i agree 100%

IN MY OPINION (and pardon my frustration here, im allowed to have a negative opinion and it stinks that i have to write a disclaimer for that because the SU fandom is so hostile towards negative opinions), rebecca sugar is just being SUPER pretentious when she says that about steven. he’s a fictional character, rebecca. you’re being hypocritical, rebecca, since you had no issue torturing the boy for the audience, but oh nooo in a show you say is about love and healing how can you possibly breach privacy and actually SHOW that love and healing. 

i heard that maybe she wanted to give him privacy because the whole therapy and recovery part was based off her own experience? and like. rebecca, come on. yes, projection is important in writing if you want to write compelling characters, but there’s a point where youre projecting way too much. projecting to deepen a character by incorporating your own experience is good! but doing so to the point where youre totally blinded and cant separate the character from yourself and incorporate experience outside of yourself is bad. 

but also, it’s important to note that rebecca has less control over the show than we think, so i don’t fully blame her, i just think she needs to learn to say no to ideas that just. dont work. rather than be “everyones ideas should be included” because even if the sentiment is sweet, it makes for sloppy and unfocused writing. SU AND AUF have a focus problem, but it showed more in SUF where every episode seemed to have a different idea of what Steven’s arc is. i think its fully possible that rebecca didn’t have much say in SUF besides a loose guidance, and that her interview about “privacy” is just her defending her team’s decisions, which she might not have had as big a part of as we think. 

point is, i think it’s bad writing. i love angst and emotional breaking a character as much as the next person, but if you don’t spend time showing the rebuilding and recovery, you’re just writing torture porn (which belongs in fanfic, where i btw DO love some good whump) and it’s a cop out to tear down a character and not put in the effort to write them standing back up. and i don’t think steven going from “i murdered someone and tried to murder another person right after then turned into a monster because i was in such immeasurable pain, shame, and rage after one by one losing all my support system because they suddenly became extremely uncharacteristically uncaring and incompetent” to “imma head off into the world all on my own because im totally stable” in just a few months is so unbelievably out of character. after what steven went through, what he did, it would take a lot more for him to be stable enough to do that, and i dont buy steven moving on from shattering someone and turning into a monster attacking his family without showing me how it was possible. 

truthfully, i woulda loved a “steven shatters someone” arc, if the shattering happened, like, in episode 10, and the remaining 10 episodes were focused on him coming to terms with it and getting the support he needs. also, i agree with the argument that in order to show that steven is loved and worthy, he needs to reach his LOWEST point and still have people care about him. i LOVE that idea and i love the sentiment, and i love that aspect of IAMM where, yes, steven is damaged and isn’t the same kid anymore, but his family will still love him. problem is, everything AROUND that sentiment, including the way they spent the whole season establishing that his family SUCKS (which isn’t in character for them, to just continuously brush off his issues when they know something’s wrong) leaves a bad taste in my mouth. it kind of ruined how i see the CG family.

but as it stands, and excuse me for being dark but this is just my personal feeling (and ive seen people saying that people against steven shattering just don’t understand steven, but i argue that i feel this way BECAUSE i understand steven), i dont buy steven being ok based on what the finale showed me. because i don’t buy it, i CANNOT imagine steven NOT hurting himself after leaving BC. this is the same kid who had a breakdown over POOFING gems. who went on a suicide mission because he felt responsible for someone’s shattering. this is the kid who blames himself for everything, holds himself to an impossible standard, and has a history of bottling up to the point of being self-destructive. the kid who clearly still doesn’t forgive the diamonds because of the awful things they’ve done, and now feels like he’s become one of them. the show did not give me ANY evidence of him not continuing to do that, so the final episode felt so so fake to me. 

if they had showed the recovery, even just one episode dedicated purely to therapy, i would have believed it. and to establish steven as having actual MEDICAL DEFINITION of trauma, and NOT give him therapy on screen is just. bad. to me. and harmful. 

Idk, I’m sick of people acting like I’m ignorant or stupid for hating the way SUF ended, and disapproving of the writing decisions made during the second half of the series. 

The harsh truth is that I do think SUF was poorly written. Looking back now, it was kind of a mess. I loved a lot of the episodes themselves in a vacuum but when you put it together it doesn’t make a particularly cohesive whole. I still think the shattering was too far, I still think Steven trying to shatter White was a short sighted thing to include after the trauma reveal. I think making us see this boy spiral further and further into despair for 19 episodes and then not even showing us any of his recovery process was very unsatisfying; it felt like misery porn, relentless angst with very little catharsis. I think a lot of the characters were more aloof and uncaring than usual for the sake of manufacturing Steven’s breakdown, which complicated my feelings for those characters and the CG family unit as a whole. On the whole, it felt like slotting characters into a plot rather than writing a plot based on the characters themselves. 

