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artificialcharisma · 2 years

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The Linked Universe Fandom and Trauma

It's a pretty common theme among fanfiction to explore topics of trauma. Who doesn't like to see the aftermath of dramatic events and life-threatening danger, which are so commonly shown in fiction?

On top of that, fandoms are very neurodiverse spaces, filled with many who have experienced trauma themselves. Using fiction to explore your own experiences is usually more healthy than other methods, but I've noticed that throughout those fandoms, and especially a small one like the LU fandom, the approaches to exploring PTSD range from nuanced and insightful to horrendously tone-deaf and inappropriate.

What's going on here?

(This essay is written by six people. We’ll mention events and feelings from our pasts, say we have a certain disorder/condition, and use I and we interchangeably—this warning is in case you began reading this and thought it was written by one person who was collecting mental and physical illnesses like infinity stones. Also, if you’d like to avoid the child abuse tag, we’ve put markers where the child abuse section begins and ends in bold.

Writers:

@artificialcharisma

@deuynndoodles

@wakingwinds

and three people who wished to remain anonymous.)

Part A. The Legend of Zelda: Abuse of the Child

(child abuse section begins)

What IS it with people and making the 7 year old a soldier?

Seriously. If you've read fics around this fandom, you know the amount of fics with Wild as a child soldier is mad high.

The story of BOTW is vague, which leaves a lot of room for speculation on backstory. A popular headcanon is that Link pulled the Master Sword at a young age and was raised as a knight since then.

You see a lot of child abuse in these fics. From his father, from Rhoam, from Zelda, name any character and they’ve probably yelled at him for not being good enough.

Someone portraying their child abuse is perfectly fine. Fanfiction, and by extension, writing in general, is a healthy space to explore your trauma.

These topics aren’t always done by people who are venting, though. These fics, usually written by someone who is only writing child abuse for the sake of angst, read like a morbid fascination with the concept of suffering—which is especially strange when applied to children.

Another thing to note is the way that many authors tend to reduce character's ages in a way to make their trauma seem "more credible", when in fact, any trauma is credible.

Let's take a look at the Hero of Time, the epitome of a child soldier.

It doesn't come off the same way authors depict Wild, and a key reason is this: It's fundamental to the story. If removed, you lose the lessons Ocarina of Time teaches you. In Wild's case, the only reason for the child soldier plotline is to gain sympathy points.

In Ocarina of Time, Link is a kid just coming into his childhood, and is immediately given full responsibility for something he didn't deserve to take responsibility for. He plays as an adult, and after the Master Sword, becomes an adult in other peoples' eyes. We, as the player, know this isn't the truth.

Link is given an adult role and by the end of the story, he is by most definitions, an adult, and becomes a child in body yet again and the cycle continues.

This is what's so interesting about Ocarina of Time—It’s what makes its story compelling.

Link being young is important to the themes of the story, and the trauma isn't the key focus. If it was removed, OOT wouldn't make sense.

Does Wild being 15 instead of 17 affect the story in any way? The objective answer is no. No, it doesn't.

(child abuse section ends)

Let's return to Wild and how his trauma affects the way fans view him.

Let me frame out a part of a fic for you: after an unexpected event, by accident or on purpose, Wild reveals his devastating backstory. The responses range from appalled to protective to altogether aghast at how someone so young could have undergone such a thing. Cue the comfort. Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

It's a fine sequence, but the tone and sometimes even the direct phrasing with which it's written often frames Wild as an incredibly admirable and strong individual who is /perfect as he is./

Let me frame out another fic concept: panic attacks, a popular topic in the hurt/comfort tag. Wild panics, someone comforts him, he reveals his tragic past, and—he gets up and is perfectly fine afterwards.

Besides having the occasional panic attack, flashback, and nightmare, Wild is sociable, kind, friendly. Ultimately, he's just the kind of person you would want to be.

However, when characters have an incredibly tragic backstory, experience only the most loud and attention-attracting symptoms of mental illness, and act completely unaffected and normal afterwards, is it really a portrayal of trauma, or is it just an excuse for angst?

