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#is there an opposites avatar or is this just a symptom of Early In The Series
cockerspaniel90 · 2 years
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I Didn’t Want It to Be True, but the Medium Really Is the Message
By Ezra Klein
Opinion Columnist
In 2020, I read a book I’d been ignoring for 10 years, Nicholas Carr’s “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.” It was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 2011 and much loved among people who seemed to hate the internet.
But in 2011, I loved the internet. I am of the generation old enough to remember a time before cyberspace but young enough to have grown up a digital native. And I adored my new land. The endless expanses of information, the people you met as avatars but cared for as humans, the sense that the mind’s reach could be limitless. My life, my career and my identity were digital constructs as much as they were physical ones. I pitied those who came before me, fettered by a physical world I was among the first to escape.
A decade passed, and my certitude faded. Online life got faster, quicker, harsher, louder. “A little bit of everything all of the time,” as the comedian Bo Burnham put it. Smartphones brought the internet everywhere, colonizing moments I never imagined I’d fill. Many times I’ve walked into a public bathroom and everyone is simultaneously using a urinal and staring at a screen.
The collective consequences were worse. The internet had been my escape from the schoolyard, but now it felt like it had turned the world into a schoolyard. Watching Donald Trump tweet his way to the presidency felt like some sinister apotheosis, like we’d rubbed the monkey’s paw and gotten our horrible wish. We didn’t want to be bored, and now we never would be.
So when I came across Carr’s book in 2020, I was ready to read it. And what I found in it was a key — not just to a theory but to a whole map of 20th-century media theorists — Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong and Neil Postman, to name a few — who saw what was coming and tried to warn us.
Carr’s argument began with an observation, one that felt familiar:
The very way my brain worked seemed to be changing. It was then that I began worrying about my inability to pay attention to one thing for more than a couple of minutes. At first I’d figured that the problem was a symptom of middle-age mind rot. But my brain, I realized, wasn’t just drifting. It was hungry. It was demanding to be fed the way the Net fed it — and the more it was fed, the hungrier it became. Even when I was away from my computer, I yearned to check email, click links, do some Googling. I wanted to be connected.
Hungry. That was the word that hooked me. That’s how my brain felt to me, too. Hungry. Needy. Itchy. Once it wanted information. But then it was distraction. And then, with social media, validation. A drumbeat of: You exist. You are seen.
Carr’s investigation led him to the work of McLuhan, who lives on today in repeat viewings of “Annie Hall” and in his gnomic adage “The medium is the message.” That one’s never done much for me. It’s another McLuhan quote, from early in his 1964 classic, “Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man,” that lodged in my mind: “Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the ‘content’ of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.”
We’ve been told — and taught — that mediums are neutral and content is king. You can’t say anything about “television.” The question is whether you’re watching “The Kardashians” or “The Sopranos,” “Sesame Street” or “Paw Patrol.” To say you read “books” is to say nothing at all: Are you imbibing potboilers or histories of 18th-century Europe? Twitter is just the new town square; if your feed is a hellscape of infighting and outrage, it’s on you to curate your experience more tightly.
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There is truth to this, of course. But there is less truth to it than to the opposite. McLuhan’s view is that mediums matter more than content; it’s the common rules that govern all creation and consumption across a medium that change people and society. Oral culture teaches us to think one way, written culture another. Television turned everything into entertainment and social media taught us to think with the crowd.
All this happens beneath the level of content. CNN and Fox News and MSNBC are ideologically different. But cable news in all its forms carries a sameness: the look of the anchors, the gloss of the graphics, the aesthetics of urgency and threat, the speed, the immediacy, the conflict, the conflict, the conflict. I’ve spent a lot of time on cable news, both as a host and a guest, and I can attest to the forces that hold this sameness in place: There is a grammar and logic to the medium, enforced both by internal culture and by ratings reports broken down by the quarter-hour. You can do better cable news or worse cable news, but you are always doing cable news.
McLuhan’s arguments were continued by Neil Postman. Postman was more of a moralist than McLuhan, likelier to lament society’s direction than to coolly chart it. But he was seeing the maturation of trends that McLuhan had only sensed. As Sean Illing, a co-author of “The Paradox of Democracy,” told me, “McLuhan says: Don’t just look at what’s being expressed. Look at the ways it’s being expressed. And then Postman says: Don’t just look at the way things are being expressed, look at how the way things are expressed determines what’s actually expressible.” In other words: The medium blocks certain messages.
In his prophetic 1985 book, “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” Postman argued that the dystopia we must fear is not the totalitarianism of George Orwell’s “1984” but the narcotized somnolence of Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.” Television teaches us to expect that anything and everything should be entertaining. But not everything should be entertainment, and the expectation that it will be is a vast social and even ideological change. He is at pains to distance himself from the critics who lament so-called junk television:
I raise no objection to television’s junk. The best things on television are its junk, and no one and nothing is seriously threatened by it. Besides, we do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities but by what it claims as significant. Therein is our problem, for television is at its most trivial and, therefore, most dangerous when its aspirations are high, when it presents itself as a carrier of important cultural conversations. The irony here is that this is what intellectuals and critics are constantly urging television to do. The trouble with such people is that they do not take television seriously enough.
That’s why Postman worried not about sitcoms but about news shows. Television, he writes, “serves us most ill when it co-opts serious modes of discourse — news, politics, science, education, commerce, religion — and turns them into entertainment packages. We would all be better off if television got worse, not better. ‘The A-Team’ and ‘Cheers’ are no threat to our public health. ‘60 Minutes,’ ‘Eyewitness News’ and ‘Sesame Street’ are.”
All of this reads a bit like crankery. I grew up on “Sesame Street.” “60 Minutes” has dozens of Emmys for a reason. And yet Postman was planting a flag here: The border between entertainment and everything else was blurring, and entertainers would be the only ones able to fulfill our expectations for politicians. He spends considerable time thinking, for instance, about the people who were viable politicians in a textual era and who would be locked out of politics because they couldn’t command the screen.
That began in Postman’s time, with Ronald Reagan’s ascent to the presidency, but it has reached full flower in our own, with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jesse Ventura and, of course, Donald Trump. As alarmed as Postman was, nothing in his book was nearly as outlandish as the world in which we live now. Reality TV is an almost too-on-the-nose example of entertainment absorbing all else: an entire genre where the seduction comes from the pretense of truth, where the word “reality” just signals another kind of fiction.
It was in that genre that Donald Trump perfected the persona of a ruthlessly effective executive with a particular talent for hiring and firing. Without “The Apprentice,” would there be a Trump presidency? And this is not just an American phenomenon: Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, secured his job by playing an Everyman who becomes president of Ukraine on a sitcom. His political party carried the same name as his show: Servant of the People. And his talents proved to be exactly what Ukraine would need when Russia invaded: He has played the part of the reluctant wartime leader perfectly, and his performance rallied what might have been an indifferent West to Ukraine’s side.
As the example of Zelensky suggests, the point is not that entertainers are bad leaders. It’s that we have come to see through television, to see as if we are televisions, and that has changed both us and the world. And so the line of Postman’s that holds me is his challenge to the critics who spent their time urging television to be better, rather than asking what television was: “The trouble with such people is that they do not take television seriously enough.”
I have come to think the same of today’s technologists: Their problem is that they do not take technology seriously enough. They refuse to see how it is changing us or even how it is changing them.
It’s been revealing watching Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of the browsers Mosaic and Netscape and of A16Z, a venture capital firm, incessantly tweet memes about how everyone online is obsessed with “the current thing.” Andreessen sits on the board of Meta and his firm is helping finance Elon Musk’s proposed acquisition of Twitter. He is central to the media platforms that algorithmically obsess the world with the same small collection of topics and have flattened the frictions of place and time that, in past eras, made the news in Omaha markedly different from the news in Ojai. He and his firm have been relentless in hyping crypto, which turns the “current thing” dynamics of the social web into frothing, speculative asset markets.
