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roosterforme · 1 year

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The Younger Kind Part 1 | Rooster x Reader

Summary: As a single dad trying to start dating again, Bradley feels like he's constantly running in circles. Hiring a twenty-four year old student to babysit should have made things easier, but no matter how hard he fights it, you're too irresistible to stay away from.

Warnings: Angst, swearing, fluff, and age gap (eventually 18+)

Length: 3300 words

Pairing: Single dad!Bradley "Rooster" Bradshaw x babysitter!female reader

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Bradley cradled his forehead in his hands as he leaned against the bar. He hated being interrogated like this. He knew it was coming eventually, but he really wasn't expecting it today.

"You need a babysitter?" Nat asked with vivid interest. "Who are you going on a date with?"

He groaned. "What makes you think I need a babysitter so I can go on a date? Maybe I just need a couple hours to myself."

Nat rolled her eyes. "Because when you need an hour or two to yourself, you always ask me if I can come over and stay with Noah. And I always oblige, because I am the best person you know. So this must be something else. Who is it?"

"Rebel asked me out," Bradley murmured, looking at his friend out of the corner of his eye.

"Rebel! She's only been at Top Gun for a week!" Nat said, eyes wide as she examined his face. "She literally arrived from Lemoore seven days ago, and she already made a move on you? Damn, some of these pilots are quick."

"She just asked me out for coffee. I only said yes, because you keep telling me I should start dating again!"

"Well, you should start dating again. But I figured you'd download an app, find some cute women and get your rocks off. Not go on a date with a coworker!" Nat said, exasperated.

Bradley just gaped at her as Penny dropped off two more beers. "I haven't done this in a while. Forgive me for not knowing precisely what you intended for me to do here, Nat," he said with a massive eye roll.

She turned her nose up at him. "You're forgiven. But you need to give me your phone," she said, holding out her hand.

"For what?" he asked skeptically.

"Just gimme."

Bradley handed it to her and she entered his passcode from memory. "Just don't order anything on my Amazon account, okay? I like my Hawaiian shirts just fine, and I donated all the shit you charged to my credit card last time."

"I'm not ordering you new clothes," she scoffed, tapping away on his screen. "I'm solving all your problems. Now look at me and smile."

Bradley glared at her instead as she snapped a few photos. "These look terrible," she mumbled under her breath as she switched to her own phone. "I have one where you look halfway decent... oh, here it is."

Then she was back on his phone again, and he just gave up trying to understand half of what she did when she wasn't in the air with him.

"Nat, I just don't know that I'll ever get serious with anyone again. Meredith kind of ruined that for me."

Nat was scrolling along on his phone as she said, "Meredith was a flaming asshat. I never liked her. The best thing she ever did was get pregnant with Noah and then dump you."

Bradley was back to cradling his head in his hand. He did not like thinking about the fact that his ex bailed on him and their son when he was just a few months old. It made him feel sick. And now he was partening alone, which was harder than anything he had ever done.

"Shit," Bradley said, checking his watch. "I need to pick Noah up from daycare. Give me my phone," he said before finishing the last sip of his beer.

"I'm not done yet," Nat mumbled, a frightening grin creeping across her face. "Just one more minute."

Bradley thought about texting Rebel and canceling their tentative coffee date. Nat was probably right about dating another aviator. He didn't even know her actual first name, and she only ever called Bradley Rooster. What the hell kind of weird date would that be like? Talking Super Hornet specs? Comparing tales of punching out and parachute deployments?

He listened to a rapid string of alerts from his phone. "Is someone texting me?" he asked, reaching for his phone. "That's a lot of alerts. Is it Noah's daycare?"

But Nat was holding his phone tight and grinning. "Not texts. Women. Women who think you are cute and like your dating profile."

His eyes went wide. "What the fuck did you do?" he asked, his voice deadly calm.

"Got you about ten dates if you want them. You're welcome," she said, handing his phone back to him.

He scrolled through all of the profiles on his screen. "What am I looking at exactly?"

"Well, here's your profile. I used the only decent photos of you in existence. And that's your bio."

Bradley squinted at the screen. "All it says is that I'm 36, a naval aviator, and I like working out. And I have golden retriever energy? What the hell does that mean?"

"It means you're energetic. They'll take that to mean in the bedroom."

"Jesus, Nat. Shouldn't I disclose important things? Like the fact that I'm a dad?"

She shook her head. "Not yet. That's second date material. They are going to want to size you up and see if you're a daddy before they need to know that you're a dad."

He shoved his phone in his pocket as he stood. "I don't have time for this," he grunted, pulling out his wallet and waving at Penny. "If I don't find a babysitter, none of this is going to make any difference anyway."

Penny took his credit card and then paused. "You need a babysitter for Noah? Mav and I can watch him if you need a break, you know that, right?"

Bradley sighed. "Thanks Pen. Yeah, I know that. I'm just looking for something a little more regular. Gonna try dating again," he said, glaring at Nat out of the corner of his eye.

"I might know someone who would be interested," Penny said, handing the card back to Bradley. "She's a student in her early twenties, I guess. Really smart and seems sweet. Noah would probably like her. She's in classes during the day, but she was looking to babysit at night."

"How do you know her?" Bradley asked, already hesitant to leave his kid alone with a stranger.

"She's renting a house on my street. I ran into her a few times, and we got to talking. She fed Luna, watered my plants, and got the mail when I took Amelia sailing."

Nat placed her hand on his arm. "I know this is a big step, but you could meet her first before you offer her the job."

Bradley stroked his mustache. "Any chance she would come over and meet me and Noah? So I can make sure she's not creepy?" he asked Penny.

Penny just laughed. "She's not creepy. How about I give her your number if she says she's interested in watching Noah."

"Sounds good," Bradley replied quickly, barely listening to Penny now. "I need to go pick him up. Bye, Nat."

"Don't forget to swipe through all your matches!" she called after him.

He just waved and made his way to his Bronco. Bradley always felt like he was running all over the place. As much as it bothered him to take Noah to daycare on a Saturday, he felt like he was losing his grip on his life. His friends rarely ever remembered to invite him to the Hard Deck, correctly assuming he wouldn't be able to go. But it would still be nice to be invited.

Everything felt impossible on his own. He wasn't getting enough sleep. As soon as Noah went to bed, it was a race to try to get every chore finished. Then he had to wake up an hour earlier to insure he had time to get Noah ready and dropped off at daycare on time. Every day was a damn marathon, and he really wished he could get some help.

He would never ever admit it to Nat, but he was lonely. Just the idea of getting to spend an evening eating dinner with a woman practically had him popping a boner. Having the chance to get to know someone again, get to have sex again? He couldn't think about it too long. He'd been spending so much time with his right hand and his imagination.

As he pulled into the daycare parking lot, he sighed. This was the reason he had forfeited dating. His son. His adorable, perfect son.

"Ready to go?" he asked, and Noach climbed up into his arms.

"Yep, daddy," he said, and Bradley carried him out after thanking the daycare staff.

"Let's get home and eat dinner," Bradley said, pushing Noah's dark curls away from his forehead and kissing him.

And this was the reason Bradley would only ever consider dating someone who liked kids and didn't mind dating a single dad. In spite of the daycare schedule, and the exhaustion and loneliness, Noah was his top priority.

-------------------------

You were just getting back from class and unloading your books from your car when you saw Penny waving to you from her mailbox. As soon as you waved awkwardly with your arms full, she was heading your way.

"Hey, Penny," you said as she walked up your driveway.

"I wanted to chat for a minute. Is it a bad time?" she asked, eyeing up everything in your arms.

You nodded toward the house. "Come inside so I can set everything down."

She followed you in, already going on about someone named Bradley. "He's sweet, and he has an adorable three year old son named Noah. They are looking for a reliable sitter, and I know you mentioned an interest."

"Oh," you replied, dumping everything onto your couch. "This Bradley guy? He's not creepy or anything, right?"

Penny laughed. "He asked the same about you. He's very hesitant to let a stranger watch Noah, but I told him I'd give you his number if you wanted to contact him. Maybe you could just go meet them one day. He's not creepy. He works with Pete. And I swear Noah is irresistable."

You sighed. You really needed some extra income. And you loved kids. And you'd probably be able to study after Noah went to bed for the night. As long as this Bradley wasn't giving off weird vibes, you'd probably want the job.

"Okay, I'll take his number," you said, and soon you were adding Bradley Bradshaw to your contacts. "Thanks, Penny. Hopefully this will work out."

You got lost in your research for the rest of the day on Saturday, and purposely avoided returning texts from Greyson. He only wanted to see you when you were too busy, and he never wanted to see you when you had time for him.

"He's being a douchebag," you whispered as you scrolled through the idiotic things he was sending you.

Then you opened a new conversation and typed out a draft to this Bradley guy.

Hi, I got your number from Penny Benjamin. She told me you're looking for a reliable babysitter. Any chance you have some free time so I can meet you and your son?

It was late, so you decided to let it sit in your drafts until the following morning. But apparently it wasn't too late for Greyson, who was now asking if you wanted him to send you a dick pic.

You switched your phone to do not disturb mode after telling him that you would really appreciate it if he didn't send you one. Then you went to bed and dozed off fantasizing about dating a guy who acted like an adult.

It was so late when you woke up, you decided to skip breakfast and just make yourself lunch. When you switched your phone back to receive messages, you were flooded with a bunch, mostly from Greyson. Luckily there was no dick pic to speak of, but he'd sent you a bunch of nonsense while he was probably drunk or high.

Then you noticed the draft to Bradley Bradshaw, so you hit send on that one. You had a reply from him before you were even done making a sandwich.

Bradley Bradshaw: Yes, I am looking for a sitter for my son Noah. Penny highly recommended you. I can make time to meet you whenever you are free. Just to be clear, I want to make sure Noah and I are both comfortable around you before proceeding.

You rolled your eyes. A grown adult man should not be as concerned about you as you should be about him. But, you could see where he was coming from about the prospect of letting a stranger stay with his son. So you replied and started eating your sandwich.

I could stop by this evening to meet you both if you're free.

He wrote back quickly again.

Bradley Bradshaw: That would be great. Anytime after 4. I'll attach my address.

If this guy was creepy or if his son was weird, Penny was going to be hearing about it for the rest of the year.

---------------------------

Bradley was just cooking dinner while Noah sat in his high chair coloring, when he heard his doorbell ring. "That might be your potential babysitter, bub," Bradley told him, kissing the top of his head as he grabbed a dish towel and headed for the front door while drying his hands.

But Bradley almost dropped the towel when he opened the door and got a look at you. As your wide eyes drifted up his body and landed on his face, you smiled up at him.

"Mr. Bradshaw?"

You were stunning. Beautiful, and so fucking young. He swallowed against the saliva pooling in his mouth. Oh shit.

"Uh, yeah. Hi," he managed, moving out of the doorway so you could step past him and into the living room. "Thanks for coming."

"No problem," you said with a shrug. "I'm looking forward to meeting Noah." You brushed past Bradley, and he closed his eyes. Your lip gloss was distractingly shiny. You smelled like beach grass or wildflowers. You looked like you were barely old enough to drink.

"He's in the kitchen," Bradley rasped, trying to pull himself together. "Back this way."

You followed Bradley through the house, and as soon as you saw his son sitting in the high chair, you went right to him.

"Hey, Noah! What are you coloring?"

"Dinosaurs," Noah told you, holding out a pink crayon.

"Cool. I love pink dinosaurs," you replied, starting to color a pterodactyl on the page next to the one he was working on.

"Me too. I like pink and blue dinosaurs the best," he replied.

Bradley watched you interacting with Noah. You seemed sweet, coloring each dinosaur the color he requested. When Noah mispronounced your name, you just laughed and told him he could call you that.

When you bent down to retrieve a yellow crayon as it rolled across the floor, Bradley got an excellent view of the backs of your bare thighs as your sundress rode up. He dropped the spatula into the pan, nearly burning himself. He was also nearly burning his dinner.

"Shit," he mumbled as you turned to smile at him before handing the crayon back to Noah.

"What else do you like to do? Besides color?" you asked.

Noah started telling you all about drawing with chalk and playing with bubbles outside. "I like snacks and movies. And hiking."

