#SDMItag

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

having a lot of thoughts as usual about sdmi and its portrayal of the cycle of abuse, and how pericles, cassidy, and ricky's foils and parallels to each other there are all both fascinating and deeply tragic.

in particular today i'm thinking about how ricky is an abusive mentor toward marcie, and tries to be abusive toward velma and fails because she has a support system and hasn't been worn down yet, and velma being an example and continuing to extend marcie support and a hand out of her situation is what gives marcie the courage to leave even when it's dangerous to do so, and how pericles spends the series--present day and past--systematically isolating ricky and dismantling his support system one by one, and how everything cassidy stood for was refusing to continue the cycle with everything she had, and how she felt so so guilty and violated and betrayed when ricky manipulated her into it anyway, and how she was willing to die to make it right, and how marcie standing up to him to great effect with her new support system leaves him utterly stunned, and how after that he starts trying to stand up for himself against his abusive mentor and break the cycle, and how he tries to take up cassidy's convictions as his weapon to do it with because cassidy was crushed under the wheels of the cycle but marcie proved it was possible to break,

and how he couldn't do that with his own abuser because pericles has spent his life building a steel cage around him, and tightening and tightening and tightening it without him even realizing it until it was too late, and how fucking devastated he is when it's finally demonstrated him that the door to the cage is closed for good,

and how when he is made complicit in his abuser reaching through the generations to make sure cassidy died for nothing, and that this little girl who gave him hope by defeating his attempt to continue the cycle couldn't escape him after all, it breaks him.

fucking kill me, man. god.

#sdmi #scooby doo: mystery incorporated #ricky owens #marcie fleach #cassidy williams #sdmi velma #velma dinkley #professor pericles #weeps in a puddle on the fucking floor there's So Much. There's So Much #abuse cw #dyn: i guess i expected more from you #dyn: she was right all along #dyn: when i die i want you to die too #dyn: so nice to meet you; angel #dyn: breaking a few worthless eggs #SDMItag

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

uwus your war criminal

#sdmi #scooby doo: mystery incorporated #professor pericles #this shitpost is several years old by now but it still sparks joy so here you go #when you're an evil and deeply traumatized fuckhead who decides to ruin the lives of everyone around you in hideously cruel ways about it #But You're Still Cute #bless his horrible ass #SDMItag #shitposting #whosebaby makes things #whosebaby draws

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

for the title of Worst Gryphon i submit to you: pericles. african grey and black-footed cat. how to make god abandon a timeline out of pure fear

#sdmi #scooby doo: mystery incorporated #professor pericles #gryphon pericles au #You are Already Dead: The Creature #If Murder Me Why Look Like Liddol Guy: The Creature #OH GOD THAT'S NOT A HOUSECAT: The Creature #i love him i really really do need to finish up that design #shitposting #SDMItag #parrots tag

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

talking about sdmi meta out of context is wild because it's just 'sir blorbo bingus betrayed spoingo gungle and left them with internalized self-loathing and survivor's guilt, and then manipulated their old flame into being complicit in their murder to silence them. sir bingus did this in search of a cursed artifact to free the ancient evil god they serve and become its vessel, which their species is implied to have been created for. also this is scooby-doo and sir bingus is a talking parrot'

#sdmi #scooby doo: mystery incorporated #professor pericles #ricky owens #cassidy williams #they did this years before gravity falls #or anything else in the modern 'goofy kid's cartoon turns out to have an extremely dark and serious overarching plot' #'with similarly complex and serious characterization and interpersonal dynamics to match that tone' genre #i cannot overstate how much you have sdmi to thank for all of those that came after it #me hearing the line 'come now children of nibiru' as a teenager: well i'm going to be thinking about this for the rest of my life #dyn: when i die i want you to die too #dyn: she was right all along #dyn: so nice to meet you; angel #dyn: breaking a few worthless eggs #SDMItag #shitposting

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

this rewatch of sdmi has so far been a combination of skipping around and watching straight through from the beginning, and my feelings are increasingly that shaggy, daphne, and marcie are precious and oh my god someone please get these poor kids away from everyone else in this cast