Behind his argument is a view of human nature, and how it does, or doesn’t, interact with technology. In an interview with Tyler Cowen, Andreessen suggests that Twitter is like “a giant X-ray machine”:
You’ve got this phenomenon, which is just fascinating, where you have all of these public figures, all of these people in positions of authority  —  in a lot of cases, great authority  —  the leading legal theorists of our time, leading politicians, all these businesspeople. And they tweet, and all of a sudden, it’s like, “Oh, that’s who you actually are.”
But is it? I don’t even think this is true for Andreessen, who strikes me as very different off Twitter than on. There is no stable, unchanging self. People are capable of cruelty and altruism, farsightedness and myopia. We are who we are, in this moment, in this context, mediated in these ways. It is an abdication of responsibility for technologists to pretend that the technologies they make have no say in who we become. Where he sees an X-ray, I see a mold.
Over the past decade, the narrative has turned against Silicon Valley. Puff pieces have become hit jobs, and the visionaries inventing our future have been recast as the Machiavellians undermining our present. My frustration with these narratives, both then and now, is that they focus on people and companies, not technologies. I suspect that is because American culture remains deeply uncomfortable with technological critique. There is something akin to an immune system against it: You get called a Luddite, an alarmist. “In this sense, all Americans are Marxists,” Postman wrote, “for we believe nothing if not that history is moving us toward some preordained paradise and that technology is the force behind that movement.”
I think that’s true, but it coexists with an opposite truth: Americans are capitalists, and we believe nothing if not that if a choice is freely made, that grants it a presumption against critique. That is one reason it’s so hard to talk about how we are changed by the mediums we use. That conversation, on some level, demands value judgments. This was on my mind recently, when I heard Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist who’s been collecting data on how social media harms teenagers, say, bluntly, “People talk about how to tweak it — oh, let’s hide the like counters. Well, Instagram tried — but let me say this very clearly: There is no way, no tweak, no architectural change that will make it OK for teenage girls to post photos of themselves, while they’re going through puberty, for strangers or others to rate publicly.”
What struck me about Haidt’s comment is how rarely I hear anything structured that way. He’s arguing three things. First, that the way Instagram works is changing how teenagers think. It is supercharging their need for approval of how they look and what they say and what they’re doing, making it both always available and never enough. Second, that it is the fault of the platform — that it is intrinsic to how Instagram is designed, not just to how it is used. And third, that it’s bad. That even if many people use it and enjoy it and make it through the gantlet just fine, it’s still bad. It is a mold we should not want our children to pass through.
Or take Twitter. As a medium, Twitter nudges its users toward ideas that can survive without context, that can travel legibly in under 280 characters. It encourages a constant awareness of what everyone else is discussing. It makes the measure of conversational success not just how others react and respond but how much response there is. It, too, is a mold, and it has acted with particular force on some of our most powerful industries — media and politics and technology. These are industries I know well, and I do not think it has changed them, or the people in them (myself included), for the better.
But what would? I’ve found myself going back to a wise, indescribable book that Jenny Odell, a visual artist, published in 2019. In “How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy,” Odell suggests that any theory of media must first start with a theory of attention. “One thing I have learned about attention is that certain forms of it are contagious,” she writes.
When you spend enough time with someone who pays close attention to something (if you were hanging out with me, it would be birds), you inevitably start to pay attention to some of the same things. I’ve also learned that patterns of attention — what we choose to notice and what we do not — are how we render reality for ourselves, and thus have a direct bearing on what we feel is possible at any given time. These aspects, taken together, suggest to me the revolutionary potential of taking back our attention.
I think Odell frames both the question and the stakes correctly. Attention is contagious. What forms of it, as individuals and as a society, do we want to cultivate? What kinds of mediums would that cultivation require?
This is anything but an argument against technology, were such a thing even coherent. It’s an argument for taking technology as seriously as it deserves to be taken, for recognizing, as McLuhan’s friend and colleague John M. Culkin put it, “we shape our tools, and thereafter, they shape us.”
There is an optimism in that, a reminder of our own agency. And there are questions posed, ones we should spend much more time and energy trying to answer: How do we want to be shaped? Who do we want to become?
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punkpsychologist · 2 years
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well, I think I have a boyfriend now
okokok so. B slept through literally all of his classes today and one of his friends and I kept nagging him to go to class but he was literally asleep until like the early evening. Keep in mind I woke up at 8am.
I'm feeling kinda lonely and I want to hang out so I suggest that he comes over again to finish watching jojos. He very happily says yes and later invites me to get dinner with him as he gets breakfast.
I meet him at the cafe and we both get out food and have some semi chill semi awkward conversations. He confesses that he has an excruciating amount of lectures to watch and look over so he decided to come over later than anticipated.
He shows up around 9:30pm and we are both chilling out on my bed like last time. We basically started off on polar opposite sides.
I would also like to note that I woke up this morning from a ptsd nightmare from sa and I had a conversation with a close friend about trying to learn how to be physically close to people while dealing with sa symptoms AS HE WAS GETTING READY TO COME OVER.
So we finish the last three episodes of jojos and are emotional about it and then I look at him and ask if he wants to watch something new to which he immediately responds with avatar the last airbender.
Shout out to avatar because this is when things get interesting. So, I am very bad about making the first move and I also am very back at picking up signals from people who are interested in me who I also like due to my own insecurities. I feel the need to mention this because last time I was really trying to read what he thought of me and I determined that by the end that he was most likely interested. I was still freaked out though thinking that maybe I was projecting or was delusional or something so I still left the first (few) move(s) to him.
Because everything just ended im having a little trouble recalling some stuff but im just going to compliment myself and say that i am one hell of a tactical flirter. Meaning- at one point I get kind of cold and I ask him if he could pass me this large blanket that was sitting on the chair at the foot of the bed near where he was sitting. He hands it to me and im chilling, then he asks me very sheepishly if theres another blanket. I tell him the truth and say that my only other blanket is on the couch in the living room but the one that he just handed me is quite big and he is instantly down with sharing.
Polar opposite sides of the bed, no more. Time goes on we're both vibing watching atla and then we're much closer. To the extent that our knees are touching, scandalous. And as much as I'm enjoying the contact I'm worried that he's uncomfortable but he does not pull away at all. In fact he seems like he's getting more comfortable.
Both of us also have a pillow behind our back because the wall is quite uncomfortable and he asks me if there are any more pillows. The only ones I have are either this small circular one or this giant king sized pillow. He just kind of takes the small one and after like fifteen to twenty minutes of my back hurting like a bitch i snatch the king sized pillow and say that im just going to lay it down behind me and while I'm doing that I ask if he wants some of it to. He is instantly like "yes" and we are now sitting like side to side, arm to arm, sharing this pillow and it is wonderful.
At this point it is quite late in the night and my inhibitions are low. So when he doesn't pull his arm away from making contact with mine I just kind of lean towards him and put my head on his shoulder. It was a very slow process, me trying to constantly read if he was uncomfortable or not. If you're wondering why neither of us has really said anything about any of this it is because we are both to major insecure nerds.
This all ends up with us sitting side by side as close as humanly possible with my head on his shoulder and his head resting on top of my head (a complete win). As soon as this whole phase begins we are both deadly silent for what I believe was about two hours. Enough time for the Northern Water Tribe to be attacked and have their princess be turned into the moon. I was also extremely sleepy and kept dozing in and out of sleep so the shoulder was v nice.
I would also like to mention that being touch starved for long periods of time is a very strange experience. Like, wow. He was just so, warm. Like I was getting totally overheated and not in like a steamy way or anything I just mean like it was fuckin toasty. Blanket begone I have an extremely warm person here with me and I'm not in the mood to have a heat stroke.
We were both still sitting along the back of my bed while all of this was happening. If I like sat up a bit he would also sit up more so I could reach his shoulder more comfortably which just made me HGHJFHGJDHJJKSODHIFID. Any doubt/paranoia that I was overstepping FUCKING ANNIHILATED. GONE.
