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Finally this thing is finished. Took way longer than I thought it would. Well, it had a bit of a sour ending at first (venting and all), so I wanted to bring it back around a little. And the frames doubled lol.

We need to start commenting under other people's posts about how to properly warn for flashing lights and eyestrain. We need to be emailing and calling companies about their possibly triggering advertisements that could induce seizures. We need to stop tolerating ableism and start speaking up for the more vulnerable.

Also, stop putting epilepsy warnings. That's like saying "warning: schizophrenia" on a post including unreality or "warning: dyslexia" on a post with a typing quirk. First off, the disability mentioned isn't the only group of people that this could trigger. Second, it doesn't truly get the message across and instead makes it worse for those with the disability-- scrolling through the epilepsy tag on Tumblr should get you to view the content of other epileptic people, but no, you just get a bunch of flashing lights and eyestrain, even though you could instead tag for, oh I dunno, flashing lights and eyestrain.

Just to try and help out and spread the word, there are two chrome extensions I've found that might be able to help.

Seizafe: This extension scans youtube videos and warns you if they contain things like flashing lights that could cause a seizure.

CogniShield: This extension (supposedly, it has like no reviews) dims the screen to a safe level if flashing lights are detected; it can also be used to limit volume. It might help.

Feel free to reblog with your filled-out sheet. Do not send us asks about your results.

Disclaimer: We are not a medical professional. This is only a reformatting of information from the DSM-5. Some information may be inaccurate. We are not equipped to provide any advice. Please do not ask for our advice.

Under the cut: Criteria for dissociative amnesia, other disorders comorbid with DID and OSDD, and the signs of feigned DID/OSDD.

(Hey @camelosuspeito, this is the essay about ableism and fandom you said you wanted to read forever ago!)

I'm going to take a massive risk by mentioning a specific scenario in a specific fandom. I call this a risk due to the chance that the entire discussion will derail into people arguing bitterly over whether or not my representation is correct. I ask you, the reader, to please take in and internalize the following:

Even if your experience doesn't align with mine, my experience did in fact happen. Both can be true. I will not engage in arguments where people begin by demanding screencaps or calling me a liar, because a good faith discussion means you must assume that I am telling the truth about my experience.

While I am naming a specific fandom about which people care very much, this phenomenon has occurred in multiple fandoms I've been involved with for decades. I will prove this by naming another more-obscure fandom, but these are far from the only two. This is a systemic issue that pervades the world at large, and fandom is merely one space where it pervades.

So anyway, Our Flag Means Death.

There's a scene in s1 (I haven't seen s2 so keep in mind that my commentary can only include what I've seen) where Edward Teach is asked to sign a contract. He does so with an X. This made perfect sense to me. The X often indicated that someone could not read in English. Teach was repeatedly portrayed as being of a class which would not have been taught to read (literacy was an extremely rare trait in this time frame). So he can't read. No big deal. Several of my OCs can't read either.

Then I made the mistake of finding Discourse about this on Twitter. (Keep in mind for the sake of this discussion that s2 had not yet been released, and I still haven't seen it.)

Some of the Discourse was interesting and useful to know--such as Indigenous use of the X on a contract. And some of the Discourse involved valid anger and concerns regarding certain fans' laziness and stereotyping regarding characters of color. I certainly did not want to be one of these fans, so I read on.

The argument was, over and over: "You can't say Edward Teach is illiterate because illiterate people are stupid and being stupid is the worst thing you can possibly be."

Which, wow. Y'all just said that, huh.

Here are several things.

For starters, let's go over the first half of the assertion. Being illiterate is an extremely common condition. In the United States alone, it's estimated that 21% of the population--or 43 million adults--have low or no literacy. Of those, 8 million could not participate in the survey "either because of a language barrier or a cognitive or physical inability to be interviewed". In the interests of accuracy, then, it's important to understand that the vast majority of people who are illiterate do not qualify as "stupid".

If you have met five adults in your life, you have met someone who was functionally illiterate. If you don't know who the illiterate adult is, it's because you're such a smug asshole that you are not a safe person for illiterate folks to be around, just like every other invisible or hidden human condition which is systemically oppressed.

Now let's address that second assertion.

