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mightyflamethrower · 8 months

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Updated at 1:58 p.m. ET on August 14, 2023

In 2008, when I was a writer for the blog Feministe, commenters began requesting warnings at the top of posts discussing distressing topics, most commonly sexual assault. Violence is, unfortunately and inevitably, central to feminist writing. Rape, domestic violence, racist violence, misogyny—these events indelibly shape women’s lives, whether we experience them directly or adjust our behavior in fear of them.

Back then, I was convinced that such warnings were sometimes necessary to convey the seriousness of the topics at hand (the term deeply problematic appears a mortifying number of times under my byline). Even so, I chafed at the demands to add ever more trigger warnings, especially when the headline already made clear what the post was about. But warnings were becoming the norm in online feminist spaces, and four words at the top of a post—“Trigger Warning: Sexual Assault”—seemed like an easy accommodation to make for the sake of our community’s well-being. We thought we were making the world just a little bit better. It didn’t occur to me until much later that we might have been part of the problem.

The warnings quickly multiplied. When I wrote that a piece of conservative legislation was “so awful it made me want to throw up,” one commenter asked for an eating-disorder trigger warning. When I posted a link to a funny BuzzFeed photo compilation, a commenter said it needed a trigger warning because the pictures of cats attacking dogs looked like domestic violence. Sometimes I rolled my eyes; sometimes I responded, telling people to get a grip. Still, I told myself that the general principle—warn people before presenting material that might upset them—was a good one.

Trigger warnings migrated from feminist websites and blogs to college campuses and progressive groups. Often, they seemed more about emphasizing the upsetting nature of certain topics than about accommodating people who had experienced traumatic events. By 2013, they had become so pervasive—and so controversial—that Slate declared it “The Year of the Trigger Warning.”

The issue only got more complicated from there. Around 2016, Richard Friedman, who ran the student mental-health program at Cornell for 22 years, started seeing the number of people seeking help each year increase by 10 or 15 percent. “Not just that,” he told me, “but the way young people were talking about upsetting events changed.” He described “this sense of being harmed by things that were unfamiliar and uncomfortable. The language that was being used seemed inflated relative to the actual harm that could be done. I mean, I was surprised—people were very upset about things that we would never have thought would be dangerous.” Some students, for instance, complained about lecturers who’d made comments they disliked, or teachers whose beliefs contradicted their personal values.

Read: The real problem with trigger warnings

To a certain degree, Friedman said, this represented a positive change. Mental illness was becoming less stigmatized than ever before, and seeking care was more common. But Friedman worried that students also saw themselves as fragile, and seemed to believe that coming into contact with offensive or challenging information was psychologically detrimental. In asking for more robust warnings about potentially upsetting classroom material, the students seemed to be saying: This could hurt us, and this institution owes us protection from distress.

Have we inadvertently raised a generation that has fewer tools to manage hardship?

Trigger warnings were only one part of a larger shift. Complaints quickly entered the wider culture, and were applied to “toxic” workplaces and “problematic” colleagues; students decried the “potential trauma” caused by ideas and objected to the presence of some speakers and works of art.

My own doubts about all of this came, ironically, from reporting on trauma. I’ve interviewed women around the world about the worst things human beings do to one another. I started to notice a concerning dissonance between what researchers understand about trauma and resilience, and the ways in which the concepts were being wielded in progressive institutions. And I began to question my own role in all of it.

Feminist writers were trying to make our little corner of the internet a gentler place, while also giving appropriate recognition to appallingly common female experiences that had been pushed into the shadows. To some extent, those efforts worked. But as the mental health of adolescent girls and college students crumbles, and as activist organizations, including feminist ones, find themselves repeatedly embroiled in internecine debates over power and language, a question nags: In giving greater weight to claims of individual hurt and victimization, have we inadvertently raised a generation that has fewer tools to manage hardship and transform adversity into agency?

since my days as a feminist blogger, mental health among teenagers has plummeted. From 2007 to 2019, the suicide rate for children ages 10 to 14 tripled; for girls in that age group, it nearly quadrupled. A 2021 CDC report found that 57 percent of female high-school students reported “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness,” up from 36 percent in 2011. Though the pandemic undoubtedly contributed to a crash in adolescent mental health, the downturn began well before COVID hit.

Teenage girls report troublingly high rates of sexual violence and bullying, as well as concern for their own physical safety at school. But it’s not clear that their material circumstances have taken a plunge steep enough to explain their mental-health decline. The CDC study suggests that, over the past decade, bullying among high schoolers has actually decreased in certain respects. Today’s teenagers are also less likely to drink or use illicit drugs than they were 10 years ago. And even before pandemic-relief funds slashed the child-poverty rate, the percentage of children living in poverty fell precipitously after 2012. American public high schoolers are more likely to graduate than at any other time in our country’s history, and girls are significantly more likely to graduate than boys.

Jonathan Haidt: The dangerous experiment on teen girls

So what has changed for the worse for teenage girls since roughly 2010? The forces behind their deteriorating mental health are opaque and complex, but one big shift has been a decline in the time teenagers spend with their friends in person, dipping by 11 hours a week—a decline that began before the pandemic, but was badly exacerbated by it. Since 2014, the proportion of teens with smartphones has risen by 22 percent, and the proportion who say they use the internet “almost constantly” has doubled. Part of the issue may be a social-media ecosystem that lets teens live within a bubble of like-minded peers and tends to privilege the loudest, most aggrieved voices; this kind of insularity can encourage teenagers to understand distressing experiences as traumatizing. “I think it’s easier for them to artificially curate environments that are comfortable,” Shaili Jain, a physician and PTSD specialist, told me. “And I think that is backfiring. Because then when they’re in a situation where they’re not comfortable, it feels really alarming to them.”

Applying the language of trauma to an event changes the way we process it. That may be a good thing, allowing a person to face a moment that truly cleaved their life into a before and an after, and to seek help and begin healing. Or it may amplify feelings of helplessness and hopelessness, elevating those feelings above a sense of competence and control.

“We have this saying in the mental-health world: ‘Perception is reality,’ ” Jain said. “So if someone is adamant that they felt something was traumatizing, that is their reality, and there’s probably going to be mental-health consequences of that.”

Martin Seligman, the director of the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania, has spent the past 50 years researching resilience. One study he co-authored looked at the U.S. Army, to see if there was a way to predict PTSD. Unsurprisingly, he and his fellow researchers found a link to the severity of the combat to which soldiers were exposed. But the preexisting disposition that soldiers brought to their battlefield experiences also mattered. “If you’re a catastrophizer, in the worst 10 or 20 percent, you’re more than three times as likely to come down with PTSD if you face severe combat,” Seligman told me. “And this is true at every level of severity of combat—the percentage goes down, but it’s still about twice as high, even with mild combat or no obvious combat.”

In other words, a person’s sense of themselves as either capable of persevering through hardship or unable to manage it can be self-fulfilling. “To the extent we overcome and cope with the adversities and traumas in our life, we develop more mastery, more resilience, more ability to fend off bad events in the future,” Seligman told me. “But conversely, to the extent that we have an ideology or a belief that when traumatic events occur, we are the helpless victims of them—that feeds on itself.”

Seligman also found that some soldiers who experienced severe trauma could not only survive, but actually turn their suffering into a source of strength. “About as many people who showed PTSD showed something called post-traumatic growth, which means they have an awful time during the event, but a year later they’re stronger physically and psychologically than they were to begin with,” he said. But that empowering message has yet to take hold in society.

so what would be a more productive way to approach adversity? Friedman, the former medical director of the Cornell mental-health program, compares building resilience to physical exercise. “It’s like any form of strength training,” he told me. “People have no hesitation about going to the gym and suffering, you know, muscle pain in the service of being stronger and looking a way that they want to look. And they wake up the next day and they say, ‘Oh my God, that’s so painful. I’m so achy.’ That’s not traumatic. And yet when you bring that to the emotional world, it’s suddenly very adverse.”

The problem is that this idea—that to develop resilience, we must tough out hard situations—places a heavier burden on some people than others. Friedman pointed out that people who grew up under constant stress, perhaps owing to abuse, poverty, or food insecurity, may find that this stress is “erosive” to their ability to use those resilience muscles. The exercise metaphor rankled Michael Ungar, the director of the Resilience Research Centre at Dalhousie University, in Halifax, Canada. “Chronic exposure to a stressor like racism, misogyny, being constantly stigmatized or excluded, ableism—all of those factors do wear us down; they make us more susceptible to feelings that will be very overwhelming,” he told me. There are, after all, only so many times a person can convince themselves that they can persevere when it feels like everyone around them is telling them the opposite.Creating the conditions where resilience is possible is as much a collective responsibility as an individual one.

