crows use tools and like to slide down snowy hills. today we saw a goose with a hurt foot who was kept safe by his flock - before taking off, they waited for him to catch up. there are colors only butterflies see. reindeer are matriarchical. cows have best friends and 4 stomachs and like jazz music. i watched a video recently of an octopus making himself a door out of a coconut shell.
i am a little soft, okay. but sometimes i can't talk either. the world is like fractal light to me, and passes through my skin in tendrils. i feel certain small things like a catapult; i skirt around the big things and somehow arrive in crisis without ever realizing i'm in pain.
in 5th grade we read The Curious Incident of the Dog In The Night-time, which is about a young autistic boy. it is how they introduced us to empathy about neurotypes, which was well-timed: around 10 years old was when i started having my life fully ruined by symptoms. people started noticing.
i wonder if birds can tell if another bird is odd. like the phrase odd duck. i have to believe that all odd ducks are still very much loved by the other normal ducks. i have to believe that, or i will cry.
i remember my 5th grade teacher holding the curious incident up, dazzled by the language written by someone who is neurotypical. my teacher said: "sometimes i want to cut open their mind to know exactly how autistics are thinking. it's just so different! they must see the world so strangely!" later, at 22, in my education classes, we were taught to say a person with autism or a person on the spectrum or neurodivergent. i actually personally kind of like person-first language - it implies the other person is trying to protect me from myself. i know they had to teach themselves that pattern of speech, is all, and it shows they're at least trying. and i was a person first, even if i wasn't good at it.
plants learn information. they must encode data somehow, but where would they store it? when you cut open a sapling, you cannot find the how they think - if they "think" at all. they learn, but do not think. i want to paint that process - i think it would be mostly purple and blue.
the book was not about me, it was about a young boy. his life was patterned into a different set of categories. he did not cry about the tag on his shirt. i remember reading it and saying to myself: i am wrong, and broken, but it isn't in this way. something else is wrong with me instead. later, in that same person-first education class, my teacher would bring up the curious incident and mention that it is now widely panned as being inaccurate and stereotypical. she frowned and said we might not know how a person with autism thinks, but it is unlikely to be expressed in that way. this book was written with the best intentions by a special-ed teacher, but there's some debate as to if somebody who was on the spectrum would be even able to write something like this.
we might not understand it, but crows and ravens have developed their own language. this is also true of whales, dolphins, and many other species. i do not know how a crow thinks, but we do know they can problem solve. (is "thinking" equal to "problem solving"? or is "thinking" data processing? data management?) i do not know how my dog thinks, either, but we "talk" all the same - i know what he is asking for, even if he only asks once.
i am not a dolphin or reindeer or a dog in the nighttime, but i am an odd duck. in the ugly duckling, she grows up and comes home and is beautiful and finds her soulmate. all that ugliness she experienced lives in downy feathers inside of her, staining everything a muted grey. she is beautiful eventually, though, so she is loved. they do not want to cut her open to see how she thinks.
a while ago i got into an argument with a classmate about that weird sia music video about autism. my classmate said she thought it was good to raise awareness. i told her they should have just hired someone else to do it. she said it's not fair to an autistic person to expect them to be able to handle that kind of a thing.
today i saw a goose, and he was limping. i want to be loved like a flock loves a wounded creature: the phrase taken under a wing. which is to say i have always known i am not normal. desperate, mewling - i want to be loved beyond words.
loved beyond thinking.
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Bradley grows up in the front seat of his mom's car and in the backseat of his uncle Tom's - soon to be called Pops - car. If Mav had a driver's licence, he would probably have sat a little here and a little there. It becomes part of his universe, and Bradley will end up cherishing every single conversation he had with both of them while they were driving. He won't get the chance to drive his mom around, to young to even reach all the pedals, but he is going to be old and capable enough to drive his pops to the hospital and back every time he needs to, and he will confine dad in the back because he made the mistake of having him in the front once and he got this close to stopping and leaving him miles from home.
At some point, it becomes pretty normal for Ice to sit on the back with Mav just so they can have a conversation, all three of them, with Maverick translating Ice's sign language.
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saw some speculation on FranklyDear in relation to the audios and i want to toss my two cents in
so all the thing's i've been seeing have been people talking about how they're a couple, but they're not acting like it, so that must be Playfellow's influence making them put distance between each other
but i immediately interpreted it as - they're not there yet. there might be feelings, but they aren't Together. cause in the 14 bug audios, i feel like it's pretty clear that these are snapshots of the neighborhood outside of the show. cameras aren't rolling, there are no influences, it's the neighbors just Existing on their own dime
'cause the conversations are more natural! the characters seem more nuanced! there aren't any sound effects! so if FranklyDear is already established, wouldn't we have "seen" that in their shared audio 8-14? wouldn't Eddie have just called Frank Frank, without the immediate (and somewhat flustered) correction to Mr. Frankly? and wouldn't Frank call him Eddie instead of Mr. Dear? plus, idk about y'all, but that scene was a lil romantically charged. a little flirty - especially from Frank's side. the kind of tension you get from budding emotions, not fully-realized ones
they just seem to be in a before state. the beginning stages. and anyway, i remember Clown saying that revealing FranklyDear as an endgame couple was sort of an Accident? i think we were meant to watch it evolve and figure it out along with the characters, the way we will with any other relationships (that we Definitely are not aware of / confident about yet).
we're still only in the prologue of the story, so it'd make so much sense if Frank and Eddie are not yet Involved. we're on this journey With them
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Thinkin' of WOF Au for DC, but like, it's a Gothamite and Fawcett thing. (And Amity Park if crossover)
Like those are the most magical areas in the world, even if Gotham is cursed as fuck. An unspoken secret of sorts that while they present themselves as human to outsiders, they are all Very Much Not.
