#parse discourse

The big breakthrough Marsha Linehan made with Dialectical Behaviour Therapy that made it successful, and made Borderline Personality Disorder the first “curable” disorder in its category, was that she underwent a major shift in thought.

Before her, clinicians looked at people who had trouble regulating their emotions, who got hung up about idealized versions of people, who saw things in extreme black-and-white, and whose relationships with people swung violently between extreme passivity and extreme aggression, and thought, “They are choosing not to behave healthily.”  They devoted a lot of time and energy to trying to convince their patients to use healthy coping mechanisms.

I see this attitude a lot from people who dislike Parse. “He’s an adult, he should get over it.” “He needs to smarten up.” “It’s time for him to snap out of it.” 

Linehan, using both her research and her personal experience of having BPD, brought the perspective to the work that her clients didn’t know how to behave healthily. Emotional self-regulation and negotiating relationships are like your ABCs and tying your shoes: They have to be learned, and they’re much easier to learn when you’re young. If you reach adulthood without acquiring them, you will struggle so much more with basic daily tasks, and acquiring those skills will be an incredibly difficult and painful process. A lot of Dialectical Behavioural Therapy is explicitly teaching skills like “how to calm down when you’re angry” or “how to tell someone else what you want from them”--things people with BPD were overwhelmingly punished for or discouraged from doing when they were young, and therefore never learned.

So for myself, I missed out on a lot of those basic developmental lessons too. Psychologically speaking, I never learned to tie my shoes. As an adult, I struggle to learn basic skills when it comes to relating healthily to other people. I have islands of competence separated by oceans of trauma and neglect.

Stories about Kent Parson are, for me, like stories that incidentally teach kids their ABCs and how to tie their shoes. I read and write them partly as fiction, but also partly as social stories, Mary Frances Learns to Assert Herself, as acts of expressing and consolidating the lessons I’m trying to learn about how to be human. Here’s how to learn to deal peacefully with someone who caused you immense pain but not out of malice; here’s how to tell people you’re unhappy even when nothing is “wrong”; here’s how to break out of passivity and isolation. 

When I listen to people who did get those lessons in their childhood, who know how to manage their emotions (even if they’re still depressed or traumatized, they have basic self-soothing skills) or how to navigate relationships without damaging anyone, it sounds like the Parse fic I love feels grating and unhealthy to them. Why fixate on stuff that any ordinary adult should know anyway? Just tie your shoes, get up, and start walking! Don’t sit around throwing pity parties about how often you keep tripping on your laces.

it baffles me that people won't admit that he's a mentally ill character just because what we get to see in the comic is him manifesting 'ugly symptoms'

There’s this view of life that’s very like... either you are a Good Person, and a victim, and do only good things, and are very oppressed, or you are a Bad Person, and you have lots of privilege and power, and you hurt other people. Those are the ONLY TWO OPTIONS POSSIBLE.

Kent Parson is a lot of peoples’ personal image of a Bad Person--a white guy who behaves shittily--so us saying he’s sympathetic and relatable is tantamount to saying, “But really he’s perfect and pure and should never be held accountable for his actions and also you’re not allowed to fight back or think your abuser was bad if they have a mental illness.”

There are two types of Kent haters I’ve met who fall prey to this kind of thinking

1. People who realize that we are not actually saying the latter thing, but still hear it implicitly loudly enough that they find Kent-love unpleasant, so they do their best to stay away from it. (The Two Types of People is a mindset that’s useful in an emergency, but unhelpful and hard to root out over the long term)

(salty ask list)

1.  What OTPs in your fandom(s) do you just not get?

I GET ALL OF THEM.  Like, even the ones I dislike (High-conflict Nurseydex) I understand the appeal of. 

I want everyone in this comic to love everyone else and I want to bake a big cake full of sprinkles and I want to hug you all.

19.  What is the one thing you hate most about your fandom?

We can’t decide on an appropriate level of discourse. Someone who said they were afraid to talk to me about race because I get so defensive later said that they think calling Kent fans “racist pieces of shit” was a perfectly normal thing to post publicly and it was weird that Kent fans are so insular and don’t listen to our critics more. I was like: ??? By what metric am *I*, then, scary?

20.  What is the purest ship in the fandom?

The post has honestly been kinda haunting me for a while, just because I feel so completely not understood by it? I don't even know where to begin with responding to it, because it feels so far away from where I am. That said, I ... have some words I can throw out there? Maybe they'll be helpful.

Okay.

I'm not putting up with Parse-positive fans as a favor to them. Some of them I like, and consideration for their comfort and happiness is a thing? But I put up with Parse-positive fans because between "put up with them", "change their minds", "silence them with harassment and abuse", and "leave the fandom altogether", the third one is evil and the second one is impossible and I'm not willing to do the fourth one. I'm not doing Parse-positive fans a favor by leaving them free to do their own thing; I'm acknowledging reality and choosing not to be a horrible person.

On top of that, fundamentally, this is just a disagreement about interpretation. Fiction is subjective - we are interpreting 'realities' that don't exist out of limited material, and each of us brings in different tools and background assumptions to the job. Either of us can connect it to broader societal things when we are having conversations about those broader things - but that's not relevant to individual ones of us talking to individual ones of you. (Sometimes it's valuable to try to connect those broader things to ourselves for ourself, but that's not something anyone else should be trying to do to any of us.) From what I understand of what they teach in the literature classes I never took, the criterion that matters is "can you support your interpretation with what's shown in the comic?" - and we can, and you can. So there's not much of a discussion to even be had.

...I guess I can come up with something to request, actually.

Please remember that we care a lot about our interpretations too.

My mom was emotionally abusive. I care a lot about communicating what emotional abuse sounds like, looks like, tastes like. About the ways it leaves you shaking and uncertain, unable to articulate how all this stuff which is supposed to be meaningless has somehow left you so messed up - and the way you turn that on yourself, because if what happened to you can't be that meaningful, your messed-up must be your fault. I want to talk about what Randall Munroe said: that sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can make me think I deserved it.

This isn't about you as a Parse-positive fan. (Parse-negative folks, don't get up in people's faces and make it about them - that's a jerk move.) And this matters. And we want to be able to talk about it. But a lot of us are scared of you, and not just because disagreeing in a way that makes someone uncomfortable is one of those things emotionally abusive people punish. We worry because we've seen Parse-positive fans respond the same way to "Parse is awful" as "Parse fans are awful", and we don't want to get harassed either. Or to always be swallowing our own distress in favor of soothing yours at our saying anything.

If we could count on you to recognize the difference between hating a thing and harassing its fans, and to have our backs when other people conflate these things, that would help a lot. A lot of people in the anti-anti crowd don't acknowledge the difference, and we'd like to know that you will.

Ah yes, the three types of OMGCP fans:

Parse positive

Parse neutral

It doesn’t mean Kent isn’t worth being loved, it doesn’t mean anyone is suggesting Kent did anything wrong. Not all relationships are epic love stories.