Tyffani Monford Dent, a clinical psychologist and an author whose work focuses on sexual violence and racial trauma, calls this “the resiliency trap.” Black women in particular, she told me, have long been praised for their toughness and perseverance, but individual resiliency can’t solve structural problems. From Dent’s perspective, young people aren’t rejecting the concept of inner strength; they are rejecting the demand that they navigate systemic injustice with individual grit alone. When they talk about harm and trauma, they aren’t exhibiting weakness; they’re saying, Yes, I am vulnerable, and that’s human. These days, patients are being more “transparent about what they need to feel comfortable, to feel safe, to feel valued in this world,” she said. “Is that a bad thing?”

Most of the experts I spoke with were careful to distinguish between an individual student asking a professor for a specific accommodation to help them manage a past trauma, and a cultural inclination to avoid challenging or upsetting situations entirely. Thriving requires working through discomfort and hardship. But creating the conditions where that kind of resilience is possible is as much a collective responsibility as an individual one.

if we want to replace our culture of trauma with a culture of resilience, we’ll have to relearn how to support one another—something we’ve lost as our society has moved toward viewing “wellness” as an individual pursuit, a state of mind accessed via self-work. Retreating inward, and tying our identities to all of the ways in which we’ve been hurt, may actually make our inner worlds harder places to inhabit.

“If everything is traumatic and we have no capacity to cope with these moments, what does that say about our capacity to cope when something more extreme happens?” Ungar said. “Resilience is partly about putting in place the resources for the next stressor.” Those resources have to be both internal and external. Social change is necessary if we want to improve well-being, but social change becomes possible only if our movements are made up of people who believe that the adversities they have faced are surmountable, that injustice does not have to be permanent, that the world can change for the better, and that they have the ability to make that change.

To help people build resilience, we need to provide material aid to meet basic needs. We need to repair broken community ties so fewer among us feel like they’re struggling alone. And we need to encourage the cultivation of a sense of purpose beyond the self. We also know what stands in the way of resilience: avoiding difficult ideas and imperfect people, catastrophizing, isolating ourselves inside our own heads.

In my interviews with women who have experienced sexual violence, I try not to put the traumatic event at the center of our conversations. My aim instead is to learn as much as I can about them as people—their families, their work, their interests, what makes them happy, and where they feel the most themselves. And I always end our conversations by asking them to reflect on how far they’ve come, and what they are proudest of.

That last question often elicits a powerful response. I started asking it because I hoped to let the women I met feel seen in full, beyond the worst things that had happened to them.

There was a time when personal strength was the quiver that held an arsenal of virtues required for our success in life. These days there is no quiver and there are no virtues. I've seen too many videos of girls reduce to tears over what they call microaggressions. The proper response to a micro aggression is micro annoyance not emotional collapse.

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evidence-based-activism · 3 years

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Okay! So, I decided to go ahead and go through the sources linked by @aliciabenissa on this post. Mostly because I really hate when people try and debate the literal definitions of words with me. @radkindoffeminist I thought you may also be interested in this since you commented on this post. Before beginning, I want to reiterate again that non-academic sources are still useful rhetorical devices. Essays, speeches, anecdotal evidence, and other sources have a role to play in both academic and non-academic discourse. It is disingenuous however to pass off an non-academic source as academic (and it is also a rising problem within many academic fields). First source (McKee, 2007a) used a self-selection survey sample of about 1000 people, 82% of whom were male. I had to go to a separate article (McKee, 2007b) to get that statistic. Additionally, the response rate to this survey was only 7.3% (very low). Further, this article is concerned exclusively with the effects of pornography on porn consumers, entirely neglecting the industry itself. The ultimate conclusion of this study is that people who consume pornography tend to think it benefits them positively. This is unsurprising, considering we tend to avoid ego-dystonic behaviors. In fact, previous experiments have shown that we tend to adapt or world-views to fit our behaviors, so as to avoid cognitive dissonance. Nonetheless, this source was an academic source. The second source (Orlowski, 2012) is not an academic source. It was published in the “Modern American” a student run, non-peer reviewed publication at the American University Washington College of Law. This is not a study, meta-analysis, or or review article, and is best characterized as a position paper. I don’t want to get too far into the content of the paper, but suffice to say, the paper argues that non-obscene pornography is protected under the first amendment. Curiously, the author posits that the current definition of obscenity is a reliable measure for deciding what pornography should be allowed, despite the definition of obscenity being notoriously unreliable and obscure. The third source (Friedersdorf, 2016) is also not an academic source. It is essentially an opinion essay published in The Atlantic. The main argument used is based on population studies, a methodology challenged in this study (Kingston & Malamuth, 2011), which you will note, is an actual peer reviewed academic article. The fourth source (Diamond, 2009) is academic! It’s also challenged by the same paper mentioned above (Kingston & Malamuth, 2011). The other main finding of this work is that people only want porn to be restricted from children, and think it’s fine to have available. Again, I don’t find the fact that porn consumers believe porn is fine to be surprising (see the discussion of the first source above). This article is also entirely focused on consumers. The fifth source (Pornography, n.d.) is a Psychology Today article that references the fourth source. Along with a study similar to the first source (McKee, 2007a). The same criticisms clearly apply. Nevertheless, the authors of that particular study (Hald & Malamuth, 2008) actually take the time to point out these problems with such a study design, and explain how the survey results actually support the arguments about desensitization, which is common component of anti-porn arguments. Source six (5 Reasons Watching Porn Together Can Be Good for Your Marriage, 2013) is a HuffPost article. It is not academic. The ideas presented are inane at best, and offensive at worst. Source seven (Moyer, n.d.) is also not an academic article. It is published in Scientific American which is a popular science magazine. The studies and arguments used in this article have already been debunked above. Source eight (Park, 2010) references source four (Diamond, 2009). It’s also not an academic source, as it is published in Time which is a magazine. The article also take an anti-pornography stance, describing the results as “provocative” ultimately unreliable and problematic. Source nine (McCormack & Wignall, 2017) is an academic source with a small sample size (n=35) of all men. It again is entirely concerned with the consumers of pornography, and relies on self-report of positive/negative effects. I explained how this is a flawed methodology in my discussion of source one (McKee, 2007a). I cannot verify if source ten (Wasserman, 1996) is an academic source or not. Based on what I’m able to access it looks like a position paper. Source eleven (Why Criminalizing Rape Porn Is a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Idea, 2014) is non academic. It is an opinion article in an “Internet Newspaper” called The Daily Dot. It’s entirely an appeal to emotion and references several of the above debunked arguments. Source twelve (Prause & Pfaus, 2015) is academic. It’s also about whether or not men who view porn experience erectile dysfunction, which, frankly, isn’t one of my main concerns about the sex industry. Since I know this is the only reason why some men will stop watching porn however: the study’s findings are strongly rebuked in a subsequent comment (Isenberg, 2015) that lays out several methodological and analytical problems found in the report. The final source (The 8 Best Sites to Watch Ethical, Fair Trade Porn, 2017) is not academic. It’s another opinion article with no sources (but plenty of links to porn sites) on The Daily Dot (the same as source eleven). It barely presents an argument at all, so I’ll just link you to my posts on how porn cannot be legal because it doesn’t comply to OSHA and a short opinion post on the violence inherent to porn. So, in summary: 8 out of 13 sources are non-academic, 4 out of 13 sources are academic (2 of which are directly challenged and all four of which have significant methodological issues), and 1 source is unknown. Of the twelve sources I verified, they were all entirely concerned with pornography consumers; neglecting “sex workers” altogether. (Hopefully, I don’t need to spell out why that’s a problem.) And @aliciabenissa I genuinely hope you aren’t sending sources like this to your supervisors and calling them academic. I strongly suggest using databases from your library or institution (such as ulrichsweb) to verify the legitimacy of sources.

A reminder for everyone that I have several essay posts discussing literature on the sex industry in my “sex industry” tag. This post may be a nice place to start for literature on how porn affects the consumer and I challenge other pro-porn articles in this post. Also take a look at this post for a nice summary article on the nordic model.