Which means hilariously in the league, when everyone expects Batman to be suspicious and short with the new guy- even made bets on it- they are then shooketh when both visibly relax and start talking.
And half the shared complaints don't make sense!
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Now Gotham technically has no Queen, nor does Fawcett, but Batman and Captain Marvel are the closest things. Not in the traditional sense of back when they were in separate tribes (& maybe from a different dimension but shh that was millennia ago) but in the sense of, they're the ones patrolling and protecting the cities along with calling the shots in disasters.
Which does sort of change the dynamic they both have in their city. If one of them calls to arms, the city would follow them. They could declare war, and their cities (begrudgingly in Gotham's underbelly's case of strongest is in charge) would follow.
And while Billy is oblivious, both Marvel-the-not-hivemind and Batman are. They know they have to be very careful.
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I'm sure we all want Nightwing Bruce but no. Bruce, like both his mother and father and father's father and so on before him, is actually an Icewing.
The Waynes however, have a case of melanism running in their bloodline. Thomas Wayne? Only his quills and part of his back were darker, but Bruce? Practically pitch black scales that shadow his eyes.
Now Alfred on the other hand, is a Nightwing. No special powers there, though you would hear many a child protest with how he seems to know everything.
Commissioner Gordon is a Mudwing, big stocky and very tired, which translates to his human disguise as a large trenchcoat. He finds this very amusing.
Barbara similarly, is half Mudwing. Her mother was a Hivewing, making her a hybrid between both. Which does ironically mean that Batgirl does in fact have insectoid wings. Though that does ponder the question on if they'd all go by their original vigilante names.
Dick is a Silkwing. Wingless as he watches his parents fall and unable to do anything despite this place supposedly being safe for beings like them. He grows into his own, and his wings, when they come in, are dark Gotham colors through and through, with the deep blue of the sky he's come to crave.
Jason is a hybrid between a Mudwing and a Skywing. He's also an animus- not that he knew that. He doesn't find out until he's dying, telling himself to not die, to get back to Gotham, to his dad, his family-
And then he wakes up in his Coffin, alive.
Now Cass, raised to be the perfect killer, is also a hybrid, just one between a Nightwing and a Rainwing, egg set out under the moon. Which succeeds, partially. She can't straight up read minds, but combined with her talent in reading body language on both human and inhuman bodies, it's a near thing.
Tim is a Seawing, borderline abandoned by his parents who seek treasures and more wealth as he's trapped back in a city where the water is dark and poisoned. But he's Gothamite, through and through, and he adapts. Scales darker than the original blues he was born with, and glow shifting to that sickly white of the Gotham's Bats.
Now Steph, is a full-blooded Rainwing, and can in fact change her scales, but can mostly be found in purples and golds. Though for a short time she was in another set of colors, thought dead before she slithered out of the shadows older and wiser than before.
Damian is his father's son, but he's also an Al-Ghul. The not-quite dragonet is half Icewing, and half Sandwing. And struggled to adjust at first, to a place so different from his first home where the only other dragons were blood related. But like any Wayne before him, he adjusts, and he adapts.
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Billy wasn't a Beetlewing originally, and perhaps he would have hesitated if he'd known it would change him, would change his body and the last thing he had of his parents. But his friends, his Team and new family help.
And he can pass as a Silkwing like their sort-of foster mother. All six of them can do so now, even if the others look more like hybrids themselves thanks to not being the Champion. They might not be, but they're his family.
And that's enough.
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I think anybody who thinks autism is more "accepted" nowadays is either in denial or can't see outside themselves. What we actually did is just popularize a really weird infantilized perception of autism that focuses on the symptoms that can be repackaged as "cute" or "quirky," and are continuing to treat people with inconvenient or even upsetting symptoms like garbage. And no I'm not talking about bigots who pull the "I'm literally neurodivergent" bs I'm talking about supposed allies telling me I'm acting like a child for getting too emotional when I literally have "Can't Regulate My Emotions" disorder, or that I'm moving weird, or that my voice never has the right tone to it. Sorry my autism doesn't stop and end at hand flapping and dinosaurs lmao I can gaurantee I'm not enjoying my meltdown any more than you are, buddy! In fact, I'd say I'm having a far worse time than you! I do not make a choice to be emotionally volatile nor do I feel good when I get upset. It's not my fault that emoting "properly" is a performance that takes energy and I really can't do it 100% of the time. Like idk it honestly feels like I still have to mask in supposedly progressive spaces just in a different way.
And of course this doesn't even start to get into people with higher support needs than me who are rarely acknowledged unless they themselves are doing it. It's one of the reasons those posts that are like "Do you think neurodivergence is just autism/adhd, and not (heavily stigmatized other disorder)?" rub me the wrong way. They always seem to be addressing the most sanitized version of autism possible which strikes me as counter intuitive to the point being made. And don't get me wrong, as a system I understand why it's being said but it just really frustrates me because the people these posts are about don't actually think severe cases of autism or adhd are neurodivergence either! They treat higher support needs people with the same disorders like shit!
No I do not think anyone who's ever made a post like that is a bad person nor do I expect every post to have a disclaimer containing every possible nuance but I do think a lot of them are not written with the existence of high support needs or "weird" autism symptoms in mind, which inadvertently feeds into this "palatable autism" thing people keep doing
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