#sdmi #scooby doo mystery incorporated #marcie fleach #shaggy rogers #daphne blake #they're not perfect by any means; but they're also not *abusive controlling assholes* and they all really go through the wringer #daphne and shaggy's arcs especially are really rough to watch #scooby fred and velma all have their issues but they need to deal with them *miles* away from these three #including keeping velma away from marcie; because sure they're cute high school wlw holding hands now #but once the honeymoon phase is over the abuse *will* come out; that is how it goes; kind of infamously so #velma deals with her issues through being abusive and that does not go away because she's on a new relationship high #with someone who hasn't stepped out of line in specific ways she feels entitled to punish and control yet #this poor kid has been through enough even in the new timeline man give her a break :((( #and that's not even going into the horror story that is daphne ending up with fred; or shaggy's closest connection continuing to be scooby #anyway i will protect these three with my life someone help them #abuse cw #domestic violence implied cw #SDMItag

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

[three-sentence fic that went over the limit; Ricky-centric, for the prompt 'future.']

---

You've got a bright future ahead of you, said his mother to his small self, stroking his hair with tired, gentle pride. He remembers that.

These kids will have no future, bright or otherwise, thanks to him. Oh, god, he wants to say forever, I'm so sorry. But he won't get forever, and neither will they.

Five minutes, though. He picks up the sword, testing its weight in his hands. He can give them that much.

#sdmi #scooby doo: mystery incorporated #ricky owens #SDMItag #i wrote a bunch of these recently and i'm still deciding which ones i want to publish #but this is one of the ones i liked the most so here you go enjoy pain #this man was a mistake squirtle. end me squirtle #whosebaby makes things #whosebaby writes

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

[cws: drugging, SA and SA apologia, fantasy racism/ableism, forced institutionalization.]

-

i know i never shut up about it but god i am still just. So Salty about how the show handles the dynamic between mayor jones and pericles for many reasons, and one of the biggest is that there are really strong overtones here of sexual assault.

a character who already brings to mind the Slimy, Shady Cis White Guy with Buried Allegations archetype:

takes advantage of the trust of someone who's doing something with him in secret--

(which will get that person in a disproportionate amount of trouble compared to him, if they're discovered)

--to catch him off guard so he can grab him, drug him, and do violent things to his body while he's unconscious; scars him for life in a way that is disabling and should cause a lot of ongoing suffering, which, like many other things that should have a strong negative impact on him physically or psychologically, the writers ignore; and dumps him there alone to discover what's been done to him when he wakes up.

specifically, he does this to someone from a marginalized group that's highly unlikely to be believed if they tell anyone what he did--and going by the fact that mayor jones never got in any trouble until present day, he wasn't.

goes out of the way to ruin the life of the victim and discredit him as thoroughly as possible, because he's a loose end and he needs to shut him up.

flees the scene and gets away scot free with this for twenty years, has a successful privileged career and is considered a pillar of the community in the meantime.

when his dirty secret, which he's been paranoid about finally facing consequences for after the victim has recently become a risk again, is discovered, it's a huge career-ending scandal.

is redeemed by the end, while his victim goes on to be the Monstrous Irredeemable Pure Evil Main Villain and also sexually abuse someone himself, which is played as horrific and traumatizing (as it should be).

more specifically, is portrayed as showing redeeming, heroic anti-villain qualities by backhanding the victim into a wall as hard as he can in present day.

