#Abusing actor | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

wilwheaton · 9 months

Text

When you watch The Curse, you are watching two children who were abused and exploited daily during production. No adults protected us.

This was originally published on my blog in August, 2022.

I had a wonderful time at Steel City Comicon this weekend. It was my first time at this particular con, so I didn’t know there was such a huge contingent of horror fans, creators, and vendors who attend.

I love horror, and I was pretty psyched to be in the same place as John Carpenter and Tom Savini, across the street from the Dawn of the Dead mall. Pittsburgh feels like one of the places horror was invented, at least to me.

A number of these horror fans came to see me, and asked me to sign posters and other things from a movie my parents forced me to do when I was 13, called The Curse. I had to tell each of these people that I would not sign anything associated with that movie, because I was abused and exploited during production. The time I spent on that film remains the most traumatizing time of my life, and though I am a 50 year-old man, just typing this now makes my hands shake with remembered fear of a 13 year-old boy who nobody protected, and the absolute fury the 50 year-old man feels toward the people who hurt him.

I told this story in Still Just A Geek, and I’ve talked about it in some podcasts I did on the promo tour, but I’ve never put it out in public like this, in its entirety.

I suspect someone at the publisher would prefer I tease this and hope it drives book sales from people who want to read all of it, but I honestly don’t want to have another weekend like this one where everything is awesome, except the few times people who have no idea (and why should they) put that fucking poster in front of me, and all the fear, abandonment, and trauma come flooding back as I tell them that I won’t sign it, and why.

To their credit, each person was as horrified as they should have been, told me they had no idea (if they didn’t read my book why would they), and quickly put the poster away. They were all understanding. I am grateful for that.

But I really don’t need to tell this story over and over again, so here it is, with a child abuse and exploitation content warning, so I can just tell people to Google it.

After Stand by Me, everything changed. The attention from entertainment journalists, casting directors, and especially teen magazines came pouring in. The movie was a generational hit, beloved by critics and audiences alike, and every single one of us could pick anything to do next.

River’s parents and his agent got him Mosquito Coast, with Harrison Ford, as his next movie. I also auditioned for the role, but I knew even then that River was going to book the job. He was perfect, and I’d have to wait a little bit for my opportunity to come along.

I went on a lot of theatrical auditions after Stand by Me. I had tons of meetings with directors and the heads of casting at every major studio. It was all a very big deal, and I felt like we were all looking for something really special and amazing as my follow-up to Stand by Me.

At some point, a couple of producers contacted my agent with an offer to play one of the leads in an adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space.” The script was titled The Farm. (It would, of course, be changed when the film was released).

I read it. I did not like it. It was a shitty horror movie, and I saw that right away. It was the sort of thing you rented on Friday when the new release you wanted was already out of the store.

My mother, already an incredibly manipulative person, used every tool at her disposal to change my mind. My father threatened me, mocked me, told me “It’s your decision” when it clearly wasn’t. It was all so weird; I didn’t understand why they cared so much.

I told my parents I didn’t like it and didn’t want to do it. I clearly recall thinking it was a piece of shit that would hurt my career.

It wasn’t the first thing that had come our way that I wanted to pass on, and every other time, it hadn’t been a very big deal.

Sidebar: I was cast in Twilight Zone: The Movie, in 1983. The film tells four stories, and I was cast as the kid who can wish people into cartoonland. It was a GREAT role, in a movie I still love. (Note that Twilight Zone had four directors. One of them got three people killed. The segment I was cast in was not that one. I mention this because too many people zero in on this to deflect from what this whole thing is actually about.)

But I was CONVINCED by my parochial school teacher that if I worked on The Twilight Zone, which she had determined was satanic, I would go to hell. (This woman and her bullshit played a big role in my conversion to atheism at a young age, but when she told me that, I was all-in on the supernatural story they taught us in religion class.) I was so scared, more scared than I’d ever been to that point in my life, I cried and wailed and begged my parents to not make me do the movie. And I never told them why, because I was afraid my dad would laugh at me for being weak and afraid. My agent tried to talk me into it, and I wouldn’t budge. It’s the only thing I deeply and truly regret passing on, and I really hate I made that choice for such a stupid reason.

Okay. Back to The Curse.

