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What are your biggest pet peeves when it comes to portrayals of something violent?

A few things come to mind: Violence without purpose, violence without consequence, and violence without thought.

A basic piece of writing advice holds: Everything in your story needs to serve a function. If it’s not building your world, characters, or advancing your plot, cut it. You may have written something you enjoyed, but if it doesn’t serve a purpose in your story, it should not be there. Violence is no exception; it can do any of those. The best fight scenes do all three at once.

When someone inserts a fight scene because, “there should be a fight here,” that’s where I check out. It’s easy to understand how this happens. I don’t have a problem with gratuitous violence, but if it’s not doing something for the story, it should have been cut.

There’s a few wrinkles here. Visual media (both comics and in video) can get away with stylish violence. If you are here for the spectacle they can satisfy. The extreme end of this is probably Kill Bill: Vol. 1, where the entire film is just one spectacle fight after another with the context stripped out. Except, each one does what a scene needs to. They explore the characters, build the world, and advance the plot, almost entirely through violence.

The other wrinkle is games. Not just video games; any game. Violence can be adapted into a rewarding play loop. You can build your entire play experience around violence and have an enjoyable game. Many strategy games build of the idea of managing violence, whether that’s a battle or a war.

Roleplaying games, both tabletop and electronic often have a heavy focus on combat systems. Some of this is because D&D was originally developed by tabletop wargamers, and that influence cast a long shadow on the genre. If you’ve ever participated in a tabletop D&D campaign, you’ll be familiar with entire nights lost to a few minutes of combat. You can build entire RPGs around nothing but violence. In video games this where things like Diablo came from. Taking the experience of traditional RPGs and distilling it into a pure combat gauntlet.

If I’m being completely fair, any scene can suffer from lacking purpose. This isn’t a problem exclusive to violence, however, it is easier to accidentally build your world and characters by letting them talk.

The second issue is somewhat related to the first, violence without consequences is deeply unsatisfying. If the violence changes nothing, then it has no purpose in the story, but it goes beyond that. It’s not like I’m looking for specific, or even negative, consequences from violence. I’d just like to see some indication that your character was almost killed a couple pages back.

Violence is messy, it’s destructive. Having characters roll over from a fight like nothing happened without any aftermath just causes me to ask, “why bother?”

Violence can instantly remove characters from your story. It can introduce new challenges, such as lasting injuries, further complicating characters’ lives, or even just draining resources. If it’s not doing anything, why use it? This is a very dynamic tool for a writer. It kills me when an author pulls it out and does nothing with it.

This last one is a little more complex. When a character’s approach to violence is irreconcilable to the rest of their identity, that’s a hard no. This can crop up in a lot of ways, but it starts with the author thinking about violence as a flavor for their scene, and not a part of their story.

“My character is a good person, they would never kill!” as they leave someone stranded, and wounded, hundreds of miles from civilization, in a hostile environment that will ensure they don’t make it out alive. This is a Bond villain routine being passed off as moral high ground.

Shooting to wound ends up in here. The author wanted to use guns, without the morally icky idea of killing people, “so let’s just set those firearms to stun,” like they’re fucking phasers. (And, no, shooting to wound is not a thing. You can bleed to death from a limb almost as easily as a center mass hit.)

Violence is ethically complicated. You can have an ethical system to moderate yourself, but if you’re going to engage in violence, you will harm others. If “being a good person” is important to you, you need to spend some time meditating the ethics of violence. So of course, you get the authors who are sure that, so long as their character doesn’t personally drop the hammer, whatever horrors they inflict on their foes are entirely acceptable.

In fairness, I have a pretty low tolerance for hypocrisy, so this may be related.

If your character is going to engage in violence, be honest with yourself about the kind of person they would be. Violence, and the will to commit violence affect you as a person. This holistic, and affects the entirety of you you are. Including characters who have that capacity affects your story. Again, the entirety of your story. “But my character’s a good person, they would never…” And that’s when I start pounding my head into the desk, because anything other response would end with, “…and that’s when I shot them, Your Honor.”

Like I said, violence is a fanatic tool for an author. I love it. However, if you’re going to use it, actually use it. Don’t just pull it out as a way to break up a few scenes, and go right back to where you started.

The ethics of violence is an incredibly deep subject, there’s a lot of stuff to talk about, and it absolutely kills me when an author tries to table the entire thing in favor of logic that would have been embarrassing in a Saturday morning cartoon.