me: hm. yeah fuck this

#sdmi #scooby doo: mystery incorporated #professor pericles #fred jones sr. #SDMItag #SDMIcrit tag #the crit files #cws in post #like. jesus christ dude. #i'm guessing there's probably been You Can't Like Mayor Jones He's Abusive discourse before; i don't want to contribute to it or anything #no shade to mayor jones enjoyers y'all have fun #but holy shit i do not like this man lmfao #this isn't even getting into the fact that it is extremely easy to read pericles as a victim of *other* SA both metaphorical and literal #(metaphorical: the entity groomed him his entire life) #(literal: the creators intentionally made reference with him; onscreen; to Inappropriate Handling that happens to parrots in real life) #(he comes from a world where people assume there is zero difference between him and an animal; and would probably touch him the same way) #(no one would have *recognized* it was inappropriate and there is not a chance in hell he would have been allowed to say stop) #(many many MANY things about his character immediately make sense with that reading whether the writers thought it through that far or not) #(which i have a Whole Post planned to go into; but this bit was enough of a detour that i felt like it should just be its own post lmao) #also re: scarred for life and ongoing suffering + disability as a result: on a literal level a scar like that would hurt like a *bitch* #especially with the complete lack of medical care it seems to have gotten; going by how it looks. it would be a huge source of chronic pain #on a not-literal level: boy howdy what a metaphor! #anyway yeah i would say this is roughly equivalent to if they'd had ricky finally get free from the snakes after twenty years #had him go into a Scary Evil Villain Spiral after while completely ignoring how horrifying it was or the trauma it'd have caused him #had pericles gloat about having pulled off injecting the snakes; and say he should have lived 'the rest of his miserable life' that way #and not only had no one go 'wtf' at any of that but given him a Redeeming Moment where he incapacitates ricky with venom again #and also tried to frame ricky as deserving the snakes/having done it to himself because he Did Bad Things while looking for the treasure #and also had him abuse someone partly in reaction to them mocking him over the snakes; and saying that being tortured and abused with them #for twenty years makes him unfit to be anything but subordinate. on a watsonian level ricky's standing up for himself against abuse but jfc #don't get me wrong there are definitely still differences in their dynamics but yeah i am not happy about it lmfao

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

[cws: psychiatric abuse, torture, homophobia, ableism, sanism, racism, pictures of taxidermy. boy this show is a lot sometimes lmfao]

-

so something @thecottageinthedark noticed recently that i'm still fucked up about is that pericles' cage in the asylum isn't actually a bird cage.

it's a bell jar.

for those who don't know what a bell jar is, it's a type of taxidermy display for preserving delicate specimens, most often birds. it's easy for their feathers to get dusty or disintegrate over time if they're left out in the open; a bell jar not only keeps off dirt and keeps people from touching them, but it's made to create a vacuum inside to keep everything where it is.

another layer to this reference is that the book The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath, is a retelling of her own experiences with mental illness and the attempts made to treat it at the time. notably, one of the major themes of the book is psychiatric abuse.

pericles is also not only a gay man forcefully committed to an asylum in what is most likely intended to be the 70s, but a very obvious and already horribly handled fantasy metaphor for both physically disabled people and POC. (in particular the talking animals' role in the worldbuilding heavily mirrors Black americans irl, which holy shit there is so much to unpack there all by itself. there is So Much)

(fun little bonus on the side: he's kept in a cell with extremely bright blue/white light 24/7, at an angle where it'd be even more difficult to block it out than if it were overhead. this would make it impossible to get any decent fucking sleep, which is widely recognized as one of the worst forms of torture to exist. they did this to him for 20 years straight.)

so, to recap: gay man and analogue for disabled people/POC, who is also portrayed as an ~evil crazy malicious psychopath,~ is kept in not only a display case for scientific specimens, but one specifically made--in-universe and out--to recreate something that is done to his demographic as a metaphorical disabled person/POC.

and not only that, and not only do people talk about him--in front of him, like he's not even there--as a specimen while gawking at him in this position, but he is being displayed like the stuffed and mounted corpse of a disabled person/POC.

he is said to belong on that display for 'the rest of his miserable [disabled/POC] life.' no one disagrees with this. he's painted as smugly bullying the violent abusive guard. in general he's portrayed as Scary and Evil Now for having been in this situation. and when he escapes, it kicks off what end up being the most heavy-duty problems for the protagonists, which result in the Bad Ending for the nibiru timeline; if he had stayed there, continued to be objectified and tortured with homophobic/racist/ableist violence for the rest of his life, the timeline almost certainly wouldn't have been doomed.

and they used a real person's autobiography about their experiences with psychiatric abuse for this. and to position them in the role of someone it should have not only happened to, but been even more horrifically dehumanizing and cruel.

yeah. i..... yeah.