This time, when I told them how much I hated it, they wouldn’t listen to me. My mother, already an incredibly manipulative person, used every tool at her disposal to change my mind. My father threatened me, mocked me, told me “It’s your decision” when it clearly wasn’t. It was all so weird; I didn’t understand why they cared so much.

That is, until they made me take a meeting with the producers of the movie, in their giant conference room on the top floor of a tall building in Hollywood. All I remember about this place was that it was huge; the table was way too big for the five of us who spread around it, and there were floor-to-ceiling windows on three of the walls, but the room was still dark. There was a weird optical illusion in the center of the table, this thing they sold in the Sharper Image catalog, made from two reflective dishes with a hole in the top of one. You placed an object in the bottom of the bottom dish, and it made it look like that object was floating above the whole thing. They had a plastic spider in it. What a strange detail for me to remember, but it’s as clear in my memory as if I were sitting in that room right now.

One man, who I presumed was the executive producer, was European or Middle Eastern (I didn’t know the difference then, he was just Not Like People I Knew), and I was instantly afraid of him. He was intimidating, and seemed like a person who got what he wanted.

So we sat there, my father who didn’t give a shit about me, my mother who was cosplaying as someone with experience, and me, thirteen years old, awkward as fuck, and scared to death.

I don’t remember what they said to me in their pitch or anything other than how uncomfortable and anxious I was to even be in that room. I tried so hard to be grown up and mature, but I — and my parents — was way out of my depth. I’d done one big movie and that was it. We didn’t have my agent with us, who had lots of experience and would have known what questions to ask.

No, in place of my experienced agent, my mother had decided she was going to be my manager, and she tackled the responsibility with an enthusiasm that was only matched by her absolute incompetence and inability to go toe-to-toe with producers the way my agent did. She was outwitted, out-thought, and outmaneuvered at every turn.

“You don’t have a choice,” my father commanded. “You are doing this movie.”

So we sat there, my father who didn’t give a shit about me, my mother who was cosplaying as someone with experience, and me, thirteen years old, awkward as fuck, and scared to death.

At some point, this man, who is represented in my memory by big Jim Jones sunglasses under dark hair above an open collar, said, “We are offering you a hundred thousand dollars and round-trip travel for your whole family. We will cast your sister, Amy, to play your sister in the movie.”

It all made sense, now. I was only thirteen, but I knew my parents were pushing me so hard because this company was offering me — them, really — more money than I’d ever imagined I’d earn in my life, much less a single job.

I knew that the right thing to do, the smart thing to do, was to say no. There would be other opportunities, and it was stupid to cash myself out of feature films for what I thought was, in the grand scheme of things, not very much money.

It’s incredible to me that I knew all of this. It’s incredible to me that I could see all these things, plainly and clearly, and my parents couldn’t (or, more likely, chose not to).

So after this man made his offer, all the adults in the room ganged up on me, selling me HARD on this movie.

My mother said, “Don’t you want your sister to have the same opportunities you’ve had? Wouldn’t it be fun and exciting to go to Rome? Think of all the history!”

The experience was awful. It was the worst experience I have ever had on a set in my life, by every single metric. The movie is awful, and it is the embarrassment I knew it would be.

I don’t think about this very often, because it’s super upsetting to me. Right now, I’m so angry at my parents for subjecting me and my sister to this entire experience. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

In that moment, I felt bullied and trapped. All these adults were talking to me at the same time, and I just wanted it to stop. I just wanted to go home and get out of this room. I just wanted to go be a kid, so I did what I’d learned to do to survive: I gave in and did what my parents wanted.

The experience was awful. It was the worst experience I have ever had on a set in my life, by every single metric. The movie is awful, and it is the embarrassment I knew it would be.