Bradley laughed. "By hiking he means walking around the block if I make it home from work before it's dark out."

"Oh," you said. "I can take you on a hike one day, Noah. I like hiking around the block, too. Maybe we can collect some things like rocks and leaves."

Bradley listened to Noah tell you about some particularly good rocks he had found last week, and you somehow responded in just the right way.

"You're in the navy?" you eventually asked Bradley, shrugging out of your denim jacket in the hot kitchen, giving Bradley a view of even more of your flawless skin. "Like Pete?"

He cleared his throat, mixing everything in the pan on the stove. "Yeah, I work with him. I'm an aviator."

"Do you want me to call you by your rank? Instead of Mr. Bradshaw?"

Bradley had to press his lips together, a little scared to know what hearing you call him Lieutenant Bradshaw would do to him. "You can just call me Bradley."

"Okay, Bradley," you said, and unfortunately that did something to him too. "You've got a cute kid. I think Noah and I could have a lot of fun together."

"How old are you?" The words were out of Bradley's mouth before he could rethink them. He almost sounded accusatory, but really he needed to know how bad it was that he couldn't stop looking at your legs.

"Twenty-four," you replied casually.

Jesus. He was twelve years older than you. But you looked even younger than that. Sweet. Too innocent.

"I'm in grad school for nursing," you continued. "I'm certified in CPR, and I can treat injuries. I know how to swim. I'm free every day starting at 4. You can run a background check on me if you want to."

Noah looked up at you and asked if you wanted to build blocks with him, and Bradley knew he already felt comfortable enough to leave his son with you while he went on a date with Rebel.

He could feel his phone vibrating in his pocket. He hadn't taken the time to figure out how to use the dating app that Nat installed, and he was being inundated with matches and messages. He also hadn't given Rebel, whose first name was Grace, a solid answer about when he could get coffee with her.

But for some reason, in spite of the laundry list of women from the app who were interested in going on a date with him, he couldn't take his eyes off of you.

"Do you want to stay for dinner?" Bradley asked as you built a block tower with Noah on the high chair tray.

"Oh, no. That's nice of you to ask, but I don't want to crash your meal," you told him over your shoulder. "Here, put this little block on the top. Let's see if we can make it stay," you told Noah, keeping your hands around the sides of the tower until he successfully set down the last piece. Then you tossed your hands into the air and cheered.

Noah turned and looked at you in surprise and you just laughed. "You're good at coloring and blocks?" He just giggled, and soon you were both knocking down the tower and starting over.

As Bradley scraped his half burned dinner onto a plate, he felt a little disappointed that you were grabbing your jacket and getting ready to leave. Noah looked a little sad, too.

"Well," Bradley told you, watching you gracefully shrug into your jacket, "you're hired if you think you can put up with the two of us."

You laughed and took a step closer to him. "Noah? He seems like an angel. You on the other hand?"

Bradley's eyes went wide, and you just laughed harder.

"Only kidding! I'm sure I'll be able to put up with both of you if you think you can put up with me."

You were young and beautiful, and for some reason Bradley wanted to feed you dinner, even though the food he made looked barely edible.

"I don't think that will be a problem."

---------------------------

I hope you enjoy your Daddy Rooster and babysitter fic @beyondthesefourwalls !!

PART 2

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#bradley rooster bradshaw x reader #rooster x you #rooster fanfic #rooster x female reader #rooster x reader #bradley bradshaw fanfiction #bradley bradshaw x reader #bradley rooster bradshaw #bradley bradshaw imagine #bradley bradshaw fic #bradley bradshaw x female reader #rooster bradshaw x female reader #top gun fanfiction #top gun maverick fanfiction #bradley rooster x reader

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scarrletmoon · 2 months

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About Powder Blue

This is going to be long. There are going to be discussions of suicide and trauma. This is going to be a bit of a jumbled mess because I can't tell a linear story to save my life. Don't feel like you need to read this, now or ever.

If you're wondering what the issues with PB were, and looking for what's next, read the indented text and skip the rest if you want!

I've had a bit of a...tumultuous relationship with the OFMD fandom. I've made close friends and lost them, made even closer friends who've very patiently reminded me of my worth when I needed that. I'm at a point where I'm still struggling, but I'm getting better. I'm still working on not being afraid. It's a bit of an uphill battle, but I'm still pushing my little boulder. I'm not alone this time, which is nice.

I entered the fandom as a nobody. I had almost 50 fics on AO3 and two had mildly popped off while I wasn't looking, but I wasn't really known for anything. I was a fandom ghost, posting my little fanfics and sharing them with the world because I just enjoyed the characters so much. Like a lot of people, I dreamed of being known for something. I thought that'd be neat.

I'm still in a state of shock and confusion that I've written anything in the past 2 years that people remember and even love. It's weird to be in a place where I never imagined myself to be. I can't stress enough how much I did not write explicit fic before this fandom; in high school, I would've welcomed a porn ban. I was afraid of my own sexuality, convinced it was some sort of monster I had to control. Convinced I was dirty. To other people my age, I was a prude, naive and childish for not being comfortable with it. So I feel for people who lash out now, who insist that attraction is actually fetishization, that if we set enough rules, maybe if we resist temptation, we'll be saved. I see you, and I feel for you. I personally don't think that's a healthy way to live, but if you'd told me that 2 years ago, I would've cussed you out. It's really a realization you have to come to (or not) on your own terms.

Anyway.

I know it's tacky to talk about your own success but it doesn't feel real. I go back and forth, reading other people's work -- and my god, there's some unbelievable talent in this fandom -- and thinking "shit, why would anyone read anything I've written? My stories are kindergarten finger paintings next to museum masterpieces". I am learning, slowly -- very slowly -- that I can't bully myself into a shape I like better. I'll never abuse myself into the kind of writer I think I want to be.

The first chapter of Powder Blue was written on a random day of the week after work. I was in a server -- the first fandom server I'd properly joined and talked in, watching a convo about how funnyt it would be for Ed to be a middle aged sugar baby -- when I pulled out my laptop and wrote for an hour and then posted that chapter to the server. I hadn't written for five years before OFMD. I had never finished a multi chapter fic. I posted that chapter and went to make dinner, and assumed the Google Docs link would get lost in that channel after a few likes.

That's not what happened.

The next few months were...a lot. My 7 year old Twitter account blew up from about 200 followers to 1000 in a matter of months. I was misinterpreted half a dozen times. Suddenly, people knew who I was and had Opinions. Some of those Opinions were Not Nice. I was told to grow a thick skin and get over it. So I figured my extreme reactions -- physical shaking, intense fear, a spiking heart rate, like I was being chased -- were just me being weak. I thought if I just sucked it up and laughed it off, it'd stop affecting me.

Turns out RSD is real and not an excuse I was using to be a baby, and it literally didn't get better until I was medicated! Wild

(This -- "I'm just overreacting and everyone else is secretly handling it better" -- has been a pretty consistent pattern my entire life, so figuring out I'm actually AuDHD has been mindblowing. If you've been wondering why you're so weak your whole life, I've got some screening tests you might be interested in).

Anyway my point is, a few things happened over the course of 2023 that brought me to a level of emotional pain I've never experienced.

At the start of the year, I was taking a self imposed internet break, after being forced to apologize for a tweet thread about Izzy, where I'd made the mistake of suggesting that fans of his should consider thinking about why they enjoy his character, but to only do this if they wanted to and ignore me if they didn't. This was taken as me being a hypocrite, and accusing Izzy fans of being terrible people. I apologized, vowed to never mention him again, and left Twitter for a month. Around the same time, a few things in a very close friend group went very wrong. I assumed it was entirely my fault for misbehaving, picked myself up, and tried to punish myself into a shape that would be acceptable for other people.

It didn't work.

Since I was now marked as an anti-Izzy bully, I couldn't say anything -- either on Twitter or in private -- that wouldn't be interpreted as me trying to start fights, as me being passive aggressive, as me trying to send covert messages for others to decipher so they could come and grovel for my forgiveness. Some of this is my fault -- it took a long time to learn than my private locked Twitter account isn't a diary. it took even longer for me to learn that maybe the people I was hanging out with weren't my people.

During all of this, I was posting Powder Blue after months of tears, pain, heartbreak, frustration and stress. I still don't understand why people write books for work or FUN. It was the most horrific experience of my life. It was valuable and so rewarding but jesus christ did writing PB take a lot out of me.

So as I felt less connected to my friends, as I was trying to hide how I felt because I thought I didn't deserve to be upset about anything (everything is always my fault, you see, and if I just behaved better, these things wouldn't happen to me), someone came to me and said they'd noticed some issues with Powder Blue. I'll refer to this person as the reader.

I was more than happy to hear them out. And it's true that I made some mistakes. The environment that I published PB in was not the one that I wrote it in. I didn't read any other sugar daddy/sex work fics as I was working on PB. PB was never a reaction to those fics. But because of those stories, which had handled things is harmful ways, there was suddenly a responsibility I'd never expected to have. I've never done sex work, I've just spent a lot of time listening to sex workers and trying to understand the legislation and environment as much as I can as a lay person. And since I don't have a personal experience with sex work, I shared my finished but rough draft with the reader, who did.

The problem, ultimately, is not something I could ever have fixed to their satisfaction. The fic doesn't involve dubious consent on a level that I think warrants an archive warning tag -- I tried to make it explicitly clear that Ed never does anything he doesn't want to, and that he's never coerced. The issue is that the nature of Ed and Stede's relationship is inherently uneven -- Stede is rich, and although he gives Ed money that's his to keep, Ed still isn't as obscenely wealthy as Stede is. Ed is poor and has been for a while. He's good at whatever he chooses to do, but he's struggling. That's a very uncomfortable spot to put Ed in. I also put Ed through some things that I've personally been through, as a way to work through my feelings and to try and better understand myself. If I was acting like Ed in real life, the reader is right that it would be concerning. But, importantly, Ed's not real. Nothing in this story is happening to a real person. Nothing in this story is an endorsement of any of his behaviours or unhealthy coping mechanisms.

I still believe the reader had good intentions -- the amount of effort they put into coming to me would be utterly bizarre for someone who was just looking to be cruel for no reason. But that also doesn't change the fact that being told I was having a trauma response and needed to stop working on the fic immediately, pushed me into the most suicidal period I've ever experienced.

That's not their fault. I'm sure that wasn't their intention. I've chosen to not try and find out who they are, or try to contact them again to respect their privacy. Some of the things people said to me, publicly dismissing the reader's pain, were so harrowing to read that it made me feel worse for ever writing PB in the first place. They were right to stay anonymous.

I'm sure the reader never meant for me to have such a massive breakdown that I took down the entire fic and left Twitter (and a few friend groups). It's been difficult to understand that just because someone didn't mean to hurt me, doesn't change the fact that I was hurt.

One silver lining is that I did go and find a new therapist. She's great! And she also thinks that how the reader tried to bring things up to me was wrong. As the reader obviously saw, I have a lot of Trauma, so I'm still not entirely convinced that I didn't deserve what happened to me. I'm not angry at them. I appreciate their concern. I just can't do what they asked of me. In the end, Powder Blue was not a story that was right for them. And that's okay.

My point in detailing all of this, is that I stayed quiet for a long time because I didn't think I deserved to tell my part of the story. I was scared that when people said they respected my choice to take down the fic, that they agreed I'd some something impossibly harmful. People trusted my judgement but I didn't trust myself. But people didn't know that I didn't trust myself.

Additionally, reader can't speak on this without revealing themself in some way. I'm terrified that they might read this and say something anyway. My biggest fear is becoming the kind of writer who sees negative criticism and pushes on anyway, or even blocks people who disagree with me. I don't want to hurt anyone the way I've been hurt.

BUT I've been holding onto this for months. I cannot write a perfect fic that will never trigger anyone. I will never write a meaningful story that won't hurt someone, no matter my intentions. There IS a way to admit you fucked up, or a way to listen and disagree, without turning into a raging asshole. I'm struggling to find that line. I'm hoping I'm making the right choice here.

And honestly, I'm just soft. I am so fucking soft. I talk a big game but I am so soft that a single person poking at my trauma caused me to break down so severely that my partner was legitimately afraid for me. I am learning that this softness doesn't mean I should become a crueler person to cope. But it's hard. There are going to be people who see this post and think I'm being a whiny crybaby looking for attention and pity. And I just have to deal with that.