We're both still laughing softly at things on the tv that we like and I can see the outside getting brighter out the window. We kind of establish that once we finish the first season we were both probably going to go to sleep, but the first season passed and we were both still being clingy. He jumps at so many things, especially his own phone. Around seven or so he finally decides to check his phone after he had previous chunked it across the room from anxiety. We're both feeling so fucking comfortable at this point that I like lean over and just place my head on his shoulder and he reads some stupid liveblog reaction text he got from someone out loud to me. It just felt so natural and chill. While he was getting ready to leave we were talking about and apparently we both really had a good time and I told him he should come over again soon.
I love how chill he is when he's relaxed. Like everything is easy, everything is okay. We're both fairly anxious people who are easy to shake up. I have NEVER seen him be aggressive though.
We did not talk about what anything meant, we did not kiss, nothing that seemed excruciatingly "official." But in my mind the lovey dovey vibes were more than fucking enough to say that yes we are totally into one another.
He finally left around 7:30am because he realized that he should probably sleep so he actually goes to his classes today lol. I, on the other hand, am not sleeping. If I sleep the chances of me actually going to class become slim to none and I like my first class.
This is the story how I watched over an entire season of atla and probably secured a partner in a single night.
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pldubrahs · 4 years
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Cool I fell half-asleep during this terrifiying Long Arm episode and Immediately had a falling nightmare
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theschizoidblog · 4 years
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Snape, the Schizoid
Blog 4: 30/07/2020
While I usually write about how Schizoid personality disorder affects me, I think there’s a lot to be learned from drawing comparisons to fictional characters. In fact, before I got my diagnosis, I was writing fanfiction in which I poured very large portions of my soul and very being, often without realizing I wasn’t really writing about other characters, but I was exploring my own inner self. I loved writing about outcasts, about recluses and sometimes I didn’t know if I just was in a sort of love with the characters I wrote about, or if they were me.
At the age of 18, we’re talking about 2001 here, I got into Harry Potter. And with that I mean: I got into Severus Snape. Described as an ugly git and a mean bastard, I still loved him to pieces. (And Alan Rickman portrayed him beautifully, RIP)
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And here might be the reason why he lured me in straight away: Snape is a schizoid, like me. And that only clicked when I got my diagnosis a few months ago. 19 years after first encountering the character. And after rereading some of my own fanfictions, I started realizing that what I’d described as Snape’s problems and needs in those stories, were my own. Strange how that works!
In this blog, I’m going to run over some traits of SPD (schizoid personality disorder) and explain how Snape fits into the criteria.
This post serves three purposes:
To people who have no idea what schizoid personality disorder is, this is a means to familiarize yourself with the disorder by exploring the traits while you imagine a character you already know.
To people with schizoid personality disorder, this is just meant to be a fun little blog where maybe you can recognize some traits of yourself. No worries, I have not forgotten we’re all on a spectrum and each schizoid is different.
To fans of the Harry Potter novels, I hope that you come to realize that people can identify with flawed characters for very personal reasons. Don’t be mean to fictional characters (unless they’re Umbridge I guess XD), because you never know who identifies with them. Your rejection of a character can feel like the rejection of a person who struggles with the same things. Anti-culture, in all fandoms, has to end. It’s not adult. It’s not wise. It’s mean. It’s exhausting.
I also feel like I need to make a statement about JK Rowling’s intent: I doubt she knew what SPD was when she wrote Snape. She said she based him off of one of her old teachers – no idea if that man had SPD or was just generally unpleasant. The way that Snape matches SPD is eerie though, just like Luna matches schizotypal personality disorder rather well. (More on that later.) An actual psychologist might disagree with me and say “No he’s not schizoid because….” – and hell, I’d love to hear it. I don’t mind it if this post, written by a schizoid but not a psychologist, starts a discussion that will help people understand the disorder even better, even if I’m wrong in assessing Snape. Or if we can learn to understand Snape better because of me being wrong, that’s also a win-win situation.
Ready? Let’s dive into it!
Cause
SPD is said to be caused by a combination of genetics and environment – as is the case with many other personality disorders. But ask around in schizoid groups, and most will tell you that there were issues in childhood with abuse, lack of warmth or understanding at home, or the presence of a “bad parent”. According to webmd: “Some professionals speculate that a bleak childhood where warmth and emotion were absent contributes to the development of the disorder.”
We all know that Snape’s early childhood was not a happy one. He had an abusive muggle father and grew up at Spinner’s End, the opposite of what you could consider a happy childhood home.
When you grow up in a loveless home, it ruins a lot of your own enjoyment of life. You get trust issues, you become awkward, and so when Snape finally arrives at Hogwarts, he gets bullied. He’s already rather isolated (he only had Lily), and they picked on him because kids can sniff out weaknesses and he was an easy target.
The bullying did nothing to stop the disorder from developing further. Many schizoids have gone through bullying themselves, and it does nothing to help you grow closer to human beings as you get older, quite the opposite, a bond of trust is broken and it’s incredibly hard to heal that. You’ll be suspicious of everyone you meet once that sort of thing happens. The more bullying you receive, the more you hate the world as you grow up. Maybe that’s not true for all people or all schizoids, but I bet some can relate.
You might say: “But Harry also got bullied at the Dursleys and he turned out fine!” Well, I guess he did. That’s the thing with many heroes – their tragic backstories make them poster boys of “look what they overcame and how he saved the world!” – but it’s not that realistic, and if you’ve got a genetic predisposition to develop a personality disorder instead, you’re screwed. Let’s also not forget that Harry’s first year in life was a very loving one. The very first year in a child’s life is crucial, and if things go wrong in early childhood, that leaves scars that most people carry with them for the rest of their lives. Snape never had that steady sort of home, not even for one year, or if he did, there’s nothing to indicate he did.
Diagnosis Criteria
Okay, time to get digging! According to the DSM-V, you need to display at least four symptoms in order to be diagnosed with SPD. Also keep in mind that these traits need to be present for longer than just a few months or a year or so. You might recognize some of these traits as something you’ve gone through yourself if you’ve ever been depressed – it’s when these traits last for what seems like your entire adult life, that a diagnosis with the disorder can be made. (I’m also not familiar with every other trait of every other disorder in the DSM-V, so as I stated in the beginning, it’s possible that other personality disorders are even more fitting of Snape, but that I just don’t know them yet.)
The seven criteria are:
Lack of desire or enjoyment for close personal relationships
Always chooses solitary activities
Little or no interest in sex with other people
Experiences little pleasure from activities
No close friends other than immediate family
Indifference to criticism or praise
Emotional detachment and lack of emotional expression
➤ Emotional detachment and lack of emotional expression
While this is usually at the bottom of the list, I want to put it on top. This is what they also call “flat affect”. You can give us a present, and it might seem like we’re not truly grateful. We may laugh with a joke, but the light never reaches our eyes. Emotionally, it doesn’t seem to an outsider like there’s a lot going on, and if it is, it’s going on so deeply within our souls we’re hardly aware of it ourselves. Think of Snape’s monotonous voice when talking. Now Alan Rickman is a brilliant actor and emotes with very very small signs sometimes, and it’s not like when talking to me, you’re talking to a wall. (But my empathic mask makes me appear rather normal to most folks.) (I don’t think Snape has a mask like that.) Other characters that have schizoid traits are, for example, Mai from Avatar the Last Airbender or Geralt of Rivia from the Witcher. If you know and visualize these characters, you may understand better what I mean with the “lack of emotional expression” then. Also, Snape being a great Occlumens? It’s because he’s the reigning champion in suppressing his emotions, like all schizoids are. We would make wonderful Occlumens, I think. XD Snape being mean? Not all schizoids have a good amount of empathy, they’re too emotionally detached for that. (Others are very empathic to some causes, but might be picky in what they are empathic about. For example: they can be empathic towards animal cruelty and Black Lives Matter, but don’t give a shit about other causes.)
