howdy pardner

thinking a lot about ryan's relationship with physical injury and pain being kind of . abnormal. i see this coming from a mixture of being raised in regional australia where medical care is hard to access + the classic australian "she'll be right" attitude where you're expected to react to even serious injuries by just walking it off. and also uniquely to him, i think experiencing so much violence from his fucked up relationship with hunter and his entire community watching on indifferently during the ritual and subsequent injuries from the entity rlly fucked him up. i don't belive he engages in self harm in the "traditional" way for lack of a better word, but has a strange sense of apathy towards being harmed and neglects looking after himself if he's hurt.. like can totally picture him being the sort of kid that was constantly covered in injuries, scraped knees, bruised elbows, perpetual black eye. he broke his wrist once when he was 8 falling off his bike but his parents never brought him to the hospital to get it checked out bc he didn't mention anything abt hurting himself until his mum tugged on his arm a week after the accident and he winced. and/or if you want to be emo like me his parents never showed any concern for him or did anything abt him being injured growing up when he came to them crying so he just learned that. oh me being hurt doesn't matter. like idk just... ryan whelan growing up thinking that his pain and injury isn't something anyone cares about so he never brings it and neglects looking after himself.

a) ryan whelan secretly watched brokeback mountain on some shitty illegal streaming site on his phone when he was 14 and was in a dissociative state for days

it does suck that the government defunded PBS but it's also so fucking funny that now that they don't take uncle sam's slavery dollars they're running videos like "How america's foundation was built on genocide"