Anyway. All previous chapters of PB will be up soon. Read them or don't. I will do my best to add more detailed trigger warnings. And I would personally suggest that if you're worried about any of the content in the fic, to run these worries past a friend who's read the fic, because they'll know you better than I ever will. Please don't read Powder Blue if you think it'll harm you. I would rather have fewer readers than triggered ones.

If there's anything I've missed that you think I need to address, know that my inbox is open, that anon is on, and that I'm not in the business of retaliating against people who come to me with an issue, even if they're a dick to me while they're doing it. I'm not going to dismiss someone because they weren't nice to me while they were upset. I'm a bitch but I'm not that kind of bitch.

So. Thank you for waiting for this fic. Thank you for waiting for me. We've got something like 16 chapters to go, and I can't tell you when they'll be up, or if they'll be up soon. But thank you for loving this story. I can't tell you how much that means to me, especially now.

Love,

Scarr

#scarrlet rambles #powder blue #about powder blue #this is also just a really long about me

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thankskenpenders · 7 months

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And now for something new

So, here's something I was never planning on doing, but I just couldn't shake the idea... Thanks Ken Penders is gaining a sister blog featuring an entirely different comic franchise!

Introducing... Thanks Steve Ditko, a blog where I read the Earth-616 Spider-Man comics, starting all the way back in the '60s! It's gonna be much more casual and less thorough than how I run things here on TKP, though, which I'll explain in a sec.

If seeing me post weird bits from old Spider-Man comics sounds fun and you need no further info, then just head right on over to Thanks Steve Ditko. But for longtime TKP readers, I know you probably have questions...

Number one: Why?

Spider-Man's always been my favorite superhero, and with the Spider-Verse movies kicking ass and my excitement building for the new Insomniac game, I've been in a Spidey mood. Inevitably, a thought occurred to me: Maybe I should actually read the comics that everything else is built off of and see the wildly varying contributions of all the original creators, rather than filtering them through big budget adaptations. If I can power through One Piece and all these other manga with hundreds of chapters, it can't be that hard... right?

And, well, after a few issues I quickly realized that my options were to either clog up my other accounts with random Spider-Man panels for years, or to just make a side blog. And so the side blog was born.

Two: Will this blog replace Thanks Ken Penders?

NO!!!!!!!!!

Okay but prove it

To allow the two to exist side-by-side, Thanks Steve Ditko will have a different format than what Thanks Ken Penders developed. Rather than an in-depth guided tour that critically analyzes every story beat of every issue, TSD will just be a place for amusing panels and brief thoughts as I casually read the comics at my own pace.

If you've seen me make a few tweets about reading Spider-Man recently, I'm basically just moving that to a dedicated Tumblr. It's a place for me to dump these things so that it doesn't fill up my media tab on Twitter for the next decade. (You know, assuming Twitter is still around in a decade.) There will be many issues where I only post two panels that I thought were funny. There will be issues where I don't have anything to say at all. Maybe I'll reach a run that I just cannot get into, and I start skipping around more. Who knows!

This may sound similar to what I thought this blog would be before it blew up. Aside from the simple fact that there's already mountains of Spider-Man commentary out there and therefore less of a void for me to fill, one of the main steps I'll be taking to avoid repeating the past is not enabling an ask box on TSD. I do not need people to ask me to go into ten times more detail on everything. I do not need to write seven essay-length responses to questions about Spider-Man minutiae every day. I do not need a place for people to chide me for not covering certain scenes, issues, or ancillary series.

It also won't have any kind of update schedule. I'm trying to keep it very casual. I'm reading these comics at my own pace, and if I feel like sharing a moment or commenting on something while doing so? It goes there. That's it.

(On the subject of format changes, I'm also listing the issue, writer, and penciller in the body of every post. This is a thing I wish I'd done on TKP so that people didn't misattribute every weird Archie Sonic panel I post to Penders.)

Three: So when will TKP come back from hiatus? You said it'd come back after you finished SLARPG!

I don't know! Sorry. I have a couple things on the backburner right now for TKP, but I'm not sure when I'll get back to proper updates where I read more comics.

I wanted to bring TKP back this year, and that's still possible. The main hurdle is that I want to reread my own archive (again) as a refresher, which is, uh. A lot of posts. I've developed a high standard for myself on here, and I feel like I wouldn't be doing my job right if I forgot half the ongoing subplots and character arcs and didn't bring them up in my analysis. Especially when I'm discussing the work of an author as obsessed with continuity as Ian Flynn. Unfortunately, the nature of this blog means that every time I go on another long hiatus for Life Reasons I have even more comic continuity to catch up on than last time.

(This is a big part of why I'm making Thanks Steve Ditko an extremely casual blog instead of promising to become a Lore Expert on 60+ years of Marvel.)

Mostly I've just been very burnt out this year after having finally finished a video game that took almost eight years to make. I haven't really had the energy for any creative projects, including TKP. But I feel a little bit of a spark here with Spider-Man, so I'm chasing that feeling to try to get back into the swing of blogging about comics - no pun intended.

So, basically, bear with me on this as I start this low-energy side project. But hopefully folks will enjoy Thanks Steve Ditko as its own thing, too.

Look forward to goofy shit like this

#tkp post

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marciaillust · 13 days

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How long does it take for you to finish drawing?

I'm an artist (beginner) and i unconsciously set unrealistic goals for myself and need a reminder of how long it takes to complete a drawing, Thanks.

Hi! In the context you presented it in, that is a really interesting question, so I'll try to approach it thoroughly. I hope I won't make you roll your eyes too much.

Where to start, where to start... I guess the first thing I should say is that there is a difference between time I spend preforming the action of <drawing>, and the time I spent <working> on a particular piece. The first would be counted in hours, the second one - days. I'm a big believer in slowing things down, and giving things time - going through options, gathering research and references, taking breaks every 1h of sitting and drawing - and seeing things through until I achieve the goal I set at the beginning of the process.

The goals are usually different each time: "quick design", "character exploration", "analysis of an artist's linework and experimenting with the knowledge gained", "creating an aesthetically pleasing image", and so on and so forth. Of course I don't write these down like it's a school assignment, but knowing in the back of my head what I'm actually doing helps me manage my expectations. I also enjoy being conscious of why I create - when I was younger regardless of what I was doing I had the thought "AND IT MUST LOOK GOOD AND PRESENTABLE! BECAUSE PEOPLE WILL LOOK!" ...and I think that obsession is the cancer of creative process.

Since the goals for each picture are different, the time I'll spent on achieving each one will be different as well, because the "satisfactory results" lay in different places. For example, the Marcile sketchpage was created in one afternoon, and took approximately 3 hours. The goal was to play around with a brush that has no opacity forcing my lines to be more decisive. I did that and so it is "finished". There's nothing else I want from it.

On the other hand, the cover of Asterism took about 10 days to create, the goal of which was to make "an aesthetically pleasing cover picture taking colour inspiration from the works of (specific list of artists)". I took my time designing it so that it looks aesthetically pleasing, made sure the anatomy is "correct" (a nebulous statement when it comes to stylised humans), took my time masking, and picking colours, and shading. I wanted it to "look good" to my own eyes so if something was not working I would go back, change it, alter it, move it around... that's the wonderful thing about personal art, you can take as long as you like making something satisfactory.

The funny thing is, with what the Asterism cover actually is (a cellshaded image), it could have been done probably in 4 days by the me 4 years ago. But that person was willing to sit 8-10 hours a day to draw with no breaks, she had little social life, and treated herself as a little circus seal performing tricks so that people clap around her, and the clapping was soooo nice because it meant that people remembered her and she mattered. And it worked for her! For long 10 years! Until her arm gave out, and the reality of never being able to draw again became more tangible than ever, and it's been following her like a fog ever since for the past 4 years. The me today works about 4 hours a day and every hour I take about a 30 minute break. I also don't post half the stuff I draw. There is also another aspect that dictates the speed of creating and that is familiarity with the subject matter. The less you know something, the fast you'll draw it! But as you get to know the intricacies of the process, and see all the building blocks, it will start taking *longer* because you will start accounting for every block. But then you'll eventually get familiar with the blocks and so the time spent on a picture will go down again! The cool yet overwhelming thing about art is that, there are always hundreds of building blocks. Form, composition, ambient occlusion, saturation, hue, light balance, line form...... and those are just the *some* of the generalised *categories*. And each category will have it's own subsection of building blocks! And then those blocks will interact with each other to create completely new area of expertise! This is crazy! Marcille sketch page took me only 3 hours to create because I am already quite familiar with linework - I have drawn 3-4 comicbooks worth of linework. This also means I am familiar with believable anatomy, more or less, which got utilised in the Asterism cover - the main bulk of linework got created during a 3h livestream. So.... what's the answer.... "It's all relative" is so unsatisfactory and probably not what you looked for. But you can draw something in 3 days and kill your body over it. Or you can become an expert in a field and dish the same picture out effortlessly in 8 hours. You can also split that 8h block over multiple days bringing you back up to 3 days. You could even add a whole day of visual research which might make your picture only marginally better. And even if we calculate it in terms of raw working time, pen-to-paper, like a self-inflicted capitalist tumor, that time can fluctuate still due to personal visual library and knowledge base. If I asked Tom Fox how long it takes for him to create his sketch pages his answer would probably be downward of 30 minutes. Yet I need whole 3 hours to create something *less* anatomically correct than him. And so here we are at the end of this perhaps unnecessary essay. And all we learned is this: it depends. Dry, not nuanced tl;dr, my personal timings: single sketch - 30mins; single linework pic 1-2h; Cellshaded illust - 16h; Rendered illust: 20-25h.

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zarla-s · 1 year

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How do you decide when to use Spamtons little speech quirk and what to have him say? Your writing for him feels so natural!

Spamton’s speech pattern is surprisingly tricky! It has a lot of weird little things to it, haha. I’m glad you think I’m doing a good job though. :D Generally I try to keep in mind a few things for him...

Spamton misspells things a lot, but not always in the same way (with exceptions). He also likes substituting numbers for letters, usually in words that get caught in a spam filter to try to get around it but not always. ( [[Amazed at thi5 amazing transformation?]], NOW THAT'S WHAT I'M TALKING AB04T! , SOMEONE LEFT [There] SOULS, [Lyeing Around......] , YOU FILLED YOUR [Inventorium] WITH [Half-Pr1ce Sallamy], AND THE [Number on theB4ck]!, [Unforgettable D3als] , [Pr3mIUm luxjerry w4tch] )

When Spamton takes over the narration or influences it, he still misspells things. (CONGRULATIONS YOU ARE THE 100th VISITOR!!! )

Spamton is bad at tenses and mixes them up a lot. This is one of the most endearing things to me for some reason, haha. ( I'M SO [Proud] OF YOU, I COULD [Killed] YOU! , I HAVE [Becomed] NEO. , MY ESTEEM CUSTOMER, THAT GUY [Steal my look]!! OKAY, MAYBE HE [Steal]ed BACK WHAT I TOOK FROM HIM, WE WILL ALSO [Divorced] )

He messes up pluralization or grammar related to it at times. ( HOTSINGLE, 100 CUSTOMER, AN [Valuable Item])

He actually swears a fair amount but it’s usually censored. ( YOU'RE [$!$!] RIGHT! , DEALS SO GOOD I'LL [$!$$] MYSELF!, [$!?!] THE PRESSES! )

His capitalization in his bracket words/phrases is inconsistent and he spells things wrong in them at times as well. He usually capitalizes the first word though. ( [[A LimiTed Time Only!]] , [[Designed BY The Classics]], [[ Sucbscrube ]] , THEN [[WHY]] GO TO A DUMPSTER!!! , YOU'VE GOT THE [[LIGHT.]] , [ succumb to the worm ], SO HAVE I GOT A DEAL THAT'S [sweet Sunday creme] TO ANY SELF RESPECTING [Ball Nut]! , [fluffey] , [Pracitce]).