-Starke

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But then they turned her around anyway. It’s pretty baffling.

It’s a great, powerful, beautifully-animated, show…but…

Do you remember back in the early days of different fandoms when everyone was making those dark, shocking, theories for the sake of being the ones who would be remembered for those dark, shocking theories? You know, X character is really in an asylum, Y characters were dead all along, etc. And people would be like, “Yeah, that’s creative, but why would you take a wholesome character, show, premise, etc. and give them this twisted fate? Oh, because you can? …Okay. Congratulations. You can………now what?”

I feel like that’s what Steven Universe has become. That’s what Future is.

Okay, you’ve proven that you know how to sneak in real-life issues of genocide, mental-illnesses, abuse, etc. into an everyday children’s cartoon. Okay. Yep. You can. Congratulations. Now. What.?

I keep comparing Steven Universe Future with Bojack Horseman (which I never thought I’d end up doing…and am not sure anyone should do…) because both of them apparently deal with these serious mental health issues…but Bojack Horseman has always marketed itself as an adult cartoon that’s going to take you on this serious introspective journey and Steven Universe…is a children’s cartoon on Cartoon Network that was originally about a boy and ice-cream.

And I know kids can handle these dark themes, we did when we were kids. My favorite (let’s face it, everyone’s favorite) episode of Danny Phantom is still the Ultimate Enemy, an AU where Danny watches his friends/family die, goes to his enemy, has his ghost-half ripped out, only to be killed by that ghost-half, which wages war on the city. Avatar didn’t hold back in showing Ozai’s regime and the things the different nations have done to one another. But I feel like Avatar did so in a much different light. Throughout all of Avatar, you saw these tragedies through the lens of, “The world is horrible now, but that’s why we’re here, we’re going to avenge the fallen and save/balance the rest of the world.” With few exceptions (the bloodbending episode coming to mind), the episodes/arcs ended on a relatively optimistic note. If there were cliffhangers, they were balanced, showing that something big was about to happen, but that those characters over there, yeah they’re all still optimistic, so hope isn’t lost.

I don’t know if Rebecca Sugar is just going through her Ebony Darkness Dementia Raven Way phase (…hey, is there anything saying she never wrote…never mind), but these episodes of Steven Universe are dark and depressing just to be dark and depressing. And it’s kinda troubling.

Because here’s the thing…I’m sure these dark episodes are leading to a happy resolution at the end. Steven’s going to get corrupted, that’s pretty much a known fact at this point, but they’re going to save him through the power of friendship and singing and gay. Quick two-minute montage showing that everything’s good now, one big final song, and Steven Universe ends on a happy note. Literally. But until we reach that point, these individual episodes just leave me feeling bitter and twisted. Like watching a Bojack episode, but again, at least I knew what I was getting into with that show. It’s gotten to the point where I’ve told people to not watch specific episodes of Steven Universe Future because the trauma is so realistic that it could be triggering for them.

And I just keep thinking about episodes like this:

And how we went from that to episodes like this:

And it’s like, how am I supposed to feel?

How is anyone supposed to feel after watching this lovable character spiral into an abusive, aggressive, state? Am I supposed to feel happy? Satisfied? I don’t! I feel bitter and angry and confused. And if that’s what Sugar’s intent is…again, congratulations, you did it…but why? At what cost? And now what’s the plan?

EDGELORD. Sorry, couldn’t think of the word we always used for those people who came up with the dark, twisted, scenarios. Just remembered. Edgelord. And, god, Rebecca Sugar really is becoming an edgelord, isn’t she? All of the latest Steven Universe Future episodes, and the latest promo/leaks have so much of that edgelord dynamic. The “we can be dark and twisted just to show you we can be dark and twisted” feel without any real substance behind it. I just don’t get it. What’s the point of all of that? To be more realistic? To show accurate portrayals of PTSD and other mental illnesses? Since when has the show about a half-alien boy living with three space rocks been focused on ultra-realistic depictions of real-life traumas? Yeah, the first few seasons of the old show touched on it, like Rose’s Scabbard and The Answer, serious themes were dealt with, but they were done in a cartoony way, there was a buffer between the cartoon world and the real world that just doesn’t seem to exist anymore. And I can’t explain how or why it disappeared…it’s just gone.