A lack of empathy is what makes plenty of people an easy prey to fascists. Without empathy, what moral compass is going to stop you from becoming a bigot? (And I also want to state that within the disorder you’ll probably find people of all political leanings – many schizoids also seem to have a thing for the underdog, and thus seem to often lean towards the left instead of the right side of the political spectrum. But as with ‘regular’ people, you’ll find people swing both ways.) But here, in Snape’s case, his hatred for his bullies and his father (a muggle) pushed him right into the Death Eater’s arms, and they were glad to welcome a man of his skill, maybe even giving him the illusion, for a while, that he had found a new family. It didn’t last, and eventually his eyes opened to what the Death Eater’s really were. He was too young and naïve to see what they wanted of him (and the one person he loved), and it basically ruined his life. He was a teenage fool, and after losing Lily’s friendship, he had no one left to keep him out of that bad group of friends.
  ➤ Lack of desire or enjoyment for close personal relationships
Does Snape strike you as the social type that’s trying to make new friends all the time? Have you ever seen the man enjoy the company of another character in the books? Not just tolerate, not just need, but ‘enjoy’? Even when it comes to Lucius or Karkarov, it seems he is just keeping an eye on them, observing them rather than offering true friendship.
Maybe McGonagall might be an exception. He seems amiable towards her, in a competitive way. He might get a kick out of their arguing. She’s certainly an intelligent woman so he might enjoy her company for intellectual reasons.
  ➤ Always chooses solitary activities
We see Snape engage in a few activities at Hogwarts, such as going to Quidditch matches, or being present at the Yule Ball. Death Eater meetings and gatherings in the staff room might be social activities, but let’s not pretend Snape has a lot to say about whether he attends those or not. As a teen he already excels at potions, a solitary activity, and when we are given a glimpse of his “summer” lifestyle at Spinner’s End in Half-Blood Prince, he’s just reading. He certainly doesn’t entertain a crowd in his spare time, like, for example, Slughorn does.
  ➤ Little or no interest in sex with other people
I hear you coming now. “BUT LILY!” Schizoids are often asexual, but not necessarily sex-aversive. When asking around in a schizoid group, about a third of the schizoids seem to be in relationships or are even married, perhaps even more. And many of the others have had sexual relationships in the past. Many have tried to make relationships work, only to realize at a later point that that sort of life was not for them and that they would never be truly happy in a relationship. Other schizoids are happy in relationships – so it exists! It’s not impossible! (Remember: you need 4/7 traits, not 7/7 to be schizoid.) Also keep in mind, if Snape really was interested in sex, why would he pine after a dead woman for 16 years? He’d be over her way sooner and into someone else’s pants way sooner too. Lily was the first person in his life that gave him any kind of warmth, so him pining after her is not strange or inexplicable behavior. She offered what he craved, what he lacked, and he mourned her for the rest of his life, because he feared no one would ever give him that warmth. (And he kind of turned that into a self-fulfilling prophecy by being such a recluse.) He dreamed of love, but we have no idea what it would have been like had he actually ever had his affections returned. Maybe he’d have enjoyed a relationship with her for a long while and she would have been the only person he could have tolerated, or maybe after a year or so he would have thought “this is suffocating” and ended the relationship.
  ➤ Experiences little pleasure from activities
Can you recall Snape laughing in any scene? Smiling, even? I can imagine him to feel rather content when brewing potions or studying the dark arts, and he does have passion for what he does. But to a schizoid, passion and pleasure are not necessarily the same. We experience emotions differently. In some ways we don’t experience them at all, in other ways, we might feel like there’s a wall around our emotions, and we have no idea how to get over that wall and check what the currently active emotion is. But with logic, we can determine “I guess I’m happy now that I’m doing this thing I like doing.” Intellectual pursuits are fun too – like solving a puzzle, it gives a little boost of dopamine when you make it to the next level, so it’s not surprising he excels at Potions.
  ➤ No close friends other than immediate family
Basically, Snape only really had Dumbledore, and that bastard only used him to win the war. (I have beef with old Dumbledore, okay?) But Snape confided in Dumbledore, and the other way around, and so I think it’s safe to say that there was a true friendship between the two. When Dumbledore died, Snape was truly alone. (Which is incredibly tragic and heartbreaking when you think about it – in the last year of his life, Snape had no one, really no one, as he tried to keep Hogwarts ‘safe’ and eventually died. And everyone hated him for killing Dumbledore, not knowing the truth about his allegiance. Everyone who had once spoken kindly to him, like the other professors at Hogwarts, now considered him arch enemy #2, behind Voldemort.)
➤ Indifference to criticism or praise
Compliment or insult a schizoid, and it’s not like they won’t give any response at all. They might say “thank you” or they might get a little defensive about the insult, but they won’t always lose a lot of sleep over it. It kind of depends on who the praise or criticism is coming from. I can imagine that it did mean something to him if it came from Dumbledore, whom he cared about. I don’t think it meant anything to him what his students thought of him, since he didn’t give a personal level of shit about them. There’s also a moment where Umbridge shrieks “You are on probation!” and it’s described as “Snape looked back at her, his eyebrows slightly raised.” Then she says that she expected better after how highly Lucius Malfoy always speaks of him and she dismisses him. Snape then gives her “an ironic bow” – he really doesn’t give a rat’s ass and I love him for it.
These are the 7 criteria that you need to fit 4 of to be diagnosed with SPD – I managed to link all 7 to Snape – so I think it’s not unlikely that Snape is truly a schizoid. Now, for the next part I would like to highlight some other comorbidities which many schizoids also have, that seem to appear in Snape as well.
Comorbidities
➤ Depression In about half of all schizoid patients, depression is or has been present. How do you notice that in Snape? The greasy hair, among other things. Bad teeth. Always wearing the same outfit. If you’ve ever suffered from a bad depression, you know how difficult it suddenly becomes to shower at a regular interval, how you can go days without brushing your teeth, how wearing comfortable clothing is more important than looking fashionable – how it is absolutely meaningless to look fashionable because who the fuck cares anyways. Snape doesn’t seem to give a hoot about himself or his appearance, which strikes me as a sign of depression. And what does he have to be happy about? He knows Voldemort is going to return and he’ll have a cursed job as a double-spy. He knows he’s probably going to die. I wouldn’t be happy either.
➤ Anger Outbursts/PTSD Not all schizoids have this, but it’s something I have myself and which I’ve written about extensively in one of my previous blog posts. I look at it as a way of my inner self breaking down the walls and coming out to say “I know that I’ve been quiet for the past 37 years but what the fuck I’m really angry about this and have been for a while and I’m not going to contain it any longer” – and then the anger comes out disproportionately. It’s hard to impossible to really control such an outburst. And often, there is a very obvious cause to the outburst. Sometimes it’s PTSD related. For Snape, while he does not emote often, you see a few outbursts – like when he is face to face with Sirius Black in the shrieking shack, his childhood bully. He seems mad at that moment, not at all composed anymore, the sign of a real anger outburst. (I think it’s PTSD helping that anger build.) A few moments later, he thinks he has turned in Sirius Black to the Ministry, Sirius, who he holds responsible for the death of James and Lily (and it’s especially the latter’s death he can’t cope with), so when Sirius escapes, he loses it again. Then the next time he gets really angry is when Harry enters his “worst memory”. That’s a few years later, during the Occlumency lessons. While he’s no longer shrieking, he’s white with rage. My pro tip: don’t impose on the privacy of a schizoid, we get mad. XD In Half-Blood Prince, he’s got a moment where he’s like “Don’t call me coward!”, looking ‘inhuman’. I too can get anger outbursts over false accusations, and this one must really hurt, because at that moment, he’s trying to save Harry’s freaking life while the boy is all like “lemme at you I’mma kill you like you killed Dumbledore for fun!” – Snape was probably grieving the loss of his only friend and confidant and knew he was on his own from that point onwards, and then you get this bloody teenager trying to drag you into a wizard’s duel you’re not in the mood for, calling you a coward, which is the last thing you are. Man it has to suck to be Snape. I also want to state that there are many moments when things go wrong in class, but Snape never loses his temper like that. He’s not pleasant and he punishes students, but he doesn’t get mad – he gets even. That makes it all the more interesting to analyze the moments that he does go bananas.