[Citation list under the cut]

5 reasons watching porn together can be good for your marriage. (2013, March 7). HuffPost. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/5-reasons-why-watching-po_b_2766968

Diamond, M. (2009). Pornography, public acceptance and sex related crime: A review. International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, 32(5), 304–314. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijlp.2009.06.004

Friedersdorf, C. (2016, April 7). Is porn culture to be feared? The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/04/porn-culture/477099/

Hald, G. M., & Malamuth, N. M. (2008). Self-perceived effects of pornography consumption. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 37(4), 614–625. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-007-9212-1

Isenberg, R. A. (2015). Viewing sexual stimuli associated with greater sexual responsiveness, not erectile dysfunction: A comment. Sexual Medicine, 3(3), 219–221. https://doi.org/10.1002/sm2.71

Kingston, D. A., & Malamuth, N. M. (2011). Problems with aggregate data and the importance of individual differences in the study of pornography and sexual aggression: Comment on diamond, jozifkova, and weiss(2010). Archives of Sexual Behavior, 40(5), 1045–1048. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-011-9743-3

McCormack, M., & Wignall, L. (2017). Enjoyment, exploration and education: Understanding the consumption of pornography among young men with non-exclusive sexual orientations. Sociology, 51(5), 975–991. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038516629909

McKee, A. (2007a). Positive and negative effects of pornography as attributed by consumers. Australian Journal of Communication , 34(1), 87–104.

McKee, A. (2007b). The relationship between attitudes towards women, consumption of pornography, and other demographic variables in a survey of 1,023 consumers of pornography. International Journal of Sexual Health, 19(1), 31–45. https://doi.org/10.1300/J514v19n01_05

Moyer, M. W. (n.d.). The sunny side of smut. Scientific American. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamericanmind0711-14

Orlowski, J. (2012). Beyond Gratification:The Benefits of Pornography and the Demedicalization of Female Sexuality. The Modern American, 8(2), 53–71.

Park, A. (2010, December 2). Study: Making pornography more accessible may curb child abuse. Time. https://healthland.time.com/2010/12/02/study-making-pornography-more-accessible-may-curb-child-abuse/

Pornography: Beneficial or detrimental? | psychology today. (n.d.). Retrieved July 19, 2021, from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/homo-consumericus/201001/pornography-beneficial-or-detrimental

Prause, N., & Pfaus, J. (2015). Viewing sexual stimuli associated with greater sexual responsiveness, not erectile dysfunction. Sexual Medicine, 3(2), 90–98. https://doi.org/10.1002/sm2.58

The 8 best sites to watch ethical, fair trade porn. (2017, December 16). The Daily Dot. https://www.dailydot.com/nsfw/guides/porn-ethical-premium/

Wasserman, M. (1996). Positive, powerful pornography. Agenda, 28, 58. https://doi.org/10.2307/4065758

Why criminalizing rape porn is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea. (2014, June 18). The Daily Dot. https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/criminalizing-rape-porn-terrible-idea/

#feminism #sex industry

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unearthitaly · 3 years

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4 Popular Stereotypes that Annoy Italians

Some time ago I run a series of surveys among Italian users on Instagram, Twitter and here on Tumblr to understand which are the stereotypes that bother the most Italians. Italians are indeed one of the most stereotyped people in the world and not all the beliefs are harmless, quite the contrary.

The things mentioned were many, but I've found four points that recurred the most. Have a read, these are interesting things to know, in my opinion, in order to better navigate within the local community, understanding the mentality and possibly avoiding gaffes.

1) GLAMORIZATION OF THE MAFIA

[Photo by Toxic Player on Unsplash]

This is by far the most mentioned topic by the participants.

With the expression “glamorization of the mafia” we indicate the American-influenced portrayal of criminal organizations in the media, which tends to focus on aspects of their public image and lifestyle, which are considered “cool”. When an Italian think about the mafia, though, the last association that comes into one’s mind is the word “glamour”, given that criminal organizations have infiltrated all levels of economy and society within the country and the consequences have been devastating.

Speaking about TV-series and movies, historically the Italian narrative has always been focused on the perils and terrible consequences of the mafia infiltrations within the society and it has aimed to depict the mafiosi as the bad guys, avoiding any attempt to empathize with them. Quite a different approach from the glamorous American one, which tend to depict them as "romantic thieves", and that ( sadly let me tell you) continue to have an international appeal.

It goes without saying that glamorizing mafia is considered extremely offensive to Italians. Instead of focusing on this media “perversion” regarding these criminals, international audiences should think about the thousands of people who have lost their lives because of these organizations.

Sorry if these words bother you guys, but, believe me, the international representation of mafiosi and the morbid curiosity people have concerning these topics are much more bothersome to us.

2) ITALIANS ARE LAZY AND THEY DON’T WANT TO WORK

[Photo by Elizabeth Lies on Unsplash]

That’s another big hit among the countless of stereotypes linked to Italians. We are not bringing into question the objective problems connected with the Italian job market and work environment, but stating that Italians don’t care about working is frankly something we cannot accept.

Believe me, we are perfectly aware we generally lack in branches like public administration, bureaucracy, marketing and customer care, yet, I think it’s easy to realize it, it’s very rude to address working people as lazy due to a national stereotype and not their actual labour. Despite the difficulties, Italy is the seventh economy in the world, a result which would have been quite hard to achieve if we were a country entirely populated by lazybones.

3) ITALY IS AN UNDERDEVELOPED COUNTRY

Several interviewees are under the impression that certain foreigners believe Italy to be an underdeveloped country, stuck in the 40s and 50s, and this, again, has very much to do with the American media representation. If you notice, on TV and in the movies, when the protagonist comes to Italy, usually aboard one’s own luxury car, one will be soon surrounded only by tractors and flocks of sheep blocking the path. Surely a picturesque image, but quite uncommon and outdated.

4) ITALIAN MEALS LAST HOURS AND ALWAYS CONSIST OF AN ENDLESS NUMBER OF COURSES

[Photo by Dan Gold on Unsplash]

During festivities and on special occasions we definitely eat like there’s no tomorrow to the point of feeling sick, but that’s absolutely not the norm. I guess foreign visitors who have been reporting this “habit” have been invited to one of these special occasions – a welcoming lunch, a special Sunday gathering or a wedding reception – and have assumed this was the standard.

The norm until few years ago was, I guess, having two courses – a soup or pasta followed by some proteins and vegetables – but nowadays it’s fairly common having just one course. It really depends on the family’s habits.

[This entry is just some sort of recap, for the complete article (around 1900 words) check here on my blog in Wordpress]

Sara - Unearth Italy. Find me also on Instagram and Twitter.

#italian culture #italians #italy #italian stuff #italian

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thisdayinwwi · 3 years

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The Shell-Shocked Soldier

Amazing analysis by CarlaJeanStokes

I’d like to start this thread by stating that the proper title of this photograph is: Dressing Wounded in Trench During the Battle of Courcelette. It was taken in September 1916 by Canadian official First World War photographer Ivor Castle. It belongs to LAC, and is PA 00909.

Item no. (creator):O-736 Item ID number:3395804

I’ve been researching Castle’s life and career for about four years (although he didn’t leave much behind for us). Learn more about Castle (and importantly, how and why he and other official photographers were hired) here: This photograph is the subject of several Reddit threads, has been colourized, is frequently shared over social media, and is featured on a few blogs. In all of these venues, it is claimed that the subject has “gone insane” and is “obviously” displaying signs of shell shock.

Here’s a dodgy one for you to enjoy:The Story of the Shell Shocked Soldier (1916)The shell-shocked soldier's eyes express the madness of the war. The soldier looks like he has gone insane from what he has seen.https://www.atchuup.com/shell-shocked-soldier/

And another (lol apparently this is a rare historical photograph? No, it’s readily available online from LAC and has been for YEARS):Shell shocked soldier, 1916A shell shocked soldier in a trench during the Battle of Flers-Courcelette during the Somme Offensive in September 1916. His eyes express the madness of the war. The soldier looks like he has gone …https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/shell-shocked-soldier-1916/

This photograph appears to have been the inspiration for “SCP-106”, a fictional character named Corporal Lawrence. You can watch his YouTube video here:

youtube

The photograph is often cropped closely around the one subject, though the original is a wider view of eight soldiers in a trench, grouped in twos. Castle also took this alternative view, entitled: First Aid being rendered to wounded at Courcelette, September 1916, LAC PA 00627.

