relationships #monogamy #drama #shipping #lol nonny if you're sorry why do it #do you mean sorry to inconvenience me? #do you mean 'sorry to activate your compulsive question answering?'

[beastars-takes]

Zootopia Takes: Darker’s Not Better

The Shock Collar Draft

So, it sounds like people are largely positive on me doing some Zootopia posts on this blog, and I wanted to talk about this tweet I saw the other day:

I’ll punt on explaining why Beastars isn’t “Dark Zootopia”--that’s a great topic for another post. But I would like to talk about why this popular yet stridently uninformed tweet is so, so wrong. Why the shock collar draft was not better, actually.

And obviously, I’m not writing several pages in reply to a single tweet--this is a take that’s been around since the movie came out, that the “original version was better.” It’s been wrong the whole time.

Let’s talk about why!

Part 1: “Because Disney”

Let’s start with this--the assumption that the film’s creators wanted to make this shock collar story and “Disney” told them to change it.

That’s not how it works.

I try to keep stuff about me out of these posts as much as possible, but just for a bit of background, I’ve worked in the animation industry for about half a decade. I know people at Disney. I have a reasonable idea of how things are there.

There is this misconception about creative industries that they’re constantly this pitched battle of wills between creative auteurs trying to make incredible art and ignorant corporate suits trying to repress them.

That can happen, especially in dysfunctional studios (and boy could I tell some stories) but Walt Disney Animation Studios is not dysfunctional. It’s one of the most autonomous and well-treated parts of the Disney Company.

The director of Zootopia, Byron Howard, isn’t an edgelord. He made Bolt and Tangled. He knows what his audience is, and he’s responsible enough not to spend a year (and millions of dollars in budget) developing a grimdark Don Bluth story that leadership would never approve. It wouldn’t just be a waste of time--he would be endangering the livelihoods of the hundreds of people working under him. Meanwhile, Disney Animation’s corporate leadership trusts their talent. They don’t generally interfere with story development because they don’t need to. Because they employ people like Byron Howard.

Howard and the other creative leads of Zootopia have said a dozen times, in interviews and documentaries, that they gave up on the shock collar idea because it wasn’t working. They’ve explained their reasoning in detail. Maybe they’re leaving out some of the story, but in general? I believe them.

But Beastars Takes, you say, maybe even if Disney didn’t force them to back away from this darker version, it still would have been better?

Part 2: Why Shock Collars Seem Good

I will say this--I completely sympathize with people who see these storyboards and scenes from earlier versions of the movie and think “this seems amazing.” It does! A lot of these drawings and shots are heartbreakingly good, in isolation.

I love these boards. They make me want to cry. I literally have this drawing framed on my wall. Believe me, I get it.

But the only reason we care this much about this alternative draft of Zootopia is that the Zootopia we got made us love this world and these characters. You know what actually made me cry?

Oh, yeah.

So let’s set aside the astonishing hubris of insisting Zootopia’s story team abandoned the “good” version of the story, when the “bad version” is the most critically-acclaimed Disney animated feature in the past SIXTY YEARS.

“But Beastars Takes!” I hear you say. “Critics are idiots and just because something’s popular doesn’t make it good!”

Fair enough. Let’s talk about why the real movie is better.

Part 3: The Message (it is, in fact, like a jungle sometimes)

This type of thing is always hard to discuss, in the main--a lot of people don’t want to feel criticized or “called out” by the entertainment they consume, and they don’t want to be asked to think about their moral responsibilities. But it’s hard to deny that Zootopia is a movie with a strong point of view. Everything else--the characters, the worldbuilding, the plot, grows out from the movie’s central statement about bias.

And the movie we got, with no shock collars, makes that statement far more effectively.

To dive into the full scope of Zootopia’s worldview and politics (warts and all) would be a whole post on its own, so I’ll just summarize the key point of relevance here:

Zootopia's moral message is that you, the viewer, need to confront your own biases. Not yell at someone else. No matter how much of a good or progressive person you consider yourself to be--if you want to stand against prejudice you have to start with yourself.

That’s a tough sell! For that message to land, we need to see ourselves in the protagonist.

Judy’s a good person! She argues with her dad about foxes. She knows predators aren’t all dangerous. She’s not speciesist. Right?

Ah fuck.

Let’s fast-forward to the pivotal scene of this movie. In an unfortunate but inevitable confluence of circumstances, Judy’s own biases and prejudiced assumptions come out, and she shits the bad.

Nick, who’s already bared his soul to her (against his better instincts), is heartbroken. But not as heartbroken as he is a minute later when he tries to confront her about what she’s said, and she makes this face:

Whaaaat? Come on, Nick. I’m a good person. Why are you giving me a hard time?

People like to complain about this scene. That it’s a hackneyed “misunderstanding” trope that could be easily resolved with a discussion. They’re wrong. Nick tries to have a discussion. She blows him off.

This isn’t Judy acting out of character, this is her character. Someone who identifies as Not A Racist, and hasn’t given the issue any more thought. This is not only completely believable characterization (who hasn’t seen someone react this way when you told them they hurt you?) it’s the film’s central thesis!

Yes, Nick somewhat provokes her into reaching for her “fox spray,” and her own trauma factors in there, but she’s already made her fatal mistake before that happens.

(As an aside, people also make the criticism that the movie unrealistically deflects responsibility for racism onto Bellwether and her plot. It doesn’t. All the key expressions of prejudice in the film--Judy’s encounter with Gideon, her parents’ warnings, the elephant in the ice cream shop, Judy’s early encounters with Bogo, Judy's views on race science--exist largely outside of Bellwether’s influence. She is a demagogue who inflames existing tensions, she didn’t invent them. Bogo literally says “the world has always been broken.”)

So, anyway. But we love Judy. She’s an angel. She also kinda sucks! She’s proudly unprejudiced, and when her own prejudice is pointed out to her she argues and doesn’t take it seriously. This is bad, but it’s also a very human reaction. It’s one most of us have probably been guilty of at one point or another.

Look at Zootopia’s society, too--it’s shiny and cosmopolitan, seemingly idyllic. Anyone can be anything, on paper. But scratch too deep beneath the surface and there’s a lot of pain and resentment here, things nobody respectable would say in public but come out behind closed doors, or among family, when nobody’s watching. It’s entirely recognizable--at least to me, someone who lives in a large liberal city in the United States. Like Byron Howard.

Wow, this place is a paradise!

Wait, what’s a “NIMBY”?

Part 4: Why Shock Collars Are Bad

So, with the film’s conceit established, let’s circle back to the shock collar idea. Like I said, it’s heartbreaking. It’s dramatic. It’s affective.

It also teaches us nothing.

If I see a movie where predator animals are subjected to 24/7 electroshock therapy, I don’t think “wow, this makes me want to think about how I could do better by the people around me.” I think “damn that shit’s crazy lmao. that’d be fucked up if that happened.” At a stretch, it reminds me of something like the Jim Crow era, or the Shoah. You know, stuff in the Past. Stuff we’ve all decided couldn’t ever happen again, so why worry about it?

The directors have said this exact thing, just politely. “It didn’t feel contemporary,” they say in pressers. That’s what it means.

If anything, the shock collar draft reifies the mindset that Zootopia is trying to reject--it shows us that discrimination is blatant, and dramatic, and flagrantly cruel, and impossible to miss.

And...that’s not true. If you only look for bias at its most malicious and evil, you’re going to miss the other 95 percent.

The messaging of this “darker version” is--ironically--less mature, less insightful, less intelligent. Less useful. Darker’s not better.

Part 5: Why Shock Collars Are Still Bad

So what if you don’t care about the message? What if you have no interest in self-reflection, or critical analysis (why are you reading this blog then lmao)? What if you just really want to hear a fun story about talking animals?

Well, this is trickier, because the remaining reasons are pretty subjective and emotional.

The creators have said that the shock collar version didn’t work because the viewers hated the cruel world they’d created. They agreed with Nick--the city was beyond saving. They didn’t want to save it.

The creators have said that Judy was hard to sympathize with, not being able to recognize the shock collars for the obvious cruelty they were.

Fuck you, Judy!

But we haven’t seen the draft copies. We haven’t watched the animatics. We have to take their word for it. Anyone who’s sufficiently invested in this story is going to say “well, I disagree with them.” It doesn’t matter to them that they haven’t seen the draft and the filmmakers have. The movie they’ve imagined is great and nobody is going to convince them otherwise.

But the fact remains that the shock collar movie, as written, did not work. And, if behind the scenes material is to be believed, it continued to not work after months and months of story doctoring.

There’s even been a webcomic made out of the dystopian version of Zootopia. It’s clever and creative and well-written and entertaining and...it kind of falls apart. The creator, after more than a little shit-talk directed at Disney, abandoned the story before reaching the conclusion, but even before then the seams were beginning to show. How do you take a society that’s okay with electrocuting cute animals and bring it to a point of cathartic redemption? You can’t, really. The story doesn’t work.

Does that mean people shouldn’t make fanworks out of the cut material? That they shouldn’t be inspired and excited by it? Hell no. This drawing is cute as hell. The ideas are compelling.

But I suppose what I’d ask of you all is--if you’re weighing the hot takes of art students on Twitter against the explanations of veteran filmmakers, consider that the latter group might actually know what they’re talking about.

See you next time!

#zootopia #zootropolis #zoomania #zootopia takes #judy hopps #nick wilde #disney #chief bogo #byron howard

[a-lil-bi-furious]

I’m gonna ask for two characters, is that okay?? 🥺 Kira Yukimura and Scott McCall, but if you inly want to do one of them that’s okay!! 🧡

Of course you can!! Thank you! 💕 And you even sent in my wonderful children!🥺🥰 Scott McCall:

Headcanon for their sexuality/romantic orientation/gender identity (I’m adding on because I want to)?

Listen, this boy is so pan. In my mind, Scott is just so filled with love for people, and I don’t think someone’s gender or sex would matter to him for feelings or sexual attraction. Is it pretty unexpected when he's attracted to people of many different genders? Sure. But mostly that’s because he hasn’t given his sexuality or romantic orientation much thought. They've just always existed and he’s run with it. He’s pretty comfortable in his gender identity as a boy, but not closed off to questioning it.

I can’t remember who I first saw this headcanon from, but I also really like the idea of quoiromantic Scott who can’t tell the difference between platonic and romantic love, he just loves. Why does he have to do it differently, y’know? Who says he can’t kiss his friends and hold their hands and express his love for them in those ways?? How is he meant to feel different between how he loves who he’s dating (if he's dating) and how he loves his friends? He doesn’t, so ??? (Also, as a side note, I am also a big believer in polyamorous Scott because he has chemistry and good shipping foundation with pretty much everyone, definitely seems open to loving more than one person, and he, Allison, and Isaac were clearly all dating each other no I am not taking notes at this time)

Have they come out? If so, how? How did their friends/family take their coming out?

Eventually he does. Scott thought it was going to be a big deal and was so nervous about it he kind of just....tucked it away deep inside where he hides all of his trauma and feelings from people. He doesn’t do anything flashy, but when he sits Melissa down he’s so serious and stressed about it she’s convinced he’s about to tell her he hit someone with the car and has a body in the trunk. She’s relieved to find out that is not the case, and reacts with a good natured “Honey, this isn’t a surprise. It’s a big deal because it’s a big part of you, and I’m happy you trust me enough to share this. But it isn’t surprising.”