His capitalization in general is kind of all over the place. ( LIGHT nER! HEY-HE Y HEY!!!, THat'll be 1997 KROMER., ENL4RGE Yourself, I USED TO be A BIG SHOT. , I WOn'T FORCE YOU. , It's still DARK... SO DARK! )

He gets the verb in sentences wrong at times or has too many/too few words in a phrase. ( HEAR THOSE [Balloons]???, [Cool down with a]!!!, [Wake up and the smell the] MY DEAD CARCASS!!! ) His grammar also gets wonky, especially with the tricky homophones like your/you’re or their/there/they’re. ( YOUR A BIGSHOT!! , WELL LET THIS BE A [Email] , SHOW OFF YOU'RE [Big Shot] )

He sometimes doesn’t finish a sentence at all, or leaves a blank space. ( BUY [KeyGen] FROM ME AT [The Low Low Price Of] , MEANWHILE I CAN [sneak out the back] AND, [Hurry now]!!! [Blink] AND YOU'LL MISS !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! , THAT'S WHY THEY'RE COMING TO [kill] ME RIGHT NOW. THEY'RE COMING TO ). Sometimes he just says one or two words or sentence fragments. (MONEY NO, KEYGEN) He likes repeating unfinished sentences as well, usually when he’s worked up about something. ( THE MEN INSIDE WOULD THE MEN INSIDE WOULD , I'LL GET SO. I'LL GET SO. )

He uses periods to emphasize certain parts of a sentence and sometimes he just leaves brackets or carets or other punctuation in his speech. ( YOU'RE LIGHT neR< AREN'T YOU? , GO BACK. AND PUT. THE DISK. BACK. WHERE YOU GOT IT. ).

Sometimes he has spaces in the middle of words or in the wrong places ( DID YOU HAVE AN YMORE?, I'M A SALESMAN , ). Sometimes it’s just a mess in general ( DOESN;T IT?KID? ), and sometimes he likes to combine words ( [HonestMan] , [handsomeGuy] ).

My general approach to this is just to keep any typos I make while doing his dialogue lol.

He drops out of caps usually when he’s scared or thoughtful (not accounting for after his battle), and usually when he’s thinking about Mike.

A fair amount of his substitutions are vaguely threatening or allude to some kind of violence or suffering. He mentions death, dying, and screaming a lot, usually in unexpected contexts ( PRICES SO LOW, EVERYONE I KNOW IS [[Dead]]!!!, VACATIONING IN [Burning acid] , NOW I'M THE [[It Burns! Ow! Stop! Help Me! It Burns!]] GUY! ).

Sometimes these threats are relevant warnings if you know what he’s up to ( TAKE THIS DEAL AND YOU WILL [[Die]]!! IT'S THAT GOOD!!!, [Die Now] AND I'LL THROW IN [50] [Bullets] FOR FREE!, THIS IS [One Purchase] YOU WILL [Regret] FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE! ). There’s always a sort of “off” vibe to him that makes him feel a little dangerous.

As an aside, Spamton talks about people beating him up a lot.

He likes turning phrases about refunds into non-refunds, haha ( [No Money Back Guaranttee] ). He’ll sometimes just admit outright he’s trying to scam you ( HOW'S AN INNOCENT GUY LIKE ME SUPPOSED TO [Rip People Off] , [What's yours is mine] AND [What's yours is mine]. ).

He’s extremely excited and shouting almost all the time, so he very rarely has only one exclamation point about anything. Usually it’s three but it can go higher. Just go ham on the exclamation points lol.

[[Hyperlink blocked.]] is a tricky one. He does use it a lot, but the context for it is hard to pin down. Usually it relates to things like souls, what it is that’s controlling him or what it wants, or how exactly he wants to escape it. Other times it’s sort of privileged or secret information that would be caught by a filter and blocked, or it’s some scammy thing or another that’d be blocked for user safety. Usually it’s something that someone wouldn’t want the player to know.

He does use sales pitch, adspeak, or internet slang substitutions a lot, ( [Friend Request Accepted] , [[Anything You See On TV!]], [[Workout-Ready Body]], [Luxurious Basement Apartment] , [[Pass My Savings Onto You!]] ) but not all the time! A lot of his substitutions are single words, usually on an odd tangent to the original word or just unusual in general ( [Deep Abyss] , YOUR [[Ant-sized]] [[Rapidly-shrinking]] LIFE!! , [Wacky Stacks] , [Little Nipper], LIKE MANY [buzzing] AND [burning] CREATORS, GET OUT YOUR CYBER [skin wallets] ).

Sometimes they’re just a normal word in the sentence ( YOU GOT [Guts] KID!! , [Part] OF MY BEAUTIFUL [Heart], LOOK IN MY [Eyes] LOOK IN MY [Nose] LOOK IN MY [Mouth] ).

I tend to think about his substitutions a bit like the Orz, where a substituted word has alternate or deeper meaning than you’d think BECAUSE it was substituted. By [LIGHT], did Spamton literally mean light, or does light have another connotation to it he’s adding that’s not clear? I like thinking of the substitutions adding a potential multiple meaning layers to a word, haha. Maybe he can’t help it, or maybe that particular word is hinting at something more...

He can say full sentences without any substitutions in them, but they’re rare ( WHAT ARE THESE STRINGS!? , YOU'RE LEAVING!? WHAT ABOUT MY DISK!?!? , TOO MANY EXCESS VACATION DAYS?? TAKE A GOD DAMN VACATION STRAIGHT TO HELL, I GAVE YOU EVERYTHING I HAD! MY LIFE ADVICE! , BUT KRIS, IF YOU REFUSE. THAT'S YOUR CHOICE. I CAN'T FORCE YOU.). Interestingly, they often involve him saying he can’t force Kris to do something, something he says over and over and over. He seems very preoccupied with it.

#deltarune #spamton #walls of text #asks and answers #meta #in a sense

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unofficial-underfell · 1 month

Text

Hey guys, I've been thinking about making this post for a long time and I think its finally time I do so. After realizing that some of my last work was done over a year ago, I don't think I can really ignore it anymore. While I haven't quite thrown in the towel on this quite yet, it's pretty evident to me and I'm sure to everyone who still follows this blog that my fervor for the project has drastically decreased. And has been kind of dead for a while. The comic has not been a priority to me, or posting online much at all actually. I did some soul searching and found that I'd started relying on outside approval for my art instead of doing art for the sake of wanting to tell a story and express myself throughout my work. I have limited energy and depression and sometimes it feels like i get such little progress done even though it takes all of my energy. While I'm trying to go to the gym more and build better habits my energy levels and mood still have a lot to be desired, and I'd rather use the limited energy I have to work on something I'm more passionate about.

I've been trying to grow my skills and absorb more stories and I've moved around a lot and started to listen to what I really felt, and I found that a lot of the art I want to focus on deals with heavier and more mature topics. I do love this story, and all of the characters and I feel like I could make a really clever subversion of what is expected from an Underfell comic. But I feel like in these uncertain times with the world and with all of the stuff going on right now, I'd like to use my energy to work on stories that hit closer to the things that I feel are important. So that's why I've not been posting much.

I'm working on a book, and I've actually got quite a lot of progress done on it, but because of all the horror stories online about people stealing author's original works, I'm kind of holding off on publishing any chapters before I can copyright the first draft of the novel. So my online activity will still be pretty scarce for a bit, though I'll still post occasionally on my @cosmicpixel01 account. I'll try better to not be so radio silent though lol. Even if that means I'll post something boring about my dog or books I'm reading just so everyone knows I'm still alive.

I don't want to call it quits on the story. But I also feel like you guys have been kept waiting to see what happens for a really long time, and that makes me feel so guilty. I will try to finish up the pages I have in the works, and I'm probably going to switch to a different format that is some drawings, some writing to finish the story. I'm sorry that I wasn't able to finish it the way I intended for you guys, even with all of the support and kind words and even the fanart that I've kept in a folder on my desktop. I am letting a lot of you down, but I feel like the radio silence is probably more irresponsible than just going out and saying something. And I'm sorry I've kept you all waiting for a not-so-happy update on the blog.

I hope that some of you will continue to follow me for some of my other exploits and see whatever other things I have going on, but I understand that you all followed me for Undertale so I don't want you to feel any sort of guilt if you decide not to. I'm just happy you all supported me for so long.

I'll try to work on this blog again soon, and if anyone has any questions, my asks are open, though I'll probably keep the asks private. Until then I hope everyone stays safe out there. And from the bottom of my heart, thank you.

-Avery

#not pages #unofficial-underfell #this was so hard to write i dont want to be a quitter but I'm tired #avery speaks

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ilovewriting06 · 1 month

Text

Mischief and Angel- Part 4

A/N- Sorry for the delay in this part but my daughter decided to get sick (first time mom and she's only four months old so I was beyond worried) and then she gave it to me. She's fully recovered and back to demanding to be fed every twenty minutes (I swear to God her stomach is an endless pit!) and she's finally down for the night and I finally finished this.

-------------------------------------------------------

It's been a week since Stiles and I learned that he was officially a billionaire. No one other than us knows just how much Stiles has but every bill that the Stilinski's have acquired over the years has been paid off and we didn't even have to dip into the savings account. Claudia's life insurance was more than we anticipated, not surprised, she was extremely smart when it came to money. All the bills were paid off with the insurance money and we even had $50 left over.

However, right now we are having a normal night as highschoolers, "Oh my God, oh my God, oh my Go-!"

"Stiles, calm down!"

He looks at me with wide eyes, "Calm down! Y/N, Coach is putting me in the game! I fucking suck. I'm going to fall on my face, hell, maybe I'll actually score and it'll be for the other team!"

I suppress a smile at his antics knowing that he really, truly is an anxious mess, "Stiles, you'll be okay, I promise."

He blinks as he sits down on the bench, "I'm the benchwarmer, why is he letting me play!"

The game starts in ten minutes and it feels like Stiles' anxiety is getting worse. I stand behind him and drape my arms across his padded shoulders, "How about this, you play this game, and you win, I'll give you a nice surprise when we get home."

He perks up slightly and tips his head back to look at me, "Are you trying to bribe me with sex?"

I smirk, "It depends, is it working?"

-------------------------------------------------

I tense up from where I'm sitting in between Mom and Noah as Stiles catches the ball, "Come on Stiles! Run!"

He glances at me before he spins on his heel and takes off down the field. I hold my breath as he sprints down the field and weaves between the other team before throwing the ball into the net and gaining BHHS a point. My jaw drops in amazement at the way he's moving before it clicks, "Oh my God."

Noah and Mom finish their cheering before looking at me, both with questioning looks. I chuckle and brush my hand lightly across my neck where the mating bite is, "He said it made him feel stronger, I guess it gave him the ability to play lacrosse, and look really hot doing it."

Mom laughs while Noah scrunches his nose in distaste, "That's wonderful but can you not talk about Stiles like that in front of us?"

Mom snorts before leaning back to make eye contact with Noah, "Don't loop me into this, I find it sweet how much she fawns over him. Lord knows they've been harboring feelings for each other since they were preteens so it's nice for them to actually say it out loud instead of pining after one another."

I roll my eyes but I haven't taken them off of Stiles' form that is darting across the field and as soon as the game is called, with Beacon Hills High taking home the win, I'm darting off the bleachers and towards Stiles. He takes his helmet off and drops it on the ground to catch me. I launch my body at him before smiling and squealing, "I told you, you could do it!"

He chuckles and kisses my cheek before placing my feet back on the ground, "Yeah you did, now let me go so I can go shower."

I unlatch myself from him and smirk, "And once your done we'll grab some curly fries. You can pay." I send him a playful wink at the last part before darting over to Scott to give him an aggressive hug and a kiss on his cheek to congratulate him.

As Scott rambles on I feel a rush of anger and annoyance hit me full force. I look towards the locker room to see Stiles is stopped and talking to someone, and he is not happy. I ignore Scott and tune into Stiles' conversation with one of the lacrosse players from the other team. "Bet she's one hell of a lay isn't she? Seems like a real kinky chick."

I ignore the fact that he's right about the last part and focus on the fact that the anger I'm feeling turns into full on rage and I can feel his control slipping. I take a deep breath and try and calm him down by relaxing and comforting him through our bond. I smile as he regains control and he shrugs, "Not cool dude. We don't objectify women, especially women who are engaged. Especially not when you just said that to the face of their very pissed off fiancé."