Random Thoughts
Before I finish this blog, there are still a few small things I’d like to get out of my system about Snape and SPD.
➤ Snape and Luna
They are my favorite characters, but also because they’re very, very alike and very, very different at the same time. Both didn’t have a great childhood (Luna lost her mother at a young age) and they get bullied as kids at Hogwarts. Snape is called Snivellus and Luna is called Looney. All the suffering they endure, affects them differently though. Snape gets meaner, Luna only seems to get nicer. I see them as two sides of the same coin. One dark, one light, both a little eccentric in their own way. When you look at it from a personality-disorder point of view, then they both have personality disorders that are related to one another. Snape has Schizoid Personality Disorder, Luna has Schizotypal Personality Disorder. Schizotypal Personality Disorder is where you’ll find a lot of eccentric people who believe in conspiracy theories. Both are class A personality disorders. Some people might even have the two personality disorders at the same time. Schizoids seem to be rooted in reality with their thoughts, schizotypals can really start believing strange things if they’re not careful, alienating them from others And, in case you’re now wondering: “So many schizo-personality disorders! Is this also schizophrenia?” No – schizophrenia is when you have delusions and hallucinations as well. Read up on those disorders if you’re interested, because these descriptions of mine are too brief and don’t do it justice.
➤ Snape was a bad teacher
Not fully, and yes, he was. I think knowledge-wise, Snape was way better at Potions than Slughorn ever was. You notice when Hermione can’t keep up in her sixth year while Harry is sailing through Potions thanks to Snape’s book. Snape’s a genius and would have been able to instruct his students to be more efficient when brewing potions. But personality wise? Don’t put a schizoid in front of a classroom. And for that, I kind of blame Dumbledore. Snape wasn’t asking for a job as a teacher, but that’s all Dumbledore had to offer, and thus he put Snape and his unwilling students in a room together where none of them wanted to be. I think Snape would have been better off as some kind of a scientist, just him and his books, inventing spells or potions. But he was not given much of a choice, and he was forced to socialize with teenagers (ew, gross), and that must have drained him terribly. It’s a wonder he was usually roaming the hallways at night because I would have been too exhausted to get out of bed. That makes you realize it’s truly a work of fiction because who on earth has that kind of stamina? :-P (No, in all seriousness it’s probably also depression at work, keeping him up.) Snape was a jerk to Harry and Neville and Hermione on various occasions, and not all of it was to “keep up appearances” to the Slytherins. He seemed to even enjoy a bit of sadism here and there. You could contemplate why he poisoned Neville’s toad. Was it just to spite poor little Neville, or was he hoping his student would perform better under pressure? (Which Neville did.. The toad didn’t die.) It’s a cruel way to teach a lesson, but I think he must have thought the end justified the means. But what a traumatic experience to Neville, who then had Snape become his greatest fear.
➤ Purity culture vs Snape
We’ve seen a shift on both Tumblr and other social media where fandom is about purity culture. Back in 2002 folks were like “We love the baddies, deal with it”, and the people that didn’t love the baddies actually dealt with it and you could joke with people who preferred the Gryffindors and just poke a little fun at one another, but it was fun fandom. But over the years I’ve seen fandom change. Nowadays you can’t even express love for Snape without someone seeing it as their moral obligation to remind you of what a “bad person he really was”. To them I can only say that I like him for his best qualities, and forgive him for his worst. And honestly, I don’t need to justify liking a character to anyone. If I want to put Umbridge-posters in every room of my apartment, are you going to stop me or call the cops on me? Purity policing is weird. Very American, too. (Though I’ve seen some Dutch folks go apeshit as well over purity concepts.) And as a Belgian I don’t have time to put up with that shit. XD And purity policing also is just nasty when you consider that some folks are like “I relate to this character” and the next person is like “THIS CHARACTER IS EVIL AND DESERVES TO DIE!” My response to that part of fandom is: “Just fuck off already, jerkface.”  Personally I was heartbroken by his death, because I feel like he could have made up to the people he’d hurt, I would have loved to see relationships mended between him and McGonagall and him and Harry and such, but instead we were left with him passing on some awkward memories to Harry and then dying. (Tbh I’m not the greatest fan of his crush on Lily, but whatever, I can accept it and understand it. She was the only light he ever knew.) It’s not his fault he didn’t get to redeem himself as a character, not fully - and that’s what makes fanfiction fun. So if people want to explore that in fic, let them. A character like Snape is too much of a treasure to shove under a carpet and pretend he never existed. Write all the things about him, have him have all the adventures! 
I think I’m done now! If you stuck around until now, 10 points to Slytherin or whatever house you’re from. (Probably Slytherin if you’re reading about Snape.) What do you think? Feel free to leave a comment, send an ask, or whatever!
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Searching for Discord 1x1
Hello! I’m looking for some skilled, experienced 1x1 partners for Discord roleplays. Please read to the end as there is a password I won't answer messages without.
•General/Writing Style•
I usually prefer sticking at around 4 paragraphs and up, but quality over quantity for the most part. These days I’ve been favoring a bit of a slower pace and writing 8+ paragraphs, however. I would prefer you write in 3rd person, past tense. Please have decent grammar and spelling, varied vocabulary and sentence structure, as well as decent syntax. Please provide me something of substance to respond to in your responses. Please also be somewhat experienced.
•Age•
18+ only, but 21+ preferred (I'm 23)
•Timezone•
EST. I don’t mind what timezone you’re in- waking up to new responses is exciting :)
•Platforms•
Discord is strongly preferred for the actual role-play. I can be convinced to use kik, Reddit, or Tumblr, however. 
•Response Frequency•
I'd prefer if you could respond at least a few times a week. I'm a pretty busy student can't always commit to much more than that, so I won't ask that of you. Please try to communicate when you will be gone or significantly less active for several weeks or more. I will try to do the same.
Please don’t contact me if you will be gone for a couple weeks plus very early into the role-play. I tend to lose interest very fast if there’s long breaks at the very beginning. Get me invested and I can wait quite a long time for you, though. 
I'm a bit less lenient with this when we're still doing introductions, so if we've barely said hello but a few days pass and I hear nothing, I'll assume you're no longer interested or never were in the first place and close our discussion. You are free to assume the same of me.
•Genre•
I'm a sucker for modern, romantic slice-of-life with a healthy dose of character-driven drama and angst. I also sometimes like to weave other genres in there too such as Supernatural, Mystery, Action, and Adventure. I'm really open to most things if the plot interests me. 
•Gender and Romantic Preference•
I strongly prefer playing a female main outside of MxM. Beyond that, I am open to MxF, FxF, NBxM/F, and MxM. Currently, I'm mostly in the mood for an MxF or possibly F//. My apologies, but please note I do not play male in MxF nor do I double up.
I do not engage in dichotomy personality dynamics and like pairings to be close to even as possible in contributions to the relationship. If a scene gets intimate, I'd prefer we fade to black.
•Plots/Creativity•
While I have plots listed, you're more than welcome to share plots of your own. I'd prefer it if you are open to brainstorming plot points and bouncing ideas off each other too. Let's keep this interesting for both of us so it stays alive.
•OCs•
I would prefer not to roleplay with OCs that are excessively shy, Mary-Sues, or OP. Additionally, please ensure your own OC does not monopolize the plot with their own issues and background. Let's share the spotlight.
I tend to play multiple side-characters and would prefer if you did too.