I guess Steven Universe Future is for all of the fans who want that hyper-realistic portrayal of mental illnesses and abuse…as portrayed by some of their favorite cartoon characters. You know…that common niche. /s. But I always saw the cartoon, the children’s cartoon, as a means of escapism. Which is a concept I know Sugar knows about because there’s a song called Escapism in an episode called Escapism. The new episodes don’t feel escapist at all. They’re not there to make us forget about real-world traumas or show those traumas in a softened light with a hopeful message that we can overcome them. They’re shoving real-world traumas down our throats with no resolution, as if that’s the point. They’re making people realize how twisted and dark the world can get just to show how twisted and dark the world can get. If that’s your goal…to quote that fish from Spongebob, “Once again…..congratulations.” But, damn, what a weird goal to have…for a children’s cartoon.

Okay, let’s talk about the diamonds characterization

so the diamonds redemption has always been a point of contention because ‘evil ruthless dictators’ transforming  to ‘out of touch graunties’ has always been a hard sell. 

But I’ll say prior to this episode the diamonds had always been portrayed like they haven’t truly internalised Steven’s values, they’re only going along with what he says because they want him to be proud of them. 

Like you could tell that in the way White says ‘equal lifeforms’ in a distasteful way in the opening of the movie. 

But as of this episode the diamonds are completely redeemed, they’re absolute saints now, they’re basically gem philanthropists. 

and it’s like wow okay that’s a pretty big fucking turn around from the last time we saw you. 

And I get why they the crewniverse did this. They wanted to show Steven at his absolute rock bottom. That the three most despicable beings in the universe can live fulfilling and virtuous lives contrasts against the traumatic identity crisis Steven is going through. 

But like, even though I understand the narrative reasoning, it’s still like, really? They still all went through complete 180 personality change, and they’re all just completely fine that they’re previous power structure where they were on top has been deconstructed. 

And we just have to swallow this character change. We have to swallow this character change for the envisioned plot to work. Because this character change had to happen in order to demonstrate how Steven feels isolated from the entire universe.

Really, the diamonds just don’t feel like real characters and are more just caricatures at this point.

This is just another example of SU sacrificing a side character’s personality/ story arc in order to enhance Steven’s story.

I will at least praise Steven calling out White Diamond’s previous shitty behavior, and how it brings into question if someone like White Diamond deserves happiness whilst a person like Steven is miserable. 

Also a couple stray observations:

I love how Blue Diamonds new power is essentially drugging people

Spinel’s animation looked sooooo bad in this episode compared to the movie. But obviously this episode doesn’t have movie budget so I’ll cut them some slack for that one.

The moment with White/Steven was predictable too but in the right way (cuz it wasn’t the endgame entirely) and had more punch to it because you figure White wasn’t gonna get killed that easily but they made the scene reasonably tense so you potentially second guess yourself.

I get gradually more and more uncomfortable with what they’ve done to SUF. What they’ve done to Steven - a lovable, empathetic boy. I can understand him having trauma from some stuff that happened LATER in the show - all the shit brought by Rose/Pink and the Diamonds. But why the fuck do they now try to pin the trauma on Greg? Why do they make Steven a psychotic murderer? Why do I hate all of this so much?

Please. Just end this fucking show. I want to see how the finale goes and cleanse my mind from it, because I can’t bear watching this monstrosity of a sequel.

flowerapplejacks said to howtofightwrite: I have always felt that the phrase “whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” is not only patently false but harmful and ignorant. It seems to romanticize the concept of pain and suffering always leaving potential for individuals to grow. Often times the reality is completely opposite. Pain cripples and stunts, it doesn’t help you grow. What are your thoughts?

So, what is the alternative? Lie in a corner and hide from the world, and hope it all goes away? It won’t. You can roll over and wallow in the pain if you want. Sometimes, you need to. Sometimes, you’ve got to nurse your wounds. The problem is you can’t lie on the floor forever. In the end, you’re gonna have to get up and figure out what you’re doing next.

You can’t stay on the floor.

You shouldn’t stay on the floor.

Don’t give up.

I say this as someone who’s lived with clinical depression since I was thirteen, I’ve lost most of my family members, lost my dog, broke my leg when I was twelve. I’ve learned from my pain. My mistakes have taught me a lot. I wouldn’t be where I am today (or who I am today) without them.

I’ve been in the pit. I climbed out. It took twenty years, but I made it. I wouldn’t have, if I was avoiding pain.