the creators of this show are genuinely really good at putting together layered references like this, some more obscure than others, which are rewarding to discover and add depth when you do, and it is a crying fucking shame that they like to use it for shit like this. god damn lmao

#sdmi #scooby doo: mystery incorporated #professor pericles #cws in post #SDMItag #this is also why i very firmly believe that Other Parrot Behaviors of his were completely intentional #and i will be linking back to this post in future as evidence for that lmfao #anyway yeah jesus fucking christ i am defensive of pericles for A Few Reasons if You Can't Tell #do nooootttt get me started on the racism #uppity runaway slave who objects to being considered subordinate; inferior; an animal; and someone else's property #will get violent revenge on his oppressors the moment he embraces that objection and escapes imprisonment #and is only unhappy with being property because he's been driven crazy with Doesn't Want to Be Owned by Other People Syndrome #in the Good Timeline he does not have this syndrome; and he actively embraces exactly the degrading dehumanizing role he hated #and refused to accept and dedicated his life to breaking out of in the Bad Timeline where he's evil and crazy #this is used by other people to publicly humiliate him for profit; which he's Totally Not Humiliated by He's Happy Like This You Guys #sure cool great why not #love it #SDMIcrit tag #the crit files #thecottageinthedark

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

imagine.

babey pericles.

nugget.

#sdmi #scooby doo: mystery incorporated #professor pericles #believe me i have wanted to draw this for a WHILE #african greys are some of the most blessed creatures on this earth and i don't know how they do it but thank god #to draw tag #SDMItag

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

i need. to draw ricky being A Bear. i cannot overstate the importance of this

#sdmi #scooby doo: mystery incorporated #ricky owens #trans bears are braver than any US marine etc #for real though there is so much untapped potential it cannot go to waste #i still need to draw that one picture of him with his hair draped over one shoulder after washing it because 😳😳😳😳 #he sucks (affectionate) (dearest beloved) and he is Husband Material. god bless #SDMItag #to draw tag

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

been doing some speedy practice sketches lately to get various characters down a bit better, have a scribble of ricky at thirteen or so that turned out alright. he's babey your honor protect him

#pericles: best i can do is traumatize him for life 🤷‍♂️ #sdmi #scooby doo: mystery incorporated #ricky owens #SDMItag #whosebaby makes things #whosebaby draws #ricky halfway down the childhood mental illness spiral while he still has some sunshine left 🥲

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

one thing i love about ricky is that a good chunk of the time he's all awkward angles, and another (often overlapping) chunk of the time he's Delightful Rickyface, and then every now and then out of the blue you just get flashbanged by how hot he is

god damn

#sdmi #scooby doo: mystery incorporated #ricky owens #When I Tell You This Man Rewired My Brain #he was top shelf tumblr sexyman material before his time and that is a crying fucking shame #now i am just determined to spread ricky propaganda. Behold Him #torture cw #abuse cw #for that second to last set of screenshots there #which like he is also the whump bait ever i am just saying #which is hilarious in that instance because then he immediately makes possibly THE most awkward rickyface on the show #tied with whatever is going on there when he bangs open the door of cassidy's dressing room #aka another in my collection of random understated moments in this show that make me fucking wheeze every time #SDMItag

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

pericles is the opposite of ricky's emotional support animal. emotional attack animal

#sdmi #scooby doo: mystery incorporated #professor pericles #ricky owens #ESA that actively undermines your mental health #between the two of them ricky is the actual emotional support animal here let's be real 🥲 #shitposting #SDMItag #dyn: when i die i want you to die too

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

[cws: starvation/food insecurity, fantasy racism, psychiatric abuse, ableism, and Upsetting Pictures.]