But here’s the thing: when you watch The Curse, you are watching two children, me and my sister, who were abused on a daily basis. The production did not follow a single labor law. They worked us for twelve hours a day, on multiple film units (while I work on First unit, second unit sets up and waits for me. When I should get a break to rest, they send me to Second unit, then to Third unit, then back to First unit. I was 13.) without any breaks, five days a week. I was exhausted the entire time. I was inappropriately touched by two different adults during production. I knew it was wrong, but I was so scared and ashamed, and I felt so unsupported, I didn’t tell anyone. I knew my dad wouldn’t believe me, and my mother would blame me. Anything to keep the production happy, that’s what she did. That was more important to her than the health and safety of her children. The director was coked out of his mind most of the time, incompetent, and so busy fucking or trying to fuck one of the women in the cast, he was worse than useless. He was a fading actor who was cosplaying as a director, as in over his head as my mother. My sister and I were never safe. Instead of harmless atmospheric SFX smoke, they set hay on fire in barrels and blew actual smoke onto the set. They took buckets of talc, broken wood, bits of wallpaper and plaster, and threw it into my face during a scene inside the collapsing house. My sister is in a scene where she goes to get eggs from some chickens, and they attack her. So they hired Lucio Fulci, the Italian horror master, to direct her sequence. His idea, which everyone was totally on board with, was to throw chickens at my sister. Live chickens, live roosters, live birds. Just throw them at a nine-year-old girl. Oh, and then tie them to her arms and legs so they’ll peck her. All of this happened under my mother’s observation, and with her full participation.

Everything I need to know about who my parents are is wrapped up in that experience: the total lack of concern for my safety and happiness, treating me like an asset instead of a son, lying to me, manipulating me, and using me to get things they wanted, and then gaslighting me about it.

If just ONE of the things I can remember happened to someone I loved, I would have grabbed my kids, gone to the airport, and flown home. Fuck those abusive assholes in the production. Let the lawyers sort it all out. Nobody hurts my children and gets away with it.

My mom says she “had some talks” with the producers. She claims that, once, she wouldn’t let us leave the hotel. (God, what a fucking dump that place was. It was just slightly better than a hostel.) I have no memory of that, but honestly the entire experience was so traumatic, I’ve blocked most of it out.

The movie was the commercial and critical failure I knew it would be. My parents spent the money. I don’t know what they spent it on. I got to keep fifteen cents of every dollar, so . . . yay?

My sister and I hardly ever talk about this. I suspect it was as upsetting and traumatic for her as it was for me. I told her I was writing about it, and asked her if she remembered anything. She told me she’d been lied to her whole life about this movie. Our mother let her believe she had been cast on the strength of her audition. “I was excited to work with you,” she said. She reminded me about some stuff I’d blocked out, including a scene where my character’s older brother (played by an actor named Malcolm Danare, who was kind and gentle, and made both of us feel safer when he was around) shoves my character into a pile of cow shit. When it came time to shoot the scene, the mud they’d put together to be the cow shit looked an awful lot like cow shit. When Malcolm pushed me into it, we all found out it was real cow shit. I was FURIOUS. The director had lied to me and had allowed me to have my entire body shoved into an actual pile of actual cow shit. I don’t remember what I said, but I remember he treated me the exact same way my father did whenever I got upset: he laughed at me, told me I was being too sensitive, reminded me that he was the director and he wanted to get a “real” performance out of me, and concluded, “If it bothers you so much, we’ll get you a hepatitis shot,” before he walked away.

My sister also recalled that, after she survived the scene with the chickens, it was the producers’ idea to give her one as a pet.

Okay, let’s unpack that for a quick second: you’ve been traumatized by these birds, so we’re going to give you one as a pet. That you’ll somehow keep in your hotel, and then will somehow get back to America. It will shock you to learn that neither of those things happened.

She remembered, as I do, the huge fight I had with my parents in our kitchen, where I told them I hated the script and I hated the movie. I didn’t want to do it, and I hated that they were making me do it.

“You don’t have a choice,” my father commanded. “You are doing this movie.”

“This is the only film you are being offered,” my mother lied to me. She made me feel like, if I didn’t do this movie, I would never do another movie again in my life. I had to do this movie. As my father bellowed, I had no choice.

Both of my parents denied this argument ever happened. Can I tell you how reassuring it is to know that my sister, who was also there, remembers it the same way I do?

The makeup department decided they would literally cut my little sister’s face with a scalpel, in three places, and put bandages over them.

But one thing she told me, the thing I did not know, the thing that makes me so angry I want to break things, actually managed to make the entire experience even worse than I remembered it.

There’s a scene after her chicken incident where I check up on her in her bedroom. She’s got cuts and bruises, and I guess we talk about it. I don’t remember and I can’t watch the movie because I’m terrified it will give me a PTSD flashback (I’ve had one of those and I recommend avoiding it). Here’s the thing about that scene: she has some cuts on her face, and those cuts are real. They are not makeup.

I’m going to repeat that. My nine-year-old little sister had actual cuts on her face that were placed there by an adult, on purpose.