The pack reacts exactly the same way his mother did, which really makes Scott wonder if he was the only one oblivious to it for so long. (He was.) They’re all very supportive, and he seems so much happier once it’s officially out in the open.

Sheriff Stilinski is a bit confused, but Stiles writes all the different labels on sticky notes, sticks them onto chess pieces, and sits Noah down in front of the chess board, just like he did with supernatural creatures (I think that’s what he does? Doesn’t he do that??) After, Scott kind of wishes he hadn’t--mostly because listening to Stiles’ convoluted explanation and bickering with his confused father made for one of the most frustrating two hours of Scott’s life.

Do they go to Pride/With whom?

Absolutely! Especially given I consider most of them as part of the lgbtqia+ community (and regardless they’re all allies), they make a pack event of it. The younger pack members don’t always join because they kind of have their own thing going, but the older/core group--Scott, Lydia, Stiles, Kira, Malia, Danny, Isaac, maybe Theo if they're on good terms--all meet up, rotating through which state/city parade they go to each year (because they’ve all scattered for college and jobs and such). They’ve convinced Derek and Braeden to come a few times, but Derek hates the big crowds and Braeden gets way too much joy out of making him get his face painted. After the parade, they do a different activity all together each year--ranging from game/movie nights to club nights to way too competitive paintballing in the woods--just, generally, something a little more personal than all the big parties around.

(If Allison, Erica, and Boyd were alive, they’d be there with them too 💜)

Do they show their colors? (Flag-wise)

For Pride, Scott paints the Pansexual flag in cuffs around his right bicep, directly mirroring his tattoo on the left.

Kira Yukimura:

Headcanon for their sexuality/romantic orientation/gender identity (I'm adding on because I want to)?

I feel like Kira sits comfortably beneath the bisexual umbrella, but has a hard time figuring out whether or not she has any kind of gender preference sexually. Gender doesn't really factor into her romantic attraction, so panromantic seems to fit. I also feel like Kira is nonbinary, uses She/They pronouns, and eventually settles on genderfluid as a good way to describe how she feels. She’s usually not uncomfortable with people referring to her as a girl and doesn’t mind being perceived as one a lot of the time, but doesn’t totally feel like a girl and isn’t sure what gender fits y’know? What she identifies with shifts around.

Have they come out? If so, how? How did their friends/family take their coming out?

After a long and confusing identity crisis, yes. There’s a lot of nervous babbling involved. She talks way too quickly and keep interrupting herself because she isn’t sure she’s explaining it right, but Ken gently interrupts and calms her down with a “Kira, your mother and I love and support you however you are, no matter how much or how little that changes. We want to hear all about it. That doesn’t mean we want you to run out of air.” She breathes and collects herself, then dives back in, explaining a bit slower this time, but no less rambly.  Noshiko’s never really seen the point in rigid definitions anyhow after living so many different lifetimes and experiencing so much fluidity in many aspects of her own life. Ken is just happy his daughter is happy, good-naturedly pokes fun at her like he always does, and later that night has a bit of a research-prompted gender crisis of his own.

Do they go to Pride/With whom?

Yes! The rambling above with Scott also applies here. The first year Kira goes, she goes separately with her parents and meets up with the pack later. Ken is really enthusiastic about it and provides lots of historical facts about the pride festival’s origins and evolution throughout the day. He makes T-shirts for everyone in the pack and buys a few too many bumper stickers. Noshiko is much more low-key about it, but is happy to be there to support Kira and enamored with how overboard Ken goes.

Do they show their colors? (Flag-wise)

Yes!! Kira has a lot of fun putting together colorful outfits to reflect her identity with multi-colored fishnets and color coded skirts and jackets with patches and of course her kickass sword-belt to tie it all together. She really enjoys the freedom of switching up those colorful outfits any time her labels shift, too.

(Send me a character/ship and I’ll answer these questions!)

#Ask games #Pride asks #Scott McCall #Kira Yukimura #jamesqueerpotter #thanks for asking friend!! <33 #will I ever learn to not answer with essays? #probably not but we can dream I guess

[hidiingplace]

TODD REBANE + FRIENDSHIP & LOYALTY

general. i’ve spoken extensively about Todd’s romantic pursuits on this blog, but have not really touched on Todd’s friendships and his loyalty that comes with that friendship. I’ve mentioned in passing the degree to which Todd is a very loyal friend, but I’ve yet to dive into the details surrounding why that is, what his loyalty and friendship look like, and how he reacts to things based on the friendship he has with people. 

making friends. Todd makes a lot of a friends very quickly. Todd is a divisive person, in that you either LOVE him or you HATE him –– there is rarely a middle ground, but it is still possible to be in the middle (Daeton is a perfect example of this). Generally, Todd is extremely social and can strike up a conversation with just about anyone. He’s a notorious flirt, and so it’s not uncommon for a friendship to start from Todd flirting with someone and then backing off when disinterest of any kind is shown. Gender isn’t a factor here, he just often finds that this is the type of interaction he leads with. He likes to tease and poke fun and have a very playful and loose expectation about whoever he’s talking to, which allows for him to often cast aside judgement where others might place it. He is quick to count you as a friend, and may even use the word friend after the end of your very first interaction with him. He does this as a way to confirm that it’s something the other person wants –– testing the water to make sure he’s actually made a friend like he thinks he has. Of course, while Todd is a very charming and personable person, the way he approaches people can also be a major point of contention depending on the person’s preferences and personality. From a writer’s perspective; your muse is allowed to hate Todd and how he acts! sometimes he’s obnoxious af in those first interactions with people because he’s TRYING to make himself likeable. Don’t feel like you have to force your muse to like him or be friends with him.

social circle. because of his quickness to make new friends, Todd has a very, very, VERY large social circle. There’s not an exact number on the amount of friends he has, but on any given day he receives upwards of 50+ texts from friends asking him to hang out or do things with them. Todd always has a lot of options when it comes to social things he could be doing –– which is why it’s very strange for him not to respond to a friend’s text for a few days (usually indicating he’s severely depressed or something is wrong). He has a tighter inner circle of about 20 CLOSE friends in which he would consider his ride-or-die friends. Within this circle he has a handful of friends that are current and ex-friends with benefits. He manages to maintain a very easy friendship with those people without holding any true romantic feelings for them. 

lacking depth. Todd is, despite his copious amount of friends, a very private person when it comes to himself. He is the kind to brush off topics of conversation he doesn’t want to talk about routinely. He struggles to make long term, deeper connections with friends in general because he is so closeted about his vulnerability. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that Todd has been through some hard shit –– but it does take longer than people might expect it to, and very rarely will they actually hear about the trauma Todd has endured. In Todd’s close group of friends, only 3 of them know darker details about Todd’s life. About 7 know about Todd’s full family circumstances, only 3 of them know about his jail time, and only 2 know about his life living homeless and some of the traumatic events he’s experienced during that time. It’s not uncommon to have known Todd for YEARS and feel as though you... don’t really know anything about him. Because of this, some people will distance themselves from him because of his lack of “emotional depth” that some people seek out in friends. As such, Todd is very used to 'drifting apart’ from long-term friends rather than having a clean and clear end to a friendship. This is why he keeps a large social circle –– so that he always has SOMEONE around. Having spent most of his life (age 6-20) being REALLY alone, he is desperate to surround himself with people so that he never really feels that way again. 

good friend. one thing no one can say about Todd is that he’s a bad friend. He might not be the most serious, or the most emotionally available, but he’s a fucking amazing friend. He will do everything and anything to make his friends feel protected, appreciated, loved, and even cared for when they need it. He is known to drop everything to provide his friends with comfort, a ride, a place to stay, food –– ANYTHING. He has left parties, family functions, and other important life events just to be at his friend’s side because they are going through something. He is very discrete about his worry and need to care for friends, often downplaying or distracting them from their issues with a bit of humour, while showing up and holding them, caring for them, and doing things in other ways that shows he cares. Todd is also extremely accepting. He is not the kind of person who will question the things you tell him about your identity, circumstances, or anything else. He trusts his friends, even when maybe he shouldn’t. This, unfortunately, can make him easy to manipulate. SHOCKING I know. Todd is a manipulator himself and can easily recognize abuse, manipulation, and toxic behaviour when it is NOT happening to him. It’s his desperation to keep people around that he cares deeply for and his fear of being alone pushes him to give too much of himself sometimes. He has been taken advantage of by friends financially, emotionally, and even physically in this manner. While Todd is not blind to the times he’s been manipulated in the past, he is still one to fall victim to these kinds of toxic friendships without his other friends pulling his head out of the sand and shaking him from his loyalty to the wrong person. 

loyalty. this brings us to my last point. Todd is loyal to a fault. He is not the kind to turn a blind eye when it comes to atrocities. He doesn’t stand for ableism, elitism, sexism, racism, homo/transphobia, etc. amongst his friends. He will not turn a blind eye to things he deems absolutely irredeemable –– but he will stick by his friends in many circumstances he probably shouldn’t. He’ll be the first to throw his fists around because someone disrespected them mildly. He’ll be the first to help you hide the body –– he might even tell you to go wash up WHILE HE GETS RID OF THE BODY HIMSELF. Todd has sought out revenge on behalf of his friends (and family). He has, in fact, maimed and killed for them, and he would do the same without question for anyone who counts him as a friend. Loyalty is somewhat easy to gain from Todd, and damn fucking near impossible to shake. You could have had a major falling out –– yelling and screaming and anger, and he would still show up to defend you against some asshole if you needed it. 

#( have i told you that i love todd's complicated duality yet???????????? #because I really fucking do ) #todd rebane ( general ). #todd rebane ( headcanon ). #abuse mention tw

[tundrainafrica]

1) about the social class headcanon that you write, that’s actually makes sense, but isn’t exactly what i meant. According to Isayama, Hange when she was young looked very much like Eren in the way of acting (even more with the titans), and (this part I am not sure if it is true) she lost her family at the fall of the maria wall. Eren looked like a rebellious teenager angry at everything, and recently I found out that depression in teenagers and children tends to manifest itself that way

2) (anger and rebellion), well, we know Eren was depressed (it only got worse with time) but what about Hange? seems to me she learned to hide her feelings so it wouldn't be between her and her job. We don't know her past, she probably didn't grow up in a violent place like Levi but it doesn't mean that her life was all joy and happiness you know.. 

---------------------------------------------   MY ANSWER   --------------------------------------

Hello Anon, 

Thank you again for your ask! Woops, sorry if I didn’t answer your  questions. I answered those two asks in a row so I ended up just building off of the last one. 

I don’t think it was ever confirmed if Hange lost her family at the fall of Wall Maria. I did some research and couldn’t find stuff on my end. If you could send me some on that, I’d love to read it.

I am aware at least that no one’s life is all joy or happiness. I think there is a difference though with growing up without ever having to consider your next meal and living in abject poverty. 

There are people who have had time to be a child and there are people who haven’t. So I think to a degree, Hange had more of a childhood than Levi. And a normal childhood is incredibly important for every single child. The early years are crucial because that’s where children build wonder, curiosity. That’s one of the psychological reasons behind children’s books. They make everything so fantastical to heighten the senses of the children. Because in fact, children only get full control of their senses later in life. Before they are even able to make sense of everything, everything is just a huge bubble or conglomeration of senses. That’s why children are so perceptive, imaginative and quick to learn things like languages. Their view of the world isn’t set yet by the rules and norms of the society they live in. 