One of the truths about life is that it’s painful, often in a variety of different ways. You can learn a lot from pain. You learn about yourself, about your body, about your personal weaknesses. You’re often stripped of the illusions you had about yourself, about your bravery, about how far you’d go to protect your ideals, about the kind of person you are, which can be damaging all by itself.

What I don’t like about the statement “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” is that it’s passive. It assumes a positive outcome rather than acknowledging the courage, hard work, and emotional toil which often comes with overcoming traumatic incidents, overcoming injuries, or even just getting up to try again after you’ve made a mistake. I think what you’ve missed is the core message of the statement, which is that if it didn’t kill you then you still have the opportunity to make things better, to rectify your mistakes, to be better than you were before. If you’re dead, there are no second chances. That’s it. That’s the end. There’s no more you.

Pain is your body’s response to getting hurt, and also for saying, “don’t do that.” Like all natural instincts, it’s not always right. Not all pain is bad for you, and some of it, like the kind you experience from change, is unavoidable. Learning to distinguish between the two is a natural part of living. Learning to distinguish between the pain from a stubbed toe and a major injury is important. Learning to push past the limits your mind has set for you, that’s important. It’s just like learning to ignore or push past your fear when it’s standing in the way of what you want. Just because you’re afraid doesn’t mean you should be. You need to learn which fears are valid, and which are standing in your way.

My feelings on pain are very simple. Pain is one of life’s constants. You will experience a lot of different kinds of pain throughout your life. Emotional pain, pain from fear, from disappointment, from rejection, from loss, from embarrassment, from change, from growing up, from your memories of past, painful experiences. You’ll experience physical pain from injuries major to minor, you could break your leg, you could bump your head, or just walk into a door. You experience low-grade pain from working out. Your stomach hurts when you’re hungry. You’re gonna feel pain from stubbing your toe. Getting hurt is an eventuality.

My approach to pain is the Rafiki quote, “you can either run from it, or learn from it. So, what are you going to do?”

If I took your advice, that pain should be avoided at all costs because pain is bad, I wouldn’t have two functioning legs. I wouldn’t have eventually reached acceptance with my father’s death, which has taken most of my adult life. I wouldn’t have three black belts. I wouldn’t have gone to college. I wouldn’t run a successful blog while also managing clinical depression. Hell, I wouldn’t be managing my depression. My depression would be managing me.

When I was twelve, I fractured my tibia (the big bone in your leg) doing martial arts and I needed to get surgery. The break itself was incredibly painful, yes, but so was the recovery. Learning to use crutches was painful, I made mistakes and those mistakes hurt. Every day, I had to work on stretching my leg and performing exercises to keep the musculature up in my leg. I had to learn, among other things, to navigate a world not designed for people with physical disabilities. I had to learn to deal with my situation when my circumstances were no longer novel to my friends, when they didn’t help anymore. I had to learn to deal with the stares and curiosity, and even bullying.

However, I learned from it. I learned how to open doors while in a wheelchair when there was no one around to do it for me. I learned how to navigate and get to my classes on time. I learned how to get around on one leg with just my own internal balance. I learned how to handle classmates who hid my crutches. I learned how to get into a house that had only stairway access. I learned how to take showers without getting an infection. I learned how to not just live with my broken leg, but thrive with it while I worked toward recovery. I had school counselors who’d tell me the story, years later, about how they were so impressed with how I figured out how to open my junior high’s heavy, double doors in my wheelchair. And do you know why I figured it out? I couldn’t sit around waiting for someone else to do it for me.

Yes, pain hurts. Pain can be uncomfortable. Pain can be horrible. Crippling? Only you really get to decide that. Stunted? Again, being emotionally stunted is something you can address.

You’re going to get hurt no matter what you do, even if you spend your life trying to avoid it. The act of learning… anything, really, is painful. You’re going to make mistakes, and making mistakes can be painful. It’s also unavoidable. Life is short. You’re going to get thrown by the horse while learning to ride, and I say that having been thrown by many horses. You’re going to lose people you care about. You’re going to face rejection. You’re going to be disappointed. You’re going to fail. You’re going to fall down. You’re going to get injured. You’ll face setbacks.

However, that pain can help you develop resilience. You can develop emotional strength, and the courage to face what you’re afraid of. When you encounter setbacks, you learn how to push past disappointment. You realize the pain isn’t as big a hurdle as you thought, that you are tougher than you previously believed.

