people always act like there’s such a hard line between “psychotic person” and “normal person”, and I feel like that plays a lot into the dehumanization psychotic people face. cause once a nonpsychotic person internalizes this logic, suddenly we’re attractions and interesting and a fun research subject cause we’re just so fucking other that we become wholly unrelatable. for the nonpsychotic person, it’s unimaginable what psychosis must “really” feel like. so they treat us like a fictional species just trying to understand our existence. and they don’t worry about how their actions might affect us any more than they’d worry about insulting a vulcan by calling the vulcan thought process “just so interesting!”.
but in reality.... the difference between a psychotic person and a nonpsychotic person is not so stark. all human brains are prone to psychosis. all humans are capable of experiencing psychosis in one way or another. anyone could develop a full blown psychotic disorder at any time, no one is born immune to this. and while there’s some contexts in which it’s necessary to differentiate who does or doesn’t experience these symptoms of course, largely I think nonpsychotic people are doing themselves a disfavor - and being ableist in the process - by ignoring the hard truth of the matter: us psychotic people are exactly the same as them.
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Do you have any headcanons or thoughts about Falin having a crush on Marcille pre-canon? Especially during her later years at the school/the years she was with Laios.
Just full on "awkward and slightly gnc teenage lesbian has a massive crush on the touchy-feely girly girl straight best friend" tropes everywhere. Even better bc it's the "best friend is also the popular girl while lesbian is the slightly ostracized quiet one" dynamic in school. Falin gets so so so good at not having a heart attack every time Marcille gets in her personal space. But she's so resigned to never saying anything bc why would a girl as blinding as Marcille ever like her back. She also doesn't make an effort to get over it either, she's just content to be trapped in that stable dynamic of silently being in love with Marcille while getting to enjoy CLEARLY being Marcille's favourite person. She gets so used to it that it's almost just background noise most of the time-- it would have to be, unless she wanted to be freaking out 24/7 bc Marcille is so goddamn affectionate.
Her feelings also definitely change throughout the time that they're in school together-- at first it was this "whooaaah pretty older girl" puppy crush that you can clearly see developing in the flashbacks we get (I think she doesn't even like... realize her fixation on Marcille is romantic at all until years after it starts, when she's 12-14 ish and all the other girls around her are talking about crushes). But then they get closer, over the years Marcille starts getting really attached and letting down her guard, and Falin gets to see the ridiculous side of her. She gets to calm her down from her tantrums when experiments don't work out, or help her clean up when something explodes in her face. I feel like the progression of her feelings from "schoolgirl infatuation" to "unrequited love" probably almost exactly corresponds to how slowly Marcille goes from trying to keep Falin at a polite but friendly distance (like she does with everyone else) to her facade completely eroding as she becomes her cheerful and ridiculous self again for the first time since her father died.
That's probably the saddest part: Falin knows that she's clearly Marcille's favourite person on the surface level, but she doesn't quite fully grasp the enormity of what that means to Marcille. She doesn't get that she's the person who made the world colorful again for Marcille, that she is the first person outside of Marcille's family to really and truly make her laugh. She just thinks she's the beloved but dinky little short-lived sidekick, one of many that Marcille has had and will have.
Part of it is that, despite Marcille becoming such a clingy and affectionate best friend, I think her initial demeanour already did its damage. You see Falin being super adventurous and weird at first, bringing Marcille berries and other stuff, only to be rebuffed by Marcille exasperatedly saying she's working or looking kind of put off by it. And by the time you see her a little older, shes already quieter and better at masking -- and I'm not saying that that's entirely Marcille's fault (being the weird girl at an all girls academy for almost the entirety of her teenhood must have been brutal, my god) but she definitely learned that she's a potential nuisance to Marcille if she doesn't tone herself down. She learned that Marcille most likely sees her as a weird little kid following her around bc she has no other friends. And for the most part, she was never given any reason to unlearn any of that.
And that all very very smoothly transitions into Marcille being her "first love that was never meant to be anyway" when she leaves the academy. Chapter closed in her mind: she loved and pined from a distance and that was that. Every now and then she'll see another woman with Marcille's build or her shade of hair and be like ":( I miss her..." But then just kinda move on with her day. Same with when she's going through her own spellbook and finds a note that Marcille left her/correction that she made-- she'll smile fondly and reminisce about how much Marcille doted on her, and then move on.