That’s why asking children questions and exposing them to so many different things at a young age and providing for them is important. Children need to see the wonder of the world while not having to consider their next meal, their danger. A childhood is generally where curiosity and imaginative thinking is most easily built. 

And that’s why I say, that Hange somehow is a lot more curious, sees a lot more wonder than Levi. Similar to Erwin, he had a pretty comfortable existence, he went to a good school, he had a father who engaged him and that’s why Erwin was able to think beyond what was within the walls. Same for both Eren and Armin. Eren had his father who probably fed him some info and Armin had his parents books and his parents who were curious enough to build that hot air balloon

And, I know about that scene in the manga that explained that it was the lightness of the titan head that got Hange curious about titans. I think kicking the titan head was a good catalyst for titan research but I suspect that even before that, Hange was curious about the outside world. Hange’s interest extends beyond titans for sure because it was confirmed by Isayama already that Hange would have been studying botany outside the walls if it wasn’t for the titans. Also, the way Hange is handling the new world where she’s constantly on top of developments in Paradis etc, also shows that titans are only one facet of her scientist personality.

Besides, if she didn’t have that wonder and curiosity about the outside world, I don’t think she would have done something as ridiculous as join the survey corps in the first place.

“Eren looked like a rebellious teenager angry at everything, and recently I found out that depression in teenagers and children tends to manifest itself that way”

Although depression can manifest itself in anger, similar to Eren’s probably, there’s no exact formula for how humans react to anything. It’s incredibly complex that the field of psychology (or any other field) is just a conglomerate of people and a bunch of reports and the people trying to make sense of all the results of the experiments they made. This is particularly true in the social sciences where any findings won’t point to anything as exact as those in the pure sciences.  

Anger and rebellion could also stem from someone having grown up in a rich family with strict rules on how to go about this and that is generally how it fits into my head canon. Someone can have a good relationship with their family while at the same time have qualms about how they were raised. To be honest, I’m probably the same way. I grew up in a relatively well off family, I was a generally angry teenager but I admittedly have a generally positive relationship with my family. 

Okay to tackle the issue on depression

 <Trigger Warning on Depression>

I don’t want to be quick as to define any action or any emotional analysis as depression. Depression is an incredibly complex subject, there are biological causes, life events and it manifests itself in so many different ways. So many different ways in fact, that people are rarely diagnosed with just depression. There are always diagnoses which accompany it. 

To be honest, I went through a period in time also where I was considering ending it. I was sleeping a lot. I quit everything. I went straight home from school. Barely talked to anyone.  I talked to a counselor about it, then a therapist but it took them months before they wanted to give the diagnosis of depression. I actually never pushed through with the sessions after a while, got busy with school and eventually, this cleared up on its own weirdly. I’ll never know actually if I was depressed during that period in time. Was I going through very stressful life events, definitely. Were my answers to the tests they were giving me alarming then? Probably. They could have pointed to depression. But I generally got past it and am generally a happier person now without much intervention. So was it even considered depression? I’ll never know. Some people who are probably much stronger than me needed interventions to stay functional. They needed to make radical life decisions, like move out from their parents place, change their courses to keep going. They needed meds to keep functioning everyday. 

Depression is a complex and  terrifying condition and manifests itself in so many different ways. In fact, talking to some friends who really watched their life spiral down because of this shitty condition. Towards the later stages of depression, they weren’t even feeling anything anymore. 

Could Hange have been experiencing symptoms similar to depression? Definitely. General teenage anger and hormones can manifest as symptoms of depression. Grief can manifest with symptoms of  depression. Loss can manifest with symptoms of depression. Trauma can manifest with symptoms of depression. Hange will have experienced a lot of things that 

Note : Also Eren’s depression? I honestly think given the experiences he had, inheriting the founding titan and inheriting centuries worth of trauma, I think his experience is beyond fathomable for the average person so I chalk that as completely something else. 

Okay, to answer your question, Hange was probably not in the best mental state late into Season 4. 

Of course she wasn’t, she lost Moblit, she lost Erwin and suddenly she was pulled into a place with so much responsibility. And she was probably suffering from a case of survivor’s guilt on top of that.

Hiding emotions comes down a lot to discipline, self control and the general strength of your inhibitions.. Emotions are manageable like I could say, I have successfully stopped myself many times from punching someone in the face. Someone’s ability to stop themselves from acting on impulses, someone’s ability to manage their inhibitions is dependent on numerous factors like home environment etc. It is also dependent on the context of that moment where someone has to choose between punching someone in the face or walking away, on the context of that moment where people choose between lying in bed and letting the day go by and standing up and plastering a smile on their face. I guess, that’s the point I wanted to make in a previous post. If Hange did grow up rich, she probably found it a little easier, to plaster a smile on her face because not ever having to experience desperation at an early age, coming to the realization that you’ve had it easier than a lot of people growing up, can do that to people. 

But yes, towards the end of season 4, she was going through something. She was struggling, despite her smiling face. But really, in attack on titan, who is happy post chapter 122? Like I cannot think of a single person in that manga who is happy at that point. Please tell me if you can think of anyone. 

Would I chalk up Hange’s true feelings to depression?

Manifestations of depression maybe? Post traumatic stress? Stress with little time to process anything or rest? Exhaustion? Not being in the best mental state? Maybe.

I wouldn’t use the word depression definitely. 

Depression is an incredibly heavy world with so many implications. In fact, it’s a medical condition which needs to be diagnosed thus, I wouldn’t use that at all to describe anyone’s situation unless they have had multiple consultations with multiple doctors and have been laid a final diagnosis. 

I hope this clears things up.

Thank you for the ask again. I appreciate it :D

#attack on titan #eren jaeger #hange zoe #meta

[goth-dean]

So, here's why I think Rose and Dean are not the same, if you ready to discuss it. Biggest points of difference between them:

Dean's first reaction to the unknown is aggression or defense position, sometimes both. He is ready to fight at any given moment, and that's not only because of how his life is, it's definitely part of his personality, (because Sam, for example, has different reaction). Rose's reaction is always curiosity and kindness, she doesn't have that aggressive part in her, she only fights when it's absolutely necessary, as the last measure, even her season 4 version. She is in general a very peaceful person and it's one of her defining qualities.

One of the biggest parts of Dean's personality is his conflict with his own emotions, he feels too much and doesn't want to, he shuts down his own feelings, his brain literally erased/changed his own memory once because he couldn't deal with trauma. Rose, in my opinion, is one if the most emotionally stable characters in the whole of doctor who. While she feels a lot and is driven by her feelings, she has no conflict with them.

An important quality of both these characters is that they love very strongly, but they do it very differently. Dean's love and devotion to people is unfortunately often controlling in it's nature. For example he loves and protects Sam but he believes that it gives him the right to control his actions, sort of "I love you so I know what's best for you". But he also genuinely cares a lot, and not only about his brother and Cas, but about literally every person they get to know, he sees someone good and immediately assigns them part of his family. Rose's love is more selfless in a way, she is ready to do everything for people she chose to love, and has no desire to control them with her love. But at the same time she can be very careless in relation to other people in her life who love her, remember how she treats Mickey, for example. She is nice to everyone, but she doesn't get attached to a lot of people.

So while they sure have similar traits, as their bravery and confidence in some situations, and devotion and the giant force of their emotional attachment, for example, and they do some things that can be easily paralleled, still some key parts of their personalities are too distinctly different in my opinion to call them similar characters.

--

that all being said, I also definitely agree with you that the satan two-parter episode is in fact a good parallel to destiel plotlines, and we can also find other parallels because Dean and Rose have things in common, and this is quite interesting

This took me a long time to answer and required a lot of thinking, but here goes:

Ok, reactions to new/unknown. you have to factor in context, Dean's a hunter, Rose is just having a fun time traveling with the Doctor. Rose at times shows confusion/distaste for aliens (the end of the world and the ood in impossible planet) Dean shows distaste/ an urge to fight. obviously their reactions to new things would be different because the context is MASSIVELY different. and even though Dean does often feel the urge to fight/kill "monsters" he (in the later seasons especially) is shown to have some level of empathy for them and Rose is very empathetic. Also, Dean desires a peaceful life, he doesn't want to hunt and fight. I truly believe that if he had the chance to get out of hunting he would.

It's true that Dean represses his emotions and that Rose doesn't. but she is extremely emotional, same as Dean. she's impulsive, so is Dean. she doesn't handle it well when things don't go her way, neither does Dean. while Rose isn't really controlling of people she loves, she can BE controlling and is extremely bossy a lot of the time, particularly in series 2. in tooth and claw she organizes the prisoners to get away from the "werewolf", in the impossible planet/the satan pit she leads the crew. she can also be manipulative to the people she loves, forcing the Doctor to take her to see her dad, twice, even though he told her it was a bad idea, to Micky, making him come to Cardiff in boom town.

As far as Rose not getting attached to many people where Dean does, again consider context, Rose and the Doctor are traveling all of time and space, not much opportunity to have the "found family" that Dean does. Although she does convince the Doctor to let Adam tag along, but that doesn't end well. they also "adopted" Jack. she also does care deeply for the people she comes into contact with, even though she and the Doctor don't bring them along. Dean does this many times as well, think about all the people he’s met that he was shown to care about, but didn’t see again.

There's also a lot to the relationships between Rose and the Doctor and Dean and Cas. Like Rose leaving Jackie and Micky to travel with the doctor, and the way that dean will sometimes ignore Sam to spend time with Cas (the hamburgler conversation while Sam's trying not to drink demon blood, or dean being with cas while Sam's at the church with Crowley). the fact that both pairs have an extremely intense relationship that was most definitely at least somewhat romantic, yet not explicitly stated to be so until the very end.

Also, more similarities, for fun

"I've got a G.E.D. and a give 'em hell attitude" - Dean Sympathy For The Devil

"I've got no A levels, no job, no future, but I'll tell you what I have got, Jericho Street Junior School Under 7’s gymnastics team. I got the bronze" - Rose Rose

Deans reactions to being sexulized/touched/"manhandled" by demons

"Don't think I didn't feel your hands having a quick wonder you dirty old man!" - Rose The Unquiet Dead

Dean talking about women at any given time, but mostly him talking w/ Cas about April at the bar (I don’t remember the ep but hopefully you know what I'm talking about)

Rose talking to Gwen about boys in the Unquiet Dead

Dean not leaving Purgatory/selling his soul to save Sam/risking his life every five seconds to protect the people he loves

Rose going back for the doctor in the series 1 finale/refusing to leave in the Satan Pit

Dean gets stuck in the Bad Place

Rose gets stuck in Petes world (ok these aren't things they did, but they're things that HAPPENED to them so I'm gonna say it counts)

Rose and Dean are two sides of the same coin. of course there are going to be things that they do and react to in different ways. But that doesn't change the fact that they are VERY similar characters.They’re just living very different lives.