When you get knocked down, you have two choices. You either get back up or you stay down. And, you know? Some people do choose to stay down. Some people choose to wallow. Some people never try again. Some people need time before they’re ready. Getting back up isn’t always easy, but the more you do it the easier it becomes.

No one ever gets to tell you how many chances you get.

The question of what you do after the pain occurs is what matters. Just because you got hurt doesn’t mean you should give up. Maybe you should take a step back and reassess before trying again, but you should, probably, try again.

I broke my leg trying to do a tornado kick. Now? I can do a tornado kick. I could have given up, but I didn’t. I could have avoided dealing with my father’s death, I could have run from it and there were certainly points where it felt like I’d never feel anything again, but now I get to celebrate his memory.

Pain is a learning experience, but what you learn from it is up to you. You’ll experience so many different kinds of pain. You’ll learn to distinguish the good from the bad and the mild or middling from the terrible. Hurting yourself more to get better might feel like an oxymoron, but, sometimes, you need to.

Celebration of survival isn’t irresponsible. Sometimes, the simple act of existing requires courage. Courage deserves recognition. If you’re bothered by someone saying, “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” then you might not have come out the other side yet. You might not be ready to celebrate how your experiences and what you’ve gone through have made you the person you are. In the end, it’s not really any different than saying, “you know, we went through some rough and tumble times but we made it!”

Do you stop playing on the jungle gym because you bashed your funny bone? Probably not, but you might be a little more circumspect about where you put your elbows.

-Michi

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Admittedly “Pain cripples and stunts, it doesn’t help you grow.” isn’t entirely accurate but neither is the belief that pain is always educational. It can be up to a point but past that, well, to quote Diane from BoJack Horseman, “It isn’t ‘good damage’. It’s just damage.” 

As a society we give too much credit to pain as a teacher, at least in comparison to its alternative. Can a person who was bullied learn the value of respect and compassion? Yes. But they can also learn it from people who treated them with respect and compassion. The fact that pain sticks out more in our minds does not make it more instructive than solace. 

People also have different tolerances for pain; what’s tolerable for one person is torturous for another. This is especially true when mental illness is involved and trying to make it through hard times can be even more difficult without the aid of therapy, medication or a stable support system. I tried for years to manage my anxiety myself with limited success but found a massive improvement after I started taking meds.  

OP is right that pain is a constant part of life and you will have to deal with it when it hits you. It can reveal the parts of yourself where you still have to grow and give you perspective on other people’s challenges. But it is not the ultimate teacher too many people seem to think it is.

TLDR; Homestuck summed it up:

one more time.

“why take your phone into the store to get it fixed? they don’t care about you, they’re only doing their job.”

“I don’t want to order a pizza. they’re not making it for me out of the goodness of their hearts, they’re only doing it because it’s their job.”

“why didn’t you just have your girlfriend do that surgery instead of going to a stranger who only saved your life because it’s their job?”

a lot - A LOT - of people conflate emotional vulnerability with love. they think that being open about your problems is something you only do with friends and family. so paying someone to be open with sounds wrong because it’s like paying someone to be your girlfriend or your mom.

but that’s fundamentally misunderstanding the point of a therapist.

the therapist’s job is to identify issues and help you develop methods to cope with them. that’s it. being open is necessary, not because they need to love you, but because you need to be honest if you want them to be able to accurately figure out what’s wrong. 

When people ask me why it took two years of writing poems to write this poem to write the rape poem, I will tell them all about you. How you watch this stage the same way you watch CSI, you already know what’s coming next, it’s just another mangled body, I am just another hit and run, so you take this time to get another drink, I’ll tell them how every story sounds the same when you stop listening, I’ll tell them how nice it must be to be able to walk away, and I’ll tell them how there’s a voice in the back of my head that sounds an awful lot like yours saying, This is just another rape poem. Just another little-girl-lost poem. Just another do-not-touch-me-until-I-ask you-to-touch-me poem.  Just another seven-years-old, sleeping with a Tinkerbell wand on my nightstand and a kitchen knife underneath my pillow because I swore the next time he came into my bedroom uninvited he would come out bleeding poem; and I get it. I know that you are tired of hearing rape poems. I am tired of hearing rape poems, the same way soldiers are tired of hearing their own guns go off, believe me, we all wish the war was over, but friend, you are staring out at a world on fire complaining about how ugly you think the ashes are, The poems are not the problem. We have built cathedrals out of spite and splintered bone, of course they aren’t pretty, nothing holy ever is— Think of Gandhi’s blistered feet, think of that crown made of thorns and the sweat on your mother’s sacred chest as she pushed to get you here, the work is never pretty, but it’s the only way the house gets built;

Ronda Rousey just did an interview with ESPN that basically said her career is over from her fight with Holly Holm. That’s not what she said, what she said is got a concussion that left her hospitalized and she’s going to need at least six months of recovery before she can even think about getting hit again. She can’t even eat an apple because some of her teeth are still loose and will be for the next three months.