Not only does this lead to the character being seen as unlikeable to those who do have personal experience with trauma, but it also gives those fics less of an emotional impact.

Part B. The Legend of Trauma: Asshole Pass

How much trauma gives you the green light to be rude and take it out on others?

Trick question. The answer is none. Trauma is a justification that can influence whether you will be forgiven, but in no way is a free pass that makes your actions right.

Legend has been through 6 adventures, so if there’s anyone who wins the completely arbitrary trophy of Most Numerous Trauma, it’s him.

One of the most common LU characterizations is that Legend Is An Asshole, which is kind of strange, because he absolutely is not in canon. He’s protective over his items and makes fun of people, but he is not a jerk. (This seems to be a running remark, the way that authors will demean one of the Links to one personality trait and one personality trait only.)

There’s no shorter way to say it than that. Writing Legend as a jerk who doesn’t need to apologize sends a similar message to the readers—that if they have a good enough “excuse,” they can get off scot-free, too.

In fics that center around him, his actions can come off as tone-deaf at best and downright cruel at worst, but it’s justified because he’s traumatized. Furthermore, it comes off like it’s more justified because he’s more traumatized. That’s not how it works.

Fanfiction is a place where people can write whatever they want. But what these authors tend to disregard is that other people can also read what you write. A lot of these readers are young and don’t have other mental health resources that talk about what they may be going through.

From when I was 13 to 17, I was an avid reader of fanfiction and also had issues in my family life. Because no other source discussed what people do in these situations, I thought the authors on Ao3 knew it better.

Fanfiction is obviously not a good source of information on mental illness, and we recommend that absolutely nobody use it as their resource on what is or isn’t acceptable, but we ask you to remember who your audience is.

When you subject young readers to these incorrect portrayals of mental illness, you might end up dictating how they view neurodivergence—-and when someone who’s reading has what you are portraying, they might see themselves in a negative light.

Fics that end in tragedy due to a character having a condition, leaving no hope for the character to recover or achieve their goals leave the reader in the same state too.

I’ll reiterate: Projection is fine, it’s just that when authors who don’t have the illness they’re portraying join in on the party, it starts to seem less like a creator expressing their feelings and more like a person using other people’s suffering as a form of angst.

Veering a little to the side to get to Wild, for a second—-in one of the most recent updates (depending on when you’re reading this) he made… a mistake! How terrible. Parts of the fandom decided that he was either A. Possessed by Dark Link, because Wild could never make a mistake, and it’s just not in his nature to, or B. He was terrible, annoying, and should get beat up by Four.

(I will admit, the Four jokes were pretty funny.)

With both these interpretations claiming that Wild lashing out was evil, the problem we’re discussing here is shown in full.

Wasn’t Wild lashing out due to his trauma?

This is what the fandom supposedly wanted: a correct portrayal of PTSD. The fandom’s idea of PTSD is less than correct, though, and an unromanticizable symptom isn’t forgivable.

Fanfiction is, by nature, self-indulgent, and rarely do people want to indulge in the ugly.

Part C. The Legend of The Other Ones I Guess

The Hero of the Skies. Everybody’s beloved soft and lazy boi.

And that's pretty much all he is, it seems.

Ignoring the flat characterization Sky goes through, there's still issues. Namely, chronic illness, and the way it is portrayed through him.

When you depict the only "lazy" character as someone with chronic illness, it reiterates the stereotype that neurodivergent and chronically ill people are lazy.

As an example, when I was on crutches, experiencing chronic fatigue, and asked for a quick favor, I was told to do it myself, even though they would have a much easier time doing it—like I was capable of completing the task, but I just didn’t want to do it.

It gets tiring after a certain point, and to see a fictional character that is called lazy by other people be tagged the chronically ill trait feels demeaning.