#i'm enjoying this dean is rose discourse #dean winchester #rose tyler

[yunsoh]

kakeru’s presentation of childhood trauma: the other side of the coin

part of the intrigue of kakeru’s character is its blatant opposition to yuki’s. he shows a self-confidence that yuki lacks. he’s unaware of how his actions affect other people while yuki is hyper-aware. he comes off as emotionally open to the point of abrasion where yuki is intensely guarded and careful. he at first seems to be everything yuki isn’t. and, being that we know of yuki’s struggles, and are intimately aware of why he struggles, our first impression of kakeru may be that he doesn’t struggle at all. it’s what yuki believes at first, after all, and this impression tinges our viewpoint.

however, as the story evolves and kakeru becomes more of a presence, we start to see that he does struggle, and carries his issues from his upbringing in his own ways -- it’s just that his presentation is different from yuki’s (and machi’s, for that matter), and his presentation isn’t one that’s as easy to sympathize with.

he doesn’t suffer from self-loathing. he doesn’t internalize his traumas in a way that make him believe he’s broken or unlovable. instead, his issues lie within how he views other people -- his issues manifest as external and other’s-oriented. he assumes that he knows why people act the way they do, which bars him from learning how to read and sympathize with them.

and it’s because of this, maybe, that we become dismissive of how, or if, he’s affected by his own childhood. 

we don’t see very much of kakeru’s childhood, but we see and hear of it in about the same amount as machi’s. i think it’s important that this is the case, and important to see where they present similarly and differently. 

though they were raised by different mothers (possibly in different households as well; the amount of interaction kakeru had with their father isn’t known), they were raised under the same strict guidelines and the same competitive atmosphere that, ultimately, left them both without figures of emotional nurture in their formative years. kakeru mentions that his mom only “came to her senses” after he “went on a rampage” about his involvement in the inheritance issue -- as he started to be less emotionally repressed after this confrontation, we can take this to mean that this is when he finally started receiving the emotional nurture from his mom that hadn’t been present to him previously (we see later that he and his mother are much closer, even if they show it in aggressively teasing ways). 

as machi never received that nurture from her parents, and was further abandoned by them, her and kakeru’s similar path of trauma split. however, her presentation of her issues -- cold, quiet, having sudden moments of aggression that peak to some form of destruction -- are traits she shares with kakeru. these traits were more blatantly shared until their early teens:

and these traits continue to show in kakeru even after he develops into a louder and bolder presence -- these moments are farther and fewer between, interspersed between him being more fun and free-spirited, but they still color how he handles conflict and difficult/negative thoughts:

i think, ultimately, that it’s a disservice to his character to treat his change in attitude after dropping the inheritance issue as a sudden and easy flip of a switch. he didn’t suddenly lose all that time of being cold, angry, and emotionally repressed -- these traits are still very much a part of him, even if it’s no longer a consistent or persistent persona he portrays. 

but, as to why exactly he presents his trauma in a way that machi does not -- that is, why he struggles to see outside of his own perspective, and why he’s cruel to other people rather than himself: his means of self-preservation is to think highly of himself. as a child, it was all he was allowed to do in order to keep ahead of the game he was forced to play. 

kakeru is more independent-thinking than machi, and this is where they differ in the manifestation of their trauma, shared as it may be. machi places a lot of blame on herself and constantly sees her own shortcomings in the face of her mother; her trauma manifests as internal (though it should be noted that her displays of aggression are by and large viewed as being intrusive to her peers; kakeru’s aggression is seen similarly, except he’s more intentional about it. he’s aggressive to them on purpose. machi isn’t.)

kakeru and machi both had certain “shortcomings” to battle against in their competition for their father’s inheritance: though machi was the legitimate child, she was younger than kakeru and a girl. though kakeru was the firstborn and a boy, he was illegitimate. machi’s means of dealing with those shortcomings follows the general socialization of young girls -- to be seen as mature, and to be seen as well-behaved and “good,” there’s a general rule of repression to be followed. she did everything her mother told her to do, and kept her opinions and wants to herself. she never acted out, and dealt with her stress in a way that, at worst, was something ultimately harmless: making footprints in the snow because its perfection stressed her out.

kakeru’s means of dealing with these shortcomings more typically follows the socialization of young boys, in that there was an allowance of higher self-focus. while he did was his parents told him and became repressed emotionally, him being able to not only question his place within the competition (“i’m being used as a pawn in someone else’s stupid game”) and then combat against it displays a self-assurance and self-confidence that machi does not possess (important to note, too, is that his illegitimacy actually gave him an out in this situation; while he could be removed from his father and the succession issue rather easily, this wasn’t possible for machi). 

while he was successfully removed from the situation, there remained a downside: although now able to grow into a much more open and unabashed personality, he still missed out on the typical milestones of healthy emotional growth as a child and preteen. he was forced to focus on himself and his own successes as a child, and as such, didn’t develop a means to understand or connect with his peers (from what komaki says of him, it seems unlikely that he had friends during his childhood). 

and this is where komaki comes in. kakeru, once he’s out of his shell, immediately begins to date komaki. we don’t know why he takes to her, but speculating, it’s possible that he knew of her crush on him, and saw the value of her being kind to him/liking him even when he was a difficult person. it’s likely, too, that his and his mom’s relationship was only in the very beginning stages of being repaired, so to have someone who liked him for him, despite everything, i think was very novel to him. he understands the value of how she feels towards him, and, in turn, becomes very loyal to her. 

which, of course, is when he first runs into the issue of realizing that people don’t think through the same lens he does, and don’t necessarily share his thoughts and feelings about a given situation.

this lens was born out of living a childhood where he was only allowed to focus on himself, where he protected himself by focusing on himself, and where his successes were viewed as being the most important aspect of himself. he knows he’s intelligent in the classroom -- but what he doesn’t realize is that that intelligence doesn’t translate whatsoever to how he understands the emotions of his peers. without the emotional connections made between his family and his peers throughout his childhood, he never had the chance to build his emotional intelligence.

the reason why machi (and yuki for that matter, as he was similarly only highly regarded for his status and similarly removed emotionally from his family and peers) don’t have a similar experience lies largely within the issues of self-esteem, control, learned helplessness. 

learned helplessness ties to the concept of psychological resilience, which regards how well a person is able to regulate emotions, react, and cope with crisis situations. children, when exposed to adverse situations, are better able to build resilience when they have protective factors (namely good cognitive self-regulation and positive relationships with adults). learned helplessness stems from experiencing repeated adverse situations outside of one’s control, and eventually growing a sense of powerlessness. 

machi in particular shows this sense of learned helplessness, as she doesn’t fight back against the adversity she continues to endure. we see this as she doesn’t confront her parents over their misunderstanding, when she’s confronted by the girls at school over what she thinks of yuki or the various rumors that go around about her, and seems to feel powerless over her own destructive reactions. yuki doesn’t show this so much, as he’s learned to become adamant about making his own decisions (choosing his high school, telling his mother that he’s going to be making his own decisions about his future), but his fight against his own self-doubt and sense of powerlessness is still rather fresh to him. it’s a constant battle against himself that he is consciously fighting. 

kakeru, on the other hand, never learned this sense of powerlessness. the moment he realized that he was being used, he confronted his mom, and she didn’t fight him back. he was shown that he was in control of his situation; while he experienced adversity as a child in the form of being used, he followed along because he wasn’t in a place to know better (“at first, i obediently went along with it and tried to live up to their demands. ‘cause, you know, when you’re a kid, your parents are everything.”) the control over his own life was handed over to him very easily, once he demanded it.

as a result, kakeru’s self-esteem doesn’t suffer in the same ways that yuki’s and machi’s do. while he was likely lonely as a child, and experienced a sense of loneliness once he realized that other people don’t necessarily share his point of view, he’s put in a position where he has control over his life. 

the combination of a high self-esteem, sense of control, and lacking emotional intelligence is ultimately what creates this issue he has in which he not only assumes other people’s perspectives and emotions, but then feels the confidence to act on that assumption. 

this combination ultimately is his personal downfall. his journey throughout the story is that of building emotional intelligence -- something that comes rather naturally to a number of the other characters, which is why his difficulty with it can come across as so abrasive to other characters and the reader. 

however, it’s crucial to understand that he does realize this is something he has to actively work on. he doesn’t hurt people and ignore it. after hurting komaki (by first hurting tohru), he sets himself on a path to learn how to better see other people’s emotions and sympathize with their situations. 

this isn’t an easy position for him to put himself in -- for kakeru, it’s actually quite vulnerable, considering that he’s actually quite private about his personal feelings and relationships with other people (machi, komaki, and tohru specifically). but he understands the worth in understanding, and understands, after some downfalls, that he isn’t above other people’s emotions. 

he decides to do the difficult thing because he understands the worth in doing so -- after leading a childhood that was largely lonely and self-focused, it’s integral for him to learn emotional intelligence in order keep these new relationships around. his means of seeking friendships, and meaningful relationships, requires him to do the hard thing and make a conscious, active change in how he perceives the world and his place in it.

#fruits basket #kakeru manabe #machi kuragi #yuki sohma #am i sorry for going tf off? no #i'll spare everyone though and put this under a read more #bc its like. 2k words long. #also i'm sorry if this is at all confusing or incoherent i just have. a LOT of thoughts about this lmao #yunsoh meta #fruits basket spoilers

[raptured-night]

Alright here are other ones that I had asked for to deathdaydungeon but they seem to be occupied for a while... There is a theory saying that Neville had a Snape Boggart because Snape had threatened Trevor, which represented Neville’s “proof” that he wasn’t a Squib, as he feared so. In this case, why didn’t he have a dead Trevor as a Boggart instead? Do you think that Snape expressing his worry over how James fancies Lily could be consistent evidence he wanted to date her or not?

I do believe that @deathdaydungeon has shared a few of their thoughts on Neville’s Boggart before that you may find of interest since they’ve not yet been able to respond to your ask. Indeed, the entire discussion following their own thoughts is well worth a read, and here’s another version where I share just a few of my own thoughts. 

That being said, I’m going to cite from a much older and very lengthy discussion post I once wrote regarding Snape as I went into a great length and detail exploring the potential symbolism of Neville’s Boggart to Neville and some of the psychological implications. Because that particular meta covered such a broad range of topics concerning Snape and that particular bit came at the very end of what proved to be a 20k word essay simply linking you to it and expecting you to search through it all to find the sections that pertain to your ask seems less reasonable than simply quoting from that portion of the meta here (although if you find yourself with a bit of time and the interest for it, here is the link to that monster of a meta all the same). So, with that said, here are my thoughts on Neville’s Boggart, Trevor, Boggart!Snape, and Boggarts overall. 

I have often challenged Harry’s narrator as one that is intentionally designed to be biased or unreliable (notably it is a limited-omniscient perspective) in order to demonstrate how it can influence reader perception of characters and even the world the characters occupy. However, the discrepancy between Harry’s perspective of how he is treated by the Dursleys and Neville’s perspective of his own family and how he is treated is revealing exactly because it is made more apparent for being presented through Harry’s narrative. From the start of HP: PS, Harry’s narrative wastes little time in painting for the reader a picture of abuse and unhappiness where Harry’s life with the Dursleys is concerned. With Dudley serving as our counterpoint to emphasize the extreme neglect, abuse and more general mistreatment that Harry suffers while under their roof (e.g. being forced to sleep in a cupboard with spiders while Dudley has a second room, being bullied and beaten while Dudley’s is doted on, even having his hair cut in a humiliating fashion while Dudley receives a new school uniform, etc.), Rowling’s narrative also expresses to the reader Harry’s awareness of the injustice of his situation and his feelings of resentment, discontent, and helplessness. When it comes to the Dursleys and their cruel treatment of Harry the narrative does function as a mostly reliable gauge for the reader to go by. Thus, when the reader is confronted with Neville’s account of his own family experiences in HP: PS I would argue that what makes it the most jarring is the fact that it goes against the precedent set by Harry and his narrative, in that Neville does not appear to recognize anything out of the ordinary in how he has been treated:

"Well, my gran brought me up and she's a witch," said Neville, "but the family thought I was all- Muggle for ages. My Great Uncle Algie kept trying to catch me off my guard and force some magic out of me -- he pushed me off the end of Blackpool pier once, I nearly drowned -- but nothing happened until I was eight. Great Uncle Algie came round for dinner, and he was hanging me out of an upstairs window by the ankles when my Great Auntie Enid offered him a meringue and he accidentally let go. But I bounced -- all the way down the garden and into the road. They were all really pleased, Gran was crying, she was so happy. And you should have seen their faces when I got in here -- they thought I might not be magic enough to come, you see. Great Uncle Algie was so pleased he bought me my toad."