This assertion, that being stupid is the worst thing you can be, is pervasive throughout the world, and fandom spaces are no exception. Even fandom spaces which pride themselves on being safe spaces for the disabled fall for this trap. The only thing unique about how it was applied to Edward Teach was how people just, like, said it with no self-awareness. Usually, it's more couched and padded and hidden than this.

For example, claiming that you "support disability rights" while also only ever discussing conditions you don't consider to be truly disabling. This is most common among certain neurodivergent advocates, who want the umbrella of disability rights to cover them while also arguing that the only thing which disables them is a hostile and unsupportive society and not their conditions in and of themselves.

Fans who do this will insist on a very narrow and specific portrayal of "representation of disability in fandom", which really just means "only my personal experience with autism can be represented in fandom works".

As another example, there's a fetishizing of perceived intelligence on Tumblr that I personally don't think needs to be expounded upon, because it's so obvious, but I'll give it a shot.

Have you ever wondered why it is that most of the Tumblr Sexy Men are, like, really fucking mean? It's because there's a logical/social fallacy at play to make them appealing.

Humans are social creatures. We need each other to survive. We have developed rules to make it easier for people to get along with each other in large groups. When someone aggressively and repeatedly rejects all of the rules, and behaves in a way that's hostile, rude, or cruel, we make an assumption about them.

We assume that they must not need other people to survive.

We think they must be very smart.

This is lazy writers' shorthand. If you, for instance, want to write a character who is smarter than you are, well, that's hard. It'd require tons of care and research and even then you might not get it right. But if you make (we all knew this was coming) Sherlock really fucking mean, the audience will go "Oh, he must be brilliant, since he can afford to flaunt social rules!". At that point, Sherlock can also be foolhardy and make a variety of terrible decisions, but the fandom will still insist he is Smart Because He's Mean.

(See under: nearly every single Sherlock Holmes adaptation except the Granada and Soviet series. And the most popular adaptations, BBC Sherlock and House M.D., are the worst offenders with regards to this specific One Weird Trick.)

Note that I'm not addressing anything about linguistics in this post so far, even though I could. The words we choose to express contempt for others frequently rely on suggesting they are not intelligent, but I'm well aware that providing a list of words you can't say won't address the issue of how we treat real human people in our thoughts and hearts.

So here's another example.

I have written more fic for L4D2 than any other fandom in my current era. I wrote multiple fics with Nellis as the endgame pairing. I portrayed Ellis in several stories as a guy who fucks, loves, thinks things through carefully, possesses moments of insight and moments of obtuseness. And then, after a few tens of thousands of words, I had Ellis conversationally reveal that he has an IQ of 65.

There were a couple of people who were caught up by that specific reveal. One admitted that they felt defensive on behalf of Ellis--but then, they did the proper, good thing. They thought through why they were defensive, and realized that they still--despite being a wonderful advocate for disability rights overall--thought of that level of cognitive disability as an accusation.

In those fics, I had a few reasons for why Ellis had such a low score: he was impoverished, he hadn't eaten breakfast the day he took the test, he had issues with his teeth that gave him chronic pain even as a child, he might be a little neurodivergent. But one of those reasons was that I figured he probably had a cognitive impairment. I included this about him because I thought it made him, and the fandom, richer.

And yet... it was an accusation. In a way that suggesting that a character is neurodivergent simply is not. Because neurodivergence is not perceived by fandom as being bad.

It's not disabling.

I am begging y'all to consider this. You don't have to change your fandom behavior overall, and certainly, do not stop headcanoning characters with conditions you share.

However.

Maybe you should remember people who will never get better, even if everyone in their life supports them and society changes to fit their needs.

Folks with cerebral palsy will not stop having cerebral palsy if you're very nice to them. Folks with TBI will not be healed by society no longer displaying their triggers in public. Folks with cognitive disabilities will not become smarter no matter what you do. So maybe your goal should not be to ignore everyone whose conditions will not materially improve along with societal attitudes becoming more progressive.

Maybe, instead if justifying why you think intelligence (a nebulous and ascientific concept as it is) is so damn important, you should stop placing value on intelligence. Maybe you'll be a happier person. Maybe you'll stop making judgement calls on others and, relatedly, yourself for failing to meet a specific metric. Maybe you'll admit that "intelligence" is a social construct, no different from gender or sexual orientation in that we've arbitrarily valued a specific form of it and devalued all others.

Happy pride month!!