Item no. (creator):O-756 Item ID number:3395787

It’s actually not weird that Castle took a wide view of a scene and people have zeroed in on one aspect of it – it’s something he did often, and the press cropped his photographs before publishing. How often? I talk about it re: photos of Vimy Ridge in my upcoming book. Castle’s photographs were also sometimes given false background stories. Don’t have time to watch the video above? Check out my thread here: Interestingly, one Reddit user claims that the photog knew the man had shellshock and took an empathic photographic of him rather than reducing the scene to something more propagandist – this is pretty out of character for Castle, who was Canada’s most propagandist photographer. Which brings me to a crucial point: we cannot ascribe meaning to photographs - usually ever, but especially when we haven’t taken the time to understand who the photographer was AND the system of information that hired them. I didn’t find a single instance of this image being shared with a proper credit to the photographer or the institution that commissioned his work. But would the Canadian official photographer take photographs portraying shell shock and would the Canadian War Records Office label them as such and send them to newspapers around the world? Hmmm. Probably not. That’s a story for another day! Now, this photograph is alleged to show Robert Lindsay Rogers. How did this connection happen? Well, dear reader, I haven’t a damn clue.

(Snagged this image from veterans.gc.ca)There is no mention of Rogers in the LAC photograph listing (based on original caption lists from the war). If we go directly to those caption lists (I have 2 copies of the bound ledgers photographed on my computer). No mention of Rogers in either. There is no mention of Rogers being the subject of this photograph in any reputable online soldier-memory website. For example, you can read about Rogers here:

The photograph is labeled as Courcelette, and Rogers was there. That’s where he received (holy crap) a gunshot wound to the neck that turned out not to be fatal. If we look back at both views of the photo, this soldier is not having his neck attended to. In Rogers’ own description, he was shot, had to wait until nightfall to crawl out of a trench with 2 others, get to a dressing station, and was put on a stretcher and then to hospital.There is no mention of him being cleaned up in a trench, or being photographed during that time. You can read his account here, and note that there IS the alternative view on this webpage, but Rogers is not ID'd as being the soldier being patched up.

Furthermore, even if this WAS Rogers (there doesn’t seem to be any reputable proof that it is, if you know more, please hit me up!) we would still need to establish that Rogers suffered from what was then colloquially known as shell shock. There is no evidence of shell shock or neurasthenia in Rogers’ service file. It does, of course, make extensive mention of his gunshot wound, as well an infected toe. He reports to a medical board to review his combat fitness after his wound had healed, and returns to the front. Rogers was unfortunately killed in action in 1917. His name is written on the Vimy Memorial.Interestingly, his late mother is pointed out as “mentally deficient.” But my albeit quick reading of 100+ year old handwriting doesn’t convince me that he was. Download his service file here:

#wwi #ww1 #Canada wwi #shell shocked

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in-tua-deep · 5 years

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What are your thoughts on Vanya’s book? I’m torn between knowing it was an empowering thing for her and being like damn girl, you were all abused, not cool putting that out there without their consent. The lines I’ve seen from it were about how Vanya’s siblings treated her but I don’t see how she can talk about their childhood without the abuse coming up. Do you think Vanya would have to apologize for the book as part of improving the siblings relationships?

I think that Vanya’s book was very important for her to write - for herself. I don’t think she should have published it without the consent of her siblings, because Vanya does not exist in a vacuum. If you think Allison was not absolutely grilled over the contents of that book in interviews and it didn’t continuously pop up in her world you’re wrong. And anyone who both knew the other siblings and read the book might make comments or ask questions or make assumptions. Vanya wrote an entire book about how terribly she was treated and then pointed the finger at her siblings.

Because the issue is this: Vanya was abused. Horrifically and terribly abused and neglected. She was drugged for the majority of her life against her consent, frequently emotionally abused and belittled, and isolated from the rest of her siblings. She has a right to be angry. BUT. That does not erase the fact that her siblings were all also abused and victims. And Vanya was so wrapped up in her own pain she couldn’t really see that.

Of course, the reverse is also true. The others were all wrapped up in their own trauma to the extent that they never considered Vanya’s point of view or the ways that Vanya was being abused.

But imagine for a moment that you father raises you as a child soldier. You and all your siblings except one. While you’re running drills and learning to fight and gathering bruises and the only time you’re allowed to yourself is half an hour during the weekend - the life of the one sibling who is allowed to pursue her own passions (violin) and is generally ignored by your drill sergeant father seems to have it pretty darn good wouldn’t you think? You’d give your left leg to be invisible or not be forced to do the training. You’d give your left leg to have her freedom.

And then she publishes an entire book painting you the bad guy because, what, you didn’t include her in your half an hour of freetime? You had better things to do trying to survive your father’s regime than take a few to play happy family with her? You look at this book and ignore all the emotional abuse and gaslighting that she’s highlighting because you think she had it easy, and she’s saying in here that she was jealous of the attention your father gave you. Jealous. As if gaining your dad’s attention was ever a good thing.

She spills a whole bunch of family secrets. Discusses your brother’s death, something you find very private (maybe you even witnessed it and she didn’t), with the entire world. She drags up all the shitty things you did as a child. A child raised in an emotionally and honestly probably physically abusive household from which your only adult human role model was your asshole father. He built you a robotic mother who obeys his orders and parrots his words. The only other person is a chimpanzee who also only ever seems to regurgitate Reginald’s ideas and always defended him even though he was hurting you. Abusing you.

Vanya deserved to write down those thoughts and discuss them. With a therapist. Or friends. Or anonymously! Maybe a blog and give everyone pseudonyms and work through it that way. Because like it or not, her siblings did hurt her. They probably gaslit her about how bad things were, blowing her off because clearly her life wasn’t that bad. And they’d probably roll their eyes and call her lucky that she wasn’t included in training anyway. And Vanya would have to grit her teeth and smile and agree because it’s six against one.

Vanya was abused. But that doesn’t mean her siblings weren’t equally abused. Honestly I bet if Vanya had called up Diego and was like “hey I’m writing a whole book about how much growing up with old Reggie fucking sucked, thinking about publishing, wanna help?” Diego would be the first one on board like “HELL YEAH let’s ruin dad’s whole career I have like, seven stories about child endangerment off the top of my head let’s go”

the book we deserved to have was a collab by the whole family offering different points of views and discussing the trauma their siblings didn’t get to see - like private training.

So what I’m saying is that Vanya does write a sequel to her book. Except this time it’s with everyone sharing. That’s the apology. The opportunity to set the record straight with what they’re comfortable sharing with the world.

Luther can talk about never feeling good enough, can talk about his isolation at the top of the pyramid and his relationship with Allison who was also there. He can talk about impossible standards and his father never using his name. Strained muscles and terrible testing. The nonconsensual body modification and the isolation on the moon. The realization that four years of his life had been wasted because his dad never even bothered to read the reports - he didn’t even care enough to try. He can talk about the fact that he was so raised up as a child that he feels like a failure at everything he does now.

Allison can talk about her father forcing her to rumor her sister when they were both four years old. She can talk about the training, having to rumor her siblings and then later the random people Reginald would bring to her. Delivery men and door to door salesmen and girlscouts who were always rumored to forget after. (And then the homeless people, the people no one would miss. The ones who weren’t rumored to forget after because they didn’t go home. She doesn’t write about them though). She can talk about rumoring her way through life and never learning how to get anything without forcing people to give it to her. Constantly on the offensive. The way that’s impacted her career, her relationships.

Diego can talk about never being good enough. His stutter that Reginald had no patience with. The training, being forced to throw knives at the one person in the world he really truly cares about as she smiles at him with her plastic smile. Trying desperately to keep Klaus from drowning under the weight of Reginald’s expectations when he was barely treading water himself after Ben’s death. Leaving the first chance he did and never looking back. The way he still tried to prove himself by joining the police academy, and when he failed at that by becoming a vigilante.

Klaus can talk about his father throwing him in a fucking mausoleum. Being scared of the dark and claustrophobic. The ghosts he sees screaming behind his eyelids and sometimes even when his eyes are open. The one escape that he found being looked down on by everyone around him when he was only doing his very best to survive because the sad truth is that he could not live that way. Not how it was. He can talk about Ben showing up after his death, and nobody believing him. Being homeless. Living on the streets with no one but a ghostly follower for company. Every moment of sobriety in that house was one of fear - and Klaus is just so very tired of being afraid. (Maybe he can bring himself to talk about Dave, the one person that made him feel safe and protected and loved and how he lost him. Maybe he can’t.)