Notably, Neville joins the other first-years like Seamus Finnegan in very casually relating details about his home life to his new peers and the reader learns that he would appear to come from a family that would risk potentially killing him over the possibility that he might have been born a Squib (the way that Squibs might function as an allegory for neurodivergence and disability is, in itself, an interesting subject to explore; especially given the attitudes of Neville’s grandmother and uncle, whose behaviors might be compared to those of modern anti-vaccers, so-called “autism awareness” groups like Autism Speaks that promote an idea of autism as a disease to be cured, and those parents who treat their disabled children in abliest ways). Indeed, it would appear that Trevor was a gift from the same uncle who had constantly tried to catch him off guard (in the same way Dudley and his friends always forced Harry to be on the defensive) and held him out of a window before thoughtlessly dropping him, which does add a new dimension to his emotional attachment to his toad (a reward from an abusive uncle just for not being so inadequate that he failed to get into Hogwarts). The stark difference between Neville and Harry’s perceptions of their families and their unique responses to how they are treated does give us some potential insight into their insecurities and measurements of self-worth.

Additionally, it gives us some potential insight into the possible sociocultural attitudes of wizarding society and might suggest that behaviors like those from Neville’s family are normalized and not regarded as abusive so much as they are accepted as just another extension of the “eccentricity” of their world. It is of interest that when Harry receives his first acceptance letter to Hogwarts addressed to “The Cupboard under the Stairs” the Dursley’s appear concerned at being caught out and move Harry to Dudley’s second room. They are also temporarily said to have tried to seem “nicer” to him, likely for fear of being watched. Moreover, the Dursley’s do show some indication that they may be aware that their treatment of Harry is abusive and would be viewed negatively by most of their Muggle society when Harry joins them at the zoo and Vernon Dursley reluctantly buys him a lemon-flavored ice cream to save face when the vendor draws attention to Harry being excluded. Overall, the very fact that Neville did feel so comfortable openly discussing his Uncle Algie’s treatment of him and the low opinion his family all appear to share about his magical capability does seem to support a point of contrast between Muggle and wizard societies and their views on abuse and child endangerment.

Furthermore, the different ways that Harry and Neville react to Severus is also revealing. Especially as there have been numerous discussions about the psychological factors that may have contributed to Severus’s seeming disdain for Harry and Neville but fewer discussions seem to be devoted to exploring Harry’s own strong animosity for Severus or the source of Neville’s potential fear of him. Significantly, we can observe that for Harry the protection afforded by Lily’s sacrifice does create a scenario where he must return to the Dursley’s at the end of each school year (in some ways, one could observe that the consequences of Lily’s death bind both Harry and Severus to an environment where they sustained most of their trauma). Thus, we see where any outward defiance within the household of the Dursleys is complicated by the requirement that Harry must remain with the Dursleys even after he learns he has magic. Instead, Harry has to mostly resort to cunning acts of self-defense (e.g. taking advantage of the Dursley’s ignorance of the Underage Secrecy Laws to lead them to believe he can use magic against them) or we see that his resistance assumes a more passive-aggressive tone (understandable given the retaliation he can expect from direct confrontation) with the exception of HP: PoA, when Aunt Marge’s sustained verbal abuse and threats over the course of two weeks manages to trigger an explosion of magic in Harry.

Whereas, at Hogwarts, we see Harry buck against authority more and more each year and Severus remains the focal point of his more active resistance. His refusal to address Severus using his title or forms of respect, even in the face of correction by multiple sources, culminates in Harry openly sassing Severus in his sixth year (”You don’t have to call me sir, Professor.”). He becomes more openly brazen in working around Severus, confronting him, and defying him when challenged. As the series progresses, Harry’s enmity toward Severus grows until we see a rancor of mutual proportions between them that culminates in Harry chasing Severus out of Hogwarts throwing curses in HP: HBP. Thus, where Harry cannot so openly defy the Dursleys, in many ways, Severus becomes a figure of authority (one who seems to unfairly hate him and who is biased against him and his house) that he can more safely (i.e. where resistance with the Dursleys might result in real harm or consequences defying Severus results in detention at worst and lost house points at best) resist in their place. Therefore, where Harry may function as a less threatening proxy of James for Severus to project onto, so too does Severus potentially function as a more secure stand-in for the Dursleys that Harry can lash out against and rebel from.

In the case of Neville, I would posit that Severus may also function as a representation of sorts. Specifically, he may serve as a symbol of the deeper anxieties and insecurities that Neville formed as a result of the pressure that his family placed on his magical capability. A pressure that the Hogwarts environment and its preferencing of a culture that fosters competition between houses and depends upon a performance-based reward system may only have exacerbated. As Harry observes in HP: GoF, McGonagall wasn’t the only professor while at Hogwarts to seldom compliment Neville, rather it would seem that “...Neville very rarely heard that he was good at anything.” His first-year alone began in an inauspicious manner, as we see Neville struggle in almost all of his classes from Charms to Potions to Flying (which lands him a broken wrist and Harry a spot on the Quidditch team). While we can debate the extent to which Neville’s magical struggles are the result of him being on a different level of skill and/or learning curve to some of the other children, we can at least acknowledge that his anxiety may have contributed significantly to many of his mistakes (”But Neville, nervous and jumpy and frightened of being left on the ground, pushed off hard before the whistle had touched Madam Hooch's lips.”), just as Merope Gaunt’s magical ability was considerably hampered by the constant criticism and abuse she sustained from both Gaunt men in her household (notably, just as Neville’s grandmother implies that he was nearly a Squib, so too does Merope’s father criticize her magical abilities by calling her a Squib).

Which brings me back to the subject of Severus and the finer points of why he may have become Neville’s Boggart, specifically. Undoubtedly, for a self-conscious and anxious student, having Severus for a teacher would be a harrowing experience and I do not deny that Neville wouldn’t have found it difficult. However, as I’ve also established previously, Severus was not entirely unique in how he approached teaching nor even the only teacher at Hogwarts to criticize, be harsh, or single-out Neville. As such, one must ask themselves why it is Neville that perceives Severus as more uniquely terrible or to be feared. For starters, we could once again point to the unreliable narrative of Harry Potter and what it tells us about the public opinion of Severus, even before Harry had his first class with him, and how that may have also influenced Neville’s preconceived notions of him as well. Notably, when Harry asks Percy (a school prefect) about Severus he’s told this, "Oh, you know Quirrell already, do you? No wonder he's looking so nervous, that's Professor Snape. He teaches Potions, but he doesn't want to -- everyone knows he's after Quirrell's job. Knows an awful lot about the Dark Arts, Snape." Thus, anxious already, it’s feasible to argue that Neville may have entered Severus’s first potions class with an idea of Severus’s “infamy” as well. 

More critically, however, one might speculate as to whether Neville even consciously connects his performance anxiety and fear of being perceived as a failure with the treatment he received as a child by members of his own family. Indeed, I would submit that the true source of Neville’s fears does stem from the traumatic experiences of his childhood and what they would have reinforced for him; that is, the idea that he would be better off dead than a Squib, a magical failure who can only become a burden to his family, and the conditioned expectation that any failure his part will always be connected to harsh corrections and/or punishments (such as having your uncle constantly torment you by trying to constantly catch you off guard or even threaten to drop you out of a window). Indeed, within a society where Squibs are treated as sources of shame and second-class citizens, and where you never speak of that “second cousin who became an accountant,” (HP: PS) Neville’s fears are legitimately validated and he would be more out to view other authority figures as capable of doing serious harm to him (if only by rejecting him from Hogwarts, declaring him a near-Squib, and sending him out into the world without a magical education). Thus, he might take them at face value as a genuine threat to his long-term acceptance in the wizarding world and regard his teachers (particularly the overly critical, stern, or harsh ones) with a deeper source of anxiety rather than test their boundaries, as we see with Harry vs. Snape. As such, the boy whose family hadn’t even entirely expected him to get into Hogwarts finds himself faced with the constant pressure of not disappointing them or proving himself undeserving of his place there among the other students. Returning back to Severus, we can find evidence of an interesting symbolism in him being Neville’s Boggart and how that might lend insight into these deeper fears Neville carries.

I do not believe it was a coincidence that Rowling placed the scene where Severus had Neville demonstrate the efficacy of his Shrinking Solution on Trevor before the Boggart lesson with Lupin as the reader is shown (i.e. between HP: PS and HP: CoS Neville is only shown making mistakes in Severus’s classes that would prompt him snapping at him or we are just told Severus was horrible) in more certain terms why Neville might fear Severus enough for him to credibly be his personal Boggart. As we know, Trevor was the gift that Neville received from his Uncle Algie for “surprising everyone” in his family with his acceptance to Hogwarts, which we could argue makes Trevor a symbol of approval from a family who formerly saw him as a disappointment. Moreover, Severus also functions as a symbol in that Neville may have come to associate him specifically with his anxieties over being singled out as inadequate. Quite fitting, as Severus Snape the biased teacher and Head of Slytherin House who hates Gryffindors, fancies the Dark Arts, covets the DADA position, has exacting standards and does not suffer fools lightly is both the safe (in that it’s likely easier for Neville to fear him than it would be for him to unpack all the psychological realities of the trauma his family inflicted on him) and the most obvious candidate for Neville to focus all of the anxieties and fears he may have formed as a result of his family’s treatment of him. Treatment that his world would appear to have normalized in such a way that, unlike Harry, he may not have consciously recognized --or even want to recognize-- it to be cruel, unfair, and even abusive. Ergo, when Severus uses Trevor as his “teaching moment” the symbol of Neville’s fears (i.e Severus) is seemingly threatening the symbol of Neville’s validation (i.e. Trevor) that he is not a complete failure and a total disappointment to everyone in his family.

Ultimately, Rowling does reinforce this psychological symbolism when she has Neville’s Boggart of Severus connected to an association with his grandmother. Also of interest is the fact that prior to Lupin introducing his class to the Boggart, Severus also makes an unexpected appearance in the staff room where he seems to caution Lupin in the form of mocking Neville (something I’ve theorized before may have doubled as a veiled warning about the wisdom of exposing children, especially those like Harry and Neville, to a creature that assumes the form of your fears). So that, once again, the connection between Severus as a source of fear and Neville’s insecurities are emphasized to the reader in such a way that by that point they are very present at the forefront of the reader’s mind and it makes it very easy to accept that Severus would be Neville’s Boggart at face value and leave it there. However, upon closer examination, the symbolic connection between Neville’s fear of Severus and his fears associated with his family is also very present. Notably, when Lupin singles Neville out to lead the class in demonstrating how to handle a Boggart, Rowling makes a point to have Lupin establish the correlation between Severus and Neville’s grandmother:

"Professor Snape... hmmm... Neville, I believe you live with your grandmother?"

"Er -- yes," said Neville nervously. "But -- I don't want the boggart to turn into her either."

