so I’ve had this Thing going on recently, it’s been building over the last few years, but it’s really hit critical mass in just the last couple of months. I don’t know if this is something other people experience, or if it’s just a Me Thing -- it would hardly be the first time that my personal experience is completely different from human normal -- but it’s gotten to the point that it’s actually starting to make using Tumblr difficult.
the only thing I can compare it to is texture aversion in neurodivergence. you know when you touch a fabric and it’s just So Very Incredibly Wrong that it makes you want to crawl out of your skin? or when a food texture makes you never want to eat anything ever again? I get the former a lot and the latter now and then, and that’s what this new Thing makes me feel like.
except it’s entirely visual. like a visual texture thing that makes me want to catapult myself to the far side of the universe every time I see it. and like I said it’s been growing for years, and seems to be getting worse/more pervasive, even when I try to fight against it.
basically it comes down to this: the visual texture of nearly every bit of animation in the history of humanity makes me want to climb out of my skin. it makes me queasy, it makes me nope so hard that at a minimum I have to quickly scroll past, and sometimes I have to completely close the tab (Tumblr or otherwise) and go look at something whose visual texture doesn’t make me want to die.
I grew up watching Disney animation, I’ve had eras of my life where I watched quite a lot of anime and animated tv shows. but I just cannot now. I can’t even stand to see stills from anything animated, either 2D traditional animation or 3D animation. it’s actually gotten worse than my Wrong Fabric aversion (tho thankfully that is easier to insulate myself from). nothing short of my actual identified PTSD triggers makes me feel grosser than looking at animation does right now.
but weirdly there are Three Very Specific Exceptions to this visual texture squick. Wolfwalkers (2020) has the opposite impact, to the point that I have used it to cleanse from seeing other animation. I think the other movies from that studio might still be in the safe zone, but I haven’t tried them yet. I’ve loved Rise Of The Guardians (2012) for years, and like to watch it around midwinter, and I popped it on this year without even thinking about the animation visual texture thing, and it wasn’t until hours later that it occurred to me that it didn’t bother me at all. and gifsets of Into The Spider-verse haven’t bothered me to look at, but I haven’t tried watching it again recently. but other than those three, every other bit of animation is Right Out.
what do those three movies have in common? nothing I can identify, other than that they are all very pretty with their own visual style that’s fairly different from other things. but evidently they’re the only animated anything that I can handle at this point.
it’s a bit similar with fabrics -- except that Tumblr doesn’t randomly make me feel Wrong Fabrics against my will when I’m just trying to scroll through my dash -- in that there’s a pretty short list of fabrics that I can stand to have next to my skin, and it’s gotten significantly worse over the last decade or so.
what causes this? is it just a weird quirk of being neurodivergent? is it just a Me Thing? I have absolutely no idea, but like everything else, all I can do is stick with the stuff that makes me feel good, and try to stay far away from the things that make me want to yeet myself into the sun.
and to those ends, I may need to make some tough choices when it comes to who I’m following here on Tumblr. if we’re mutuals and you tag #animation or something similar, that is HUGELY helpful for me. but really this is my problem to deal with, so I’m going to do what I can to curate my own experience and try to keep the visual texture nausea under control.