I don’t think it’s not a fun thing to explore, though—-I find it interesting to see, but there's a problem when it's only Sky. (I will admit, this is moreso a societal issue where 'lazy' and 'chronically ill' seem to go together, but that's not the point.)

You’re stuck between a rock and a hard place: thinking of Sky as lazy when he’s mentioned to be chronically ill, or thinking of Sky as chronically ill when he’s mentioned to be lazy.

When you’re able-bodied and/or neurotypical, it’s easy to fall back on stereotypes, and you need to think about why you think a character is disabled. If you’re allistic, why do you headcanon a robot as autistic? If you’re able-bodied, why do you headcanon the “lazy” character as chronically ill?

Another common “trait” people will give Sky is asthma, but I've always found this hard to follow.

As he grows up above the clouds (where we all know the air gets thinner as you go up) his body is already familiar with the strain.

Once he goes down to the surface, it would be noticeably easier to breathe—this is supported by real life children who grow up in high altitudes, who have to acclimate to high air pressure as they descend and, notably, still have to acclimate to the low levels of oxygen when they return, as well.

Instead, I propose chronic altitude sickness—commonly short bouts of illness related to changing altitudes without time to acclimate. This is both accurate and more interesting to read.

Sky is also often portrayed as having narcolepsy, a disorder with many stereotypes. Because it’s something even the medical field doesn’t know much about, it leads to people without narcolepsy who want to depict it in their fic thinking they don’t need to put research into it.

Narcolepsy is, in fact, incredibly complicated—I have narcolepsy, having fully gone through the long diagnostic process and everything and there's still things even I don’t understand about it.

To clear up any misconceptions: Narcolepsy is not a “falls asleep at random” disorder. Narcolepsy is a disorder of a person's sleep cycles, specifically REM sleep, as the brain is unable to regulate when the sleep cycles happen.

This can cause things like excessive daytime sleepiness, disrupted nighttime sleep, sleep paralysis, hallucinations, having your brain be stuck in autopilot, (meaning your body keeps moving after your brain tells it to stop) and if you have Narcolepsy Type-1, cataplexy.

I won’t go too in-depth, though. I am not a doctor. I just know what my sleep specialist has told me. Please do your own research and talk to people who have this condition (and if you don’t know anyone, you know me now! @wakingwinds on tumblr—I don’t bite, I promise).

Narcolepsy is not cute, or fun, or something you can use as a tool for angst. Narcolepsy is real. I and many others suffer from it daily. I love the idea of Sky with narcolepsy, but only when it’s done right.

The Hero of the Four Sword. The least popular LU character (at least in terms of fics), and the subject of some pretty heavy discourse.

The writer of this section is a system, and I am speaking to the singlets of the Linked Universe fandom. There are a couple things I want to touch on here, and hopefully, I will be able to better educate people who want to learn.

First off, Four. Specifically, singlets portraying him with DID.

DID is something that has a lot of stereotypes and misconceptions even within the psych field, which is something I won’t get into here, but it’s safe to say that if you want to portray it properly you’re going to need to be very careful.

In my opinion, I don’t think singlets should write Four with DID.

The fact of the matter is that Four… doesn’t have DID. Four’s plurality was caused by a magic sword, not trauma. You can write Four as plural without giving them DID, which avoids issues with an accurate portrayal.

Obviously, you still shouldn’t use pluralphobic stereotypes (the “evil alter”, among others), but I would hope that’s a given. Once again, this is my personal opinion. There are probably going to be systems who disagree with me on this, and I am absolutely open to hearing their thoughts on the subject in a constructive conversation.

If you’re a singlet who wants to write Four with DID, I’m not going to stop you, even though in my opinion, this subject should be left to systems to write on their own if they want to.

So, how can you do it right?

Talk to systems. Every system will have vastly different experiences, so if you can it’s best to talk to multiple, but not everyone knows that many systems (and if you don’t know any at all, once again, you know me now. @wakingwinds on tumblr etc etc).