Significantly, Neville first admits to Severus being his Boggart and when Lupin brings up his grandmother he acknowledges that he does not want his Boggart to turn into his grandmother, which might support my theory that Severus is a safer focus for Neville’s anxieties and fears than acknowledging any connection between them and his family would be. Nevertheless, his Boggart does become an amalgamation of Severus and his grandmother and it is only by confronting them together that he is able to overcome his Boggart. Interestingly, one can also observe that the majority of the forms the Boggart assumed in Lupin’s class were primarily surface-level fears that some might associate with childhood or more general phobias, such as clowns or spiders. Even Harry, who Lupin expected would see Voldemort, found himself confronted with a Dementor instead, largely because his most recent experience with a Dementor unearthed the traumatic memories of the night his parents died. As such, one can argue that Harry did not fear the Dementor so much as he feared what the Dementor had come to represent to him, which, while connected to Voldemort in a more intangible sense, had more to do with the trauma of the night when he lost his parents and was a more immediate threat for Harry to process and to fear (rather than the more distant and abstract awareness he would have had of Voldemort existing somewhere in the world, the uncertainty of when he would even return, and what that, i.e. actual war, might even be like for him to experience).  

In fact, Rowling presents us with another example of the Boggart functioning as a representation of deeper fears and anxieties much later in HP: PoA, which further supports the argument that Snape was not Neville’s Boggart just because he had managed to become the sole source of trauma in Neville’s life but rather because he had come to represent the more complex fears that Neville was not prepared --or potentially of an age of maturity yet-- to be able to consciously process or really confront head-on. It is noteworthy that Rowling makes a point to draw the reader’s attention to the fact that Hermione had not had an opportunity to face the Boggart by the end of Lupin’s lesson (He seems like a very good teacher", said Hermione approvingly. "But I wish I could have a turn with the boggart --") and I would posit that it was an intentional build-up to the reveal at a later part of her book where we discover that Hermione and Neville would seem to share very similar fears:

Hermione did everything perfectly until she reached the trunk with the Boggart in it. After about a minute inside it, she burst out again, screaming. ‘Hermione!’ said Lupin, startled. ‘What’s the matter?’ ‘P-P-Professor McGonagall!’ Hermione gasped, pointing into the trunk. ‘Sh-she said I’d failed everything!’ It took a little while to calm Hermione down.

Ultimately, we might question whether it was wise on McGonagall’s part to encourage Hermione to attempt such a rigorous schedule as she did third-year. Particularly as we see the evidence of the pressure (psychological, emotional, etc.) that Hermione has placed on herself knowing that McGonagall received special permission for her to use a Time-Turner as the third-book progresses and Hermione becomes more and more frazzled and anxious. Nevertheless, one is justified in applying some scrutiny to any assertions that McGonagall was Hermione's Boggart because she was a more literal source of fear or trauma for her, so much as one might argue that she had also become a symbolic focal point for the anxieties of a student and that the Boggart merely provided a representation of those deeper, more complex fears. As a Muggle-born, one might argue that Hermione does have certain fears about being found inadequate or unworthy of belonging to the magical world and that she compensates for those fears by placing a great amount of significance on her grades and the approval of her teachers. Therefore, where Trevor may serve as a symbol of validation for Neville, for Hermione it is her grades and the approval of her teachers that similarly assume a symbolic function and help her feel she has validated her right to be at Hogwarts. Thus, just as Severus served as a representation of Neville’s fears of inadequacy when he threatened Trevor or assumed the form of a Boggart in his grandmother’s clothing, likewise, could we argue that McGonagall functioned as a representation of Hermione’s anxieties about disappointing her teachers and failing to demonstrate she belonged at Hogwarts and, more subsequently, the wizarding world.

Both Neville and Hermione might be said to be very keenly aware of their privilege in being accepted into Hogwarts and, perhaps, the most self-conscious of their right to be there as a result. As a Muggle-born, Hermione was able to discover a world of magic despite not being born into it, and we see where the impact of that does seem to instill in her a conscious desire to prove herself and demonstrate that she has a place in that world and at Hogwarts. In contrast, Neville may have been born into the magical world but the pressures and expectations placed on him by his family would appear to have made his own acceptance to Hogwarts feel less secure; as if he were on shaky ground and the privilege could be revoked from him at any moment. It’s no coincidence that in HP: PS Hermione seems to regard being expelled from Hogwarts as worse than death (even if we do allow for hyperbole) or that Neville most demonstrates his courage when standing up for Gryffindor house to preserve the points they have. Rowling could be said to have drawn some intentional parallels between these two characters as early as the first book, and the similarity of their Boggarts and the anxieties that it reveals only further validate this connection.

Moreover, it also showcases for the reader the key difference between him and Harry as two characters who came from abusive family environments. Where Harry is able to acknowledge the wrongness of the way the Dursleys treat him, Neville exists in a world where such behaviors seem to be more normalized and, as a result, he could be said to project his fears onto Severus in lieu of being equipped with the recognition that he would need to acknowledge the more complex source of his fears. In conclusion, Neville may have been socialized to accept the treatment of his family largely because he does love them and he places greater importance on their acceptance of him. Whereas, Severus is a more safe option for him to channel his fears through given he is someone who already has a reputation of “infamy” --unless you’re a Slytherin-- and could be expected to do exactly what Neville most fears; reject him and belittle his competence as a wizard (a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts). Likewise, Harry can more safely push back against Severus than he can the Dursleys, so Severus does become a more convenient outlet for his feelings of powerlessness and anger and one who can be expected to play the role of antagonist that Harry counts on (until HP: DH when he suddenly doesn’t). This is why any contemporary psychological analysis does fall short unless one is prepared to go beyond the issue of Severus being Neville’s Boggart and fairly examine the matter of McGonagall being Hermione’s Boggart and the psychological underpinnings of Boggarts as a concept overall.

In regards to Severus’s reaction towards Lily, I would argue that it could be interpreted a few ways. One could choose to read it as evidence of Severus’s romantic attraction to Lily and his anxiety that Lily might prefer James as a romantic partner over him. Canon could certainly support such an interpretation and it would be more than valid. However, given the full context of the conversation that came before Severus displayed any anxiety, one could also interpret Severus’s response more platonically. Notably, prior to Severus becoming concerned by the idea that James fancies Lily and that Lily might not mind being fancied by him so much (because she fancies him back) they had been arguing over the behaviors of people from their houses and how objectionable they might be. Lily insisted that Mulciber had used “dark magic” on a classmate (which might be hyperbole given there is never any mention to teachers responding to a student using dark magic openly enough for other students to have a conversation about it later) and that Severus shouldn’t associate with him. In turn, Severus alluded to the very real dangers that the Marauders were capable of based off his own first-hand experience. 

Importantly, although he is forbidden to discuss the incident with Remus, he does noticeably try very hard to make Lily aware of the danger but she is not convinced. Interestingly, Lily also makes a point to single-out James and defend him specifically while Severus is criticizing all four Marauders. It is ultimately this that leads Severus to the issue of James and provokes his flustered observation about James’s infatuation with Lily. Thus Severus’s anxiety and his relief when Lily denies having any interest in James could also be interpreted through the lens of Severus’s experiences with the Marauders as bullies who only recently escalated the situation between them with Sirius’s prank to new and much darker levels of malice (and that they were able to do so and received no apparent consequences from any of the authority figures at Hogwarts; in fact, one could argue that from Severus’s perspective it would have seemed Sirius nearly killed him and Dumbledore responded by protecting the Marauders by enforcing his silence). Ultimately, the anxiety might also be read as Severus’s fear for a friend who has ignored his warnings about people he has a legitimate reason to believe can be dangerous and he does not want Lily to get involved with James for that reason. So, there you have it, two different ways of interpreting that scene from the book. 

Once again, thank you for your ask! 

Regards,

Raptured Night

#severus snape #snape meta #pro snape #snapedom #snape community

[starship-imzadi]

S5 E12 Violations

This opening immediately brings to mind the "repressed memories" craze in psychology in the 1980's and 1990's. The "fad" has since become regarded as incredibly harmful and dangerous as human memory can be quite malleable and undependable. A lot of people were treated to believe they had repressed memories of horrible abuse and sexual trauma in their childhoods, made horrible accusations, for events that never actually happened. Not only do these fabrication create real trauma and ruin relationships, they also delegitimize the actual trauma and abuse others have suffered and very much remembered from their childhoods.

Now, that isn't quite applicable to this episode, but this episode has some heavy moments and perhaps the worst abuse, out of all the abuse, Troi suffers through the series, and I want to address it the best I can.

"father, you know you're not supposed to probe someone's memory unless they've given you permission."

A.k.a. you have to get consent

"you are right, but sometimes with a beautiful woman I cannot help myself."

Red flag?! But not the red flag we're looking for. (Still: not appropriate) Beverly's laugh doesn't seem like acceptance to me, rather it's the socially acceptable way for women to cope with remarks that certain men think are flattering but are actually creepy. In a post #metoo world my hope is that as a society this is understood better than when this episode aired. I'm sure for many women it's just as evident as it ever was.

To be clear, this memory reading isn't sexual. What it is, is intimate. For whatever reason no other type of telepathy in Star Trek is depicted as a high form of intimacy, except for the now forgotten telepathic link that Troi and Riker have (which was formed because of the closeness of their relationship). But, to have access to someone's mind would be an incredible vulnerability, the sharing of one's mind a great intimacy, and the invasion of one's mind a great violation. A strong analogy for these is sexuality.

I want to make this distinction because there are violations and intimacies that are not sexual, and I think allowing for a broader analogy makes this a stronger story.

This conversation between Geordi and Data about memory feels like exposition to explain the concept to the audience. But, it seems to misrepresent some of the finer points, like how human recall and triggering recall actually works, how neurological structure and age factors in, how trauma effects memory, or in fact how humans encode specific memory or general concepts (like remembering the layout of your childhood home.)

"perhaps you would like to resurrect solve memories"

Is Beverly flirting with Picard? Or just teasing him

This scene with Troi brushing her hair and drinking hot chocolate is.... incredibly frustrating. Because of the "on again off again" or complete neglect of the story between Troi and Riker's relationship. Why have we never seen this part of their relationship before? Where does it fit it? I've seen people question at which point the memory becomes manipulated, wondering if Riker would ever force himself on Troi...which I would categorically say: no he would not.

"imzadi we can't, not when we're serving on the same ship"

"have you stopped thinking about us, just answer that" "I can't stop thinking about you"

They're clearly on the Enterprise, and Riker has a beard, and it could feasibly be somewhere in the past three and a half seasons. As the audience we are not privy to the original memory free of Jev's manipulations.

"Do you know what she was doing when this happened?" Riker's voice is so gentle.

Beverly's little smile as she walks in and sees Riker talking to Troi is exactly how I feel. "I miss you. Please don't stay away too long." Is so sweet and a bit heartbreaking.

Now, we see an apparent memory of Riker's. Troi's memory seemed to be hazy and pink like an old romance filter might be in black and white, but Riker's memory is distorted and stretched, and both have distorted and slowed audio. By contrast, Keiko's memory had no visual or audio distortion at all. Riker's apparent memory is feasible like Troi's.