The other dude at least has the decency to cringe and shrink back a little but Stiles continues, "Besides I don't kiss and tell and you'll never find out what she's like, personality or her preferences in bed. I don't usually speak for her because she's a strong independent woman, but she isn't here to defend herself so I'll speak for her this once," Stiles clears his throat before leveling the other player with a glare that could freeze over hell, "Angel would rather poke her eyes out with a toothpick and then dig out her intestines with a spork before she ever did anything with you. Not to mention I'll fucking chop your dick off and shove it down your throat if you so much as look at her again. Did I make my point clear or do you need some more imagery? I have a very detailed imagination I'm sure I could think of something else."

The dude backs up and nods frantically, "Look man, I was just messing around, I had no idea. I swear I won't say anything about her again, I won't even think about her."

Stiles grins and pats the other guy on the shoulder, "Good choice man. I wasn't kidding about that threat so remember that. Now I have to go shower so I can go get dinner with my wonderful fiancée and our wonderful family."

The other dude runs away and Stiles makes eye contact before winking and running towards the locker room. I sigh dreamily before looking at Scott who is glaring at the retreating figure that is still left unnamed.

Scott looks at me before frowning, "Fucking Brad."

I snort before bumping my shoulder against Scott's, "Alright Scotty boy, go get a shower. Once you and Stiles are done we're going to the diner to get some curly fries, Stiles is buying."

He smiles and grabs his gear before running towards the locker room where Stiles had disappeared to a few moments ago.

-------------------------------------------------

I shriek as cold water splashes my back before spinning around to see an amused Stiles. I roll my eyes and cross my arms, "Really?"

He shrugs, "You should have been more aware of your surroundings. What if I was some murderer and wanted you as my next victim."

I roll my eyes again before glaring, "You aren't a threat to me. My senses literally ignore you when it comes to shit like that. Unless you're distressed or overly excited or something, then my senses will react but it's more of a reflex to protect you."

He nods before he grabs my hand, "Cool, I'm hungry. Ready for some of Marie's infamous curly fries?"

I chuckle and nod before glancing at Noah and Mom, "I guess we'll meet you there. Stiles and I have to make a pitstop so you might get there first."

Stiles looks at me in confusion before I drag him across the parking lot to his jeep. When we climb into the jeep he looks at me, "Where are we going?"

I smirk, "The diner, just park in the deserted parking lot behind the building across the street."

He raises and eyebrow before nodding but I can see his suspicion, "Okay."

---------------------------------------------

As soon as the jeep is in park I take my seatbelt off and turn in my seat to look at Stiles. He's looking right back at me and raises an eyebrow as he asks, "So, why exactly are we in an abandoned parking lot?"

I smirk and lean across the center console so that Stiles and I are nose to nose, "For privacy."

He pulls back slightly with a confused frown, "Why do we need priva-, ohh, y-yeah okay, I get it. Privacy...p-privacy is good."

I smirk as his eyes flutter shut and his head falls back. I increase the pressure of my hand before slipping my hand into the front of his red track pants. He wiggles slightly before moaning as I pull his half hard cock out so that I have easier access.

As I increase the pressure I move my hand along his shaft adding a few wrist flicks every now and then. Stiles' eyes fight to open and stay open but when he makes eye contact his pupils are blown and he's trying to catch his breath, "W-what's this for?"

I smile and place a few kisses along his jawline before pulling back just long enough to answer, "I did tell you that if you won that I'd give you a surprise."

He nods trying to talk before choking on his words when I lick across his mating bite, "Y-ye-ah, but you said when we...when we, fuck, Jes-...shit!"

I bite into the mating bite causing Stiles to shudder and grab my hair in one of his hands before giving it a sharp tug. I moan against his neck before whining when he uses his free hand to press into my mating bite, "N-no...it's gotta be quick. Jus' you."

He nods before moaning again, "Kay 'm close."

I smile and place one more delicate kiss onto his neck before ducking down and swallowing his dick down in one go. I only give him three hard sucks before he thrusts his hips up and his mouth falls open in a silent moan as his cum is shooting down my throat.

After he's come down from his high I pull off with a lurid slurp. I sit back up as I wipe my hand across my chin to stop the little dribble of his cum that escaped.

I tuck him back into his pants and he whines from overstimulation before I cut him off in a kiss. He hums into the kiss before we separate and he asks, "I thought you said the surprise was for when we got home?"

I grin before nodding, "Yeah, but you did so good I had to give you something. That and watching you play tonight really turned me on and I wanted to taste you."

He groans, "Stop, I can't go another round yet. It felt like you were trying to suck my brain out through my dick there for a second."

I chuckle and place a quick kiss to his cheek before sitting back in my seat and putting the window down to help clear the stench of sex out of the jeep, "That just means I was doing my job right. Now head to the diner, and don't worry you still get a surprise when we get home."

He lets out a deep sigh as he shifts slightly and rearranges the front of his pants. I laugh and buckle my seatbelt as I ask, "I thought you couldn't go another round?"

He starts the jeep and throws me a glare, "That was before you made me promises of future sexy times!"

I swat his forearm as he pulls out of the parking lot, "Stop thinking about it before you go from half hard to full on raging boner."

He groans again, "I can't stop thinking about it if you keep talking about it!"

I purse my lips in thought before I bite back a smile, "Think about the dude that was trying to get into my pants earlier."

He throws the jeep in park at the diner before whipping his head to me and growling, "Don't even. I was five seconds away from cutting his balls off and shoving them so far up his ass they were coming out of his mouth."

I coo and cup his face, "Aw, Mischief that's so sweet, I could blow you again right now if we had time."

He leans into my touch and his eyes flutter shut before someone clears their throat.

I squeak at the same time that Stiles shrieks. We turn to look out of the passenger window...that was still down, to see our parents and Scott standing there awkwardly. Well, Scott looks like he's about to vomit but I have a feeling that's from the smell emitting from the jeep.

I leaned forward and gave Stiles a quick peck on the cheek before clearing my throat trying to escape the awkwardness, "Okay, who's hungry for some curly fries?!"

--------------------------------------------------

I steal a fry off of Stiles' plate as he carries on a conversation with Mom and Noah but I'm not quick enough. I pout as Stiles catches my wrist as the fry is five inches from my mouth, "No, you still have half of yours, leave mine alone."

I give him a pouty face and my best puppy eyes, "But yours taste so much better."

He looks at me unimpressed as he pries the fry from my fingers, "That's because you aren't supposed to eat them. Now eat your own fries or ask for some of Scott's."

I huff before I turn to Scott with a wolfish grin. His eyes widen before he grabs his plate and pulls it closer to him, "NO! Eat your own!"

I hold my hands up in surrender as I relax back into the booth, "Alright."

He sighs in relief but I feel Stiles snort beside me because he knows me well enough to know I haven't given up. I wait another minute and finish my last few fries until Scott has relaxed and is taking a drink before I lunge across the table and grab the plate with curly fries on it. I pull it towards me as Scott shrieks, "Y/N! NO!"

He grabs the plate and we wrestle over it as half the diner watches, including everyone that works there. Scott is trying to pry it from my fingers while I try and land a hard blow to his shin. He hisses as I land a solid kick but not enough for him to ease up on his grip, "Stop it! They're mine! Go assault your boyfriend!"

I hear an appalled gasp from beside us before suddenly there's a hand scooping the fries of the plate and moving them to their own plate. We track the hand to find a scowling Stiles who is glaring daggers at Scott, "That's it, no more fries for either of you!"

Scott and I drop the plate at the same time causing a ping to ring throughout the diner. We both look at Stiles scandalized, as I pout, "What?! Why?!"

Scott nods, "Yeah! They were mine to begin with! She's the one that acts like a pig half the time."

I squawk and reach across the table to smack the back of his head as Stiles pushed the plate of fries to Mom, "Here Melissa, you can have them if you want. It's the least I can do for you having to raise these two idiots."

Mom shakes her head with a smile and declines before intently watching us to see what happens.

"IDIOTS?!"

"EXCUSE ME?!"

He turns to both of us with a smirk and snaps his fingers, "Sit."

Scott and I both freeze and sit back down to face Stiles before he gives one nod of approval before pointedly looking at me, "You don't get them because you were terrorizing your brother. I told you to ask, not steal."

I shrink down and glare at the table with my arms crossed as Stiles points at Scott, "And you!"

I look up to see Scott look around slightly scared, "What did I do?!"

Stiles narrows his eyes before grabbing my left hand and slamming it down on the table, "I'm not her boyfriend! I'm her fiancé, get it right or starve."

Scott's mouth dropped open in disbelief as Mom and Noah both cough to hide their laughs, something I don't do. I let out a snicker and go to yell at Scott before a hand clamps over my mouth. I look at Stiles with wide eyes as he frowns, "Zip it before you lose milkshake privileges for a week."

I muffle against his hand in protest and he tsks, "Welp, two weeks."

I squeak and throw him my murder eyes which only causes him to raise an eyebrow, "Three weeks! Want to keep going or are you going to be nice."

I smirk and go to lick his hand but Stiles is quicker, "And I swear to God! If you lick my hand you lose passenger princess rights for a month and Scott gets the passenger seat."

I deflate but Stiles' lips twitch in a smile when he feels my amusement and happiness through the bond. He removes his hand and nods, "Now what do you two says?"

Scott and I both sigh before grumbling, "I'm sorry."

Stiles nods before pushing me the curly fries, "Here you can have the rest I'm full."

I squeeze his arm in a hug as Scott glares and goes to protest before I put the plate in between us, "We can share."

Scott smiles and nods, "Okay."

Stiles looks up to see everyone staring at us and he shrugs, "You do what you gotta do to keep the peace."

#stiles stilinski #stiles stilinksi x reader #teen wolf #dylan o’brien #scott mccall #dylan o’brien x reader #stiles x reader #stiles stilinski smut #stiles x reader smut #mischief and angel #dylan obrien smut #dylan o'brien x reader smut

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misscammiedawn · 4 months

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Dissociative Identity Disorder in Mr. Robot

So I have been writing little essays about Mr. Robot recently.

Dom's Sexuality, Gay Marriage and Whiterose

Back to the Future and Brainwashing

Today I wish to talk about the DID representation in Mr. Robot.

Actually I want to talk about the DID representation in the Hulk comics but there are 40 years worth of storylines involving it and it would require me to write about clinical understandings from the 1980s when it was called MPD (admitedly Mr. Robot's stumbles at the finish line with some of these same outdated treatment models) and that would take a while. Suffice to say it will happen eventually*. I shall make a new tag "Media Myself and I" and post it under that when I have more time to do it justice. Maybe I'll do others. I am uncertain. I believe I want to focus on positive depictions where there are no murder alters. The goal is to get people to want to enjoy things, not to steer them away. I have a few shows and games in mind at the very least.

Regardless… Mr. Robot is an easier topic to cover and is my hyperfocus of the moment.

So Mr. Robot is a show about isolation in the modern world. It's a show about socioeconomic stress, late-stage capitalism and what it means to enact meaningful change on a broken world.

But above all it is about the healing journey of Elliot Alderson, a man with dissociative identity disorder.

I say that at the start because Elliot's condition is never named until the final episode. In many ways a realistic depiction of a real world disorder was an afterthought noted in the final hour of the journey as a means of justifying the split personality trope and hiding a final twist. In spite of that the roadmap for the show was always leading to this destination and along the way they managed to get some fairly good representation out of the mix.

Season 2 even involves the only time I have ever seen a piece of fiction depict "blending" on screen. Blending isn't a symptom listed in either DSM or ICD manuals. It is, however, something one would hear about if they had a conversation with someone who had DID. I have used that scene to depict what it feels like to my partners.

I'm getting ahead of myself.

I love Mr. Robot. It is currently my favorite show of all time. If you have never seen it then please give it a shot. This post will be spoiler heavy and I'd hate to rob anyone the opportunity to watch S4E7 and have a pure emotional reaction to it. The show is on Amazon Prime and the full box set is available for $35-50 depending on format and vendor.

Go with my blessing.