Ben can talk through Klaus about his own life. He was forced to kill people against his will with a power he couldn’t really control and that he was afraid of. He ended missions covered in blood that he never wanted to shed. Then his death which was reportedly very bad. Then showing up again and only being able to talk to Klaus. Not being able to hug him or stop him or intervene - forced to become a spectator to his brother overdosing over and over again. Loving him but being so angry that he’s squandering the chances Ben wishes he could once again have.

Five can talk about growing up pushing the boundaries and the way the others only seemed to notice when Reginald praised him and never when he was punished. And he was punished. Reginald tried over and over again to get Number Five to come to heel and never quite succeeded. Every point Five gained in his own personal score was gained through blood and bruises and willpower. There’s all that to talk about, and then there’s the time travel and forty years of isolation and Dolores and becoming an assassin and his plethora of issues regarding that he doesn’t even need to get into to make a whole book of his own. Coming back and seeing that cold portrait sitting on the mantle and knowing that Reginald used his presumed death in order to further control his siblings.

And they write it together, sitting in the living room and contradicting each other’s memories of events (”No, Dad caught us because you tripped on the table!” “Nuh uh! It was because Klaus was whispering too loudly!” “Actually guys looking back I’m pretty sure Dad just checked the cameras and noticed us leaving.”) and maybe they don’t publish it! They don’t have to! Or maybe they do, taking out all the bits about, you know, murder and all of that sorry Ben they could probably just downgrade the language to ‘hurting a lot of people’ though I mean. He’s dead it’s not like they can charge him with excessive use of force at this point.

And it’s a bonding experience. And they all come out of it better understanding that they were all traumatized and abused and groomed and gaslighted and neglected and just overall their childhoods were shit. Five will defend Vanya’s book with his fucking life and probably is instrumental in making the others see that just because her abuse looked different doesn’t make it less valid. And he’s also instrumental in making Vanya see that just because the others abuse looked different doesn’t make it any less valid, either.

Do yeah, have enough material for a sequel? There’s enough material for a fucking series.

Honestly though genuinely do you know what I think would have been a way better and more empowering move on Vanya’s part? Writing a fiction novel about an ordinary child in a world of magic and superpowers who saves the world. Writing about her own life through the lens of fiction. Basing her characters on real people, yeah, but not writing a tell all book about people whose lives it would very much still affect. Plus, I bet the others would actually read the book at least and recognize it.

I mean, if they read an entire book about a character who was excluded and belittled and ignored and told she wasn’t worth anything because she wasn’t special in the context of this fictional world, I think they would sympathize. And then if Vanya told them hey, actually this is me projecting and I really did feel this way a lot then it might go over a sight better than hey I’m writing about our childhoods and all your friends are going to read about it

and honestly?? I think that’s a story that needs to be told to other little girls as well. Maybe they aren’t literally being told they’re ordinary because they don’t have superpowers, but there’s a lot of girls who are told they aren’t special and can’t do things and having an ordinary character save the world is an important and inspiring narrative. And it might help Vanya get some closure, because she gets to come up with an end to the story. Wish fulfillment. She gets to write about an ordinary little girl who saved the world. Or maybe she didn’t save the world. Maybe she saved her piece of the world and left the rest up to the people with powers. Small acts of kindness that change everything, for some people.

(and it would reach more people than whoever reads autobiographies and memoirs)

I have a lot of feelings about the book as you can probably tell lmao

I just think the book could have been handled better on Vanya’s part. But I also think she had a right to write it because she had a LOT of stuff to work through. Honestly I think the book originally began from an exercise her therapist gave her and took on a life of its own until it reached the publisher. But like I said, she doesn’t exist in a vacuum and her actions have effects on other people - specifically her family.

Granted, it’s not like I’ve read the book in its entirety and can’t judge it because of that. But the others had a right to their privacy and I don’t blame them for feeling angry and betrayed because of that invasion of privacy I mean damn. And I doubt Vanya put any of the good stuff in there really, mostly bad. Because that’s how she was feeling.

(If I wrote a book about my childhood with my brother - I could talk about how he sold our joint runescape account without consultation despite all the hours I put in. I could talk about him chasing me through the house or eating my chocolate that I was saving. I could talk about some of his shitty views and his self-isolation, how he would call me stupid and never let me play with him. When he purposefully ditched me in Mini-Amsterdam when I was six and I had to find someone to call my mum for me. Maybe the time he left me on the school bus when I fell asleep next to him. When he pushed me into a bank of nettles, ouch. Or I could talk about how when my balloon popped when I was seven, he gave me his balloon. Or the time he won me a toy starfish on a crane machine. Or when he took me to school after my surgery so I could pick up my homework and when I went back before I was ready he was the one to pick me up again. Or the time when my sister and her friend were being horrible and he let me hang out with him and his friend in their secret base even though he usually didn’t give me the time of day.)

At the end of the day, you can frame people any way you want, and Vanya was going for the bad stuff. Because she was hurting. And she hurt them. And she needs to acknowledge that, so yeah I do think she needs to apologize for writing the book without asking or consulting in order to improve their relationship. I think the others need to apologize to her as well for what little shits they were as kids, because their own abuse is a reason but it doesn’t excuse what they did, either. Vanya was abused and they hurt her and they need to apologize for that. But that didn’t give Vanya the right to hurt them back, so she has to apologize as well if that makes sense??

I dunno this ended up longer than I thought it would oof but I hope it answers your question!!

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dreams-madeof-strawberrylemonade · 5 years

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Fanfiction masterlist

All my imagines refer to a female reader! Requests are open. Link to the requests rules is HERE.

(GIF found on Tumblr, but the account seemed deactivated... Still giving credit to the creator when found :) )

Series

Sound of Nature [Josh Kiszka - Imagine] (this series doesn’t have a masterpost for itself so here are all the parts) - set during a camping trip with the boys. Prologue Part 1 - By the Fire [Teaser HERE] Part 2 - Sunshine [Teaser HERE]

Heartbreaker [Jake Kiszka - Imagine]. This is an AU series, set in the year of 1968. The reader is an aspiring reporter and things quite change when she is given the chance to interview a new up and coming band. Heartbreaker Masterpost

Bad Moon Rising [Sam Kiszka x O.C.]. Jane Morrison finds out on her wedding day that her soon-to-be husband has been cheating on her and things get called off. Her best friend will always be there for her through good and bad, but how bad can things actually get?

Requests/One-shots

Josh Kiszka What are you going to do? (Imagine- Set at a college party) Blanket (Imagine- Some fluffy Josh) Getaway (Imagine- Josh proposes to the reader) My Sun, Moon and Stars (Imagine- Birthday special for the amazing @safarimama) Blue (Imagine- Josh and reader meet again after a long time and fall for each other, just like the first time) Zero (Imagine- Reader shaves her head and Josh supports her) Photos by the Pool (Imagine- Josh and reader have some mid-July fun. Fluffy!) Here (Imagine- Josh helps you get over an anxiety attack)

Jake Kiszka Guitar Strap (Imagine- Reader goes on tour with GVF) Falling (Imagine- A little bit angsty) Heart (Imagine- Jake proposes to the reader) Backstage (Imagine- Steamy time with Jake backstage) Mistletoe (Imagine- Jake is the reader’s fake boyfriend and goes with her to a Christmas family dinner) Unexpected (Imagine- Christmas angst) Reunion (Imagine- Reader and Jake meet after four years from their breakup. Expect steamy stuff in here) Run (Imagine- Reader and Jake get dared to run around the street [there’s a twist but u gotta find it]) Reunion (Imagine- just some fluff)

Sam Kiszka Love Hurts (Imagine- Set at a party) In another life (Imagine- Angst) Snow (Imagine- Soft Sammy during winter) Waves (Imagine- Reader and Sam go to the beach) Anger & Cupcakes (Imagine- Sam and the reader get in a fight and then Sammy apologizes)

Danny Wagner Pumpkin Pie (Imagine- Fluffy Halloween special) Safe (Imagine- Reader has a nightmare and Danny comforts her) Homecoming Dinner (Imagine- Reader and Danny meet at a dinner and they hit it off)

Headcanons

Soft Sammy (Sam Kiszka) Going Out (Sanny [Sam x Danny] ) Comforting Jake (Jake Kiszka) Christmas at Josh’s cabin (Josh Kiszka)

DISCLAIMERS:

I do not own Greta Van Fleet, nor their music. None of the written stories are real, they are pure fiction with recreational purpose. None of these stories are meant to be offensive nor triggering. If in the story will exist any potentially triggering factors (ex: smoking, drinking, swearing etc.) it will be announced in the story post, before the actual story.