The makeup department decided they would literally cut my little sister’s face with a scalpel, in three places, and put bandages over them. My sister told me our mother wasn’t in the makeup room when this happened — honestly, it seemed like our mother was strangely and conveniently absent when most of the really terrible things happened to us on the set — and when my sister told her what they’d done, she “lost her shit” at the production. She was pissed, I guess, which is appropriate and surprising. I wonder what would have to have happened for her to put us on a plane and get us home to safety? I mean, her son being abused daily didn’t do it, and her daughter being CUT IN THE FACE ON PURPOSE didn’t do it.

I just . . . I can’t. I can’t understand or comprehend allowing your own children to be physically and emotionally abused. They were literally selling my sister and me to these people, like we were some kind of commodity.

This was a tough conversation. My sister’s experience with our parents is very different from mine. My sister and I love each other. We’re close. I know it’s hard for her to hear that her brother, who she loves, was so abused by her parents, who she also loves. I was really grateful she made the time to talk to me about it, and grateful the experience wasn’t as horrible for her as it was for me.

As we were finishing our call, Amy also remembered one man, a young Italian named Luka, who was our driver for the movie. I haven’t thought about him in thirty years, but I can see his face now. He was kind, he was friendly, he taught us how to kick a soccer ball, and in the middle of an abusive, torturous experience, he stood out as a kind and gentle man. I mention him because she remembered him, which made me remember him, and goddammit I want at least one small part of this thing to not be awful.

The Curse remains one of the most consequential times the adults in my life failed to protect me. I’m 50. I still have nightmares.

Ultimately, as I predicted and feared, this piece of shit movie cashed me out of respectable films forever. I got offers for movies, but they were always mindless comedies or exploitative horror films. They were never the serious dramas I wanted to work in after Stand by Me. The industry looked at me and River, wondering if one or both of us would become a breakout star. They quickly saw that River was doing real acting work, and I was in this piece of shit. For River, Stand by Me was a beginning. For me, it would turn out to be pretty much everything, at least as far as film goes.

There are thousands of reasons film careers do and don’t take off. Maybe mine wouldn’t have taken off anyway. Clearly, it’s not where my life ended up, and I’m super okay with that now. But when all of this happened, it hurt and haunted me.

The Curse remains one of the most consequential times the adults in my life failed to protect me. I’m 50. I still have nightmares. Everything I need to know about who my parents are is wrapped up in that experience: the total lack of concern for my safety and happiness, treating me like an asset instead of a son, lying to me, manipulating me, and using me to get things they wanted, and then gaslighting me about it.

This annotation is the last thing I wrote before I turned this manuscript in, because opening these wounds is hard and painful. I put it off as long as I could, and I feel like I’m still holding back, because just this small glimpse of the experience has taken me a week to write. I can’t imagine trying to go back and unpack the whole thing. (Note that is not in the book: I’ve made an EMDR appointment to work on this because the nightmares have come back after the weekend).

Fuck The Curse, and fuck every single person who exploited and hurt two beautiful children to make it. You all participated in child abuse, and you all knew better. Shame on all of you. I hope this follows you to the end of your life. I hope that living with what you did to innocent children has been as hard for you as it has been for me, because you deserve no less.

#tw abuse #tw child abuse #tw exploitation #child actor #still just a geek #lucio fulci #trauma survivor #speaking up for the child who was silenced by his abusers

2K notes · View notes

reduxskullduggerry · 11 months

Text

just watched shiny happy people and it was an ok docuseries overall (if you don't know it's a documentary about the duggar family and fundamentalism/IBLP/Bill Gothard more generally), but as with other documentaries in this style, it often heavily covers the aspects of misogyny, patriarchy, and abuse (which are very important to cover!), but really only minimally focuses (if at all) on the depth to which Christian fundamentalism is at its core about advancing white supremacy and white supremacist goals. Like they spend an episode talking about how the purpose of families having as many children as possible is to push them into conservative leadership (with the ultimate goal of creating Christian theocracy), but they only focus on how they want to pass like anti-abortion stuff not their assuredly racist positions otherwise. Like focusing solely on the narratives and abuse of white women (and some white men) from the perspective of these people means that you only hear their limited perspective on the situation. Which means they've grown enough to understand how this religion/cult/sect oppressed them but not anyone different from them. non-white people are almost entirely absent from the series outside of when white people go/have gone on mission trips and the documentary makers never confront the people who they interviewed who've gone on mission trips about the neocolonialism they're engaging in through these trips. Even from the perspective of you've spent your whole life hearing this narrative of Christianity that you know is fucked up and terrible for you, but then you think you've unlearned all of this enough to go give christian teachings to others without perpetuating these same narratives?? Like one (professor?) guy mentions racism all of once and it's like?? I also feel like the documentary makers in spite of how political this documentary is fail to address the politics of those they are interviewing. They interview several people close to the duggar family/are in the duggar family who are like still very conservative and present their narrative uncritically. anyway in conclusion, documentaries on institutions like iblp and the catholic church etc often focus solely on the oppression faced by white women and children in that institution without examining the larger context of white supremacy and racism that kind of patriachy is based in and they should change that