The first season of the show begins with Elliot Alderson (Rami Malek) living a double life. By day a cyber security expert and by night he spends his time at his computer hacking people's accounts and satisfying a "little itch in the back of his head" that guides him to uncover the murky facts about people. The first scene of the show has him take down a cafe owner who hosts an illegal and deeply unpleasant website. I have seen individuals walk away from the first episode thinking that the show is "Dexter but with computers" but it is more lulsec activism with a Fight Club aesthetic.

The show has 4 seasons and each season depicts a different stage of Elliot's healing journey and with it completely different rules and depictions of his condition. I'll break down each season for what they do right and what they do wrong.

Season 1: Discovery

Elliot's system in season one is undiscovered but he has overt symptoms, meaning he is unaware that he has any alters but he suffers from clean breaks in his consciousness and drastically altered behavior patterns both which are a detriment to the "hidden" nature of the condition.

Commonly most people do not discover their condition until their 30s. I was 37/38 when our therapist started guiding us towards accepting our condition.

DID manifests in childhood but it's a hidden illness that does its best to go undetected. The point of the condition is to remain hidden. The internet and the educational resources it offers are helping younger individuals to recognize their symptoms and advocate for themselves at an earlier age but the standard medical understanding is that most people are developed adults before they are diagnosed.

Published statistics for DID indicate the global population of those with the condition is about 1.5% (some organizations argue the number should be higher due to how difficult it is to receive an accurate diagnosis, but 1.5% is the most consistent figure) which is rare but not to the point of never encountering it. For comparison, according to a 2023 census 1.0% of people in the USA identify as transgender. There are no tested classifications for Covert vs Overt display of symptoms but it is widely agreed that an overwhelming majority of cases within the 1.5% are covert.

We learn that Elliot is desperately lonely, abuses morphine and has paranoid delusions about men in black stalking his every move. Whenever Elliot is on screen we can never be sure what is real and what isn't, so there are times when men wearing black suits are on screen and we cannot be sure if Elliot is paranoid or delusional.

The show takes place through his perspective after all and we are a character in the show.

See… the narrative device of the show involves Elliot speaking to "friend", us. The audience. "Hello, friend." is a common refrain spoken throughout the show. The narrative begins a short while after Elliot had a complete mental breakdown and smashed up a server room, he is seeing a court appointed therapist, is socially paralyzed to the point of which we see him linger outside a birthday party and retreat home to cry in loneliness.

The entire first season Mr. Robot is depicted as another character, akin to Tyler Durden, a wild revolutionary who wants to encrypt the data of the world's largest bank in order to seal the debt records and reset everything back to 0. He starts off appearing in scenes involving the men in black stalking Elliot to mingle him in with the paranoid delusions and eventually begins interacting with him in earnest. Though the reveal is treated as a twist 8 episodes into the show Elliot does accuse the audience of knowing the entire time and he refuses to speak to us for some time, even going as far as to keep secrets from us because he cannot trust us any longer.

It's at this point that I will note that media depictions of DID tend to lean heavily on the phrase "it's a visual medium" and depict ways that characters can see, interact with and communicate with alters/parts in a dramatic setting. Off the top of my head Hulk is about the only form of fiction I've seen where the temptation to do this doesn't take over and even then the old "other face in the mirror" trope shows up there.

So for what it's worth the paranoid thinking and hallucinations are not DID symptoms and typically a person with the condition cannot see or hear their alters. In fact a testing criteria included in the MID exam is to rule out schizophrenia by eliminating the possibility that the voices heard are external or that any hallucinations exist. In Mr. Robot they are likely caused by Elliot's morphine addiction, but he gets clean after season 1 and Mr. Robot is always there.

There are some plot elements which I want to talk about but they do spoil the final "twist" of the show. So I want to warn again that anyone in the process of watching should be warned we are getting into entire show spoiler territory.

The Elliot we see in the show is the result of the stress fueled breakdown that Mr. Alderson had 6 months prior to the show starting. The timeline is fuzzy in my head but there were two triggers which set him off and began his condition flaring up (and/or caused him to lean harder into his drug addiction which in turn fueled his condition). The one we know about is that he was locked in a server room and forced to work long into the night on an issue and the already upset and stressed Elliot snapped and had a black-out.

We come to learn that he has had these his whole life but this is the first time such an incident occurred that he couldn't self-justify what had happened. He smashed up a server room, something he felt himself not capable of.

But the second trigger is the more important one.

His sister, Darlene, moved to NYC and started visiting him.

The bigger and better twist of season 1 is that Elliot and Darlene are siblings. This is hidden from Elliot and the audience for the first 7 episodes and her presence is treated much like Marla Singer from Fight Club, of whom she likely contains some inspiration, where she keeps showing up in Elliot's apartment and acting overly familiar with him.

In the earliest episodes when we are learning about Elliot's lonely life he looks at a photograph of himself and his mother at Coney Island. Due to some hallucinations we know that Magda is an abusive mother and screamed at/hit Elliot a lot. We learn more about her in future episodes and she is a truly horrible parent. Likely more than was ever depicted in the show.

The photo is actually of the full Alderson family including Darlene and Edward but is not shown as such until the reveals that Darlene is Elliot's sister and Mr. Robot is modeled after Elliot's father. The photograph is a reference to Back to the Future.

But it also is a fairly good visual representation of self-filtering information, even when it is contradictory in nature. This is common not just in DID but in all forms of CPTSD.

Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is a condition that develops during prolonged exposure to trauma and makes radical changes to the nervous system. CPTSD is considered a root of DID and it is universal for those diagnosed with DID to have a CPTSD diagnosis also.

One of the ways CPTSD symptoms manifest is "Emotional Avoidance". The nervous system is activated when triggers related to the trauma exist within the person's life. In order to function their brains push away these reminders and naturally avoid interacting with them. This causes those with the condition to become withdrawn, to isolate and to have distorted and often contradicting patterns of thought. For instance Elliot needs connection and safety that he associates with family but his family were his primary abusers and so he edits his memories to focus on positive associations such as a family trip to Coney Island that has become an obsession to him in adulthood. We later learn that Elliot's obsession with movies was born from it being his primary way of connecting with his father... which is fairly relatable.

His positive memories of his parents are held in high regard even though we know that his father "pushed him out of a window" and his mother used to put out cigarette butts on Darlene, tried to force her to commit animal cruelty and is often depicted in hallucinations as beating and screaming at Elliot.

In a case where it is impossible to avoid the traumatic trigger, for instance the return of relative who is a living reminder of his abusive childhood, the individual may begin to dissociate. Dissociation being where a person, overwhelmed by what they are experiencing has a separation from their normal state leading to a disconnect from emotions, sense of self and reality.

Episode 8 in particular contains a visual depiction of it when Elliot is having a quiet meltdown over finding out he has a 2 day deadline and his boss at work has known about the server exploit he installed all along.

(the show often uses the camera in ways to emphasize emotional walls, dissociation and isolation like this. This sequence does so by having hard cuts, shaky cam and frantic pace melt into a gliding slow lull where the background noise filters out and we can share in Elliot's distance from his situation for a moment)

Elliot's form of blocking out is extreme but has half a foot in reality (and half a foot in the logic born from the "twist" ending) in that in order to continue interacting with Darlene he views her as a member of Fsociety and edits out their connection until it is revealed in episode 7.

A small brilliancy about Fsociety is that the entire group is formed around Elliot and Darlene's need for childhood safety. The hacking elements of the show undoubtedly born from 9 year old Elliot spending time at Mr. Robot computer repair with a smile. The anon-mask that the show uses comes from an in-universe movie that Darlene and Elliot watched every Halloween and their base of operations is Coney Island. A place that both siblings seem to associate with safety and happiness...

Which is extra messed up when you factor Season 2's revelation that Darlene was kidnapped while on a family trip to Coney Island.

Darlene's panic attacks, need to feel special and her abusive upbringing are not the topic for this essay, but I wanted to make mention that Magda was such a horrible mother that a 4/5 year old Darlene thinks of being kidnapped from a family trip to Coney Island as one of her most precious childhood memories.

The desire to reach into the past and change things to create an ideal future is a heavy theme of the show and I feel it's important to note that though the Alderson siblings reject Whiterose and her scheme, they are both living in an almost literal fun house distortion of the few unambiguously GOOD childhood memories that they each have and have wrapped them around themselves like a protective blanket.

The plot of season 1 gets a lot more uncomfortable when you realize how much of Fsociety is two traumatized kids recreating positive elements of their childhood and trying to live inside of those memories while lashing out at those who took their father away from them. The entire plan is centered around events from 1995. The show takes place in 2015.

Mr. Robot himself is, of course, the ultimate symbol of that take on events.

Edward Alderson was a monster. He's referred to as such overtly in Elliot's detox fever dream. Everyone asks him who his "monster" is while handing him the key that we learn was to his childhood bedroom. A key that he hid to prevent Edward from entering his room late at night.

Yet throughout the first 3 seasons of the show we are only shown him in context of the positive memories that he and Elliot shared. Elliot was 9 years old when Edward passed away from leukemia.

At a point, Elliot is picked up from school. He has a bruise on his cheek and the scene begins with Edward asking "If I had to guess, you didn't tell Principal Howard your side.", assuring him it's okay to share his side of the story. Because Edward is convincing him to tell his side I am going to assume Elliot got into a fight but it's not impossible to assume that the school pulled Edward in to discuss the signs of physical abuse on the child. Edward would never tell Elliot to tell his side of that story so I assume it was a fight.

It's unclear if Mr. Robot is the one who participated in those fights (we only have 2 confirmed instances of Elliot's alters showing up in childhood. The window incident and the day Edward died) but Edward picks him up and protects him from his mother's wrath and bonds with him during that drive, he reveals his diagnosis to Elliot before inviting him to work with him at the computer repair store. Likely this is what leads to Elliot's hacker skills being born.

A hauntingly similar event in my own life is why I am a photographer.

Given that the majority of Season 1 has Elliot in the dark about his condition we are only given context as to why he is the way he is and see the display of dissociative symptoms which manifest from CPTSD. Mr. Robot existing at all is actually not required for this to be a good depiction of adults who grew up in abusive environments and the way they maladaptively cope.

I also want to give a little praise to the "itch at the back of [Elliot's] head" that shows up when he feels the desire to hack someone or dig deeper and the way he pushes forward with his own will until he calms down enough to let a creeping hesitation overcome him and prevent him from acting.

Passive Influence is part of DID. It's a situation where a "fronting" (that is to say part that is in control at a time) performs an unthinking action or is emotionally swayed by the influence of another part/alter that is not presently conscious. These are one of the biggest ways that the condition flies under the radar for many. When they are close to discovering proof of their condition they will often feel an unconscious push away from it. The phenomenon is fairly easily brushed aside internally as "a gut feeling" or an "impulse" but it's observable under the right conditions.

An instance I can think of in my own life is when our survival part is trying to push people away and our emotional part desperately tries to reach out. I will often find my hand grabbing a person's wrist and clinging tightly to it without even noticing that I've done it.

In the show Elliot is compelled by Mr. Robot when he feels someone is a danger or has a weakness that can be exploited. Part of him knows he needs to do something about it and so he lets himself be guided.

The season ends with The 5/9 Hack succeeding, all the financial data being encrypted and Elliot sent to prison for (minor) hacking charges.

He knows who Mr. Robot is now and he fears him as his enemy.

Season 2 (and the book): Exploration

The first 8 episodes of Season 2 are a filter for those watching the show, many drop off. Personally I love it but I can see why it's not for everyone. Season 2 is much slower than the first and Elliot is in prison for those 8 episodes. He's also imagining that prison is his mother's house.

That daydreaming coping mechanism is largely there to add a fairly unearned sense of mystery to a character development season and make things a little more visually interesting. For the most part I don't really want to focus too much on it or the way Elliot treats "us"/"friend".

The fact is that for this season Mr. Robot and Elliot are in direct conflict but they are feeling out their landscape and trying to find common ground. They are pulling in different directions but they are reacting and responding to one another. The show uses a chess match as a visual symbol of this and in such they are keeping one another in a constant state of check. They are opposed to one another but they are communicating and working things out.

So let's start by looking at the book. The book is a recreation of the in-universe journal that Elliot keeps while he is in prison. We see him writing in it during the show and the entire thing is available, it even includes little ARG elements to let you decode the messages Mr. Robot is receiving from The Dark Army.