Troi's assault is what almost everyone focuses on, because the "violation" of the episode is seen as an analogy to rape and because this element is inexplicably used again in the film Nemesis. However, I would like to point out that the two memories shown up until this point are both memories of vulnerability. The memory with Troi isn't just about sex, it's about the intimacy she has with Riker, a relationship they both want but don't feel like they're allowed to have. Riker's memory is of vulnerability of those under his command, as he has to actively make a choice that will kill a crew member to save the rest of the ship. His crew is ultimately his responsibility, their lives are in his hands, and he has to carry the responsibility of their deaths under his command.

Now we see Beverly's apparent memory. Her's is also a clear instance of vulnerability: seeing her dead husband's body. This memory is most likely of the three we see to have some reality to it. We do know that her husband died and Picard was the one to tell her and Wesley of his death. (It's mentioned in the pilot episode and in "The Bonding")

Rethinking the search parameters is incredibly clever on Geordi's part and he deserves more credit for it. It's almost... intellectually refreshing to see rather than a simple solution, and I applaud the writer who wrote this bit.

If Riker wasn't still in a coma he would be right by Troi's side.

"I'm remembering something from a few years ago" so, it is a memory, they're all actual memories, up until a point. "It's not Will, sombody's taken his place." when the person in her memory is hurting her the face isn't initially shown, we can't see who it is. But, before when the memory was safe and positive, we could see Will's face.

(the background soundtrack is a little too much and the whole sequence of Troi in pain makes me really uncomfortable.) And Worf and Picard.... don't react except Picard, very conservatively, places a comforting hand on her shoulder. Which fits with his decorum and all things considered is really, really sweet.

"A perverse source of pleasure perhaps. A need to exercise control over another." Even though Troi's memory was romantic or sexual in nature and through Jev's manipulation has the strongest direct parallel to literal sexual assault, rape is ultimately about power, the assertion of power, domination without consent. It is in direct opposition to intimacy, sexual or non sexual. intimacy is vulnerability plus trust and safety, regardless of what that vulnerability is.

I just realized the Ullian coats remind me of paper snow flakes.

I've seen some people confused that after everything that has happened why Jev would jeopardize himself by going to Troi. He seems to honestly like Troi, in whatever way he can, but at the same time is not in control of his impulses and desires, and whatever he likes about her is warped into his sick desire to overpower her. It's fantastic to see Troi fight back; Jev talks about how fragile she is, and it's important that we see that she is in fact NOT how he sees her.

"this form of rape" here is the first time the word is specifically used BUT I want to reiterate that Troi, Riker, and Beverly have all been subjected to this trauma.

It's good, and nice to know, that they will be getting counseling and help to process through what has happened. It's not always but on occasion TNG acknowledges that its characters have suffered with potential long term ramifications.

[comfeyworks]

Alastor writing/ Character ref sheet

NOTE: This is MY interpretation/ notes of my characterization of Alastor. Most is speculation and the other parts are just me having fun imagining what his character could be like. This is no way meant to be official or taken as cannon in any way.

A wonderful user by the name of dolly moon complied a lot of information from Viv’s streams. I’m referencing some of the information here so please check them out, they did a fantastic job making notes.

Warning: Contains talk about murder, cannibalism and other possible triggering subjects.

General

---NAME: Alastor--- Died: 1933 Age: 30′s Occupation: Former radio host and serial killer. Currently powerful overlord in hell

Main Personality/ notes

Always smiling (He sees people frowning as weak)

Sadistic

Charming and charismatic

Very proud( puffed out chest, arms behind back)

He's controlling/ does things his own way

Careful! He's not too braggy, or too forceful/ demanding. Ex: Viv stated in her qna that the pilot was originally going to have Alastor boast about himself and his backstory. Instead vaggie narrates his backstory. She changed this because Alastor wasn’t the type of person to flaunt his achievements. He knows that everyone knows how powerful he is, he’s not the type to rub it in. He's supposed to be charming, but still proud, juuuust in the right way

He knows what he wants, but doesn’t necessarily brute-forces his way to get it. Ex: "He-" "-llo!" He KNOWS he's getting in hotel regardless, but waits for Charlie to open up the door before invading the hallway.

Deceitful; When asked why he wants to help out at the hotel, he says: "Consider it an investment in ongoing entertainment for myself!" 'This is what you can think my reason is...' is essentially what he's saying. He answers Charlie’s question in a roundabout way that givers her what she wants to know while still keeping his true intentions secret. Time and time again, he lets his mask down slightly when Charlie isn’t looking. At 24:10 he narrows his eyes when she has her back turned to him At the beginning of his song he distracts her with magic so he can push Vaggie away. When he says “...And it’s just laughable-” during he reprise he turns away from Charlie to say this, he leans down to Vaggie.

He’s a hypocrite (hates being touched, invades other’s personal space)

Watches people do things the hard way and then reveal he can do it once it's done just to watch people fuck up

DELIGHTS in watching people failing/ struggling to do things. He likes observing people/ sinners as they are battling with their conflicted emotions.

He’s curious (He stopped by the ‘radio shack’ place to see what Charlie was talking about on the broadcast, and cocked his head when she started singing. To me that meant, “Oh? What’s this now? Something new?” he was intrigued and wanted to know more)

He analyzes people. He looks at the Magne family portrait when left alone. You can briefly hear him playing Charlie’s “Inside of every demon is a rainbow” song, and smiling.

He picks up on things quickly. Vaggie makes it clear she doesn’t like the idea of him being there, and he messes with her. He puts his elbow on her and pushes her away ( 20:44-20:48) He pulls her chin up and tells her to ‘smile’

He’s egotistical. No one is really ‘up to his level’

He gives verbal and physical affection constantly throughout the pilot, but it’s not genuine.

Likes being unpredictable

Primary drive:   Decisions are weighed in his own wants/ feelings. He wants to be amused, he chases exciting/ entertaining things. Think of him as like a cat chasing a mouse.

Fears: He doesn’t fear anyone. But is wary of powerful threats. He dislikes dogs Physical Expression: He’s VERY, VERY expressive through his body language and eyes. Large/ easy to read emotions can be perceived through his body language (Leaning towards someone, or leaning away). Smaller/ pinpoint emotions can be read through his eyes and type of smile (Wide eyes, squinted, closed vs open smile, etc.) He’s like a bird, fluffing out his feathers constantly. (He fixes his hair briefly at 24:41) He expresses himself proudly. ‘This is who I am, remember that!!’. Viv said the reason why almost all of characters have nicknames is that a soul’s real name is dangerous, its a way others can have power over you. Yet Alastor uses his first name, because he’s not scared and confident in who he is as a person. He doesn’t hide from any aspect of himself. I’ve stated he hates being touched by others. When he picks up Nifty in the pilot, she poofs out and spreads her limbs out. At 25:41, Alastor turns his head away from her briefly so she doesn’t touch him.

Flaws/ Weaknesses:

(Note: Basically anything already stated can be a problem depending on the situation, I’m just saying things about his character that he’d find weak or naturally cause problems)

His mother, he’d do anything for her.

He has a darker/ more powerful demon side to him where he runs purely on instinct/ primitive emotions.

He’s arrogant. This can cause problems!

---

Killer/ moral compass profile (Living)

Motivations:

Thrill Killer- Pleasure from pain

Slight power/control aspect involved as well.

‘Causes’

Childhood trauma (abusive father)

Environmental factors (mother died when he was 18-20)

Type of killer: *Note: I’m still not 100% satisfied with this part, I might make some changes later*

He won’t just kill anyone. They have to meet a certain list of requirements.

Viv compared him as someone similar to Dexter

He’s a very goal oriented killer. Whatever he did it was with reason and purpose, meticulously planned. Ex: Maybe one year he’d kill someone who was a real jerk, to see how the others around him flourished. Likewise he might kill someone who was important to the community just to see how the grief made everyone react.

He was a very careful killer, he ended up dying purely on accident, bad luck.

He killed for the fun of it, pure joy, excitement, curiosity. But he only killed people he thought deserved it.

He considers what he does to be ‘work’. He expresses in the pilot how after decades in hell it’s become ‘mundane’ and ‘aimless’.

The victims had to be overconfident to some degree.(This ties into the ‘he wouldn’t chase his victims.’ They had to be somewhat full of themselves or naive)

Some kills are personal (Someone wronging him, trying to hurt him, otherwise he just wouldn’t care if some guy is an asshole) but others are just because he feels like they’re bad/ they’ve have done something that they need to die for.

He used ‘personal’ ways of killing people. (Knife, his hands). I don’t think he would have used a gun of any kind because of the noise, but he could have once every blue moon.

Generally doesn’t draw things out for too long ”...If I wanted to hurt anyone here... I would have done so already.” (He defeats Sir Pentious in under a minute. But still takes the time to crush him and drag his body across the floor.)

He ate people, and knew how to make delicious meals out of them.

Buried his victim’s bodies/ remains on a hunting ground for deer.

Morals

No human is pure or kind just because. They’re selfish beings. Who take and act to help their own causes. Everyone is a monster on the inside. “...redemption, the nonexistent humanity!”

Everyone puts on a mask to hide who they truly are. Life is one big game to see who can survive. “...the world is a stage! And the stage, is a world of entertainment!”

People don’t change “...there is no undoing what is done.”

Puts himself first, and above everyone else. He also degrades others. “I don’t think there’s any hope left for such loathsome sinners...” ”Inside of every demon is a lost cause, but we’ll dress them up for now with just a smile!” “...and show these simpletons some proper class and style...” “...do I know you?” “You think I’m [husk] some kind of fuckin’ clown!?” “...maybe!”

People deserve the consequences they get for being themselves “...the chance given was the life they lived before, the punishment is this!”

He understands what society views as good and evil, but doesn’t really believe in those standards himself. What is considered evil he just views as a hobby or something fun to explore. Ex: Cannibalism is wrong by society’s standards, but to him he thinks the greater wrong is killing something and not making use of it.

He has some level of empathy. (Again, He’d never kill a child or those running away.)

People’s emotions are a fun little game to him. “...I want to watch the scum of the earth struggle to climb up the hill of betterment! Only to repeatedly trip, and tumble down into the firey pit of failure!”

Doesn’t see value in being nice or honest. (He does find it funny to watch)

Other notes/ hc

He’s knowledgeable. In more ways than one. He knows not to fuck with certain people if he doesn’t want to get hurt, he’s got knowledge on the workings/ operations of hell and deal-making.

Likes to cook

He likes bitter things (Bloody meat, alcohol, black coffee)

He’s got a party side to him.

He speaks french!

He plays musical instruments

He knows how to fight without his powers

He’s an only child

He’s part creole

He hates silence, he always surrounds himself with noise of some kind.

Husk and Alastor have a long, complicated relationship

He does things to make Nifty happy (Wearing sweaters)

He’d go out into a hurricane just to let it beat him down for fun (Why is this so funny to me)

Despite all he is, Alastor is capable of having friends and loving.

Has absolutely NO romantic experience.

He hates modern technology in general, but hates tik tok the most

The idea of Alastor cross-dressing to lure his victims in is absolutely hilarious to me, but I don’t think he’d ever do it.

#i made this to help me write him #alastor is deceivingly difficult to write if you dont understand him #and he's WAY more complicated than you'd think #hazbin hotel #hazbin hotel alastor #alastor #writing

[musicalhistory]

Hi! I really liked your post about the Newsies’ views on gay rights, and I was wondering if you have any information about the views of the characters of Bandstand on it. Like, I know there was a cut scene where Jimmy comes out and Donny seems at least somewhat accepting; how do you think the other characters of Bandstand would react to Jimmy coming out, and gay rights in general? I love your blog by the way!