Please do not control my main OC or any named side characters I introduce. It can really mess with my plans with them if you suddenly auto-kill out of nowhere or something... If necessary, I may permit you to control a side character of mine, but please run it by me first. Communication is key.
•Fandoms•
I am willing to roleplay within the universe of several fandoms, but please note I do not roleplay as canon characters and would prefer not to roleplay with canon characters either. Please recall that I am more than happy to do original plots too if you aren't into any of these.
-Corpse Party**
-Black Mirror*
-Death Note
-Avatar The Last Airbender*
-Downton Abbey
-Call The Midwife*
-Dragon Quest(IV-IX)***
-Miraculous Ladybug****(I'd love to delve into the more subtle, darker elements like the consequences of a broken miraculous and time travel)
-Fruits Basket***
-Soul Eater
-The Hunger Games
(The number of * indicates craving)
•Original Plots•
(Muse I would like to play is bolded. If neither are bolded, I can do either. All of these are open to brainstorming and tweaking!)
(This is an older one of mine, but I’ve recently kinda been in the mood to start it up again.) Marianoh’s Culinary Institute is the most renowned school for culinary arts in the country. Any who truly wish to be a master chef would be foolish not to attend. Unless they don’t have the means- the tuition is insanely high. Muse A is part of the lucky few of humble beginnings that has been selected to attend via scholarship. They couldn’t be more excited. Muse B, on the other hand, comes from a family of celebrity chefs. Their spot at Marianoh’s was confirmed before birth. Yet, somehow, they don’t share Muse A’s joy. Far from it, actually. What happens when the two are partnered up for the year?
 Muse A has always been at the top of their class since early elementary and thrived on it. They come from a family of high achievers where failure is neither seen nor accepted. Proud and arrogant over their achievements, their grades make them, them. All that changed when Muse B showed up, smashing the entrance exams with marks unheard of. Of course Muse A wouldn’t take that lying down, thus, the classic rivalry begins. What happens when the two find they have more in common than they thought? Life on Muse B’s side is not all it seems as well.
They were the voice in their head. The imaginary friend. For as long as they can remember, Muses A and B have always been there for each other when they needed it. But to everyone else, it’s all in their heads. They was saved from that riptide by pure chance and luck, despite being unable to swim. The bullies were coming for them, but they found that little nook to hide in all on their own. Flash forward to current day, the two are attending the same university. Muse A is an upstart, trying to make a name for themself academically and socially, the latter going much better than the former. Muse B is the opposite, the social anxiety fueled by a rocky past relegating them to basically a shut in. Their grades, on the other hand, are phenomenal despite barely ever attending classes. When a sibling suggests they try working as a tutor to get out more, they have their doubts, but decide to go for it anyway. The first student walk-in, however, just so happens to be Muse A...
Please note the idea for this world is not mine, but I unfortunately don’t remember the title of the original story. If this sounds familiar to you, feel free to comment the details and I’ll credit the story! Anyhow, in a smaller country, tucked away from the rest of the world, people are born into a unique system. They are either Energy Givers or Energy Takers. Their ability activates from a young age and they are paired with the most compatible one of the opposite ability as soon as possible, usually early elementary school. Energy is transferred from the giver to the taker via a kiss on the lips and must be done at least once a day. While partners are not necessarily romantically involved, the two depend on each other immensely. Without receiving energy, the taker will quickly tire, weaken and collapse becoming comatose and at risk of death. If they do not give energy, the giver’s energy supply builds up making them suffer from nausea, lethargy, fevers, and other unpleasant symptoms that will gradually worsen to the point where their life is in danger. Should a pair of partners be separated either through death or other means, the lone individual must visit a donation center where they will be paired with a donor that somewhat matches until a more compatible, new permanent partner is finally found.].
Now for the main plot. Muse A and Muse B are a Giver-Taker pair that has been together since childhood. Their feelings grew from platonic to romantic and by high school, the two were a golden, seemingly unbreakable couple. Near the end their last year, all comes to a grinding halt when Muse B suddenly breaks up with Muse A and disappears. Five years down the line, Muse A is a jaded, lonely individual, known for constantly going from donor to donor. Deciding they need a change, they take a teaching job in a boarding school on the other side of the country. Yet when they walk into the faculty office on their first day, they find themselves placed in a desk right next to Muse A. Not only this, the two are in the same department. How will things proceed?
Contact Instructions: Please either message me here @addienadelaide or email me at [email protected] with BOTH your favorite season and a recently written roleplay sample. If all looks good I will give you my discord and we can move things there. Hope to hear from some of you soon!
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I think the worst part of this current Reylo discourse is that I've been defending the ship for months now. I don't ship it - I think John Boyega and Daisy Ridley have more chemistry than Adam Driver and Daisy Ridley - but with people making posts like "let's go back to 2015 so we can dump on Reylo again" I wanted to chime in with my own shipping experience in the Avatar fandom to discourage all of that. Reylo is a contentious ship for a reason, but people have been shipping heroes and villains in the same vein as Reylo for decades. I still don't believe that Reylo fans have to "answer" for their ship.
The example I always go to is Zutara from Avatar - before he showed traits of redemption (i.e. the early half of season 1) people took a moment where he held Katara against her will and recotextualised it as belligerent sexual tension. He said he'd "save her from the pirates", how romantic - except he hired those pirates to hunt the Avatar in the first place, and he used a precious family heirloom to try and get her to sell out the Avatar. I would go out of my way to say that this was a pretty straight villainous moment, and yet there were people viewing it through a romantic lens by the end of season one.
Zutara did become a more valid ship over time, even if I personally don't ship it. But people were all over that shit even before Zuko started to get better.
Plenty of people have shipped things that are downright antagonistic most of the time, but characterised it as having romantic undertones or it being a facade for the characters to discuss how they really feel. Ships like that have been successfully defended or gone unscrutinized to this day. In a similar vein, I don't think it's the end of the world for Reylo to exist.
That's been my take for months, consistent in its boundaries. But it's really fucking hard to be cool about it when Reylo fans are yelling death threats at JJ Abrams, doxxing Adam Driver to try and get him to divorce his wife and trying to get crew members who worked on TROS blacklisted from Hollywood. Honest to god, how fucking dare you.
My real brush with crazy fandom came years after I had stopped shipping Avatar. I checked out the ship tag in 2013, 5 years after Avatar has ended - and there were people my age and older still engaging in ship combat over Kataang and Zutara. Making pithy comments in the ship tags, being rude to new fans who asked about the schism between ships, basically acting like the other ship was detrimental to their mental health. A 20+ year old found it acceptable to attack teenagers over ship drama, talking about how they were being abusive and trying to gaslight fans by pretending to be confused about the ships, or how distraught they felt at the mere mention of the other ship. Putting themselves above other fans because they loved the pairing so much, so they can attack other people because it's like attacking an extension of themselves. Five years after the show ended. People my age and older slagging off teens out of their obsessive love of their fictional pairing. And I have the same opinion on that batshit crazy behavior now as I did back then.
First of all - shipping is meant to be an inherently positive experience. In my opinion, it's an expression of someone's romantic feelings, taking something lovely and wonderful and playing these feelings out between fictional characters that you like. That's fine. It's a positive experience for you to express these emotions, and it can be a positive experience to share these emotions with like-minded fans. But as much as you love that pairing and how it makes you feel, you need to stop yourself and ask whether your fandom is worth it when that ship makes you start feeling bad and gross.
That ship that you like so much should make you feel happy, whether it's canon or not. If it's making you feel sad and miserable instead, if you feel like you need to lash out at other shippers because they don't share your vision, then you need to ask yourself if that's what you signed up for. This thing that you got into because it made you happy should not rule over your emotions to the point of active harm to your mental health. You need to chill out, re-evaluate your priorities and move on.