The book is detailed like this and it's possible to note when Elliot's handwriting turns into Mr. Robot's handwriting. There are even points where there is "blended" handwriting. It's easy to spot in the above image because Mr. Robot writes with a heavy hand and in all caps where Elliot is soft and uses lower case, in the top line of the second page "you NeeD atteNtioN aNd aRe Willing to pay a lotta MoNey to get it." you can see Elliot slipping from one headspace to another while becoming upset at society.

Even still if you look above the FUCK SOCIETY image you see Elliot's calmer handwriting as clear and flowing.

When we were in denial of our condition we poured through journal after journal and chatlog after chatlog hunting for evidence to prove or disprove the theory.

It was when I looked at our old gaming journals (we took notes in pen/pencil live during TTRPG sessions because memory issues are gonna memory issues) that we noticed similar. Cursive used in some phrases, individual letters separate on another, the letters g and y getting curled at times and not at other times.

Subtler than what is displayed above but no less real.

Season 2 introduces us to Ray the warden brilliantly played by Craig Robinson. He empathizes with Elliot because he speaks to his dead wife as a means of coping with grief and assumes that Elliot is the same.

He offers Elliot guidance by asking him to play chess "against himself" and this leads to Elliot and Mr. Robot playing endless games of stalemate against one another with deletion on the line for the loser. It's the same brain and neither side wants to lose (nor do they truly want to win, Elliot admits as much in Season 3 that he likes having Mr. Robot and misses him when he's not around) and as noted above with passive influence, the games are always guided to end in a stalemate because no matter how opposed they are as forces, they both want the same things.

So... how about the Sitcom episode?

Elliot breaks his promise to Ray and looks at the website that he is tasked with doing tech support on. It's--- not good.

Ray uses a combination of crooked cops and convicted Neo-Nazis to have Elliot beaten into submission so he won't report what he saw. Elliot cannot handle this and has a mental break and wakes up in a 90s 4 camera sitcom world.

Alf is there. Because old episodes of Alf are playing in the medical ward at the time Elliot is being treated for his wounds.

The entire time he is taking a beating Mr. Robot is protecting Elliot by fronting and forcing him into an inner-world fantasy.

Okay... so Inner-Worlds.

In the show we actually had one of these in Season 1 during the detox trip but I want to talk about it now and round back and talk more in Season 4.

Inner-Worlds are a thing within DID treatment. Emphasis on the word treatment. It's one of the more commonly misunderstood things within discussion on the condition because it's regularly reported as part of the experiences within those who are diagnosed with DID but it's important to know that the existence of the diagnosis indicates the existence of treatment.

During any adapted 3 or 4 phase trauma treatment program that includes parts work, whether this be Internal Family Systems model which is used for individuals who do not have DID or system mapping and stabilization for those who do, the patient must work on creating a "meeting" space to visualize (or sense out emotionally for those with aphantasia) and much of the work of developing safety and structure within comes from filling that space with comforts and generating communication between parts.

I'll talk more on the "conference table" in Season 4.

It is possible for those not going through therapy to create one outside of the context of a therapeutic alliance but the creation of one is an intentional act. Not something that comes free with your childhood trauma.

Elliot's trip to the inner-world keeps him from experiencing any of the beating that the body is receiving and at the end Mr. Robot earnestly says he only wanted to take the punches for Elliot, nothing more. Elliot falls against him, tearful and whimpers out "Thank you" before we are given the flashback of the day Edward picked up 9 year old Elliot from school after the fight and confesses his leukemia.

For the record, my heart swells every time I see Mr. Robot acting as a protector.

So, let's talk S2E9 and the "blending" incident.

Blending is what happens when two parts/alters are co-conscious and are present enough that they are sharing control of the body. It's an uncomfortable experience. Co-Consciousness means that more than one part/alter is actively perceiving the world at any given time.

It's more complicated than binary yes/no. Every one of these experiences exists on a spectrum and no two people with the condition experience it quite the same way but there are levels of presence that one has.

The following is me talking more from anecdotes and personal experience than textbooks. I like to be clear when I'm not being academic because I do not want to spread misinformation in my arbitrary analysis of TV shows that will get 20 notes on Tumblr Dot Com.

Front is to be driving the body, to have your inner monologue playing (if you have one, most people do, but it's not a given) and have your emotions interact with the nervous system if you are grounded enough to feel your experiences. As I said, it's a spectrum. Everyone gets dissociated at times and can just go into auto-pilot or a trance. That all still counts as being in front.

To be conscious but not front is to exist in an emotionally reactive state. If Fronting is driving then co-consciousness is to be in the passenger seat.

It's truly difficult to describe and my therapist doesn't even fully comprehend it despite her being the one who educates me on these topics. Presently as I type this I can only feel one of our system (5 parts) active and "with" me right now. She's not speaking but she's reacting. I can feel her apprehension to us typing this much about our personal life, little flits of paranoid thinking that we'll get anon-hate or that people from our former life will see this and judge us. It's a presence and exists on a gradient. She's "awake" right now but I do not consider her fully "co-con" because if I asked her to tell me what she thinks about this sentence I can feel an emotional reaction (apprehension) but not a direct answer akin to "I think you should edit out references to our journal and focus on talking about the show" (which is what I imagine she would say right now). That's the spectrum.

Closer to the front a part/alter is the more direct communication happens.

There's also "asleep" and "dormant" when they are unresponsive. Pretty self explanatory. Elliot's system has 5 parts(plus "friend") and until Season 4 we only really see Mr. Robot and the main character version of Elliot. Magda and Young Elliot show up in hallucinations in Season 1 and Young Elliot is co-con in Season 4. Magda never shows up outside of emotional flashbacks and the inner-world.

So after Elliot and Mr. Robot combine forces (though Mr. Robot is still working with the Dark Army and is trying to move in secret) they have moments where they rapidly switch and cannot keep straight who is fronting at any given time.

There's a scene where Elliot is in another room thinking to "friend" when he hears an argument in the next room and realizes Mr. Robot is in the argument. As he walks in, Mr. Robot is surprised to see that Elliot is aware when he is fronting and he trails off and they switch.

Mr. Robot says that something feels off about how they are acting and that they feel like they're overheating.

A later scene depicts Elliot phasing out mid-conversation on the subway and picturing himself in the next car observing Mr. Robot talking to Cisco while a passenger plays erratic music on a keyboard.

That is such a horrifyingly accurate depiction of something we live with that I was stunned to see it on screen. I've included it in some of my stories that go over living with these experiences but the idea is when we are stressed out, can't keep our head straight and are blended like this we tend to have snippets of music playing over and over in our head. We also get what I refer to as "static" and that seems to be relatable in support groups.

A++ for the show depicting something about the DID experience that simply does not get spoken about outside of the spaces of people dealing with it. It was the moment I knew they actually spoke to people who experience this stuff and did proper research that wasn't just media depictions and medical textbooks.

The final part of Season 2's wild ride I want to talk about is the "lucid dreaming" bit.

Mind awake. Body asleep. Mind awake. Body asleep.

This again goes into Overt DID which I cannot comment on as much as covert depictions but the idea is that Elliot trains himself to remain awake when Mr. Robot takes over. We have seen from the blending experience that he is starting to remain when Mr. Robot is active and so he tries to force himself to stay when Mr. Robot is active.

In therapy this would be achieved through trust, communication and awareness. It's said in communities that systems tend to become more overt as they go through treatment as they are able to identify lines, parts can advocate for themselves and there's better understanding of what "self" means for every alter.

In my experience there's also an element of trying to pretend to be consistent and whole. We were coming out transgender when our therapist guided us towards DID diagnosis and there was a lot of tearing ourselves apart because we needed to act in a certain way for our safety and inability to do so put us at risk of being targeted. In accepting our system we have stopped trying to be the same individual and that has lead to a more overt presentation. As I tell my therapist "we need to act out our gender expression anyway. Every action we take is a performance."

That is to say, Mr. Robot has never attempted to maintain the illusion that he is Elliot Alderson (albeit he never identifies himself. He's even surprised to learn that Elliot calls him that) and Elliot doesn't even know he is "The Mastermind".

In opting to remain hidden and conscious he gains a greater degree of control and agency in his situation.

These things get easier as you learn your condition, build system trust and allow yourself to experience that which you feel comfortable experiencing. With the example of the beating earlier, Mr. Robot shut Elliot out and took the beating for him and Elliot resisted but ultimately did not want to be present. In this episode he learns that if he wishes he could have pushed through and been there and experienced everything, albeit as a passenger rather than the driver.

Therapy also teaches how to "go into the back room" to maintain stability. A technique that lets you volunteer to not be involved in a situation. My system all use this whenever I (Dawn) perform erotic intimacy of any kind. They cannot handle the thought of associating with those acts and prior to treatment it would emotionally disregulate our nervous system if parts that couldn't handle the concept were to be present during those moments because parts of me would be trying to dissociate while I am trying to act. It would either trigger a switch, cause blending or make a part shut down and become unresponsive for a large period of time- one of our partners actually discovered our system this way. She saw us shut down during a scene and realized it wasn't just a "mood swing" as we had insisted.

Elliot learns how to intentionally open up and be present when Mr. Robot is active and because Plot happens he is shot and decides to use this skill to close himself off and create a stronger divide between parts.

Season 3: Rejection

If Season 2 was the pair working things out on a chess match where they keep one another in check then Season 3 is after Elliot has tossed the board and decided to shut Mr. Robot out completely.

The arc words are "battling in our own voids", in Season 1 Mr. Robot was always aware of what Elliot was doing but Elliot was unaware of Mr. Robot's actions and in Season 2 they were fairly co-conscious to the point of overheating. Season 3 the connection is shut down. Mr. Robot has no concept of what Elliot is doing and Elliot no concept of what Mr. Robot is doing.

This goes back to the Overt/Covert thing mentioned at the start. It's a rare thing even within a rare disorder to have that level of amnesia barriers between parts and so I can't really comment on accuracy. It's a frustrating season for me in that regard because Season 2 was doing so well at depicting something that I have lived through that going back to Fight Club tropes was fairly disappointing to me.

Season 3 is great by the way. It's a debate on if 3 or 4 is the best but it's close enough that there is a debate.

The real meat of the discussion, spare for the events of the final episode where they reconcile, is in how other people treat them and talk about their condition.

Angela Moss is Elliot's childhood best friend and also lost a parent to the disaster that claimed Edward Alderson's life. She discovered Elliot's condition during his breakdown in S1E8 and was brainwashed by the show villain Whiterose in S2E11 (I have a write-up of the psychological principals at play with the brainwashing here).

In Season 3 she acts as Elliot/Mr. Robot's handler and is responsible for helping Mr. Robot continue his hacktivist terrorism without Elliot finding out. She betrays Elliot and exploits his condition. She also tells people about it without his knowledge or consent, which is pretty fucking monstrous in my eyes.

Don't out a person. Just don't do it.

When Mr. Robot asks how she can tell who she's talking to she responds "Your eyes. You're never trying to look away." which is accurate enough that I messaged my girlfriend to be sappy and grateful towards her as the first time she noticed our condition she told me it was our eyes.

From a 2022 IM chat, shared with permission:

"it's ... well, it's [...] your eyes soften, kind of, when going to Cammie. Dawn has this piercing gaze, like she's looking right into my heart and soul. Camden is just very alert, noticing so many things but not the level of piercing. Cammie... her gaze is softer. More focused, but in a ... drinking everything in, rather than seeking it out sort of way"

and added today when I asked for permission to share the quote:

"(for the record, Craig draws his eyebrows down in a particular way that makes his gaze intense in a good way)"

The show works as hard as it can to never let the audience wonder who they are seeing on screen at any time. Most scenes where Rami Malek is depicting Mr. Robot it is a brief perspective view to remind us what the other characters are seeing before switching back to Christian Slater playing the character. There are a few scenes which involve Rami playing the character for a full sequence. One is the context for a flashback where we see a scene Slater performed through another character's eyes where they see Malek.

The others usually involve us being in Darlene's perspective to highlight her unease and uncertainty of what is happening with her brother.

