#catstronaut

drawings of canonical characters are free to use for edits/icons/etc. with credit.

please do not use artwork of my ocs for edits/icons <3

i may also post suggestive artwork, which will be tagged as “suggestive”. i will not post explicit NSFW here.

non-artwork posts/text only will be tagged as “record player”

im so happy so many people have so many different angles they’re coming to it with, and that the emotion came through so intensely.

as a victim of child abuse and torture, my 20s have been a lot of unpacking and unlearning the only things that kept me alive for a long time. one of the biggest, hardest coping mechanisms ive had to unlearn is “my suffering is irrelevant, helping others is what matters.“

while it helped pull me out of suicidal episodes and gave me motivation as a child, it is incredibly harmful as an adult who is no longer in that living situation. i was constantly sacrificing my wellbeing for others and running myself into the ground and believing that if i wasnt suffering enough, i wasnt doing enough. id been taught that my suffering was the exchange for other people’s peace, and i really connected with ivypaw because of that.

ivypaw does not want to be in the dark forest. dovepaw does not want ivypaw in the dark forest. but the adults around her, lion and jay, instead tell her to stay and act as a spy. we then proceed to see ivypaw, and later ivypool, repeatedly only think of her personhood as what she can do for others. its the only way she values her life at all.

my purpose in the piece is to bring two things to the front:

1. ivypools lack of agency as a child

2. how coping with that in the past might affects her as an adult

now personally, i dislike that they chose to have ivypool get a mate and have kits. they had to discuss her getting to that point in the text and say she’ll “think it over” because they Knew it was ooc. the woman has to have kids, because thats what women do! by any means necessary!

and because the text has to do this, and coax the character they control into it, it becomes a meta version of the same lack of agency. ivypool should want this, she’s a woman and women have babies! ivypool should want this, her husband wants it! ivypool should want this, the clan always needs more warriors!

and yet, regardless of what she’s been taught to think, regardless of what i had been taught to think, a part of you still rebels. part of you still wants to do what you want, and to take care of your needs. but because suffering equals positive, lack of suffering then equals a negative. you feel like an, awful, evil, selfish person. you should want whats best for everyone. you’re already so damaged and broken, you never felt worth before, the only way you can be worth while is to serve others. but that part of you is still there. even when you think it’s evil, it knows its not.