I think sending him alone on a road trip just months after a total mental breakdown and the implication that he has lifelong trauma doesn’t make any sense.

the warm buttered toast of early mornings, the sheated heavy rain of grey days, the huge welling tears of grief and the electric anger that raises your whole head of hair

Source ~ Autism Women's Network

What is Autistic Burnout?

Signs:

Lack of motivation (hard to care about goals when everyday life is overwhelming)

Loss of executive functioning abilities (decision making, organisation etc)

Difficulty with self care

Easier to reach overload or meltdown

Loss of speech, selective mutism

Lethargy, exhaustion

Illness, digestive issues

Memory loss

Inability to maintain masks or use social skills

Overall seeming "more autisic" or stereotypical

May have a period of high energy before collapse

Causes:

Passing as neurotypical/suppressing traits

Doing "too much", too much stress

Ageing: needing more downtime, having less energy

Changes, good or bad (relationships, jobs, living arrangements, belongings, environment, routines...)

Sleep deprivation, poor nutrition, dehydration

Illness

Sensory or emotional overload

Strategies:

Time

Scheduling breaks, managing spoons

Leave of absence

Stimming, sensory diet

Exercise

Massage

Reminders and support

Routines

Better environment/job/etc

Boundaries, saying 'no'

Dropping the mask/facade

Solitude

Absolute quiet

Creative projects, passions, special interests

"Do you want to help me cook dinner?"

No, I'm still overwhelmed from earlier and want to stay in my room.

"well fine, dinner will be ready when it's done." And now they're upset with me

If you want someone in your life to switch from Guess to Ask with you, then you need to have a discussion with them, Ask them to meet you somewhere in the middle on this, possibly explain the difference in cultures, definitely explain, "When you say $THING, it does not mean to me what it means to you", and then understand that it will take them time and work to change, and that you may need to be an active participant in that change. You can do this by remembering that things do not mean the same to them that they do to you, and, when they say, "Do you want to cook dinner with me?" replying with, "Are you asking me to do that, or are you asking me if I'd like it?"

Yes, I understand that this will be hard for you also. You and this person in your life will both need to work on this, together, and be forgiving of one another.

now that Disney owns 95% of all movies and other media, ‘Disney princess’ has become functionally useless as a descriptor;

it’s what you mean anyway;

Strong Winds Causing This Waterfall To

Some of you may have seen my post about Baroque artists and their realistic depictions of human bodies as having skin and fat.

I've had a lot of negative and frankly fatphobic comments on that post, calling the people in the paintings "fat" and "obese," mostly along the lines of this:

"It's because the artists are depicting rich people, who were fat and lazy. Normal people didn't look like that!"

The idea, of course, is that these artists wouldn't have ever drawn bodies that looked like those in the Baroque paintings, if they weren't painting super-rich people that stuffed themselves with food all day.

Supposedly. We'll see how well that holds up.

Today I was in the library looking at a collection of drawings by Albrecht Dürer, and learned that in the early 1500's, Dürer tried to put together essentially a "how-to-draw" book, showing how to draw people. His work was controversial, because of his technique of "constructing" figures using rules about proportions. (A quick and easy method of inventing realistically proportioned bodies out of thin air? Cheating!!)

However, in his "constructed" drawings, Dürer had to figure out how to handle the range of variety in bodies, and ended up breaking down how to create a variety of body types in correct proportions.

I'm showing the women, to contrast with the post on Baroque paintings. Here are some of his drawings that I thought y'all should take a look at.

These are a couple of his more "average" women—the one on the left is from his drawing book, and the one on the right is one of his drawings.

Here's a "strong woman" and "A very strong, stout woman"

This is what he refers to as a "stout woman."

Here's where it gets interesting: this is what Albrecht Dürer refers to as a "peasant-type" woman

^That. That's what a "peasant" body type looks like.

He labeled this one "A peasant woman of 7 head lengths"

in case you missed it: this figure drawing by a guy in the 1500's is literally labeled as being of a peasant woman! this is what a "peasant woman" body type looks like!

He did draw similar amounts of thinner figures, but they're not particularly emphasized over the "Strong" and "Stout" figures. Nor is there exactly a "default" figure. He's just...going over the range of variations that there are?

Here's another "stout woman," covered in notes on how to draw the proportions:

now that's too technical for me to make any sense of but

this was in the 16th century!! This body type was apparently not incredibly rare in the 16th century. This body type was important enough for you to be able to draw, as an artist, in the 16th century to be handled in detail in a 16th century artist's drawing advice

In conclusion: yes this is just what people look like, yes it's important to know how to draw fat bodies, even this dude from the early 1500's is telling you so, Die Mad About It