#i feel like its because the documentary makers failed to fully understand systemic oppression rather than just individualized examples of it #like they do talk about how abuse is enabled by many actors but they really tend to focus far more on the individual abuser(s) in the story #also i havent checked but the two directors are women and i would guess are likely to be white women #shiny happy people #duggar family

102 notes · View notes

ilovemesomevincentprice · 5 months

Text

Vincent Price and Peter Lorre

The Comedy of Terrors (1964) // dir. Jacques Tourneur

271 notes · View notes

autism-alley · 2 months

Text

now that the show is over, i’m slowly revisiting things that are less fundamentally dysfunctional and more symptoms of the overall problems. one of those is hephaestus. the way his disability is so… reduced is. almost incredible. like, they started off on the right foot casting a disabled man, i appreciate that, but the way they utilize hephaestus’ disability, or rather don’t, leaves a lot of room to be desired.

first off, allow me to be annoying by saying he is not there in the book—but i don’t think the decision to add him is inherently a poor choice. it could work.

in the lightning thief, the way the kids get out of his trap is through annabeth’s intelligence in an action-packed scene. in the show, i was alright with the fact they changed the trap—foolishly assuming they were going to actually make something different of equal craftsmanship—but the end result is one of many instances of sacrifice way too early in the series, and an utterly underwhelming solution to that sacrifice—annabeth literally just asks hephaestus to free percy and. he does? i thought she was going to figure out how to reverse the throne’s trap; while she’s not a child of hephaestus, you’d think a child of athena with a passion for architecture would have some understanding of mechanics. it would have been different from the book, maybe not the best approach, but still emotionally satisfying. but alright, we’re… making an emotional appeal to hephaestus. putting aside my feelings about her rant of what exactly it is that makes percy different and worth freeing, why is the show’s hephaestus… so generally underwhelming?

my man was tossed from the fucking heavens by a parent—in pjo it’s hera—they could have visually used that to show hephaestus, like annabeth, does not want to repeat his mother’s cold and selfish ways. but he’s just. alright, first just look at these two guys.

before we get to the meat and potatoes, tell me which of these two guys look like they’ve spent a millennia in a workshop? the guy covered in grease and sweat, dressed in a stain-littered apron, tool belt at his side, muscle built for lifting heavy parts and swinging a hammer century after century? or the man with a neatly brushed, trimmed, washed beard and head of hair, clean hands, remarkably unstained sweater and flannel, crisp, new overalls, and academic-looking glasses? which looks to you like the embodiment of blacksmiths and the flame of the forge? yeah. but that can all be lumped in with my other wardrobe complains of the show, now we get to the section of this post where i would like to tread lightly.

i want to start by saying not all disability is visual, or even overtly visual, but hephaestus’ is and that visual is important to his character and the story. as a disabled person, i love that they cast a disabled actor, but based on how it was handled in the show, i had no idea this man was disabled. i thought he was an able bodied actor, and i am so sorry i came to that conclusion, but i really see no other one i could have come to based purely on what was in the show itself. i had to google who timothy omundson is to know he’s disabled and with what disability (he suffered a stroke that left him paralyzed on his left side in 2017 and has been in recovery ever since—godspeed my man, i hope it helps where it can). i am so glad it was a disabled actor and not an able bodied one, but he’s still not hephaestus. while obviously no mortal has fallen from the heavens, i think they could have made it work, but a man who’s had a stroke and a man who’s had his body crushed are not the same. i am not here to belittle this man’s experiences or say one is more severe, i am saying they are different, and not interchangeable.