Sometimes she thinks about contacting Marcille but convinces herself that it's too late (she spent too many months focusing on getting Laios healthy again and didn't mean to go no contact, but ah well). It's only when she has a practical reason to be reaching out that would also benefit Marcille ("Marcille is studying dungeons and we need a trustworthy mage to go with us to the dungeons") that she feels like she's allowed/that it wouldn't just be 100% a nuisance.
I almost think she didn't expect Marcille to reply at all, only to get a telegraph (or some in-universe equivalent of express mail, maybe magical pigeon carrier) that's like. EN ROUTE TO ISLAND. LETTER TO FOLLOW. and she freaks out like AAAA LAIOS SHE SAID YES WE HAVE TO CLEAN UP NOW.
I do think getting a response accidentally sparks a little hope in her, judging by the way she acts in the chp 57 flashback-- she's pouty that Marcille sees her as a kid, gets really worked up about being presentable, and then tries to play it cool when she actually meets Marcille (as if she didn't freak out and force Laios to shave while rambling a mile a minute about Marcille). She's an adult now, really and truly, and she's seen and survived things that her 18 yr old self would have never even imagined-- then all of a sudden, the person she was in love with since she was ten years old appears, and she's so desperate to be seen as mature and competent. She's trying soooo hard to impress Marcille with her newfound combat and dungeoneering experience...
Only to fall right back into their old dynamic. RIP. At least she gets the girl eventually, even if it takes dying twice and being the core catalyst behind an almost-apocalypse.
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my very serious writing advice for people who are trying to write more morally complex characters is to stop caring about their morality and focus instead on their individual motivations
it’s hard to articulate exactly what I mean, but the essence of it is basically: when a character does a murder, not only do I not care about whether they’re justified in doing so, it’s straight-up irrelevant. a character’s moral standing from some nebulous universal standard has no bearing on the plot or their interactions with other characters and has no use in the story for me as a writer. what does matter is why the character thought they were justified and then if it comes up to other characters, what they think about it.
you can obviously think about your characters’ morality but it’s not your job as a writer to interpret your stories for your readers and tell them how to judge your characters. your readers can see the evidence for themselves and draw their own conclusions. your job is just to understand why a character is motivated to act in a certain way and have it make sense
focusing on character motivations is a much more versatile framework than trying to give them specific personality traits or moral alignments, and frankly more useful to understand why a character would do a certain thing instead of just what they do. that way when something fucked up happens and your character starts acting differently, there’s an actual logical reason for it that isn’t you forcing characters to do things because it’s what’s required to make the plot go
when you write your characters with the understanding that people are not static and they act differently under different circumstances, complexity in character and morality follows naturally.
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also crazy how skewed the morals are on the qsmp in both directions because of the situation. You cannot kill the probably artificial children that the evil organization who kidnapped you all gave you. Placing mines is okay though. Even when they almost kill the fore mentioned children.
q!ElQuackity is a villain for acting mean and suspicious, supporting the evil government who kidnapped all the islanders, and attempting to kill them and the artificial children that the evil government gave them.
q!Bad is also a villain, but for lying, stealing things, for being a vocal anarchist, and for kidnapping and torturing a lower-class, presumably-innocent-but-maybe-not member of the evil organization that has kidnapped and tortured him (because what q!Bad and the other islanders have gone through is certainly some kind of torture - just very drawn out) for months on end.
Think about this for a second. Just think about it. The island itself, the situation has warped people’s frames of thought. What q!Bad is doing, if we step back for a second, would probably land him with an anti-hero title or something similar. Because sure, he’s tortured an innocent worker but they were the Federation’s uniform - which has tortured him worse and for longer, of course he’s attacking the workers. Why isn’t everybody attacking the workers? Well, because the workers seem to be as trapped as the islanders. Well, after q!Bad discovered that for certain (because until Ron told us, we didn’t know that for certain), he’s now treating Ron kindly in a twisted sort of familial bond. Well, but he’s still keeping him captive and that’s wrong. Well, well, well - this is morally grey character stuff.
If you described a character in q!Bad’s situation to me - I would certainly say the character is in the wrong, and committing cruel, violent acts, but I wouldn’t say they were evil nor would I even call them a villain. I would point at the Federation, I would go “that is the evil, that is the villain” and I would point at the character and go “that is a cornered, injured animal that has finally decided to bite”
But it’s the island. so it’s not like that. And on the island, q!Bad is an evil person, and he’s horrible, and he’s a villain. He is the only one who has dared to beat the Federation at their own game. And, most importantly, he is a threat.
I don’t know, just interesting to think about.
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