None of the photos and/or GIFs I use are mine. I do not mean to steal from the owners/creators. In case I don’t know who made the original post, I am going to announce in the beginning of the post and I am willing to give credit to the creator/owner.

I am sorry, but I must deny from the beginning all the requests that refer to the LGBTQ+ community. Don’t get me wrong, I FULLY SUPPORT this community, but I am afraid I can’t write that kind of fanfictions without triggering people from both in and outside the community. I just don’t want to offend anyone with my lack of knowledge. Nevertheless, this blog IS supporting LGBTQ+!

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whumpforthewin · 4 years

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Hunted

((I wanted to thank @castielamigos-whump-side-blog and @whumpwhumpwhumpwhump for being the biggest supports of this. It’s given me inspiration to get the posts out quick. Idk where I’m going but I can sure find out! So here’s Part 3! Part 1, Part 2))

They were being hunted, stalked. That was about all they knew. Therin woke up first, in the middle of a forest, there was a moment of panic when he sat up but a note fluttered off him. In neat, familiar script it said, “Make it back to the Academy. You have five days. - Master Carron.”

Looking around he’d found Ciel and Julietta. Apparently they were ready to start training together. It had been several months since he’d started training with his shields and Master Carron had said they would be moving up training. Apparently this was it.

And now, they were on day three and they knew people were behind them. Stalking them, watching them, hunting them. Ciel had two healing potions and a small bag of herbs. Julietta had her sword. And Therin has been left with his spell book. Not having their spell books meant they couldn’t cast high level spells. It seemed each of them had been left with the tools of their future positions.

On the back of the note was the name of the woods, and that was all. It surrounded the Academy, but none of them had been too far in it. They had to work together to get to the school. They noticed the people following them the first day. An arrow at his feet was the only warning they’d gotten. They ran.

“Cave, up ahead,” Julietta panted. And sure enough, there was. The people were closer, their own pace had slowed, the people’s had not. Therin nodded to the cave and they shifted direction to get in the cave, it wasn’t too deep, fifteen feet back at most and ten feet tall. They all but collapsed onto the floor.

“We can’t outrun them.” Therin grimaced, but Ciel was saying what they were all thinking. “We have to lose them or fight them.”

Therin let out a shaky breath. It was his call. He was the leader, the one with the spells. “We’ve got two more days. Let’s try and lose them tonight, if not we’ll fight. If we win, we’ve got two days to get back, if we don’t, we weren’t meant to be there in the first place. Hoods up, we’re going to circle back.” They nodded and flicked up their hoods.

****

They did not lose them. But circling back did reveal there were six of the hunters. They forced a fight at dawn. It was hard. Ciel only had his lowest spells. Therin sent him to take out the archers while he and Julietta took on the four melee fighters.

He was not a melee fighter himself but he had enough close ranged spells that he didn’t immediately get taken out. He heard a body drop and an angry scream. An arrow caught him in the shoulder and he fell. Pain ripped through him, different than a spell’s pain.

The next was cut out of the air by Julietta. He threw up a shield to stop the attack at her back, the sword clanging off it. “Focus,” he growled pushing himself to his feet. He saw Ciel take out the other archer. Four left, actually three, as Julietta sword connected. He snapped off the end of the arrow and raised his hands towards the two nearest, teeth gritting to ignore the pain radiating from the wound.

The spell went off a second too late and Julietta turned, a sword striking her back. “No!” Ciel yelled rushing over despite the three still up.

Therin threw a shield up to block the next attack against her as the spell struck two of them. One didn’t move but the other scrambled for a sword. He ignored them, and launched himself at the man still up and felt a sword bite into his calf. Ciel slid under the blade to get to her. Therin slammed himself into the man, knocking them both over.

He called lightning, his favored element, to his hands and slammed them on the man’s chest. His face contorted in horror, then pain, then it went slack. He stood and immediately shot lightning at the man who cut him, the only one left. Nothing but a blackened crust of his head was left.

Therin wanted to drop. The adrenaline faded and his vision swam but he stumbled to Julietta. Exhaustion hit him, physically and magically, as he dropped next to her. In the back of his mind he knew they needed to hunt something. But that could wait.

“She alive,” Ciel confirmed, there was an empty healing potion bottle next to him. “But she’s not awake.” Her breath was shallow, the sword had cut from one should blade to the the other hip.

“Use the other,” Therin commanded.

“But your wounds,” Ciel tried.

“I’m still conscious. We won’t leave her, but we can’t carry her all the way. She needs to be up,” Therin’s time left no room for arguments. He could survive his wounds. He was the leader and that meant making the most beneficial decision. Healing himself wouldn’t put him at full strength and they wouldn’t be able to carry her. Ciel nodded and after this one Julietta opened her eyes.

“Welcome back, we need to keep moving.” Therin couldn’t hide his smile. “Let’s see what they’ve got then continue. Julietta, can you stand?” She nodded and got shakily to her feet. “Good, go search their weapons, at least the bows, it’ll give us more to work with.”

“And their cloaks!” Ciel called as she stiffly headed to the scattered bodies. “You sit. This is gonna hurt but I’ve got no healing potions left,” he said gesturing to the arrow.

Therin gritted his teeth as Ciel pulled it out. They wrapped it in strips of cloth and did the same for his leg, putting some of the herbs on it. It stung and he had to limp but he wasn’t going to bleed out, probably. They each had a cloak now, Julietta had a shield, and Ciel took a bow and the arrows. They left with Ciel supporting him while Julietta scouted ahead.

It was slow going, and Therin did his best not to stumble but the steps burned his leg. He could feel the blood deep under the bandages.

They actually managed to get a rabbit that night and Therin got a fire going. It was the first day they weren’t just eating berries. Therin’s arm throbbed with every movement, and his leg ached. He took first watch. Just because the hunters were gone didn’t mean they were safe.

He couldn’t get their faces out of his mind. He didn’t know if they’d been ordered to kill but it certainly seemed like they had been. It had been a do or die situation. He couldn’t be faulted for that, not really. Still, he saw the man’s horrified expression when he shut his eyes, the taste of electricity on his tongue.

Even when it was his turn to sleep it didn’t come easy. The dreams were electric white and blood red that faded to burned blackness. He awoke with a jolt early the next morning. Julietta glanced over at him but didn’t say anything, her expression less haunted in the beginnings of light. He tended the fire and when Ciel woke up they were off again.

It was slow going. He refused to let Ciel support him the whole way. If he was correct they should make the Academy by mid afternoon. He’d already been injured, he didn’t want to show Master Carron further weakness by needing support with those injuries.

The wound on his leg was steadily bleeding, despite the new wrappings, it couldn’t scab when each step tore it apart. But he limped on. They stayed in a tight formation, the other two on the defensive while he was on the offensive.

He must’ve been lightheaded from either the pain or the blood loss because it wasn’t mid afternoon, it was past dusk when they arrived. A guard ran to get Master Carron while they stood in the front hall. Therin swayed slightly, just wanting to sleep but they all straightened when Master Carron made his way down the stairs, a pleased smile on his face.

“Well done. Go, get your wounds attended to. I want your report, written and verbal, tomorrow morning,” the words were neutral but the smile didn’t leave his face.

“Yes, Master Carron,” they said in unison. Finally, Therin let Ciel help him to the infirmary.

#whump #magical whump #hunted #story #fighting #physical whump #exhausted #magic #Therin #Master Carron #whoomp for the win #long post

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xiaosdinonuggies · 5 years

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Continuation from the story I started earlier. You can find it here if you wanna give it a read ^^ I do appreciate feedback. »»——⍟——««

It wasn’t until the next day that the exhausted hero woke up from the strain caused by the night before. She didn’t remember even going home, just remembered a loud scream before forgetting everything afterwards. Whatever had happened, she didn’t trust the so-called ‘ally of the heroes’, Iris. Looking around the room, she saw the begging eyes of a basset hound staring at her. It brought an instant smile to her face.

“Awww, Burrito. You’re cute.” She patted the dog for a moment before getting out of bed.