regardless, a disability that is visual is no less than one that is invisible and timothy omundson’s paralysis is visual, but it was hidden. it was NOT clear to the audience timothy omundson is paralyzed, or that he is disabled at all. the gods can appear however they choose, but it’s a point that hephaestus generally does not, or his disability is implied to be such a hindrance on him, no matter how he chooses to appear, he cannot escape his disability, how glaringly visible it is. his body itself is a story of how the gods betray each other, how they literally eat each other alive and are so hypocritical about it. think of how impactful the visual of hephaestus is—has a parent ever rejected your existence so violently, your divine body is broken and disfigured for all eternity? it is a brutal establishment of the godly norm as ruthless, cruel, and petty abuse. and the show, for all its talk of how the gods are awful, just did not highlight his disability and its origins it at all.

again, i think including hephaestus in this scene could have worked, but not how the show went about it. imagine. annabeth, desperately fiddling with the throne’s inner workings, makes her emotional appeal to hephaestus. he’s partly obscured by shadow as he stands, watching from afar on the balcony, but we see a gnarled hand grasp the railing. annabeth, still pulling back the machine’s inner workings, tearfully describes how her mother punished her for embarrassing her. as she does, we receive a few close up shots of hephaestus, still leaving him mostly in the dark, but providing peeks at his disfigurements, and a hesitant but pained look in his eyes tells us he is reliving painful memories—a conflicted bead of sweat runs down the side of his face. it wouldn’t cost any more run time to use these shots while annabeth makes her plea to him, and the disability is in the spotlight, the parallel between athena/hera and annabeth/hephaestus is clear as a younger, more hopeful version of this emotionally broken man begs him to help her be different than both their mothers.

free my friend, she says. and for a moment, he just shakes. he opens his mouth, and annabeth—and the audience—lean forward to hear his reply. but then his face crumples with regret and resentment. he is still apart of the same wheel that crushes everyone in their path—if he, a god, could not escape, why would a demigod? why should a demigod?

no, the god of the hammer tells annabeth, you cannot escape.

annabeth, in her hubris, replies, maybe you can’t—and we cut to her hands, tearing away a gear to reveal a switch—realization flashes across her face, and she grasps the trap’s mechanical release. percy is free, and hephaestus, in his misplaced anger, unleashes more of his creations (mechanical spiders!!) after them, mirroring the book as the kids use quick-thinking to escape waterland.

it’s not perfect, but that would work. instead, they finally show a god rather than just talking about them and it’s so underwhelming. and yes, this hephaestus carries a cane, clearly the potential to show front his disability was there, but you cannot throw me table scraps and tell me my frustration at not receiving the feast i was promised is unfounded. it’s laughable. most of the time it’s on screen it’s not in use and there isn’t even reference in the show as to why he carries a cane. casual viewers unfamiliar with the books or greek mythology might mistakenly assume this is just how this god chose to present himself and he doesn’t need this cane, and not that disability is at the core of who this divine figure is. it is NOT clear to the audience this is a disabled character played by a disabled actor. it is, indefensibly, a watered down depiction. what in the book needed to be ‘fixed’ with hephaestus—? this is a disabled god, you dare not give him to me in all his disabled complexity? you dare not show him as he is?

one of the most insulting things you can do to a disabled person is reduce our disability and the show has done it to the greek god of disability, with such a cheap payoff. if they did not want to be true to hephaestus, to his actor, they should not have shown him at all, and maybe—i don’t know, stuck to the book whose narrative makes sense in this scene?

#this is a loooong post i cannot tell if i articulated all the points i wanted to as i wanted to but alas. posting #the fact that they cast a literal disabled man and it was not clear at all that he or his character are disabled is #yeesh #if your audience—including your disabled audience—reads your disabled actor and character as able bodied you have a problem #add it to the list of ways the show that promised to highlight disability proceeded to erase it at every opportunity #disability is as close to the heart of pjo as its humor and whimsical charm i take no criticism on that #and yes i think it would be more impactful for hephaestus not to help the kids—the Point is it’s a cycle of abuse #that hurt people hurt people #but even if they went about it another way what we got in the show was So disappointing #pjo show crit #hephaestus pjo #annabeth chase #ris raves #percy jackson #pjo show #percy jackson and the olympians