The only scene where it is ever treated as a surprise is when Darlene plants a bug on Elliot's computer while staying overnight and is roughly interrogated by "Elliot", only to realize midway through the conversation "Jesus. It's you".

The camera cuts back to reveal it has been Mr. Robot the entire scene. They avoid that trick throughout the show so it has large impact when it actually happens.

I feel like that scene (as well as the scene where Elliot wears the real Mr. Robot jacket and gives birth to the 2 Stage plan to take down Evil Corp) are important for reminding that no matter how differently Malek and Slater play their roles, to an outside observer they are the same person and when he acts "out of character" it could easily just be an emotional outburst.

Incidentally you can see the physicality of the acting if you go back and watch it again.

The end of the season has Elliot, betrayed, alone and terrified for the safety of his sister; finally reach out to Mr. Robot and open a dialogue.

He even goes out of his way to have this discussion on the Ferris Wheel at Coney Island both as a Season 1 callback and as a sign of trust. Elliot admits in this conversation that he missed Mr. Robot while he shut him out and wants him to be part of his life and in the season finale Mr. Robot says that he wants the two of them to keep talking.

Elliot also finds out that the window incident wasn't his dad pushing him out of a window. They jumped. Elliot asks in a kind and soft way to Mr. Robot, representing both his protector and an element of the loving father he wished he had, "did you know?"

Mr. Robot, the one who jumped. The one who wanted to protect Elliot from Edward says nothing. But he finally feels an alliance form with Elliot.

The road to healing finally has opened.

Season 4: Integration and Fusion

So let's address the elephant in the room right away. The show uses the word "real" to describe the Elliot who existed before the show started and considers him to be the only legitimate alter. There is enough wiggle room within the show to think that is in-universe ignorance but the show does nothing to prevent the fumble at the finish line.

I want to say upfront and before I start dissecting this season that outdated models of DID believed that there was a crack formed in a person's sense of self and that healing involved restoring the identity prior to the crack.

This is 100% UNTRUE and it upsets me that people once believed it. DID is formed in childhood during a time of a person's life (between ages 4-9) where the child is taking in data from their surroundings and integrating it into their socialized survival mechanics to form a personality. The child is working out what traits it can exhibit to receive nurture, care and protection from other humans and will adapt to those processes. Attachment Theory goes into greater detail about how this relates to the formation of psychological disorders, especially personality disorders.

For a traumatized child they will find that their environments do not offer consistent and reliable safety and thus they are unable to adapt to a version of their reality where they are able to maintain stable safety. This may be horrifying forms of physical, emotional and sexual abuse placed upon a child and is often depicted as such but it can also be a confused child trying to get affection from a cold and distant parent or having a parent who abuses alcohol and becomes inconsistent in their ability to give affection and care. Child psychology is a heavy and depressing field, sadly.

The result is that the child never forms a permanent sense of identity. This is a large factor in the formation of Borderline Personality Disorder and is why DID and BPD are so often thrown together within medical treatment and diagnosis. It's at the point of which when my therapist gave me our diagnosis she presented a clinical list of "myths" regarding DID and "BPD is the same thing as DID" was 5 on the list of 6.

The point of this detour is to say that there is no original self. A person who has DID never managed to form a stable sense of identity in childhood and thus they find themselves acting as chameleons in their day-to-day life, adapting to what they feel they need to become in order to receive the things they need from their surroundings. It's why there is a stigma in the BPD community over the concept of being "manipulative". In reality people with that condition are unconsciously adapting to their environment as a survival mechanism. With DID the added layer of dissociation is there to help the self function even when they are forced to interact with materials that are incompatible with their ability to function.

Pre-show Elliot was living a fairly comfortable life but his emotional needs were not met and at the time he was alienated from his sister. He was miserable and lived in a society that he felt was crumbling. His daydreaming gave birth to "The Mastermind" to remove the threats from his reality and Mr. Robot who had been there all along went into Protective Sicko Mode and decided to expedite the process in a way only a protector's morality could.

We'll get into system roles a little later.

The point is that day-to-day life Elliot (Janina Fisher's book "Healing the Fragmented Self" refers to the part untouched by trauma as the "going about daily life" part) is not Real. He is not The Original. Those terms do not exist and are meaningless in this space.

True/Real/Orignal-Elliot is as much a construct as Mr. Robot. He's a version of Elliot who does not have to think about the trauma, he can just live a happy normal life. The kind that Elliot speaks often and derisively about in Season 1.

With that out of the way, I'm going to ignore the bad use of language and talk only about what is depicted on the screen and not said out loud. Because if you remove the misconception about real/original from the mixture, this is a perfect depiction of final fusion model healing.

Season 4 introduces us to the conference table in the inner world. A conference table is a therapeutic technique used in trauma therapy where you bring the alters/parts to a conference. The idea is that it needs to be a neutral ground where everyone is comfortable and able to share their thoughts and ideas. With practice it can be a space one can close their eyes and imagine, seeing their system and allowing communication to happen between parts.

Mine is based on the Minerals Gallery in the Natural History Museum in London. I refer to it as The Library. You didn't need to know that but I didn't want to discuss this section without mentioning it.

Elliot's is the conference room in Evil Corp where he and Tyrell spoke in the first episode.

Interestingly enough there are only 4 seats in this set. I'm not sure what the implication is here as in the scene depicted above Magda (Persecutor Alter) is scolding Young Elliot (Child Alter) for sitting in a chair that isn't his. They mention all 3 alters who are not present (Elliot, Mr. Robot and The Other One).

My thought is that this is the show going all in on the idea that Elliot ("Real") is not an alter and does not take a seat at the table. Which I have issues with.

I'll note as I did with the inner-world that this is a therapy technique and not something Elliot would just have in his mind. It's an accurate depiction of DID treatment but Elliot isn't being treated for DID. Krista is no way near close enough to be able to help Elliot. She's wonderful and deserves the world and more for how she handles things in this season but she's in the pre-stabilization phase of therapy where she knows more than Elliot is willing to accept and needs to wait for him to come around.

Speaking of Krista. Episode 7 is the greatest hour of television rivaled only by Ozymandias from Breaking Bad and the M*A*S*H finale. At present it has a 9.9 on IMDB.

The episode is structured as a bottle episode in way of a 5 act play depicting the stages of grief. This is the episode where Elliot peels back to dissociative layers and understands the truth. The truth of what his father did.

I won't type it.

I don't need to.

The next episode involves Elliot seeing Young Elliot and following him to a museum exhibit with a model of Manhattan. In Season 1 when Elliot had his psychotic break after realizing Darlene is his sister Darlene and Angela checked this location stating it was a place he used to go in times of crisis.

It turns out when he was young Elliot hid the key to his bedroom here to prevent Edward from getting in. All these years later adult Elliot (or "The Mastermind" if you prefer, which I do not) discovers it and has a heart-to-heart with his younger self, screaming into the emptiness that he's sorry for not protecting him. Sorry for letting him get hurt.

The scene is lit in the golden hues that symbolize safety in this show. The final season also takes place during Christmas in New York so it gets to show off that color palette more often which is great for symbolism and aesthetic.

Young Elliot shows that the act of hiding the key from their father was protecting him. It was fighting back. Sometimes surviving is the best you can do and you need to forgive yourself for not being able to do more.

God I love this show so much.

That episode ends with the scene I most want to just overtly show off to an audience.

youtube

I already loved the show. The final episode may have broken my heart a little with its talk of "Real" but this scene? This scene gets it.

Prior to the above video clip Mr. Robot cautiously approaches and says "Hey, kiddo". Something he always says. It's who he is. Regardless of anything else he, Mr. Robot, is designed from the father Elliot wishes he had and when he hears Mr. Robot-- no Edward's voice he tenses up in terror, allowing the above scene to take place with Mr. Robot so scared that he has failed as a protector by allowing Elliot to remember and that he cannot be there for him any longer because of who he is based off of.

Those with the condition commonly create alters who are based on the traits of those in the child's life at the time the symptoms developed. I... have experience.

The lines I want to focus on the most are:

Mr Robot: If I could go back in time and change everything that happened to you... just make it all go away...

Elliot: Then I wouldn't be me... *He turns to finally look at Mr. Robot* ...and I wouldn't have you.

The final arc of the show is where the "Mastermind" twist takes center stage and Elliot enters his inner-world and finds out that he created a peaceful reality for "Real" Elliot to exist in so that he is unharmed by the horrors of the world that is crumbling in reality. Mr. Robot, as a protector, wanted to expedite the whole hack and destruction of capitalism in order to rescue "Real" Elliot from the inner-world prison. In time he came to accept "Mastermind" as a part of the whole and not a rogue alter who was endangering the body and their "Host".

S4E13 lays it all down. An imagined version of Krista speaks directly to Elliot and explains the system and their functions. Mr. Robot a father and protector who could prevent Elliot from intolerable situations. Magda, a persecutor who blamed Elliot for the abuse. Young Elliot, who Elliot could push the traumatic situations on, a common thing that many do unconsciously in CPTSD situations, dissociating from the person the trauma happened to, disconnecting until they are just another version of self.

Elliot then says "I guess she doesn't know about you." referring to us, the audience.

Krista(*) looks into the camera and addresses us directly, calling us the voyeurs who pretend we're not a part of it even though we have been here for it all. She even claims we are on her side in getting "Mastermind" to accept he is a constructed personality who was there to lash out at the society that caused him so much pain.

"You loved him so much you wanted to keep him safe, no matter the cost."

The episode ends with "Mastermind" Elliot waking up in a hospital and reuniting with Darlene only to realize that she has known the entire time that the person we have been following throughout the show wasn't her "real" brother.

...and god damn it I hate this element of the show so much.

I'll accept that they had very little time to clean things up and needed to get a way to have Mastermind agree to the fusion. I'll even demonize Darlene and say she was being selfish and ignorant in saying something hurtful because she missed the version of her brother that existed before Fsociety.

But Our version of Elliot says that he loves her and she doesn't reply. Her disappointment and resignation causes Our Elliot to go back inside and agree to the fusion.

The show ends in a first person perspective of Darlene seeing her "real" brother wake up and that's it. I'm glad we never actually see "Real" Elliot, that feels fitting.

Here's the thing about that last minute fumble though.

Let's talk about Integration and Fusion. They are different things.

Integration is when dissociative barriers come down. The system is stabilized to the point of which the alters are capable of communicating openly, sharing thoughts, memories and experiences and every part has the ability to opt in or out as life goes on.

"Functional Multiplicity" is what happens when a system is in harmony, no memories are being withheld and the system is able to go about everyday life with minimal disruption or disregulation. It is a valid goal for trauma therapy and there's a decent amount of medical stigma around it being used as the goal and not a step towards the goal. Many clinicians prioritize the appearance of normalcy over the function of the individual(s).

Fusion is when you go the extra step and take this communication and sharing of memory and experience and as you tore down the dissociative barriers you tear away the division between parts.

A system is made up of parts that make up a whole person and Fusion is the process of all parts uniting to "become" that whole person. It is a valid and normal goal for treatment. It shouldn't be held up as the only legitimate method of healing but it shouldn't be demonized for being an option. I say this because I have seen some people in support communities get real upset when the topic comes up.

The final sequence of the show, prior to Elliot opening his eyes, involves the system at the inner-world conference table agreeing to go through with it and walking towards a cinema screen. Elliot says this will only work if we go too.

The family (and audience) sit down in the movie theatre and memories flood onto the screen and pour out until all experiences and emotions are shared in one pool and Elliot Alderson opens his eyes with all 5(+audience) alters fused into one.

It was almost perfect if only Darlene hadn't have rejected the "not real" brother.

The cinema screen projecting memories, all the thoughts and experiences being shared as the Alderson System accept their parts in the whole and agree to the process? It was a beautiful visualization of a healing journey.

There are imperfect moments here and there. There are great moments I skipped over such as S3E8 (I'm not up for talking about Self-Deletion today) but all in all it's the best depiction of DID for a main character we'll likely get on TV. It's a whole and complete narrative and I love it so much. It makes me feel seen.

#dawn posting #mr robot #dissociative identity disorder #elliot alderson #did #plurality #domo arigato mr alderson #media myself and i #watch me post my trauma in public #Youtube #media essays

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