Once she slipped the fuzzy bunny slippers onto her feet, she realized that her costume was taken off and hanging up on the closet--fully washed and ironed. Two moments later, and older woman leaning on a cane hobbled into the bedroom. “Ms. West, you really should be careful when you jump through the windows. Someone could have seen you come crashing into the house, or heard you with all that noise you caused. Are you trying to hide your identity from criminals?” She tapped her cane against the woman’s arm with a frown. “You’re twenty-seven and have been doing this since you were a teenager. I’d expect you to know this by now.” “Sorry Nana.” In no way was this doting woman related to the young hero, but the two shared such a loving friendship that she couldn’t call the elderly woman anything different. She ended up leaving without saying anything else, just leaving a plate of pancakes on the desk before dipping from the room. Sighing, the hero went over towards the plate and plucked a few pancakes off the top before sitting down and opening her laptop. Someone had to have recorded last nights chase, the city was way too nosy to not have take a video of at least something.

Deciding to start with the common social media platforms, she opened up Twitter first and scrolled through it. When that struck out, Instagram, Facebook, and even YouTube were searched through. She found nothing, to her surprise. Checking the clock, it was well after 3 p.m. She’d been sitting there for almost four hours and came up with absolutely nothing.

Rubbing her eyes as she groaned, the thought of the dark web came to mind. Well....It wasn’t entirely a bad idea if the threat of being chased by Iris still lingered in the air. Besides, finding out who had shown up before she passed out was important. Maybe not just to figure out who needed thanking, but also because they might be in whatever trouble that was meant for her.

Still not wanting the dark web to be on her conscience, she tried seeing if perhaps a few others in the hero community could help her out. After all, most of the heroes with actual paying jobs had cameras all around the city. If she could get her hands on it...perhaps she’d know what happened last night. Sliding her phone from her pocket, she dialed the first number that popped up. It was only labeled with a leaf, nothing more. If anyone had gotten a hold of her phone, she didn’t want anyone getting much more than numbers. “What West? Everyone knows I’m on vacation in Paris. Its 2 in the morning, make it quick before I send a pipe bomb to your house.” The girl on the end of the line had definitely just been woken up and wasn’t too happy about it. “Sorry, sorry. I was wondering if you had any cameras set up near the dark side?” The dark side was usually what they referred to the rougher side of the city, rather than calling it something worse. “You couldn’t have called my brother--or either one of my sisters? Never mind...I do but you’re going to need the login for it. I’ll just text it to you. Goodnight and good luck with whatever you’re doing.” The line dropped right after that.

Just as promised, the login and link to the cameras was sent to her phone. While there was the feeling of guilt for waking the resting vigilante during her one month of rest, this was urgent. Besides, she was convinced the other girl’s older brother had some sort of weird condition that caused him to disrespect most the people he came in contact with. Weird.

The cameras were definitely more useful than the internet had been. The exact moment had been fully recorded from the time the canister dropped to when she was having trouble breathing. “Dear god, I look like I’m having heart burn or something. That’s attractive.” She stopped providing commentary for herself when a blur moved across the screen. After nearly choking on her own saliva, she replayed the whole thing just to make sure she wasn’t seeing things.

She threw her hands in the air. “That’s it. My career is over.”

The very petty-thief she’d been trying to catch since she was nineteen had taken a high-voltage hit to the back for her right after kicking her through the portal to send her home. That explained why she woke up in her bedroom instead of behind a dumpster. But why save her?

Throwing herself into full work mode, she politely asked Nana to make a large pot of hot tea since she’d be sitting there a while. As she started digging into any little thing she could find on Iris, the older woman sat behind her and offered advice every once in a while. The sun had set by the time she had actually collected enough that was considered useful.

It seemed that the government-sponsored company wasn't as heroic as the people they claimed to work with. Several personal blogs, including those of a small-time reporter, had gone into detail about community heroes going missing after talking with Iris. All of them had been approached in the same way she had, Iris claiming they mistook the hero for a villain or criminal and apologizing for it. However, there were never any sightings of the heroes in question once they’d been reportedly released.

Putting her cup of tea down, a frown worked its way onto her face. If heroes had been going missing, she couldn’t imagine what had been happening to them. Whatever Iris was doing must have been behind the larger heroes' backs, and probably wasn't anything legal if it was being covered up so well. Depending on what was actually going on in their facilities, they were likely treating their villains worse than their potentially kidnapped heroes. “ You don’t find any of this offensive?” Nana spoke up, raising an eyebrow from her own tea. “What do you mean?” “They went after you. That means they think you’re a nobody!”

------

Two hours had gone by and there was an open suitcase on her bed. Her costume was shoved inside it, along with anything else she could possibly fit. When she leaned over to zip it, a Scottish Fold hopped onto the pillows that had been forcefully pushed into the overflowing suitcases. This led to more stuff being somehow fit inside the case, mostly cat products.

“I mean if this goes sour, at least I have you and Burrito. You wanna go break a villain out of jail Simon?” The cat meowed back at her in response. “This is why I’m single. I talk to cats.”

Bringing the suitcase to a rather broken-down looking car, she said her goodbyes to the elderly woman before putting the two animals in the car and driving off. She’d reached out to another friend, getting a location of the Iris-owned facility in the city. It was near the emptier section where the rich bought huge properties for the sole purpose of not having to look at their neighbors. She supposed that would have been a perfect spot for them to set up, somewhere no one would notice anything sketchy going on.

It was well into the late hours of the night, maybe early morning when she pulled into the parking lot of a Dollar General with the lights off. It was about a half-mile away from the actual facility, but she didn’t want anyone seeing her car so close by and piecing things together. The cat was on her shoulder as she pulled a backpack from the trunk of the car and slung it over the opposite shoulder. Thus began the twenty minute walk towards the facility, and the poor performance of her attempting to climb someone’s storage warehouse.

Once she had gotten up there, she looked over the facility and started taking photos for later. It was only when she noticed a lone female agent standing off to the side while talking annoyingly loud on the phone. A grin twitched at the corners of the hero’s mouth. “You’ll do Karen, you’ll do.” Sliding the backpack onto the roof, she unzipped it and pulled out a brown wig similar to the Karen’s hair.

After fixing the wig to her head, she made quick work of knocking the woman unconscious and stealing her uniform, leaving a thin dark-colored blanket just to keep her body hidden. Thankfully this woman had a pretty plain face and always wore sunglasses, so it wasn't entirely hard to pull something like this off. After stealing the woman's ID badge and putting Simon in her bag, the nervous twenty-seven-year-old made her way to the front doors.

Nobody questioned her when she walked back inside, lifting her phone to her ear as if she were still talking on it. A few people rolled their eyes, as if this were a regular thing. ‘It kind of makes me wonder how hard it actually is to get in here.’

Trying to be subtle while searching for something had no clue as the whereabouts to was incredibly difficult. She kept stumbling over the high heels, laughing and just blaming it on that ‘darn gravitational pull’. Eventually she tripped into another hallway. It was long, and only had one door at the very end. Deciding this had to be it, she picked herself up and made her way down the hall as quietly as possible. The door was made of steal and had tempered bulletproof glass in the corner. Even with the high heels, she was still too short to reach it.

Leaning on the door in an attempt to hear through it, she got nothing. Deciding to test her luck, she pushed on the door handle. Surprisingly, it opened. There was only one person in the room, so she shut the door and locked it. Hanging upside down in chains was the person she’d been trying to stop for years. She stared into his green eyes, only finding them full of fear. It was such a change from arrogant and mischievous that it shocked her to her core.

“I told you, I don't know anything. I don’t know who they are!” He started thrashing around to the point where she just pulled the wig and glasses off. There was a purple-colored domino mask replacing her usual one but it still looked enough like her normal costume to be recognizable. A net was covering her natural hair for the moment, so she wasn't too worried. “Sucky name?” He looked at her with confusion in his eyes. “You really shouldn’t be here. You need to go. They’re trying to find you.” “Yeah, I’ve got that. But I didn’t come all the way out here just to leave you behind. Also stop calling me that, my name is Origami.” She went over to the chains and started working at the lock while the cat climbed from her purse and went over to the barred window. “Exactly. Sucky name. I’ll stop calling you that when you stop calling me Cottontail.” Without warning, the chains unraveled and he tumbled to the floor head-first. “You did that on purpose.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.” Grinning, she pulled the chains to the side and let them pile in the corner.