30 notes · View notes

sukibenders · 1 month

Text

tw: mentions of assault

Listen, I get some people may not like Alicent and have reasons for not doing so and all. That's fine, you do you (within reason). However, what is really gross is to use that dislike for her as means to make jokes about her assault, whether through Viserys or Larys, but especially Larys. Like saying things like "oh but she gets to sell feet pics" or take her words of the Targaryens having queer customs (which they do, that wasn't a lie, everyone in Westeros knows they do) and acting like that foot scene discredits her, even though it's very obvious that she's very uncomfortable and that Larys frightens her (there are other scenes that show she does not like him and that he's a creep), all of this is gross. It also paints assault in a joking light, which should never happen. And this is such a disgustingly common thing that I see happen in the ASOIAF fandom for many of the female characters, some who are popular and some who aren't depending on who you ask, that it makes my skin crawl. And another thing, it's even more sinister seeing people who say they stand on the side of feminism, but then make fun of a female character being assaulted. Just say that your "feminism" only extends to the team/characters that you like and go.

#house of the dragon #hotd #alicent hightower #asoiaf #a song of ice and fire #dance of the dragons #hbo max #tw mentions of assault #even the actor who plays larys called that scene what it was during a podcast but yet people lack media literacy #and i better not see anyone try to paint viserys as a good guy either bc it is very clear that alicent holds no attraction whatsoever #there are also people who make fun of heleana whether it be her mental state or any abuse she may have faced and it's gross and ableist

29 notes · View notes

yourlowkeyidiot3 · 4 months

Text

Sometimes I think about how Michael's behaviour in fnaf 4 is a lot like Williams (apathetic, sadistic and abusive) however with different outcomes when the latters take it too far (Michael killing Evan ,feels regret, redeems himself, William killing Charlie, doesn't regret anything, kills more children)

and it makes me sick/pos.

#micheal afton #william afton #fnaf #five nights at freedy's #fnaf 4 #dave miller #mike schmidt #you dont understand #it's about a cycle of abuse it's about the abused becoming like their abuser #well tenchally with my theories and speculations #more like the abuser manipulating the abused to become like them #it's about breaking that cycle and finding redemption when it gets taken too far #Im sick/pos #i make myself sick #/pos #michael and william are so like eachother yet so different at the same time #as their voice actor said “william is up to no good #michael is broken“

45 notes · View notes

ketho484 · 1 year

Text

Hoi! This is gonna be the start of my personal version of the Welcome Home Actor AU made by Frillsand on Tiktok and inspired by the drabbles made by @wally-darling-hyperfixation (love your work! Keep being inspirational!). This will mostly follow Wally and my OC, Willow. I'll put up a character sheet or several for each story I have in mind at a later date. For now, let the show begin!

Au belongs to @frillsand

🎬🎬🎬🎬🎬🎬🎬🎬🎬🎬🎬🎬🎬🎬🎬🎬🎬

Chapter 1: The blue haired child

It was a pretty normal day in the busy city. Cars were full of people trying to get to work or trying to get kids to school. The hustle and bustle of the early morning was fairly common, albeit rather annoying. The city was a good place to live, but it wasn't without its flaws, to put it kindly.

The greatest flaw in this city would be its discrimination against puppets. See, in the late 1950s, a prideful puppeteer had discovered a way to bring what he created to life. Nobody knows how he did it, but the puppet population exploded rather quickly after that as the creatures spread out into the world. They were similar to humans in many ways. They can grow and develop from childhood like humans, their digestive tracts are like humans, they can produce offspring like humans, and they can bleed, be bruised, get hurt, and even die much like humans. However, nobody knows if they are a new race of humans or if they are a species of their own due to the differences they have. The puppets can be hurt, but they are significantly more durable than humans. They can heal rather quickly, needing stitches and casts for roughly half the time that humans need them. If the injury is grave, like, say, a limb gets cut off, they just need to stitch the limb back onto their bodies and it will work with no problem. It was a bit freaky, but people started accepting that as normal for puppets as time went on. Even still, discrimination is a bit of a problem in the city as humans still try to grapple with the existence of puppets living among them.

However, this story doesn't deal with that on the macro scale. Instead, this story begins a bit smaller, beginning in the city suburbs, where a small puppet girl worked tirelessly to meet a deadline set for her, hearing an argument between her human parents outside her work room door. She had yellow felt skin and dark blue hair that hung down to her back. She wore a ragged dress with long sleeves, but wore no shoes. She had a gift of mastering many creative arts, including singing and sewing. This little girl would hum to herself, just like right now, as she worked on costumes for this place her father had signed for called PlayFellow Studios, the home of her favorite show, Welcome Home, the cast of whom always needed new costumes, so her father made a contract with the studio owners to make them and dumped all the work onto this poor little kid.