She may come back, but it’s going to take a long damn time.

She’s probably looking at at least a year before she gets in the ring again.

If she ever does, which she might not if any injuries persist.

We all remember Muhammad Ali lighting the torch at the Olympics when his hands were literally shaking from the degree of damage he’d suffered. He has Parkinson’s. There’s an article in LA Times about his brain damage being the result of his boxing career.

Greatest boxer of a generation. It’s tragic.

And it’s not uncommon.

This happens to many professional fighters later in life. It happens to football players too, all the time. There are so many stories across the country of high school football players dropping dead on the field because they had a concussion or bleeding in their brain that no one caught. They do get concussed fairly often. You can get the data on this through the American Journal of Sports Medicine and other sources, the average is 1 per every 100,000. Roughly 12 high school students every year will die directly from playing football.

This is kids, this is not the higher levels where they have better medical care but push them harder. This is high school. And that’s just death, that’s not counting injury or long term damage.

Brain injuries are very common on the boxing circuit, in professional fighting, and many other sports. They can be and often are career enders. This is a risk that every professional fighter takes when they enter the ring.

Many professional fighters in the United States only fight 3 to 4 times per year. When my brother was doing collegiate boxing, he fought about every three to four months. This is due to the amount of stress that kind of physical combat puts the body under.

They do take medical precautions. They do as much as they can. They’re choosing to take the risks. And it’s not always enough to save them.

If you don’t think that professional boxers or any other kind of fighter doesn’t suffer long term damage from their career choice or are somehow immune, then you just haven’t been paying attention.

I’ve been in seminars with UFC fighters where they were talking about the ring and their advice was essentially, “they get you in a hold, just tap out, don’t even wait. You’re not proving anything. Don’t risk your career over one fight.”

You fight. You get hurt. You hope you don’t get hurt so bad that it ends your career, that you can recover. And if you can’t, well, there’s always someone out there to take your place. Another young idiot who think they’re immortal or invincible.

Though, honestly, where did you think all those jokes about boxers being meatheads or thick-skulled come from?

Reality.

Brain damage.

There are so many jokes about boxers being idiots because brain damage. It’s become a cliche. People make fun of this. You might have made fun of this, at least once. I know I’ve told the Rocky jokes.This truth is such an embedded part of our culture and been with us for so long that you don’t even think about it. It’s literally become a joke. The injured while fighting plot is one of the most common in boxing movies.

There is an entire character stereotype built around this concept.

The Big Dumb Bruiser.

For the longest time, (and you still see it), there was an assumption in media that if you were European and a fighter then you had to be an idiot. D&D has an entire class built on this concept.

Why?

Boxing.

You can only take so many hits to the face before your brain stops working.

How many times have you heard that, by the way?

“Don’t mind him. He’s taken one too many to the face.”

That’s a boxing joke. Or a fighting joke. Boxing is like alcohol, everyone knows that it kills brain cells and they forget because that knowledge is so common.

-Michi

this is just my own observations of course but 90% of the time when a kid tries to get people to treat them like an adult, what they really want is the respect and acknowledgement that they associate with adulthood - because that’s what they must give the adults. they have to give that to the adults in their lives, but the adults never give that same respect back, and so they see that difference and decide that they want to be treated “like an adult”

and sometimes i see parents who are like fine you want to be treated like an adult then you can work and pay rent but that’s the exact OPPOSITE of what the kid is actually asking for. you’re just belittling them, clearly intending to punish them for daring ask for your respect, clearly intending for them to break down and beg to be “treated like a child” again because you purposefully twisted their wants. they ask for respect, and you give them abuse.

never, ever, ever, treat a child like a full grown adult. it’s our responsibility as adults NOT to, because they ARENT adults no matter how much they think they want to be, and it’s our job as adults to take care of them.

that said, ALWAYS treat children like people. because they ARE that. they’re real people with real agency acting as best as they know to with what knowledge they have