Make sure you do research into the real life experiences of real systems, not just what some singlets have boiled it down to. Systemhood is a very varied experience, so in all honesty, as long as you aren’t being actively harmful and talk to some systems about your portrayal it’s not too hard to do it right.

The second topic I wanted to touch on is how all of you as singlets can make this community more welcoming to the systems in it. I personally have had some incredibly bad experiences in this fandom directly related to being a system, and I know I’m not the only system who’s dealt with the same thing.

First off, even though the whole idea of multiple people sharing a body may seem “weird” or “unrealistic” to you, we do exist.

Do not assume a system you know is faking. You don’t know them, you are not their therapist, you are not inside their head, and quite frankly, it is none of your business. Especially as a singlet. Just let systems exist. It doesn’t matter if you think introjects are “cringy” or think that everyone on the internet is faking for attention. It’s not your place.

Treat introjects like real people, not characters, because that’s what they are. Some introjects may be similar to their source, some are entirely detached from it, but at the end of the day they are a real person. Not roleplay.

Next, have pluralkit and/or tupperbox in your servers! These bots are used by many systems to proxy as themselves, with their own names and profile pictures. I know for me, it is so incredibly validating to be able to proxy as myself in a server instead of having to mask as our collective singletsona, and the rest of my system feels the same.

None of them want to have to pretend to be me, so in servers without pluralkit they feel alienated – like they can’t talk at all.

Ask the systems you know about their boundaries. Everyone has a different experience, and they will want to be treated differently. Do they want to all be treated as separate people? Cool! Do they all consider themselves facets of the same person? Also cool!

Ask about what language they prefer and most of all, be respectful. A little bit of kindness and an attempt at understanding goes a long way. And hey, if you really want to help make the community more of a safe space, call out the pluralphobia you see in other singlets.

Listen to systems and boost their voices. Stay out of any system related discourse/drama. And most of all, just be nice to people.

The Hero of Time.

Something I've noticed is how many people seem to interpret Time as a stoic, stern heroic figure. There's nothing wrong with this interpretation, but there's something I find lacking about it.

Let's look at the fanon interpretation of Mask, before we get into Time.

Mask is commonly used in Hyrule Warriors fics or as a younger, teenage version of Time. He is typically jaded, angsty, angry and snarky—and I enjoy seeing such characterizations, since it's a realistic way to lash out from trauma. Said fics also explore the consequences of his 'angsty teenager' actions, which is also great.

Now, let's remember that Time canonically has a form of support in Malon, and perhaps other characters we haven't met. While, yes, he can be stony and stoic at times, that's not all he is.

He opens up, he lets himself show his emotions to others, talks about what makes him happy. All things Mask doesn't do—because he has had time to heal from his trauma.

Not to say he isn't perfect. Of course he makes mistakes, of course his trauma hasn't up and disappeared. But he's learned how to be himself again.

I notice in fics where Time is this epitome of a stoic, heroic figure; it feels like his efforts have been erased, like he's still stewing in his trauma. This feels like we're reducing him to a character archetype (which is fine, as long as that's not all it is) and erasing what makes him such an interesting character.

We all create art to indulge and enjoy sharing our creations with others, and that's completely fine—encouraged, even.

However, something we must always keep in mind is the fact that while fiction isn't reality, they are symbiotic and affect each other drastically. Propaganda takes example of this by influencing peoples' minds through content, even fictional content. The word may have a negative context, but it can apply to anything—even this essay!

When you write fiction, you must remember that if you share it with other people, the information in it will subconsciously ingrain in their minds.

And when said information is stigmatized, stereotyped, or puts off incorrect ideas of trauma and how to heal, it can hurt many people.

Disabled people are not your tools for angst.

You don't have to take everything to heart here, but we ask that you at least take a second to think critically about yourself and the things you read.

That's all.

#linkeduniverse #tw child abuse #lu wild #wild linkeduniverse #lu legend #legend linkeduniverse #lu four #four linkeduniverse #lu sky #sky linkeduniverse #lu time #time linkeduniverse

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