It was rare that she was allowed any time with the TV, but sometimes her father would allow it if she had been very good. When that happened, she was always keen on watching Welcome Home when it aired. It was one of the few things that made her feel like an actual child, watching all of the friendly characters sing and dance and have fun. It made her start to daydream about how different her life would be if she went to that beautiful town to live there. It would be far better than this horrible place…

She shook her head and got back to work. These new outfits had to be ready for tomorrow or else her dad would punish her. She hated being punished. Her dad had set up a whole room for her punishments depending on the severity. If she didn't get this finished, then-

"Willow?" A gentle voice called from the door to her sewing room, the voice of the girl's adoptive mother

"Yes, momma?" Willow looked up, turning off the sewing machine for the moment to speak

"Hey, honey…Your father and I were talking and-"

"You mean arguing?" Willow cut her mother off, making the woman chuckle as she came closer

"Either way, I…I might've convinced your father to take you with us when we go to show these costumes to the cast" Her mother said with a smile that widened when Willow's smile came bright and beaming onto her face

"You mean I'm gonna meet them!?" She asked as she bounced in her seat

"That's right…though for your safety, I need to ask if the costumes are ready yet"

"Almost" Willow said as she calmed down, turning to her current costume project "I just need to finish the costume for Mister Darling. I know he didn't demand much, but I wanna make all the costumes really special and I can't help but feel like this one is missing something…"

"Like what?" Her mother asked as she looked down at the white shirt Willow was sewing

"I'm not sure" Willow said simply as she kept going with her project "That's the problem. I'm not sure what this is gonna need. I made everything right. What is it missing?"

"...Could you sneak something onto it?" Her mother asked quietly

"What?" Willow perked up as she took the finished shirt off the machine

"Try adding something as a personal signature" Her mother said "Something your father can't take credit for"

Willow started thinking. What could she add to make these costumes unique? Something to ensure people knew she made them…That’s when it hit her. Her mother had been teaching her this technique for a few weeks now, so maybe she could try it. She gathered all of her colorful thread, grabbed the knit sweater for Wally’s costume, a simple dark blue sweater, and started sewing some embroidery on it, specifically a nice rainbow wrapping around the body. Willow gave her adopted mother a nod and the woman left to let her work. Willow didn’t often smile, especially at home, but she was smiling now as she embroidered all of the costumes. Wally’s white shirt to go with the new sweater had some vine and apple patterns on the collar and shirt cuffs, Julie’s new dress got some flower embroidery on the skirt and neckline, Frank’s new vest got some butterfly embroidery, Howdy got some apples on the pockets of his apron while his shirt cuffs got some caterpillar imagery, Polly’s new costume got some baked goods imagery, most notably on the bottom of her baking apron but also on the skirt of a dress, Eddie’s shirt collar and hat both got some letters embroidered onto them, Sally got some stars on her skirt and a theater mask symbol on her dress pocket located on the chest, and Barnaby’s vest got some bouncy balls and dog bones on the bottom along with a rainbow on the chest pocket and a daisy embroidered into the new hat. Willow was going through a creative frenzy thanks to her mother encouraging her, and she finished it all just after her parents went to bed.

As usual, she had to feed herself, but there was nothing in the fridge, so she went and got some money from her mother’s purse to go buy a burger from a place down the street. The owner, Jerry, was there when he saw her come in and sighed. She looked worse and worse every time she went in to see him. She just ordered a plain burger, but he gave her a big combo meal including a burger, chicken nuggets, and a large holder of fries. He paid for it himself and bid her farewell after she thanked him. She ran home, but ate on the porch so her father didn’t catch her eating in her room again. Last time it happened…She shuddered and finished eating before throwing out the bag and taking out the still full trash. She then quietly crept to the room she had been sewing in and laid down on some fabric scraps, the softest of which was her pillow. She took a deep breath, smiling at the outfits she’d made, and closed her little eyes.

Tomorrow was another day…

#Welcome Home #OC #TW: Mentions of abuse #Actor AU

91 notes · View notes