Thank you so much! I’m always happy to hear that people like my blog and that the posts I make are helpful and informative.

So, much like with the Newsies post I made on this topic (which can be found here for anyone who hasn’t read it yet and would like to) this is a complicated question that there is no one easy answer to. However, I will do my best to examine as many angles as possible when answering this to provide you with as clear a picture as possible of how history relates to the show canon in regards to LGBTQ+ people and their rights.

The LGBTQ+ community in the 1940s was still a long way away from being accepted by most of society. Being gay was illegal, and would remain so until the 1960s when individual states began to legalize it (although being gay was not legalized in all 50 states until 2003). However, some strides forward were being made in the name of gay rights at the time.

In 1924, The Society for Human Rights was founded by Henry Gerber in Chicago. It was the first documented gay rights organization in the United States and marked a big step forward for the LGBTQ+ community as a whole. By the 1940s, many cities had gay bars and thriving (if hidden) gay communities were beginning to take shape. Cleveland’s first gay bar, The Cadillac Lounge, was opened in the 1940s. These bars were subjected to frequent raids, and so were by no means perfectly safe, but the fact that they existed in relatively large numbers across the country is a testament to the slowly changing opinions of people at the time.

World War II marked even more changes within the LGBTQ+ community. Due to a variety of factors, a community of gay people began to take shape under the surface of the US military. At one point during the war the Women’s Army Corps contained such a large number of lesbians that when the army tried to kick them out, they found that doing so would result in the majority of their staff being fired and so were forced to back down (you can read more about that remarkable instance here). This is probably one of the main reasons why Donny seems so accepting of Jimmy in the cut scene you referenced- as a member of the US Amry during WWII it’s highly likely that he came into contact with a least a couple of gay people before meeting Jimmy (he could also be some form of LGBTQ+ himself, although that, of course, depends on your own personal headcanons).

With that very brief history out of the way, let’s now get into what the other members of the Donny Nova Band might have thought about gay rights and gay people in the 1940s. Please note, however, that this is all pure conjecture on my part and that you can really headcanon anything you want in regards to this (one of the perks of Bandstand being a fictional show).

As I said before, Donny, Johnny, Nick, Wayne, and Davy would have probably met at least one or two gay people before during their service (and possibly in their civilian lives as well), and so Jimmy being gay wouldn’t be as big a shock for them as it might be for someone else. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they would be completely accepting of Jimmy, of course, but it does make it a bit more likely that they would be. In my personal opinion, homophobia usually comes from a place of ignorance, and the guys in the band wouldn’t be as ignorant about the LGBTQ+ community as some other people at the time might have been.

This brings us to Julia. She would probably be to most sheltered and ignorant of LGBTQ+ people, given that she never served and grew up Catholic (and as I’m sure many people know, the Catholic church doesn’t exactly have a favorable opinion of LGBTQ+ people, even today). Taking this into consideration, it would probably be the hardest for her to come to terms with Jimmy being gay at first. That being said, she clearly does eventually come to terms with it in some way since she writes and sings as openly as she can about him and the trauma he experienced related to his boyfriend being killed in the song Welcome Home, and I doubt she would have done that had she been harboring any kind of ill-will towards Jimmy with regards to his sexuality.

To summarize my very long-winded response (I’m oftentimes incapable of giving short answers, my apologies): Based on both historical facts and the musical canon, it is very likely that Jimmy would face homophobia from the outside world, but not from the members of the band themselves. This isn’t to say that the members would be perfectly understanding of him at all times, but rather that they clearly value him as a person regardless of his sexuality and are willing to look past whatever homophobic values they might have been raised with in order to accept him.

I hope that this answered your question! Again, this is a hard topic to talk about in any kind of definitive way, and so I welcome anyone else to chime in with their own opinions on this.

Sources:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_in_the_United_States#

https://www.cnn.com/2015/06/19/us/lgbt-rights-milestones-fast-facts/index.html

https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/gay-and-lesbian-service-members

#ask #anonymous #bandstand #bandstand fanfiction #donny nova band #jimmy campbell #lgbtq+ history #lgbtq+ rights #history #military history #wwii history #1940s #donny novitski #julia trojan

[scripttorture]

I've gone through a couple posts, so I'm not sure if you covered this. If a person is exposed to torture from a young age, would they be desensitized to it and see it as normal and thus not bat an eye? Would their reaction be different if they were the victim instead of a bystander or perpetrator? You mentioned in another post that child soldiers tend to participate in torture as well due to their environment, however you also stated many times that humans are empathetic beings.

I think this depends on what you mean by ‘desensitised’. Because someone can see an experience as normal and still be damaged by it. A trained lack of external response does not necessarily mean a person is unmoved.

 And, based on what I’ve read so far, I’d suggest that that is the most common experience of children exposed to torture from a young age. They think it’s normal. They accept it as a part of life. And it makes them ill.

 Unlearning that takes time, social support and a healthier environment.

 We can be moved by each other’s pain and still not know how to react to the world without violence.

 And- this is part of what makes rehabilitating child survivors really hard. They’re ill, they’re traumatised. That’s difficult enough with an adult. On top of that they don’t have a lot of other life experience to look to, they don’t know what ‘healthy’ is.

 And they can be violent.

 One of the really awful things that’s come out of the lack of response to Daesh is- this sudden flood of children who are traumatised, angry, without a support structure and struggling against years of being taught violence is the ‘correct’ response to the world around them.

 Introducing these children back into a community that’s traumatised often leads to other survivors viewing these kids as aggressors. They reject them.

 I can understand why. If you’re dealing with your own trauma, your own pain, it’s hard to take on someone else’s. When that someone else echoes things torturers said, when they’re sporadically violent or seem aggressive, that can be too many complex problems to expect another survivor to ‘fix’.

 Children in these situations need intensive, professional help. Generally they don’t get it.

 Essentially all of the things you’ve mentioned can be true for child survivors at the same time.

 Recovery is possible. There are a lot of cases of child soldiers, and other children who survived torture or genocide, being reintegrated into the community. These children can grow up to live full, happy lives.

 If you’d like to read about someone who survived that kind of childhood then I recommend looking up Aki Ra, who did his level best to remove all of the land mines he was forced to lay as a child.

 As with other survivors recovery does not mean the absence of symptoms. It means learning to manage and live with symptoms in a way that doesn’t interfere with what the survivor wants out of their life.

 Most of the positive outcomes I’m aware of for child soldiers involve kids who didn’t have access to professional help. What they had was constant, consistent community support. They were welcomed into a pre-prepared support network, often a religious one. And after years of hard work, support and good parenting they improved.

 Now- when it comes to a character’s reaction to being a victim, witness or torturer, well the answer depends on what you mean.

 The symptom set is the same across these categories regardless of age. There are behavioural differences in children, ie they tend to express their symptoms in different ways to adults. But I don’t know much about childhood development so I don’t feel confident speaking about differences based on age.

 A character in any of these categories could be traumatised. For a torture victim or a torturer trauma is guaranteed*, however when it comes to witnessing some individuals may be traumatised and others may not be. If a character has witnessed torture once and has experienced no other traumatic events a lack of symptoms is within the realm of possibility. But the more traumatic events like torture they’ve witnessed the more likely it is that they’d develop symptoms.

 But symptoms alone don’t really tell you much about a character’s emotional reaction and how they process or justify things.

 You asked about resistance specifically and given the context of the question I’m interpreting that as meaning opposition to torturers.

 This is a common response in both torture victims and people who witness torture. In political struggles it’s a powerful recruitment tool for the opposing side. I’ve not seen anything to suggest that changes with age. In fact a few of the survivor accounts from children kidnapped to be soldiers talk about witnessing torture as- the thing that made them decide to risk their lives and attempt escape.

 But torturers don’t express this. They don’t talk about having sympathy for their victims and they don’t seem to feel driven to oppose each other. Even though they’re clearly effected in the same ways, because they manifest the same symptoms.

 I’m not a psychologist so I’m not sure how well founded my suggestions here will be.

 That said- Based on a combination of what torturers say and what they do I think torturers spend a lot of energy denying their instinctive emotional and physical responses to torture.

 They re-frame brutality as proof of their strength, ‘toughness’ and dedication. They deny the fact they’re experiencing symptoms up until the point they collapse.

 This is exacerbated by the social structures they build up. Torturers don’t function alone. They work in groups. The toxic hyper-masculine subculture these groups build up means any sign of ‘weakness’ is dangerous.

 Torturers have a marked tendency to turn on each other because they see themselves as locked in competition with each other. This means they egg each other on to more and more brutality. It also means that any sign of sympathy or illness could be met with violence at worst and being thrown out of the social circle at best.

 Given the way they behave towards each other, well I suppose you could argue that torturers do act in opposition to each other. Not in ways that stop other members of the group from torturing or in ways that oppose torture. But they are competing, the comradery they display towards each other is understood to be fragile.

 They know that the group could turn on them at any point.

 And this makes any admission of the effect torture has on them a big risk.

 Ex-torturers do sometimes talk about the effect torture had on them in a way that is- almost sympathetic to the victim. They talk about things like recurrent nightmares and particular events or images becoming intrusive memories. They talk about finding particular things grotesque.

 But they tend to talk about these things in a way that’s at a slight remove. They acknowledge that what happened was awful but in a way that almost makes it sound as if they played no part in it.

 They talk about torture in a way that focuses on their pain, or regret or symptoms with no real consideration for the victims or reflection on the fact that they caused this.

 And like I said, I’m not a mental health professional. I don’t really know the underlying reasons why they do this.

 Perhaps it’s the only way they can keep themselves going.

 With child soldiers in particular we’re talking about a group of extremely vulnerable people who are coerced into participating in torture.

 I don’t have enough data to reach definite conclusions about their responses because they are often both victims and perpetrators.

 That said, from a few anecdotal accounts, there may be a difference between individuals who embrace the ideology/group that kidnapped them and those who don’t. The former group tends to survive longer in the group and that may also be a factor.

 But the older individuals who have participated in a lot of atrocities and appear to embrace the armed group they’re part of- my judgement of the interviews is that they sound more like torturers when they express their views on events.

 Younger individuals who escape (and I have access to more interviews of this type) tend to express regret, revulsion and a deeper understanding of the harm they inflicted. They also tend to emphasise that it wasn’t ‘their fault’ and that they were forced to act the way they did.

 There’s a sense in which both responses can be seen as a survival strategy: the former for life within the armed group and the latter for life in a group of survivors. That- is not a suggestion that either response is a conscious choice. Just an observation that both responses make survival more likely in one group and less likely in the other.

 I hope that answers your questions. It’s not a simple answer, or a short one. These are complicated scenarios.

 The question of when a child stops becoming a victim and starts becoming a collaborator has been plaguing us for- well since the advent of warfare. And the ‘correct’ ethical response is not a one-size-fits-all stamp-

 Perhaps if we had worked out a better way to deal with torturers we would have a better answer for these children, one that acknowledges both the harm done to them and the harm they caused.

 *We think that the mechanism that leads to torturers becoming traumatised is the same as the one that leads to witnesses being traumatised. But the intensity of the violence someone is exposed to makes a difference. Torturers do not generally see torture only once; they see multiple incidences a day, every day for months or years at a time.

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#writing advice #tw torture #tw child abuse #tw child soldiers #child soldiers #child prisoners #child torturers #writing victims #writing torturers #writing witnesses #effects of torture #effects of torture on witnesses #behaviour of torturers #rehabilitating child soldiers