There was a clanging noise as the window and bars hit the floor. It made the villain jump a bit but Origami just sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose. “Simon do you really have to be that loud?” “Wait, you have a magical cat? All these years and you’ve never once brought your cat, who can apparently cut through metal rods, to any of our fights.” He stared at her, but she just shrugged and pointed to the open window. “Didn’t see the need to bother him for a skinny crook like you. Now climb out that window before I punt your fuzzy butt out of it for you. I don’t have all night.” He snorted a bitterly but obeyed, starting to climb out the window. “Funny. I don’t recall you ever having caught me.”

Once he had gotten out, she dropped next to him with the cat in her arms. “What’s next, hero?” He was referring to the large group that currently had their guns pointed at the both of them. With a bit of hesitation, she pulled three of the folded wolves and blew onto them. They grew and sprang to life, the six foot creations immediately taking action and beginning to make quick work of them. Almost instantly her chest tightened and her breathing became labored. It wasn't anything she couldn’t handle for the moment, though. Grabbing his hand, she pulled another paper creation out of her bag. Though, this time it was a butterfly. When it grew, it was only about four feet. Even still, it was enough to carry them off into the coming sunrise.

#writing #original writing #fiction #hero #hero x villain #villain #villain x hero #writers on tumblr #villains and heroes #heroes and villains #heroes

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flawsomesims · 4 years

Text

EndEr ASylum ✲ 🏚️ Entry #002

| 📑 Table of Contents/Information | 🦙 Main Blog |

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Monday, Spring

I woke up at four in the morning, according to the old grandfather clock in the hallway. Despite the mattress feeling like cardboard, I didn’t sleep as bad as I was expecting. After using the restroom, I carefully went downstairs, wincing when the third step from the bottom creaked loudly. For a solid minute, I stood there, waiting to see if I had disturbed anyone, but there was no movement.

Thinking about it, this asylum is pretty old for only being built five years ago. Everything creaks and groans, there’s cracks in the walls and green mold growing from the tile and water spots on the ceiling. It’s almost as if they purposefully used the oldest, worse possible materials when they were building this place. Talk about being on a budget.

I spent the next couple hours sitting in the kitchen near the window, using the rising sun to read until the lights flicked back on. It wasn’t long before Gretchen joined me at the table, followed by Jane.

Jane asked both of us how we’re progressing with our goals, but it seemed like most of her attention was on me. It made me feel super uncomfortable, like a mouse under the watchful eye of a cat. I had only been here for a day, so I had nothing to report. Gretchen was excited to report on her progress, but Jane wasn’t really listening to her.

Deidre entered soon after and headed straight for the chess table. She started to talk, but she wasn’t talking to us. Gretchen explained that Deidre tends to have conversations with an imaginary man named Bob who she claims used to be her lover once upon a time. I question the validity of that statement.

“This place is a mess,” Jane had commented as she stood up from the table, her eyes sweeping the room before zeroing in on me once more. “Winterbrook, clean this mess immediately, will you?”

Although it had been phrased as a question, it was clearly an order. I don’t like this woman one bit, but I don’t want to get on her bad side, either. She holds all the power here, after all. So, I ended up washing all the dishes without a word.

Around seven o’clock, Jane left the asylum for work, leaving the place unattended. I’ve never run an asylum before, but I feel as if leaving six mental patients alone to their own devices for several hours is a bad idea. Does the government know? Surely they wouldn’t approve of such a thing.

Here at the asylum, the patients are meant to make their own food. I don’t understand the reason for this. All of the ingredients are provided for us, but they are far past their expiration date and some of them even have mold, which I’m pretty sure isn’t meant to be consumed by the sim body.

After looking over my choices, I decided that the instant oatmeal was my best option. Unfortunately, the microwave is a cheap thing that looks about a decade old, so while the top of the oatmeal was close to burning, the middle was cold.

I decided to practice playing chess because I wanted to be prepared on the off chance I was able to enter the chess tournament at the end of the year. I had been entering it every year since I was a child, but something tells me Jane would never allow it.

Deidre ended up joining me and, soon after, Steven stopped by. We were having a nice chat with one another until we started to swap stories. I decided to tell them about one Winterfest when I was six-years-old. The story involved getting stuck at the airport for two days during a blizzard and missing the chance to visit my mom’s parents in Roaring Heights. I thought it was funny because, at the time, I had chosen to entertain myself by sitting on the back of the security guard’s golfcart and read a book about art theft while my father tried to find me.

Neither of them seemed to care about the tale.

It left me feeling embarrassed and a bit sad. I had listened to their stories with enthusiasm and responded accordingly, but it felt as if they hadn’t listened to a word I said.

The two of them walked away, continuing the conversation with each other and leaving me behind to my own thoughts. Had I said something to offend them? Maybe the tale I chose was too long? No matter what my mind thought up, nothing seemed to fit properly. Perhaps they just don’t like me. They wouldn’t be the first. In fact, I’m convinced that my mother hates my guts. I didn’t turn out to be the perfect little over-achiever she was hoping I would be.

“Why so glum, chum?” Gretchen had asked after slipping into the chair across from me. I explained the situation, even going so far as to re-tell the story to see if I had said something offensive. During this time, Aubrey had joined us, sitting at the table and staring at us with a smile that sent chills down my spine.

“Nah, you didn’t say anything offensive.” She insisted. “You’ll quickly learn that the folks around here are pretty selfish. They love to have people hanging off their words, but refuse to give any attention to anyone else.”

I was starting to learn that and I don’t like it. It reminds me too much of my mother, who acts very much the same.

“Don’t worry, sweetcheeks. Just flash a little more skin and everyone will be hangin’ off your words,” Aubrey commented, licking his lips as his eyes trailed over my form and then Gretchen’s.

I snapped at him. “Can you ever just open your mouth without being a total creep?”

Gretchen agreed with me. “Just because you can say something, don’t mean you should!”

After that, I felt like I needed a bath to relax my fraying nerves. I stood in the hallway for ages, but Tim refused to leave the bath. I knocked a couple of times, just to make sure he hadn’t passed out or anything, but he just yelled at me to “Feck off!” and then proceeded to rant and rave about having no privacy.

At this point, I started to feel very sad. It felt as if everything was slowly crushing me as if I were an empty soda can.

I stepped out into the yard to get some fresh air and admire the nature around me. If you overlooked the decrepit asylum plopped down here, the neighborhood was quite beautiful and peaceful. It’s hard to believe that, up until five years ago, it was impossible to live here without dying.

Unfortunately, seeing the world through a chain-link fence doesn’t do much to lift one’s spirits. We have more free-reign than we should, honestly, but it still feels as if I’m a prisoner rather than a patient. I guess it’s a good thing they don’t experiment on their patients like you read about in books.

For dinner, I decided to make myself a garden salad. I opened the fridge door and grabbed a tomato, over-ripe and probably only minutes away from being foul. The light inside flickered a few times before going off, the soft hum dying out as the bottom of the fridge started to spark.

It broke. The refrigerator actually broke. I knew the appliances were pretty trash, but this? This seemed dangerous.

When Jane returned home, I went straight to her to let her know about the broken fridge, thinking she would call a repairman to fix it, but I was surprised by her response.

Her expression remained bored as she looked me dead in the eye and said, “And? Why are you telling me this? The point of your stay here is to figure out how to handle such things. In other words, it’s not my problem.”

I could only stare at her as she headed up the stairs. What kind of administrator is she?

I returned to the kitchen, finding Dante looking at the sparks curiously. The thought of fixing it myself honestly terrified me because I know the risk of electrocution is high, especially when you don’t know what you’re doing. I’ve read many books in my time in this world, and several of those books had been about handiness and repair, but I don’t feel confident in my skills. Even so… this is a hazard waiting to happen.

With a nervous sigh, I rifled through the drawers until I found a screwdriver. Dante looked at me like I was nuts, but didn’t stop me as I opened the door.

I… I did it. I fixed the refrigerator! And I didn’t get shocked in the process, either. This was such a boost to my self-confidence, something I definitely needed today.

“Hey, Miss Handy, you wanna fix the toilet, too?” Dante had chuckled, sending me a grin as he ate his sandwich.

I ended up fixing the toilet, too, which was much less stressful than fixing the fridge. Plumbing doesn’t offer the risk of death, after all.

Lights out arrived and the bedrooms were unlocked. So, I guess this is goodnight. Before I go, I want to add a couple pictures I was able to capture from my window. I’ve never caught a bee on camera before, so it was a nice find for me.

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#sims #the sims #sims 4 #the sims 4 #ts4 #s4 #simlit #ender asylum #asylum #asylum challenge #the asylum challenge

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