-

one thing that fucks me up immensely about pericles before and after the asylum is how fucking skinny he is.

like. as much as obviously the two designs are Very Inconsistent in general which annoys me, look at him pre-timeskip. look at how he's shaped.

his head and face are way smoother and rounder, both in front and back, and the space between his cheekbones and his eyebrow ridge is filled in; his body is rounder in general and his belly is noticeably between his thighs when he's standing up; he has kind of a chubby butt; his chin and neck are softer and wider around, which you can really see with the width of the scarf compared to his shoulders and the angle where it meets his head. it comes up in front of his face more because there's not as much of an angle with his chin to hold it down.

now. compare all those things to this.

christ.

and like, you could argue some of these design differences are tiny things to zero in on in a show that's as loose with its models as sdmi is. but present-day pericles' design is pretty obviously supposed to be unsettling because he's physically built to be a Cute Roumb Little Mascot Creature--so much so that the framework has managed to stick around a little in spite of everything--and has become gaunt and haggard anyway. and you could also argue that the body type changes are just thanks to aging twenty years (and i don't doubt that's contributed).

except. he spent those twenty years in an asylum where the other inmates we see look like this.

christ.

(fun little fact that @thecottageinthedark pointed out also: remember how he literally got caught at one point because he couldn't stop eating sunflower seeds, even during a heist? a high-fat, high-calorie snack for birds? you know, exactly the kind of thing a starving person who finally has proper access to food would be wolfing down?)

(yeah.)

did i mention that this happened in a (fantasy) racially segregated prison, which is technically an asylum so the inmates can be kept there indefinitely, because in an actual prison you're required to have a sentence? did i mention that none of the human characters we see in human prison look any less healthy during or afterward, and on top of that are allowed to move around and socialize? did i mention the absolutely horrific treatment of the asylum inmates is implied to be despite the fact that the (physically abusive!) guard is playing up how dangerous and malicious they are? (you know. except for pericles 🙃)

did i mention the man who got pericles imprisoned--who he had not only done nothing to beforehand, but had helped--says he was there to 'live out the rest of his miserable parrot life in a cage, where he belonged,' and not only do none of the characters we're supposed to side with have anything to say about that, but the audience is clearly supposed to agree with him too?

(did i mention said man--who was in on the crime, singular, that pericles went to prison for!--spends those twenty years living a life of luxury in power while abusing the child he kidnapped as a baby and held hostage his entire life, and when we see him in prison he is not only chilling out and helping the authorities but reading a newspaper?)

did i mention the part where by the time we meet pericles he hasn't spoken in years?

like. man the 'ooooo scary evil abused asylum crazies' trope is bad enough, even when they pretend to lampshade it for a minute before playing it straight; i don't know how they added in All That and made him emaciated and expected no one to find it heartbreaking or even sympathetic. i don't care how bad he was before the asylum (and dear god was he ever), that is horrifying and no one deserves it. god damn.

#sdmi #professor pericles #scooby doo: mystery incorporated #the worldbuilding re: the talking animals in this universe is already really fucked up and awful #but everything to do with the asylum is one of the biggest things for me that shoves it over the edge from #'this aspect of the show is really disasteful and uncomfortable and i Don't Like It' #to 'wow this is actually really fucking upsetting i am straight up having to skip past scenes and/or take breaks when a detail comes up' #anyway pericles is a colossal piece of shit and also incredibly fucking tragic and i need more content that acknowledges and goes into that #and also due to Recent and Ongoing Life Experiences i am especially pissed these days about #'character loses a ton of weight and looks Haggard compared to before; because of that and in general' being associated with Evil Scary #especially when it's done to them in some way as *punishment* for being Evil #same energy as how badly it fucked me up as a kid to grow up constantly seeing #'villain has a horrifying spiraling mental breakdown because they're Pathetic and Evil' #in every fucking piece of media i engaged with! #anyway lol #the crit files #SDMItag #cws in post

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

when i say i am going to crush pericles like a pineapple in a hydraulic press i am sorry to say it's with more than one meaning

#sdmi #scooby doo: mystery incorporated #professor pericles #sorry everyone if you know you know #(to be very clear this is not a pericles hate post. he's the worst and i love him dearly) #(we are furries and monsterfuckers under this roof) #i have not been very active on this blog this month and of course i come back by whipping this out first thing. you're welcome #SDMItag #shitposting #nsft implied

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

i think one of the things that upsets me the most about velma and shaggy's relationship in sdmi--and boy there is a lot--is that not only is her constantly ''correcting'' him for minor, harmless, and usually completely reasonable things with physical and emotional abuse, well. abusive by itself. but so many of the things he does that she treats him that way over are very autistic things, and what she subjects him to is textbook abuse aimed at autistics in particular. (including the part where she gets more and more pissed whenever attempts at said emotional abuse fly over his head, because he's too bad at picking up cues for them to land fully.)