Secondly - as an adult, do you really think it's okay to act the way you've been acting? I'm sympathetic towards mental illness, and I understand that people may grow attached to pairings as a way of alleviating the symptoms of their mental illnesses, but when you start to cope by attacking people who are younger than you? By acting like your shipping opinions are the most valuable input in the world and that anyone who disagrees for any reason is attacking you and your mental illness over it? That's gross. If your rabid obsession stems from mental illness, you need to take constructive steps forward to get better, not using fandom as a band-aid and using opposition as a chance to vent your most negative feelings.
If you're an adult and you don't have a mental illness - you know you're just unnecessarily being a piece of shit, right? An adult yelling at kids and other, calmer adults over a couple of fictional characters. This is not justifiable behavior. You are not in the right. You need to calm down and ask yourself whether your fandom is worth being such a massive pile of shit. For better or worse, you should be setting a standard of maturity in your fandom, not helping it descend into a puddle of vile, hateful garbage.
Reylo fans, you're at a crossroads. I believe that it's fine for you to ship what you want, but the doxxing? The dehumanising and disrespectful way you're treating Adam Driver and John Boyega? You need to disavow this behavior right now. You can act like you're entitled to behave like this for whatever reason, but you're not. You never were, and you never will be. And that goes for every ship, not just Reylo.
Shipping never justifies shitty behavior, and this goes beyond shitty. Cut this behavior out, reject the leeches who think this is okay and be like every other ship where people are chill, ship their pairings in a way that doesn't hurt anyone, and doesn't go out of its way to harm other people for not being on board with it. For the love of fuck, moderate your community.
Edit: using this post to validate Reylo only goes so far if you don't disown the abhorrent behavior that Reylo fans have exhibited. As much as this post can support Reylo as one ship in a sea of thousands, this post is also criticising Reylo fandom.
As we speak, people bearing your ship's name are being incredibly toxic and targetting an actor in the ship you love so much. A TROS staffer is being doxxed, and people want to blacklist them from Hollywood. That side of Reylo is just as but of a part of your fanbase as the "good ones".
Take my support of your ship if you want, but take it with the criticism of your ship. Work with your fellow fans to disavow this behavior. This isn't okay, and without the "good ones" making an example to disavow this behavior, the actions of the most extreme shippers will smear you all.
For the love of fuck, be better. I can support your right to ship, but you have to moderate your community and call out the garbage in order for this to work. Blocking your ears and pretending everything's okay isn't going to cut it - be better, and moderate your community.
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exjade · 4 years
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From: source
A detransitioned woman recently conducted a survey of detransitioners (Stella, 2016c). Though the survey was only open for two weeks, more than 200 women completed it. Clearly, there are more than just a handful of people who are coming to re-identify as female. The survey results are compelling.
• 92.5% of those who responded said that their dysphoria was the same or better after detransitioning than during transition.
• Only 8% of respondents felt somewhat or completely positive toward their own transition, whereas 60.2% felt somewhat or completely negative toward it.
Following are quotes from the individual comments included by survey respondents:
• “I used transition as self-harm. It destroyed so many parts of my life.”
• “My seeking medical and social transition led to a deep spiral of depression and lack of identity—and was probably also caused by those things. The social ostracization led to increased anxiety and my grades were devastated.”
• “I was a train wreck waiting to happen and transition fed the insecurities, anxiety and hopelessness” (Stella, 2016c).
The following is a quote from detransitioner and blogger Max Robinson, with her permission:
I transitioned FtM (female to male) at 16, was on testosterone and had a double mastectomy by 17. 
I absolutely am traumatized by what happened to me, and I'm not the only one. I'm a part of support networks for women who stopped transition that have over 100 members, and that's just the individuals who have gone looking for others with this experience and found us.Early in my transition, I went through menopause. This caused vaginal atrophy and drip incontinence that has persisted for years. I piss myself slowly all day now; it's really not cute or fun. I refused to acknowledge it was connected to the HRT-caused vaginal atrophy that immediately preceded its onset until months after going off testosterone. Yeah, I signed a paper saying I knew that could happen. I also thought this treatment was my only hope for coping with the intense feelings of alienation/disgust with my femaleness. I was wrong. Transition didn't help. It did harm, harm that I now have to learn how to live with on top of all the shit I thought transition would fix.
My double mastectomy was severely traumatizing. I paid a guy, a guy who does this every day for cash, to drug me to sleep and cut away healthy tissue. I did this because I believed it would heal all of the emotional issues I was blaming on my female body. It didn't work. Now I'm still all fucked up and I'm missing body parts, too.
There is no surgery that will undo what's been done… adding synthetic materials to resemble the tissue of mine that was incinerated years ago would not help me. It took 3 years of stuffing down every negative feeling about my mastectomy before I was ready to face that what happened did harm to me. I was off hormones for months before I admitted to myself that I deeply, deeply regretted this surgery. I have lost my breasts and I have lost the chance to reconcile with my breasts. It wouldn't be easy, but it would be work worth doing. Now the work before me instead is reconciling with what I've done and with the chest I have now—flat, scarred, asymmetrical, and nerve-damaged. (Robinson, 2016)
Detransitioner and blogger Cari Stella went on testosterone and had a double mastectomy as a teenager. In a video she made, she lets viewers know that she is not just some statistic. Looking right at the camera, she tells us that “I'm a real live 22-year-old woman with a scarred chest, and a broken voice and a five o'clock shadow because I couldn't face the idea of growing up to be a woman. That is my reality” (Stella, 2016a).
It has been demonstrated that pediatric transition can have serious side effects and comes with the possibility of a high incidence of regret. Now I would like to discuss how social factors and therapeutic practices are playing a role in encouraging young people to transition.
In recent years, young people (tweens and teens) have been presenting with dysphoria “out of the blue” without ever having expressed any gender variance before (https://transgendertrend.com/rapid-onset-gender-dysphoria-research-study/). An announcement of being transgender is often preceded by anxiety, depression, social isolation, loss, or trauma. This now-common presentation was virtually unheard of until a few years ago. The sudden onset of gender dysphoria seems to be correlated with a couple of factors.
One is social media use. On sites such as YouTube, thousands of homemade videos chronicle the gender transitions of teenagers. The Tumblr blog “Fuck Yeah FTMs” features photo after photo of young FtMs celebrating the changes wrought by testosterone. “I finally have freedom!” posters boast under photographs of their scarred chests post mastectomy. “I'm no longer pre-T!” boasts another under a video of someone injecting testosterone. “My name is Cameron! I'm a nineteen-year-old nonbinary/trans person living in Ohio! I'm excited to say that yesterday was my first injection! I am so happy with the person I am becoming.” Almost all of these posters are under 25 years of age.
Young people can find plenty of in-group validation online. There is an incredibly positive climate around being trans in many places on the Internet. On just one of the hundreds of thousands of YouTube videos that document the poster's “top surgery,” there are 48 comments such as:
“Can't believe how far you've come! You are amazing in every way!”
“So proud and happy for you.”
“You are totally rad.”
“By the way, you are totally attractive.”
Young people are also finding validation online for their self-diagnosis as transgender. The blog transgenderreality.com meticulously details the process by which a questioning young person is encouraged to understand his or her symptoms as evidence of being trans. Young people on reddit and other social media sites explain that they started wondering whether they were trans because they enjoyed creating opposite-sex avatars in online games and liked the clothing or hairstyles of the opposite sex. Commentators frequently respond by telling them they sound like a “textbook case” and congratulate them on “finding out early.”
The second correlative factor is having peers who also identify as trans. We are seeing kids coming out together in peer groups. The following quotes are all taken from parent comments on the blog 4thwavenow unless otherwise noted.