[cws: anti-autistic ableism, ABA, self-harm, physical and emotional IPV, victim-blaming, and abuse apologism. it's a lot and it's really fucking bad lmao]

-

like. there's a lot of examples there; shaggy's behavior coming across as autistic is worth a whole post of its own, and a lot of media depicts abuse targeted at autistic traits because ✨️hooray ableism.✨️but she straight up tries to Fix Him (read: force him to perform a Presentable Personality) by forcing him to wear clothes that are sensory hell, and trying to condition him to self-harm every time he does some small harmless, reflexive thing she thinks is Poor Socialization until he stops. and to catch himself doing it, and punish himself, without being prompted. i cannot fucking overstate how fucked up that is.

they even got down the fun little aspect of ABA where the methods of conditioning-through-pain are presented as toys and kiddish things: she gives him a rubber band to wear on his wrist, and tells him to snap it as hard as he can every time he says 'like.' 🙃🙃🙃🙃

like. this does not begin to scratch the surface of the abuse she puts him through in general. and again, characters being abused for autistic traits with the approval of the narrative is a common thing in media, which sucks. but holy fucking shit! they really took the 'violent ableism that is done to autistics irl' to the next fucking level here!

.......and it's portrayed as kind of cringey, immature teen drama on both sides. the self-harm, his dread over how much he knows it'll hurt, and the extreme pain it causes him to the point of screaming are all supposed to be funny. and her arc is all about learning to accept that she deserves better, because she was repressed and had low self-esteem and therefore putting him through fucking DIY ABA didn't make her happy.

🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃

anyway if you couldn't tell i can't fucking stand sdmi velma and i have a lot of words in me about it. when one of your main heroes would have made a way more compelling villain as they are, on a more mundane level compared to all the wild fantastical shit they go up against, holy shit go back to the drawing board you have fucked up. she could have been genuinely good representation of a marginalized person dealing with the trauma of her experiences in some shitty ways she has to grow past, and an interesting flawed character, without being absolutely despicable--hell, she'd have made a great foil to pericles if they'd handled him decently too. they have a lot of parallels, which only gain more depth when you add their respective parallels with cassidy into the mix. and it really fucking sucks that we got this instead.

#sdmi #scooby doo mystery incorporated #velma dinkley #shaggy rogers #SDMItag #cws in post #sdmi velma lies at the intersection of A Lot of Hard Feelings for me; in ways both inherent and personal #so she is viscerally upsetting to me in a lot of ways mostly re: framing; and that makes it difficult to analyze her in a sympathetic light #even though i recognize she is very much a depiction of a hurting; traumatized person lashing out in nasty and interesting ways #but the older i get and the more perspective i gain; and the more i unpack and understand about my own experiences #the more important it feels to me to talk about this stuff #i still want to try writing fic sometime about newniverse velma and how she ends up being a non-abusive; less shitty person #without just *being* a completely different person who's All Nice Sweet Sunshine with No Hard Feelings About What She's Been Through #and about the confusion and grief newniverse marcie goes through when one day her loving girlfriend is gone #and in her place is someone who is so much like her and has clearly been through a lot; but is Different in ways that hurt more and more #that marcie keeps trying to justify and make excuses for; and sits in the pot and slowly boils #until she finally has to face that this isn't the girl she fell in love with; that that girl will never come back; that this is velma now #i'm totally not working through anything here lmao #and a nasty; pretentious; controlling; insecure young adult who's up their own ass about Being Super Intellectual and Telling It Like Is #abusing a teenager to make them stop saying 'like' because it's Annoying and What Stupid People Say and Not Gramatically Correct(tm)(tm)(tm #definitely does not hit dead on some very specific 'hi that scarred me for life and i don't think it's particularly fucking funny' buttons! #anyway. protect shaggy and marcie and daphne while we're at it #SDMIcrit tag #the crit files