We are a progressive family caught in the teenage transgender wave. It's so scary. I can't even put it into words. What we are seeing are pockets of teens in different towns who are declaring themselves either non-binary or transgender. In many cases, these are teens who showed no gender variance at all, and then they get connected with a group in their high school, and suddenly a large percentage of them are identifying this way. The information they find on the Internet convinces them that physical transitioning via hormones and surgery is not only the only way to go but should also be available to them right now, as soon as they want it. I am very concerned that the medical community is not looking at the sheer number of teens, post-puberty, who are making these kinds of declarations and asking whether this can be genuine or a temporary stop on the process of figuring out one's identity as a teenager. Peer influence is just so huge in these kids. As soon as they turn 18, they are seeking medical intervention, and the model now is informed consent, so we have lots of teenagers and young adults making permanent changes to their bodies when their brains have not yet reached adulthood. Very, very scary.
In my daughter's extra-curricular activity, one of the groups has about 20 kids in it (all teenagers). Seven of those kids are natal females. THREE of those seven females are publicly out as FTM. This does not include my daughter, who has never come out publicly. So four of seven girls have some issue with gender identity. Of the three girls who have socially transitioned, one is on testosterone and has had surgery. All are under 18. All of them made this discovery after puberty.
My daughter befriended some trans kids from her acting troupe. When you look at this group, each year they are something different. There are kids who, upon joining, are just “allies,” the next year they are bisexual, the next year they are gay, and then the final year, they are trans. And at every step of the way, they are being applauded and receiving so much positive support from themselves, each other, the group, the grownups, and the audiences they address (I call this the “echo chamber”). But it's fishy. Why are there so many kids who, the more they hang out, all of a sudden, they are trans too? It doesn't make sense.
My daughter, who is 17, told me last year on Mother's Day that she was now my son. When I began researching this subject, I was extremely concerned with the medical intervention that takes place with these children. Then when I went to a meeting for parents with transgender children, I was shocked about how all of these parents were jumping on the bandwagon of drugs and surgery without questioning. They even complain about wait times for surgeries! Unfortunately, here in Canada, children as young as 16 can make medical decisions for themselves and parents are not allowed to intervene (and surgeries are free).
My daughter decided she is transgender just as soon as she learned of it as a concept, in her senior year of high school. The previous school year she was dealing with a lot of anxiety and stress. She learned of transgender from a small high school group of friends. The university diversity center director took a group of transgender students to a free gender clinic, where my daughter then returned and received, after a single visit, a prescription for testosterone.I am the mother of a young man in his late 20s who, within the space of just a few months of bingeing on reddit and YouTube transition videos, decided that he was transgender, and is undergoing transition at a frightening speed. Obviously, he is old enough to do whatever he pleases, and all I can do is grieve quietly as I watch him from afar as he destroys his physical and mental health.
In my local high school my daughter is in the marching band. She plays an instrument, but she is friends with many girls in the color guard. There are about 25 members of the color guard this year. All of them are natal female. Last year my daughter told me that almost all of them felt they were lesbian. This year, almost all of them feel they are transgender, agender, or, at the very least, are questioning their gender identities. I've noticed that many of them have similar haircuts and that some of them are binding. Many constantly discuss their gender identities and agonize about “coming out” to their parents. Their lives seem to be focused on this subject 24/7, which has driven away certain non-transgender friends. No adults have stepped into help, even though they are aware of what is happening. (Anonymous, Private correspondence, 2016)
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Looking for Roleplay Partners
•General/Writing Style•
-Literate->Novella
-4+ paragraphs
-Quality over Quantity
-Try to match my length
-3rd person, past tense
-Decent grammar, spelling, and flow
-No texting language unless chatting OOC(u, 2, 4got)
-Varied vocabulary and sentence structure
-Acknowledge my response within yours to some extent.
•Age•
-18+ only. No exceptions.
•Response Frequency•
-Preferably once a day or once every other day
-Try to be consistent (most important).
-Do not harass me for responses. I am a very busy graduate student. If I am silent for a week, you may send a single reminder.
-Communicate(also very important). If you will be gone/much less active for a week+, say so. I will try to do the same.
•Genre•
Preferred
-Drama
-Romance
-Slice-of-life
-Supernatural
-Mystery
-Sci-Fi
•Gender and Romantic Preference•
-I almost always play a female main.
-I can play male side characters.
-I do MxF, FxF, and MxM my preference for them in that order.
-I do not play male in MxF. No exceptions.
-(The password of the month is your best Halloween costume or favorite candy if you don’t do costumes)
-I do not engage in dom-sub or seme-uke personality dynamics. No exceptions.
-No smut. Such scenes /must/ fade to black. No exceptions.
-I am open to non-romantic rolepays.
•Plots/Creativity•
-Be open to brainstorming
-Though I have plots, feel free to bring your own.
-For my plots, if I indicate which muse I would like to play, please respect that.
-Be willing to drive/add your own twists to the plot at times.
•OCs•
-I will not roleplay with excessively shy or submissive OCs as I find they make it very difficult to progress plots.
-Obviously, no Mary-Sues, Gary-Stus or OP OCs
-If your OC has mental or physical health issues, please do not let said issues monopolize the plot.
-I will not roleplay as or with canon characters.
-Do not control my main OC.
-At times I may permit you to control my unnamed side characters, but /always/ run it by me.
•Fandoms•
-Corpse Party
-Danganronpa
-Black Mirror
-Death Note
-Avatar The Last Airbender
-Downton Abbey
-Call The Midwife
-The Hunger Games
-Harry Potter
•Current Plots•
1. Marianoh's Culinary Institute is the most renowned school for culinary arts in the country. Any who truly wish to be a master chef would be foolish not to attend. Unless they don't have the means- the tuition is insanely high. Muse A is part of the lucky few of humble beginnings that has been selected to attend via scholarship. They couldn't be more excited. Muse B, on the other hand, comes from a family of celebrity chefs. Their spot at Marianoh's was confirmed before birth. Yet somehow, they don't share Muse A's joy. Far from it actually. What happens when the two are partnered up for the year?(I play Muse A)
2. Muse A was born into a society where 'falling in love' is not a thing. Sure, it's written in about fairy tales and even history texts, but most Readers laugh it off as a silly, archaic concept. All couples are formed by reading Cerebral wavelengths, stats that are unique to every individual. Every person has a single match and are paired with that person permanently when they come of age. No trades, no take-backs. Muse B, though born into the regular world, doesn't believe in love either. Perhaps it was the plight of their parents, or that one nasty breakup. Perhaps it was the sight of all the couples around who'd be love-dovey one week, but strangers the next. Whatever it is, they don't buy it. That suits Muse A just fine- their Cerebral wavelengths not only don't match, they bang together in a cacaphony. Why is it then that these two begin experiencing an undeniable pull to each other? (I play Muse A)
3.(Based on a manga I can’t find the name of :( ) In a smaller country, tucked away from the rest of the world, people are born into a unique system. They are either Energy Givers or Energy Takers. Their ability activates from a young age and they are paired with the most compatible one of the opposite ability as soon as possible, usually early elementary school. Energy is transferred from the giver to the taker via a kiss on the lips and must be done at least once a day. While partners are not necessarily romantically involved, the two depend on each other immensely. Without receiving energy, the taker will quickly tire, weaken and collapse becoming comatose and at risk of death. If they do not give energy, the giver’s energy supply builds up making them suffer from nausea, lethargy, fevers, and other unpleasant symptoms that will gradually worsen to the point where their life is in danger. Should a pair of partners be separated either through death or other means, the lone individual must visit a donation center where they will be paired with a donor that somewhat matches until a more compatible, new permanent partner is finally found. Now for the main plot. Muse A and Muse B are a Giver-Taker pair that has been together since childhood. Their feelings grew from platonic to romantic and by high school, the two were a golden, seemingly unbreakable couple. Near the end their last year, all comes to a grinding halt when Muse B suddenly breaks up with Muse A and disappears. Five years down the line, Muse A is a jaded, lonely individual, known for constantly going from donor to donor. Deciding they need a change, they take a teaching job in a boarding school on the other side of the country. Yet when they walk into the faculty office on their first day, they find themselves placed in a desk right next to Muse A. Not only this, the two are in the same department. How will things proceed? (I play Muse A.)
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